Much of the available literature on zina has focused on human and legal rights (Zia 1997, Toor 1997, Jahangir or Jilani 1988) or alternatively has the potential to generate cultural explanations for their situation in the west (Khan 2001). Narratives of the women I interviewed suggest that yes their human and rights have been violated, but this has largely happened because they are poor and because they are women. Indeed their lives, when examined as embedded within local and international systems, provide a direction for feminist analyses that is neither orientalist nor neglects the oppression of Pakistani women. The zina laws were promulgated as a means to ensure a moral and just society in Pakistan. The reality is quite different in a society where police corruption and violence go unpunished, male violence against women has no legal sanction, and the majority of the population is increasingly impoverished. The legal system is so backlogged that often incarcerated persons awaiting trial are held longer than the sentence they would receive if convicted (USDS 2000:20). The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Women (1997) charged that the zina laws are subject to widespread misuse, with ninety-five percent of the women accused of adultery being found innocent either in the court of first instance or on appeal. Indeed human rights lawyer Zia Awan argues that this is not the environment to introduce these kinds of laws (1999). Defenders of the zina laws claim that they regulate morality in Pakistan and help bring about a just social order. The definition of morality through the zina laws however is ambiguous and the states control over its citizens is not absolute. Thus both the reading of the law and its effects of laws are uneven. As the narratives of the women suggest that women are jailed for all kinds of offenses that have nothing to do with sex. Indeed the narratives of the women uncover deeper issues: corruption, poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism and male violence. Frequently, poverty causes many parents to marry their daughters in exchange for money. Their accounts point to a culture and tradition which puts women, especially poor women at risk. Pakistani budgets and five-year-plans reveal a high priority to the military and a low priority to poverty alleviation and development. There is little insitutionalization of democracy and a dismal human rights record. As for womens rights, few in Pakistan would say that women do not have rights: under Islam or under the Constitution. Yet the rights of women, particularly poor women are systematically denied in political forums, institutional practice, and family traditions. Misuse of the zina laws makes the situation worse. Women who behave in ways the men in their families do not like, or choose whom they will marry, or seek divorce, or for no apparent reason incur the wrath of the men they are married to, or are related to men who are wanted by the authorities, get accused of offenses as a means of intimidating them and their relatives. Even friends of a woman who wants to leave her family or her husband are often charged and incarcerated under the terms of the zina laws. Their male co-defendants also suffer, but men often benefit from the bias in the laws which favours them. The women are poor and illiterate and likely they have not participated in the Pakistani political process. They do not vote nor do they hold the state accountable when their constitutional rights are violated. Nearly invisible as citizens, they become more invisible once behind bars. In a sense, the zina laws are used to sweep clean the streets of women, particularly poor, unwanted and rebellious women. From 1979 to 1995 over one million zina cases were filed with the police and 300,000 heard by the courts (USDS 2000:10). The laws censure women and men for having sex outside of marriage, but there is little conclusive proof that the women in jail had sex in the first place. Many of them have been accused of merely aiding and abetting abductions, and have not even been accused of having sex. Indeed many of the women are acquitted after trial due to lack of evidence. That thousands of women have been incarcerated for years on the accusation of helping in an abduction, or elopement, sends a message that women, particularly poor women, belong to their fathers, brothers and husbands. And people who treat them as individuals with full rights of citizenship and are sensitive to their narratives of pain and suffering at the hands of those whose property they are deemed to be better watch out. They could be accused of helping that property escape the clutches of its rightful owners. Pakistani law is committed to general abstract principles of equality. Moreover, as a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women, Pakistan has reinforced this commitment. State policies and practices however generate a diminished status for poor women. The state oversees the regulation of these discriminatory practices and reinvigorates a disciplinary culture harmful to the interests of women, particularly poor women. A moral and just society, the goal behind the laws, would undoubtedly be welcomed in Pakistan as it would be in other places. The zina laws do not bring about such a society in Pakistan. The English press has frequently taken up and debated the idea that the zina laws, indeed the entire text of the Hadood Ordianances is contributing to social and political injustice. But there is little debate in Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi and Pushto the languages of the people most affected by them (Hakim, 1999). The impoverished female population, the primary victims, are unlikely to follow the debates in the English press. Few of them can read and write and if they are literate it is in the vernacular. The inability of those affected by the laws to mount a substantial popular defense against is due not only to their lack of resources but also because of their lack of awareness as to how they might be affected by these laws. Indeed a survey conducted in 1988 found that 90% of the over 90 prisoners interviewed in two prisons in