by Sanam Maher
She cringes when she recalls how she had to watch some of Qandeel’s videos with her colleagues. “The men couldn’t look at me and I couldn’t look at them. It was so awkward.” She hears women talk about wanting the freedom to behave as they please. “I don’t think as women we are missing some kind of freedom,” she says. “Do you?”
It’s time for her to meet the next investigating officer, the man who will take over the case from her. Some of her colleagues need to sit in on the meeting, but there aren’t enough chairs in the room for all of them. Three of them sit on a charpoy that has been pushed into a corner. One puts his feet up; the other leans against the wall and dangles his legs over the side. It is the same charpoy that Attiya first saw Qandeel’s body lying on.
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“The day she was murdered, I got a phone call from a friend,” Malik Azam says. “He said, ‘It’s you. You did this.’ ” The Daily Pakistan story revealing Qandeel’s identity had set in motion a chain of events that would end in her murder, Azam’s friend said.
“So when she was putting up all those photos and making videos about Imran Khan, her brother didn’t feel dishonoured then?” Azam retorted. “When she posed for the whole world, he didn’t feel dishonoured then? But when I run a story he suddenly feels dishonoured?”
He hung up on his friend. They haven’t spoken since.
When I meet Qandeel’s parents in November 2016 Anwar bibi makes the same accusation. She says that the media is responsible in part for her daughter’s murder. If the media had not revealed her real name or made such a big deal of the Qavi meeting, no one from Shah Sadar Din would have cared about Fouzia Azeem. People would not have jeered at her son, and he would not have been driven to kill his sister.
It’s an accusation that Malik Azam and his bureau chief have heard many times since July 2016—not just from Qandeel’s parents and those who spoke out against her murder, but from colleagues in the industry as well.
Azam’s bureau chief, Shaukat Iqbal, is scornful of the accusation. “All we revealed was her real name,” Iqbal says. “That’s it. The issues that arose after that were her own family’s problems. We didn’t create those.” He and Azam do not believe they did anything wrong by printing pictures of Qandeel’s passport. “A passport is nothing personal,” Iqbal says. “If you go to an embassy or apply for a visa, don’t you give them your passport? So what?”
He does not regret the Daily Pakistan coverage, although, “I think we underestimated the story,” Iqbal says. “Someone else would have run a bigger story, made a bigger deal of it.” As for the journalists who criticize the Daily Pakistan, he just has one question for them: if the story about her real name was such a danger to her, then why did every other news outlet run it as well? If the Daily Pakistan is responsible for what happened to Qandeel, then so is every other newspaper and TV channel that ran a story on Qandeel’s real name and where she was from.
Iqbal believes that Anwar bibi blames the media because she does not want to admit that Qandeel’s whole family conspired to kill her. They were greedy for her money, he says. They watched Qandeel’s interviews and saw the clothes she was wearing, the lifestyle she boasted of, the “side businesses” she claimed to have and the cars she was driven around in. They believed that she was withholding money from them. “This hen was laying golden eggs for them, and they wanted all the eggs at once,” Iqbal speculates. “They didn’t get that and they slaughtered their hen.” After all, Iqbal and Malik Azam say, look at the pictures of Qandeel’s parents on the day they called the police to their home in Multan. Look at the clean white shalwar kameez and turban the father is wearing and the embroidered kameez the mother has on. Did they change after they found their daughter’s body and called the police? Or did they sleep in these clean, ironed clothes? “The mother is wearing a party dress!” Iqbal exclaims. “Who goes to sleep in such nice clothes?” Their daughter, he says, was nothing special. Of course he feels sad that she was killed, but he does not understand why she is still being talked about. “What was her profession?” he asks. “Simply, she was a call girl. No other word for it. I’m sorry to say this, may Allah forgive me, but that’s what she was.”
When Waseem returned to Shah Sadar Din after the murder, news of what he had done quickly spread. People in the village say his cousins, uncles and friends congratulated him. They said he had done the right thing. No matter that they had called him shameless. “A man with no honour can discover honour at any moment,” they assured each other.
