Genocide Studies Media FileFebruary 4-10, 2007

A compendium of news stories, features, and human rights reports pertaining to genocide and crimes against humanity. Compiled by Adam Jones. Please send links and feedback to adamj_jones@hotmail.com.

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ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

"Rockumentary Rages Against Genocide"
By Jim Keogh
Telegram.com, 9 February 2007
"[...] The documentary 'Screamers' is unstinting in its condemnation of people's willingness to look past history's most unpleasant truths. Director Carla Garapedian turns her camera, and clear sense of outrage, on the nearly century's worth of denial of the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkish soldiers in 1915. This first genocide of the modern era was an opening act for a hundred years of institutionalized killing to follow, including the Holocaust (Garapedian quotes Hitler in 1939 as he ordered the annihilation of European Jewry, 'Who remembers the Armenians?'), Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. The film is no desultory collection of talking heads -- though there are authors, pols and historians on hand to offer context -- but adds some contemporary pop to transmit the message that if you’re going to scream, turn the volume up to 11. Garapedian follows the hard rockers System of a Down on their European concert tour, where they mesh their music with images of genocides ranging from Armenia to Darfur, hoping to stoke their audience's conscience as they fill their eardrums. All the band members are of Armenian descent and some of their more urgent songs play like posthumous howls from the mass graves where their brethren were buried. The concert footage is spliced deftly with more sobering passages, including interviews with lead singer Serj Tankian's grandfather, who survived the massacre of his village by the Turks -- and who, despite failing health, can recall the gruesome details of his family’s murder. His story about the fate of his brother after the two were orphaned is as heart-wrenching a piece of cinema as you’ll ever see. [...]"

"Genocide Resolution Gains Steam"
By Pam Wight
Whittier Daily News, 7 February 2007
"Having the U.S. government use the term 'genocide' to describe the World War I-era killing of Armenians would be more than a symbolic gesture for Montebello resident Jack Hadjinian. It would be a long-awaited victory he's fought to win for most of his adult life. As a board member of the San Gabriel Valley chapter of the Armenian National Committee, Hadjinian organized other members, friends and 'anyone with a consciousness who would listen' to write letters to their congressional representatives and urge them to support a resolution introduced last week by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena. The resolution calls on the U.S. government to officially recognize the killing of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide committed by Turkey's Ottoman government between 1915 and 1919. This is not the first attempt by members of Congress to push for an official genocide recognition. But this is the first time in years the issue has had a serious chance of passing in the House of Representatives, Hadjinian said. 'For years there was a huge contingency of legislators who either didn't want to take a stand on the issue or had a contrary belief,' he said. 'But now with the Democrats, there's more support.' Serge Samoniantz, chairman of the San Gabriel Valley ANC, said the approval of Schiff's resolution could prompt the media to use the term 'without qualifications' such as the word 'alleged.' 'It's really only a non-binding resolution, a statement from the House basically,' said Samoniantz, a Whittier resident. 'But with Nancy Pelosi ... she's been a long-time supporter of it. It's an important statement that has a good chance of passing.' [...]"

INDIA/KASHMIR

"Indian Army and Police Implicated in Kashmir Killings"
By Somini Sengupta
The New York Times, 6 February 2007 [Registration Required]
"[...] Kashmiris have long accused the Indian authorities of disappearances and extrajudicial killings; one local human rights group estimates that 10,000 people have disappeared since the anti-Indian insurgency began here in 1989. Nor have civilians been immune to the savagery of militants; beheadings are among their favored tactics. India blames its rival and neighbor, Pakistan, for aiding and arming the insurgents. Pakistan denies the charge, and does not recognize India’s claim to Kashmir. Claimed by both countries, Kashmir has been a center of strife for nearly 60 years. While the violence has calmed considerably since a 2004 peace deal between India and Pakistan, it has hardly ended the bloodshed or diminished the presence of Indian troops here. India says troop reduction can begin only when the militants lay down their weapons. Those troops have been blamed repeatedly for human rights abuses here, most recently by a 156-page report released last October by Human Rights Watch, which detailed dozens of cases in which, it said, the state had failed to hold its security forces accountable for suspected abductions, killings and detentions. Among the most infamous of those cases were the March 2000 killings in the southern village of Pathirabal of five men, whom the army identified as foreign terrorists responsible for a massacre of Sikh civilians. The men, whose bodies had been burned and badly mutilated, turned out to be civilians abducted by the army, according to relatives and a subsequent federal investigation. In a rare instance of prosecution, five Indian soldiers were charged with the killings, but the case remains stuck in the courts nearly seven years later, and the accused remain on the job. The army insists that they be tried by an internal court martial, and not a civilian court. [...]"

