The story’s been told around the world: a low-caste 12-year-old Pakistani boy was sodomized by a group of men from a higher caste; to deflect blame, they put a girl from their own family into the room where they held the boy and accused the boy of assaulting her. When the charges came to the village’s tribal council, the boy’s punishment was decreed: one of his sisters would be raped by men of the “injured” clan. Four men gang-raped the boy’s sister and sent her home through the village streets disrobed and disgraced.
Out of this horror came a story of breathtaking courage and compassion. Mukhtaran Bibi, the sister so wronged by her community, did not commit suicide out of shame and despair, as expected by that society. She fought off thoughts of killing herself and rose up to bring formal charges against the rapists, encouraged by a local imam who was outraged at her treatment and denounced it widely.
Mukhtaran won her case in a court that put the rapists on death row. She was awarded both cash damages and the offer of posh living quarters in Islamabad, far from the village and its accusing eyes.
Instead, Mukhtaran used the cash to build a school for the girls in her village. Mukhtaran had never attended school herself; she enrolled in her own elementary school, eager to become literate. When the school ran out of money, Mukhtaran sold her dowry and a cow to raise more funds. Then Nicholas Kristof wrote about her in the New York Times and readers sent $133,000 for the school. Mercy Corps offered to help the village with health care. Newspapers and bloggers all over the world took up the story. Mukhtaran opened a shelter for abused women and bought a van that provides ambulance service to the village.
But the bad news didn’t end there; the outrages continue as we write this. Mukhtaran was denied the right to travel to the US, where she’s been invited to speak. Grounding her was “for her own protection,” said Pakistan’s Prime Minister. According to that logic, she is in danger from Amnesty International and the Asian-American Network Against Abuse of Women—the organizations that have invited her to speak—but not from the angry convicted rapists who have been released from prison and returned to the very village where Mukhtaran still lives.
By phone, she told a London newspaper that 40 police had surrounded her family’s farm and were preventing her from leaving. The land line was cut. Then her cell stopped working.
Kristof has been refused a visa to enter Pakistan. The travel ban on Mukhtaran has been lifted but her passport has not been returned to her, so the lifting is meaningless. Attempts by the US Embassy in Islamabad to reach her have been unsuccessful.
Here's an update on Mukhtaran's story, with our thanks to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukhtaran_Bibi
On 2 November 2005, The US magazine Glamour named Mukhtaran as their Woman Of The Year. Upon her visit to the United States, President Musharraf told the Washington Post that claiming rape had become a "moneymaking concern" in Pakistan. Musharraf denied making the comment, prompting the Post to issue a tape of the interview
Mukhtaran was originally slated to speak at the United Nations on 20 January 2006, but the UN postponed the visit at the last minute after Pakistan complained that her appearance was scheduled for the same day as a visit by Aziz. The UN wanted to move it to sometime after 24 January, but since Mukhtaran was due to leave New York on 21 January, Islamabad's complaint effectively cancelled the visit. She claimed she was not going to say anything bad about Pakistan or its government. "I was just going to talk about my work and what people are doing," she told the Times. Aziz claimed he didn't know that Mukhtaran was due to appear.