Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [211]
All of these politicians have claimed either that the girls were not killed at all, killed but not buried alive, or that they had engaged in ‘immoral acts’ and therefore deserved their punishment, or all of these together. None of this is true. I interviewed the police surgeon who dug up and examined the bodies of the three girls, Dr Shamim Gul. They had all been buried alive, and they were all virgins.
Dr Gul – the only police surgeon for the whole of Balochistan – is the most remarkable person I met during my travels in Pakistan. Among other things she is very much more of a man than the vast majority of the men I encountered – if I may be forgiven a Baloch-sounding comment. This fifty-eight-year-old Pathan grandmother, deaf as a post in one ear (our conversation was conducted in bellows on my side), spends her professional life travelling around Balochistan at night (because there are a great many people of course who do not exactly favour her investigations), digging up rotting corpses and examining them in makeshift morgues in temperatures which can reach 50 degrees Celsius. ‘Sometimes the bodies fall to pieces and I have to put them back together again,’ she told me.13
Dr Gul does her work without a police escort – for reasons that will come as no surprise to anyone who knows the police of Pakistan. And she goes on doing her duty despite the fact that of the ten or fifteen bodies of women murdered in ‘honour killings’ which she examines each year, not one case has ever been successfully prosecuted, though a few people may have been embarrassed a bit; and those she examines are in her estimate only around 5 per cent of the total killed, because the vast majority are never reported.
Dr Gul retired in 2008 but then took up the job again in 2009 because no one else wanted it. For myself, if I had Napier’s powers I would begin by making her the Inspector-General (i.e. provincial chief) of police in Balochistan, and then promote her upwards from there. She certainly deserves a senior job more than any other local politician or official whom I met.
VISIT TO A BUGTI
Nawabzada Jamil Bugti, son of Nawab Akbar Bugti by his second wife, took a rather more restrained – and coherent – line on the murder of the girls when I visited him on his estate outside Quetta. He also said that there was no proof that they had been buried alive, but then immediately changed his line to say that, if indeed it had happened, it was contrary to Baloch tradition:
If there is a case of adultery then in our tradition you have to kill the man as well as the woman involved; and if you do so without sufficient evidence then you have a blood feud on your hands. Salik Umrani is not even the real head of his tribe. He is neither partridge nor quail, that is why he didn’t follow tribal tradition in this case ... I remember a case that my father once deputed me to judge. A man had killed his wife and her lover and volunteered to walk through a fire to prove that they had been having an affair. The lover’s family had denied it and demanded compensation, or they would have launched a blood feud. And the husband took his seven steps through the fire as if on rose petals! So the lover’s family withdrew their demand and I closed the case.14
This was strange stuff to hear in an elegant modern living-room lined with vaguely Impressionist still-life paintings, and from a man with some at least of the manners and appearance of an English gentleman; but then, there was a good deal that was strange – and revealing – about our meeting.
Nawabzada Bugti’s house is set in an artificial, tube-well-fed oasis near the village of Miangundi, a few miles outside Quetta. The area has been developed by various Baloch nobles as a commercial venture of orchards, with their mansions set in the middle of them. The contrast between his garden, with its green lawns and rose-beds, and the arid, savage mountains behind added to the slightly surreal air of our conversation.
The Nawabzada