IRAN/UNITED STATES/NUCLEARISM

"The Edge of the Abyss"
By Eric Herter
CommonDreams.org, 3 February 2007
"[...] For those who think a US strike on Iran will be a cakewalk like the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, it's important to know that there are grave differences. Here are some likely outcomes of attacking Iran: Everyone in Iraq -- including the Shiite government and army we've been supporting -- attacks our forces there, aided by a well-armed Iranian army of 650,000; Iran uses its Chinese and Russian missiles to hit our troops in Iraq, our ships in the Gulf, and Israel; Syria, linked by a mutual-defense treaty to Iran, joins the war with large stocks of chemical and biological weapons; The US and Israel use nuclear weapons to prevent our forces in Iraq from being annihilated; Huge numbers, possibly millions, are sickened and die as radiation is blown by prevailing winds into Pakistan and/or India; The Pakistani government is overthrown by its Islamic generals, who start using their nuclear missiles on US forces and Israel; Oil supplies from the Middle East are sharply curtailed, pushing American gas prices up above $10 a gallon; Worldwide outrage results in global boycotts of American products, plunging the US economy into chaos; The US government declares martial law and uses anti-terrorist laws and military force against those who protest; The US Congress and press effectively do nothing. Unfortunately, this isn’t a worst-case scenario -- all of the above are entirely possible and predictable consequences of attacking Iran. And this war is not urgently necessary; there are still many untried routes to a resolution of our impasse with Iran’s nuclear program, other then the pre-emptive war that’s long been on the wish-list of the neo-cons. [...]"

IRAQ

"UN Warns of Iraq Refugee Disaster"
BBC Online, 7 February 2007
"The flow of people being forced to leave their homes by violence in Iraq has become a humanitarian disaster, the United Nations refugee chief has said. Antonio Guterres said there were almost four million displaced people inside Iraq or in neighbouring countries. He said the international community had been 'overwhelmed' by the problem, and needed to do much more to help. About 1.8 million have left their homes within Iraq, with two million in Syria, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran. According to figures collated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, some 640,000 out of Iraq's population of 26 million fled their homes in the past year. Speaking in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, praised Jordan and Syria for accepting large numbers of Iraqis. 'The sacrifices made by these countries are remarkable and the international community needs to assume full responsibility in supporting them,' he said. 'They are having huge strains in their infrastructure ... we need to help them cope with this massive challenge.' Many refugees live in conditions of acute poverty: in Syria, almost a third of Iraqi refugee children do not go to school. 'When you have almost four million people displaced inside the country or in countries around ... we are facing a humanitarian disaster,' he said. 'This is the biggest movement of displaced people in the Middle East since the Palestinian crisis in 1948,' Mr. Guterres said, referring to the movement of Palestinians after the establishment of Israel. [...]"

"War in Iraq Propelling A Massive Migration"
By Sudarsan Raghavan
The Washington Post, 4 February 2007 [Registration Required]
"[...] As the fourth year of war nears its end, the Middle East's largest refugee crisis since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948 is unfolding in a climate of fear, persecution and tragedy. Nearly 2 million Iraqis -- about 8 percent of the prewar population -- have embarked on a desperate migration, mostly to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The refugees include large numbers of doctors, academics and other professionals vital for Iraq's recovery. Another 1.7 million have been forced to move to safer towns and villages inside Iraq, and as many as 50,000 Iraqis a month flee their homes, the U.N. agency said in January. The rich began trickling out of Iraq as conditions deteriorated under U.N. sanctions in the 1990s, their flight growing in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Now, as the violence worsens, increasing numbers of poor Iraqis are on the move, aid officials say. To flee, Iraqis sell their possessions, raid their savings and borrow money from relatives. They ride buses or walk across terrain riddled with criminals and Sunni insurgents, preferring to risk death over remaining in Iraq. The United Nations is struggling to find funding to assist Iraqi refugees. Fewer than 500 have been resettled in the United States since the invasion. Aid officials and human rights activists say the United States and other Western nations are focused on reconstructing Iraq while ignoring the war's human fallout. [...]"

