Bina Shah September 18, 2005

Tags: women rights , musharraf

href="/tag/Women">Women’s groups in Pakistan vociferously protested on the streets of Karachi this week, while in other parts of the world, Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin has asked Musharraf to apologize publicly for his insensitive, misguided statement. Today Musharraf denied that he made these remarks, stating that he was misquoted, in both a meeting with Time Magazine and a speech at a conference of Pakistani-American women.

“I stand totally on the side of women and their struggle against violence and gender equality,” said President Musharraf. However, according to the Daily Times (September 18, 2005), when a woman at the conference asked Musharraf if he was retracting his statement, he became angry and lashed out at her. “Lady, you are used to people who lie. I am not one of them. I am also disappointed. I am disappointed in people like you. You work with people who looted and plundered the nation. You are against the national interest.”

He went on to say that he recognized Pakistan’s record on women’s rights “leaves much to be desired and we should be ashamed of it.” But he voiced his strong disapproval of rape victims who publicize their cases abroad, with the support of various NGOs and women’s and human rights organizations both in Pakistan and overseas. “I am willing to work with any group that is sincere. I am with them, but if the intention is to malign me or the Government of Pakistan or Pakistan, then let them shout because I can shout louder.”

Musharraf’s statement brings to mind the remarks of the American prosecutor, a US state attorney, in the Aimal Kansi case: he said that Pakistanis were so morally corrupt that they were willing to sell their mothers for a few thousand dollars. There were howls of protest by Pakistanis at this statement. Pakistanis, we said, honor our mothers; we think that heaven is at the foot of our mothers, and what’s more, we respect our daughters and sisters as well.

Musharraf’s statement is a clumsy repeat of the idea that Pakistanis are willing to sell their own women – through ‘getting them raped’ they can earn money, asylum abroad, media attention, and so on. Again, Pakistanis (and others) have been crying out in protest – how dare our President say this about women in his own country? But Musharraf’s ill-thought-out and incredibly politically immature words do deserve a closer examination before he is condemned outright for the mess.

There is no doubt that Musharraf thinks rape is wrong. And of course, there are probably quite a few criminals who think that crying rape is the way to make a fast buck, given the type of support that has poured in for rape survivors such as Mukhtaran Mai, Dr. Shazia Khalid, and now Sonia Naz. Unfortunately, Musharraf could have easily avoided the brouhaha if he had said something like: "We are on the side of the women’s struggle, and we oppose violence against women in all ways. But we do not want to see our women exploited at the hands of anyone, whether they are rapists or political or financial opportunists. There are some despicable people who might even stoop to claiming to have been raped – or might coerce women into saying so -- in order to gain benefits, both monetary and political.”

As far as rape and violence against women goes in Pakistan, Musharraf is well aware that rape is a horrific form of torture, but he is stuck leading a country where not everybody believes it is a bad thing. This translates to the paralysis we are seeing in trying to get rape laws amended and eliminated, establishing a proper reporting system, and providing protection and security to the victims of rape and their families. However, there is no excuse for foot-dragging, especially from a leader who believes in enlightened moderation. Musharraf must unequivocally show his support for the women of Pakistan in this, their most desperate hour of need.

Pakistan is nowhere when it comes to providing any kind of support or help to women who are raped and abused. This is a home truth that nobody can deny. But no woman in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world who is raped would drag herself through the kind of public humiliation that we see today befalling upon rape victims in the courts, the press, and the eyes of the community and country. The world press and human rights’ and women’s rights groups abroad have picked up on the injustices that we know have existed in our society for years and years; they wonder aloud how we as a nation can be so very apathetic about something that is destroying the lives of so many women in our nation. The real security lies in the status quo as far as we Pakistanis are concerned.

The real issue at stake here is not the insensitivity or stupidity of Musharraf’s remarks, but the failure of we as a body politic and as a nation to see the fact that rape in Pakistan is a political issue. Dr. Rubina Saigol, the well known educationist and sociologist, has this to say about women, rape, and politics in Pakistan:

Recent feminist theories of nationalism have pointed out that the Qaum (nation) is essentially feminine in construction. The nation is narrated on the body of women who become an emotionally-laden symbol of the nation, self, the inner, spiritual world and home. One’s motherland or maadar-e-watan, as it comes to be called, becomes invested with the kind of erotic attraction felt towards women, especially in the figure of the mother. The country comes to be appropriated, represented and contained within words which have strong romantic, erotic as well as maternal connotations. The desire for this land/woman/dharti is constructed as masculine desire; the desire to possess it, see it, admire it, love it, protect it and die fighting for it against rivals.

Since the desire for women gets transferred on to the nation and women’s bodies come to signify the nation, communal, regional, national and international conflicts come to be played out on women’s bodies. These bodies thus become arenas of violent struggle. Women are humiliated, tortured, brutally raped, and murdered as part of the process by which the sense of being a nation is created and reinforced.

(From “Militarisation, Nation and Gender:Women’s Bodies as Arenas of Violent Conflict” by Rubina Saigol)


In this light, rape is not merely a personal crime, the most terrible violence that can be inflicted upon a woman; it is a crime against a citizen, and therefore should be prosecuted as a crime against the state. Taking this further, we begin to see that there are people who wish to inflict great harm upon the state, and they can achieve this not just by planting bombs or shooting worshippers in a mosque, but by raping a Pakistani woman; the psychological effects on the individual woman, and the sociological effects that hit society soon afterwards, are destructive in the extreme, a poison that will slowly but surely kill everyone in its path.

Perhaps what Musharraf is so angry about is exactly this: the violence that is being inflicted upon our country through the crime of rape. Blaming the victim is a gross misunderstanding on his part; he must retract his statement, or at least replace it with a clarification that would do his stance more justice. What he tried to say to the Washington Post is that women are not the only victims of rape; Pakistan is becoming the victim of a type of “political” rape through the subsequent “exploitation” (in his eyes, anyway) of the rape victims, to the detriment of Pakistan’s image.

Still, Musharraf must be made to understand that the only way to create awareness about the hideousness of this crime is to bring it to light instead of trying to hide it away shamefully, so that victims either run away, lose their sanity, or kill themselves. Musharraf will very probably live to regret this instance of foot-in-mouth disease, but the only way to show Pakistani women, and the world, that he has had it cured is to take very concrete steps for the protection of and the achievement of justice for every woman and girl who is raped in Pakistan today. Changing the Hudood Ordinances, ensuring that rapes are registered as criminal offenses, guaranteeing that criminals are caught and punished, and making sure that women who report rapes and their families are safe from physical danger and intimidation are the ways in which he can prove he really means what he says when he claims to be on women’s side in this struggle. And perhaps it should be made mandatory for all government figures to attend a rape awareness class so that they can see just what a cruel, horrific crime rape really is for any woman, Pakistani or otherwise.