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Dogged reporting in Azerbaijan landed a U.S.-trained journalist in prison

Khadija Ismayilova (Credit: euroasian.net.org)
Khadija Ismayilova
(Credit: euroasian.net.org)

The U.S. government spends millions each year on programs to improve the skills of foreign reporters, but rarely have its efforts helped produce such a media superstar as Khadija Ismayilova in Azerbaijan.

Ismayilova was 27 when she enrolled in her first U.S.-funded investigative workshop in Baku in 2003. At 30, she moved to Washington to work for the government’s Voice of America, which trained her in broadcasting. Two years later, she returned home as bureau chief of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and later, became a talk-show host and investigative reporter there.

Beginning in 2010, Ismayilova uncovered secret ownership amid government dealings in the telecommunications, construction, gold mining, hotel, media and airline services industries. Her bombshells won international awards and high praise from some in the State Department as well as anti-corruption groups worldwide.

But in Azerbaijan, in December, she was arrested and imprisoned. The hidden fortunes she revealed were those of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, and his family. She reported that they used their positions to vastly enrich themselves with public funds.

The charges against her — tax evasion, illegal entre­pre­neur­ship, embezzlement, inciting a suicide attempt and misuse of authority — did not cite her reporting. But U.S. and European officials and her employer say they are retribution for her articles, designed to quash her investigations and growing pro-democracy activism.

Earlier this month, Ismayilova was found guilty of all but the suicide charge and sentenced to 7 1/2  years in prison. She told the court that the government “won’t be able to force me to stay silent, even if they sentence me to 15 or 25 years.”

U.S. officials condemned the verdict.

“This sentence is clearly retribution for Khadija exposing government corruption and sends a warning shot to other journalists in the country,” said Jeff Shell, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent federal agency that supports independent media abroad. “The Azeri government has demonstrated to the international community that it disdains press freedom, supports its own impunity and has little regard for human rights.”

Khadija Ismayilova’s journey from U.S.-sponsored journalism workshops to a jail cell in Central Asia is also a tale of U.S. policy at odds with itself.

On the one hand, U.S. agencies and their affiliates train, fund and publish investigative reporters such as Ismayilova, who provide some of the last remaining independent news reports in Central Asia and Russia. Congress appropriated an estimated $64 million this fiscal year for programs to promote “media freedom and freedom of information” worldwide, according to State Department records.

But on the other hand, press freedom and human rights usually take a back seat in U.S. foreign relations to military, intelligence, oil or other business interests.

“The U.S. government isn’t doing anything in terms of pressure and sanctions against the government of Azerbaijan to make it clear the jailing of Khadija and other journalists there is unacceptable,” said David J. Kramer, a human rights specialist at the McCain Institute for International Leadership and former president of Freedom House. “There are other interests with Azerbaijan that have crowded out human rights concerns.”

In March, two officials from RFE/RL and the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent U.S. agency that oversees Voice of America, flew to Baku to discuss Ismayilova’s case with the foreign minister, national security adviser, two other senior presidential advisers and the prosecutor and tax offices.

“I said, ‘If you have specific information that contradicts her reporting . . . give it to us,’ ” said Jeffrey N. Trimble, deputy director of the IBB. He got nothing, he added, and “no hint of flexibility.”

The Embassy of Azerbaijan declined to comment on questions submitted by The Washington Post.

Ali Hasanov, the presidential aide for public and political affairs, told media in Baku after the verdict that “Ismayilova faced criminal charges for committing concrete criminal acts unrelated to her journalistic activities. During the trial, the charges were fully proved and the adequate decision was made. That is why attempts to politicize the court’s verdict about Ismayilova by some international organizations, officials of different countries and a number of international human rights organizations are unacceptable.”

Before Ismayilova’s arrest, Azerbaijani officials portrayed her as an enemy of the state because of her reporting and on-air commentary.

In a 60-page statement issued days before her arrest, Presidential Chief of Staff Ramiz Mehdiyev said Ismayilova “makes absurd statements, openly demonstrates destructive attitude towards well-known members of the Azerbaijani community and spreads insulting lies. It is clear this sort of defiance pleases Ms. Ismayilova’s patrons abroad.”

Ismayilova, 39, is being held in Kurdakhani prison, 30 miles north of Baku and home to some of the 80 other journalists and pro-democracy activists identified by U.S. and European governments. Speaking through intermediaries, she answered questions in writing for this article.

“We publish investigations because we value peoples’ right to know,” she said. “I expect people to struggle for their right to know, to try to hold corrupt politicians responsible.”

Today the government owns all television stations, and virtually all newspapers are allied with the president.

“Azerbaijan has been a friend to the United States and a partner in the battle against radical Islam, but mostly it’s their oil. It’s important that [the oil] remains in a Western direction,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), co-chair of the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus.

Even so, Cohen said, President Aliyev “has talked about human rights, but we haven’t really seen it.” Cohen recently co-signed a letter to Aliyev, asking him to reconsider the closing of RFE/RL, which the police shuttered in December, and assure justice to Ismayilova, whose arrest the letter called “politically motivated.”

Ask anyone who knows Ismayilova to describe her, and they usually chuckle to themselves first. “She gives you a healthy amount of headache,” said Ayaz Ahmedov, a co-worker.

“She is the most courageous man in Azerbaijan!” said Altay Goyushov, a professor at Baku State University.

Ismayilova was raised in an intellectual household. Her mother was an engineer, and her father was the president of a company that made machinery for the oil industry. Their daughter was a stellar student. Khadija graduated from Baku State University with a master’s degree in the Turkish language and literature and also speaks Russian.

She came onto the job market shortly after Azerbaijan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, and for the first time independent news outlets began springing up in the former Soviet republic.

Her first jobs were at alternative monthly newsletters for nonprofit organizations; then covering politics for a Russian-language paper; then as a deputy editor in chief of an English-language newspapers’s Azerbaijan section.

Alakbar Raufoglu, a fellow journalist, first met her in the mid-1990s. “Sometimes people don’t like her because she says everything to your face; she will not talk behind your back.”

Ismayilova’s exposure to U.S. journalistic techniques and mind-set came in 2003 amid a dynastic transition in Azerbaijan. That year, Ilham Aliyev replaced his father, Heydar, a former chief of the KGB branch in Azerbaijan and first secretary of the Communist Party there, as president of the country.

With Western help and investment, Ilham Aliyev developed Azerbaijan’s oil and gas infrastructure and turned a country the size of Maine with a population of 9.6 million into a player at the center of multiple geopolitical competitions. Glass skyscrapers and garish displays of wealth sprang up in the otherwise crumbling downtown.

Sandwiched between Iran and Russia, Aliyev increased intelligence cooperation with Israel and the United States and allowed the U.S. military to use commercial airports to ferry troops and supplies into Afghanistan.

Ismayilova’s pedigree can be traced to some of the finest American investigative reporting minds in the industry, a small, sometimes awkward group of junkyard dogs. They were among the first to realize the golden nuggets of information that could be found within banal government documents.

Her teachers included people like Don Ray, a California-based broadcast journalist famous among U.S. reporters as a pioneering document sleuth. Beginning in 2006, he taught Ismayilova and her colleagues to conduct what he calls a “bottoms-up investigation” that begins with a search of standard corporate, tax and property records.

Another teacher was Drew Sullivan, a onetime city hall reporter at the Tennessean, who founded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a nonprofit group that receives U.S. and other funding to teach reporters mostly in Central Asia and Eastern Europe how to do cross-border investigations. She also worked with a U.S.-trained Romanian computerized-records wizard, Paul Radu. Radu had built an online tool called Investigative Dashboard that contains corporate registries and company records worldwide, and much more.

Ismayilova would eventually combine Ray’s scrutiny of documents, Sullivan’s cross-border capabilities and Radu’s Dashboard to produce the half-dozen fact-filled stories about the Aliyev family that got her in so much trouble. The training that all three men provided to Ismayilova was partly subsidized by U.S. government funds.

But one more thing was required to turn her into a full-fledged investigative reporter: passion.

In March 2005, a friend, investigative reporter Elmar Huseynov, who had published stories linking Aliyev to hidden business holdings, was shot dead at his doorstep in Baku by assailants who have still not been identified.

“That was the moment when I felt guilty,” Ismayilova later told Ray in an interview. “I started crying — I just couldn’t control it. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Ismayilova had dismissed Huseynov’s work because he didn’t document most of the allegations made about the Aliyev family, Ray said.

Only later did she realize that “he was a one-man band going after the powers that be” with none of the training she had to find the necessary paper trail, Ray said. “She did some self-assessment and realized that the spirit of what he was doing was correct, but he didn’t know the best way to do it.”

Deeply regretful, she promised herself that she would honor him by continuing his work and training others to do the same.

 

The turning point for Azerbaijani investigative journalism came only in mid-2010. In March, The Post published an article by one of its correspondents about an 11-year-old boy with the same name and birth date as the president’s son who had spent $44 million on nine Dubai mansions.

Ismayilova had helped with the story but for safety reasons had asked that her name not be used.

The article, according to Raufoglu, the fellow journalist, “made the local media wake up. . . . We were asking ourselves, ‘Why can’t we write like this?’ ”

Ismayilova, he recalled, told colleagues: “Okay, we will call our colleagues abroad. We will figure out a way to prove everything we know.”

