PAKISTAN
FEMICIDE, MISOGYNY, PATRIARCHY

Saying 'not all men' means you're part of the problem

PUBLISHED 26 JUL, 2021
IMAGES STAFF
DESK REPORT

Men need to step up and stop detracting from a very important conversation.

How many acts of violence and how many murdered women will it take for us to admit we have a problem? After a harrowing week following the murder of Noor Mukadam, on Monday morning we saw that 'not all men' was trending on Twitter — and that did not go down well with us.

Women are dying, they are literally being slaughtered, and a section of our society does not want to call out men because "not everyone is evil". Complicity is as evil as the crime itself because complicity exonerates the criminal, it lets their behaviour continue unabated and tells the victim that no one is on their side. Ignoring someone's behaviour because they are your friend or brother or whatever makes you as bad as them.

When the conversation is about one gender and how it is rampantly subjected to violence and you decide to throw in the 'not all men' detractor, you are complicit in letting the abusers and harassers and murderers continue their horrendous acts without any accountability.

There are too many tweets and opinions online regarding 'not all men' to tackle but we've addressed some of the most common 'justifications'. Here goes.

"Oh, but it happens everywhere, not just Pakistan."

Yes, but we live in Pakistan and Noor was murdered in Pakistan, as were Saima, Quratulain and hundreds of thousands of other women whose names we don't even know. When a crime happens in Pakistan, our outrage will be a thousand times more than if it happens elsewhere because we live here. That victim was one of us.

When it happens in our own backyard, it does and should pinch us more.

But why did she go to his house/get in his car/meet him/put herself in that situation?

Counter question: why did he kill her? Victim blaming is not going to solve this problem.

When you say you are not victim blaming by asking these questions, please know you are because your outrage is directed towards how the victim put themselves 'in harm's way' as opposed to the act of violence.

What about your father/brother/son/husband/cousin/best friend?

When attention is called to men being the main perpetrators behind gender-based violence, it's not a personal attack on your father, brother, son, husband etc or you.

But, do keep in mind that the rapists, killers and harassers of the world are all someone's brother/son/father/husband. They were not spawned in a lab, ready to be inflicted upon society like a plague. They are among us every day and they don't have a sign tattooed on their foreheads saying that they are rapists or killers.

Not every man is a rapist

No, not every man is a rapist, but in a society where harassment is brushed under the rug, how many men have done things to make women uncomfortable? How many men in positions of power — and men do occupy majority of positions of power in Pakistan — have used their influence to improve the conditions for women? Or have they, in fact, used that power to continue abuse or let others continue?

Making women uncomfortable is a form of harassment too and unless we wake up and realise that, we'll continue to live in a society where these things persist and are hushed up until someone dies.

These situations rarely begin with murder. There is a lead up but those aggressions are so common that women brush them off as 'normal', something 'everything goes through'. They are NOT normal. Abuse is NOT normal. Gas-lighting is NOT normal. The sooner we realise how toxic these behaviours are, the sooner we can start calling them out and stop accepting them as normal.

So no, not all men are rapist but all men should denounce these acts and have conversations which will give them a deeper understanding of the issues women face.

Not all men

Does reading about toxic behaviour that sounds eerily familiar make you feel uncomfortable? Does your heart beat a little faster thinking about the time you sent some explicit messages to an unsuspecting woman or you didn't take no for an answer? Does reading of women's experiences of harassment make you feel angry not because women had to experience this but because that harassment sounds uncomfortably familiar?

A late night text to a female colleague, a slight brush against a woman in a grocery store, staring at a woman walking on the road in jeans, zooming in on a lower neckline in a picture on Instagram, being persistent and flirting with a woman who has already said no and thinking it's 'romantic', laughing at a crude joke at the expense of a woman, looking at a violent threat online and not reporting it — or being silent when you see these problematic patterns in the society. Introspect instead of saying not all men.

Yes all men

If you truly believe that not all men are complicit, then prove it. Stop getting upset when you see posts on Twitter saying 'yes all men' and prove that not all men are complicit. Be an ally, not an adversary. When you come across a woman who you don't agree with, don't throw out expletives to try and put her down.

