The social media star strangled by her brother
Only in Pakistan would a young man proudly confess to having strangled his own sister, said the Daily Times (Lahore). “Honour killings” are a sad feature of life here: most go unnoticed. But the “cold-blooded murder” of the social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has caused a public outcry. Baloch (real name Fauzia Azeem) was a young model whose provocative videos and “selfies” attracted huge audiences across Asia. She was Pakistan’s answer to Kim Kardashian, and though she never posed naked, her pouting photos were daring by the conservative standards of her homeland. Last month she went a step further by posting images of herself at a hotel with a prominent cleric, claiming he was “hopelessly in love” with her, and that they’d drunk soda and smoked cigarettes together during Ramadan instead of fasting. For her brother Waseem it was the last straw – he told reporters he drugged her at the family home before strangling her. And religious conservatives have applauded him.
Female entertainers in Pakistan have tested boundaries before, said Hamna Zubair in Dawn (Karachi), but Baloch, unabashed in her desire to be a “screen siren”, went further. In a country so conflicted between tradition and modernity, that was bound to end badly. From the confused comments that appeared under her posts, young men wanted to be with her, but also to “snuff her out”. Young women were “horrified” by her “immodesty”, while lauding her for doing as she pleased.
Last year alone, about 1,100 women lost their lives in Pakistan because their life choices offended somebody’s honour, said Zeeba T. Hashmi in The Nation (Lahore). But under sharia-inspired laws, the victim’s family can forgive a killer on payment of “blood money” – and because the killer is often a husband or relative of the victim and acting with the family’s approval, perpetrators often go free. Given the outcry, this won’t happen in Waseem’s case: but he’s the exception. As long as these pernicious laws survive, they’re a constant invitation to murder.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to change the law, said Huma Yusuf in Dawn, but he needs to follow through: these murders keep occurring. In June a woman was burnt alive by her mother for marrying a man of her own choice. Sharif ordered an investigation. He also denounced the murder as “un-islamic”. Would that he’d done the same for Qandeel Baloch. Alas, she was too “provocative” and “sensual” for that to be politically feasible. In the eyes of many voters, she was a woman who had transgressed certain boundaries and who deserved her fate.