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It would be hard to find anyone in Shah Sadar Din today who does not know Qandeel’s name. I make my way down uneven sandy trails in a large graveyard, stepping past empty chocolate and biscuit wrappers and dried dog shit as I search for her grave. The previous month, October 2016, Qandeel’s father told a reporter, “Following my daughter’s wish, I have installed Pakistan’s flag on her grave.”15 But I cannot see a flag anywhere in the graveyard. Two villagers standing near a grave ask me who I’m looking for. They point to the far left corner of the graveyard. They have become used to people—mostly the media—coming here searching for Qandeel. Someone has planted a thin reedy sapling a few feet tall next to the grave, which is just another mound of dirt like the many others around it. It is not covered in concrete or marble like some of the others. There is no marker, no sign of her name and no Pakistani flag. Without the villagers, it would have been impossible to find Qandeel in this graveyard.
EPILOGUE
On 22 July 2016, six days after Qandeel Baloch was murdered, a parliamentary committee approved a bill that sought to close a loophole in existing legislation dealing with honour killings which allowed killers to walk free.
By the time Qandeel was murdered, 2016 had already seen an estimated 326 such murders in Pakistan, of which 312 victims were women.1 According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the most common motive appeared to be retribution or punishment for “illicit relations” (185 murders) and “marriage choice” (99 murders)—the deceased man or woman’s decision to marry someone their family, tribe or former partner did not approve of. Of the 326 murders, it is known that 67 were committed by a husband or ex-partner, 64 by siblings, 41 by parents, 30 by other relatives, 15 by in-laws and 10 by the deceased’s son or daughter. Many of the killings took place with the collusion of several family members.
Under the existing legislation, a killer or killers could walk free even after confessing to a murder through the Islamic provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code relating to forgiveness/waiver or compounding, whereby the relatives of the deceased man or woman—in the majority of cases also the relatives of the suspect—could pardon the killer or accept “blood money” as compensation for the crime.
In 2014 Sughra Imam, a senator from the Pakistan People’s Party, moved a bill to close this loophole, and the Anti-Honour Killings Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2015 was passed by the Senate. However, the government failed to have the bill passed in the National Assembly.
On 17 July 2016, the day after Qandeel’s murder, an editorial in the English-language daily Dawn stated that the only “crime” she had committed was to “live life on her own terms,” adding, “Women have the right to be themselves even if they offend conventional sensibilities.” The state, the editorial continued, “must unequivocally demonstrate that [women] do not deserve to be murdered for [doing so].” The writer criticized the loopholes in existing legislation: “The murderers of women go scot-free they are forgiven and even supported by regressive patriarchies after killing ‘disobedient’ female family members.” While activists and legislators had lobbied for the lapsed amendment to the existing laws since 2015, the government had dragged its feet. “Why the lethargy?” the editorial demanded. “When will parliament be jolted out of its stupor?”
Four days later the newspaper received its reply. In an interview with Reut
ers the prime minister’s daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif—not a government official—promised that a draft of the amended law would be presented to a parliamentary committee and, once approved, sent for a vote before a joint session of parliament within “a couple of weeks.”2 The draft was cleared the very next day, and three months later, on 6 October 2016, unanimously adopted.
The most significant change under the Criminal Law Amendment (Offences in the Name or Pretext of Honour) Act 2016 is that family members can now only prevent a killer from receiving the death penalty.3 They cannot “forgive” or pardon the killer and enable them to walk free. Everyone convicted of an honour killing will face a mandatory sentence or life imprisonment.