In the wake of a series of acts of violence against women, stories are being shared online of other aggressors, ones who haven't escalated to the level of murder yet. Listen to these stories, even if it makes you uncomfortable and understand what makes a monster. No one is born like this, they're created every time you let an act of aggression or harassment go.

When you post and say 'not all men' you are minimising the pain of women. You are missing the point and detracting from the conversation. If you truly believe you are not one of those men then great, pat yourself on the back, give yourself a thumbs up and stay quiet. Listen to what women are saying. Stop making this about yourself and listen, because women in Pakistan have a lot to say and it's time someone finally listens.

So yes, all men, not because all men are harassers but because all men are complicit. You aren't doing enough to help and you need to recognise it. Call out your friends when they objectify women, understand that no woman is asking for it, stop toxic behaviours. Social media is currently glorifying behaviour such as not staring at women or not harassing them, but that is simply the bare minimum. All men need to step up so that the ones who perpetrate acts of violence against women can be brought to justice.

There's another far more relevant phrase being circulated on social media right now that we all need to hear and use — educate your sons.

Every rapist is someone's son. Every murderer is someone's son. Every harasser is someone's son. Teach them now so they don't become the problem later.

FEMICIDE, MISOGYNY, PATRIARCHY

PAKISTAN

Women are angry. Men will witness
This was another case of a man thinking he needed to show a woman her place, and things got out of hand.

Aisha S

Published 3 days ago


It was a day of anger. Women were angry. And men were to bear witness.

This was a day different from all the other days. Usually, men are angry, women stand down. But on that day, when we staged a sit-in at the #JusticeForNoor protest in Islamabad; a Sunday — a day when most people in the capital stay home with their families, now there is a dark shadow cast on the word family itself. Yet, this seemed like a new family; these women who had come together for a cause.

I stood in an enclosure roped in by volunteers who wouldn’t let anyone in except women and trans people. A speaker at the protest said: This is our space and while we applaud the men who have shown up in solidarity, today we ask them to stand back and stay quiet.

We were also told that the district officer had not permitted us to march beyond the sit-in at the press club, but we insisted we must march to the point closest to our parliament. We were taxpayers and we had demands — it was a simple case of wanting representation and being heard.

A participant speaking at the protest calling for justice for Noor Mukadam in Islamabad. — Photo by writer

We walked from the press club to the famous D-Chowk, one foot after another. In front, a woman wearing two-inch platform heels walked too, finding it harder than the rest of us in traditional khussas, but walking nonetheless in the same formation, her short hair clumped together from the sweat. It was a scorching afternoon and the sun beat down on us at about half boiling point. Inside us all, there was a slight thaw from the numbness we all felt over the last few days when we received news of 27-year-old Noor’s beheading — a violent murder, but an intent all too common. A man thought he needed to show a woman her place, and things got out of hand.

These streets belong to all of us, they are not men’s property — a young woman yelled into a crackling microphone. She stood atop a pickup with a banner honouring the three recently slain women at the hands of the men. Her voice was shrill, from screaming azadi slogans, and from just being a woman. We need a base voice in the rally, I said to my friend who was also a speaker. She smiled back from behind her Covid mask. At that time, humour felt like resistance.

Behind me, young girls raised a poster over their heads that read — raise better men. Almost all of us had deep sunset orange henna on our hands, intricately applied. The day Noor was murdered was the day we were all supposed to celebrate Eidul Azha and be merry. We were supposed to make offerings; not be an offering.

Protesters calling for justice for Noor Mukadam. — Photo by writer

I was marching somewhere in the middle of the crowd. Some women had dyed their hair blue, pink, and silver — it’s in vogue. Girls were wearing sleeveless, there were women in niqabs and there were women who were dupatta-clad, some women were demure, others boisterous, all focused on one single motive — mourning.

We walked, we chanted shame-shame-shame, and we walked some more.

