Murdered for a song

Acts of unprovoked violence in Kohistan video scandal have to be punished, no matter what is said about tribal custom.

For a few days last year, the media reported the story of five women from a remote village in Kohistan who had been sentenced to death by a jirga after a video clip of them clapping while men danced to music had leaked. The matter received sufficient attention for the Supreme Court to take suo-motu notice of it and send a team to the village to investigate the matter. The team reported back that the story was a hoax and that they had been assured the women were alive. There the story rested, with the matter supposedly settled. Now, Reuters has reinvestigated the matter and found evidence that the team may have been lied to and that the women, along with two men who were also in the video, had indeed been killed on the jirga’s orders.

The Supreme Court must take this new evidence into account and reopen the case. This time, simply sending a team to the village will not be sufficient unless there is photographic or video proof that the women are still alive. Talk of cultural sensitivity and how women in the area must be hidden from outsiders will no longer suffice. The jirga members and anyone else who was involved in the incident must be brought to Islamabad in handcuffs and forced to face murder charges. Such acts of gross and unprovoked violence have to be punished, no matter what is said about tribal custom. The law of the land holds no meaning when some are free to ignore it on the basis of tradition.

The Supreme Court should also take this opportunity to crack down on the jirga system, which exists above and beyond the law. The argument that jirgas provide speedy justice holds no sway when the kind of justice delivered is so barbaric. One of the reasons the justice system moves slowly is that defendants have the right to fight their case comprehensively and appeal verdicts to higher courts. These are the protections on which the foundations of justice rest and which jirgas ignore completely. It is high time the anachronistic jirgas were done away with.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2013.