Dr. Shazia Khalid after Mukhtaran Mai ...

[Hemast]

Dr. Shazia Khalid who worked in a hospital run by state-owned gas supplier Pakistan Petroleum Ltd in Baluchistan was raped by unidentified men while on duty. She was then allegedly forced to flee Pakistan along with her family for New York, USA.

“Think of me as your daughter and use your powers to bring justice to bear in my case. I have not received justice. In addition to fighting for justice in my own case, I also want to fight for justice for other women,” pleaded the 32 year-old physician who still carries the trauma of her ordeal including being sent to a psychiatric hospital in Karachi instead of being treated for her wounds.

Dr. Shazia is the second high profile victim-turned-activist (after Mukhtaran Mai) who has used international forum to bring out the atrocities committed on women in Pakistan. She was addressing a press conference organized by “Equality Now” (an NGO) in the NY.

[It is noteworthy that: In all Muslim countries even today, the 21st century, Hudood Ordinances derived from the barbaric Shariat Laws require either confession of the perpetrator(s) of rape or the eye-witness testimony of at least four Muslim adult male witness to the rape. If she is unable to prove the rape, a woman who reports rape to the police is vulnerable to prosecution herself for fornication if she is unmarried or adultery if she is married.

Presumably, when the Shariat Laws had been proclaimed during the ancient times, the Laws upheld the cultural praxis of that time, namely, the barbaric men used to treat their women like dirt so much so that the males could not care less if they were raping women in front of eye-witnesses.

What Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Pakistani Political Party “Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal” (MMA), says is siginificant. Praising the Taliban, he says, “Taliban during its rule of Afghanistan provided justice to people as per Shariat laws”

The deafening silence on the part of so called moderate Muslims living in the civil societies of India, U.K., USA, is an eloquent testimony to their concurrence of the kind of “Justice” meted out to their women folk under barbaric Shariat Laws.]