Asia-Pacific, Gender, Headlines, Human Rights

PAKISTAN: At Home, and In Hell

Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Mar 11 2011 (IPS) - “Life is next to hell as we pass the entire day and night inside four walls of our houses. Militancy and the local male-dominated culture are the reasons for the women’s problems,” says Jabeena Bibi, 38, a resident of Khyber Agency, one of the seven tribal districts of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan.

For a woman to leave home is a threat to male Pakhtun honour, Jabeena tells IPS. Such male views are dominant across this region with a population of five million alongside the porous 2,400 km border with Afghanistan, and in the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

There is little thought of anything by way of entertainment, she says. Jabeena believes life cannot improve in the foreseeable future given the presence of Taliban militants out to keep women away from politics, education and entertainment.

“The Pakhtuns like to restrict women to their homes,” says Shahid Ali, a student of the University of Peshawar. They see this as respecting their women, he says. “It’s double standards because if you respect them, then you give them education.”

A resident of North Waziristan Agency, Ali said that the only entertainment for womenfolk in their area was marriage ceremonies and festive occasions.

“We had no television coverage there. No game. No outside entertainment. No inside entertainment. So we forced parents to sell their property there and get a home in Peshawar,” Hafsa Ali, 18, told IPS.

Now a student at the Home Economics College for Women at the University of Peshawar, she has become one of the best volleyball players in the area, representing the college at national level tournaments.

Family entertainment around FATA is confined to women-only gatherings. “On the occasion of marriages and on other happy occasions, women gather for singing and dancing. These occasions are exclusively for women, and male relatives aren’t allowed to watch women dancing or signing,” Ali said.

“Women go outside their homes to pay condolences at relatives’ houses if someone has died, or to ask about the health of ailing relatives, but then they must wear a veil (burqa) that covers them from head to toe,” says Tahseenullah Khan, head of the National Research and Development Foundation.

Khan, who has done research work on FATA’s women says that the situation for women was not that bad till the dismissal of the Taliban government in Kabul, that forced the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda friends to cross over to Pakistan’s side of the border and take refuge in the sprawling and rugged FATA which spreads over an area of 27,220 sq km.

The female literacy rate in KP is 30 percent, and only 3 percent in FATA, compared to a nationwide literacy rate of 54 percent.

According to official reports, female enrolment in schools in the KP is 3.8 percent and in FATA 1.3 percent, while only 22 percent of girls nationwide complete primary schooling.

“Since 2003, the Taliban have been calling the shots in FATA, and they are strictly opposed to women’s role in society. The Taliban have announced that no women would be allowed outside home,” Khan said.

“Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the Pakhtun-dominated Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the adjacent FATA. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’,” he said.

Women in FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are banned from participation and decision-making – a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to, and who their daughters should marry and when.

Women won 15 of the 272 general parliamentary seats in Pakistan in the 2008 elections in the open contest. The tally in the 2002 general election was 13. “However, no women from the Pakhtuns made it to the parliament because they didn’t contest any direct electoral seat,” said Khan.

There are 342 seats in parliament. The Pakistani constitution reserves ten seats for religious minorities and 60 for women, to be filled by proportional representation among parties with more than 5 percent of the vote.

Saima Jan, a teacher at the University Model School (Girls) in Peshawar blamed “Pukhtunwali” (the code of Pakhtuns or Pashtuns who are the majority in northern Pakistan) for the backwardness of women. “Pakhtuns are not ready to accept a part of the society and give them roles in decision-making. Girls students are doing great studies but the parents invest more on their sons as compared to daughters,” she told IPS.

Some Pakhtun women have made tremendous improvement when their parents migrated to other cities from FATA. “I play ten hours a day, and now I want to train other women,” says Maria Torpeka, 19, who won the women’s squash championship in Islamabad last year.

 
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