Licensed to Kill in Pakistan

Aug. 5, 2002 -- On a hot afternoon in April 1999 in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, Hina Jilani, a respected Supreme Court lawyer, was meeting with her client Samia Sarwar in her office when Sarwar's mother stormed into the premises accompanied by two men.

Sarwar, a 29-year-old mother of two, was seeking a divorce from her violently abusive husband. But her conservative family viewed the looming divorce as a slight against the family honor and Sarwar had told Jilani that she feared for her life.

It's the sort of threat that Pakistani lawyers dealing with women's issues take very seriously and on her part, Jilani was taking no chances.

Her client had fled her Peshawar home two months earlier and agreed to meet her mother — with no male relatives present — in the law offices to collect some documents needed for the divorce.

But when Sarwar's mother arrived at the offices that fateful afternoon, there were two men with her — an uncle and another man, Habibur Rehman, who claimed to be their driver.

The next few moments have been imprinted in Jilani's memory forever, and more than three years later, the feisty activist vividly recounts the event.

"It was a horrible incident, just horrible," says Jilani in a phone interview with ABCNEWS.com. "They walked into my office — it was after-office hours and I guess the security was lax. They entered the building, walked into my office and even as I asked the men to leave the room, the assassin (Rehman) shot her (Sarwar) in the head, killing her instantly. I was very close to her and I very nearly missed a bullet."

In the chaos that followed, a paralegal was used as a human shield to help the attackers escape.

"It was so shocking," says Jilani. "I had only been seeing the girl for a week — not long enough to get to know her — but I thought she trusted her mother."

That a woman could abet her daughter's murder rather than put up with the social shame and the sheer audacity of the attack — in broad daylight, in a crowded city, in the offices of one of the country's most esteemed lawyers — revolted many Pakistanis, but not all of them.

Some local commentators, especially from the remote tribal provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, argued that the killing was in accordance with tradition and therefore, not a crime. Their only reservation was that Sarwar family had not received a verdict to kill their daughter from a traditional tribal council, or jirga.

Gang Rape With a Sanction

Indeed, obtaining a jirga verdict to kill a woman accused of dishonoring her family and tribe is not a very difficult undertaking in Pakistan.

Although honor killings are illegal under Pakistani law, the impoverished South Asian nation has an extensive parallel tribal justice system that is allowed to operate in the tribal areas under legal sanction and functions illegally in other parts of the country mainly to settle family and property disputes.

In June, the world got a horrific introduction to Pakistani tribal justice when a tribal council in a remote village in the relatively affluent Punjab province ordered the gang rape of a woman as punishment for her younger brother's alleged affair with a woman of another tribe.

Mukhtaran Bibi, a 30-year-old woman from the impoverished Gujar tribe in the village of Mirwali, was repeatedly raped after the council alleged that her 12-year-old brother had "illicit relations" with a woman of the influential, landed Mastoi tribe.

According to local reports, the wholly innocent woman was then forced to walk through the village naked, a particularly demeaning punishment in a conservative, patriarchal society.

Bibi's brother has denied having an affair with the woman and has testified that he was sodomized by some members of the Mastoi tribe and then accused of having the relationship as a cover-up.

Musharraf Attempts to Do the Right Thing

Days after a local reporter broke the story, Pakistan's embattled human rights community as well as ordinary citizens and a particularly robust national media took up Bibi's cause.

But it was not until the international media picked up the story that President Pervez Musharraf announced that the authorities were committed to doing the right thing.

The four men accused of raping Bibi are currently on trial for their lives at a special anti-terrorism court in southern Pakistan.

Ten other men face jail terms for ordering the gang rape.

Musharraf has also paid $8,000 as compensation payment to Bibi's family and has announced that a new school would be built in her name.

'Girls in Jeans'

But these are measures Asma Jehangir, a Supreme Court lawyer and member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) describes as the Pakistani government's penchant for "playing the role of fire brigade rather than looking at the underlying problem."

Jehangir should know. As Jilani's sister and a vocal women's rights activist, she watched in dismay as Sarwar's murder, which so offended moderate Pakistanis, came to nothing in the Pakistani political arena.

Months after Sarwar's honor killing, the then opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP) attempted to get the Pakistani Senate to pass a resolution condemning the killing. But the resolution was rejected by Senate members, some of whom dismissed the sisters as "girls in jeans" who were deliberately inciting Pakistani women to break with tradition.

Even worse were the threats and fatwas (religious edicts) placed against the two sisters. "Threats and harassment have been recurring features in our lives," says Jilani. "But this is not made easier by the fact that there is never any action taken against those who threaten our lives."

