Comedy - #Colbert #DrAnthonyFauci #DrFauci Doctor's Orders: Dr. Fauci Says Don't Go Hit The Clubs, Even After Being Vaccinated

Video Report - This week, President Biden stopped by W.S. Jenks & Son

Video Report - Covid-19 situation in Paris area is extremely tense, French PM says

Video Report - New York tests app to check for COVID-19 infections

Video Report - Does the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine cause blood clots? | DW News

#Pakistan - Establishment candidate Sanjrani Defeats Gillani: Can Rejected Votes Be Counted| Nawaz Sharif & PDM

Video Report - Will Maryam Get Arrested? | Will Courts Cancel Sanjarani Victory? | Will Imran Survive?

When will there be justice for Pakistan’s victims of child abuse?

Samira Shackle

Three years after the murder of seven-year-old Zainab Ansari shook Pakistan, little has changed for victims.

On January 9, 2018, the body of seven-year-old Zainab Ansari was discovered on a rubbish dump in her home town of Kasur, Pakistan.

She was not the first young girl from the city to have disappeared and protests erupted in Kasur about police inaction over a string of violent sexual attacks against small children in the city. This anger spread beyond Kasur as riots broke out across Pakistan.

Three weeks after Zainab was raped and murdered, her killer, Imran Ali, was arrested with the help of security camera footage – which was obtained not by police, but by Zainab’s relatives. He was found guilty of similar crimes against six more girls. The families of those other children had sought help from the police but had been dismissed or come under suspicion themselves, leaving the killer free to continue offending. He was executed later that year, but simmering rage about the mishandling of the case remains.

This rage has triggered a national conversation about the prevalence of child abuse and sexual assault in Pakistan: crucially, about the fact that in this conservative nation, sex education is practically non-existent, meaning that many children do not have the tools to recognise predators, nor do they have the language to speak out about it if something happens.

This is a pressing issue. Nearly 10 cases of child abuse are reported each day in Pakistan, with girls disproportionately affected, according to Sahil, an organisation focused on child protection. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan places the estimate closer to 13 cases per day. As in other countries, many cases go unreported, so the true number is likely to be much higher.

At the time of Zainab’s murder, Pakistan did not have any national legislation on child abuse. Two years later, in March 2020, Pakistan’s parliament took steps to address this, passing a law responding to these concerns – the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Bill. It provides for a dedicated agency to respond more quickly when children go missing; creates a helpline for missing child alerts; makes it incumbent on local police chiefs to respond within two hours of the alert; requires police to complete their investigations of these cases within three months; and introduces a life sentence for child abuse.

But a year after the legislation was introduced, and three years after Zainab’s death, not much has changed in practical terms. Why might this be? First of all, it is important to acknowledge that tackling child abuse is a complicated process that every country struggles with. In Pakistan, however, there is the additional issue of weak state institutions, which makes the implementation of laws patchy at best and non-existent at worst.

This is not unique to child abuse legislation; Pakistan has a raft of relatively progressive laws on women’s rights, for instance, which exist on the statute books but are simply not enforced by police. All too often, police at the ground level are poorly funded and poorly trained. Police officers may not always be aware of legal changes, and are ultimately a product of the society they live in – which often means they are patriarchal and conservative, with a tendency to view violence against women as a “family problem”, or as something provoked by the victim. There are also very few female police officers. Last September, a woman was gang raped on a highway after her car broke down. The lead police investigator suggested she should have taken a safer route and said that no one in Pakistani society would “allow their sisters and daughters to travel alone so late”.

The second problem is even more nebulous and difficult to challenge – the continued shame that exists when talking about these issues, which is particularly acute in a conservative society where any discussion of sex or sexual violence is taboo.

After Zainab’s murder in 2018, women on social media shared their experiences under the hashtag #JusticeForZainab. The actor, Nadia Jamil, tweeted about her own childhood abuse, highlighting that people are often shamed for speaking out: “People tell me not to talk to respect my family’s honour. Is my family’s honour packed in my body?”

The model, Frieha Altaf, tweeted about being abused by her family’s cook when she was six, writing: “My parents took action but everyone remained silent as if it was my shame.” These were brave interventions, but, as we have seen with the #MeToo movement globally, it takes a long time for social norms to change.

