The idea of paying blood money to settle murders in rural Pakistan reaches its logical conclusion, since women are still considered nothing more than chattel:<\/p>\n\n
A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood “marriages”… The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival. The rival families have now called in their “debt”, demanding the marriages to the village men are fulfilled. [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n<<\/p>\n\n
p>Shall the sins of the father be visited upon the
sons<\/strike> daughters?<\/p>\n\nThe Human Rights Commission of Pakistan condemned the “barbaric custom of vani”, – the tradition of handing over women to resolve disputes – and called on President Pervez Musharraf to enforce a ban. Last year a three-year-old girl near Multan was betrothed to a 60-year-old man in a similar settlement. [Link<\/a>] \nHer father had killed someone, and she had to marry a member of the victim’s family<\/span>Her father had killed someone and she had to marry a member of the victim’s family as compensation under a centuries-old custom of Pakistan’s ethnic Pashtun tribes. Known as swara, the custom calls for a girl to be given away in marriage to an aggrieved family as part of settlement for murder perpetrated by one of her relatives… the custom is still prevalent in the semi-autonomous tribal regions where Pakistani law seldom applies and where jirgas, or councils of tribal elders, settle disputes the old way… “Sons are never given away in settlement<\/font> because we women folk are easy target…” [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Once married their in-laws often treat them with cruelty seeing them as symbols of the original hurt done to their family… In another vani case another village council decreed that a young woman should not only marry a man to compensate for a murder but that her three brother-in-laws should rape her on her wedding night before her new husband – an obscene and degrading sentence that was carried out. [Link<\/a>] \nMost girls married under swara spend their lives in torment because their in-laws consider them symbols of a rival family, activists say. “They are treated like enemies,” said Samar Minallah, an anthropologist who produced a documentary highlighting the plight of women married under swara… [e]ntitled “Swara – A Bridge over Troubled Waters”… [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n
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p>The arrangement leaves girls widows at early ages and unmarriageable thereafter, since the sum of a human being’s intelligence and wisdom is reduced to an opened soft drink can. The girls’ father has stood up for them:<\/p>\n\n
He added that his family had already paid blood-money to the aggrieved party. “I have refused to give into the council’s request as it is un-Islamic. I cannot hand over my girls like goats<\/font> to marry these illiterate boys,” he said. [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n<<\/p>\n\n
p>The girls themselves are taking refuge in the eternal desi symbol of sacrifice, immolation:<\/p>\n\n
“If the government does not help us, we will commit suicide,” says Abda. “We will burn ourselves alive to protest vani.” [Link<\/a>]<\/blockquote>\n\n