[DEBATE] : Tariq Ali: Diary

Thu Dec 11 00:26:55 GMT 2008

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n24/ali_01_.html>
Diary
Tariq Ali

If cheating in bed was always settled by the bullet, many of us would
be dead. Gerald Martin's new biography of Gabriel García Márquez
reveals that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was based on the murder of
the novelist's friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre in 1951. He had
seduced, deflowered and abandoned Margarita Chica Salas. On her
wedding day Margarita's husband was told that she was no longer a
virgin. The bride was sent back to her family home. Her brothers then
found Gentile and chopped his body into pieces. Márquez blamed the
socio-moral dictatorship of the Catholic Church.

But of course it is usually women who are killed for breaking codes of
sexual conduct. There have been several recent cases in Britain. Banaz
Mahmod, a 20-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered in Surrey at the
behest of her father because she'd left an arranged marriage and her
father didn't approve of her new boyfriend. Iraq has lately seen a
spate of such murders. Last month acid was thrown at three women in
Basra who were talking to a male friend. Yet Iraq once had the highest
proportion of women integrated into every level of society of any Arab
country.

And then there is Pakistan. In 2005 Pervez Musharraf pushed through
legislation making honour killing a capital offence yet official
statistics admit to 1261 honour killings in 2006 and half that number
again the following year. The actual figures are probably much higher,
since many deaths go unreported. 'Women are considered the property of
the males in their family irrespective of their class, ethnic or
religious group, and the owner of the property has the right to decide
its fate,' Tahira Shahid Khan of Shirkat Gah, a group that campaigns
for equal rights for women, reported in 1999. Domestic violence too,
according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, is 'considered
normal . . . A sample survey showed 82 per cent of women in rural
Punjab feared violence resulting from their husbands' displeasure over
minor matters; in the most developed urban areas 52 per cent admitted
being beaten by their husbands.'

Consider the following. A man dreams his wife has betrayed him. He
wakes up and sees her lying next to him. In a fury he kills her. This
really happened in Pakistan and the killer escaped punishment. If
dreams are to be treated as justification for an honour killing, what
woman is safe? Since the police and the judicial system regard murder
in the family as a private affair, most cases don't get to court even
if they're reported. Society, it's said, needs to protect its
foundations. So mostly we rely on the information collected by the
Human Rights Commission and on courageous lawyers like Hina Jilani and
Asma Jehangir, two sisters both of whom have received numerous death
threats.

In 1999, Hina Jilani was in her office with Samia Sarwar, a mother of
two from Peshawar seeking a divorce from her husband, when Sarwar's
mother burst into the room with two armed men in tow and had her
daughter shot dead. In 1989 Samia Sarwar had married a first cousin.
For six years he beat her and kicked her. But after he threw her
downstairs when she was pregnant with their second child, she went
back to her parents' house. The minute she told them she wanted a
divorce they threatened to kill her. Yet they were educated and
wealthy people.

One widely reported murder this year was that of Tasleem Solangi, the
17-year-old daughter of a livestock trader in the Khairpur District of
Sindh. She wanted to go to university and become a doctor like her
uncle, but instead agreed to marry a cousin in order to settle a
protracted family dispute over property. Her mother, Zakara Bibi,
tried to stop her, but Tasleem was determined. Her father-in-law,
Zamir Solangi, came to collect her and swore on the Koran that no harm
would befall her. A month after the marriage, Zakara had a message
from her daughter: 'Please forgive me, mother. I was wrong and you
were right. I fear they will kill me.' On 7 March, they did. She was
eight months pregnant. The Koran-swearer accused her of infidelity and
said the baby was not his son's. She went into labour, her child was
born and instantly thrown to the dogs. She pleaded for mercy, but the
dogs were set on her as well and the terrified girl was then shot
dead. On this occasion at least there was an inquiry. Her husband was
charged with Tasleem's murder and is currently awaiting trial.

