Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  There were seventy-six refugee camps, most of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, ten in Balochistan and one in Punjab where they did get free water, light, healthcare and education. Legal assistance was also provided for illegal detentions under the Foreigners Act.

  Most refugees came in since 1979 and a census was conducted only in 2005 when about 3 million were documented. However, of this only 37 per cent, or 1.6 million, were in camps. It was after a follow-up census in 2006–07 that the NADRA started registering Afghans who were worried about being thrown out. PoRs were issued to 2.15 million out of the 3 million and the registration process is an ongoing one. The government has an Afghan Management and Repatriation Strategy (AMRS) to facilitate the voluntary return of the refugees.10

  In May 2012, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and the UNHCR had an international stakeholders’ conference in Geneva to formulate a Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees (SSAR) and create a conducive atmosphere for their return. Under this, forty-eight sites were identified as potential areas where the refugees could settle, and work had been going well in nineteen of them. However, the numbers of refugees who wanted to return declined each year. In 2013, it was only 31,000.

  In Islamabad, I attended the launch of the Pakistan Portfolio of projects under the SSAR which was seeking international funding support. The popular sentiment was that Afghanistan had to do more to bring back the refugees. Pakistan appealed to the donors to provide $367 million for the implementation of projects in refugee hosting and affected areas in the country. The federal minister of states and frontier regions, Lt. Gen. Abdul Qadir Baloch, spoke of how long the government could test the patience of the local population, and how long it would have to wait for the refugee sites to be developed in Afghanistan; he also appealed to the donor community to come forward and reduce the negative impact. I asked the minister what the government’s plan would be if the refugees didn’t want to leave at all. Off the record, he joked that maybe India should take some of the refugees. In fact at the Afghan camp, some of the refugees asked me in a very serious tone whether I could help them get to India in any way. They loved Indian films and Salman Khan, and said they would love to go to India, and so on. The Afghans have always loved India and that proximity has not exactly been welcomed by Pakistan.

  Women and peace

  For a region which has always been embroiled in some conflict or the other, women were missing from the peace debate. A regional peace conference I attended with women from the Asian countries, drew attention to the lack of a peace agenda and more so the absence of women in it despite the fact that they bore the brunt of the conflict. Khawar Mumtaz, an activist and head of the National Commission on the Status of Women in Pakistan, said that women had no role in the conflict to begin with and they continued to be marginalized despite being the most affected. Nighat Saeed Khan of the ASR Resource Centre in Lahore said that women were the ones meant to clean up the mess.

  Since Afghanistan had recently become part of SAARC, the issues from there were not included in the narrative of South Asia. Khan said that women’s groups in Pakistan were against the military supporting the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. After so many peace initiatives in the region over a span of thirty-five years, she said the women’s agenda did not occupy a place in peace movements or discussions. ‘Unless we have ownership, and internalization of the need for women’s participation, things will not change,’ she pointed out. With reference to Kashmir, she said that she had not been able to convince the men that women needed to be on the peace negotiation committee. It was the challenge to patriarchy more than anything else that was preventing women’s participation.

  On honour killings

  During my first trip to Karachi in 2011, an activist had said that as you go into the interior, you go further back in time. A feudal structure and patriarchy ensured that women were objects to be traded for resolving disputes and killed if they showed any independence. Like the khap panchayats (groups of villagers who take decisions extralegally, much like the jirga) in North India which are above the law and nothing can stop them, the jirga holds sway in some parts of Pakistan. In June 2016, an assistant political agent in Landi Kotal in KPK acquitted two men who had killed their uncle and sister-in-law for having ‘illicit relations’ after a five-member jirga said it was the local riwaz, or custom, to do so and the killers had committed no crime. The jirgas would order the killing of any woman who strayed from the local codes, and in the rural areas, women who wanted to study and not marry a stranger were constantly under threat. Meanwhile, Hindu women were often in danger of being converted and married off, and some of these incidents had been uncovered by the Pakistan Hindu Council. Education for women is a dangerous activity and what happened to Malala Yousafzai and her schoolmates was perhaps the most infamous embodiment of that medieval approach. Schools are under attack and apart from disrupting polio immunization programmes, education of girls is another Taliban bugbear.

  On Women’s Day, 8 March 2014, I went for a small programme that focused on the situation of girls in Pakistan. Samar Minallah, a human rights activist and film-maker, had made a powerful documentary on the practice of settling disputes by bartering girls. The film showed girls as young as four offered as compensation for a murder. This bizarre practice is called Swara in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and is known by other names in all provinces of Pakistan. In one case, young Asma’s father and brother resisted the resolution of the jirga to hand her over for a dispute involving her uncle. Both were killed for defying the order, and another of her brothers fought to stop this barbarism.

