Pakistani graduate raped to punish her low-caste family

[ECH1969]

A YOUNG Pakistani woman has been kidnapped, raped and beaten by a gang of high-caste villagers because her uncle eloped with one of their relatives. She was chosen for punishment because she had recently gained a degree and was the pride of her low-caste family.

Ghazala Shaheen, 24, and her mother Mumtaz were abducted last month by men dressed in police uniforms from their home near Multan in southern Punjab.

Her shocking ordeal mirrors that of Mukhtaran Mai, 29, who became a symbol in the campaign for women’s rights in Pakistan after she was gang-raped because her 12-year-old brother had been seen with a higher-caste woman. Six men were found guilty but five later had their convictions overturned.

Shaheen’s ordeal began last month when 11 armed men, believed to be security guards employed by one of Musharraf’s ministers, forced their way into her home, attacked her father and brothers and pulled her and her mother into the street.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2372124,00.html

[bluestateguy]

1. What a disgusting medieval society

And no doubt the woman will be the one blamed for it.

If that is their culture, I will not respect it.

[NVMojo]

2. ...and life was worse in Iraq?? Hmmmm. But Bush likes Pakistan.

[donsu]

3. a pox on the rapists - justice for women and children

men's war against women is the worst war

[smirkymonkey]

4. I'm so disgusted I could ....

:puke:

And we have people here who will defend this crime because at one time "Christians" burned women as witches.

[AliceWonderland]

5. When have you ever seen anyone here defend rape?

Just curious.

[smirkymonkey]

8. Stick around long enough - you will see plenty of apologists for

the abuse and violation of women. In this particular situation, it will be in the form of "It's their culture and who are we to condemn them" or somehow excusing it, because what "We" do is much worse.

[AliceWonderland]

11. I need evidence of a post, please - this is a serious allegation

You're making a very serious allegation, that members of the DU community defend rape. Please provide a link, if your argument is that "plenty of apologists" defend rape as a cultural artifact. If what you say it true, this is very disturbing.

[Andromeda]

35. You're free to do some research on your own.

It'll take a while to go through the archives but, believe me, there have been rape apologists who have posted on DU that have suggested that it is a "cultural thing" and we shouldn't judge them according to our standards.

[Iris]

18. I take it you weren't around DU when the Duke rape case was first

reported.

Ugly, ugyl scene.

[laheina]

31. Agree with you there.

You couldn't have paid me to go into GD while that was happening.

[Warpy]

6. It's also the longest and least recognized

From petty sexual harassment on the street aimed at making us feel like powerless pieces of dog shit to the glass ceiling for those of us who have worked our butts off to succeed according to the male model, the war continues, even here.

And yes, we get raped too. We are raped again by the men's justice system, because men know rape keeps us in our place against a background of fear at all times.

To hell with these men.

[Stargazer99]

7. It is things like this that make me ask God

"What the hell am I doing on this planet? There is so much ignorance and belief that harming another benefits self. Is it that man is so stupid that he cannot see the forest for the tree?

[RandomUser]

9. A crime compounded

Stuff like this is sickening and wrong no mattter what country you're in. But what really compounds the underlying violence is the fact that they came dressed as police officers and are believed to be employed by the government, assigning it a greater veneer of condonation for such a terrible act. The rape and government corruption fester and magnify each other.

[Frustratedlady]

10. Thank you for posting the article.

I saw it earlier this morning, but became so nauseated at the content, I closed out. However, I wanted to show it to someone and couldn't locate it again. I am in the midst of a long discussion with a Repug about religion, politics and Iraq/Middle East, men and I wanted him to see the atrocities brought about by these archaic customs and beliefs.

Even animals are above such behavior. Sickos!

[Auntie Bush]

12. God...I'm glad I was born in the USA...in spite of our fascist tendencies.

[Acadia Blue]

13. These people are where the Christians were in the middle ages

and just as ignorant. Our fundi christians are still there.

[rodeodance]

14. still treating women like dirt. hard to believe it is 2006

[LeftishBrit]

15. How sick and evil...

It breaks one's heart what some people can do to other people.

[AX10]

16. And why has the US called this irate-13th Century country our...

"ally" for the past 60 years?

[Joe Chi Minh]

17. I thought Pakistan was Moslem. The caste system is Hindu. O

has the immediate post-Independence enmity given way to a degree of multiculturalism?

