From The National February 28 and March 1, 2006

Correspondent: Terence McKenna
Producer: Michelle Gagnon
Consulting Producer: Nazim Baksh

There is much about life in rural Pakistan that has not changed for hundreds of years. In the countryside, you can still find tribes of nomads, the families of shepherds who range back and forth over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The children don't go to school; most are illiterate.

In the rural areas, the predicament of women is especially precarious.

Young girls are routinely sold off into virtual slavery by their families. They are sometimes offered up to settle a dispute over land or insults to family honor.

Women are often raped to settle a score.

Mukthar Mai

That is what happened to Mukhtar Mai, now one of the leading crusaders for women's rights in Pakistan.

She was living a poor but happy life in the small town of Meerwala in Southern Punjab.

The trouble began four years ago when her younger brother, Shakur, was accused of making improper advances towards the daughter of one of the feudal landlords in the area, the Mastoi family.

Mukthar Mai was ordered to apologize for her brother in front of a panchayat, a local tribal council set up to mediate disputes. These panchayats are usually dominated by powerful feudal families and mete out justice according to their own rules.

Mukthar felt that she had to go.

"People who don't listen to them and don't obey them will be beaten up...or sometimes even killed," she says.

Maulvi Abdul Razak

The imam in Meerwala, Maulvi Abdul Razak was a witness to what happened when Mukhtar Mai was summoned before the tribal council.

He came over to the Mastoi family house when he heard there was trouble. He says that when Mukhtar arrived at the Mastois to apologize for her brother…they attacked her.

"The girl was dragged to a room in that house. One Mastoi brother named Halik was holding a pistol. First she was beaten and then she was raped several times by them. She was kept in that house for four days."

In Pakistan, tradition dictates that a woman who has been raped is forever shamed. Mukhtar Mai says that her first instinct after being gang raped was to commit suicide.

"There was pesticide spray. I was going to drink it, but my mother stopped me." Mukhtar says. "At that point I said either you have to let me die or you have to help me seek justice. My mother said, ‘Whatever you want to do I will be with you.'"

Police reluctant

Mukthar Mai

At first the local police in Meerwala were reluctant to investigate the rape of Mukhtar Mai.

Mukhtar was warned that if she could not prove the rape allegation by providing four male witnesses, she herself could be put in jail for adultery. She was baffled.

But this is the key problem in Pakistani law: both rape and adultery fall under the crime of Zina, meaning illicit sexual relations.

"This has to stop. Rape is rape and adultery is adultery. They're not the same thing," Mai says.

The Pakistani religious laws regarding rape and adultery are called the Hudood Ordinances.

Supposedly based on the Qur'an, they were proclaimed in 1979 by military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq to appease the country's religious extremists.

Benazir Bhutto

After the death of General Zia, Benazir Bhutto came to power. She campaigned against the Hudood Ordinances, but because she only had a minority government, she was never able to change them.

Now Bhutto lives in exile, charged with corruption, but is Pakistan's most powerful opposition leader.

Four eyewitnesses

"According to General Zia's law, if a woman is raped she needs four eyewitnesses to prove that she was raped," Bhutto says. "But if she files a complaint of rape and fails to produce four eye witnesses then she has confessed to adultery and must be punished for the crime of adultery. Now this is a highly iniquitous law. Islam says men and women are equal. Islam speaks about justice, Islam does not speak about doubly penalizing a woman who has been subjected to a horrendous rape crime."

Since 1999, Pakistan has lived under another military dictatorship, that of General Pervez Musharraf. He has portrayed himself as a religious moderate, and has repeatedly promised to repeal the Hudood Ordinances.

"I am supportive of all women, of all actions to emancipate women, end violence against women, and gender equality," Musharraf told reporters.

Asma Jahangir

Lawyer Asma Jahangir is the head of Pakistan's Human Rights Commission.

She says, "Well, President Musharraf, what he says and what he does are two different things. President Musharraf can do what he wants in Pakistan. He can get rid of the constitution, he has. He can bring elections and bring in parliament. What is the repeal of one single law? I mean surely he can do it, there is no justification for him to say that there is going to be any opposition in any case."

