LAST week, police received confirmed reports that two girls were murdered in a village bordering North and South Waziristan, purportedly to ‘restore’ their families’ ‘honour’ after a mobile phone video of them began circulating on social media. On Sunday, they arrested two male relatives of the victims, who have yet to be identified by name. The mystery, secrecy and silence behind this crime bear all the grim hallmarks of similar high-profile ‘honour’ killing cases of the past, the most notable of them being the murders of three women in Kohistan in 2012 after footage of them singing and clapping was leaked online. A year later, in 2013, two teenage girls and their mother were gunned down in Chilas by the girls’ stepbrother and his friends after a video of them smiling and enjoying the rain outdoors was circulated in the area. In some cases, these pixelated videos are the only documentary evidence we have to prove that these women ever lived, let alone the circumstances behind their untimely deaths, as the question of them ever receiving posthumous justice lingers. In fact, the pursuit of truth can itself prove deadly; last year, Afzal Kohistani, the man who spearheaded the long quest for justice for the Kohistan victims was himself gunned down on a busy street in Abbottabad.

For such crimes to be committed today, despite all the shock and horror expressed over previous high-profile cases, and despite all of Pakistan’s legislative achievements and claims to uphold the rule of law, a culture of impunity for crimes against women must obviously remain entrenched in the hearts and minds of many in the far reaches of the land where the law dare not trespass. Tribal ‘custom’ is a law unto itself, with the state apparatus abdicating practically all responsibility in pursuing legal action for gender-based crimes, and a public inured to brutality shrugging off or condoning the murder of yet another woman. Is it futile to expect things to be any different today than they were in, say, 2008, when Senator Israrullah Zehri spoke in defence of burying women alive in Balochistan, claiming it was “a tribal custom”? MNA North Waziristan Mohsin Dawar said of the recent murders, “Honour killings are an extreme expression of patriarchal violence, and the practice has to be condemned in the strongest terms … timely justice must be served”. More leaders must speak out for attitudes to change and justice to prevail.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2020