The Interfaith International is concerned about the situation of human rights in Pakistan, which has significantly deteriorated during 2004.
Interfaith International would like to bring the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Commission the widespread violations of civil and political rights of the Sindhi people by Pakistan. We will focus particularly on religious intolerance, and violations of the right to freedom of expression.
Religious Intolerance
Of the approximately 30 million Sindhis living in Sindh today, an estimated 3 million are Hindus and suffer particularly under Pakistan’s oppressive laws and discriminatory practices. Pakistan imposes the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy. The definition of blasphemy includes ridiculing or criticizing fundamentalist Islamic beliefs; members of religious minorities are frequently charged with this crime.
The law and practices discriminate against minorities in other ways. In civil and criminal trials, the testimony of a witness belonging to a religious minority is deemed inherently untrustworthy. A non-Muslim man may not marry a Muslim woman. By law, members of the religious minorities cannot hold executive positions such as Mayor, Governor or President.
Hindu Sindhis have been made particularly insecure. Kidnapping for ransom of middleclass Sindhis is frequent in the province; the Pakistani police act particularly unconcerned about the treatment of Hindu victims. In January 2004, five people were kidnapped near Shahdatkot; within days, the police secured the release of four of the victims, but not of Vijay Kumar, the one Hindu among them.
In fact, the police have been accused of being active participants in the epidemic of kidnappings and looting in Sindh: in January 2004, in the village of Kabir Ghangri near Kandiaro, a 2am raid to loot and kidnap was reported to have been carried out by the police while still in uniform. With the connivance of the Pakistani authorities, tens of thousands of Sindhis, including a disproportionately large number of Hindu and Christian Sindhis, are held in virtual slavery as bonded laborers.
The last census systematically undercounted the number of Sindhis. The census forms in Sindhi were simply printed in insufficient quantities so data could not be collected in many remote villages. In addition, Hindu Sindhis were intimidated by Pakistani soldiers who accompanied the census takers in Sindh. On the first day of the census, soldiers shot dead a 50 year-old Hindu Sindhi father in front of his teenage son. The electoral power of minorities has been further marginalized through gerrymandering and a system of separate electorates that is still in use in local elections.
In the eastern desert region of Sindh which borders India, Pakistani paramilitary forces have been periodically accused of violating fundamental human rights of Hindu Sindhis. The Pakistani government has designated homes and businesses of Hindu Sindhis in this area as ‘Enemy Evacuee Property’ and seized the legal deeds to their properties. On July 27, 2004, over 50 Sindhis fasted in a ‘hunger strike’ in Nangar Parkar, Sindh to protest Pakistani paramilitary and police forces in the region violating the chastity of women.
Islamic Studies has been made a compulsory subject for Muslims in all government and private schools. The officially mandated textbooks preach a fundamentalist and militant ideology, contravening the indigenous universalist Sufi beliefs of the Sindhis. The promotion of hatred and intolerance is not confined to textbooks for religious studies; it extends to even the language and history textbooks that are required in compulsory classes. In particular, the textbooks stereotype Hindus and Jews as ‘conniving’ and ‘scheming.’
Hindu and Christian places of worship have been frequently ransacked by Islamic fundamentalists in different parts of Pakistan. A large number of Christians and Ahmadis—an Islamic heterodoxy accused of heresy by fundamentalists—have found refuge in Sindh. The Pakistani government has tried to extend the reach of its oppressive laws into Sindh’s tolerant towns: in one case, a non-Sindhi judge in Karachi ordered the local police in Larkano, Sindh to charge an Ahmadi refugee with blasphemy for professing to be Muslim. On July 27, 2004, Rev. Khalid Soomro, a translator of the Bible into Sindhi, was attacked in Shikarpur, Sindh by members of a non-Sindhi Jihadi group for refusing to convert to Islam; his family was threatened and his house burned down. The Pakistani government has also been accused of fomenting violence against Hindus by sending outside agitators into small towns and villages.
The Rights of Women
In traditional Sindhi culture and folklore, women are celebrated for their independent andadventurous spirit. Many Sindhi folktales are legends about heroines who defied family or social custom to choose their own marriage partners. Pakistan has imposed harsh measures against women, for example, by denying their right to choose marriage partners.
In particular, in contravention of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pakistan makes it illegal for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man. In January 26 2005, Pakistani police in Tando Adam, Sindh, arrested Saif Masih, a Christian man, and Ruksana Bhatti, a Muslim woman, for attempting to get married.
