The government of Pakistan continues to turn a blind eye to Islamic extremism throughout the country and is compromising the rule of law for religious fanaticism. In doing so, the country has once again witnessed the brutal and senseless death of one of the states political hopefuls. This time, the Minister of Social Welfare was assassinated in the streets for no reason other than being female.
On 20 February 2007, Punjab’s provincial Minister Zille Huma Usman was killed in broad daylight as she was about to address an open session of her ‘meet-the-people’ pre-election campaign at her electoral constituency in Gujranwala. The murderer, a man named Maulvi Sarwar Mughal, is known to have already killed more than half a dozen other women in the past for so-called sins against Islam. After one year, each of his cases were thrown out of court based on a lack of evidence, resulting in him remaining a free man up until his most recent planned execution of the minister. Shamefully, Maulvi had tried to kill female Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto at least two times in the early 1990s. Maulvi Sarwar stressed that he was unable to kill her because she had such tight security.?In his statement to police and media, he went on to say that the minister (Zille Huma) deserved to die because she refused to wear her full veil and had chosen to pursue a career that was outside the home.
In Pakistan, murders against women such as this are happening because military and police promote policy that allows fundamentalist killers to negotiate their freedom. This is the same policy that grants reprieve under Islamic Law. Those who commit such heinous crimes are allowed to pay a determined amount of money to the victim’s families via authoritative negotiation or aggressive threats. Once the family has been bought, the killer walks free and is able to continue carrying out the work that has been quietly sanctioned by the radical clerics and sympathetic government administrators. It is known that Maulvi had not been condemned for targeting working women after he and his patrons began a protest movement against theaters and picture houses, a campaign that was made successful through the support of local government administrators and religious extremists in 2005. It is alleged that he was actively involved and supported by influential community figures in this movement that was set to clean the city of sinful women who decided to work.
The Asian Human Rights Commission accuses the Pakistani government of supporting fundamentalist policies that have resulted in Minister Zille Huma Usman’s death. If the government had acted against this serial killer in the past and condemned his hateful doctrine, Minister Zille Huma Usman may be alive today. Despite the killer’s first two assassination attempts, the police did not arrest him since they did not take the matter seriously enough. The AHRC purports that the government of Pakistan refusal to take death threats against women seriously proves that they are quietly condoning a patriarchal society that is organized under fundamental law. The AHRC is extremely saddened to report that the government’s lack of respect for women has resulted in a drastic increase incases of rape, honor killings, abduction and forced marriage over the past 6 years. From 2000 to 2006, roughly 9379 women were killed throughout Pakistan in different disputes including 117 from rape. There were another 3116 cases of reported rape, 1260 gang rapes, 4572 honor killing, while 1503 women were burned to death.(Please see AHRC Human Rights report 2006). Needless to say, the unreported figure is much higher.
