The 25-member all-female council is likely to face hostility in a region that has long been a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban and where schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head last year for campaigning for girls' education
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Women in Pakistan’s conservative Swat valley are defying tradition by sitting on an all-female jirga – a council to resolve disputes usually restricted to men – to seek justice and fight gender discrimination, the BBC reported.
The 25-member council is likely to face hostility in a territory that has long been a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban and is where schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head for campaigning for girls’ education last year.
But its founder Tabassum Adnan, a social activist and mother of four, is determined to make history.
"Our society is a male-dominated society, and our men treat our women like slaves," Adnan told the BBC. "Maybe I could be killed. Anything could happen. But I have to fight. I am not going to stop," she said.
In Swat, as in many other regions of Pakistan, men are in charge of women’s lives. They decide whether a girl goes to school, at what age she gets married and to whom.
The women’s jirga discusses everything from land disputes to salaries and water supply. It also addresses murder, like the killing of Tahira, a Pakistani girl who was married off at 12 and died last year after her husband, mother-in-law and father-in-law allegedly attacked her with acid.
The acid burned 35 percent of the flesh on her body but as she lay dying and in terrible pain she recorded a video message naming her attackers. Her mother, Jan Bano, had encouraged her to speak out.
“She was talking until her last breath," she told the BBC.
Her tormentors were acquitted this month but Bano plans to appeal the verdict with the help of the all-female jirga.
The jirga system is controversial as it functions as a parallel justice system to the official one and its rulings have often discriminated against women.
Prominent Pakistani human rights activist Tahira Abdullah told the BBC she wants all jirgas, male or female, stopped.
"The jirga system is totally illegal, and has been declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Pakistan,” she said. “It can never be just. There are several extremely notorious cases where we have noticed that women do not get justice from jirgas, neither do non-Muslims."
Nevertheless, the jirga is a source of hope for women like Bano and Taj Mehal, another mother who lost her daughter, Nurina, to violence.
Nurina was tortured to death in May by her husband and his family, who have now been charged with murder.
"Whenever we brought applications to the judge he would tear them up and throw them away," she told the BBC. "Now our voice is being heard, because of the jirga. Now we will get justice. Before the jirga, husbands could do whatever they wanted to their wives."
Some local men also voiced their support for the jirga.
"It's a very good thing, women should know about their rights like men do, and they should be given their rights," a fruit seller told the BBC.
Local male jirga members, however, were dismissive, saying women still had no power to enforce the decisions that came out of the all-female council.
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