[Gormy Cuss]

19. There is a relatively small Hindu population in Pakistan

and the southern Punjab is one of the areas of concentration, so the references to caste in this story may be correct.

[Hoping4Change]

20. It seems she is Muslim.

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/09/16/10068132.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. If not as rigid as Hindu castes were, it seem Islam in the area

still has, or had, some similar structures:

From the beginning, those in the Islamic world who could trace their genealogy to Mohammed (who said, “There are no genealogies in Islam”) and even to his tribe partook of nobility. Islamic jurisprudence later codified this notion and generalized it into the principle that, with certain specific allowances for wealth and learning, the longer Islam has been in your family or tribe or ethnic group, the higher your status.

It is this principle that is invoked to explain the basic division between high and low Muslim castes. Islam spread to India through invaders from established Muslim societies in the Near East and Afghanistan. The great mass of Indian Muslims, however, descend not from these conquerors, but from sections of the indigenous population who converted under their influence during the centuries of their rule. So those castes said to trace their lineages to the invaders, and therefore to have had Islam in their families for a longer time (this traditional ulamic distinction conveniently coinciding with reputed descent from the old foreign-derived ruling classes) are called ashraf (literally, “noble”). The other, inferior castes--the ajlaf (“lowly”)--are supposed to descend from the native converts. Seventy-five per cent of Muslims are born into ajlaf castes.

The line between ashraf and ajlaf castes corresponds to that between the upper three, “twice-born” varnas in the Hindu system (brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaishyas) and the sudras and untouchables beneath them. Nothing analogous to the phenomenon of “uppercaste sudras”--wealthy, landowning sudra castes like the kammas and reddis of Andhra who are treated as high-ranking despite their low varna--seems to exist among Muslims, probably because a prospering ajlaf caste can in time more easily move up to ashraf status.


http://www.anti-caste.org/muslim_question/caste/caste_one.html

[Joe Chi Minh]

25. Thank you for the information.

[aquart]

28. They couldn't get rid of it, so they incorporated it.

Just like Christianity did with pagan customs.

[varun]

29. Christians and Muslims in India and Pakistan

still cling to the old Hindu caste system...

...it seems as if they have absorbed the worst characteristics of all religions

:eyes:

[Ignacio Upton]

40. The idea of totally veiling women was also absorbed from pre-Islamic

cultures. The Koran says that women need to dress modestly, but that can be interpreted in different ways.

[Gormy Cuss]

22. Thank you for the second link.

Comparing the details, it barely appears to be the same incident. The gulfnews link suggests that she was targeted primarily because she had just acquired a master's unlike the Times link with its emphasis on class and family honor.

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. The report from Pakistan's Dawn mentions the uncle

Ghazala was kidnapped as punishment for her uncle Wahid Bakhsh had allegedly run away with Kulsoom Mai, wife of Muhammad Nawaz, some two years back.

Balagh Sher, brother of Kulsoom Mai, had filed a murder case against his brother-in-law Muhammad Nawaz for killing his sister.

http://www.dawn.com/2006/09/08/nat23.htm

And a human rights organisation says a government minister is involved:

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) writes to inform you about the alleged kidnapping of a girl named Ghazala Shaheen and her mother who were abducted from their house at 1:00 am by the henchmen of Mr. Raza Hayat Heraj who is the Minister of State on Law, Parliamentary Affairs and Human Rights and Punjab province police of the Khanewal district on 25 August 2006. The victims were only freed after local villagers took action and stormed a house, while detaining the perpetrators on September 5.

The father of the girl was also so severely beaten by the minister's men that he could not move for two days. The girl, who has completed her Masters in Education from Baha uddin Zakarya University, Multan in Punjab province, and her mother are feared by the father that they will soon be killed once they have reported the case to the police. Local human rights organisations also fear that the kidnapped women have been subjected to torture in their confinement since the perpetrators are previously known to have committee rape and torture to other women in the past.
...
Miss Ghazala Shaheen who is a part of the lower caste "Batti", graduated first class with a Master of Arts (MA) in Education. On 25 August 2006, she went to her house at the village Chak Sher Khan, Kabirwala Town some 50 kilometres away from her Zakarya University to inform her parents about her success. The news about her completion of the MA spread in the village like fire. This news provoked the people of the minister of state for law and human rights and also the tribal elders of upper caste namely "Mirali".

http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2006/1955/

A tangled case. It's obvious the women are completely innocent, of course.

