The Observer

12/05/02

Zafran Bibi was raped, but a Pakistan judge decided it was adultery - now this young mother will be stoned to death

Rory McCarthy in Kohat, North West Frontier, reports on an extraordinary judgment in a country where Islamic code collides with secular law

May 12, 2002

Zafran Bibi walked into the police station in the village of Kerri Sheikhan, deep in the valleys of Pakistan's North West Frontier, and gave a harrowing account of how she had been raped by a neighbour.

Medical tests were ordered, witnesses questioned and a trial was held. Defence lawyers were called in. But Pakistan's archaic legal system, a mix of secular and Islamic codes, offers little protection for women.

 Bibi, 28, was convicted of adultery under Islamic laws which many regard as deeply prejudicial. Last month, a year after she reported the rape, a judge sentenced her to death by stoning.

 For several weeks the young mother has lived in solitary confinement in a death cell behind the redbrick walls of Kohat jail nursing her seven-month old daughter. An appeal will be heard before an Islamic court in Islamabad later this month.

 Her case has exposed the empty promises of Pakistan's military regime, which has committed itself to improving women's rights and countering religious extremism. General Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler, knew nothing about the case until he was questioned by foreign journalists last week. 'Is that the law?' he asked. 'Now? I don't even know.'

 He was asked if he planned to reform the adultery laws, introduced in 1979 in a wave of Islamisation led by the last military dictator, Zia-ul Haq. 'Frankly, I haven't given it such deep thought, let me admit,' said Musharraf.

 The urbane general, sitting in his lavish office in Islamabad, insisted Bibi would not be executed. But hundreds more women who have reported rapes are held in jail under the same adultery law.

 It appears Bibi was used by relatives caught up in a family feud, and her husband claims she suffered from poor legal advice. Her account of what happened has never been heard. In remote villages such as Kerri Sheikhan, the word of a young, uneducated mother counts for little.

 On the morning of 26 March last year Bibi went to the village police station with her father-in-law, Zabita Khan, and said she had been raped while cutting grass outside the village. She named Akmal Khan, a villager involved in a long-running dispute with her family, as her attacker. At the time, her husband was in jail for murder.

 Bibi was examined by a doctor and found to be seven to eight weeks pregnant, a fact that appears to have convinced the judge she was guilty of adultery. She later insisted that the baby was conceived during a conjugal visit to her husband in jail.

 Last October the trial opened and Bibi appeared in court in Kohat wearing a faded yellow burqa, the all-enveloping cloak the Taliban forced women to wear in Afghanistan. She recorded a statement repeating the claim of rape and again naming Akmal Khan. But at the next hearing she said her father-in-law had pressured her into making the accusation. In a new statement, she named her brother-in-law Jamal, 15, as the rapist.

 The judge acquitted Akmal Khan, the man first accused. But no investigation was ordered into the new accusation and Jamal was never arrested. The judge ruled the medical evidence showed no signs of force and her pregnancy was evidence of adultery. 'Resultantly, I hereby convict and sentence the accused Zafran Bibi to stoning to death and that she be stoned to death at a public place,' Judge Anwar Ali Khan wrote in his final judgment.

 Her lawyers were stunned. In the court at Kohat last week they were still arguing over the case. 'She has never confessed her guilt. There is no case against her,' said Sardar Ali, one of her original defence lawyers. 'I think it was mishandled by a relative of this lady. She never stated she committed adultery.'

 Under the Offence of Zina Ordinance, which covers both rape and adultery under the Islamic code, a conviction requires either a confession from the accused or evidence from four witnesses to the crime who are Muslim men who 'abstain from major sins'. Frequently, when rape is not proven, women are charged with adultery. As a result, most rapes are never reported, even though the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates that every two hours a woman in the country is raped.

 In Bibi's case, the judge ruled the fact that she changed her statement to name a new attacker was a confession of adultery.

 'She made herself guilty in that statement when she clearly admits she had committed zina [adultery] with her brother-in-law,' said Kurshid Anwar, a prosecutor in the case. 'There was no mark of violence on her body. It was the right decision as long as the law exists.' Later Anwar admitted he favoured 'modernisation' of the law. 'Women suffer more because of our customs,' he said.

 Outside Kohat jail last week Bibi's husband, Naimat Khan, and his two sons, Israr, nine, and Rehman, six, tried to arrange a visit to his wife. His children were allowed in, but he was not. Several minutes later, her sons returned with beaming smiles, clutch ing a small purple fan their mother had made them.