In fact, for a painful illustration of both of these issues – problems with the justice system and a pervasive culture of shame – we need look no further than Kasur, the city where Zainab lived. At the time of her death, Kasur was often referred to as “the child abuse capital of Pakistan”, due to the horrifying revelation in 2015 that a paedophile ring had sexually abused 280 children from impoverished areas on the outskirts of the city, filming and selling videos of the assaults. At the time, the case prompted national outrage, prefiguring Zainab’s case. Politicians visited the city and made grand promises of justice. They pledged psychological and financial support for the victims. But, as the news cameras moved on, so did political attention. The support never materialised.

Six years on, the boys and girls affected have been stigmatised by their communities and, in some cases, forced to move away. Meanwhile, the accused – who are mostly from, or affiliated with, a powerful family – have been released from jail and are free to live their lives and intimidate those who reported them. This was an all-too-common miscarriage of justice, highlighting the problems with a weak and corrupt justice system (particularly at the local level, as opposed to within the higher courts) and the deep shame that too often afflicts victims and their families.

The public debate and new legislation that came out of Zainab’s death was a positive outcome of a terrible tragedy. But the work, clearly, is just beginning.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/11/when-will-there-be-justice-for-pakistans-victims-of-child-abuse

Pakistani forces kill five previously abducted Baloch in a staged encounter

 The Pakistani forces’ Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) has killed five previously abducted Baloch prisoners in a fake counter in the Espelinji area of Mastung Balochistan on Monday evening.

The spokesperson of the CTD claimed the deceased were members of ‘the Baloch Liberation Army’ and were killed in an intelligence-based operation. He claimed that when the forces raided their ‘hideout’ and asked them to surrender, they opened fire on the CTD forces instead.

The deceased have been named Shah Nazar Marri, Yousaf Marri, Arif Marri, Jamil Perkani and Samiullah Perkani.

Family sources of at least three of the deceased have confirmed to Balochwarna News that they were arrested many weeks before the so called ‘intelligence-based operation’ from different areas of Balochistan.

 Yousaf Marri was abducted from Jaladi on 27 November 2020 and his cousin Arif Marri was abducted from Quetta on 28 February 2021. Yousaf used work in his farms in Jaladi whereas Arif Marri ran a small shop in Quetta.

A school teacher Sher Dil Marri and Nadir Marri two uncles of Yousaf Marri were abducted from New Kahaan Quetta on May 15, 2020. Sher Dil Marri later charged with trumped-up drug-related charged and release conditionally.

Nadir was transferred to Mach Jail for a few days and a ransom was demanded for his release. Since his family could not pay the military, he was once again disappeared from jail and his whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

 Shah Nazar Chalgari Marri was abducted from Harnai during a military offensive in December 2020.

The other two youth Samiullah and Jamil Perkani were abducted on January 18, 2021, from Eastern bypass Quetta.

Sources informed Balochwarna News that Pakistan army officials had contacted the families of at least two of the deceased and demanded ransom but their families could not afford the huge ransom. Hence, they refused to pay the army.

It is worth noting that previously also Pakistan army demanded ransom from the families of disappeared Baloch and later killed the detainees despite being paid.

The Pakistani army has admitted that in recent years several high-rank officials including Major ranks were dismissed for ‘misuse of power’ and their involvement in corruption.

In the past also Pakistan army killed many Baloch prisoners in similar fake encounters and released statements to media that they were killed during operations.

Baloch pro-freedom political parties and human rights organisations say that Pakistani forces have killed thousands of missing Baloch persons since the beginning of the new state policy ‘kill and dump’ since early 2009.  

The victims of Pakistan’s kill and dump policy include highly learned Baloch academics, teachers, students, lawyers, doctors and other members of the society.

https://balochwarna.com/2021/03/09/pakistani-forces-kill-five-previously-abducted-baloch-in-a-staged-encounter/

#Pakistan - Child marriage: How the Girls are ill-treated During Childhood in #Balochistan?

