Here’s a confession: I’m tired of hearing about women’s empowerment in Pakistan when the government is breaking all its promises to Pakistani women on the subject of safety and security in terms of gender-based violence. While debates rage about the Panama Papers, the situation in Karachi, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and the state of affairs in Indian-held Kashmir, the issue of “honor” killings has been swept under the rug. All the feel-good news about women entrepreneurs and girls’ education drives pales in comparison to the images of women’s bodies in funeral shrouds that appear on our newspaper pages with depressing regularity.

The latest news that British citizen Samia Shahid was raped before allegedly being honor-killed by her father and former husband reminds us that women are no safer now than they were before this summer. After the media uproar over Qandeel Baloch’s murder in July, everyone is curiously silent about the larger issue of violence against women and the particular issue of honor killings. Perhaps it’s a form of collective guilt, but there isn’t enough whitewash in the world to cover up the blood of Pakistani women spilled with such impunity by their brothers, fathers, husbands and uncles.

Today, business continues uninterrupted for men murdering women for the sake of their honor and suffering no repercussions. A parliamentary committee approved two bills back in July that addressed both honor killings and convictions for rape; the nation was told these bills would be voted on “in a matter of weeks.” Yet months have passed and no vote has been held, nor does it seem to be on the horizon for the foreseeable future.

The hoopla around the anti-honor killing bill was enacted merely to show the international community that the government was doing something about the problem. In July, we were told that the bill would not even be opposed by the religious parties, who usually block laws written to protect women and girls from abuse and violence in our heavily male-dominated society. But instead of an anti-honor killing law, what Pakistan got was a cybercrime law in August, pushed through parliament and the Senate as if their lives depended on it.

I can’t imagine the frustration of Sen. Sughra Imam, who has spent much of her parliamentary career for the past two years trying to get a bill tabled that eliminates the loopholes and lacunae in the parts of the Pakistan Penal Code that already address honor killings. It must be extremely disheartening to be a parliamentarian making Herculean efforts to bring about good laws and then see all that effort go to waste simply because the government does not deem it a priority after saying exactly the opposite.

The proposed honor killing law must be made watertight, so that the crime of honor killing is non-compoundable, meaning that the parties cannot enter into a compromise and have the accused acquitted of the crime. On the other hand, it also has to make sure that anyone committing an honor killing doesn’t change their plea and claim it was a murder with a different motive -- a domestic argument, for example -- in order to escape punishment under this particular law.

Member of the National Assembly Nafisa Shah is in the process of publishing a book on honor killings in upper Sindh, based on field research she conducted for her Ph.D. at Oxford. Her experiences as a journalist and as district nazim (similar to a mayor) of Khairpur make her one of the foremost experts on the practice of honor killing in Pakistan today.

In upper Sindh, she observed the practice had become something of a business: Men who killed their wives for honor would forgive the man co-accused of the “affair” -- if the co-accused paid a fine or supplied the “widower” with a new bride from his own family. However, in most cases, Shah says in an interview with a magazine, “Honor acts as a mask for instrumental coldblooded violence.” She knows that the key to stopping honor killings is not just legislation but community engagement, mediation that doesn’t involve using women as barter and the wholesale protection of women.

According to Shah, “The state, the law and the power elite are jointly implicated in the immunity that the family and kin enjoy in taking the lives of men and women accused of damaging family honor.” Implementation of the law, prosecutions and convictions promise to be extremely challenging in a country whose legal system is already under tremendous pressure, and there’s already a sense of defeat before the law has even been passed, which might explain the lack of impetus behind it. But millions of Pakistani women haven’t yet lost hope that they may be the recipients of justice from a country that has promised them equality and protection.

As terrible a crime as honor killing is, it would be equally criminal to show, by refusing to pass an anti-honor killing law, that their hopes are unfounded and that being killed for honor is just another one of the indignities you have to live with because you are a Pakistani woman.

By Bina Shah

Dawn (Pakistan)
The writer is an author. -- Ed.

(Dawn/Asia News Network)