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DAWN.COM | Columnists | Invisible victims of terror
The morning of International Womens Day 2010 in Pakistan was a bloody one as a car laden with explosives rammed into the wall of a building in Lahores Model Town area and blew up. Among the first dead bodies taken to hospital were those of a mother and her daughter on their way to the latters school.
Another woman was killed in her home, which was destroyed by the impact of the blast; television cameras showed an abandoned drawing room, once carefully decorated and now scattered with rubble and melted metal.
These grim images on a day meant to celebrate women encapsulate the tragic circumstances of Pakistani women who are caught in a nexus of terror that can eliminate lives in a second. Terror attacks kill both men and women. The purpose of this article is not to argue that womens suffering is more tragic in this regard, but to focus on the particular challenges facing women who must articulate a strategy for survival at a time when personal security has all but been eliminated. Foremost among these challenges is that of drawing attention to the many women left behind as widows and orphans in the wake of terrorist attacks.
According to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, 2009 saw 2,586 terrorist, insurgent and sectarian-related attacks in Pakistan, which killed over 3,000 people. If all the casualties from the war on terror in 2009 are tabulated, the number of dead and injured runs into many thousands. The cumulative figure is important because when it is considered in the light of the Pakistani family structure, where one breadwinner often supports four to five people, then the death of every head of the household means the creation of nearly five times the number of victims who are left destitute and these victims are inevitably women and their small children.
Among them are women such as Razila, a Pakhtun woman who was married at the age of 16 and spent her life taking care of her household. Along with her daughter-in-law and four grandchildren, she fled Swat when the fighting began and moved into the Jalozai camp for internally displaced persons. Her son, who remained in Swat, subsequently died under mysterious circumstances, leaving her to support the family. Razila can no longer go home because the house the family rented in Swat has been taken over by another family; moreover, she and her dependents lack the protection of a male head of the household.
With the helplessness of such women visible to all, it is hardly surprising that stories have surfaced about pimps who propose marriage ostensibly to help them. Apparently, after a sham ceremony, the pimps transport widows and young women from various areas of the NWFP to red light districts in Karachi and Lahore. Undoubtedly, many of those who escape this fate often end up begging to feed their large families since they lack access to any skills or resources to earn a living.
The tragedy faced by these female victims of terror is that their concerns are all but invisible in the national and international sphere. In a moving essay published in the Urdu newspaper Azadi on International Womens Day, former lady councillor Shai Izzat asks why not a single project aimed at training women to have independent livelihoods has been planned in the area. She recounts how she defied her family to serve the country as a councillor during the Musharraf era and was resultantly banished from her fathers home. Why, she asks, do the politicians and NGOs do so little for the uncounted numbers of women eking out a living on the charity of neighbours and family members? Indeed, why does the womens ministry in Islamabad continue to lie dormant, even as Pakistans women face such dire circumstances?
Many years into Pakistans involvement in the war on terror, hardly any project exists in the country to provide vocational training to widows left without economic support owing to the ongoing conflict. Whether it is American or Pakistani aid disbursements, the establishment of such programmes is perpetually at a low priority, secondary to achieving political and military goals.
Similarly, it is reported that nearly 70 to 80 per cent of Pakistani women experience domestic violence and eight rapes occur every 24 hours in Pakistan; yet no national helpline exists to provide immediate assistance to women who have faced sexual or domestic assault. This is particularly troubling in the case of women living in makeshift camps or temporary housing with extended family since, given the breakdown of social and family structures, they are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
Given the US role in the war on terror, a word must also be said about the lack of initiative shown by the Obama administration in relation to Pakistani women. If the Bush administration was obsessed with using women as a pretext for war, loudly proclaiming its intentions to liberate Iraqi and Afghan women, the Obama administration seems to have gone to the other extreme and forgotten about them altogether.
At the receiving end of this, and bearing the weight of a war while never being counted in the assessed damages, Pakistani women have become the invisible casualties of the war on terror. The carnage seems to have extracted not just the visible life of Pakistans women, as evidenced by the dead and injured bodies scattered around bomb sites, but also their ability to mobilise and demand their share of the nations resources.