Ismayilova’s first bylined investigation was vetted and published by RFE/RL, once a Cold War propaganda outlet that has since evolved into the last remaining source of independent news in much of Central Asia and Russia. By then it broadcast only on the Internet, having been banned by the government from airwaves.

In August 2010, using documents from the State Committee on Financial Securities, Ismayilova and a colleague reported that an Azerbaijani holding company called SW Holdings had a near monopoly on recently privatized airline services to the state airline company, Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL), including ticket sales, in-flight meals, technical upkeep, duty-free stores and taxi service.

SW Holdings, they wrote, was partly owned by Aliyev’s then 21-year-old daughter, Arzu, and by the wife of AZAL’s president.

“It is unclear where Arzu Aliyeva — who until now was best known for her role in an Azerbaijani tourism ad aired on CNN — may have acquired the estimated . . . $7.8 million . . . she used to acquire her initial stake of 29.08 percent” in SW Holdings, they wrote.

As president, her father, Ilham Aliyev, earns $230,000 a year.

The next article documented the meteoric success of Azerfon, a mobile phone company. Within three years, it had 1.7 million subscribers and was the only company licensed to provide 3G services. The government had insisted that the company was owned by Siemens, the German conglomerate.

Using Azerbaijani tax documents and the Panama State Registry of companies, Ismayilova walked readers through a trail of documents leading to three companies registered in Panama and the Caribbean tax haven of Nevis Island, and then to Leyla Aliyeva, 25, and Arzu Aliyeva, 22.

Every investigation drew threats and invectives from Azerbaijanis defending the president. In March 2012, Ismayilova received a letter containing still images from a video of her having sex with her then-boyfriend in her apartment. The letter writer threatened to air it if she didn’t stop her reporting.

She immediately posted the threat on Facebook. “If they think they will stop me this way, they are wrong.”

The video was aired two days later, but the tactic backfired. Even radical Muslims in the mostly secular Muslim country condemned what they said was the government’s attempt to smear her.

Looking at the video, Ismayilova determined the camera angles and discovered phone wiring in her bedroom where the cameras had been, and followed it into her living room and bathroom. She found the installer, who recalled bringing the line to the apartment for a mysterious customer. Ismayilova asked prosecutors to investigate, but nothing came of it.

Two months later, she published two more investigative stories, jointly reported with OCCRP. One article probed the hidden ownership of a gold mining company which was widely believed to be British. Using official documents again, she reported that the president’s two daughters owned part of the firm through four Panamanian corporations.

“The UK company is actually a front for the first family,” Ismayilova wrote, “who stand to add to their already enormous wealth.”

The second article revealed that a $134 million glass-and-steel auditorium rising up from downtown Baku for the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest 2012 was largely constructed by a company secretly connected to the president’s wife and two daughters.

After those stories, parliament passed a law ruling that ownership of private companies could no longer be made public except by court order, by police investigators or with the owner’s consent. Another law granted all presidents, ex-presidents and first ladies lifelong immunity from prosecution.

Ismayilova’s articles fueled small pro-democracy protests in Azerbaijan calling for the Aliyev government to step down. She joined in, crossing a line that her Western mentors found uncomfortable.

Sullivan tried to get Ismayilova to stick to journalism, but she “felt she was in an historic time and needed to come out and explain what the government was doing” in a plain-spoken way people could understand, he said.

“She felt the government was so evil and abusive of the people that she had to pick sides,” Sullivan said.

In early 2013, Ismayilova was arrested with other protesters in Baku and sentenced to community service, which she turned into another protest by sweeping the streets, joined by groups of her supporters. The government also questioned her about allegations that she passed secret documents to U.S. congressional staffers.

By now, the threats to Ismayilova had become routine but still worried her, friends said. Her tactic was always to publish them on social media, thinking that the publicity would give her protection.

But the threats escalated. Her mother’s address was printed in a prominent newspaper, SES, under the headline: “Khadija’s Armenian Mother Should Die.” Armenia is considered Azerbaijan’s main enemy.

It had become clear to Ismayilova that she would be arrested soon, a dozen of her colleagues said in interviews.

In September 2014, Thomas Melia saw her while he was serving as the U.S. envoy to an annual high-level European human rights meeting in Poland. As usual, they joked and laughed, then shared stories of how many more Azerbaijani journalists and activists they knew who had been imprisoned since the last time they met.

“I told her, ‘Why don’t you not go home,’ ” Melia recalled. “ ‘Stay here or go to D.C. Let things cool off.’ ”

She refused.

Melia recalled the last thing she told him before returning to Baku:

“ ‘If they arrest me, please speak out,’ ” he recalled her saying.

Sure enough, on Dec. 6, she was arrested and denied bail.

“I knew that I would be arrested,” Ismayilova later said from prison in response to questions by The Post. “I am not a running-away type of person.”

She was charged with driving her former boyfriend to attempt suicide. He drank rat poison, he said, but later confessed he had “defamed” Ismayilova because police forced him into it. After his about-face, he was charged with tax evasion.

Two weeks later, police stormed RFE/RL’s bureau in Baku. They searched the safe, confiscated computers and sealed the office for reasons they have yet to clarify.

The raid came six days after Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who oversees $14 million in mostly economic assistance to Azerbaijan each year, telephoned Aliyev to complain about his human rights practices.

The president also then banned all foreign aid to independent media outlets and signed a law shuttering those accused of defamation twice in one year. Ismayilova’s news outlet moved its operations to Prague. Some of its Azerbaijani journalists left with it for safety reasons; a handful remain in the country, keeping a low profile but reporting nonetheless.

In February, Ismayilova was charged with four other crimes — embezzlement, tax evasion, misuse of authority and illegal entrepreneurship — and denied bail again.

Kenan Aliyev, who hired her as RFE/RL bureau chief in 2008, said, “She’s like this woman who’s being insulted by the government, but she’s still fighting back; like she’s being raped, but she still fights back,” he said. “She’s saying. ‘We shouldn’t be afraid of this.’ . . . She’s now the symbol of Azerbaijan.”

While she sits in prison, 20 of her OCCRP colleagues from 11 countries have banded together to carry on her work. A series of articles posted on the nonprofit organization’s Web site under The Khadija Project further documents the wealth of the Aliyev family and their lobbying in the United States.

Ismayilova’s imprisonment illustrates the limits of U.S. support for independent media as a critical part of durable civil societies worldwide. The Voice of America, whose editorials reflect U.S. policy and where Ismayilova was widely respected as a reporter when she worked there, did not editorialize on her behalf until she was sentenced on Sept. 1.

“The United States is deeply troubled by today’s decision of an Azerbaijani court to sentence prominent investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova to 7 1/2 years in prison,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said after the sentencing.

Previously, the State Department had issued only brief statements of support for Ismayilova, usually in response to a question posed at a briefing.

Colleagues and some members of Congress criticize the State Department for not doing more to gain her release, saying it has let oil and security interests dominate the relationship. The Senate Appropriations Committee has demanded an accounting of the department’s steps to seek her release and that of a handful of other political prisoners.

Pro-democracy Azerbaijanis are particularly angered by what they see as Washington’s inaction. “This back-door, under-the-table diplomacy just is not working anymore, and everyone is realizing this,” said Arzu Geybullayeva, who fled under threats and is currently a Vaclav Havel journalism fellow at RFE/RL in Prague.

Tom Malinowski, the State Department’s human rights envoy, defended the department’s actions. “We have been pushing hard, and they have pushed back hard in ways that have affected the relationship,” he said, but refused to give examples. “They understand what steps will be required to improve the climate, and the ball is in their court.”

Ismayilova has her own opinion on the U.S. response to her predicament.

“Western politicians, who have compromised human rights and democracy values for energy and security cooperation, should know that corruption and organized crime does not know borders,” she said from prison. “By tolerating these diseases in other countries, they open their own country for corruption.”

Komuves is a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Mabeus is a graduate student there. OCCRP’s Khadija Project is edited by Drew Sullivan, whose brother, John, is a Washington Post investigative reporter. One of the project’s editors is on the faculty with Dana Priest at the University of Maryland but was not involved with this article.

 

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Pakistan’s Growing Gender Gap

Women in Education (Credit: article.wn.com)
Women in Education
(Credit: article.wn.com)
IN 2013, Pakistan ranked 135th out of 136 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index Report of the World Economic Forum. In 2014, eight more countries were included in the report, but Pakistan remained second last at 141 out of 142 countries. It is significant that Pakistan ranked at 112 in 2006, the first year of the report, and since then, its position has been steadily deteriorating every year.

Even in the ‘Political Empowerment’ sub-index of the GGGI report, Pakistan had slipped from 64th place in 2013 to 85th in 2014 due to the weakening of women’s position in parliament. In comparison, Bangladesh was at 68th position, while Rwanda and Burundi ranked as seventh and 17th respectively. These three are low-income countries, while Pakistan is rated as a low middle-income country.