 'The defence lawyers told us this would be an easy case. Then they told my wife if she didn't change her statement she would be tied to a pole and soldiers would throw stones at her,' said Naimat Khan, 40, a poor farmer who makes less than �400 a year from his fields. In an affidavit written for the appeal hearing, Bibi again pleaded her innocence. 'I have not committed zina with anybody,' she said. 'I have not confessed any guilt.'

 While Bibi's conviction may be overturned on appeal later this month, it is clear the military regime, despite its promise to eradicate fundamentalism, is unwilling to reform the Islamic laws for fear of angering the religious Right.

 'She is not the first case and she is not going to be the last,' said Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. 'If General Musharraf really wants to do away with extremism, then there is no alternative to doing away with the structures created by Zia, which include the so-called Islamic laws.

 'Even if Zafran Bibi returns to her village now, the stigma is so severe that it will be a very harsh life for her and her children.'

Raped woman is sentenced to death in Pakistan

By Seth Mydans (The New York Times)

 May 18, 2002

CHORLAKI, Pakistan: The evidence of guilt was there for all to see: a newborn baby girl in the arms of its mother, a village woman named Zafran Bibi.Her crime: she had been raped. Her sentence: death by stoning.Now Zafran, who is about 26, is in solitary confinement in a death-row cell in Kohat, a nearby town.

 The only visitor she is allowed is her daughter, now a year old and being cared for by a prison nurse.In photographs, Zafran appears as a tall woman with striking green eyes. She is a peasant woman of the hot and barren hills of Pakistan's northwest frontier country.Unschooled and illiterate, like most other women here, she may have little understanding of what has happened to her. But her story is not uncommon under Pakistan's strict Islamic laws.Thumping a fat red statute book, the white-bearded judge who convicted her, Anwar Ali Khan, said he had simply followed the letter of the Koran-based law, known as hudood, that mandates punishments.

"The illegitimate child is not disowned by her and therefore is proof of zina," he said, referring to laws that forbid any sexual contact outside marriage. Furthermore, he said, in accusing her brother-in-law of raping her, Zafran had confessed to her crime."The lady stated before this court that, yes, she had committed sexual intercourse, but with the brother of her husband," Khan said."This left no option to the court but to impose the highest penalty."Although fine points of legality do exist, little distinction is made in court between forced and consensual sex.When hudood was enacted 23 years ago, the laws were formally described as measures to ban "all forms of adultery, whether the offense is committed with or without the consent of the parties." But it is almost always the women who are punished, whatever the facts.

The case of Zafran fits a familiar pattern. But it raised an outcry, even in Pakistan, because of the sentence of death by stoning, a punishment called for by hudood but never carried out here.The facts of her case have become the subject of editorials and news stories in Pakistan, bringing her some notoriety, and in early May, a higher court called for a review of Zafran's sentence.But even if the case returns to a more typical course, she is likely to spend 10 to 15 years in prison as the result of her rape, said Rukhshanda Naz, who heads the local branch of a women's rights group called Aurat.

 As many as 80 percent of all women in Pakistani jails have been convicted under laws that ban extramarital sex, according to Aurat.Zafran, whether she was angry or just naive, chose to point her finger at the man she said raped her. The assaults, she said, came sometimes on the hillside behind her house when she went to cut hay, sometimes at home when nobody was there to see.Sardar Ali Khan, her lawyer, said that Zafran had told him she cried when she was raped and that she had cried again as she spoke to him about what happened.Her husband, Niamat Khan, was serving a prison sentence for murder and in his absence, she had become the plaything of at least one of his brothers."She complained to her mother-in-law and her father-in-law," her lawyer said, "but they just turned away." It was her pregnancy that forced her accusations into the open and led to her conviction for zina.Human rights groups say abuse of women is endemic in Pakistan. 

Often, they are locked inside their homes where they are subjected to beatings, acid attacks, burning and rape. Every year there are hundreds of "honor killings," in which a woman is murdered for perceived breaches of modesty.Rape itself is a crime under hudood, but it is so difficult to prove that almost no men have ever been convicted. 

On the other hand, human rights workers say, as many as half the women who report a rape are charged with zina, with adultery."With the men, they apply the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty," said Asma Jahangir, an official of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the author of a book on hudood. "With the women, they apply the principle that you are guilty until proven innocent."The man Zafran accused, Jamal Khan, was set free without charges.

 A case against him would have been a waste of time. Under the laws of zina, four male witnesses, all Muslims and all citizens of upright character, must testify to having seen a rape take place.