 

Munaj Gul Mohammad

The month of November in Makran comes with some excitement for school-age children after the announcement of vacations amid the second wave of coronavirus. Most of the children happily chatted with one another as to how to pass their off-days in their neighborhoods. However, Sara in full excitement tells her classmates that she will enjoy full time with her family members in her village (Tehsil Tump).

She was uncertain that the end of November 2020 would be unfair with her studies and life-changing dreams.

Rather than doing school assignments, she was told to be ready in wearing the bridal dress as her marriage was scheduled for December 10. For her classmates, the middle of December came up with that grim news.

Though for Sara,12, in the village of Tump area of district Kech, the forced marriage was a lifelong curse that washed away her beautiful dreams. Consequently, she got married to a much older man than her age. Now she owns those cultures which she has been reviling her fate.

In fact, child marriage has been a very long practice in the Tump, region of district Kech (Tump is a neglected area in Eastern Makran, Balochistan) and in other parts of Balochistan, too. In the region, girls are never given a choice when and where to get married.

” I dreamt to be a school teacher,” Sara said. Whenever my class teachers asked me about my future planning, I responded to them that the only wish of mine is to “contribute something good to the girls’ education in my society which no more remains a wish for me,” she answered in tears.

After the marriage, Sara says goodbye to her education, and getting married at a very young age has put all her dreams aside, but no one cares!

“We (females) don’t need all the constitutional rights to secure ourselves from the so-called male-dominated society, what we just want to have the right to accept the proposal of the marriage or disagree to further continue our education.” Laments Nazish told me, who is another young married girl who dreamt to be a lawyer; unfortunately, she is the mother of a daughter and a son, with no choice left for her to pursue her education and fulfill her childhood dreams. “They (our families) would never try to educate their daughters as sons. We wish to wear school uniforms and to rest in our mothers’ arms, but we are forced to wear a wedding dress, thenceforth, we are married before the completion of our education.”

Nazish and Sara are not the first prey to get early marriage in Balochistan province; there are hundreds of thousands of such unreported stories on the basis of so-called family honors. In Pakistan, Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) 1929 has set the legal age for marriage to 16 for women and 18 for men; but sadly, there remains no implementation of laws for the eradication of the existing dilemma.

Similarly, there are numerous young girls who think of holding books and pens in their hands but the so-called society handover them the burden of responsibilities on their weak shoulders by enforced and early age-marriage; before they could reach to the age of puberty. Instead of holding books and pens, they are compelled to hold children.

Undoubtedly, early marriage affects the health of brides and grooms besides education.

Here the questions arise, why are the only girls forced to marry not boys? Who is the onus of deaths of beautiful souls in the early pregnancy? Who is responsible of the violation of their (girls) legal rights besides the rights bestowed by God?

” I complained to my uncles about my marriage, but they remained silent even though they were educated and aware of the consequences of early marriages. Secondly, it was the most difficult moment for me when we (my sisters and relatives) were told to sew the matrimonial dress of mine. In fear, I remained dead-silent. During the marriage, they (family members) were rejoicing and dancing, I passed all the days and nights in tears,” says Nazish in anguish. ” There are many girls who are married off before they reach puberty and their dreams are crushed out.”

In Balochistan, almost more than 50% of marriages are solemnized before the age of 18. Because of early marriages mortality ratio during pregnancy is high. Though, the prime reason behind child marriages is lack of public awareness and illiteracy. Howbeit, the so-called civil society, religious leaders, and other communities, had to better work on the decimation of this social evil in the province.

The Sustainable Development Goals has planned to achieve its goals in the year 2030 and promise to create progress, which will improve lives across the world. The elimination of early marriages is one of them. But when every year young girls are married off; they have ultimately locked away from a better life. Young girls in Balochistan, are no exception. Some with great dreams of the future and some too young to envisage anything about themselves are married off. The provincial and federal governments have to impose the laws in the prohibition of early marriages if they want a change in the world of education…!

As for the present, Sara and Nazish wail with the moon at nights and nights. God only listens to their rebukes but never bothers Himself to reply to them in the affirmative.

https://balochistanvoices.com/2021/03/child-marriage-how-the-girls-are-ill-treated-during-childhood-in-balochistan/