Blackened Men, Blackened Women

Crimes of honor, or "honor killings," are an age-old practice in many parts of the Islamic world, but they are not exclusive to it. Stray cases of honor killings have also been recorded in Brazil, Ecuador, Uganda, Albania and among immigrant communities in Britain and Sweden.

But Pakistan is widely believed to have the highest number of honor killings although accurate estimates are hard to come by, particularly in remote rural and tribal areas.

Called karo kari, a term which literally translates as "blackened man, blackened woman," honor crimes appear to be on the rise in Pakistan.

In the first three months of 2001, Madadgar, a Karachi-based human rights group, found 120 cases of karo kari reported in the local and national press. The figure for the first four months of 2002, in contrast, was 430.

Human rights experts however warn that the actual figures are much higher since many cases of honor killings go unreported in a society where the practice enjoys community — and some say quasi-religious — sanction.

'Like an Epidemic'

But Riffat Hassan, a professor at the Religious Studies Program at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, says honor killings are not a part of Islamic law.

"Honor crimes are very old tribal customs that date back to the pre-Islamic era," she says. "The idea is that honor is a male possession and if something happens to a woman that dishonors men, then the family honor must be regained. It's an old tribal custom, wherein honor is more important than life itself and it has nothing to do with Islam," she said.

But in a country where 57 percent of the population is illiterate, Hassan says religious extremists have periodically sought to legitimize honor killings by linking it to Islam.

And this, Hassan believes, partly accounts for the increasing cases of honor killings in Pakistan in recent months.

"It's like an epidemic," she says. "In the past few months, it's been just one case after another. It could be the result of greater awareness and attention being paid by the media. But I think this has to do with the (recent) crackdowns on terrorist groups. After these groups were disbanded, there's been a lot of violence in Pakistani society. And when a society becomes violent, it starts taking it out on the most vulnerable."

Justice for the Poor

While many experts say Musharraf deserves credit for his attempts to crackdown on militant groups operating in Pakistan in the current war against terrorism, they are not optimistic about his ability to buck the hardliners and provide Pakistani women with basic human rights.

In an impoverished, increasingly radicalized country where more than 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, experts say the Pakistani judicial system is so overburdened and ridden with corruption, that the poor have no access to formal justice.

Although there have been programs aimed at addressing this problem, such as the multi-million dollar "bringing justice to the doorstep" program financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the gains of various developmental projects continue to dodge Pakistan's poor.

While these problems dog the entire subcontinent, I.A. Rehman, director of the HRCP, says the situation in Pakistan is exacerbated by the fact that the political elite lacks the will to repeal the controversial Zinna laws, which were introduced in 1979 in a bid to "Islamize" the country.

Experts say the Zinna laws, which were passed by then military ruler Gen. Zia ul-Haq in an attempt to win the support of hardliners, inherently discriminate against women. A 1997 Women's Commission called for the repealing of the laws, but successive governments have shied from following the commission's proposals.

"Every government has had inquiries into the issue," says Farhat Bokhari of the Women's Rights Division of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "There's no need for inquiries. It's evident the laws need to be repealed. The fact is, the Zinna laws obliterate the distinction between extra marital sex and rape, because rape requires a high level of evidence. So women are actually punished for rape because the laws criminalize extra marital sex."

While some experts believe that Musharraf, as a military dictator, could be in a better position to crackdown on Islamic extremists than an elected leader, Rehman says the failure of democracy in Pakistan has only exacerbated the situation. "There may be corrupt politicians in a democracy," he says. "But there can't be good rulers in a dictatorship."

Blame It on the Law

Jilani herself is dismissive of Musharraf's reaction to the Bibi case. "His response has been nothing but superficial," she says. "Musharraf is not guided by a sense of human rights, it's more to give an impression of his government as a liberal Muslim government to appease the western governments with whom he has found it expedient to align himself."

Three years after her client was killed in her presence, Jilani has been unable to get justice served. Under a recent amendment to the Pakistani Penal Code, the families of victims can strike a compromise with the perpetrator of a crime.

"The person indicted for her (Sarwar's) killing was forgiven by her father, mother and husband," she says wryly. "There was nothing I could do. The amendment makes murder a crime against the individual rather than the state. Laws like the Zinna laws don't have legal basis and they have a very negative social impact. They provide total impunity for the perpetrators of the crime. Why do you think we are seeing so many cases like these?"

And yet Jilani says she is not without hope. "I am happy that this (gang rape) case has sparked such opposition and these incidents are now being exposed," she says. "I am happy that at least the human rights struggle in Pakistan is achieving something."