ISRAEL/LEBANON

"Cluster Bombs: A War's Perilous Aftermath"
By Scott Peterson
The Christian Science Monitor, 7 February 2007
"Cease-fires end wars. Or so the Zayoun family thought, when Israel and Hizbullah agreed nearly six months ago to stop battling. But instead, this poverty-stricken Lebanese Shiite household found new agony when a remnant of this war was brought into their living room: one Israeli cluster bomblet, out of an estimated 1 million such unexploded munitions that carpet southern Lebanon. The US State Department said last week that Israel 'likely could have' misused American-supplied cluster bombs by peppering civilian areas from which, Israel says, Hizbullah was operating. Similar Israeli usage in 1982 led to a six-year ban of US sales of the controversial weapon, though analysts do not expect such a sanction of the US ally today. But as UN-organized demining teams toil across olive groves and tobacco farms to destroy what they call an 'unprecedented' concentration of the controversial cluster bombs here, the casualties continue to mount. The Zayoun family alone accounts for three of a postwar Lebanese toll that today stands at 184 wounded and 30 dead. Father Mohammed blames himself for picking up the small metal cylinder and putting it in his bag while cutting thyme in a field that had been marked with red and white warning tape. Just after nightfall, with the house lit only by a few candles, his 4-year-old daughter Aya Zayoun found the cluster bomb in her father's bag outside. She took it inside to the living room and handed it to her older sister, Rasha, who thought it was a toy bell. Then it exploded. [...]"

"The 'Toys' That Kill in Lebanon"
By Nicholas Blanford
Time Magazine, 2 February 2007
"[...] Cluster sub-munitions are supposed to explode on impact. Manufacturers claim a dud rate of around 5 percent, but the U.N. estimates that more than 30 percent of cluster bomblets fired into south Lebanon failed to detonate. When hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting began to return to the area, they found thousands of cluster bomblets in gardens, houses and streets, orange orchards, banana plantations and olive groves, often hanging from the branches. Chris Clark, Lebanon program manager for the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC), said that his organization had logged some 840 individual cluster bomb strikes, covering an area of 13 square miles. A decorated former British soldier who oversees global operations for the U.N. Mine Action Service and has cleared munitions in Kosovo and Sudan, Clark says the cluster bomb situation in south Lebanon 'is the worst I've ever seen,' adding, 'It's unprecedented and unbelievable.' ... A map of cluster bomb strike sites in south Lebanon pinned to the wall of his office illustrates the severity of the problem. A red rash covers much of the map, concentrated on the areas south of Tyre, and around the towns of Tibnine and Nabatieh. By mid-February, Clark hopes to have 55 teams in the field collecting cluster munitions, and hopes that the area could be cleared by year's end. 'That doesn't mean that there won't be any more cluster bombs, but they won't be causing casualties on a daily and weekly basis,' he says. Clark says his mission is hampered by a lack of cooperation from the Israeli military. Israel has been repeatedly asked to aid the bomblet-clearing mission by providing such information as the grid coordinates of cluster-bomb selected targets, the number of strikes and the types of submunition. He says that the U.N. has received 'nothing' from Israel. Israeli spokesman Regev counters that Israel is considering the U.N. request for 'more information,' but he says that Israel has already given the U.N. maps of strike areas and technical information that are 'sufficient' for helping the bomb-clearing effort. [...]"

JAPAN/"COMFORT WOMEN"

