PAKISTAN: The rape of a teenage girl in revenge for a crime committed by her brother has left residents of Raja Ram in central Pakistan shaken and questioning a deeply entrenched system of village justice.
Last month, a council of village elders ordered the rape of the 16-year-old victim after her brother was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl.
The ruling highlighted the role such councils — known as panchayats, or jirgas — play in the lives of many rural Pakistanis, who see the country’s courtrooms as a distant presence.
The councils have traditionally enjoyed broad support, thanks to their ability to offer immediate justice, compared to courts that can take years to settle a criminal case, and as much as a decade to resolve a civil dispute.
But the recent ruling, which allowed a rape victim’s brother to sexually assault another innocent girl, has unsettled Raja Ram, home to some 3,000 people.
“May God have mercy, it was such a strange day and it was such a big injustice,” said villager Amina Bibi.
“In our area there is neither a school nor a hospital, and poverty and ignorance rules here... This incident is a mark of this ignorance,” said 46-year-old Imtiaz Matila.
“It’s a stain on the name of the panchayat,” agreed another villager, 65-year-old Manzoor Hussain.
The girls have since been taken to a women’s shelter in conservative Multan, Pakistan’s fifth-largest city.
Raja Ram is just a few kilometers down the road, but feels a world away away from urban life.
Men sit around on charpoys, sheltering from the blistering heat, while women are conspicuous only by their absence, shielded from view behind the rough stone walls that surround each of the crudely built, single-story houses.
Central Punjab is also home to one of Pakistan’s most prominent advocates for women’s rights — Mukhtar Mai, whose own story offers a window into jirga justice and its brutal mistreatment of women.
In 2002, a jirga ordered Mai to be gang-raped after her brother was falsely accused of rape.
Mai, who lives a few hours north of Multan, made the unusual decision to defy her rapists and take them to court.
But in one of South Asia’s most infamous miscarriages of justice, her attackers walked free, and people continued to rely on panchayats, even as she went on to become a high-profile activist.
“It’s an honor-based system and there’s nothing more dishonorable than the rape of a woman within your family,” explained women’s rights activist Aisha Sarwari.
The men of the aggressor’s family must be shamed through the loss of their women’s dignity, Sarwari explained.
“That’s the balance of power in these communities, which makes sure that women are some kind of collateral.”
The Supreme Court, trying to bring jirgas to heel, declared them illegal in 2006.
But in an apparent backtrack this year aimed at unclogging the slow-moving court system, the government passed a new law that promotes village councils as an alternative solution to small civil disputes.
The decision, dubbed the “Jirga Law” by activists, has raised concerns about women’s rights, given the precedents set by the panchayats.
“The decisions of the jirgas have always had a negative impact on the lives of women,” said women’s rights activist Samar Minallah.
The new law does not suggest penalties for decisions like the one made by the council in Raja Ram, added Minallah, who brought the original 2006 anti-jirga petition to the Supreme Court.
But the uproar surrounding the rapes at Raja Ram has spurred the court to demand a full investigation.
Despite her concerns, Minallah is confident that the court will “step in at one stage or another to remind the state that these jirgas are against the constitution and humanity.”
Whatever the court decides, for some in Raja Ram at least, faith in the traditional system has been shaken.
“There used to be wise people in the old days who were making good panchayat decisions,” recalled resident Matila.
“They used to know the realities of the village... but now, these are the panchayat,” he said, dismissively.
Women as ‘collateral’ in Pakistan village justice
Women as ‘collateral’ in Pakistan village justice
How a Syrian refugee chef met Britain’s King Charles
- Alarnab, 48, said he had asked the king to come to the popular eatery when he met him at Buckingham Palace
LONDON: Pots clanged and oil sizzled inside the London kitchen of Syrian chef Imad Alarnab, as the former refugee who fled his country’s civil war recalled hosting King Charles III.
When the chef left his war-torn homeland in 2015, he never imagined that one day he would watch as cameras flashed and wide-eyed crowds greeted the monarch arriving at his Soho restaurant last year.
Alarnab, 48, said he had asked the king to come to the popular eatery when he met him at Buckingham Palace before an event honoring humanitarian work in 2023.
“I told him ‘I would love for you to visit our restaurant one day’ and he said: ‘I would love to’... I was over the Moon to be honest.”
The chef has come a long way since he arrived in London after an arduous journey from Damascus with virtually no money in his pocket.
Fearing for his life, he had escaped Syria after his family was uprooted again and again by fighting.
His culinary empire — restaurants, cafes, and juice bars peppered across the Syrian capital — had been destroyed by bombing in just six days in 2013.
Alarnab spent three months crisscrossing Europe in the back of lorries, aboard trains, on foot and even on a bicycle before he reached the UK.
“When I left, I left with nothing,” he told AFP, as waiters whirled past carrying steaming plates of traditional Syrian fare.
Starving and exhausted, he spent the last of his money on a train ticket to Doncaster where his sister lived.
“Love letter from Syria”
To make a living, Alarnab initially picked up any odd jobs, such as washing and selling cars, saving enough to bring his wife and three daughters over after seven months.
His love of cooking never left him though. In France, while he was sleeping on the steps of a church, Alarnab had often cooked for hundreds of other refugees.
“I always dreamed of going back to cooking,” he said.
So it wasn’t long before he found himself back in the kitchen, cooking up a storm across London with his sold-out supper clubs, bustling pop-up cafes, and crowded lunchtime falafel bars.
Alarnab’s friends gave him the initial boost for his first pop-up in 2017, and profits from his new catering business then covered the costs of later events.
He now runs two restaurants in the city — one in Soho’s buzzing Kingly Court and another nestled in a corner of the vibrant Somerset House arts center.
“I was looking for a city to love when I found London,” Alarnab said, adding it had offered him “space to innovate” and add his own modern twist to classic Syrian dishes.
Far from home, Alarnab said his word-of-mouth success had grown into a “love letter from Syria to the world” that needs no translation.
“You don’t really need to speak Arabic or Syrian to know that this is the best falafel ever,” he said, pointing to a row of colorful plates.
“There is hope”
For Alarnab, spices frying, dough rising and cheese melting inside a kitchen offered an unlikely escape from the real world.
“All my problems, I leave them outside the kitchen and walk in fresh.”
When he fled Syria, Alarnab thought going back to Damascus was forever off the table.
Yet he returned for the first time in October, almost a year to the day after longtime leader Bashar Assad was toppled in a lightning rebel offensive — ending almost 14 years of brutal civil war.
He walked the familiar streets of his old home, where his late mother taught him to cook many years ago.
“To return to Damascus and for her not to be there, that was extremely difficult.”
Torn between the two cities, Alarnab said he longed to one day rebuild his home in Damascus.
“I wish I could go back and live there. But at the same time, I feel like London is now a part of me. I don’t know if I could ever go back and just be in Syria,” he said.
Although Syrians still bear the scars of war, Alarnab said he had seen “hope in people’s eyes which was missing when I left in 2015.”
“The road ahead is still very long, and yes this is only the beginning — but there is hope.”
