Pakistan is introducing a bill to ban forced marriages, including the ones that use women as a payment to settle feuds.
Pakistan’s ruling party on Tuesday introduced a bill to outlaw forced marriages, including under an ancient tribal custom in which women are married off in order to settle feuds.
[…] Hussain’s party, which has a majority in both houses, strongly supports President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has vowed to give women more rights in line with his policy to project Pakistan as a moderate, progressive Islamic nation.
“Whoever coerces, or in any manner whatsoever compels a woman to enter into marriage shall be punished with imprisonment” for up to three years and a fine, according to the proposed law.
The bill foresees the same penalty to discourage “wanni” or “swara,” a tribal custom in which a woman is forced into marriage to settle a dispute between two families or clans.
Another provision bans forcing a woman into a “marriage with the Holy Quran,” a practice still seen in deeply conservative rural parts of Pakistan in which a woman swears on Islam’s holy book never to marry. Critics argue the tradition is used to prevent a woman from taking her share of a family’s land with her when she marries.
Illegally depriving a woman of her inheritance rights would be punished with up to seven years in jail, under the bill.
Woo-hoo! Those wacky Pakistanis! They’re going to join the 21st century!
Islamic radicals, who accuse Musharraf of trying to introduce Western secular values into the country, staged rallies across Pakistan to protest the changes, calling them un-Islamic.
Or maybe not.
The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said last week that at least 565 women and girls died in 2006 in so-called “honor killings,” nearly twice as many as the previous year.
Some men consider it an insult to family honor if a female relative has an affair outside of wedlock or marries without their consent, and view attacking or killing the women or their partners as a way to restore family honor.
You see? Pakistan is getting even more radicalized and backwards. Yeah, that radical Islam thing—it really improves the standard of living. As long as you’re not female or non-Muslim, and of the right brand of Islam or sect, of course.
Assuming the law passes, good luck enforcing it. Quite likely it will be a dead letter, like the sovereignty of the Pakistani state in North Waziristan. Generally the writ of the government does not run where the radical Muslims do not want it to run. Since those radicals include much of Musharref’s intel and police organizations there are certain problems about enforcing laws the radicals dislike.
The sad thing about the Religion of Peace world is that as bad as they are, phony despots such as Pervez Musharaf and Hosni Mubarak are as good as it is going to get. Their replacements can only be far worse, unlike Israel where any three random names in a Tel Aviv phone book would be better then the clowns Olmert, Peretz, and Livni.