The main purpose of the GGGI is to provide a framework for measuring gender-based disparities in different countries and tracking their progress in four key areas: access to economic opportunities, political representation, education facilities and health services. Since the first global gender gap index in 2006, about 80pc of countries have managed to reduce their gender gaps. On the other hand, there are a few countries that have either made no progress, or are even falling behind their previous rankings.
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The situation in the country is steadily deteriorating for women who continue to be sidelined in mainstream economic activities.
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In Pakistan, the situation is steadily deteriorating: women remain sidelined from mainstream economic activities mainly due to the dominant religious and patriarchal ideology that continues to confine, subjugate and violate their space despite their having equal rights under the Constitution. The percentage of female employment in the non-agricultural sector in Pakistan was last measured at 13.2pc in 2013 by the World Bank. Needless to say, this percentage is abysmally low. It is also one of the 10 lowest-performing countries on the GGGI sub-index of ‘Economic Participation’ and one of the three countries with the lowest percentage of firms with female participation in ownership.

Before the 18th Amendment, the ministry of women development, social welfare and special education used to work on issues related to the improvement of women’s status in society, and implemented the global agenda of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) and the Beijing Platform for Action in conjunction with forums such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the Commonwealth, UNIFEM and UNDP.

During its existence from 1979 to 2010, the ministry took many initiatives designed to improve women’s access to education, health and legal services, and enhance their participation in the political economy of the country.

For example, it was on the recommendations of this ministry that the principle of reservation of seats for women in the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies was revived and their representation ensured in the local bodies. The First Women Bank Ltd was established with the ministry providing credit lines for micro-credit facilities for women to set up bakeries, boutiques, beauty parlours, catering centres, tuition centres, grocery stores, and poultry, dairy and fish farming. Women study centres were established at various universities, while skill development centres, women’s polytechnics, computer centres, literacy centres, crisis centres for women in distress, child care centres and working women’s hostels were set up in different parts of the country.

Subsequent to devolution, the ministry was dissolved and its functions transferred to the provinces which do not appear to have the capacity or political will to develop an alternative narrative to the rampant obscurantism proliferating throughout the country. The state needs to emerge from its stupor to stop this shameful slide of half of its population into the dark ages, keeping in view not only global requirements, but also its own economic imperatives.

In order to improve outcomes for the women of Pakistan, the government needs to create a new organisational mechanism on the pattern of World Economic Forum’s gender parity task forces for Turkey, Japan and Mexico to reduce national gender gaps in three years. These task forces comprise members of the government from the relevant ministries of gender, human rights, law or population welfare in each country, and representatives of private-sector organisations and corporations. This composition allows for greater dialogue between the government and the private sector to discuss the rationale behind reducing gender disparity, developing a common vision and aligning all stakeholders in a well-articulated policy framework, so that realistic targets can be set, strategies chalked out, and benchmarks introduced for mobilisation, accountability and impact.

The recommendations of the Gender Parity Group are available for any country that wishes to improve the status of women in their own national interest. These are based on best practices such as women-focused education and health initiatives, mentoring and training women for high-level professional positions, flexible working hours, salary parity, career planning, etc that can be implemented through government policy, legislation and private-sector support. Top-down approaches towards promoting women’s leadership have also been very successful. For example, in Norway, public-listed companies are required to have 40pc women on their boards.

Some top-down policy measures can be taken immediately by the government in Pakistan, such as announcing high job quotas in the civil service, accelerated promotions, nominations to high-profile positions in the public sector, and making it mandatory that women are represented in greater numbers on the boards of private-sector companies, banks, chambers of commerce and industry and other similar institutions. The private sector should also be urged to ensure that women are adequately represented in the employment force, including the supply and distribution chains of manufacturing companies.

These measures, though only skimming the surface, will nevertheless increase women’s visibility, generate confidence, create role models and provide increased space for leveraging their access to education and health, the other sub-indices which are critical prerequisites for inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

The writer is a former federal secretary.

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Leader of Islamic State used American hostage as sexual slave

Kayla Mueller (Credit: euronews.com)
Kayla Mueller
(Credit: euronews.com)

Washington, Aug 14: The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.

The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.

Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure. 

 

The FBI also told the Muellers that their daughter had been tortured.

“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”

The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.

News of Baghdadi’s abuse of Mueller, who was from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by the Independent, a London newspaper.

“As painful as this is for our family, we just feel like the world needs to know the truth,” said Carl Mueller, Kayla’s father. The Muellers noted that Friday would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.

The Islamic State claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the building where she was being held. The U.S. government confirmed the death but not the cause.

Mueller’s family had previously released a letter their daughter had written in which she talked about the conditions of her captivity. “Please know I am in a safe location, completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I have been treated w/the utmost respect + kindness,” she wrote in the letter, which the family received in the spring of 2014.

Kayla’s mother said she had thought her daughter had been treated reasonably until she learned about the conditions of her captivity during a June meeting with FBI officials in Washington. The FBI said they learned about Mueller’s mistreatment from the wife of a senior Islamic State operative captured earlier this year, as well as young female members of the Yazidi religious sect who had spent two months in captivity with Mueller before at least one of them escaped last fall.

U.S. officials had previously said that Mueller was abused by her captors, but it was not known until now that she was kept as a sex slave of the leader of the Islamic State.

Baghdadi is a former Iraqi insurgent who was detained by U.S. forces early in the Iraq war. He was part of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq that was thought to have been largely destroyed before the civil war in Syria allowed it to regenerate.

Though little is known about his background, Baghdadi is regarded as an experienced fighter and a capable leader. His most prominent public appearance came last year when he surfaced at a mosque in Mosul to declare himself the leader of a restored caliphate.

Mueller was abducted in August 2013 after leaving a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Three months after she died, the compound where she had been held was targeted in a raid by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The operation was aimed at capturing Abu Sayyaf, the nom de guerre of a high-ranking Tunisian member of the Islamic State, who was thought to be in charge of oil smuggling and other illicit enterprises that have funded the terrorist group.

Sayyaf was killed in what U.S. officials described as intense “close quarters combat.” But his wife, identified only as Umm Sayyaf, survived and was eventually brought back to Iraq aboard a bullet-riddled U.S. aircraft. She was then questioned by U.S. interrogators for months, providing information about Mueller as well as the Islamic State’s leadership, before recently being turned over to Iraqi custody.

Mueller’s mistreatment is the latest evidence of the Islamic State’s systematic abuse of women on a significant scale.

A report released in April by Human Rights Watch accused the Islamic State of war crimes for its brutal treatment of female Yazidis — many of them teenagers — who were captured in Iraq last August, taken to Syria and forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.

After surging into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar last year, Islamic State fighters captured as many as 1,000 Yazidi women, many of whom were given a bleak choice of “marriage” to a fighter or imprisonment and potential death.

The Human Rights Watch report focused on 20 women who escaped the group and provided detailed accounts of their treatment.

One described attempting to kill herself by going into a bathroom, turning on water and grasping a wire “to electrocute myself but there was no electricity.”

After being discovered, she said she was badly beaten, handcuffed to a sink, stripped of her clothes and washed. “They took me out of the bathroom, brought in [a friend] and raped her in the room in front of me,” said the woman, who is referred to only as Leila. Later she, too, was raped.

Another victim, who was only 12 years old, said that after being abducted in Sinjar, the women in her family were separated from the men and sent to a house in Mosul. Islamic State fighters “would come and select us,” she said. One of the captors beat her, she said, and then “spent three days having sex with me.”

A recent issue of the English-language magazine published by the Islamic State described the taking of sex slaves as religiously justified. The article — titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” — endorsed the practice, saying sex slaves are “lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their [non-Muslim] husbands.”

The article went on to cite accounts that the prophet Muhammad “took four slave-girls as concubines,” a purported religious basis for the practice.

 

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Where Afghan Women are Jailed for Resisting Enslavement

The first thing you hear as you approach Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul is children’s laughter. The closer you get, the more the building sounds like a kindergarten class during recess.

Over the past five years, I visited a half-dozen women’s prisons in Afghanistan and met hundreds of women who were arrested while pregnant and gave birth in prison, along with hundreds who came into the system with toddlers. Afghanistan’s prisons are filled with mothers who have been rejected by their families because they are accused of “moral crimes”: women who have been raped or fled abuse or forced marriages, women accused of adultery, unmarried women who have become pregnant with partners their families didn’t approve of. In Afghanistan, such victims of abuse are penalized instead of protected.

When a woman’s body, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, is considered the property of her father, husband, community, religion or state, any action she takes without first being given permission by the men who wield power over her becomes a threat to the authority of those men. In Afghanistan, such threats are often met with incarceration and violence. Whenever I asked a female prisoner what she would do when released, the most common response was: “I will be killed.”

The justice system in Afghanistan is a funhouse-mirror reflection of what a justice system should be. Women who run away from their homes to escape abuse or forced marriage are tracked down by the police. Victims are transformed into criminals, and the limited resources that should be used to bring perpetrators of violence against women to justice are instead spent to keep young women behind bars.

When I first began visiting women’s prisons in Afghanistan, I focused on these “moral crimes.” But as I spent hours seated on prison floors in conversation with prisoners, I met more and more women who had been incarcerated for crimes they actually did commit — such as one 20-year-old who cut the throat of the sleeping husband who forced her into prostitution, unable to withstand another day of the abuse he had inflicted on her for years. I came to realize that I needed to abandon the categories of guilty and innocent. Nearly every woman accurately accused of murder, drug or drug-related offenses said she had been physically abused or raped, or had survived extreme poverty, or had been forced into marriage and motherhood, often while still a child herself. Each of them had been denied control over the direction of her own life from girlhood.

