Justice for women

THE shelter for women in distress is often described as a halfway house and one wonders whether Pakistani women are considered entitled to anything more.

Another case of extraordinary barbarism towards a young woman is in the news. It is said that before being shot dead, young Tasleem Solangi was subjected to a forced abortion and a dog was set upon her and bit her repeatedly. The emphasis in the story as told by the media has been on the use of a dog to torture and humiliate the victim. No strong reaction was seen when the killing of Tasleem was first reported in a Sindhi newspaper in March and listed in the HRCP’s bulletin in April this year.

Earlier, the alleged burying alive of five (the precise number is disputed) women in a village in Balochistan was a nine-day sensation in the media. In that case the emphasis was on the victims’ burial before they were dead.

The manner in which such incidents are reported and discussed reveals both society and the media in a most uncomplimentary light. The story of a woman’s foul murder deserves front-page headlines and discussion at exalted forums only if the final act in the drama includes some unusual form of bestiality.

One of the problems with this approach is that the debate on the incident is restricted to the extra act of cruelty and the ascertainment of facts related to that cruelty, and due attention is not paid to the crux of the matter — the wanton willing of women. During the period between the Balochistan and Khairpur incidents 27 women fell victim to the karo-kari custom and the number killed between January and Sept 11 this year stood at more than 130. These murders were considered routine happenings, no more serious than deaths in road accidents and hence consigned, if considered newsworthy at all, to the bottom of a column on an inside page.

Karo-kari, the killing of women (and sometimes men too) for having illicit sex or the mere suspicion of it, has been an issue in public debate for at least 150 years since Charles Napier first noticed it. The increased awareness of women’s oppression in various forms has pushed the vile custom to the top of human rights activists’ concerns.

Two factors in particular have added to the gravity of the matter in recent years. First, while in the past the so-called honour killing was confined to some tribal settlements its incidence in the settled areas of the four provinces has shown an upward trend. Second, the jirgas (councils of tribal nobles/elders) that have a long history of dealing with karo-kari cases have been awarding and enforcing punishments that were never reported earlier. Newer punishments include forcibly marrying off women from the accused male’s family or raping or gang-raping the women.

Both these factors have been strengthened by the state’s failure to deal with the custom of honour killing adequately and effectively. No serious study has been done on the consequences of the migration of tribal families from rural to urban areas. All that we have is an intelligent guess that faced with newer and often harsher forms of exploitation in suburban settlements these families withdraw into their tribal traditions in order to protect their identity. The question of whether better work and living conditions in katchi abadis could facilitate their social advancement remains unanswered.

At the same time the state institutions have adopted an ambivalent attitude towards the jirga system. The system of lawfully created panchayats and jirgas introduced by the British disappeared long ago. Many factors, including the failures of the justice system, have contributed to the rise of non-formal panchayats and jirgas.

The feudals patronise jirgas and panchayats to preserve their social clout regardless of the size of their estates. They have borrowed two expressions from the state — quick justice and deterrent punishment — and have gone berserk in their attacks on the people’s rights, especially women’s. No feudal has condemned karo-kari murders, the auction of kari women in southern Punjab or the sack of girls’ schools in the Frontier.

The executive and the legislative organs of the state have devised no definite plan of action to eradicate the custom of sacrificing women to the male patriarchs’ warped sense of honour. On the contrary, the executive’s frequent calls on jirgas to establish peace in conflict zones have rehabilitated such forums.

As for the judiciary, the Sindh High Court’s valiant effort to extinguish a deep-rooted social evil with a single verdict has been thwarted by a coalition of political satraps, nazims and police officials. These self-appointed justices have held jirgas with impunity. Above all some of the political parties have helped the jirga and its champions survive because their support is needed in the curious system of representative government Pakistan follows. A politician denounced by the whole country for his advocacy of cruelty to women suffers from no handicap in securing high political office.

The state has not been unaware of the extreme forms of violence against women such as honour killing but it can be indicted for treating it as merely a crime against the victim concerned. Even in this respect, however, it has been guilty of tardiness. It took years of agitation to get the custom of vani made a penal offence.

Other instances are available to prove the government’s lack of interest in pushing legislation aimed at protecting women’s rights or in implementing laws and policies designed to achieve this objective. Quite some time ago the Council of Islamic Ideology proposed a measure to outlaw the outrageous custom of marrying girls to the holy book. Nothing is known of the government’s response. The Law and Justice Commission was rightly agitated over the continued practice of denying women their share of inheritance, especially in land. What has been done about it? Bills dealing with domestic violence have been lying in cold storage for a pretty long time. And this in a country where not only constitutional amendments but also legislation on banal issues, such as marriage feasts, can be adopted in a matter of hours.

