11-year-old Christian boy has been found in Pakistan’s Punjab
province (published in Express tribune) 24TH AUGUST 2012
With the hysteria over the arrest of a Christian girl with
Down’s syndrome on a charge of blasphemy yet to blow over, the brutally
tortured body of an 11-year-old Christian boy has been found in Pakistan ’s
Punjab province. The body of Samuel Yaqoob, was
discovered with his lips and nose cut off, his stomach removed and his legs
mutilated. According to police the body was later burned and could hardly be
recognized.Relatives identified the corpse from a distinctive mark on the boy’s
forehead. Yaqoob, a resident of the Christian Colony of Faisalabad ,
had been missing since August 20, last seen on his way to a local market. His
mutilated remains were found on Eid-Ul-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of the
month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan. Detectives are investigating whether
accusations of blasphemy had previously been filed against the minor. Yaquub
was believed to be an orphan, but The Telegraph reports that his mother was
quoted in the local press denying any allegations were made. "We neither
received any phone call for ransom nor were we told that Samuel had committed
blasphemy," she said. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing
the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal, reports the World Public
Forum NGO. The death of the 11-year-old comes a week after a young Christian
girl with Down’s syndrome was charged with blasphemy after reportedly burning
pages of a Koran. Rifta Masih was beaten by local Muslims after they witnessed
her allegedly torching pages of the sacred book when cooking. Several hundred
Christians have fled their homes following the incident in fear of violence
after local mosques reported the alleged incident over loudspeakers, and
hundreds of Muslims taken to the streets. In Pakistan ,
those accused of blasphemy are subject to instant imprisonment and most are
denied bail to prevent mob violence. As a rule, the accused are placed in
solitary confinement for their own protection against harassment from inmates
or guards. Those that have been acquitted from the charges, often leave the
country, one of the strictest enforcers of Sharia law in the world, reports the
Washington Post. In Pakistan ,
slandering Islam or its holy book is punishable by death. There have been no
executions for blasphemy, though Asia Bibi, a mother of five and a Christian,
was sentenced to death two years ago. Bibi has not been executed as of yet, and
may be pardoned of her death sentence. Christian minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Pakistani
government politician Salmaan Taseer were both assassinated for opposing the
blasphemy laws in connection with Bibi’s case. Last month, a man accused of
desecrating a Koran was dragged from a police station by a mob and beaten to
death. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dyan Hasan, "The
[country’s blasphemy] law creates this legal infrastructure which is then used
in various informal ways to intimidate, coerce, harass and persecute."
Torture took another life away (APRIL 2012) PUBLISHED
IN "THE NATION"
Fakhra Younus, who committed suicide aged 33, gave a face to
the thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured as a result of acid
attacks, typically carried out by husbands who accuse their wives of
dishonouring them; her attacker has not been brought to justice.
Born to a heroin-addicted mother on Napier Road in Karachi’s
red-light district, probably in 1978, Fakhra Younus was 18 and working as a
“dancing girl” (a euphemism for a prostitute) when she met Bilal Khar, a former
Member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a former Punjab
governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
The Khar family owns vast swathes of farmland in the
province and is a major political force in Pakistan .
A cousin of Bilal’s is Pakistan ’s
current Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. When he met Fakhra, Bilal Khar had
already been married and divorced three times and was married at the time to a
fourth wife with whom he had two children, facts of which Fakhra was unaware.
The two married after six months, but, by her account, her husband subjected
her to a sustained campaign of sexual, physical and verbal abuse from the very
start that lasted three years before she eventually escaped and moved back to
live with her mother. But her peace did not last long. On the afternoon of May 14, 2000 , she was disturbed by an
intruder. She later said that she had been asleep in her drawing room when she
heard a man’s voice telling her: “Fakhra... Fakhra wake up!”
“I jerked as he held me by my hair and opened my mouth.
Because I resisted, he couldn’t get me to swallow. But then he threw something
on me. At first I thought it was a joke. I did not understand what had happened
to me. Then he left, so I ran after him. My house was on the second floor and
by the time I got to the first floor, I realised I could not see.”