If these women had been able to control their destinies, and had access to basic education and protection from abuse, they would have chosen different paths and would not have been in prison to tell me their stories.

In 2009, the Afghan government formulated groundbreaking legislation called the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW). This law criminalized harmful practices such as rape, forced marriage, domestic violence, the sale of women and girls and the denial of the right to education and work. It was enacted by presidential decree but because of conservative resistance was never ratified by parliament. The resulting confusion about its status has made its application inconsistent at best. Without a firmly established legal framework of protection and basic human rights, Afghan women have no hope of securing gender equality or a justice system in which their rights can be defended. As the international community continues to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is urgent that the law be ratified and implemented.

But the solution is not only legal. It is also cultural. The monitoring of women for “moral crimes” perpetuates a system of marginalization and legitimized violence. If women were free to choose their intimate partners, their communities, husbands, fathers and the entire justice system would no longer be in the business of safeguarding their virginity and their bodies. So long as a woman’s body is regarded as property, gender equality — and basic human rights — cannot exist.

 

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Anatomy of a murder

Sabeen with mother (Credit: nylive.nytimes.com)
Sabeen with mother
(Credit: nylive.nytimes.com)
It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F.

Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F”. A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number.

As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”

“There wasn’t one particular reason to target her; she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.”

Sitting in a sparsely furnished room within Karachi Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Aziz appears at ease even in blindfold. Recounting the events of that evening, he never sounds hurried or under duress.

After shooting Mahmud, he says he and Tony turned left from the signal towards Punjab Chowrangi and reached Sharae-e-Faisal, crossing Teen Talwar in Clifton on their way. While still on the motorcycle, he messaged others to get back to Tariq Road. Once there, he just picked up his motorcycle and they all dispersed. “We only got confirmation of her death later from the news,” he says. “At that moment [of shooting], there is no way of confirming if the person is dead. You just do it and get out of there.”

It was on February 13, 2015, when he says he decided that Mahmud had to die. That evening, he was at T2F, attending an event, The Karachi “Situation”: Exploring Responses. “It was something she said during the talk,” he recalls. “That we shouldn’t be afraid of the Taliban, we should stand up to them, demonstrate against them, something like that. That is when we made up our minds.” Later in the conversation, though, he adds, “There wasn’t one particular reason to target her: she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.” He laughs softly, almost bashfully, as he mentions the last.

Aziz remembers visiting The Karachi “Situation” seminar with Tony who, the police say, remains on the run. Pictures and video footage of the event show Aziz sitting at the end of a row, close to the entrance. Next to him is Tony, a round-faced young man with a dark complexion. The police say he is an engineering graduate from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi campus. “Tony had a Twitter account under a fake name and he used to follow Sabeen’s tweets very closely,” says Aziz. He also mentions another source of information. “About four weeks [after the discussion on Karachi], when I got emails about events being held there, I sent Tony there a few times to check if her car was there. It wasn’t.”

On April 24, 2015, Aziz says, he told Tony to go there again. “When he confirmed her car was there, we made the plan there and then.”
By that time, he confesses, he had taken part in 20 major and minor “operations” in Karachi. These include an attack – just eight days before Mahmud’s assassination – on American academic Debra Lobo, who taught at a college in Karachi, bank heists to put together money for their hit-and-run activities, multiple attempts to target the police and the Rangers and grenade attacks on co-education schools in Gulshan-e-Iqbal (on February 3, 2015) and North Nazimabad (on March 18, 2015).
Nineteen days after Mahmud’s murder, Aziz says he took part in an attack that elicited worldwide shock and condemnation: the assassination of 43 members of the Ismaili Shia community, including women and children, travelling in a bus in the Safoora Goth area on the outskirts of Karachi.

Aziz appears as a mild-mannered young man of medium height and build, with a trimmed beard. He makes a little joke about how he can instantly tell which law enforcement or intelligence agency the person asking him questions belongs to. “The first thing the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] want to know is whether there are any links with RAW [the Indian intelligence agency]; CID is interested in the funding aspect; and the police keep hammering on about what other wardaat (hits) we’ve been involved in.”

Aziz calls himself a Salafi, though his father says the family follows Sunni, not Salafi, Islam. When an interrogator asks him why he and his associates targeted Ismaili Shias, he cites their sectarian affiliation as the reason. “It is perfectly acceptable to take the lives of women and children for that reason.”

Aziz’s radicalisation began in 2009, following a visit to Saudi Arabia for umrah with his family. Upon his return to Pakistan, he decided to read translations of the Quran. “Until then I had only read it once in Arabic.” (One investigator, however, reports that Aziz could not recite certain Quranic verses that every practising Muslim recites at least once a day during Isha prayers.)

For a while, he joined the Tableeghi Jamaat. Then, he took to attending lectures by a scholar, Shaykh Kamaluddin Ahmed, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) at the time, whose Sufi interpretation of Islam is distinct from what the Tableeghi Jamaat stands for. “But neither [Ahmed] nor Tableeghi Jamaat even discussed jihad,” he says. “It was over time, primarily through reading the Quran, that I developed an inclination towards jihad.”

Aziz then met Tony, whom he suspected had contacts with militants. Tony made him wait for some time before introducing him to one Haris, an al-Qaeda operative. “[Haris] was heading al-Qaeda’s daawati (recruitment) wing for Pakistan at the time. I joined this wing at the end of 2010,” says Aziz.

In September 2013, Haris, whose real name is said to be Abu Zar, was arrested from a hostel of the Punjab University in Lahore, along with two others, for alleged links with al-Qaeda. In the last 22 months, the authorities have not produced him in any court of law for a trial. Police sources in Lahore say Haris and his associates are in ISI’s custody. This information, however, could not be confirmed through other sources.
In 2011, Aziz went to Waziristan for training where, he says, he was attached to a group headed by Ahmad Farooq, deputy head of al-Qaeda in the subcontinent and a former student of Punjab University. (Farooq was killed in an American drone strike in January 2015 in North Waziristan.)

By 2013, Aziz says he was disillusioned and frustrated. Instead of allowing him take part in terrorist operations, his handler Haris limited him to media duties — such as managing online jihadist publications. “In mid-2013, I met Haider Abbas,” says Aziz. Abbas introduced him to Tahir Minhas alias Saeen, identified by the police as a member of al-Qaeda.

As a senior, experienced commander, Minhas set the ground rules for the group that Aziz joined. “We all used aliases; I only know Tony by his real name,” says Aziz. He got his own alias — Tin Tin. “None of us would ask for the members’ real names, addresses or anything that could identify them in case one of us was arrested. That was on Minhas’s instructions.”
The cell had no designated ‘safe house’ to meet. Minhas often called its members for meetings to Jan Japan Motors, a car auction site on the Super Highway. He also selected the targets. The attack on Mahmud, though, was different. Aziz says it was on his own initiative. “Tahir wasn’t even there that day.”

In 2014, the sudden ascendancy of the Islamic State (IS) and its territorial gains in Iraq and Syria became a lightning rod for militants across the globe. In January this year, IS announced its expansion into Khorasan, a historical region comprising parts of present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and some Central Asian countries. Several factions of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) immediately joined it.

“We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda.”

“Among my acquaintances there was already a lot of discussion about the merits of al-Qaeda and Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS]. Many of us felt that al-Qaeda was reduced to mainly talk and little action,” Aziz says. “We were in Waziristan when the creation of the [IS’s] Khorasan [chapter] was announced, and we pledged loyalty to its emir, [former TTP commander] Hafiz Saeed Khan.” (A senior official of the Intelligence Bureau in Peshawar says Khan was “in Tor Dara area in Khyber Agency’s Tirah valley in January 2015”, the time period to which Aziz refers.)
Subsequently, he says, some of his associates did pro-IS wall chalking and left propaganda pamphlets in parts of Karachi, especially at the scenes of some of the attacks they carried out. Some of the people working with him, he claims, have gone to Syria as part of an effort to strengthen their connection with the IS leadership there.

Weeks after Mahmud’s murder, Jaadu, her white Persian cat, would sit expectantly by the door of her house for hours every evening, waiting for a familiar footfall on the steps outside. Inside, her mother, Mahenaz Mahmud, sits on a chair looking like her daughter might have 20 years in the future — had she had that much time. The mother also exudes the same warmth, intelligence and artlessness as the daughter — and, since Mahmud’s death, a stoicism that would move a stone to tears.

“On April 24, Sabeen made breakfast for us (Mahenaz and Mahenaz’s mother) as usual. That was her routine. She would switch on the kettle, run to her computer, then she would put the bread in the toaster,” Mahenaz recalls with a chuckle. “She didn’t want me to have a cold slice, so she would toast the second slice only after I had finished the first.” They would usually chat away during breakfasts. “We would talk about all kinds of things.” Sometimes, Mahmud would seek her mother’s advice. “She would ask me what I thought of something being done at T2F. Sometimes we would flog some philosophical concept. We would share articles, then discuss them… there was lots that we talked about.”

