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Blood Debt Women Offered Up For Rape
The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 11-22-2005 | Isambard Wilkinson

Posted on 11/21/2005 6:04:09 PM PST by blam

Blood debt women offered up for rape

By Isambard Wilkinson in Sultanwala
(Filed: 22/11/2005)

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women
should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood
"marriages".

The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in
their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family's enemies in 1996,
when they were aged from six to 13.

The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the
village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the
girls shot dead a family rival.

The rival families have now called in their "debt", demanding the
marriages to the village men are fulfilled.

The case is becoming a cause célèbre in Pakistan, pitting tribal mores
against a group of modern-minded, educated women. Amna Niazi, the
eldest of the five at 22, is taking a degree in English literature, while
both her sisters want to attend university.

Their fathers are supporting them and have refused to hand them
over, leading to a resumption of the blood feud, with two relatives
shot recently and 20 people arrested, while promises of further
retribution and murder abound.

In addition to the sentence on the women, the village council has
sentenced to death Jehan Khan Niazi, the father of three of the
women, and the fathers of the other two for failing to honour the
supposed bond with men whose identities they are not even certain of.

The women have said they will commit suicide if their fathers obey the
council.

Speaking at their home in Sultanwala, a remote cotton and
sugar-cane growing village, Amna said: "It is a great injustice that
should be ended. Why should we pay for a crime committed by
someone else? We will commit suicide if it happens. We would be
treated like animals by them. Our misery would never end as this is
just another way of using us as tools in the feud." None of the women
has so far been able to marry as their childhood "marriages" hang
over them.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan condemned the "barbaric
custom of vani", - the tradition of handing over women to resolve
disputes - and called on President Pervez Musharraf to enforce a ban.

Last year a three-year-old girl near Multan was betrothed to a
60-year-old man in a similar settlement. The case led to parliament
passing a law banning vani and honour killings, but it has been widely
ignored.

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