Feeling peevish
In Balochistan, Pakistan, three teenage schoolgirls planned ‘to marry men of their own choice through a civil court by defying the centuries-old tribal traditions.’
When the fuming elders of Umrani tribe came to know about the intentions of these girls to appear before a local court, they picked them up from their homes along with two of their elderly women relatives. The crying girls were pushed into official cars and driven to a deserted area. There they were pushed out of the cars, made to stand in a queue and volleys of shots fired at them. As the bleeding girls fell on the sand, the tribesmen dragged them into a nearby ditch and levelled it with earth and stones before the girls could breathe their last. As the two shocked elderly women tried to rescue the hapless girls, they too were gunned down and buried in the same manner. The killers after burying these women returned to their tribe like conquerors without any action against them. The step taken was to send a loud message to the rest of the tribe’s girls.
Romantic, isn’t it. Life as it used to be – passionate, vivid, exciting, turbulent, heroic.
No comments on this note yet. The reason is probably because it is so stunning. But the murdered girls and the unfortunate elderly women should be remembered, not just because we are stunned into silence, but because we want, somehow, for their pointless deaths not to be absolutely pointless.
Of course, people will say that this is not what Islam requires. But it is, because this is the way Islam expresses itself all over the world, in meaningless violence towards women, and pitiful displays of male superiority. What superiority? Madness!
I sent protest emails to Mr. Syed Yousaf Raza, Gillani, Mr. Rehman Malik, Mr. Farooq Naik, Mr. Farooq Naik and Nawab Aslam Raisani.
I sincerely hope that the purported ‘official’ monsters, Mr. Abdul Sattar Umrani, a brother of the minister who ‘came with more than six persons and abducted them at gun point’ – who, by all and sundry, are allegedly deemed to be the perpetrators of these heinous crimes towards Ms. Fatima, (wife of Umeed Ali Umrani), Jannat Bibi, (wife of Qaiser Khan), Fauzia, (daughter of Ata Mohammad Umrani), and two other girls, aged between 16 to 18 years – will eventually be brought to justice.
I read that “the names of two younger girls were not ascertained because of strong control of tribal leaders in the area.”
It leaves one speechless to think that two of girls died and that somehow by by their torturers they remain nameless.
Their names should be written on the walls outside the houses of the ones who purportedly committed these grotesque crimes.
Thank you, Marie-Therese. I have done so too. There should be some way of memorialising these women, and not these only, but all those who have been killed in the name of religion and ‘honour’. Perhaps something like the Vietnam Memorial could be arranged, so that these inhumanities will not only not go unnoticed, but memorialised forever.
Women of the Magdalen Laundries are celebrated in both sculpture/memorial format in Galway/Dublin respectively. It was women themselves who saw to it that these legacies by society be put in place.
Memorials of a similar nature, throughout the world should be by humankind erected to *honour* all victims – lest all these beautiful people be by the world forgotten. During their lives they were treated by their elders as nonentities – so at least in their deaths they will be recognised somewhat (by their names) on the memorials – and for once and for all- by it be given honour of the real kind.
War hero’s, victims of bombings/holocaust/wars etc, by society, have been given excellent treatment when they died – but the same society is found wanting when it comes to acknowledging innocent, poor people from around the globe – who died and of who each day continue to die from domestic patriarchal antediluvian wars of violence,