When we turned onto the eight-lane Jinnah Avenue, we grew wide like a river that meets an ocean, in front of us was Constitution Avenue. The symbolism was unmistakable. Our founding father and his sister side-by-side in politics gave Pakistan a visual blueprint of how to behave, and our constitution, guaranteeing our protection and our equality. Our founding father died a year after the nation’s birth, his sister suspiciously dead not long after.

In Pakistan, women’s Constitutional rights are guaranteed, but are generally out-claused by other matters that are more important to the country than 51% of its population. Still we walked, onwards. To our right was commercial area and on our left were the banks that help roll out loans to enable the commercialism — all of this is mostly for men. We marched between the two, daring to ask, daring to name our murderers, daring to be soft, daring to be hard and to be shell-shocked; one more loudspeaker chant: give patriarchy one last push to its final end!

An attendee speaking at the protest in Islamabad. — Photo by writer

I chanted dry-mouthed, voice grainy. Maybe for us women, pushing patriarchy down may require much more than a nudge. I was parched and asked a friend to buy me some from water from a street hawker. The water was like hot soup. I thought of blood; blood is drawn out of women, much like hot soup. I’ve become morbid. Dark thoughts are a consequence of knowing too much. It is also a consequence of choosing not to cope by ignoring the problems our society coughs up again and again — violence against women, domestic violence, victim-blaming, and the well-funded war on women.

Call the gender wars what you may, but the blood must remain within our skins — no need to bleed us out because of minor discomfort to a moral code like honour. Feel dishonour, but please do not kill for it. Someone recognised their friend and rushed to them for a hug; they trembled and held each other tight while we marched on around their little friendship island. I am so glad you had the courage to show up, she told her friend.

We were promised that Noor’s friend was to speak, but she couldn’t. She was overcome by the protest and by the trauma it unleashed. I would be too. We had heard witness testimony earlier of a sister of a slain woman. She spoke about her nieces witnessing the crime. She spoke of delayed justice. She spoke of evidence tampering. She spoke of death. Her voice didn’t rattle, she had recounted it over and over again, but the rest of us shuddered and cried over the relatability of it — the familiar feeling of not being believed. Of getting silenced. Every story began with silencing, and every story was un-silenced because of social media’s ability to garner support for the underdog.

We finally sat down on the road to the parliament — the road blazing hot. This was it. This is where we say goodbye to Noor, but not to our need to bring her up every day of our lives; in memory, in words, and in a very cautious life for our daughters.

Why do we wait for a hashtag to get justice? The last speaker asked us. We nodded. The question assumes that #JusticeForNoor will get Noor Mukadam justice.

When we slowly walked back home from D-Chowk, banners in toe, the birdsongs from the trees along the well-heeled parts of Islamabad were louder than usual. I gathered some wildflowers along the roads leading back to my home. They now sit blooming in an earthen vase near a poster from the protest. They are also loud.

Aisha is a freelance writer and the Co-Founder of Women’s Advancement Hub.

FEMICIDE, MISOGYNY, PATRIARCHY

PAKISTAN

Noor of our nation

Rafia Zakaria

Published July 28, 2021 -

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

I DID not know Noor Mukaddam personally, but I am related to her family and thus to their suffering. But one does not have to know Noor or be related to her to be utterly gutted and devastated by her death. The circumstances of the case are well-known by now and it would be accurate to say that they have devastated an entire country.

Moments of such deep and soul-crushing tragedy are rare; they stun and surprise not simply as a consequence of individual facts but also in their capacity to reveal the face of the nation that may at other times be obscured by the bows and baubles society affixes to pretty itself up.

Editorial: It would not be an exaggeration to describe Pakistan as no country for women

It is also a moment when we are all shaken by moral whiplash, slapped awake and forced to confront the absolute brutality of the society we have created, one that permitted a killing whose horror must never leave us. Noor has left us — truly light has left us — sitting with this record of our astonishing failure in the darkness of grief.

Noor’s death came in the wake of a lurid melee of cases of Pakistani men slaughtering Pakistani women. Just days before her death, Pakistan, or rather those Pakistanis who mourn such crimes and killings, had witnessed another act of bloodthirsty femicide. Quratulain, whose picture as a beautiful glowing bride was put side by side with the photo of her bruised and battered corpse, was killed allegedly by her husband.

