Words Fail Me
Well. What a lovely story.
Ms Bibi was catapulted to world attention after a panchayat, or tribal council, at the remote Punjabi village of Meerwala in June 2002. Her 12-year-old brother was accused of having an affair with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. In punishment, the elders ordered that Mukhtaran be raped. As several hundred people watched, four men dragged her screaming through a cotton field. Pushing her into a mud-walled house, they assaulted her for more than an hour.
Is that pretty or what. It has all the ingredients, doesn’t it. Nothing left out. A higher-caste tribe. The elders. Punishment of A for something B is accused of doing. Rape as punishment, rape as judicial (sort of) punishment, rape as something that elders order to be done, rape as something that a tribal council of old men order to be done to a young woman. Several hundred people (some of them no doubt well known, neighbours) watch. Several hundred people watch a young woman dragged screaming through a field by four men, to be raped, on the orders of the elders of the tribal council.
“Honour” killings and punishments are usually sanctioned through the panchayat system, which has no legal standing but is still prevalent in many rural towns. Last week elders in another Punjabi village ordered that a two-year-old girl be married to a man 33 years her senior. The betrothal was in compensation for an adulterous affair committed by her uncle.
And the brother was framed anyway. In fact he was assaulted himself.
According to the prosecution, the Meerwala council ordered the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai, then 30, as punishment for the alleged illicit sexual relations of her brother Shakoor with a woman from the rival Mastoi tribe. It was later revealed that he had been molested by Mastoi men who tried to conceal it by accusing him of illicit relations with a Mastoi woman. The Mastoi demanded revenge. That was delivered when the council approved the rape of Ms. Mukhtar.
Paul Anderson in Islamabad.
The BBC’s Paul Anderson in Islamabad says most women involved in attacks against them which are designed to restore the slighted honour of a family, clan or tribe, accept their fate, believing that tribal or feudal leaders are too powerful to resist and that the police and judicial systems are stacked against them. The statement said the reason for the increasing violence against women in Pakistan was the fact that men, guilty of assaulting them, were rarely punished. Hundreds of women are killed or injured in honour attacks each year.
Nothing to add.
Too sickening for me, too. Echh!
But…But…But. These are TRADITIONAL societies. Don’t you know traditions, especially third world traditions, are always better than our nasty little SECULAR western imperialism?
So what is the conclusion to be drawn from the urgency and horror of this episode?
I don’t know what the “answer” is. Is there an “answer”? As this site continuously makes clear, human “culture” can be a very beastly thing.
I wonder though: Could a traditionalist Muslim not perhaps find similar horrors in OUR society? Like, for example, the American habit of packing the inconveinent elderly off into “rest homes” or “nursing homes,” with visits limited to guilt induced rarities? (Not that I am equating the two, but still…)
Expose and denounce. Use economic and diplomatic pressure where applicable. Activists with more guts than I’ve got might go work in these countries.
Or we can just say it’s human nature, everybody does it, what the hell can we do about it, you can’t fight city hall, and go back to watching Fear Factor and MTV Spring Break. Party on, dudes!
I’m not even sure this particular horror is actually traditionalist Muslim – it may be just plain traditionalist, period. It may be more to do with the idiocy of rural life than with religion – or that combined with ingrained contempt for women, which could have to do with traditionalist Islam. The horror that others could point to that occurred to me was the two white guys in rural Texas who tied a black man to the back of their pickup and dragged him to death. Not an exact parallel (not ordered by a council, not watched by hundreds), but certainly brutal enough. And official, watched by hundreds forms of brutality – like lynching and blocking schoolhouse doors – are not far in the past.
Anyway, what Karl says. Do what can be done. Awareness is the first step.
After all, it appears that the international outrage had its effect. Even the mere outrage of people like all of us – reading newspaper articles on the subject – has an effect. Outrage does sometimes have an effect. It wore down apartheid in the end. Wore down Jim Crow.
Horrible.
So the panchayat has no legal basis but what the hell was an ‘anti-terrorism’ court doing condemning the six Mastoi men to hang? Barbaric and with no legal basis either it would seem.
My first reaction on reading the linked article was that the fact that it was being attended to domestically in Pakistan was, at least, a ray of hope. But then I thought of the case, with some of the attendant details, as being fanned by international publicity, inspite of the traumatization and the courage of the woman at its center, and, perversely, thought of it as an inverted instance of Carl Schmitt’s dictum about the exception being what proves the rule. The imposition of the death penalty on the malefactors, in particular, as with duncanw above, struck me as precisely a reproduction of the same, rather than conducive to an amendation of ways. And, of course, such extremity also led to a conflicting counter-reaction, overturning the convictions.
Yeah, death penalty not helpful.
I don’t know, I think foreigners are of some real avail (though certainly limited). Moral support for the women’s groups who work against this kind of thing, for instance. I should think international outrage is more helpful than either agreement with the rapists or indifference would be.
It’s like the hundreds who watched. They made it worse (surely). More hundreds (and millions) who watch in another sense, can make it – less worse.
Sustained attention is needed, as well as, judgment. [ed]
Why conflate the promotion of international standards of basic human rights with the wasteful overconsumption in American society? One does not entail the other.
Karl:
I’m not aware of having made any such conflation. There would, however, be a connection between modes of the utilization and distribution of resources and forms of social organization and the social recognitions that are anchored in them. Abstract appeals to universal rights,- (presumably, that is what you meant by “international standards”),- are well and good, but underdetermined in their actual application, and they are prone to be invoked self-referentially, while, at the same time, hypostatizing or ignoring the material and social conditions of their application,- which would be ideological. The main point, though, is that I don’t think that poorer, non-Western people are devoid of any conception or sense of rights, any more than they are oblivious to the dynamics of social recognition, but those would be conceived and developed and institutionalized from their own situations and drawing on their own cultural resources. So the “promotion of international standards of basic human rights”, in an unmediated fashion, without considering the differences, processes and difficulties involved, may well be hypocritical and subject to ideological abuse,- perhaps as much so, as a rationalization of their absence. I might add that I consider the primary value of the institutionalization of rights that they enable the non-violent pursuit of socio-political conflict and thus enhance the possibilities of their productive resolution.
Just wanted to be sure I got your meaning. Well, yes, we do have to be savvy and shrewd in how we pursue these goals and should expect to achieve them only in piecemeal fashion. It’s going to be a long, long struggle. And if we can find local (indigenous) cultural analogues for conveying and supporting fundamental human rights abroad, so much the better. Amartya Sen has often written about this in re to “Asian values” and political freedom.
Sen is very good.