Donga Gali
Via Raquel Evita Saraswati, a new horror in Pakistan –
Pakistani police on Thursday arrested 15 members of a tribal council accused of ordering the burning alive of a young girl for helping a couple to elope in a so-called “honor killing”, police said.
Those are the men who had a 16-year-old girl set on fire.
They just look like ordinary men. No doubt they are. Ordinary people can be horrible; it doesn’t take extraordinary talents or qualities.
The 16-year-old girl was set on fire last week in the town of Donga Gali, about 50 km (30 miles) northeast of the capital, Islamabad, on the orders of the council, said district police chief Saeed Wazir.
Police said the honor killing was ordered as punishment for what the council deemed irreparable damage to the village’s reputation. The couple appeared to have escaped.
Well the village’s reputation is certainly burnished now. Donga Gali can join Lidice and Oradour and Srebrenica and My Lai and Dos Erres and Chibok.
The girl’s mother told police her daughter had helped a couple from the nearby village of Makol elope, in defiance of cultural norms.
“The jirga then took her to an abandoned place outside the village and made her unconscious by injecting her with some drugs,” said Wazir.
“Then they seated the girl in a van in which the couple had escaped. They tied her hands to the seats and then poured petrol on her and the vehicle.”
The vehicle was set ablaze.
For the sake of the village’s “reputation.”
Sickening. The village’s reputation is safe now, that’s for sure.
The report also said:
“The girl’s mother and brother were also arrested, Wazir said, as they were present during the meeting and allegedly agreed to the sentence.”
It disappoints me greatly that feminism, at least the online stuff I read, fails so reliably to bite the bullet and face the sad truth that culture (misogynistic, partriarchal or whatever it may be) is learnt in the nursery and that culture’s agent of transmission between generations is mostly dear mama.
This is not to say that men – their fathers, teachers and priests – have no effect. Just that the groundwork is laid for all of this in the early years at home. I don’t believe for a second that boys in teenage years can be ‘trained’ into hatred without such foundations.
Outside of the home, depending on the particular society, women have varying degrees of physical safety, influence and power, but inside the home, with father absent and a house full of children, a woman’s position is very different.
And how can women realistically be expected to behave under these every day, but inverted, circumstances?
Can a Saudi women feel unambiguously towards her infant son when she is only allowed out in his company? Or a Western mother who knows her boy will automatically have better life choices than his sister? And should she let her daughter go out dressed like that when people will think she’s a tart? How can she stop her son from crying like a cissy?
Feminism, it seems to me, seeks to discover the roots of misogyny in social and economic factors when it’s daily renewal escapes everyone’s notice.
I think that Yahweh is right (now there’s a sentence I never expected to utter).
It fascinates me that people choosing who to marry is damaging to the village’s reputation but murder is apparently respectable. It seems to me that people need to pour scorn and ridicule upon such people so that their reputations are destroyed.
Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that it is when war is seen as vulgar rather than wicked people will be put off. It seems that the obvious horror that goes with these murders is not deterrent enough. It will be when people regard the perpetrators with derision that attitudes will change.
In this report about the jirga system, interesting examples of jirga decisions are given. Here is the quote. Just pick your favorite.
I guess that these examples are telling enough, so there is no need for me to comment on them.
Myrhinne #3: whose “obvious horror” and whose “derision, scorn and ridicule”? That’s the question. On p. 12 of the report from my link we read:
This is not merely about people’s attachment to the ‘traditional way of living’. At this point the authors of the report emphasise that in some areas jirgas remain the only means of justice (with practically no state presence); they say also that the official courts are perceived – with good reasons! – as corrupt, slow and inefficient.
I’m afraid that as long as nothing changes in this respect, no amount of derision and scorn from the mainstream media and human rights activists will achieve anything.