EDITORIAL: What’s honour killing? It’s the killing of a relative, especially a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonour on the family. Honour killing in Pakistan is a curse that refuses to disappear or die down.
Also known locally as karo-kari, it is prevalent in Pakistan like nowhere else. About one-fifth of all the honour killings in the world are committed in Pakistan – a prominence the country enjoys despite the existence of a host of laws against this abdominal practice or custom.
These laws have long time come into existence but never implemented to the extent to put to an end this lingering curse. His or her actual or perceived immoral behaviour is enough to warrant the killing of a woman more often than of a man.
Punishment is dictated by the local Jirga, and in many cases it is carried out by the family members of the karo (blackened man) and kari (blackened woman). How treacherously is carried out this killing an incident that happened in Lahore in 2014 not very far from the precincts of Lahore High Court comes to mind.
As scores of people watched the spectacle unconcerned a clutch of barbarians pounced upon a young woman, Farzana Iqbal, beating life out of her with repeated hits of broken bricks. The killers included Farzana’s father, her two brothers and her former fiancé.
She had violated the ‘code of honour’ enforced by the custodians of our sociocultural moorings. In another case, a local Jirga condemned a girl and a boy to death by electrocution as they had purportedly eloped, and the punishment was carried out by the fathers and uncles of the young couple.
Across the country this year, 417 people, including 152 men and 265 women, became victims of honour killing, and the killings took place all over the country. Giving the perspective of NGO ‘Watch Hunt/Karo-Kari’ at the Karachi Press Club on Monday, the Vice President of HRCP, Qazi Khizar, informed the audience that in Karachi alone 21 incidents of honour killings took place during 2022.
According to him, the causes that trigger this homicide practice include lawlessness, low literacy rate and feudal system which influential feudal lords have enforced in the name of tribal traditions. And regrettably, even the residents of areas where the highest number of karo-kari cases were reported, don’t consider it a crime while the killers feel proud.
He also told the audience that the honour-killing victims were buried without funeral rites. Be that as it may, Mahnaz Rehman of the Aurat Foundation, another rights groups, pointed out that honour killings are a ‘factory’ of blackmailing women.
An honour killing is a homicide of a member of a family or social group by other members, due to belief the victim has brought dishonour upon family or community. So, it is not only a penal offence it also earns the societal stigma of sociocultural illegitimacy.
On the legal front, honour killing should be treated as a case of pure and simple homicide and tried as such by courts without factoring in any way the tribal culture or social compulsions. But equally important is the imperative on the part of society, particularly the media, to declare honour killing a pernicious act that should buy the evil-committers nothing but social rebuke and censure.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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