I am not sure if all the

Kohistani jirga women are

alive

I was a member of the fact-finding team that was sent by the Supreme
Court last week to check whether the five women who had been
deemed liable for death by a local jirga in Kohistan were
alive or not. Their lives had come under threat after a video showing a
boy dancing and another in a baseball cap filming and the girls sitting
on the floor, heads covered, and merely clapping, was put up on
YouTube. Reports began to appear in the national media that their lives
were under threat and then it emerged, after two relatives of the men
who uploaded the video claimed that the women had been killed .
The Supreme Court took suo motu notice of this and asked the local
administration, principally the commissioner of Hazara division and
the DPO to bring the girls to Court. They went to the Court expressing
their inability to bring the girls citing tribal custom and tradition but
said without any proof that the girls were alive and well. It was
then that the Court decided to send the fact-finding team, comprising
four activists (including myself) to the remote area in the Kohistan
district via a government helicopter.

The chief secretary of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa asked me to accompany the

fact-finding team that was chosen for this purpose. It included Riffat
Butt, who is legal adviser of the National Commission on the Status of
Women, Shabina Ayaz, member of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwas Commission
on the Status of Women and Dr Fouzia Saeed. We were told that we had
to leave right away with no time even to take essentials with us. We all
left within an hour after the court hearing on June 6.

As for the women whose status we were sent to check, I can

speak of only one, named Amna (out of four shown in the cell
phone video) and confirm that she is certainly alive. We met her and
verified her identity. We also met another of the women named
Shaheen but we didnt have her photograph to independently verify her
identity and hence had to go by what the local people told us and after
she herself confirmed her identity. Maulana Javed, who was the head of
the jirga that allegedly gave the verdict, was in fact accompanying the
team and to us he denied giving such a fatwa. People in the area also
denied that any such incident had ever taken place.
That said, it should be remembered that in the presence of the jirga
elders, chances that the local residents we met would give us reliable
information were bleak. In my view, a far more detailed investigation is
required to establish the fact whether such a fatwa was given or not.
Also, as of yet, we do not know what could be the motive behind the
leaking of the said video on the internet. This is something that the
police should investigate.

What was foremost in my mind was that I wanted to see with my own
eyes that the women were alive. This is important because this would
have been the clearest evidence of their safety. I did not believe
the version being given by the government officials because they
usually try and cover up such things, either to hide their own
inefficiency, or because of political and other vested interests, such as
doing favours for the influential people in the area of their jurisdiction.
We landed in Pattan, one of the four tehsils of the Kohistan district.
We were not able to fly to the village where the women were because of
bad weather. So we decided to explore whether the local people knew
about the video and/or the alleged killing of the women shown in it.
What we found was that many local men had the video on their cell
phones and the majority of the people thought that these women had in
fact been killed. Their perception was clearly based on their prior
knowledge of the customs of the area where in such cases families
invariably kill both the men and women. The next day at six in the
morning we left Dassu (which is a small town on the Karakoram
Highway) for the village where the women were supposed to reside.
When we landed and asked the villagers about the houses of these
women, they pointed towards dwellings that were empty and
abandoned. We were told that these families had move up in the
mountains, which is a common practice in summer.
After four hours of walking, we reached the place where we met a few
men; one of them was the father of Shireen Gul (one of the women) and
the other said he was Amnas uncle. We were told that they would bring
the women down because their home was further up the mountain.
After a few hours, two women Amna and Shaheen appeared. We
showed them still photographs, presumably screen shots of the video on
YouTube, which we managed to take with us.

We asked Amna to point out who was who in the photographs. She gave
us the names of the other women and also pointed out herself in the
photographs. She told us that that the video was made more than a year
ago and that it was not at a wedding ceremony. She did not understand
Urdu and her uncle translated for us. We asked her about the safety of
the other women and she pointed towards the mountains and said that
they were alive and living up there. Then we requested her uncle to
allow us to make a video of her on the cell phone. Initially, he was
reluctant but when we told him that it will be shared only with the Chief
Justice of Pakistan and not with the media, we were allowed to film
both Amna and Shaheen. After that we took them to a room where we
checked whether there was any sign of torture on their bodies but we
found none.

We were not able to contact the other three women, since that would
have required that we stay there for another two days. In any case, the
officials accompanying us said that we must return immediately
because of the Supreme Courts order to return and report back the
same day.

As for the two women that we did meet, they could have been
brought back with us to Islamabad and before the Supreme
Court but for some reason the provincial administration was not
willing to do that. Perhaps, the reason is that there is hardly any
government writ in that area and local officials operate through tribal
elders.
Also, I feel that there is now a very real and serious threat to the lives of
these women since the video has been widely circulated in the area.
Unfortunately, the killing of men and women in such cases is a routine
matter. Before we left, we told the jirga elders that the village will be
monitored on a regular basis and if anything happens to these women,
they will be held responsible. However, my fear is that once the public
attention will be off the case, these women could be harmed, that is if
they are not already dead.