"Second World War 'Sex Slaves' to Testify Before Congress"
By Justin McCurry
The Guardian, 9 February 2007
"Relations between Japan and the US will come under renewed pressure next week when the US Congress debates a resolution calling on Tokyo to issue a formal apology for forcing tens of thousands of 'comfort women' to work in military brothels before and during the second world war. The resolution's author, Democrat Michael Honda, said yesterday he was confident the resolution would pass by the end of March, shortly before the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, visits Washington for talks with the US president, George Bush. The move comes after senior Japanese politicians voiced unprecedented public criticism of the US invasion of Iraq. The defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, said recently that Mr Bush was wrong to have ordered the invasion in the mistaken belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction; last week the foreign minister, Taro Aso, described Washington's Iraq policy as 'immature.' Mr. Honda's resolution calls on the Japanese prime minister to 'formally and unambiguously apologise for, and acknowledge' the sexual enslavement of as many as 200,000 mainly Asian women by the imperial army in the 1930s and 40s. 'There are parties who are going to be lobbying against the resolution also, but on the whole we're enjoying bipartisan support,' he told reporters. ... Mr. Honda said: 'The urgency is based upon the age of the women who were victims of the policy. Every year these ladies get older and older and they start to die off.' Three previous resolutions failed to get beyond the committee stage. Conservative politicians in Japan are alarmed by the very real prospect of the legislation passing a Democrat-controlled congress. Members of the Liberal Democratic and Democratic parties will fly to Washington in a last-ditch attempt to stop the resolution from passing. [...]"
[n.b. This is a promising initiative; could the Democratic-controlled Congress also call for a formal apology to the millions of women of African descent who were enslaved sexually (and otherwise) in the American South?]

PERU

"Peru President Questioned in Probe of '86 Massacre"
Reuters dispatch on CNN.com, 9 February 2007
"Peruvian President Alan Garcia was being questioned by a judge Friday about a 1986 prison massacre of suspected guerrillas by state security forces during his first term as president, from 1985-1990. More than 100 suspected Maoist guerrillas were killed at El Fronton, the island prison off Lima's coast, on June 19, 1986, when marines were sent in to quell an insurrection. 'The president has arrived at the Petroperu building; he is there being questioned as a witness by a judge handling the case of the killings at El Fronton,' a spokesman at Peru's state government palace told Reuters by telephone. Garcia, members of his first government and former military personnel and officers have been questioned about the massacre since sporadic investigations began following the killings. In 2004, Peru's top court ordered a full judicial investigation into the massacre, but it was not immediately clear if Garcia's questioning on Friday was part of that investigation. ... The killings by Peruvian armed forces trying to quell riots stirred up by Shining Path rebels was one of the darkest periods in former Garcia's 1985-1990 rule. The massacres have never been fully investigated, but Garcia has been cleared of any wrongdoing. Garcia was elected to a second term as president in June last year."

RWANDA/FRANCE

"France Rejects Rwandan Team Investigating 1994 Genocide"
Associated Press dispatch on CNN.com, 9 February 2007
"The French Defense Ministry on Friday rejected what it said were plans by Rwanda -- which has broken diplomatic ties with Paris -- to send an investigating team to France in search of proof that France had a role in that country's 1994 genocide. The ministry said French authorities have learned that Rwanda planned to send a commission to France to conduct hearings in search of 'proof of the implication of the French state' in the genocide. France had peacekeepers in Rwanda at the time. However, there is 'no guarantee of independence and impartiality' of the commission, the ministry said in a statement. It noted that Rwanda's decision to break diplomatic ties with France last November argues against sending such a commission to France, 'which recognizes neither its legitimacy nor its impartiality to carry out such hearings.' Rwanda abruptly broke ties with France after Investigating Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame of ordering the assassination of the then-president of Rwanda and nine other ranking Rwandans of plotting the attack. Rwanda's genocide began hours after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was mysteriously shot down as it approached the capital, Kigali, on the evening of April 6, 1994. The French judge opened an investigation because the plane crew was French. [...]"

SUDAN/DARFUR

"Shortage of Peacekeepers Could Affect Plan for Darfur"
Sapa-AP dispatch in The Mail & Guardian (South Africa), 6 February 2007
"A shortage of African peacekeepers probably means that nations of the continent will not be able to provide enough troops to meet the United Nations target for deployment in Darfur, a United States State Department official said on Monday. Cameron Hume, who heads the United States diplomatic mission in Sudan, said the African Union probably could deploy no more than 10 000 peacekeepers at any one time in Darfur, compared with a UN goal of 20,000. Hume's account suggests a potential new source of frustration for governments and private humanitarian groups eager to provide protection and relief for the estimated 2,5-million Darfurians uprooted from their homes in a sectarian conflict that began four years ago this month. Hundreds of thousands of others have died. According to the private Save Darfur Coalition, refugees who have fled the region 'now face starvation, disease, and rape, while those who remain in Darfur risk displacement, torture, and murder.' As Hume described it to reporters, the UN has had difficulty navigating the first -- and least demanding -- of the three phases of prospective 'hybrid' UN-AU peacekeeping involvement in Darfur. Of the 185 civilian-military personnel scheduled for deployment in Darfur in the first phase, only about half are actually on duty in the region six weeks after the Sudanese government agreed to it and five months after the UN Security Council authorised it. The second phase calls for 2,500 troops who would lay the groundwork for the arrival of the remaining forces due to be sent as part of phase three. [...]"

