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Friday,
July 5, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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A VIEW FROM PAKISTAN Girl
punished with gang-rape
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Arafat
sacks two top commanders Jerusalem, July 4 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat dismissed two of his top security commanders, but both indicated yesterday that they would not go quietly. The upheaval in the Palestinian Authority came as Israel eased some of the restrictions it clamped on West Bank towns and cities and agreed to allow some Palestinian workers to return to Israel, but Palestinians dismissed the moves as cosmetic.
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A VIEW FROM PAKISTAN Lahore, July 3 Shahzad Butt was a manager of a Davis Road travelling agency. They went to Sialkot to hand over air tickets for the USA to a client when his Suzuki car hit the mine on the way. “There were no barbed wires and no board displaying the installation of landmines. Our car flew in the air with a bang and I could not ascertain as to what had happened to us,” Sarwar, the survivor, reportedly told the family of the deceased. Residents of the nearby villages brought them out of the car after some 20 minutes and rushed them to hospital. For the past six months, in the wake of escalation of tension between India and Pakistan, a large number of people have been rendered homeless and scores of people have been blown up in landmine blasts in the border districts of Sialkot, Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar. The mobilisation of troops on a massive scale and the installation of warfare outfits, like artillery, along either side of the borders have badly disrupted the routine life of thousands of people in the border areas. Thousands of people have migrated to safer areas for fear of the impending war. Numerous villages have been vacated and the Pakistan army has got a number of villages evacuated. According to Punjab’s Revenue Department, the number of displaced persons is at least 10,000. The deployment of troops began in December, 2001, a peak time for farming communities for preparing fields for wheat. The movement of troops and the subsequent control of certain areas by the army made the sowing of wheat difficult. Afterwards, it became hard for farmers to reap the wheat crops because of intermittent shelling and firing across the working boundary in the Sialkot sector. The army personnel also dug trenches in the standing crops. Since a majority of farmers along the border possesses small land holdings, it was a huge loss for them. The management of livestock and fodder remains another major problem for the displaced. The issue of the displaced people and the suffering of the farming community came to surface when President Pervez Musharraf addressed a rally on April 18 in Gujranwala in connection with his referendum campaign. A large number of participants in the rally were from bordering districts of Narowal and Sialkot. At that time, the President announced that the government would compensate the people who suffered losses owing to the mobilisation of troops and the installation of military outfits. The Punjab Revenue Department has declared 367 villages of Punjab as calamity-hit. With the declaration of calamity-affected areas, the dues of agriculture income tax, water rates (Aabiana), development cess and local rate have been remitted. The villages include 75 of Lahore, 44 of Narowal, 49 of Okara, 104 of Bahawalnagar and 95 districts of Sialkot. Moreover, the agricultural loans taken by the farmers from these areas have deferred for one year and advance loans for the next crop have been allowed. Although farmers have got some relief, so far little attention has been paid to the victims of several landmine explosions. The media has been reluctant to report such incidents. Since December, at least 12 persons — a family comprising three men, as many women and a child, three army men, a farmer and a shopkeeper — have lost their lives in separate incidents of landmine explosions in various areas of Cholistan in Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar districts. All these incidents went unreported in the Press. One such incident took place in mid-January in a village of Yazman tehsil, near Cholistan. Tufail, 50, was returning from his field on his tractor when four army men met him on the way and asked him to accompany them to Yazman to bring barbed wire. “In the evening, people told us that they all were killed in a landmine blast,” recalls middle-aged Hashmat Bibi, Tufail’s widow. The anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines installed along the border have caused the deaths of numerous animals as most of the forward areas along the border are used as pastures. Villagers said when the landmine explosions took place in Cholistan, no barbed wire had been laid around the mine-laden area and even the army men didn’t know where landmines had been laid. That’s why they fell prey to the defensive landmine line drawn by the army against an expected Indian attack from the Rajasthan sector, said a villager. Two months ago, another incident also took place near a checkpost in Chaapu village in which a family