“We have achieved consensus on anti-honour killing…in committee of joint sitting of Parliament,” tweeted Maryam Nawaz Sharif. “Great news for Pakistan.”4
The response to the amendment was overwhelmingly positive, not just in the local media, but internationally. “Pakistani men who kill their female relatives in the name of honour will no longer be able to evade punishment,” announced the Guardian.5 The BBC described the new legislation as a “step in the right direction,”6 while the New York Times noted, “Pakistan toughens laws on rape and honour killings of women.”7 A senator from the Pakistan People’s Party told CNN, a “vicious circle has now come to an end” with the new law.8 It was the kind of positive media coverage that Pakistan rarely enjoys internationally.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also received praise and thanks from within the country, most notably from documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. On the day that Qandeel Baloch’s body was found, Obaid Chinoy tweeted, “How many women have to die before we pass the Anti Honor Killing Bill?” When the legislation was announced, she said she was grateful to the prime minister.9 “Thank you to PM Nawaz Sharif for keeping his promise: #antihonorkilling bill,” she tweeted.
The “promise” Obaid Chinoy was referring to had been made eight months before, when she won her second Academy Award—for a documentary on honour killings in Pakistan. Called A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Obaid Chinoy’s film tells the story of Saba Qaiser, an eighteen-year-old girl from the district of Hafizabad in Punjab, who was beaten, shot in the face, bundled into a sack and thrown into a canal in 2014. Believing she was dead, her attackers, her father and uncle, fled. However, Saba manged to get out of the sack and trod water till she reached the canal’s banks where, grasping at reeds, she pulled herself on to dry land.
When Obaid Chinoy met Saba’s father after he was arrested, he explained that he had tried to kill his daughter because she had married a man of her own choice. “Whatever we did, we were obliged to do it,” Maqsood says in the documentary. “She took away our honour.” He described his daughter’s decision as “unlawful” and a choice that had ruined her family’s reputation. “If you put one drop of piss in a gallon of milk, the whole thing gets destroyed,” he explained. “That is what [Saba] has done.”
Proceedings in Saba’s case came to an abrupt end when she pardoned her father and uncle. She had come under pressure from her family and in-laws. “Saba can just tell the judge, ‘I was angry then, and I want to forgive them,’ ” her lawyer, Waqas Bhatti, says in the documentary.
“We all live in the same neighbourhood,” explained Saba’s brother-in-law Shafaqat when asked why she should forgive the men who had tried to kill her. It was for the good of the community and her family. “Some day we may need our neighbours’ help. Would they ever cooperate with us if we did not compromise?”
A Girl in the River revealed the extraordinary grip the concept of honour has on men and women in Pakistan—a grip that was only strengthened by the legal right to pardon those who go to any lengths to preserve that honour. In January 2016 the film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary—Short Subject category. The lapsed anti-honour killing bill from 2014 leaped back into the headlines, with Obaid Chinoy running a campaign urging the prime minister to “bring this Bill back in parliament.” “We need a law that ends impunity for perpetrators of ‘honour’ crimes right now,” stated a petition started by Obaid Chinoy calling on the prime minister to put his weight behind “tighter legislation.”10
In February Sharif met Obaid Chinoy and invited her to screen A Girl in the River. On 22 February the first screening of the film in the country was held at the prime minister’s house in Islamabad. The following week Obaid Chinoy made history, becoming the only Pakistani to win two Oscars. “This week the Pakistani prime minister has said that he will change the law on honour killing after watching this film,” she announced in her acceptance speech. “That is the power of film.”11
But until July, when Waseem confessed to killing his sister, the law remained the same. A murder committed in the name of honour in Pakistan was still the perfect crime: when a brother shot his own sister, a father bludgeoned his daughter or a mother burned her daughter alive, there was rarely any penalty. Families protected their own. However, Qandeel’s case appeared to be different. A father had accused his sons of conspiring to murder their sister, and he wanted the harshest punishment possible meted out to them.