  Minallah filed a PIL in the Supreme Court with details of 110 cases of Swara or Vanni, as it is called in the Punjab, or Sang Chatti in Sindh. In a landmark order, the court ruled that the police should take action and stop such incidents and file cases against the perpetrators. The men in some of the families that Minallah met were against the practice of young girls being given away as compensation for a crime committed by male family members. In Sindh, the police and journalists took up the matter and followed up cases. The PPC (Pakistan Penal Code) was then amended to make Swara and similar practices a punishable crime, with a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment, but the practice is embedded in customary law. The Prevention of Anti-Women Practices (Criminal Law Amendment) Act 2011 also criminalized practices like Swara and Vanni but reduced the sentence.

  Tradition victimized women and apart from customary law, the problem was that women lacked the freedom to take decisions. In some provinces, water and sanitation were lacking. Moreover, even during pregnancy, women had to do a lot of physical work. Pakistan and India have high rates of stunting, and as reported by the National Nutrition Survey 2011 (jointly carried out by the Aga Khan University’s department of women and child health, Pakistan’s ministry of health and the UNICEF), stunting, wasting and micronutrient malnutrition were endemic in Pakistan. More than 30 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, the report said, and the poorest 20 per cent of the population earn 6.2 per cent of the country’s total income. Most households spend almost half their income on food. Of the SAARC countries, Pakistan has the second highest stunting rate for children under five years of age—43.7 per cent, and higher in the rural areas. About 31.5 per cent of the children are underweight. India, too, has a high rate of stunting among children—43 per cent. The increasing rate of chronic and acute malnutrition in Pakistan is primarily due to poverty, high illiteracy rates among mothers, and food insecurity.

  The shelter home

  Some institutions in Pakistan have to pretend they don’t exist. I was to experience this when I went to a ‘place of worship’ of the outlawed Ahmadi community in Islamabad, and in Karachi it was the women’s shelter home. Nothing gave you an indication of what was inside. The multiple gates and the high security walls, for good reason, hid many vulnerable women who were relieved to be away from the trauma of social ostracism. Honour killings are a major issue, and Uzma Noorani, a trustee of Panah, th
e privately run shelter for women, is under threat from relatives of the girls. These relatives often waited in the court to take revenge or get the girls back. The brave Noorani and other women risked their lives and reputation to protect these young girls who were often married off to men they didn’t like in order to settle some dispute; or were not allowed to marry the men they wanted to. Some years ago, a young girl who married against her family’s wishes was tracked down to Lahore and killed; her husband had been from another tribe. The pregnant girl was shot at on her grandfather’s order and left for dead. She was taken to a hospital and finally ended up at Panah. The girl, who was five months pregnant when she was referred to them, survived and filed a case leading to two arrests. She remarried and changed her identity for survival.

  I met the soft-spoken Mahnaz Rahman, the resident director of the Aurat Foundation, who had helped a young girl who was about to be killed for refusing to marry a person her family had chosen. The girl who wanted to study, escaped to Karachi where she met someone from her village. They ended up getting married but the families found out and she was harassed. Finally, the couple moved to a foreign country.

  Money, enmity or land, and a feudal structure are the basis for honour killings. Panah provides free legal aid and help to deal with the trauma, apart from rehabilitation. The majority of women who come here want a divorce or are escaping a forced marriage. Many are also under the threat of honour killing. The women from interior Sindh who want to marry of their own choice face death threats and have nowhere to go. Families come to court and threaten the women and those who are helping them. The earlier shelter home which was less secure was literally under fire often from angry relatives. Noorani and others had had their cars damaged and she was threatened and stalked by an army major whose wife was in the shelter. And the thin security for women is exacerbated by low convictions.

  Domestic violence and a survey

  For the first time, cases of domestic violence were included in the 2012–13 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS)11 which reported other shocking findings. The National Institute of Population Studies (NIPS) which did the PDHS found that one-third of the married women, or 32 per cent, had experienced physical violence since the age of fifteen, and one in five women had been victims of physical violence in the last twelve months (the report was released in February 2014). Women in the poorest households were more vulnerable—25 per cent—and the violence in most cases—79 per cent—is perpetrated by the husband. Eleven per cent of women also experienced violence during pregnancy. Almost 40 per cent of women had suffered abuse from their husbands at some point in their life and one-third of them reported some form of physical or emotional violence by their husbands in the last twelve months.

  There was huge resistance to including questions on sexual violence, and even the domestic violence questionnaire was inserted with great difficulty, Tanvir Kiyani of the NIPS said. Women don’t have the power to make decisions and more than one-third of them had no say on healthcare, or visits to family or relatives or on major household purchases. About 43 per cent of women and one-third of the men agreed that a husband was justified in beating his wife if she argued with him, neglected the children or in-laws, refused to have sex, went out without telling the husband, or burnt the food. About 34 per cent of women agreed that if they argue with their husbands, it is justified if they are beaten.

  At a discussion I attended on the report at the SDPI, Dr Abdul Basit Khan, the executive director of the NIPS, said that lack of education, financial constraints, wars and religious extremism had contributed to the situation, and instead of fighting with India, Pakistan should learn from it on the health front. It was one of the few times I heard India not being spoken of in inimical terms.