Punjab were unaware of the law under which they had been imprisoned. And over 60% had received no legal assistance whatever (Jahangir & Jilani 1988, pp 134-136). The comments of Najma Parveen (1999), the first female warden in a Pakistani prison, suggest that this lack of awareness is not confined to the illiterate and impovirshed. Parveen, a former librarian, only became aware of implications of the zina laws when she became warden and realized that the fifty percent of the prisoners in her charge were in jail because of them. Despite their lack of awareness about the ordinance, the narratives of the women who I interviewed are a testimony to their endurance in the face of tremendous odds. The women are contesting control of their sexuality and morality and indeed of their bodies, particularly those at Darul-Aman where despite the prevalent restrictive and oppressive conditions, many women have chosen to find refuge. They are running away and seeking shelter from the domination and violence of fathers, brothers and husbands who beat them and sell them to the highest bidders. They are choosing their own marriage partners knowing that their choices place them at considerable risk. At the same time many women also articulate a desire to be gharaloo (domestic) and sharif (honest) suggesting that they have accepted the middle class ideal of domesticated, chaste and honest women. Their families also want it of them. The womens narratives, however, indicate difficulty in maintaining domesticity and chastity in their conditions of poverty. It is this aura of domesticity, chastity combined with youth which commands a price on the marriage market and many parents are loath to let go of such a valuable commodity. Although the zina laws apply to all citizens of Pakistan, the state does not have the power, resources (or will) to see the sanctions against illicit sex carried through for any but the most vulnerable. Well-heeled citizens are able to disregard these prescriptions of morality, while those with little social and financial resources face the brutality of the state. Police corruption and violence exacerbate the already vulnerable situation in which women charged with zina find themselves. At the hands of the police they face sexual, physical, and emotional violence and extortion. Poor women have nothing with which to buy their way out of the situation and they are the ones who suffer the most. So what happens if we do away with the zina laws? Would the women still suffer? The violence that women face is coming out of social and political attitudes and from a system which does not respond to their needs. The zina laws, which allow for an ambiguous reading of the law, exacerbate the problem. Families are provided with a mechanism through which they draw upon the power of the state and a corrupt police force to control their women. The states treatment of the zina victims, put into question, the nations commitment to protect the interests of all its citizens. Poor women are born into a national symbolic order that teats them as chattels to be bartered. The nation needs morality and gendered and classed citizens are sacrificed to provide a moral face for the nation. Although the state invokes Islam, the womens narratives clearly suggest that is not religion but the state that is responsible for their plight. Indeed many turn to religion to find peace and make sense of the situation. In so doing they often become recruits for the Islamist group WAT which has been involved in rehabilitation work in the jails. As Pakistan struggles to imagine its future, the moral regulation of poor women through zina laws serves to symbolically cleanse the material impurity of the nation. The police as agents of the state are delegated to protect the rights of citizens against violence. Yet frequently it is the police who become perpetrators of violence. Police corruption as well as violence exacerbate the already vulnerable situation that women charged with zina find themselves. Women running from family control and coercion find the police another violent and corrupt adversary. At the hands of the police they face sexual, physical and emotional violence and extortion. Poor women have nothing with which to buy their way out of the situation and they are the ones who suffer the most. So what happens if we do away with the zina laws would the women still suffer? The violence that women face is coming out of social and political attitudes. Likely women would still suffer violence and be exploited by their families if it did not exist. Zina laws allow for an ambiguous reading of the law, and exacerbate the problem by allowing families to use the power of the state and a corrupt police force to regulate their women. A weak democratic regime brought in the zina laws to bolster its political base through alliances with right wing religious parties. Subsequent weak regimes have allowed it to continue to wreck havoc in society at the expense of the most vulnerable members, lower class women. The current martial law regime has done nothing to repeal the anti-woman laws. All of these regimes have had western financial and political support. In the West few questions have been raised concerning the mis-use of religion or lack of human rights in Pakistan. Particularly the United States has seldom used its influence with Pakistani regimes to press for an end to human rights violations. Notwithstanding the grip on power by ruling elites, Pakistani society is dynamic and contested (Waites 1995). Both the media and hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in Pakistan contest the ruling vision of society. In response to budget cuts stipulated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the state has retreated from providing the infrastructure required by Pakistanis. Increasingly NGOS have filled the vacuum left by the state as they provide legal aid, primary health care and education to groups that cannot afford to pay for them. But as several social activists in Pakistan pointed out there are all kinds of development monies available to do research on and provide services to women. There is little money for infrastructure