Qandeel’s father had stated in his FIR that his son Aslam had encouraged Waseem to commit the murder. However, Waseem proudly accepted all responsibility. “It’s just me,” he told the media after his arrest. “I did this all alone.” He seemed to want to take all the credit for saving his family’s honour. In an interview three months later his mother would say that Waseem thought he would be in jail for “two to three months and then after he will be free,” as was common in many such cases. Her son, she said, “was not aware that this would become a high-profile case.”12
Muhammad Azeem was praised when he told the media that his daughter had been the “best son of all sons”—she had taken care of her parents and supported them when none of their sons had stepped forward to do so.13 Azeem wept in an interview with BBC Urdu as he thought of how Qandeel must have called out to her parents for help on the night she was killed. “I say shoot my son on sight,” Azeem said. “He suffocated my little one.” Even in October, when Azeem’s right to pardon his son for Qandeel’s murder was taken away from him, he reiterated, “There is no pardon from our side.” He wanted his son to be punished “at the earliest” and said Waseem “should get life imprisonment or death—I will feel happy.”14
It’s a statement that Azeem would repeat often, and in his last major television interview, in October 2016, he said he would never bow to pressure from his family to forgive Waseem, even though he and Anwar bibi no longer had the financial support that Qandeel had provided.15 He swore he would never take a rupee from his sons. “God will provide for me,” he said. “I don’t need these sons…I will never take anything from them.” When Anwar bibi, sitting next to him in the interview, told him to be quiet, he raised his voice. “I am the petitioner in this case,” he asserted. “I will never forgive him.”
However, when I met Qandeel’s parents in November 2016, Azeem’s resolve seemed to be crumbling. After an initial sum of money from a crowdfunding campaign run by a few activists was provided, donations all but dried up. One activist I spoke to confessed that she was reluctant to send Qandeel’s parents money through Safdar Shah as there was no way to account for where the money went once he had it.
Azeem told me that his son’s friends have visited him in jail and told him that his son cried out in his sleep and sometimes woke up screaming. He dreamed of his sister. Waseem now said that he was intoxicated the night he planned to kill Qandeel. When he tried to strangle her, he could not do it because he felt so weak. When she screamed, he had wanted to run away and so his cousin Haq Nawaz had choked Qandeel. Waseem claimed he had only held Qandeel down. Haq Nawaz surrendered to the police in Dera Ghazi Khan on 25 July.
In December 2016, a month after I met Qandeel’s parents in Multan, Waseem and Haq Nawaz were formally charged with the murder of
Qandeel Baloch, while Abdul Basit was charged with conspiracy to murder for his role in driving the getaway car. The three men pleaded not guilty.
In January 2017 Muhammad Azeem retracted his statement against his other son Aslam—he apparently no longer believed that Aslam had encouraged Waseem to carry out the murder. A criminal case was then initiated against Azeem and Anwar bibi, accusing them of trying to save one of their sons. If the charges are proved, they face a fine and a possible jail term of seven years. The police officer who brought the charges against Qandeel’s parents claimed he saw Aslam give “a sealed envelope to his father and mother and said he had fulfilled their demand, and they should now give a statement in his favour in court.” Speaking to the media, Qandeel’s parents denied the accusation. “We wrongly nominated Aslam in Qandeel’s murder,” they said. “We were enraged at that time.”16
In July 2017, in an interview with Adil Nizami—the reporter who broke the story of Qandeel’s murder and who has since progressed to become the host of his own show—Safdar Shah denied that there had been any foul play or bribe from Aslam. Speaking for Qandeel’s parents, he said that Aslam had arrived in Multan more than a month after Qandeel’s death. “He called me and pleaded with me to get him a meeting with his parents,” Shah claimed. “When I took him to the parents, they clung to him and wept…Aslam said, ‘Baba, why did you put my name as a suspect in the FIR?’ ” What Shah saw next amazed him. “I have never seen a father beg for forgiveness from a son,” he said. “Azeem asked his son for forgiveness and said, ‘I made a mistake. I had gone mad.’ ” ”17 Shah also said that Anwar bibi confided in him that on the day the murder was discovered the police had treated her and Azeem badly and demanded the names of people who could have murdered their daughter. In their grief and shock, they could only think of their sons’ names.