That day, though, Mahenaz sensed something unusual. “I don’t know whether it was anxiety but there was some element about this Baloch missing people event, especially because of the talk that was cancelled at LUMS [under orders from the ISI],” she says. Mahmud was not moderating the session; she hadn’t even organised it. “Someone else wanted to do it and she had agreed to provide the space,” says Mahenaz. “But she talked to some people about it and then said to me “It’ll be ok, Amma””.

After breakfast, the mother went to work – she is an academic programmes advisor at a teacher training institute – but planned to attend the talk on the Baloch missing persons. “I hadn’t been to any event for a long time because I get quite exhausted by the evening but that day I had a very strong feeling that I must be around her.”
Following the event, around 9pm, Mahmud was planning to drop her mother home, pick up a friend and go to another friend’s place for dinner. “When Sabeen came out [of T2F], I remember she was in a hurry, and she told the driver to sit in the back. I got in the seat next to her and we drove off.”

A short distance away, the Sunset Boulevard traffic signal turned red and their car came to a stop. “It is impossible for me to process those five, 10 seconds,” Mahenaz says quietly. “I was talking to Sabeen, and my face was turned towards her. She was looking in front. A motorcycle came up along the side she was sitting, much too close for comfort. My eyes became riveted on a gun in someone’s hand. I said to Sabeen, “What do you think he wants? He’s got a gun.” I thought it was a mugging. All this must have taken only three or four seconds. Then the window shattered, and Sabeen’s head just tilted to one side; her eyes were open. There was not a moan, not a groan, not a whimper. Then pandemonium broke out around us.”

Mahmud was shot five times. Her mother also took two bullets: one in her back and another that, after going through Mahmud’s body, went into her arm and out again. She says she remembers feeling there was something “happening with my body but I wasn’t sure what.” She was too focussed on her daughter to be sure of anything else. “I was saying ‘Sabeen talk to me, give me some indication that you can hear what I am saying.’ Even though I knew that she had gone, somewhere there was a glimmer of hope.”

She herself was taken to the Aga Khan University Hospital for treatment. “Next morning, I started demanding that I wanted to go home. I was told that Sabeen’s body was being kept in a morgue and I thought she should be put on the way to her last journey immediately.” With a bullet still lodged in her back, she left the hospital to bury her only child.

When Mahenaz Mahmud learnt that the police had arrested some educated young men for carrying out the murder, it was a shock to her, almost a betrayal of some of her most closely held convictions. “I felt terrified. I am a person who teaches my students that we all have our biases and that we put people into boxes because we don’t have time to find out about each and every person.”

In the third week of June, T2F organised a qawwali session to celebrate her daughter’s birthday posthumously. While observing the audience from the back of the room, she couldn’t shake off a nagging thought. “I was looking at the young boys in the audience and wondering, ‘So what are they thinking? What is really going on in their head?’ Normally I wouldn’t have thought that about young people. I would be happy that all kinds of young people come to T2F. Now I am really scared about how these young men’s minds can be messed with.”

The senselessness of the murder is difficult for her to process. “I want to ask them, why? What happened to you? What was it that bothered you about Sabeen? Was it something she stood for? Did you just want to make an example out of her? Did you think that taking a human life is such a small matter? But then I realise that these people think very differently. Their paradigms are different. Their schemas are different.”

In another part of Karachi, sitting in her home studio, architect Marvi Mazhar, one of Mahmud’s closest friends, says: “I always knew. I always thought that if someone gets to her, it’ll be someone educated. Sabeen had to deal with a lot of hate speech, and from people who were all educated. They used to write, they used to tweet, they were all very tech-savvy. Every time she’d complain that these young bachas, I wish I could have chai with them, talk to them.”

Mazhar recalls an incident from last November. At the Creative Karachi Festival organised by T2F, the azan went unnoticed for a few moments in the hubbub and a young man angrily demanded that the music be stopped instantly. “Sabeen went up to the guy, took him aside and spoke to him for a while; a little later, he actually brought flowers for her by way of apology. There was this strange magic about her,” she says with a wistful smile.

In the days leading up to her death, Mahmud was particularly restless, says Mazhar. On Tuesday, April 21, there was a get-together of friends at Mazhar’s place where Mahmud was “a little agitated”. Mazhar heard her saying to someone on the phone, “If we are not going to do it now, then we won’t do it because after that I am leaving for London and I don’t have time.” She assumes this was about the talk on Baloch missing persons. “Her heart was not into this talk, mainly because she had so much going on otherwise. She believed in it, she believed that the Baloch must be given a platform. But, I felt, judging from the conversations I have had with her, she was waiting for a signal, waiting for someone to tell her not to do this.”

A sturdy metal barrier bars entry into a rough stretch at the end of Beaumont Road in Karachi’s Civil Lines. Only a few street lights illuminate the area; that, along with the dilapidated condition of the road, is perhaps deliberate, designed to make things a little more difficult for terrorists looking to target the CID headquarters that looms up on the right, after the barrier. They did exactly that on November 10, 2010, killing at least 17 people and injuring over 100 in a massive truck bombing. Access inside the CID premises now lies behind a raft of concrete barriers, designed to minimise the possibility of another attack.

Raja Umar Khattab, Senior Superintendent Police, strides into his office at around 10.30pm after taraweeh prayers. A stocky, barrel-chested man, he is wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with khaki pants, rolled up at the bottom and rubber slippers. He speaks in rapid-fire sentences; names of terrorists roll off his tongue like those of old acquaintances. Several phone calls interrupt conversation; a senior official has misplaced his cell phone and Khattab is trying to get it traced. “Sir, don’t worry. I’ll make sure it is back with you soon,” he says reassuringly.

As the CID’s lead investigator, Khattab is flushed with pride over the recent arrest of what he calls a major terrorist cell. He has no doubt the police under him have the men who killed Mahmud and committed the Safoora Goth massacre, apart from various other crimes.

Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation.

The Sindh Rangers, too, have made a separate claim of arresting a mastermind of the attack on Ismaili Shias. “He has nothing to do with Safoora Goth incident; he never did,” says Khattab, shaking his head vigorously, when asked about the man arrested by the Rangers and reportedly linked to the detained office-bearers of the Fishermen’s Co-Operative Society. “When you go to a court to seek remand, you put in extra things. Otherwise it can get difficult to get a remand,” is how he explains the reason for the claim made by the Rangers.

More importantly, Aziz’s claim about his allegiance with IS meets with a similarly dismissive response. “We just finished a 16-day joint investigation but we have not established any direct or indirect link between him and Daesh. Al-Qaeda’s tentacles, however, touch him in multiple ways. We are sure he is with al-Qaeda,” says Khattab.

“And why should it be so surprising that these terrorists are so educated? There were always educated people in al-Qaeda. Educated people don’t join TTP. It is the madrasa-educated ones who join TTP. They have the desire for jihad but these [educated jihadis] are ideologues. They envision grander things,” he adds. And for that reason, Khattab states, they are far more dangerous: They can be anywhere — the shopping mall, the university, saying their prayers beside you.

Khattab believes it was a failed romantic relationship that sowed the seed for Aziz’s radicalisation. “He became disillusioned with worldly pursuits,” says the police officer. “When he joined Unilever for an internship [in the second half of 2010], he met Aliur Rehman – alias Tony – who was also working there.” Tony, a member of Dr Israr Ahmed’s Lahore-based Islamic movement, Tanzeem-e-Islami, was to play a vital role in Aziz’s radicalisation, inspiring him to fight for a Muslim caliphate, says the police officer.

But it was Minhas, the police claim, who turned Aziz into what he has become. In Khattab’s words: “Saad says Tahir motivated him so much that he no longer has any fear of killing people. His role in targeted killings was that of the shooter; by my reckoning, he has killed about 20 people.”
CID officials maintain that the terrorist group of which Aziz was a member had split from a larger al-Qaeda formation eight to 10 months ago. “While Tahir is its askari (militant) commander, he in turn answers to Abdullah Yousuf, who is in Helmand, Afghanistan. The other group formed by this rupture is led by Haji Sahib, Ramzi Yousef’s older brother,” says Khattab. He believes the crime spree by Aziz’s group, which hadn’t yet given itself a name, was aimed at raising its profile within the terrorist fraternity so that someone “owned” it.

Tracking down the group, he says, was not easy. They operated under aliases, did not use mobile phones and, instead, employed a Wi-Fi-based application called Talkray to communicate. The CID first picked up their trail sometime in 2014 through some men who were in prison, Khattab says. Based on the information obtained from them – he does not quite elaborate how but only says “we did some working on them” – the police picked up two former Karachi University students who had joined al-Qaeda through contacts at the campus and whose job was to maintain the organisation’s website. “We soon figured out that there is a network of educated al-Qaeda members in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Gulshan-e-Iqbal and other areas around Karachi University,” he says.

The clues led the police to a sports teacher at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, who had set up a laboratory in his house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal where, along with his son and nephew, he used to teach young men to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices. The police also found a lot of written material that led them to conclude that a large al-Qaeda group was active in Karachi. “We found out it had two wings — one askari and one daawati.” The police do not divulge whether or not they have arrested and interrogated the teacher or, for that matter, any other details about his identity and whereabouts.

