By Ashfaq Yusufzai | Inter-Press Service
PESHAWAR, Oct 6 – The current campaign against “honour” killings in Pakistan led by anti-death penalty NGOs has support from lawmakers and lawyers pressing for modifications of Islamic law to prevent perpetrators from evading justice.
The NGOs take a principled stand against the death penalty under any circumstances. Some lawmakers and lawyers who support them in the struggle against “honour” killings may not be active opponents of capital punishment, although it is inconceivable that they would back Pakistan’s death penalty for consensual sex outside marriage.
The groups have joined forces over the alleged killings of five women in Balochistan, a region known for its highly conservative and patriarchal traditions. On Jul. 13, five women were kidnapped by armed men objecting to three of them — Fauzia, 20, and two unnamed schoolchildren between 16 and 18 — wanting to marry men of their own choosing, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). In defiance of Umrani tribal elders in the village of Babakot, the young women, accompanied by a mother of one of the teenagers and an aunt of Fauzia, were abducted as they were preparing to leave to get married at a court in Usta Mohammad, a city 80 km away. The men forced them into a jeep with Balochistan government number plates. They were driven to a remote area where the three young women were allegedly beaten and shot. They were still breathing when the men “hurled them into a wide ditch and covered them with earth and stones”. The two married female relatives who tried to intervene were also pushed into the ditch and all five were buried alive, according to AHRC. On Sep. 24, the police, under intense pressure from NGOs and lawmakers in parliament, arrested seven people.
“We have seven suspects, including the brother of two of the girls,” Balochistan police chief, Asif Nawaz Warraich, told IPS. One of the arrested had allegedly confessed to the crime, although the police still had no other evidence. “The federal government is sending a top official to Quetta [the provincial capital] to investigate the murders,” he added. Senator Mohammad Adeel told IPS that the parliament human rights committee would be recommending legislation that would reform the Islamic Qisas and Diyat law. The committee was set up after heated exchanges in parliament over the alleged killings.
Qisas gives the victim’s heirs the right of retribution. But Diyat orders them to seek compensation rather than demand this. Both concepts are incorporated into Pakistani law.
Adeel said he was also proposing that those accused of “honour” killings be tried by judges sitting on the anti-terrorism courts rather than the ordinary courts of justice. “If that happens, the relatives of the deceased women will not be able to get away with the crime by invoking Diyat law.”
Adeel said he had told the parliamentary human rights committee that the police in Balochistan were facing difficulties investigating the case because of political interference. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and some lawyers would prefer the government to amend the 2005 law specifically outlawing “honour” killings, reining in the rights given to the accused under Qisas and Diyat. Since most of “honour” killings took place within families, agreements were being reached in accordance with Islamic law which undermined the ability of the state to prosecute those guilty. “We have been urging the government to reform the law,” Asma Jehangir, chair of the HRCP, told IPS. “But when our reform proposals were presented to parliament in 2005, they were defeated as ‘un-Islamic’.” The Peshawar-based women’s rights lawyer, Noor Alam Khan, also wanted the law against “honour” killings amended. She predicted that no one would be punished for the alleged killings in Balochistan because the families would invoke Islamic law. “All [those allegedly guilty] are relatives and they will be set free because of Qisas Law,” she told IPS. HRCP’s statistics on “honour” killings show that they have been increasing, in spite of the 2005 legislation. In 2007, there were 636 “honour” killings, of which 61 victims were under 18. In 2006, the number was 271. So far this year, HRCP has recorded 283. “Many more cases go unreported. Almost all go unpunished,” said AHRC. Anti-death penalty NGOs say the increase in “honour” killings is also a reflection of the growing brutalisation of Pakistani society. The death penalty, and its steady extension, has contributed to this. “Pakistan currently has 26 criminal offences that allow for the death penalty — as opposed to just two, for murder and treason, at the time of independence in 1947,” Human Rights Watch said, in an open letter to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani in June, calling for a ban on state executions. Over 7,000 people, including 40 women, are awaiting execution, although most of these were promised a commutation of their death sentences in June. In 2007, 134 people were executed by the state in Pakistan.
What is to be done?
October 6, 2008Paul D’Amato sets Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in the context of the struggle to build a socialist organization in Russia.
Socialist Worker, September 29, 2008 | Issue 681
IN DECEMBER 1895, Vladimir Lenin, then a young Russian Social Democrat, was arrested in St. Petersburg and spent the next four years in Siberian exile. He had been the leader of a local social democratic circle for two years.
Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.
In exile, he spent part of the time working on a massive work analyzing the nature of Russian capitalism. On the practical side, he hatched a plan to produce a national newspaper that could unite around it the scattered, isolated groupings of Russian revolutionaries throughout the empire into a single all-Russian Social Democratic Party.
An attempt to form a national party had been made at the first national Russian Social Democratic conference in 1898, but it was small and unrepresentative, and most of its participants were arrested immediately after the conference took place.
It did, however, produce a manifesto that encapsulated the orthodox view of the majority of Russian Marxists at the time, including Lenin: “The further east one goes in Europe, the meaner, more cowardly and politically weak the bourgeoisie becomes, and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that fall to the proletariat.”
Lenin’s plans bore fruit; the periodical Iskra (the Spark)–which gathered as editors both the most prominent young leaders, such as Lenin and Julius Martov, but also the founders of Russian Marxism, such as George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod–was able over a period of three years, from 1900 to 1903, to win over the majority of Russian committees to Lenin’s proposal for the all-Russian party.
Lenin outlined his plan in a number of articles in Iskra. The first step, he said, was an all-Russian political newspaper. “Without it,” he wrote, “we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population.”
This passage gives a hint of the urgency of Lenin’s call; he believed that the working-class movement was advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the socialists, with their purely local, agitational work, usually centered around lending assistance to workers’ economic struggles, were lagging behind these developments. The working class, he wrote, “has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle.”
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THE TASKS of the Iskraists, therefore, were not purely organizational or technical. Lenin and his cohorts were waging a political fight against other trends in the movement–namely, the trend known as “economism,” centered around a newspaper called Rabochaya Mysl (Workers Thought), but also the eclectic trend around the newspaper Rabochaya Dyelo (Workers Dawn), which seemed unable to take a firm stand on anything.
In Lenin’s opinion, the economists made a virtue of the socialist movements’ weaknesses, arguing that the task of socialists was merely to support workers’ economic struggles. The elitist assumption was that workers weren’t ready for political agitation.
The economists, argued Lenin, were the Russian variant of the German “revisionists,” led by Eduard Bernstein, who famously wrote that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing. In Russia, Lenin argued, the economists were attempting “to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers’ party into a reformist party.”
Lenin’s beef with the Dyelo group was that it downplayed the danger of economism, alternatively criticizing and flirting with their ideas. The Dyeloists also were uncritical of terrorism, and though it is rarely acknowledged by Lenin’s critics over the years, Iskra spent some time engaging in a polemic in favor of the methods of mass struggle and against individual terror, on the grounds that this tactic “disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution.”
For Lenin, the main imbalance was between the rapid growth of class struggle–strikes, even general strikes, and May Day demonstrations–while the organization of socialists that could provide a national leadership and unite the disparate struggles into a common front against the autocracy was lacking. Worse, there were political trends in the movement that saw this as a perfectly fine state of affairs.
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Tags: exile, Iskra, Russian capitalism, Russian Marxists, socialist consciousness, socialist movement, Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, working class struggle
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