comprising three men, three women and a child were killed and jeep driver Muhammad Arif was critically injured in a landmine explosion. The family was coming from a chak of Yazman tehsil to participate in a wedding feast at the house of Chaapu Numberdar Rukan in a jeep when they hit the landmine, a villager said. They could not identify the mine-laden area in the desert and were blown to pieces by a heavy landmine. The parts of jeep and human bodies were scattered in a vast area. “Some shepherds and I collected parts of bodies and removed them from the landmine field,” the villager said. Villagers say the residents of the area knew every inch of the desert. He said after a long drought, the desert needs heavy rain. But so far scarcity of rain has proved a blessing in disguise because the villagers can identify where landmines are laid. After a heavy rain, there might be many more casualties when even shepherds would not be able to make out the landmines. In another incident, Azhar, a shopkeeper of chak 297/HR in Tehsil Fort Abbas, was killed when his motor cycle was blown up by a landmine near his village. Azhar was returning home when he entered a mine-laden field accidentally and was blown up, a villager said. Many people have so far lost their body parts, especially limbs in various mine explosions. Sharifan Bibi (25) of chak Marot in Fort Abbas tehsil was deprived of the lower half of her right leg when she entered a landmine field to save her little son. “Landmines have been laid down just two acres away from our village and is very difficult for us to keep a watchful eye all the time on our children and especially our cattle to save them from these landmines”, a villager said. Currently, the villager said, head of cattle are the main victims as the mine-laden areas have not properly been fenced. There are only single wires surrounding the landmine fields that could easily be crossed by animals, especially camels. Villagers in Cholistan fear that there could be many more casualties if the army leaves the area without removing these mines. |
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Girl punished with gang-rape
Meerwala (Pakistan), July 4 The council was unconvinced, and ordered a brutal punishment: the boy’s sister would be gang-raped to shame her whole family. Shortly afterward, four members of the council took turns raping the 18-year-old sister in a mud hut as hundreds of people stood outside laughing and cheering. “I touched their feet. I wept. I cried. I said I taught the holy Quran to children in the village, therefore don’t punish me for a crime which was not committed by me. But they tore my clothes and raped me one by one,” the young woman told The Associated Press yesterday. Senior police and provincial government officials visited Meerwala yesterday. Asef Hayyat, Punjab’s Deputy Inspector General of Police, said the top officer at the local police station had been suspended and several close relatives of the suspects had been detained to pressure the perpetrators into surrendering. “We will soon arrest the real culprits,” Hayyat told reporters. Pakistan has a tradition of tribal justice in which crime or affronts to dignity are punished outside the framework of Pakistani law. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has demanded an end to punishments by tribal councils. The June 22 rape has outraged rights groups, who say the number of atrocities against women in Pakistan is increasing. And Pakistan’s Supreme Court yesterday directed top Punjab police and government officials to attend a special hearing tomorrow on the case. Cited by Pakistan’s Government-run news agency, Chief Justice Sheikh Riaz Ahmad described the case as a violation of human rights. Rana Ijaz, the Punjab Government’s Law Minister, was among officials who visited the village, and promised full investigation. Villagers told him the rape was the second in the region recently. In the June 22 rape, the Mastoi tribe demanded punishment after the teenager’s brother was seen walking unchaperoned with a Mastoi girl in a deserted part of the village. The Mastoi tribe called a meeting of the tribal council. The teenager’s father, Ghulam Farid, (54), said he pleaded for clemency with the council, telling them the Mastoi girl was safe with his son because he was too young to have sex. But the Mastoi girl’s father rejected the pleas and demanded the gang-rape as punishment, Farid said.
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Arafat sacks two top commanders Jerusalem, July 4 The two sacked security chiefs, West Bank strongman Jibril Rajoub and Gaza Strip police chief Ghazi Jibali said they had not received official notification. “So far I have not received any official presidential decree regarding my dismissal,” Rajoub, the head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, told The Associated Press in an interview at his home in Ramallah. “I will not leave my position until I get something official.” Jibali insisted the reports were “rumours” and there was no sign he was ready to leave his post. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the steps being taken are part of a 100-day reform plan and are not meant as “punishment or measures taken against specific people”.
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