Qandeel Baloch, the 26-year-old social media celebrity deemed Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian, was unapologetically drugged and strangled to death by her brother in the province of Punjab for ‘having brought dishonour to their family.’
Qandeel Baloch, real name Fouzia Akeem, who is likened to US celebrity Kim Kardashian because of her provocative posts on social media and controversial rise to notoriety, was killed by her own brother hours after posting the usual provocative picture of herself on Facebook and Instagram. “Yes of course I strangled her,” said Baloch’s brother, Muhammed Wasim, who had given her a sleeping pill before killing her. He explained that his sister’s immodest behaviour had brought dishonour to their family and was intolerable, and this drove him to kill her. The killing of Qandeel Baloch has brought about mixed reactions. While some applaud the killing as honourable, others believe that her actions though wrong, did not warrant death. Others support her rights to live as she chose.
Wasim’s lack of remorse is telling of the level of tolerance of these so-called honour killings in Pakistan. Although condemned by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif stating that it had no place in Islam, the number of honour killings has been on the rise in the country and analysts stress that a large number of these deaths are unreported.
In its annual report, Pakistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission said nearly 1,100 women were killed in Pakistan, last year, by relatives who believed they had dishonoured their families, 900 more women suffered sexual violence and nearly 800 took, or tried to take, their own lives. The number of victims has been on the rise since 2013, with the predominant causes of these killings being domestic disputes, alleged illicit relations and exercising the right of choice in marriage, the report said.
Among the most infamous cases of honour killing in Pakistan was the stoning to death by family members of pregnant Farzana Paveen, outside the High Court in Lahore in 2014. She had married against her family’s wishes. Similarly a Sargodha man fatally shot two of his sisters for what he dubbed “bad character.”
These killings persist, in part, because the perpetrators who are often family members, walk free. The killers get away with these atrocities because of a law that allows the family of the victim to pardon the murderer. The families involved often reach an out-of-court settlement and the alleged killers walk free when pardoned by their relatives. Under a law passed in the 1980s, the next-of-kin of the victim have the right to pardon the person accused of killing them. Although there have been attempts to pass stricter laws, these have often been frustrated by opposition from religious groups.
A law passed by the Punjab parliament in February, criminalising all forms of violence against women, has still not been enacted after the Council of Islamic Ideology said it violated Islamic teachings. Religious groups argue that the new Punjab law will increase divorce rates and destroy the country’s traditional family system.
Honour killings are on the rise in Pakistan and will continue as long as the killers are allowed to walk free. It is not just the law that needs to be strengthened, social attitudes towards the severity of these crimes must be reassessed. “I really feel that no woman is safe in this country, until we start making examples of people, until we start sending men who kill women to jail, unless we literally say there will be no more killing and those who dare will spend the rest of their lives behind bars,” said Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose documentary, ‘A girl in a river,’ was inspired by honour killings in Pakistan and won an Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards.
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