Women’s rights bill termed eyewash
PESHAWAR, August 22 2006: Speakers at a seminar called for an end to military intervention in politics. Speaking at the seminar entitled ‘Current political situation and the status of Human Rights in Pakistan’, organized by the Alliance for Protection of Human Rights (APHR), resident director of the Aurat Foundation Rakhshanda Naz said military and fundamentalist regimes used women issues as a tool to prolong their rule.
“It is always easy, in a traditional society, to gain support for restricting women’s movement on the pretext of saving her from immorality,” she said. She asked why didn’t men impose similar restriction on themselves. Rakhshanda Naz termed the Women Protection bill eyewash and said it would not be able to protect women. “Movers of the bill know very well that the bill won’t change a thing but they will present the bill to gain political mileage,” she said.
She said unless the entire political system was changed, tabling of laws like Domestic Violence and Hudood Ordinances or the Women Protection bill made no difference despite 33 per cent representation of women in the legislative assemblies. She reminded the participants that there were areas where government itself barred women from casting votes and cited the federally administered tribal areas (Fata) as an example. She said that Fata councils, too, did not have women representation, adding that one vacancy had been created after much hue and cry.
She alleged that more than 600 women in Waziristan had been married to foreigners ‘in a single night’ to ‘establish’ their affiliation with the locals and derive concessions for them. She said that internal displacement of tribal people caused women trafficking as 90 per cent of the people displaced included women and children. She accused government agencies of denying protection to women workers of the NGOs.
“They (Political Authorities) even accused us of planting a bomb in our office (Khwendo Kor) in the Khyber Agency to extort funds from donor agencies,” she said. She denied the allegations and said that no one in the NGO was involved, adding that if any of them had done it, they would have vacated the building. A number of their staff was injured in the bomb explosion, she said. She alleged that while ministers’ salaries were being increased, the government was cutting down allocations for the Women Development Fund by half.
Dr Said Alam Mahsood of the Pukhtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party said that the army had decided, from the very onset, to rule Pakistan and had used all of its resources to threaten, bribe and corrupt politicians. He said that Musharraf-led government had broken all previous records in term of Human Rights abuses, adding that President Pervez Musharraf had himself negated the seven-point agenda he had presented to the nation after he had taken over power in 1999.
“Accountability topped his seven-point agenda, but when it came to sugar crisis, the matter was hushed up,” he said.
He accused the domestic security agencies of being sympathetic to the Taliban and said that innocent people had been killed in Waziristan and elsewhere in the country just to prove the government’s indispensability to the outer world as a frontline state against terror.
“About 117 tribal elders, who had nothing to do with the Taliban terrorists, were killed by the security agencies in Waziristan alone,” he alleged.
He said that 256 illegal FM radio channels, backed by various intelligence agencies, were operating in the NWFP, adding that these radio stations instigated people to act against women workers of NGOs and urged people to participate in jihad until Shariah was imposed in Afghanistan.
Source: Dawn
Date:8/22/2006
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