While investigating the people arrested earlier, the police learnt that Minhas was the group’s commander. Born in a village in the Jhelum district of Punjab, Minhas is a resident of Kotri, near Hyderabad, and has been in and out of police’s hands since 2007. According to an official source, one looking very closely into the massacre of Ismaili Shias, Minhas, (a matriculate, according to this source), had a thriving poultry business in Kotri at one point. He is also, says the same source, rabidly anti-Shia and has been a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned organisation involved in hundreds of acts of sectarian and religious terrorism.
Khattab and his team of investigators describe Minhas as a highly sophisticated militant, with his own signature style. They claim to have discovered important similarities in the terrorist activities he has carried out: in all of these, silencer-fitted imported Glock, Caracal and Stoeger pistols are used; he and his associates always hit their targets in the head. “By the time the Safoora Goth massacre happened, we had gathered lots of little clues,” says Khattab.

Some other clues materialised in September 2014 after a suspect named Amir Abbas managed to escape during an encounter with the police but his wife was injured and arrested. “We found plenty of incriminating material at his house and worked on it quietly from September [2014] to April [2015], matching and cross matching the evidence,” says Khattab.
This finally led to the arrest of Minhas and his associates, including Aziz. “When we recovered their laptops, their browsing history helped us connect them to other cases. “Had we been even one day late, all these boys would have left Karachi for Quetta, Waziristan etc.”

The CID officers also show what they call a hit list. These are A-4 size prints, carrying no information about their senders and receivers, but complete with photos and addresses of the targets, which include naval officers, intelligence agency personnel, police officers, showbiz personalities, journalists, workers of non-government organisations and three fashion designers. In some cases, the prints also carry details of the targets’ daily routine. When asked why the group wanted to target fashion designers, Aziz is quoted by Khattab to have said, “You kill three. No one will design sleeveless clothes again.”

At a distance from the police’s neatly tied narration, events take a rather mysterious turn. A former academic at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) who once taught Aziz, and who has since moved to Europe, recalls his student as “being extremely close to [an intelligence agency]”. In April 2014, this academic needed a police clearance report for some work. Having tried unsuccessfully for a week to obtain it, he asked Aziz for help. “He told me it was no problem, and that he could get it for me in 10 minutes. He was wrong; it took him an hour.” This alleged link, however, could not be verified through any other source.

Aziz’s purported reasons for having targeted Mahmud are also rather mystifying. Many Pakistanis, weary of having their lives held to ransom by rampant militancy, make anti-Taliban statements the way she made at the talk on the Karachi situation. And on February 14 this year, Aziz’s restaurant had a promotional offer targeted at customers and their “loved ones” — complete with the image of two hearts placed right next to each other. Isn’t this just another way of saying pyaar ho jaane do? His account of planning her murder also mixes up a few details. He states that Tony was unable to spot Mahmud’s car outside T2F between the February 13 talk on Karachi and the April 24 discussion on Baloch missing persons. (Mahmud did leave Karachi on February 19 for an overseas trip and returned on March 5. She briefly went out of the country again from March 25 to April 5.) Between her arrival from abroad and her assassination, there were at least five events at T2F and she was also attending to her office work at T2F every day during this period. Can, then, her murder precisely on the day of Unsilencing Balochistan: Take Two be seen as purely a coincidence?

Whatever the motivation behind his actions – whether he is serving the ends of as-yet unknown masters or assuaging his own desire to ‘right’ society’s moral compass – his confession suggests that he is part of a cell carrying out orders issued by a central command structure. This is particularly evident in the Safoora Goth incident: an attack of that size and precision cannot be carried out by a motley group of like-minded individuals.

While Aziz has been singing in police custody, his confession may not stand the test of a trial in a court of law. Confessions before the police or a JIT, or any executive authority for that matter, have no legal standing. “[Only] a confession before a judicial magistrate has legal sanctity because a judge is an independent authority,” says Karachi-based lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “A judge is not part of the investigation so he has no vested interest [in its outcome].”

Without independently verifiable evidence, it is virtually impossible to successfully prosecute any accused on the basis of their confessions alone. Ajmal Pahari, an alleged target killer, for instance, was acquitted in 2011 notwithstanding his on-camera confession of having committed over 100 murders. (He was soon re-arrested on additional murder charges, however, and is currently behind bars.) Aziz shows little concern about his trial and punishment when asked about his future. “What are my plans now?” he says completely unfazed, and laughing slowly. “We’ll go to prison, but we’ll break out of there. Then, we’ll make plans.”

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Obituary: Sabeen Mahmud
Karachi’s wild child

Sabeen Mahmud (Credit: in.com)
Sabeen Mahmud (Credit: in.com)

NOBODY, of course, had anything to do with it, when Sabeen Mahmud’s car was stopped by two men on a motorbike who shot her at point-blank range through the windows. The Pakistani Taliban denied all responsibility. The Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI, promised all possible help to the police. Nawaz Sharif’s government ordered the police to find the perpetrators within three days. The police said they were very busy ascertaining a motive.

Really, it wasn’t hard to spot one. Here in the midst of anarchic, dysfunctional, crammed, crazy, noisy Karachi was a woman who was even more anarchic, crazy, noisy and in-your-face. She was at the heart of every disturbance, from supporting rank outsiders in the local elections to organising flash protests on social media, and spiced up every organisation she belonged to, which was any outfit committed to challenging discrimination or injustice.

No veil or scarf for her; with her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, she looked like a New York intellectual and felt like a postmodern hippie child. She loved Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and the Beat poets. She’d give you a straight, cool stare, equally straight talk, an easy laugh, and a philosophy of absolute fearlessness. If you were afraid, she’d say, you’d get nothing done: especially not in army-ridden, intolerant Pakistan, where so much was never to be questioned or discussed, and certainly not by women.

The centre of all she did was the Second Floor (T2F for short), the café/bookshop/ performance space she founded in 2007. She had a pittance in the bank at the time, but a reckless dream of copying the old Pak Tea House in Lahore where radicals used to meet. By working on tech projects all the hours she could, maxing out her credit cards and begging money from relations, she gave Karachi a place where talk—about art, science, politics, anything—could flow freely, and citizens could get online and organise. Two years later, when the nervous landlord kicked her out, the café had become such a lifeline for Karachi’s free-thinkers that she easily found a better place. She called the performance area “Faraar”, Urdu for “escape”.

There, in a comparatively shabby street in the posh Defence district, poets on open mic advocated revolution; people sat around for hours discussing life on Mars; musicians tried out their pieces, artists hung weird stuff on the walls, home-made films were screened, and anyone could wander in and shoot the breeze, no matter what their creed or disposition or label— Punjabi, Bihari, or whatever. In 2007, when President Pervez Musharraf fired some Supreme Court judges, Ms Mahmud invited lawyers to plot their protests there. In 2013 she organised a hackathon, Pakistan’s first, where for a whole weekend people brainstormed new ideas and apps to make Karachi work better. Don’t just bad-mouth the government, she would say. Take charge! Change things!

No one paid to belong to T2F, though you could buy good coffee and brownies, as well as alternative books. Those takings covered about half the costs and gave her a salary, not that she cared much. She ran her own media-and-tech consulting firm and was president for a time of the Karachi outpost of an organisation that fostered tech entrepreneurs, but didn’t want to make money. The point was to fight the “horrible stuff” going on in Pakistan and the world.

Where had all this adrenalin-boosted energy come from? She blamed her mother, Mahenaz, for instilling “mad ideas at a young age” and supporting her ever after. (Mahenaz was in the car with her, and was hurt in the attack.) But she was spurred on just as much by anyone who told her she could not or must not do a thing. When a computing teacher belittled her at school she decided to master computers by herself, falling in love at 14 with a Macintosh Plus that had Pink Floyd and Lenny Bruce in it, and teaching herself to solder wires and write programs. Small wonder she believed, first, that formal education was stultifying, and second that computers, especially Macs, could shake everything up in the way she longed to see.

Even sport pricked her defiance. Her school, Karachi Grammar, didn’t let girls play cricket, so she played it at home with any spare passing males she could find. A bat, stumps and proper hard ball went with her to the office—to whack assailants over the head, apart from anything else.

Inviting enemies in

Abuse and threats came often. She laughed them off. Other dissidents left Karachi, but she loved it too dearly to live anywhere else. Friends said she should put a security guard on the café door; she preferred to invite her enemies in, to eat panini and join the conversation. In 2007 she hosted a talk by an author who had uncovered army finances; ISI people were invited, and some came. On April 24th she had just held a meeting to “un-silence” Baluchistan, Pakistan’s most neglected and separatist province, where hundreds of activists and students had been abducted, probably killed. Lahore University had been warned off the subject. There would probably be “blowback”, she told a friend; “I just don’t know what that blowback entails.”

The authorities and jihad-makers were all most extremely sorry. Not half as sorry as the artists, poets and thinkers of Karachi, who suddenly found it hard to breathe.