Most of the conscious citizens, some of whom can also be found in government, will agree that laws alone will not guarantee women’s most basic rights, especially since strong social forces invoke belief and culture to fiercely resist any women-friendly measure. But how long will these be used as an excuse for denying women their basic freedoms and fundamental rights?

While laws may continue to be made and their implementation improved, it is time the government undertook a serious review of its national plan of action regarding women’s uplift, considered ways to implement the Saarc social charter and used the educational curricula to demolish the walls of myths, prejudice and feudal fads behind which the lives of countless women have been destroyed. A good beginning may be the creation of a working group to retrieve and implement pro-women plans which have drawn up over many decades.

No arbitrage in governance

THE local bodies system is likely to undergo fundamental changes, if not a complete reversal, in Punjab, the Frontier, Balochistan and also perhaps Sindh once the provinces are allowed, as apparently has been decided, to chart their own course. Why is the system unravelling?

The devolution plan, the biggest plank of Musharraf’s zealous reform agenda, was built on the commonsensical rationale that a government should be close to its people. It garnered substantial support — grants, loans, technical assistance and praise — from donors and civil society. But it suffered from several design, scope and execution flaws. It was also opposed by a leading section of the civil service.

But these factors, though important will not cause its permanent disfigurement or demise. It is likely to fall apart because it is a victim of impatience — the common technocratic disdain for the political process. Aiming to reconstruct the nation within a few years, the architects of the local bodies system ignored obvious roadblocks in the political economy. In the absence of legitimate political support, i.e. legislation by free, sovereign provincial assemblies which have a constitutional prerogative on matters of local government, it was never going to last.

The absence of the democratic process isn’t a question of abstract constitutional niceties. Free (or even freer) assemblies and legislators were never going to passively accept a drastic emasculation of their powers to allocate resources and make personnel decisions in the key areas of health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture, and small-scale infrastructure development. Especially since the commensurate transfer of powers from the federal to the provincial tier, promised at the time (inadequate anyway for patronage purposes at the grass roots) did not materialise.

The powers of the district nazims with large manpower and financial resources at their disposal overshadowed those of the legislators. District and tehsil nazims became extremely powerful. Many MNAs and MPAs resigned from the assemblies to contest and win elections to the office of the nazim. Those who couldn’t or whose families didn’t partake of the devolution power bounty were very unhappy. Battle lines over who could claim credit for the construction of a local road or a peon transfer were quickly drawn.

The NRB admonished that the international experience dictated that provincial legislators should not get involved in issues of local development and law and order and should concentrate on legislation. However, legislators incessantly pushed by their constituents for local favours calmly and expectedly ignored this patronising advice.

The provincial governments’ opposition to devolution was not just about matters of ego. With most functions transferred to the district set-up, chief ministers didn’t have a large enough area to implement their agendas or claim any credit. With service delivery the prerogative of the non-party nazims, there wasn’t much left for the chief ministers (and political parties) to fight provincial elections on.

Faced with such gritty (and much-predicted opposition), Musharraf pushed for the protection of the Local Government Ordinance (LGO) in the 17th Amendment which was approved by a pliant parliament in 2003. As a result of the constitutional amendment the provinces were barred from amending the LGO without the president’s approval until 2009. As long as Musharraf was in power, his pet project would be safe.

Still resistance from the provincial governments was relentless and even Musharraf couldn’t withstand the pressure from the chief ministers. Several amendments in the LGO were introduced to increase the powers of the chief ministers vis-à-vis the nazims. The chief ministers also used administrative measures to enhance their powers. In Punjab, a ban on all transfers and postings without the explicit permission of the chief minister was enforced. In NWFP, the chief minister reduced the development allocations to the districts to assert his supremacy over recalcitrant nazims.

Without Musharraf tilting the balance in their favour, district governments were never going to win the war with provincial governments — donors and NGOs and dozens of support programmes notwithstanding. Had nazims used their substantial powers to advance the interest of the common man, thus creating a greater stake of the citizen in the reform process, the rollback would have been more difficult. Unfortunately, the nazims didn’t. The impact of the devolution plan on service delivery, even according to its most ardent admirers, was at best modest.

Should politics dictate the final outcome of this apparently decent idea of local government? As long as the political process is legitimate, as is the case now, it should. According to the MQM, the only major political supporter of this idea, it should be retained. According to the PML-N in the Punjab and the ANP in the Frontier, it should be abolished. The PPP appears to support the system in the Punjab, giving tacit support to the nazims who are possible allies against the PML-N. In Sindh, the PPP legislators appear to be opposed to the devolution plan. The top PPP leadership is ambivalent.

Whatever the outcome, the negotiated process shall duly accommodate all power interests. These compromises may appear ugly and slow to the naive and the impatient, as it did to the devolution planners, but they mean an increased likelihood of sustainability.