Another case much discussed this year is that of five women in
Baluchistan who were buried alive in Baba Kot village, about 250 miles
east of Quetta, the Baluch capital. Three of the women were young and
wanted to marry men they'd chosen for themselves; two older women were
helping them. Three male relatives have been arrested. According to
the local police chief, the brother of two of the girls has admitted
that he shot three of the women and helped bury them, though they
weren't even dead. The trial date is awaited.

Traditionalists have always considered love to be something that
brings shame on families: patriarchs should be the ones to decide who
is to be married to whom, often for reasons to do with property. If
you fall in love, the 18th-century Urdu poet Mir Hassan explained
(more than once), you will be burned by its fire and perish. That is
what happened in the Punjabi city of Wah in late October. Now Wah has
half a million inhabitants and Pakistan's largest ordnance factories,
but it was once an idyllic village almost floating on water. The
streams and lakes that surrounded it attracted the Mughal emperor
Jehangir, who stopped there on his way home from Kashmir, and is said
to have exclaimed 'Wah!' or 'Wow!', thus giving the village its name.
Before that it had been called Jalalsar after one of my forebears,
Sardar Jalal Khan, a leader of the Khattar tribe around 800 years ago.
His successors wanted to please the emperor and agreed to the name
change. I can't imagine that the decision was taken without a fierce
struggle (one faction is said to have been deeply hostile to the
arriviste Mughals), but those speaking sweetnesses to power won the
day.

Jehangir built a beautiful, domed rest-house in Wah, surrounded on all
sides by flowing water. In 1639, his son Shah Jehan supervised the
landscaping of beautiful water gardens and pavilions. More than half a
century ago, I used to play hide and seek here with my cousins. The
pavilions were ruins by then, which made them even more magical on a
moonlit night. A cousin swore that the ghosts of the Mughals could be
seen in the mist on a winter night, but nobody believed her. The
caretaker was extremely sharp-tongued, although when talking to my
uncles and aunts, he masked his intelligence in language of
exaggerated humility. We were never deceived and threatened to expose
him if he gave us a hard time.

Other ghosts lurk there now. A mile and a half from the old village,
my youngest maternal uncle, Sardar Ghairat Hyat Khan, built himself a
house and moved out of the decaying manor house we'd all shared. My
Kashmiri great-grandmother, Ayesha, moved with him. Before she became
completely blind she was the best cook in the world and my visits were
always rewarding. Shortly before I left Pakistan for Britain I went to
say goodbye to her. She said: 'I feel a moustache. Is it really you?'
'No,' I replied trying to make my voice deeper, 'I am a stranger here,
but I was told your bakarkhanis tasted like heaven.' Bakarkhanis are a
crumbly, Kashmiri version of the croissant. I've not been to his house
for a long time but I'm told it's in a state of disrepair and
crumbling like the bakarkhanis.

In the last week of October, my uncle's granddaughter, Zainab, barely
18 years old, was shot dead by her brothers, Inam and Hamza Ahmed.
Zainab apparently had a lover and despite repeated warnings refused to
stop seeing him. She was on the phone to him in her grandfather's
house when her brothers pumped seven bullets into her body. I don't
know whether her mother, Ghairat's oldest daughter Roohi, whom I last
saw when she was about ten, was part of the plot. Whether or not she
was involved, I find it deeply shocking that my uncle allowed the
young woman's body to be buried that same day without at least
insisting that a First Information Report be lodged at the local
police station, let alone demanding an autopsy. Zainab deserved at
least that. I am told that Ghairat is old and frail, that he was angry
and wanted to ring the police, but was talked out of it by his
daughter and other members of his immediate family, who collectively
recoiled at having to accept the consequences of what they had
witnessed. Perhaps his faith in a just and merciful Allah was not as
strong as he used to claim. Whatever the reason, it's unacceptable.
The body should be exhumed, the murderers arrested and put on trial,
as the law requires.

Tariq Ali's latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of
American Power.