[sacw] I.A. Rehman on 'Samia's murder' in Pakistan

[Harsh Kapoor]

Given below is an account of Samia's murder by the well-known Pakistani
commentator & human rights campaigner I.A.Rehman, which has been published
in the April 1999 issue of Newsline, Karachi, Pakistan

IN THE NAME OF HONOUR
By I.A. Rehman

From: NEWSLINE APRIL 1999 April 1999

Lahore. April 6, 1999. Time: 5.54 pm. Samia Sarwar is sitting in
advocate Hina Jilani's room. For the first time in a few years she feels a
sense of relief. Her parents has sent word that they have agreed to her
getting
a divorce from an abusive husband. In fact, her mother is bringing the
settlement papers. It is only to meet her and receive the documents that Samia
has been brought here from Dastak, a shelter for women in distress. Well-known
intermediaries have persuaded her lawyer to arrange this meeting and they have
offered complete assurances of good faith. Samia will soon be free to make a
new life, there is a tangle feeling of optimism all around.

The mother arrives. But she is not alone. She is accompanied by a tough
looking man. Samia rises in her chair out of respect for her mother. At the
same time Hina Jilani asks the mother to send the man accompanying her out as
his presence is the room is not permitted. The latter answers in English, "He
is supporting me as I have difficulty in walking." She has barely finished her
sentence when the male intruder whips out a pistol and takes a shot at Samia's
head. In a split second her dreams are shattered as she slumps on the floor,
her young body forming a pool around her lifeless head. The assassin and
Samia's mother run out of the room - the latter apparently has not
difficulty in
racing through the corridor, towards the exit door where another man, Samia's
uncle, is standing guard with a pistol in his hand. Their getaway plan
however,
somehow goes awry. Perhaps the vehicle needed for the great escape has not
arrived. Perhaps the appointed driver has changed his mind and not shown up.
The man at the door notices Shahtaj Qizilbash, a key figure at AGHS Law
Associates, grabs her, puts his pistol to her head, forces her to accompany
him,
and warns everyone against following him. Meanwhile, the assassin notices the
police guard crouching behind the reception desk and takes aim at him, but the
policeman is quicker. He who had a few moments earlier taken a life, thus
loses
his own. Amid this chaos, Samia's mother and uncle with their captive Shahtaj
in tow manage to scramble down the stairs.

They are spotted by the security guards of the private organization, but
when
the latter see Shahtaj being taken hostage at gunpoint, they desist from
intervening. Her captor then pushes her and the other woman into a rickshaw,
squeezes himself in and off they go. Lahore has just witnessed one of the most
foul murders of its kind in recent years.

The premeditated and cold-blooded killing of Samia Imran Saleh in the law
office of widely reputed campaigners for human rights, especially of women's
rights, Asthma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, was a crime of extraordinary daring.
The culprits knew that they could not gain access to their prey at Dastak as no
man is allowed entry there. The only place they could hope to reach her were
the advocate's chamber and that too was proving difficult since Samia had
refused to met anyone - even her father. Thus, they had to assign a key role to
Samia's mother.

A mother being used to help assassinate her offspring is not an ordinary
matter, even in Pakistan's violence-ridden society. Men have been guilty of
such cruel behavior, but instances of a mother's heart being hardened to such a
degree, of being an accomplice to her child's murder, are rare.

It was an even more extraordinary crime because the culprits were aware of
the nature of the venue chosen for the dastardly act. They knew that any
violence committed at such a place would immediately attract the attention of
the media, the lawyers' community, the NGO fraternity and the public at large.
They were also fully aware of the high-profile contracts they had to use to
persuade the advocates to allow Samia's mother to see her, and that too for
delivering a settlement deed that would rule out recourse to a court of law.
Yet they were not deterred from committing a capital offence at these premises.