UNITED STATES

"The Genocidal Namesake of the Hasting School of Law"
By Bruce Anderson
Counterpunch.com, 5 February 2007
"A stern visage, the picture of 19th century rectitude, looks down on passersby from a banner at the corner of McAllister and Larkin, fin de siècle San Francisco. The banner celebrates the adjacent law school, which is named after Serranus Clinton Hastings, born in New York, law degree in Indiana, on west to Iowa where he was Iowa's first congressman and first chief justice, then out to California during the Gold Rush where he became Chief Justice of the California State Supreme Court. Hastings, through his term as a congressman and founding legal father of the state of Iowa, was already a nationally-connected Democrat when he arrived in California in 1849, looking to add to the small fortune he'd made in Iowa real estate. He knew the Gold Rush also meant a land rush as thousands of Americans made their way into the under-populated state to make their fortunes. But Hastings preferred to look around for likely real estate and legal sinecures rather than pan for gold; and as he prospected for free land he also got himself a seat on California's early supreme court as its chief justice. The Mendocino Indians soon had the judge sitting on them in Eden Valley, near Covelo, which the judge had appropriated for himself as a horse and cattle ranch, remarking that he'd found the place 'uninhabited except for some Uka Indians.' The foreman of Judge Hastings' Eden Valley ranch was a giant Texan named Hall, 'Texas Boy Hall' as he was known, and a giant at 6'9" and 280 pounds, a doubly intimidating presence to the Indians who were still trying to adjust to the lethal unpredictability of ordinary-size white men when they first encountered Texas Boy, a recreational Indian killer who showed up with the first wave of white settlers in the Round Valley area in the middle 1850s, and may have killed more Indians than any other single American, including Kit Carson, the generally recognized champ. [...]"

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ISSUE: CHILD SOLDIERS

"Deprived of Love, Play and Hope, The 250,000 Children Still Fighting"
By Mike Pflanz
The Telegraph, 6 February 2007
"[...] Using children in war was supposed to have been banned 10 years ago. But 250,000 children as young as six are still involved in more than a dozen conflicts worldwide, seven of them in Africa, and others are still being recruited. The claim, from child rights campaigners, came as delegates from 50 nations gathered in Paris yesterday to accelerate efforts to stamp out the practice. Mr. Wilson and his wife, Ayaa Alicen, have seen their nine children and four nephews and nieces kidnapped or killed by Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which still holds 1,500 child fighters despite current faltering peace talks. ... The recruitment of children is repeated across the continent. In Sierra Leone, The Daily Telegraph interviewed former child soldiers who remembered being 'willing' to fight. 'They gave us food and blankets, and sometimes money. That is more than we had before, so we were willing, even though sometimes the fighting was hard,' said Abdul Kargbo, 25. Such accounts are common wherever children are forced to fight. Save the Children yesterday named the 13 countries of most concern as Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Burma, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. [...]"

ISSUE: ENVIRONMENT/GLOBAL WARMING

"Holding Bush to Account for Climate Lies, Neglect"
By John Nichols
The Nation, 6 February 2007
"[...] The Bush administration has consciously and intentionally failed for six years to address the crisis. Worse yet, the president and his aides have actively attempted to foster the fantasy that global warming: a. does not exist, b. is a natural phenomenon, c. is a good thing or d. all of the above. The combination of deliberate inaction and delusional denial has earned this president a place in history alongside all the past Neros who have fiddled while their Romes burned. But the evidence that the Bush administration tampered with scientific research on global warming in order to advance its agenda calls for more immediate sanction. The president and those around him have, as evidenced by their actions over the past six years, proven that they cannot be trusted with power. Yet, without an intervention, they will retain power for another two years. That is not a prospect to be considered casually. ... What to do? The Green Party, for reasons both of its environmental commitment and the seriousness with which it approaches issues of political accountability, has proposed a proper response. Responding to complaints from more than 120 scientists from seven federal agencies that they have been pressured to remove references to global warming from research reports, press releases, and communications with Congress, the Greens have accused the Bush administration of conspiring to deceive Congress and the America people about fundamental issues facing the nation. And there is a proper sanction for so serious an offense. ... Just as there are still those who debate whether climate change is actually taking place, there are still those who debate whether this president has committed acts that merit impeachment and removal from office. [...]"