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Feminism is about Redefining Space for Women and Men

A few days ago, a newly appointed female civil servant of the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) said in an interview how on duty she felt more like a police officer than a woman. This meant she could do her duty as well as a male officer. She didn’t feel discriminated against during training. Here was a tough woman ready to take on a tough job. Wish I could tell her and numerous women in her position to discard the idea of trying to be a man in a man’s world. All women in positions of power have tried the formula and ended up killing their feminism and all that good it can bring to the world. A woman trying to be a man and working according to those principles is setting herself up for failure even before she begins. In case it is misunderstood, I am not advocating laziness at work or taking relaxations on the basis of gender.

I also realise that in today’s Pakistan, feminism is considered as bad a word as ‘liberalism’. I will not be surprised if after reading this some pretentious analyst will trash feminism as an extension of liberalism. But feminism is not about disregarding or disrespecting values or being what is popularly understood as madar-piddar azad — a hippie of sorts. It is about enhancing space for yourself and others with greater sensitivity to life and those around you. Feminism does not preclude negotiating power or using power; it means a bigger and different vision than a man’s. While ‘man’-kind is known for total obsession with power (and please here we are not discussing exceptions), ‘woman’-kind bears the greater burden of creating life and taking care of it. Instinctively, it makes her different from a man. I am not even suggesting that all women are feminist. A lot of women lose their sense of feminism or what it is to be a woman by constantly trying to play by the rules laid down by men. Just go down a list of women in authority and see how their power brought greater disappointment because in an urge to compete with men, they forgot to be women and thus bring to the table a sensitivity towards life and humanity that a male-oriented system doesn’t.

May I also take the opportunity to remind the young police officer to debunk the idea that she would be treated equally or that she ever was. A training system and its norms do not mean equal opportunity. Perhaps, at junior positions she may not notice this but the system does discriminate. Having been a civil servant myself and with my continued engagement with many others, I couldn’t miss how women are always treated as a different category. They have to disprove their womanhood every minute by stating that they are professionals and not women, as if that is something bad. Male colleagues often indulge in gossip to explain the success of a female co-worker. It may be her looks, her style or something else but rarely her work. And even if her work is accepted, it is done with a pinch of salt. Or she is immediately categorised as one of the men. The female police officer would be expected to be tougher and do more to prove her competence than fellow male officers. The minute she can’t deliver on something, she will be reminded of being a fragile species from whom nothing better was expected. By the way, these men are educated. But so were those who would argue with you that why crib about Mukhtaran Mai as she had been compensated sufficiently for the deed done to her.

 

I am not arguing that this is completely the fault of men. Women in professional lives can be equally brutal in mistreating themselves. There are many in the civil service who would emphasise their gender to get some relaxation at work. These women are not feminists. There is always more gossip about women at the workplace or the accusation that women can’t work together. The stigma always hides the fact that men are some of the worst gossipmongers and have a killer instinct when it comes to competition. The stories of the unimaginable extra miles that men go to for ensuring success both in the civil and military bureaucracy are a fact, not fiction.

In the past decade or so, Pakistan has done a lot to market its ability to compete with the world in giving opportunities to women. We now have women as police officers, and as fighter pilots in the army and navy. The short biographical notes published about them basically convey the following: these women are treated the same as men. But do we know about how many of these fighter pilots are actually deployed on active duty? You could count the numbers on your fingers. Many end up doing office work rather than operations. I remember from my time at the naval headquarters, the vice chief refused to entertain my request to provide a proper toilet. There were occasions when male officers would point out female naval officers doing secondary duties wearing nice saris and ask you how nice (read: cute) they looked. It goes without saying that by asking such questions, they either tested your limits or treated you as one of the men. Surely, new spaces have been created but that they do not really provide breathing space to women is another issue.

Remember, in our part of the world women’s accomplishments are still accepted grudgingly. Recently at a conference in India, which reminded me of many such I had attended in my own country, I realised how the female PhDs really had to strive to remind people that they had a doctorate just like the male presenters. Our societies are programmed to give respect of even a qualification much more easily to men than to women. In such an environment, policing would certainly not be easy. Hope the police officer remembers she is far more capable and stronger to have survived this environment and can contribute much more as a woman.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9th, 2015.

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Veteran leftist activist Tahira Ali laid to rest

Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (Credit: unewstv.com)
Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (Credit: unewstv.com)

LAHORE, March 25: Veteran leftist activist Tahira Mazhar Ali was laid to rest in a graveyard near her home in Shah Jamal on Tuesday.

She had been unwell since 2009. She passed away on Monday.

Advocate Abid Hasan Minto recalls Tahira as a campaigner for the rights of the working people. He says her work on issues pertaining to women’s rights and their political empowerment was part of a broader lifelong commitment to the cause of marginalised communities.

Minto says he had known her since 1949 when as a teenager she became a founding member of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). “I was based in Rawalpindi but I got to see her once in a while at the meetings of the CCP central committee in Lahore,” he says. In 1950, Tahira established the Democratic Women’s Alliance (DWA), first leftist organisation in the country particularly for women. With the CCP and its subsidiary bodies banned in 1954, Minto recalls, Tahira was amongst the core group of activists who kept the political left alive across the country through various underground organisations.

Later on, Tahira remained active with the National Awami Party and after it’s disbanding with the Socialist Party and the National Workers Party. She was also part of the Women Action Forum established in the 1980s to counter the dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq.

“I believe Tahira’s most important legacy is her work amongst working women,” he says. “She did not just restrict her work to the educated middle class women. She was amongst the first activists to have started organising women relatives of the railways workers,” he says.

Activist Farooq Tariq says Tahira would call him up every day and tell him about issues relating to the working people that she thought needed immediate attention. He says the calls stopped only in 2009 when she fell ill. He says Tahira was amongst the first people who generously donated books to a library set up by him and his other colleagues at the Labour Education Forum in 1998.

Tahira was the daughter of united Punjab’s chief minister and unionist politician Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan. She married her cousin Mazhar Ali Khan when she was 17. They remained lifelong political activists. Tahira has left behind a daughter, Tauseef Hyat, and two sons, Tariq Ali, a renowned left-leaning writer, and Mahir Ali, a journalist.

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Tahira Shah ‘The martyr of the Indus’

Tahira & Mohammed Ali Shah (Credit: dawn.com)
Tahira & Mohammed Ali Shah (Credit: dawn.com)
Tahira Ali Shah, long time social activist and rights campaigner for Pakistan’s fisherfolk community, passed away this month in a car accident in Sindh.

I remember when I first met her, at my first official meeting after joining the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) in January 2010, at the PFF’s Secretariat, Ibrahim Hydri – the largest village of fishing community in Pakistan.

I noticed a simple yet graceful lady in her mid-40s, taking notes of the discussion, and humbly raising her hand when she wanted clarification on some points.

She seemed to be very serious about the issues of fisherwomen; their education and health; their role at the unit (village), district and central governing body of the PFF. One of the senior colleagues told me that she was elected Senior Vice Chairperson of the PFF.

That was the first occasion where I observed the leader in her.
Born in a middle class Syed family, it was hard for Tahira to even get an education. But even harder for her was to get married – against social norms and her family’s wishes – to Muhammad Ali Shah, who belonged to a comparatively lower class of the fishing community.

Ultimately, Tahira took the bold, rebellious step to get married to him in court. She was confident that she knew what to do with her life.
Together, the couple started working for the rights of the fishing community at a very local level, under the platform of their first, small organisation, ‘Anjum-e Samaji Behbood’.

Later, Tahira realised that the issues of women were not being addressed appropriately and neither did the women have any effective say in the decision-making of the organisation.

That’s when she founded a separate organisation only for women, named ‘Saheriyen Sath’ (group of womenfolk).

She visited women door-to-door, organised and mobilised them, made them understand the roots of their problems and showed them a way to resolve their problems.

In 1998, the couple, along with other companions, founded a countrywide organisation of the fisherfolk community and named it the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF).

Not only did she speak up, she made other women speak up too against the discrimination based on gender, caste and religion.

This one time, the PFF had organised a caravan journey under their ‘Keep Rivers Free’ movement. Of the hundreds of participants in this caravan, a few happened to belong to the Hindu scheduled castes. Tahira learned that some of the other women participants were discriminating against the Hindus.

She intervened at once. She mingled with the women like they were old friends, shared meals with them, did away with all the discrimination and ensured that their feelings of inferiority were washed away.
She was indeed a genuine leader.

A brave, tenacious woman
Tahira’s real struggle started with the Pakistan Rangers – the paramilitary force occupied the lakes in the coastal areas of the Badin district.
She pulled the fisherwomen out of their homes and onto the streets, organised demonstrations, observed hunger strikes and sit-ins in front of the Press Club. To lead a struggle against the illegal occupation by the Rangers like this required some bravery.

When her husband Muhammad Ali Shah was in jail, Tahira fought on to strengthen the fisherfolk community’s cause and continued to face the hardships she had willingly chosen.

Soon, everyone saw Tahira meet with success as the powerful Rangers bowed down to her even in a semi-martial law era.

In Sanghar, the journalist community was suppressed under the influence of feudal landlords. Many of my friends say it was Tahira who gave voice to the Press Club of Sanghar district, after the PFF launched a campaign against the illegal occupation of the landlords on the Chotiyarion Reservoir.

Tahira worked her magic again and led thousands in protest on the streets of Sanghar city. She made fiery speeches in front of the Press Club and openly challenged the feudals. Soon, Sanghar’s journalists were emboldened enough to cover her speeches and struggle.