[liberalpragmatist]

37. Non-Hindus in the Indian Subcontinent Generally Follow the Caste System

The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the subcontinent are the descendents of Hindu converts from the 1200s through the 1600s, and they've largely held to the caste system.

I'll add that, as a Hindu, you see stories like this in India too (from Hindus); caste rivalries are VERY intense in rural areas and the stuff that happens is pretty sickening.

I will add in the defense of Pakistani society, the country has HUGE fissures; the largely middle-class population of the large northern Punjabi cities like Lahore are predominantly secular (little wearing of the headscarf, even) and there's a very large secular culture in Karachi, as well. However, in cities along the Afghan border and in the rural areas, things are VERY backward.

[MadMaddie]

23. Wow...with Allies like Pakistan * can push his Democratic

society further ahead...so 50 years from now Historians can say it worked:sarcasm:

Seriously, didn't junior just say that reading and education would lead these countries into Democracy....?

This is disgusting and this is the company that this administration keeps....we won't hear a word about how this is not civilized from this administration......how women are raped and abused to keep them down.....

[lovuian]

26. I have to say this society is truly dark and the treatment

of women is their darkest truth...

[aquart]

27. "High caste" means "worthless scum" in Pakistani?

May their testicles shrivel into hard crystals that jingle as they walk.

[WildEyedLiberal]

30. Sickening.

I'm surprised the radical Islamic apologistas haven't swarmed into this thread to defend the culture that encouraged this hideous act of violence to happen.

Oh, maybe they won't, because Pakistan is a Bush "ally" and so therefore condemning their evil oppressive culture is okay. I'm sure if the same exact thing had happened in Iran or Syria, the apologists would be swarming all over this thread telling us how this incident is either a) a lie invented by the corporate media to help drum up support for a future Bush war; or b) not significant because women get raped in the US too and/or because Christians have killed people in the past so therefore it's hypocritical of Americans to condemn this odious culture.

Human rights and dignity transcend politics.

[daleo]

32. Well, I wouldn't defend this aspect of Pakistani culture

But I would point out that the U.S. Senate debated legislation last week about what level of torture ought to be permitted when interrogating accused persons.

[WildEyedLiberal]

34. And I'm totally not defending that

If they cravenly pass a bill authorizing torture, I'll be disgusted and outraged. But that doesn't make radical Islam and it's treatment of women as less than human any less disgusting. It's good if you are capable of being outraged at both the US's and other countries' human rights violations, but a lot of people here are willing to overlook human rights violations in countries that Bush hates simply on the logic that if Bush hates them they must be 100% good.

Human rights is something that transcends borders and political ideology and I will fight against abuses whether the US or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or China or Iran or Cuba commits them.

[Bridget Burke]

38. Were these criminals really "Radical" Muslims?

Followers of the worst of ancient ways, yes. And some of those ways are probably pre-Islamic. ("Castes.")

But don't confuse them with Bush's enemies. Pakistan is "our good friend." And there
is no indication that these "high-caste" males are politically radical.

[daleo]

39. Yeah you are right

It is just sad that this torture debate has diminished the moral stature of the U.S. government.

[wuushew]

42. Well what do you want to do exactly? (to change the world)

(A) Wilsonian/neo-con them into the paradise of democracy

(B) Buy them off Chinese capitalism style, despite the long term non-sustainablity of western style material economies.

(C) wait for such backward societies to fail in societal competition with the more advanced world.

(D) promote authoritarian communist secularism

(E) Condoms, education and food aid

(F) send them bibles and other useless crap.

[JI7]

33. what does Musharaff have to say about this ?

[Andromeda]

36. He's not talking about it

until his book is released. :silly:

[bloom]

41. Every element of society

That goes along with this is guilty - like denying her a job because "they did not want to be associated with someone who had been raped".

"According to her relatives, she had been selected as a kidnap target to maximise her family’s humiliation. She had been been the first in her family to gain a degree. This earned her a job as a local schoolteacher, but the offer was withdrawn after officials said they did not want to be associated with someone who had been raped."


Pakistan and BushCo terrorizing the world:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/18/82548/4524

[nebula]

43. The rape victim must now be killed

In accordance with the tradition, a rape victim must be killed by members of her own family, in order to preserve the family honor.

Human Rights Watch reported that such 'honor killings' are still widely practiced in Muslim countries, including Pakistan.