In June 2006 a five member bench of Supreme Court judges ordered police in Kashmore, Sindh province to arrest a PPP leader and national assembly member, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani, for involvement in Sang Chatti (offering young girls as blood money). He was accused, along with others, of offering a total of five young girls as blood money in two separate cases. Most of the girls were under seven years old. Police neglected to follow up on the order and, after some time keeping his head low, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani has become federal minister of Education.
Pakistans legal process has long been derailed by illegal jirga courts — gatherings of powerful men in rural areas, who act as judge and jury. They may once have had a legitimate role in the settlement of tribal disputes, but over the years jirgas have become exposed as little more than mob trials, manipulated by rich, powerful and often vengeful men, egged on by spectators. The men mete out death with regularity; two thirds of the condemned are women who have no say in a jirga, and who die the most brutal of deaths. Jirgas have been illegal since 2004.
This August, Balochistan Senator Sardar Isarullah Zehri, along with Senator Jan Mohammad Jamail (the deputy chairman of the Senate), chose to defend as custom, a jirga-ordered ‘honour killing’ in his province: the burying of three teenage girls and two of their aunts alive. (The case is yet to be properly investigated). At the end of October Mr. Zehri was inducted as a minister of state.
Mr. Bijarani eventually had his charges waived by Mr. Abdul Hameed Dogar, who was inserted into the system by then-President Musharraf after Justice Iftekhar Chaudry was deposed. The AHRC fears for the future of an already flaccid education system.
The message sent by such appointments is irreversibly damaging, both to Pakistan’s world reputation and to the faith of its people in its system of justice. The government has repeatedly pledged to tackle illegal jirgas and honour killings, both deeply entrenched problems, yet by placing men with archaic beliefs and fundamentalists pasts within the system, it clearly has no intention of doing so. For the average Pakistani the message is clear: power is impunity; for the world, it appears that the tribal and feudal hierarchy is seeping back into power once again.
