Another Face of Terror

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/073105X.shtml

 

 

 

 

Another Face of Terror

By Nicholas D. Kristof

The New York Times

 

Sunday 31 July 2005

 

Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, is supposed to be our

valued ally in the war on terrorism. But terror takes many forms, not

all of them hijacked airplanes or bombed subways.

 

For the vast majority of humans, terror comes in more mundane ways

- like the violent hands that woke Dr. Shazia Khalid as she lay

sleeping in her bed, and the abuse she's suffered at the hands of Mr.

Musharraf's government ever since.

 

I mentioned Dr. Shazia briefly in June when I wrote about General

Musharraf's quasi-kidnapping and house arrest of Mukhtaran Bibi - the

Pakistani rape victim who used compensation money to open schools and

start a women's aid group. But at that time Dr. Shazia was still too

terrified to speak out.

 

Now, for the first time, Dr. Shazia has agreed to tell her full

story, even though this will put herself and her loved ones at risk.

Her tale is simultaneously an indictment of General Musharraf's

duplicity, a window into the debasement that is the lot of women in

much of the world - and a modern love story.

 

Dr. Shazia, now 32, took a job by herself two years ago as a

doctor at a Pakistan Petroleum plant in the wild Pakistani region of

Baluchistan, after Pakistan Petroleum also promised a job for her

husband there (that job never materialized). Dr. Shazia's family

worried about her safety, but her residence was in a guarded compound

and she felt strongly that the women in that region needed access to a

female physician.

 

Then on Jan. 2, Dr. Shazia woke up in the middle of the night, and

at first she thought she was having a nightmare. " But this person was

really pulling hard on my hair, and then he started pressing on my

throat so I couldn't breathe. ... He tied the telephone cord around my

throat. I resisted and struggled, and he beat me on the head with the

telephone receiver. When I tried to scream, he said, 'Shut up -

there's a man standing outside named Amjad, and he's got kerosene. If

you scream, I'll take it and burn you alive.' ... Then he took my

prayer scarf and he blindfolded me with it, and he took the telephone

cord and tied my wrists, and he laid me down on the bed. I tried hard

to fight but he raped me. "

 

The man spent the night in her room, beating her, casually

watching television, raping her again and boasting about his powerful

connections. A 35-page confidential report by a tribunal describes Dr.

Shazia tumbling into the nurse's quarters that morning: " semiconscious

.... with a swelling on her forehead and bleeding from nose and ear. "

Officials of Pakistan Petroleum rushed over and took decisive action.

 

" They told me to be quiet and not to tell anybody because it would

ruin my reputation, " Dr. Shazia remembers. One official warned that if

she reported the crime, she could be arrested.

 

That was a genuine risk. Under Pakistan's hudood laws, a woman who

reports that she has been raped is liable to be arrested for adultery

or fornication - since she admits to sex outside of marriage - unless

she can provide four male eyewitnesses to the rape.

 

Dr. Shazia wasn't sure she dared to report the crime, but she

begged for permission to contact her family. So, she says, officials

drugged her into a stupor and then confined her in a psychiatric

hospital in Karachi.

 

" They wanted to declare me crazy, " Dr. Shazia said bitterly.

" That's why they shifted me to a hospital for crazy people. "

 

Dr. Shazia's husband, Khalid Aman, was working as an engineer in

Libya, but he finally was notified and rushed back 11 days later. Dr.

Shazia, by then freed, couldn't face him, but he comforted her, told

her that she had done nothing wrong, and insisted that they report the

rape to the police so that the criminal could be caught.

 

That was, perhaps, naïve, particularly because there were rumors

that the police had identified the rapist as a senior army officer and

were covering up for him.

 

" When I treat rape victims, I tell the girls not to go to the

police, " Dr. Shershah Syed, a prominent gynecologist in Karachi, told

me. " Because if she goes to the police, the police will rape her. "

 

That's the way the world works for anyone unfortunate enough to be

born female in much of the world. In my next column, on Tuesday, I'll

tell how our ally, General Musharraf, then inflicted a new round of

terrorism on Dr. Shazia.

 

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