  The report had other shocking findings. One in every fourteen Pakistani children died before reaching the age of one, and one in every eleven did not survive his or her fifth birthday. Infant and under-five mortality rates were at seventy-four and eighty-nine deaths respectively per 1000 live births in the five-year period before the latest report, a far cry from the millennium development goal target of 40/1000 live births. Children in rural areas were more likely to die young with the under-five mortality at 106 per 1000 live births, while in urban areas it was 74/1000 live births, the survey said. Neonatal mortality at fifty-five deaths per 1000 live births had remained unchanged for the last twenty years.

  Pakistani households consisted of an average of 6.8 persons and about 39 per cent of the population was under fifteen. Only 11 per cent of the households were headed by women, the survey said. The majority of women, 57 per cent, and 29 per cent of men had no education and only 16 per cent of women and 21 per cent of men had attended primary school. Fertility had decreased from 5.4 births per woman to 3.8 in the last twenty-three years. Women who had a higher education had a fertility rate of 2.5, while for illiterate women it was 4.4. Thirty-five per cent of the women were married at eighteen and more than half—54 per cent—by the age of twenty.

  Transgenders in Pakistan

  Two of my friends in Pakistan identified themselves as from the transgender community. I met Z at a press conference in a five-star hotel and was introduced by a mutual friend. Dressed casually in baggy jeans and a T-shirt with sneakers, Z looked refreshingly different from the overdressed and made up-to–the-nines women I usually met. After that we hung out together with Z’s companion who was equally charming. They made sandwiches as a business and it did well for a while. Often I would be invited for lunch or dinner on their terrace where a large wooden table would be full of food. Crisp French bread with delicious fillings, coffee and sometimes cakes. They cooked well and I enjoyed being there. The funniest time I had was when at a pre-Christmas party for which I landed up late, we played a game, Cards against Humanity, with zany clues and sometimes answers you could have never imagined.

  Z had started to undergo a gender transition and had begun taking testosterone. I did notice the excessive growth of hair on the upper lip but I thought little of it till I was told the reason. We often covered events together—and sat together during Musharraf’s trial. Other journalists were very curious about Z and would keep asking me was this a boy or a girl, and I would firmly say girl. In a society that finds it difficult to accept transgenders, they had strange experiences. Once, while watching the ceremony that takes place every evening on the Wagah border between Indian and Pakistani soldiers, they ended up in the section reserved for women!

  Life can be difficult for transgenders in the subcontinent, especially in Pakistan, and they braved it out for a while before leaving the country to go to a place where they would be more welcome. We did a lot of fun things together like going to play mini-golf near the Rawal Lake or going bowling to celebrate one of their birthdays. We also watched bad Hindi films together, or ate ice cream at Hotspot, and they were a fun couple, very different from most people in the city. They reminded me of my friends in Mumbai, they were casual and full of beans. When I told Z my visa was cancelled, she immediately called me for a farewell lunch of sorts where we cribbed about the visa problem and I met some of her other friends whose visas were not being renewed and had to leave.

  While women suffer from poor social standing and health, for the 1.5 million transgender community in Pakistan, social acceptance—despite court orders—is a long way off. I reported on a discussion at the SDPI and met some members of the community. As Gulnaz, a researcher said, there was a need to be sensitive and understand the community, instead of driving them to the fringes. In one case, Rifee Khan was asked to take private lessons at a premier ‘spoken English’ training institute in Karachi. Families of other students would object if she studied in class, the institute said. Rifee, a double MA and part of the Gender Interactive Alliance, was one of the three transgenders—the other two being Mahar Anjum and Muskan—to have got jobs in the Sindh government’s social welfare department as office assistant, some years after a court order. The situation was very similar
to India, though Indian activists said India was better off.

  A landmark Supreme Court judgment in 2011 recognized transgenders’ right to equality, inheritance, and to be registered as the third gender, or khwaja seras, in the National Database and Registration Authority which issues the identity cards, but the community continues to be stigmatized. The court order allows for a third gender category on national identity cards, gives transgenders a legal share in family inheritance, reserves 2 per cent jobs in all sectors, and gives them the right to vote in elections.

  The main issue remains social acceptance. Almas Bobby of Transgender Foundation wanted to study beyond matric but couldn’t go ahead due to social pressure. She was against separate schools for transgenders as she felt it would isolate them further. Even on the health front, when they went to hospitals, they couldn’t stand in the male or female queues. If they stood in one queue, they would be asked to go to the other. So, access to health care was a difficulty.

  Rifee called on families to support their children who had a different sexual orientation. She said her family had supported her and so she could study as much as she wanted to. Many families disowned their children and then they had little option but to beg or dance. ‘Remember this is a society which persecutes its women, so the transgenders are further marginalized,’ she pointed out. Jannat Ali, who is an MBA and heads the Khwaja Sera Society, said she ran a literary project which aimed at teaching skills to young people so that they didn’t have to beg on the streets. It was difficult for transgenders to continue in school due to stigma and prevalent attitudes. These children were taunted and many were reluctant to study. However, education remains the only way they can integrate and get jobs.