It was also an extraordinary crime because the characters involved were no
ordinary persons. True, Samia Imran came from Peshawar but she was not one of
those Pathan women who have never tasted freedom. The fact of her
incompatibility with her husband, the son of her mother's sister, had been
accepted by her parents. They had been maintaining her in their home for about
four years and providing her two children with comfortable upbringing and
education. They had not only allowed Samia's younger sister to study medicine
and become a doctor but had also permitted Samia herself to study law after her
separation from her husband. And the parents themselves were not ordinary
persons - her father enjoyed eminence in the business community of Peshawar and
her mother was a doctor. They had just returned home after performing Haj, a
rite that symbolises in its essence the best and most pure in life, that
conjures up images of peace and sanctity. How did they seeds of a murder plot
strike root in such a household?

And then it was an extraordinary crime cause it was not warranted nor
understood in any way - not even as a crime of passion. Samia was seeking a
divorce four years after her separation from her husband that had been accepted
by both sides. It was not a sudden development. Nobody had enticed her to
Lahore. Neither Dastak nor the AGHS had suggested to her that she should seek
refuge with them. She had, in fact, gone to a law college in Lahore about
which
she might have heard after deciding to take up the LL.B course, and it was the
principal of that institution who had advised her to take refuge at Dastak and
engage Hina Jilani for the divorce proceedings. There was no immediate
provocation, and divorce is not unknown even in tribal society.

Ironically, it was this extraordinary crime that exposed the Prime
Minister and the Punjab chief minister's hollow rhetoric about instant
retribution for all killers for what it really is. They apparently,
believe an innocent woman's brutal murder is not a heinous crime.

"A brutal killing," "senseless" "cold-blooded murder," shouted women
activists, human rights defenders, media personnel, et al. Certainly not for
the first time. Were they crying out in vain?

They had cried out when Kanwar Ahsan was shot and critically wounded on the
premises of a court in Karachi-targeted because he and an adult women had
decided to live together in marriage.

They had cried out when the country's most outstanding painter, Zahoorul
Akhlaq, and his talented daughter, Jahanara, were mercilessly gunned down in
Lahore.

And they cried out each time a women fell victim to the evil custom of karo
kari. Samia's murder demonstrates only too graphically how each time their
cries were in vain.

Is there a link between Samia's murder, the killing of Zahoorul Akhlaq and
Jahanara, the murderous attack on Ahsan and the increasing incidence of karo
kari killings?

These orgies of wanton killing cannot be wholly explained by the theory of
the progressive brutalization of Pakistani society over the past few decades.
True, society has been brutalized each time the state has used arms to deal
with
political dissidents among the Pakhtuns, the Bengalis, the Baloch, the Sindhis
an the new Sindhis who call themselves mohjirs. It was brutalized when capital
punishment was made a trivial matter by prescribing it as the minimum
punishment
for a variety of breaches of martial law regulations, and when several new
offences were added to the list of capital crimes. It was brutalized when
Zia-ul-Haq gathered crowds to witness a hanging in public or to listen to the
shrieks of victims who were flogged in public squares, or when individuals in
authority harangued their audiences with the resolve to hang people by
lampposts. And so on. These are surely some of the more commonly identified
factors that have contributed to the culture of violence in Pakistan. But
it is
time to take a critical look at some other factors that have encouraged the
perpetrators of mayhem.

To begin with, murder is not treated as a crime against society since the
promulgation of the Qisas and Diyat law in 1990. This law had made it possible
for murderers to go scot-free if they are rich enough to buy a pardon from the
victim's heirs or notorious enough to scare the latter off law courts. Nothing
is proved by the argument that murders continue to be sentenced to death, that
indeed their number has been growing year after year. What is important is the
creation of hope in the criminal's mind that he can escape retribution even if
his legal defense is untenable.

This hope is greatly reinforced if a killer has the wali of the victim
on his
side. A man can kill anyone so long as he is sure o being pardoned by the
wali. A man killed his daughter and told his son to take the rap. Later, he
pardoned the 'killer' and both were home free.

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