Feeling her clothes melting to her body, she collapsed on
the floor, screaming. By the time the acid had done its work, the hair had been
burned off her head; her lips had fused together; her left ear was obliterated;
she had been blinded in one eye; and her breasts had melted to the bone. She
could breathe only with extreme difficulty. When her four-year-old son, Nauman,
first visited her in a crowded public hospital, where she remained for the next
three months, he ran away crying. Fakhra’s family sought to prosecute Khar for
attempted murder and the case came to court in 2003. Although four witnesses
testified to seeing him enter Fakhra’s home on the day of the attack, all later
retracted their statements. They had complained of receiving death threats, but
the judge in the case took no notice and in December 2003, he dismissed the
charges.
Khar continued to protest his innocence, claiming the
perpetrator was a pimp with whom his wife had been having an affair. After her
release from hospital, Fakhra Younus found that she had become a liability to
her family, for whom she had once been a source of income. She and her son were
subsequently taken in by Tehmina Durrani, a stepmother of Bilal’s and a women’s
rights activist who had chronicled “the Khars’ way of treating women” in her
book My Feudal Lord, in which she described the abuse meted out to her by her
ex-husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar. In 2001, after some difficulty (the
government, concerned about Pakistan ’s
image abroad, dragged its heels over issuing a passport), Tehmina Durrani
helped Fakhra to move to Rome
where, over the next 11 years, she underwent 39 major operations. By the 38th
operation, in 2011, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though
still badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape. By this time, she had
learned Italian and co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato (The Erased Face),
which brought in some income to add to a monthly disability allowance from the
Italian government. But the operations exacted a heavy psychological toll, and
she was said to be depressed by the impossibility of returning to Pakistan ,
where friends were worried that her life would be in danger. On March 17,
Fakhra Younus climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in Rome
and jumped. In a suicide note, she gave her reason as “the silence of law on
the atrocities and insensitivity of Pakistani rulers”.
News of her death arrived in Pakistan
as the country was celebrating its first Oscar – awarded to the Karachi
filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for Saving Face, a documentary focusing on
victims of acid attacks. As Fakhra’s coffin arrived for burial, protesters were
demanding that the case against Bilal Khar be reopened.
But Khar continued to deny that he bore any responsibility
for his wife’s death: “My hands are clean,” he told interviewers. Fakhra Younus
is survived by her son, who is in the care of an Italian family.
Fakhra Younus, Former Pakistani Dancing Girl Commits Suicide 12 Years After Acid Attack
A former dancing girl who was left severely disfigured after
acid was hurled into her face, has committed suicide 12 years after the attack.
Fakhra Younus, 33, felt she looked “not human” after the attack, which was
allegedly carried out by her then-husband Bilal Khar. Khar was accused of
pouring the corrosive substance over her face as she slept, in full view of the
victim’s five-year-old son. Younus, then 21, was left fighting for her life and
has endured 39 separate surgeries since the attack. She had left Khar earlier
amid accusations of physical and verbal abuse. Her nose was almost completely
melted making it difficult for her to breathe. Khar, the son of a former Pakistan
governor, was acquitted, but many believe he used his connections to avoid
justice, AP states. Younus jumped from the sixth floor of a building where she
was living and being treated in Rome on March 17, having finally decided life
was no longer worth living. Her body has since been returned to Pakistan ,
reigniting anger over her tragic case.
The former wife of Khar’s father, Tehmina Durrani, became a
high profile supporter of Younus. Durrani, who said Younus’s injuries were the
worst she had ever seen on an acid attack victim, said: ”So many times we
thought she would die in the night because her nose was melted and she couldn’t
breathe. “We used to put a straw in the little bit of her mouth that was left
because the rest was all melted together.” After Younus’s suicide, Durrani
wrote a column in The News, stating: “Her life was a parched stretch of hard
rock on which nothing bloomed.” Durrani also wrote movingly about the
"open disgust and contempt by everyone who set eyes on her in Pakistan "
and gave heartfelt thanks to the Italian government for providing Younus with
care.
News of Younus's death has been received with sadness around
the world, with many calling for action over the 8,500 acid attacks reported in
Pakistan in the
last year.
PAKISTAN: Young women held in military torture cells and forced into sexual slavery
Ms. Zarina Marri, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from
Balochistan province, was arrested inlate 2005, and has been held incommunicado
in an army torture cell at Karachi ,
the capital of Sindh province. She has been repeatedly raped by the military
officers and is being used as a sex slave, to induce arrested nationalist
activists to sign state-concocted confessions.
One man, who was arrested by a state agency and kept in
military torture cell almost for nine months, narrated the story of this young
woman to Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF);
nowpublic.com; the International Red Cross; and at Woolwich Court in London.