ISSUE: GENOCIDE EDUCATION

"Americans Want Mandatory Holocaust Course"
AngusReid.com, 9 February 2007
"Many adults in the United States believe public schools should address the Jewish Holocaust as part of their curriculum, according to a poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. 79 per cent of respondents support mandatory genocide education. ... In some states, public schools are required to teach about the Holocaust, the genocide committed by Germany against Jews during World War Two. Some believe that genocide should be a required topic in public school social sciences or history classes. Given the many other topics that might also be taught in our schools, do you strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose mandatory genocide education in public schools?"
[n.b. Both the poll and the Angus Reid press release are very interesting. The poll clearly demonstrates that a strong majority of respondents favour "mandatory genocide education." But the title of the release, and the whole body of the text, are exclusively focused on the Jewish Holocaust. It is an open question how the numbers would come out if the pollsters had asked about education focused overwhelmingly or primarily on the Jewish Holocaust. My own view is that in this day and age, a strongly pluralist and comparative genocide curriculum should be developed -- not one that implicitly or explicitly prioritizes one genocide over all others.]

ISSUE: GENOCIDE RESCUERS

"Behind the Camera -- Secret Life of Man Who Saved Jews from Nazis"
By Kate Connolly
The Guardian, 10 February 2007
"He was responsible for bringing to the world a high-quality compact camera that changed the face of 35mm photography. But after dogged research by a British rabbi it has emerged that Ernest Leitz II had a secret but possibly greater claim to fame -- saving Jews from Nazi persecution in prewar Germany. Days after Hitler's rise to power, Leitz, who manufactured the Leica camera, began taking on a string of young Jewish apprentices from the town of Wetzlar where his optics factory began producing Leicas in 1925. He purposely trained them so that he could transfer them to New York to work in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US and thus rescue them from the fate that was to befall many other Jews. Others were able to escape punishment for being related to Jews by marriage, thanks to Leitz's intervention. The numbers he saved, about 50 sent to the US plus 23 others, are much smaller than those rescued by Sudeten German industrialist Oskar Schindler, to whom he is being compared. But the risks he took were arguably just as high. Only now have details of the Leica refugees come to light, thanks to the detective work of a London-based rabbi. Frank Dabba Smith, 51, rabbi of the Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue in northwest London and a Leica enthusiast, has reconstructed their stories through photographs, documents and letters of thanks from survivors and their families. Yesterday his painstaking work culminated in a posthumous award for Leitz, who died in 1956, in recognition of the efforts that risked his life and those of his family. [...]"

ISSUE: "HONOUR" KILLINGS

"'Honour Killers' Expect to Walk Free"
By M. Ilyas Khan
BBC Online, 5 February 2007
"They don't look like murderers -- but the two frail-looking, lower-caste brothers in the village of Khatan in eastern Pakistan are self-confessed killers. Mohammad Aslam and Maqbool Ahmad admit killing their sister Elahisen and a neighbour, Ghulam Nabi Shah, when they found them together in Elahisen's room on the night of 27 January. They smashed their skulls with a brick and then strangled them with a rope. Then they gave themselves up to the police saying they had redeemed their family honour. The event has a familiar ring to it. According to official figures, more than 2,700 women and about 1,300 men have been killed in honour-related offences in Pakistan since 2001. Human rights organisations put the number much higher, saying that most honour crimes are never reported to the police. Sexual indiscretion on the part of men is seldom treated as dishonourable in Pakistani families, but women are expected to be chaste. As such, the killing of women is hardly ever reported because the perpetrators are usually close male relatives. Men, on the other hand, are killed by the family of the 'dishonoured' woman and their families are more likely to seek justice from the courts. [...]"