National Post (National Edition)
5 Pakistani girls killed for dancing
ONE MAN’S SIX-YEAR FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
It was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing alone, apparently in the same room.
The cellphone video was made six years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan. It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.
What happened to them remains a mystery. Their fates have been shrouded by cultural taboos, official inertia, implacable resistance from local elders and religious leaders suspected of ordering their deaths, and elaborate subterfuges by the families who reportedly carried out those orders.
Even in Pakistan, where hundreds of “honour killings” are reported every year, the details of this case are extreme. According to court filings and interviews with people who have investigated the case, the families confined the disgraced girls for weeks, threw boiling water and hot coals on them, then killed them and buried them in the Kohistan hills.
Later, when several groups of investigators appeared, relatives and community leaders insisted that the girls were still alive and produced a second set of similar-looking local girls to prove it. They even allegedly went so far as to disfigure one girl’s thumbprints so she couldn’t be checked against the government identity card of the victim she was supposed to impersonate.
The story illustrates many of the reasons Pakistani authorities have failed to curb the persistent problem of honour killings. These include the cruel sway of traditional tribal councils, known as jirgas, over poor and uneducated Muslim villagers; the lengths to which such leaders may go to defy intrusions by the state; and the casual worthlessness they often assign to the rights, lives and even identities of young women.
Today, the truth is beginning to come to light, mostly as a result of determined efforts by a 26-year-old man named Afzal Kohistani whose brothers were killed as a result of the incident.
“This has destroyed my family. The girls are dead, my brothers have been killed and nothing has been done to bring justice or protect us,” said Kohistani, a poised but sombre man who has received death threats and is no longer able to visit his home area.
“I know I will probably be killed, too, but it doesn’t matter,” he said in an interview. “What happened is wrong, and it has to change. Someone has to fight for that.”
According to legal filings and interviews with Kohistani and half a dozen other people who have worked to investigate the case, this is what they believe happened:
In a conservative rural region where social mingling between genders was taboo, the girls’ participation in a coed singing party was risky enough. But someone posted the video on the Internet, where it spread rapidly, bringing shame on their community before the vast virtual world.
For the sin of dishonouring their tribe, the head of the local jirga, who was also a Muslim cleric, allegedly issued a religious decree ordering the five girls to be killed, along with the boy seen dancing and every member of his extended family. There was no resistance from the community. After the girls were disposed of, several brothers of the dancing boy were also caught and killed. The rest of the family, including Kohistani, had to flee the area, abandoning their farmland.
There things stood for more than a year.
“No one in my district or my province has ever spoken against honour killing. They tell me I have defamed my culture, my religion, my tribe,” Kohistani said in an interview, adding that political, religious and tribal ties among leaders in the region also thwarted his efforts.
“Everybody knows what happened, but no one is ready to come forward.”
Finally, with assistance from a lawyer in Islamabad, Kohistani appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, a liberal activist, personally took up the case in 2012 and ordered two fact-finding missions sent to the remote area by helicopter. But when the choppers landed and the visitors demanded to see the girls, the families and community leaders at first refused, saying their culture forbade it. Eventually, they were shown three girls and told they were the ones in the video. With no chance to speak to the girls in private, they tried to compare their faces to the images from the video. Two members said they were convinced of the likenesses; the third, Farzana Bari, said she had doubts.
After that, life apparently returned to normal in the isolated herding community for several years.
Finally, last month, Kohistani’s five-year crusade got an unexpected break when the Supreme Court, under a new chief justice, agreed to accept his habeas corpus petition and reopen the case. Once more, a factfinding mission was sent to the village, with a mandate to discover if the five girls were alive. This time, the delegation was headed by a district judge, included two police officers, and was armed with government ID records with the heights and thumbprints of the missing girls.
In the report he submitted to the Supreme Court, Kohistan Judge Shoaib Khan said the village elders were “unanimous” in insisting that the girls were alive. But two of the girls they produced were much younger than the victims, according to their official birth dates. A third could not be identified because both thumbs had been burned. The delegation concluded that at least two girls did not match the ones in the video and that the others were probably also not who they claimed to be.
One day last week, Kohistani walked up to the Supreme Court. He smiled slightly as he shook hands with his attorney, and they went inside to wait for the next hearing.
WHAT HAPPENED IS WRONG, AND IT HAS TO CHANGE.