In one NRB-organised India-Pakistan symposium on the subject in Lahore in the summer of 2007, NRB speakers claimed that devolution was a veritable revolution. Indian speakers, especially from civil society, on the other hand were critical of the slow progress of local governments in India. A constitutional amendment was introduced to promote local government during Rajiv Gandhi’s days but it was left to the states to introduce legislation they deemed suitable. Some states introduced substantial reforms. Most didn’t, with opposition rooted in the same turf war between local and provincial governments. The Indian union minister for panchayati raj was more philosophical; it would take some 20 to 30 years for the proper deepening of local governments, he hoped — without any sigh of impatience.

In short, in July 2007, India had a four-foot-tall shisham and we had a 60-foot-tall sufaida. In 2009, India shall have a 6-foot shisham and we are likely to have a hole in the ground.

Impatient citizens should learn a lesson (if they have not already done so after the regret of supporting the Musharraf coup). Technical governance interventions, however well-intended or well-designed, aren’t going to make a big difference. Like democracy, the most vital of all governance innovations, major reforms of government, are mostly about process, prudence and perseverance. In governance, like in shisham-growing, there are no opportunities for arbitrage. Devolution or no devolution.

How safe is the Lowari tunnel?

ZIARAT, on the Chitral side of the Lowari Pass, near the village of Asheret, is the gateway to Chitral and home to a contingent of the Chitral Scouts. It is also the final resting place of a Muslim saint who died many decades ago.

It has been the scene of many tragedies. Last year, 11 Scouts were killed in an avalanche; the year before, a Korean engineer was washed away in a flood, along with a small satellite village and expensive equipment. Ziarat is the site of the second entrance to the Lowari tunnel.

I have been travelling across the Lowari for the past 28 years. I know every twist and turn. I have been stranded at the top in a winter blizzard, slipped and slithered in spring ice and snow, and suffered from the heat of the summer in an open jeep on the lower slopes.

At the end of the eighties, I travelled with an American survey team across the pass. At the entrance to the tunnel (started in 1975 and abandoned due to ‘snags’), the senior geologist pointed out an earthquake fault line above the entrance. A couple of months later, I received a Christmas card from his wife telling me her husband had died in mysterious circumstances. No other details were given, nor any address.

I have been present both in Peshawar and Chital during minor earthquakes. Last week there was a tremor in Drosh. Two weeks ago, my Chitrali driver was coming to pick me up in Dir and felt a tremor coming over the pass. I have trekked all over these mountains and in Nuristan. I know only too well how treacherous and unstable the terrain is, especially when the mountainside is being blasted or heavy rains have fallen. In the Kalash valley of Birir I have seen many floods caused by deforestation.

In these mountains there is water seepage. When crossing the passes into Nuristan and taking shelter in caves I made it a point to always check if there was any water seeping through the rocks. What are the chances of floods and water seepage in the vicinity of the tunnel? Supposedly, if a tunnel is being dug through a thick rock base, there should be no water seepage, but what about all the mining disasters that have occurred throughout the world due to water seepage?

And floods? On the Chitral side of the tunnel the entrance has been built at the junction of two nullahs, one leading from the Lowari Top and the other which lies beneath deforested slopes. It was here that the flood came and washed away the engineer. On the mountainside opposite the tunnel entrance, below a slope shorn of trees, is the new construction housing the Chitral Scouts. It was here that the avalanche swept away the Scouts last year.

These are just the outside physical aspects. What about inside the tunnel? Is there any water seepage as rumoured? Has the soil been stabilised? Has the rock within the tunnel been reinforced with rock bolts? If so, has the tensile strength of the steel from which rock bolts are made been tested? Has a reliable epoxy been injected under pressure into these holes, which are often overhead? What about air quality? Maintenance? These are generally failings in Pakistan.

Although the Koreans are the experts involved in the tunnel operation, it was the Japanese who were first asked to build it. They refused as they considered it far too complicated and expensive. Tunnel-building is always hazardous. Some years ago there were problems in tunnels in the Alps. Recently a fire broke out in the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France.

Although a railway has been planned for the Lowari tunnel, there is a rumour that the tunnel may be open for light traffic this winter. Rs5.4bn was the quoted price for the tunnel in 2005. What is the real cost in 2008? How much has been allocated for the safety and security of the tunnel? I have requested a meeting with the secretary for communications in the hope that he can answer these questions.

The people of Chitral have always been desperate for an all-weather route throughout the year. They have long been neglected and cut off from the rest of the country, as though they were second-class citizens, but why were other alternatives such as a chairlift and an alternative highway on the Swat side of the pass not given more consideration?

The Chitralis want access to the outside world during the winter as well as the rest of the year, but they do not want to put their lives in danger. It is imperative that the public be told about measures taken for their safety and that before the tunnel is opened inspection teams from the Alpine countries of Europe be given tours of this project.

The writer, a British author and photographer, is the director of the Kalash Environmental Protection Society and the Hindukush Conservation Association.