such as a shelter for women. So while they are able to help women escape violent situations there are few places to house and shelter the women while they get their lives in order. Dastak, a shelter for women run by the Legal Aid organization AGHS is one of the very few places where women can find refuge while they explore their own options. Otherwise they have to try to get shelter in one of the Darul-Amans where they ar channeled into marriage or sent home to family situations they are trying to escape from. Helping raise funds for shelters for women is one way women in the west can join forces with activists in Pakistan. My intention is not glorify the role of NGOs as powerful and progressive champion of peoples rights. Instead I argue that through their social work agenda the activists who work for these organizations often find themselves on a collision course with the state and law enforcement agencies over civic and human rights issues. These challenges foster a climate where unjust procedures and directives are questioned, often which are also against both the spirit of Islamic values as well as those found in human rights debates. Indeed the Nawaz Sharif regime felt threatened enough to attempt to muzzle the media by imprisoning prominent journalists and harass the NGOs into being more supportive of government policies. The NGOs are funded by foreign agencies thus vulnerable to Islamist claims that they are western agents and un-Islamic. But they are subtly changing Pakistani society (Mallick 1998). Many legal challenges to the zina laws have been brought about by NGOs such as Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. As a result the government has brought fewer charges against the women under the zina laws than in the past and the courts have shown greater leniency toward women in their sentences and in the granting of bail (USDS 2000:46). Edward Said (1978) has argued that the Orientalist produces his identity through difference of the other. Similarly the zina victim as spectacle allows the western women to participate in the illusion that she is free and equal. And the zina victim becomes a metaphor for all that is wrong with the third world and by implication what is right with the first world where zina laws do not exist. Within this view globalization is no longer responsible for the Pakistani parents that sell their daughters in marriage or the underpaid policeman who accepts bribes because he does not earn a living wage. Instead it is the perverse customs and practices which are responsible for the horrors perpetrated by the zina laws. The spectacle of caged sexuality of the Pakistani woman is an orientalist construct focussing on patriarchy. Its interrogation reveals zina to be a feminist issue that connects gender oppression not only to colonial images but also to imperialist strategies which keep third world countries impoverished in a web of unequal relations. Feminist solidarity needs to demystify the spectacle of the woman condemned under zina as well as those factors obscuring issues that link the woman here to the woman there. The women in the Pakistani jail is defined as deviant because of her uncontrolled sexuality. She has been positioned to flee the power of the law and the control of her family. Why does she end up in a Pakistani jail. Statistics tell us that it is because she is poor and illiterate. She is poor and illiterate because the state is spending less and less money for education and job creation. Although the issues are presented within a religious and cultural script, the underlying basis of womens subordination in Pakistan are more closely connected to lack of education, lack of employment opportunities, lack of a living wage, and exposure to violence. Similar issues exist in the west where feminists have long problematized the social construction of the poor and minority woman as deviant and whose sexuality needs to be controlled. These issues are connected to patriarchy and capitalism. As the state retrenches and provides fewer services, like health care, basic education and employment opportunities, women particularly poor women become more vulnerable to conditions of poverty and violence both here and there. In moving out of examining gender as the basis of Pakistani womens subordination, a feminist response might move into exploring poverty, corruption and illiteracy as the mitigating factors for the Pakistani womens situation. These issues can be linked to structural adjustment directives imposed on third world countries, including Pakistan, by the IMF and the World Bank. These are the same structural adjustment directives which are increasingly responsible for the loss of funding for shelters and for womens organizations in first world countries, including Canada where I live, work and write. I argue that the voices of women incarcerated under zina laws be scripted over an analysis of the effects of globalization. So that feminist collective strategies continue to examine and challenge how globalization affects women internationally. I recommend that feminist strategies be cognizant of the ways in which womens subordination not only differs at diverse sites but also how it is similar. So that the woman in Canada who is in an abusive situation is aware that the forces of globalization responsible for the lack of shelter space for her are also connected to the conditions which help imprison the Pakistani woman. An understanding of these difference and similarity as the basis of a feminist solidarity is a position which Angela Miles (1996) supports. Miles calls this form of collective action specificity in diversity. This is not the solidarity based on a notion of shared oppression of women, but a redefined sisterhood through which, as bell hooks argues, women struggle to understand differences and build a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite (1997: 410). Finally I argue that the tension between the production and reception of knowledge not be resolved but kept vibrantly alive. Only then can the feminist voice continue to be a vital transformative agent for social change.
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