Murders, coverups and a long march to justice
After a six-year battle, gruesome details of alleged honour killings coming out
ISLAMABAD— 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 head scarves 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 somewhere 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.
The truth is finally beginning to come to light, mostly as a result of determined efforts by a few individuals, in particular a 26-year-old man named Afzal Kohistani whose brothers were killed as a result of the incident. He spent years seeking help from local and provincial officials, then petitioned the Supreme Court twice. In 2012, his case was dismissed, but last month the high court suddenly reopened the case and ordered an investigation that has produced a chilling report.
“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,” Kohistani said.
Renewed judicial interest in these long-ago events in the hamlet of Gadar-Khota Koat coincided with another encouraging development: the passage of a new law in Pakistan’s parliament that strengthened judicial powers in honor-killing cases.
Often, even when such crimes manage to reach the courts, there is no punishment because the law allows victims’ families to “forgive” the perpetrators — who are often their own relatives.
The new law, passed in October, gives judges more ammunition to impose life prison sentences for honour killings in extreme circumstances, allowing them to overrule personal deals by making the murder a crime against the state as well.
But women’s rights advocates said other factors, including traditional culture and political timidity, will continue to weigh against the odds of justice being done.
“We don’t know yet whether the law will make much difference. Punishment is still not mandatory, and forgiveness can still negate justice,” said Benazir Jatoi, a lawyer with the nonprofit Aurat Foundation in Islamabad, which promotes women’s rights. “Until there is more political will, I don’t think the lives of ordinary women threatened with honour violence will change.”
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 fact-finding 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.
What they encountered was hairraising.
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; her parents insisted that it was from a cooking accident. 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.
“All this leads to the suspicious conclusion that something is wrong at bottom,” Khan wrote. The case, he advised, “needs exhaustive inquiry.”
Recently, Kohistani, carrying a copy of the judge’s report, 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.