Two politicians accused of brutal attitudes toward women have been made Cabinet ministers in Pakistan, causing outrage among human rights activists.
Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani, charged with presiding over a jirga that gave away five young girls as compensation, and Israrullah Zehri, who recently made international headlines after defending the burying alive of women in “honor killing” cases, have been made ministers.
Last year the Supreme Court ordered the arrest of Oxford-educated Bijarani over the allegations, though he remained at liberty. He has now been made minister for education. Street protests and angry newspaper editorials met the induction of Bijarani and Zehri, who were brought in as part of a major expansion of the Cabinet last week.
“It is a very clear message from the government that they don’t care about these things,” said Samar Minallah, a human rights campaigner who had brought the court case against Bijarani. “I think they deliberately chose these two people to be ministers to send that message.”
The practice of settling disputes by awarding girls taken from the family of those convicted by a meeting of village elders in a jirga to an aggrieved party is illegal but it continues in rural areas. Bijarani, a landowner from Sindh Province, is accused of heading such a jirga in 2006, in which five girls, aged between two and five, were given as compensation to the family of a murdered man.
He denies the allegations.
“Is this the politics of appeasement?” said Tahira Abdullah, a member of rights group the Women’s Action Forum. “It almost looks like rewarding these men for their deeds against women.”
Zehri, a member of the upper house of parliament, has been made minister for postal services.
Earlier this year, in response to news that three teenage girls had been buried alive for trying to choose their own husbands, he told parliament it was “tribal tradition.”
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