Peace & Democracy

Due to the offensive by the military only a few weeks ago, Pakistan came into the focus of the international public again. The power of the Taliban in connection with the attitude of the society was widely discussed, but once again gender and women issues were not highlighted. Durre Ahmed, chairperson and senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Gender and Culture in Lahore, about the current situation and development of the gender discourse in Pakistan.

The American-led NATO mission in Afghanistan began with the stated objective of denying Al Qaeda a safe haven. President Barack Obama restated that in his speech at West Point earlier this month that the overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and its allies in the future. “We are in Afghanistan to prevent cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan.”

Presently, more than seventy thousand American and NATO troops are in Afghanistan. In addition, Pakistan has deployed more than hundred thousand troops in the tribal areas, adjacent to the Pak-Afghan border, to stop the infiltration of the Taliban and their supporters into Afghanistan. But no significant achievement is in sight. Interestingly, both Pakistan and Afghanistan are blaming each other of not doing sufficient to curb the militancy in the region.

Several research studies conducted in the areas of peace, conflict and wars across the world show that not only the impact but the perceptions and perspectives of men and women of conflicts are also fairly gendered In general, women are perceived as passive victims of wars/ conflicts who do not play any active role in initiating or participating in wars and conflicts. However, there are plenty of examples that show that women are not only the victim of wars and conflicts but they also play an active role as combatants and supporters of wars and political violence.

Violence against women is not confined to our country alone but its prevalence is evident across the world. Violence against women is a phenomenon that takes several identifiable forms and cuts across national, ethnic and social backgrounds. In Pakistan certain social precedents, call them customs or traditions justify acts of torture, violence, and murder infused with a sense of righteous pride. The worst of such customs is that of so-called ‘honour’ killings. In Baluchistan, the act of ‘honour’ killings is termed siyahkari, karo kari in Sindh, in NWFP tor tora, and kala kali in the Punjab. Shirkat Gah wants to shed some more light on what this issue entails and why it continues to persist. We also want to determine the type of action that can most effectively be initiated against it. We hope that by the end of this seminar some recommendations and suggestions will emerge that can provide further guidance in this regard.

The three topics Democracy, Traditions, and Gender are strongly interrelated. Thus the conference offered various representatives of the civil society from South and West Asia to discuss always two of these topics through the lens of the third one.

Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gilani announced the restoration of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan - the apex court. This is the first ever victory of the Pakistani people by staging a non-violent civil activism at a mass scale that, in literal terms, defeated the State tyranny on an issue that was earlier agreed by the sitting government that represents the Pakistani State at the moment.

This Citizens’ Report is not going to capture the ‘behind-the-scenes’ process of the 2005 Local Government elections. This Report gives instead some valuable information of the socioeconomic backdrop to the electoral processes in 2001 and 2005 in the form of the district profiles of the 105 districts, some glimpses of the two Campaigns, (for which the material from the Citizens’ Report of 2001 was used again,) and the overall results of the Campaigns, a part of which we could take credit for.

First, the bottom line: Pakistan will not break up; there will not be another military coup; the Taliban will not seize the presidency; Pakistan's nuclear weapons will not go astray, and the Islamic sharia will not become the law of the land. That's the good news. It conflicts with opinions in the mainstream U.S. press, as well as with some in the Obama administration. For example, in March, David Kilcullen, a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, declared that state collapse could occur within six months. This is highly improbable.

Pakistan is presently faced with a large-scale human displacement in the North Western part of the country. This is the largest in its history since the time of its creation in 1947. Under the circumstances, the country is witnessing an extraordinary political, social and economic situation that will have a serious impact on its longer-term social and economic development including increased incidence of chronic poverty in some areas.