The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy
The morning of International Womens Day 2010 in Pakistan was a bloody one as a car laden with explosives rammed into the wall of a building in Lahores Model Town area and blew up. Among the first dead bodies taken to hospital were those of a mother and her daughter on their way to the latters school.
Another woman was killed in her home, which was destroyed by the impact of the blast; television cameras showed an abandoned drawing room, once carefully decorated and now scattered with rubble and melted metal.
These grim images on a day meant to celebrate women encapsulate the tragic circumstances of Pakistani women who are caught in a nexus of terror that can eliminate lives in a second. Terror attacks kill both men and women. The purpose of this article is not to argue that womens suffering is more tragic in this regard, but to focus on the particular challenges facing women who must articulate a strategy for survival at a time when personal security has all but been eliminated. Foremost among these challenges is that of drawing attention to the many women left behind as widows and orphans in the wake of terrorist attacks.
According to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, 2009 saw 2,586 terrorist, insurgent and sectarian-related attacks in Pakistan, which killed over 3,000 people. If all the casualties from the war on terror in 2009 are tabulated, the number of dead and injured runs into many thousands. The cumulative figure is important because when it is considered in the light of the Pakistani family structure, where one breadwinner often supports four to five people, then the death of every head of the household means the creation of nearly five times the number of victims who are left destitute and these victims are inevitably women and their small children.
Among them are women such as Razila, a Pakhtun woman who was married at the age of 16 and spent her life taking care of her household. Along with her daughter-in-law and four grandchildren, she fled Swat when the fighting began and moved into the Jalozai camp for internally displaced persons. Her son, who remained in Swat, subsequently died under mysterious circumstances, leaving her to support the family. Razila can no longer go home because the house the family rented in Swat has been taken over by another family; moreover, she and her dependents lack the protection of a male head of the household.
With the helplessness of such women visible to all, it is hardly surprising that stories have surfaced about pimps who propose marriage ostensibly to help them. Apparently, after a sham ceremony, the pimps transport widows and young women from various areas of the NWFP to red light districts in Karachi and Lahore. Undoubtedly, many of those who escape this fate often end up begging to feed their large families since they lack access to any skills or resources to earn a living.
The tragedy faced by these female victims of terror is that their concerns are all but invisible in the national and international sphere. In a moving essay published in the Urdu newspaper Azadi on International Womens Day, former lady councillor Shai Izzat asks why not a single project aimed at training women to have independent livelihoods has been planned in the area. She recounts how she defied her family to serve the country as a councillor during the Musharraf era and was resultantly banished from her fathers home. Why, she asks, do the politicians and NGOs do so little for the uncounted numbers of women eking out a living on the charity of neighbours and family members? Indeed, why does the womens ministry in Islamabad continue to lie dormant, even as Pakistans women face such dire circumstances?
Many years into Pakistans involvement in the war on terror, hardly any project exists in the country to provide vocational training to widows left without economic support owing to the ongoing conflict. Whether it is American or Pakistani aid disbursements, the establishment of such programmes is perpetually at a low priority, secondary to achieving political and military goals.
Similarly, it is reported that nearly 70 to 80 per cent of Pakistani women experience domestic violence and eight rapes occur every 24 hours in Pakistan; yet no national helpline exists to provide immediate assistance to women who have faced sexual or domestic assault. This is particularly troubling in the case of women living in makeshift camps or temporary housing with extended family since, given the breakdown of social and family structures, they are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
Given the US role in the war on terror, a word must also be said about the lack of initiative shown by the Obama administration in relation to Pakistani women. If the Bush administration was obsessed with using women as a pretext for war, loudly proclaiming its intentions to liberate Iraqi and Afghan women, the Obama administration seems to have gone to the other extreme and forgotten about them altogether.
At the receiving end of this, and bearing the weight of a war while never being counted in the assessed damages, Pakistani women have become the invisible casualties of the war on terror. The carnage seems to have extracted not just the visible life of Pakistans women, as evidenced by the dead and injured bodies scattered around bomb sites, but also their ability to mobilise and demand their share of the nations resources.
The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy
