24/05/2002

PAKISTAN: Mother faces death by stoning - Pakistani woman, who told authorities she was raped, is convicted of adultery

 By Seth Mydans

The evidence of guilt was there for all to see: a newborn 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 on death row in Kohat, a nearby town. The only visitor she is allowed to see is her daughter, now a year old and being cared for by a prison nurse.

Zafran is a peasant of the hot and barren hills of Pakistan's northwest frontier country. Unschooled and illiterate, like most other women here, she has 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 Quran-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. In accusing her brother-in-law of raping her, Zafran had confessed to her crime.

 "This left no option to the court but to impose the highest penalty," Khan said.

 Although legal fine points 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. Her case has become the subject of editorials and news stories in Pakistan, 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, Aurat said.

 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.

 Sardar Ali Khan, her lawyer, said 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 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, burnings and rapes. Every year, there are hundreds of "honor killings" in which a woman is slain 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. As many as half the women who report a rape are charged 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. "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, 4 male witnesses -- all Muslims and all citizens of upright character -- must testify to having seen a rape take place. The testimony of women or non-Muslims is not admissible. The victim's accusation also carries little weight; the only significant testimony she can give is an admission of guilt.

 "The proof is totally impossible," Naz said. "If a woman brings a charge of rape, she puts herself in grave danger." If, on the other hand, the woman does not report the rape and becomes pregnant out of wedlock, her silence can be taken as proof of guilt.

 It is not only women but young girls who are at risk, Aurat says.

 A man can deflect an accusation of rape by claiming that his victim, of any age, consented. If the victim has reached puberty, she is considered to be an adult and is then subject to prosecution for zina. As a result, the Aurat report says, girls as young as 12 or 13 have been convicted of having forbidden sexual relations and have been punished with imprisonment and public whippings.

 With no safe recourse, rights workers say, rape victims often flee to the protection of influential families, which take them in as servants.

 When Zafran was given in marriage to Niamat Khan, his family took possession of her and she disappeared into their mud-walled compound a mile away. Her parents rarely saw her again; they are too poor even to have a photograph to remind them of her.

 In this barren world, where people grow hard to survive, their tenderness for their daughter seems all the more painful. They sat silently one recent day on the string beds that are the only furnishings of their one-room home.

 Zafran's father, Zaidan, an unsmiling, weather-beaten man, spread his hands as if he had no words to offer.

"When we heard the sentence, we couldn't breathe," he said at last.