The Haqqania Madrassa is the largest religious school in Pakistan. Young men come to be trained as Muslim leaders. It was the conservative religious establishment in Pakistan that initially pressed for stringent Islamic laws and is now fighting to retain them. Anwar al-Haq is the vice principal of this Madrassa.

"The Hudood Ordinance is defined by God and his Prophet. It has been outlined in the Qur'an and no parliament, no intellectual and no man has the right to amend it, add to it, or remove anything from it," al-Haq says.

Religious conservatives wield a lot of political power in Pakistan. Many women wear veils or cover themselves completely with a Burka because conservatives insist on a strict interpretation of the Qur'an. Seventy per cent of Pakistani women live in the rural areas, where the conservative view is dominant.

Women jailed

There are an estimated 3,000 women in Pakistani jails because of the Hudood Ordinances.

Nilofar Bakhtiar

Pakistan's Minister of Women's Affairs, Nilofar Bakhtiar, says that changing the society here will take time.

"We are an Islamic country and these are Islamic laws," Bakhtiar says. "So to change something which has been brought about in the name of religion you can imagine is not easy in Pakistan."

In the case of Mukhtar Mai, the government of Pakistan has a mixed record. It was only when international aid organizations protested that the local police finally conducted an investigation and arrested the accused rapists.

The accused were initially convicted, then released on appeal. The Musharraf government insisted they be re-arrested and re-tried.

Mukhtar Mai became a celebrity in Pakistan and was invited to travel to the United States to speak to a women's rights organization.

That's when General Musharraf personally intervened to stop her from going. He said that he did not want Pakistan's "dirty linen" to be washed in public in the glare of international attention.

Pakistan's Women's Affairs Minister supports her President.

"It is washing dirty linen," Bakhtiar says. "Why should Mukhtar Mai go and protest about her case in the U.S. Have you ever received a U.S. rape victim in Pakistan protesting about the cases, no."

"Is it the difference between freedom of speech and dictatorship?" reporter Terence McKenna asks.

"I don't see this as an act of dictatorship because I've been in this story all along, and I know to what extent the President and the Prime Minister have gone to help her out," Bakhtiar says. "And then at the end of the day we hear that we are not supporting these rape victims and they are asked to go out of the country and protest, it is very sad, it is very discouraging for us."

Mukhtar Mai thinks that General Musharraf is fighting a losing battle.

"Whenever there is humiliation, you can't hide it. Dirt is dirt; you can't hide it. At one stage, the truth will come out," she says.

Not only did the Musharraf government prevent Mukhtar Mai from traveling. It placed her under virtual house arrest, so that she would not talk to the press.

Mukhtar contacted lawyer Asma Jahangir.

"She called me up and she said that there is police all around my house and I am not allowed to move," Jahangir says. "That means that you are under detention. So it's not that you are not allowed to move Mukhtar, this is illegal you're under detention and nobody has a right to detain you."

Mukhtar Mai was released from house arrest but tension was building between the Musharraf government and women's rights organizations in Pakistan.

Mixed-gender marathon

Those tensions boiled over in May 2005, when Jahangir announced that she would hold a mixed-gender marathon in the city of Lahore to raise awareness about violence against women.

Local police showed up to disrupt the controversial event. Religious conservatives believed the race was a provocation, and wanted it shut down. The organizers were arrested and thrown into police vans.

Asma Jahangir is arrested.

Asma Jahangir received especially rough treatment from local police and intelligence agents. They began to strip off her clothes in public.

"A lot of people tried to cover my back because I could only feel it I could not see my back," Jahangir says. "When they were putting me on the police van, they assured that my photograph was taken while my back was bare. This was just to humiliate, this was simply just to humiliate me."