The current whereabouts of the young woman are not known. It has been asserted
that women who are fighting for the greater autonomy of Balochistan are being
arrested by the state agencies and being forced into sex slavery intheir
custody.
Mr. Munir Mengal, the managing director of a
Balochi-language television channel, was arrested on April 4, 2006 from Karachi International airport
by the state intelligence agencies and transferred to a military torture cell
in Karachi for nine months
(http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2006/1666/). He narrated the story of
the forced sex slavery of the young teacher Zarina Marri whom he encountered in
a military cell. According to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Mr. Munir
Mengal witnessed many human rights violations in this military prison. Mengal
says that, "a young Balochi woman, Ms. Zarina Marri, was used as a sexual
slave by the officers. They even once threw her naked into my cell. I did not
know what had happened to this mother of a family who was arrested by the army
in our province."
Another Balochi nationalist (name omitted by request), who
was arrested by the militaryintelligence agency twice and kept in military
cells in different cities, has confirmed to the AHRC that there were young
Balochi females seen at those two torture cells, naked andin distress. The
prominent Balochi nationalist leaders say that they know fact that young
Balochi women are being arrested, either during or after protest demonstrations
on the disappearances and are missing. They also know about the women are
sexually abused in the military custody but they cannot say so publically
because of their sanctity and harassment of their families.
Mr. Munir Mengal was also tortured and his penis was
severely injured when he refused to have sex with Zarina Marri. He told RSF,
"on 27th January, 2007
at 6 pm Major Iqrar Gul Niazi (Military
Intelligence) called me in his office and showed me some nude pictures, and
laughingly told me that you have been a director of a TV channel so certainly
you have good relations with actresses."
When he returned to his cell he found porn pictures strewn
all over it. Around 12 pm a
low-ranking military officer called Subedar brought a female there. She was
trembling and weeping. "He threw her on my body and told me, 'You know
what to do with her. You are not a child we have to tell what to do with
her.'" Mr. Mengal says after half an hour the officer returned, and seeing
them sitting apart, abused them and forcibly took off their clothes. Mengal
said he was stunned when the woman began praying in the Balochi language. She
told Mengal her name was Zarina Marri and that she belongs to the Kohlu area,
headquarters of the rebel Marri tribe, a scene of a bloody insurgency that
begun in 2005. She said she was a schoolteacher and that the army personnel had
abducted her along with her one-year-old.
"They accuse us for spying for the Baluchistan
Liberation Army," Zarina Marri said. She begged Mengal to kill her. “I
have been undressed several times for them."
Mengal said on the refusal to have sex, the intelligence
officials inflicted cuts on his private parts. "I thought I would lose my
manhood," he said. Ms. Zarina told to Mengal that she has seen some
females in the torture cell but was not allowed to talk with them.
At the time of this incident Colonel Raza of the Pakistani
Army was in charge of that cell. After a few days he was transferred to Rawalpindi ,
Punjab province and Colonel Abdul Malik Kashmiri came as
head of the military torture cell.
Mr. Munir Mengal was released from the military torture cell
on 4th August 2007 and was
held in a civilian jail on August 5th. The International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) representatives met him in Khuzadar jail, where he provided them
with a detailed briefing which they wrote down. The next day their doctor also
checked the injured portion of his penis. Mr. Andrew Barterlays, the officer of
ICRC who visited Mr. Mengal several times injail, told Mr. Mengal that until he
was out of custody the ICRC could not take up the issue of Zarina Marri,
because both their lives would be threatened.
The Asian Human Rights Commission has already reported that
52 torture cells are run by the Pakistan
army, please see following link
The AHRC severely condemns the use of women as sex slaves by
the Pakistan
army and for keeping these women incommunicado. Pakistan
is the signatory to Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) but women are being used as sex slaves in a gross
violation of the Convention by army officers.
The AHRC urges the government of Pakistan to immediately
hold a judicial investigation into the women detainees being used as sex slaves
by the army officers in their detention centers, and to arrest all the army
officers posted in the torture cells; both in Karachi and in the rest of
Pakistan. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes must be brought before the
law. The government should ascertain the whereabouts of the women arrested from
Balochistan province who have disappeared after their arrest, including Zarina
Marri. It is the duty of the government to search for the missing persons taken
by State intelligence agencies, who have held them in torture cells for many
years.
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