Tahira was a multi-dimensional personality. Where she led with courage and organised with discipline, she also worked as hard as an ordinary worker of the organisation. She could always be seen meticulously taking notes during discussions and preparing reports of community meetings.
In the community events of the fisherfolk, she sang folk songs and danced. In workshops and seminars, she was a great listener and always polite, though those who have heard her speeches in processions and rallies know very well that she was a great, fiery orator too. Most of all, she was a rock; an upright leader who would never leave her companions alone, no matter how dangerous the situation.

Tahira was generous enough to support a number of poor families. Every person she met has their own story with her. Everybody in the fishing community across Pakistan calls her Jeeji (mother).

Jeeji was simple. She never wore jewelry or make up, even at ceremonies and festivals, where other women would insist that she put on some make up. But Tahira always preferred to wear her natural smile instead.

During the PFF’s struggle for the protection of mangroves, two of our comrades had been martyred by notorious land grabbers. Tahira never hesitated to openly call out the names of the murderers every time she spoke at a forum.

I considered that to be extremely risky. I approached her and requested, “Jeeji! Please avoid becoming overbold; it can be dangerous at this time.”
She replied, “I would never want to die a death of suppression. I would be proud to rather sacrifice my life for the truth and for this struggle.”

That was not the first time she did so. I recall a number of occasions when we asked her to take time out for some rest, or to visit the doctor when we she was unwell. Her reply was the same: “I want to die in the fight for the rights of my community, not on the bed in illness.”

Even the day before her demise, our senior colleague Dr Ely Ercelan noticed that her blood pressure was high and suggested that she avoid continuous travelling. She responded the same way:
“I shall go in a glimpse, not in inches.”

And she did.

She went in a blink and right in the center of the path of the struggle, for she was travelling to Badin with her husband to lead a rally there, celebrating the International Rivers Day. They had an accident and their car plunged into a deep pond, proving fatal for Tahira. Considering her sacrifices and struggle for the restoration of environmental flow in the Indus river, she has been titled by the civil society as ‘The Martyr of the Indus’.

She may not be with us physically, but her vision, dedication and courage are always be. She lived as she wanted and she died as she wished.
Live long Jeeji Tahira, Live long the PFF.

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Women’s groups campaign in D.C. to help victims of forced marriages

Mariam embraces colleague (Credit: washingtonpost.com)
Mariam embraces colleague (Credit: washingtonpost.com)

Mariam was a sixth-grader in Toronto when her family started pressuring her to get engaged. They sent her on a summer trip to their native Pakistan, ostensibly to study but actually to meet a fiance chosen by her aunt. When she protested after returning home, she said, her mother kept insisting and wearing her down.

“She cried a lot. She prayed loudly to God that I would change. She refused to speak to me for days. She told me the family’s honor was at stake,” recounted Mariam, now 20, who asked that her last name not be published. “I wanted to finish school and go to college, but at times I almost said yes, just so she would stop crying.”

Finally, when she turned 17, Mariam decided to leave home — an unthinkable act in her culture. With encouragement from a women’s rights group, she slipped out early one morning, taking a small bag. No shelter would accept her, because she had not been physically abused, and she felt racked with guilt and loneliness. Eventually, though, she found housing, friends and a measure of emotional independence.

Today, Mariam is active in a growing movement in the United States and Canada to promote public awareness and legal protections for victims of forced marriage. She visited Washington last week as part of a nationwide tour organized by the Tahirih Justice Center, a legal aid and advocacy group in the Virginia suburbs that helps immigrant women facing abuse.

According to officials at Tahirih, a 2011 survey of social agencies and other experts reported as many as 3,000 suspected or confirmed cases of forced marriage in the United States over the previous two years. They said the practice is found in many immigrant communities, especially among South Asians, from the Washington suburbs to ethnic enclaves in cities including Houston, New York and San Francisco.

Kathana R., 24, left and Aruba A., 20, right, rehearse, “When We Leave,” a play that explores the complexities of family violence, including forced marriage, at a Busboys and Poets in Washington. (Amanda Voisard/For the Washington Post)

Nevertheless, they said, there is no U.S. law against the practice, and laws that could help victims in some regions, including the District and Virginia, are more geared to victims of kidnapping or physical violence. Moreover, many shelters and welfare agencies are unfamiliar with forced marriage and ill-equipped to help young women fleeing it.

Many traditional societies observe the custom of arranged marriage, in which family relationships matter more than individual choice. Such weddings forge lifelong alliances between families and are seen as ensuring that young couples have compatible backgrounds. The intended bride and groom meet, spend time together and consent to the union.

Forced marriage is less common and illegal in most countries, but it is harder to define or prove. A daughter may be ordered to marry someone she may not know or like, such as an older relative, a stranger or someone who is owed a debt. If she is extremely young, she may not know the arrangement has been made. Even if she finally agrees under pressure, activists assert that such marriages are neither fair nor legitimate.

“Families use a range of coercive tactics, and there is a lot of emotional blackmail,” said Jeanne Smoot, the legal director at Tahirih. “If a mother says to her daughter, ‘You will be dead to your parents,’ or ‘This will kill your grandmother’ or ‘I will kill myself if you don’t marry him,’ ” Smoot said, “that is as coercive as a gun to the head.”

Tahirih has been working for the past three years with a coalition of women’s groups in North America on the campaign to curb forced marriage. They met with White House officials last week, asking for national legislation similar to a new law in the United Kingdom that makes forced marriage a crime, and they have put on dramatic readings and skits in five U.S. cities this spring that tell the stories of girls like Mariam.

Although better laws can help young women resist family pressure or report physical abuse, they can also backfire in complicated domestic situations and add to public prejudice against certain immigrant groups. Many young victims of forced marriage are loath to bring charges against their parents because of the shame it would bring.

“It is important for us not to criminalize all of South Asian culture, to suggest that the West is a safe place where girls flee from terrible oppression,” said Aaliya Zaveri, an official of a South Asian women’s aid group in New Jersey called Manavi. “In cultures where family duty and honor are so important, this is not what the girls themselves want.”

Chenthoori. M, 22, enters the “Honoring Our Heartbeats: A Tour to End Forced Marriage in the U.S” event at a Busboys and Poets in Washington. (Amanda Voisard/For the Washington Post)

What victims do want, the advocates said, is a way to escape from intolerable, even if well-intentioned, pressure to marry. But they often face dead ends, because most shelters and service agencies do not view such pressure as an abusive emergency and local laws fall short of offering full protection, even if a girl is about to be flown abroad to marry against her will.

In one such case in Virginia, Tahirih officials said, a high school student sought help from school counselors, saying her parents had arranged her marriage back in their homeland and were punishing her for resisting. The local child protective services office declined to take her case, so Tahirih lawyers appealed to a judge to protect her. The girl was sheltered in a private house, and the judge confiscated her family’s passports.

“Legally, we were skating on thin ice,” said Layli Miller-Muro, executive director at Tahirih, explaining that child protection laws in Virginia, Maryland and the District are geared more for kidnapping and trafficking than family conflicts. “If the judge hadn’t bent over backwards, we could have been charged with aiding a delinquent minor. This is why we need laws that are clearly designed for scenarios of forced marriage.”

In a case in Texas, a counselor said she could do nothing to help a young woman who called as her parents were preparing to fly her to Pakistan for a wedding. She came back married and called the counselor again, saying her parents were now pressuring her to sign immigration papers for the groom.

“They wanted her to sponsor a spouse she had never wanted to marry,” said Nusrat Ameen, the case manager at a women’s legal aid center in Houston. “They stopped paying her school fees and took away her car. She keeps calling me, and I tell her to be assertive about her rights, but there are a lot of gray areas and strong cultural feelings that you have to obey your parents. It can be very hard to define abuse.”

In many such families, disputes over early marriage can be part of broader generational conflicts in which Asian-born parents seek to control and protect their Western-raised daughters, who yearn for modern freedoms such as dating boys, staying out late, and wearing makeup and party clothes.

But advocates at Tahirih and other agencies said they have made few inroads into family counseling or public education within immigrant communities, partly because of cultural resistance and partly because they place a higher priority on rescuing or protecting the young women who call their hotlines for help.

“Many times, families are not interested in intervention,” said Usha Amachandran, who runs a women’s aid program in San Francisco. “In the South Asian community, no one wants to talk about things like domestic violence or forced marriage. But we are in the business of talking about uncomfortable things, and it is very much needed.”

In Washington last week, Mariam and several other young women performed skits at a Busboys and Poets cafe in the District that reflected their contradictory feelings about parental demands. One played both herself and her parents calling her a slut and a “bad daughter.” Another held an imaginary phone conversation with her mother, saying she believed “family comes first” but insisting that if she stayed at home and acquiesced to marriage, “I’ll have to bury part of myself.”

Mariam said she eventually overcame her guilt and sorrow about leaving home. She was able to enroll in college and earn money making clothes, and she plans to become a fashion designer while keeping up her activism. She never fully reconciled with her parents but said she keeps in touch with them “on my own terms.”

“For me, it is important to talk to victims who are in situations like I was, to let them know they do have options,” she said. “The system failed me, and it fails many girls.”