Pakistan has condoned so-called honor killings where relatives may kill an unrelated man and woman on the slightest suspicion of adultery—sometimes for so much as socializing, or for marrying outside the community. A historic account by Richard Burton in the 19th century contrasts the rarity of such killings in Sindh with their frequency in Afghanistan and the Middle-East. Today, encouraged by fundamentalist clerics, about 300 young men and women are killed each year. For example, on June 22, 2004, 19 year-old Ms. Resham Junejo and 30 year-old Mr. Mukhtiar Junejo were killed in Garhi Yaseen, Sindh.
Pakistan continues to protect the powerful accused of this crime by allowing them to make payments to victims’ families to have murder charges dropped. Often families are harassed and forced to accept such payments.
A woman who is raped must produce at least four Muslim eye-witnesses in court to prove her case. If she is impregnated by a rapist but cannot prove it, she is charged with the offence of adultery, punishable by death. It is estimated that the majority of women in prison today are charged with adultery. The net result of these oppressive conditions is to discourage the participation of women in civic life. The Zina ordinance makes unlawful sexual intercourse including adultery and rape punishable by death by stoning and makes a wrongful accusation of Zina a crime. As Amnesty International observes:
- These laws place an almost impossible burden of proof on women and girls who are raped. If they report a rape to the police they are often charged with Zina crimes because they have in effect admitted to sexual intercourse outside of marriage and been unable to prove absence of consent. In such cases, the victims are more likely to be convicted than the perpetrators.
A woman may inherit only half as much as a man. A woman cannot be a judge in a Sharia court—courts that adjudicate cases of marriage, divorce, inheritance, blasphemy, apostasy, and other matters.
Freedom of Expression
Pakistani authorities are trying to exert control and censorship on independent Sindhi media. Sindhi newspapers and electronic media are generally supportive of democratic and secular values. Pakistan authorities has used various overt and covert means to control these newspapers. One tool has been economic: Pakistan controls all public and private advertising in newspapers through a government body called the Pakistan Information Board. In 2003, the government ordered a cut in Sindhi newspapers’ advertisement ‘quota’ by an additional 50%. Although Sindhi speakers account for about 20% of Pakistan’s population, Sindhi newspapers now receive less than 1% of the total advertising revenue.
Pakistan has frequently banned Sindhi books, newspapers and magazines. In 1975, the largest circulation women’s magazine Sojhiro (‘Daylight’) was banned. In 1999, the largest circulation Sindhi monthly magazine Subhu Thiindo (‘A New Day will Dawn’) was banned for spreading disaffection against the ‘Islamic ideology of Pakistan.’ The magazine focused on sustainable development and environmental protection. The government often uses violence and intimidation against journalists. For example, in August 2003, six Sindhi journalists covering a peaceful protest during the Pakistani dictator General Musharraf’s visit to a college were arrested under ‘anti-terrorism’ laws. In the past two years, two journalists have been killed for covering corruption and the government has failed to aggressively pursue the crimes.
Impunity
Before concluding, Interfaith International would also like to point to recent events in Pakistan which are illustrative of the impunity with which the Pakistan military violates the rights of people. On January 2, 2005, a Sindhi woman physician serving a rural area of neighboring Baluchistan was allegedly gang-raped by an officer of the Pakistani military and his cohorts. The army interfered with the local police investigation, to the extent of shooting at the police to force the police to surrender witnesses under interrogation. While the suspects enjoyed impunity, hundreds of protestors were arbitrarily arrested.
Recommendations
Interfaith International specifically request the Member States of the Commission on Human Rights, together with the UN Special Rapportuers, to find the best methods to determine Pakistan to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right (ICCPR) and to full fill its international legal obligations.
Urge the Pakistan Authorities to
- Scrap all laws that discriminate against minorities including the review of the laws on blasphemy.
- Sindhi Hindus, Christians, Ahmadis and all other religious minorities should be treated as equal citizens and granted them the right to profess and practice their faith.
- The provocative religious speeches and issuing fatwas must be banned.
- Minority groups must be given the full protection under the law.
- Laws discriminatory to women need to be urgently repealed including Hudood and Zina Ordinance.
- Those guilty of crimes against women should be punish under the law and to ensure women should be granted the legal protection
- The increased intimidation of journalist by Pakistani intelligence must be halted.
- The Audit Bureau of Circulation must be placed under independent and transparent control to avoid misuse of advertisement allocation as a means of coercion.