FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AHRC-STM-048-2009
March 04, 2009
A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
PAKISTAN: Order an honour killing – become a minister
The Asian Human Rights Commission is extremely concerned to discover that a man accused of ordering an honour killing last year in a tribal court – and who is still openly pursuing the murder has just been made a minister in the Sindh provincial government. He is the seventh person with a history in illegal jirga rulings, relating either to the murder or the bartering of women and children, to be appointed in Zardari’s government.
On 25 February, 2008, the AHRC released an urgent appeal on behalf of a young couple in hiding, both black-marked for death by the Jatoi tribe in rural Sindh. Saira Jatoi, 22 and Mohammad Ismail Soomro, 30, had married against the wishes of their families. Please see the appeal: http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2009/3118/
As the chief of the Balochi Jatoi tribe, Mr Abid Hussain Jatoi commanded the couple’s death sentence and arranged the beating and abduction of the husband’s relatives. Though Jatoi has not yet been given a portfolio, he has been given all the powers of a minister, and after being appointed on 27 February, 2009, his first official duty was to send a message to the husband’s parents through henchmen and police officials. The message said that if the young woman was not returned to the tribe, she and her six-month-old baby would be killed. Being ‘Kari’, or black marked by the tribal court, Saira is liable to be killed regardless.
The message was sent on 1 March and arrived at midnight at her in-laws house in Sukkur, Sindh province (20 km from the Jatois house). The family was told that the men in uniform were personal guards of the minister and that in his new role he could easily track down the couple, who are currently in hiding.
The case hasn’t yet reached the courts, but Abid Jatois name is mentioned in a first information report (FIR number 97/2008), a requirement for a legal case, which accuses him of kidnapping the couple. Though it was lodged with the Sukkur police by Mr. Bashir Ahmed Menon, the deputy inspector general of police in Sindh, Jatoi was never arrested.
In Pakistan extra-judicial killings and the jirgas that command them are illegal, and yet three ministers in the federal government were prominently involved in jirgas in the recent past, which dealt destructive sentences against women and children. Mr Hazar Khan Bijarani, minister for education, was sentenced by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2005 for a jirga that handed over five minor girls in marriage to settle a dispute. His sentence was never arranged. Mr Sana Zehri, state minister, declared in the senate that the jirga-ordered burial of five women alive was a justified local custom. The perpetrator of that crime is allegedly Mr Abdul Sattar Umrani, the protected younger brother of Minister Sadiq Umrani, and had been ordered to pay compensation to a jirga court years before for the murder of eight other people. He was not arrested. Mr Amin Fahim, senior minister in the federal cabinet used a tribal custom to marry his two sisters to the Quran, to bar them from marrying men.
There are at least three other ministers in the Sindh provincial cabinet who are notorious for helming jirgas against women, but have not been officially charged: Mr Abid Hussain Jatoi, Mr Nadir Khan Magsi and Mr Abdul Haque Bhurt, the minister of livestock. When looking at the promotions of these men soon after illegal and often barbaric acts of jirga authority against women and children, it begins to look like the penchant has become a professional asset. Is this misogynist and illegitimate form of religious conservative rule now to be embraced by the Pakistani government? Does it really expect to champion the rights of women, as it has claimed to now do, with these men on board?
The provincial government is duty-bound to provide protection to the couple in question and their baby, and it is duty-bound to arrest Abid Hussain Jatoi. To promote him instead, as with Bijarani, Zehri and Umrani, is utterly at odds with Zardari’s assumed stance on the empowerment of women and the progress of Pakistan.
The Asian Human Rights Commission would also like to appeal again to human rights and women’s rights organisations to consider the case of Saira Jatoi and Mohammad Ismail Soomro. With their would-be killer now enjoying the power and impunity of a government position, their chances of survival are becoming slimmer by the day.