Bhutto says, "Now Asma Jahangir makes Musharraf angry, women make Musharraf angry. As I said it's not just Musharraf, it's that whole military establishment which believes in a patriarchal society, that believes in the subjugation of women….that if a woman speaks out or criticizes them, she needs to be punished. And punished in the most barbaric way in medieval times, women used to be stripped naked and pushed through the streets of their town to be humiliated and degraded so that they never raise their head again. What happened to Asma Jahangir is, in my view, the manifestation of Musharraf's rule."

General Musharraf's defenders point out that he is faced with an enormous challenge in trying to change Pakistani society. The ancient feudal culture and traditions are very strong and there are numerous instances of the government passing laws that are simply ignored by much of the population especially in the rural and tribal areas.

"If you bring about a law and then nobody is there to implement it, what is the use of bringing about a law? So we have to be more realistic, we want to do it, we just need a little more time," Bakhtiar says.

The city of Faisalabad is one of Pakistan's major commercial centres. Recently it has also been the focus of serious corruption allegations, involving the Faisalabad City police.

Senior police officers have been accused of extorting kickbacks from businesspeople and from government employees. They have been accused of intimidating anyone who stands up to them.

Demanding bribes

Sonia Naz

Sonia Naz is a 24-year businesswoman and mother of two. A year ago, she registered a complaint against the Faisalabad police. She said they demanded a bribe from her husband and kidnapped him when he refused to pay.

Months later, she claims that she, too, was kidnapped by the superintendent of the Faisalabad police, Abdullah Khalid.

"I told him that I was going to take back the complaint and I begged him for forgiveness. I said ‘Please let me go,'" Naz says. "But he didn't listen and he raped me. Even when he was beating me on my face, he urinated on my face. And all the other people kept watching this happen. And I was begging each one of them, for God's sake let me go, for God's sake let me go. I have small children and they said yes, yes, we'll let you go."

When Sonia Naz was released, she reported the rape to other police and government officials but they did nothing.

Then she brought her story to Asma Jahangir and to the media in Pakistan which caused a public uproar. Under pressure from the international community, the Pakistani government finally arrested the accused police officers.

"We thought these things happened in medieval times," Bhutto says. "This is happening under General Musharraf and when you know it pains me that when men are urinating in the mouths of women, General Musharraf can say that he has done more for women than any other government in the history of Pakistan. This did not happen under other governments in Pakistan. But nothing happened to that Superintendent of Police until the international community got involved. But can the international community govern Pakistan? No, it can't."

Another reason Pakistani women are reluctant to report rapes is that there are cases of women being raped again at the police station. Apparently some police officers feel free to abuse a woman already considered shamed.

"It's not a very common occurrence but it did happen," says Nilofar Bakhtiar. "I don't know if you have interviewed Sonia Naz or not but if you do you will see the sort of support she got from my office and the support she got from the president's office. It was not an easy thing, because it was very high-level involvement of senior police officers. But we fought and supported Sonia Naz."

Bakhtiar feels that Pakistan is being unfairly singled out on the rape issue.

"If you compare the number of rape cases in Pakistan to any other country, any neighbouring country for example…, as a matter of fact if you compare it with a developed world also, it's the same, you know that. Then why should we only take the blame?" Bakhtiar says.

"In other countries if a woman is raped she can get justice, she can go to a police station," says Bhutto. "She doesn't need a political dictator to come to her aid, she doesn't need the international community to come to her aid. She goes to the police station and she files a case and the rapist is arrested. This doesn't happen in Pakistan."

Woman's shelter

Dastak is a woman's shelter and rape crisis center in Lahore. Many women are divorced by their husbands and expelled or even killed by their own families after being raped because they are considered a dishonour to the family. Here they find safe haven, and learn a new trade to support themselves and their children. Only a small proportion of rapes are actually reported in Pakistan, and an even smaller number are prosecuted.

"Everyday, every single day women are being raped and it is being reported in the press. Many are not even reported, and many women don't even report it. I can tell you as a lawyer that women come to me asking advise as to whether they should report or not. What chances do they have of winning this case. As a lawyer I have to tell them very few, very few," Jahangir says.

• Part 2:

  The case of Shazia Khalid