All pain is back for Mukhtar Mai

PAKISTAN (Meerwala, southern Punjab): “I’m hurt and upset,” says Ms Mai. “I am going through the same things I went through in 2002. It’s brought back all the pain.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has decided that all but one of the men previously imprisoned for gang-raping Mukhtar Mai on the orders of tribal elders should have their convictions overturned.
They have now been released.

“Then, it was a decision of the tribal council that made me suffer; now it’s a verdict from the Pakistani courts.”
Since the attack, Ms Mai, who was then illiterate, managed to start a school for girls and a women’s refuge just a few hundred feet from the spot where she was raped.

She received international awards for her bravery in speaking out, and her autobiography In the Name of Honour has been sold worldwide.

But Ms Mai says the new ruling to free her attackers has crushed her.

“Yes I had civil society with me, and groups from all over the world,” she says. “But only I knew what difficulties I still had to face.”

She says she had to battle men from an influential local clan when most women who experienced what she did were expected to commit suicide.

“After everything, the men of powerful families are openly handing out sweets in celebration of this judgement,” she says. “I was never expecting this.”

She also feels threatened because the released men could now return to the village where they still have homes.
“They will be close to my school,” she says. “My school, employees, my family and I will be in danger.”

She says that if anything happens, it will be the Supreme Court and the government of Pakistan who should be held responsible.

Nine years ago, to punish her for an affair her brother was accused of having, a tribal council ordered that she be repeatedly raped.

After the attack, she says she was paraded past scores of villagers. It became the most infamous women’s rights case in Pakistan for years.