Perhaps the new tools of virtual connection can bring together the grieving whose goal is to create a Pakistan that does not just belong to men.

If her bloated and beaten face were not devastating enough, there was the testimony of her young daughter narrating, in the lilting, sing-song voice of a child, the moment-by-moment narrative of how her mother was beaten to death. She said, he put on songs — to drown out the noise of the torture — but she, along with her three younger siblings, heard everything. She saw it, too, her mother being doused in water and shivering in the air conditioning, the punches and the beating her father dealt out, a dying mother whose cries for help were unheard or ignored.

When it was all over, her father reportedly went to sit in the car and drink, leaving the children, the youngest only two years old, in the house with their mother’s corpse. Society’s truth falls off the lips of children, pure and untouched as they are by the filth of ulterior motives and the dictates of ego that taint the rest of us. Pakistan’s truth is that we kill women and leave children to watch over their bodies.

Quratulain’s murderer is behind bars for the moment, but he need not worry. If you can count on one thing in Pakistan, it is the unceasing march of murders of women; one happened today, another yesterday and several more will occur before the week is out.

Sitting in his jail cell, her alleged killer can feel confident, even smug, that the attention given to Noor will perhaps turn public attention away from him, and he, the son of a locally powerful man in Hyderabad, will be quietly bailed out of prison and roam free. In Pakistan in 2021, monsters roam loose but women are restrained, constrained, maimed and killed. No one has even thought about what he might do to the little girl, his daughter, who told everyone the truth about how her mother was murdered in cold blood.

As if on cue, to illustrate just how rich men walk free, Shah Hussain, the monster who brutally stabbed law student Khadija Siddiqui 23 times, walked out of prison on July 24 without completing his sentence, which was a paltry five years in the first place. We forgive the killers, we forget the crimes and we bury the women. Shah Hussain is roaming around as if nothing had happened, as if the life of a woman he stabbed has not been ruined.

Somewhere in our midst are those Pakistanis who are truly anguished and ashamed of how this country failed Noor Mukaddam and all those who have come before her. For them, the challenge of the coming days will be to translate grief into action and into attention. Public scrutiny plays a role in pushing prosecutorial action, in ensuring that the government and authorities do not drop the ball, that the parents of a killer do not pretend to empathise with the victim in one moment and refuse to turn over evidence in the other.

There is no doubt that it is the continuity of public attention that will ensure that a killer caught red-handed with the victim’s blood all over him be made to pay for his crimes. Concerned Pakistanis who want this to be a turning point must put their heads together to see how they can create Facebook groups, news update alerts, and newsletters so that factual information about the cases (rather than all the anonymous hearsay circulating on social media) can be shared.

Change has evaded Pakistan until now, but perhaps the new tools of virtual connection can bring together an army of the grieving whose goal is not to vanquish any foreign nation but rather to do what generations before them have failed to do, to create a Pakistan that does not just belong to men.

The death of Noor Mukaddam, the deaths of so many women who have died at the hands of bloodthirsty men, is what weighs on us now. It is as if the sheer horror of Noor’s case has suddenly made us all feel the burden of the bodies of dead women killed by our inability to punish men. The rage, the helplessness, the recurrent thoughts of what was done for her, have left us all grief-stricken and gasping. We grieve for Noor but we also gasp at the truth that Pakistan is a femicidal nation where we silence all women who disobey, anger or even irritate a man.

The only deliverance from our collective tragedy is through a collective reckoning unlike anything before, a piece-by-piece dissection of just how we became the sort of society where darkness kills the light.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2021

IN MEMORIAM: MY FRIEND DANISH

 SIDDIQUI

Salma Siddique 

Published July 25, 2021

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A group of men, chanting pro-Hindu slogans, beat a Muslim man during protests

 sparked by a citizenship law in New Delhi, India | Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

I try to remember my first meeting with Danish at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre of Jamia Millia Islamia, as freshly enrolled film school students in the summer of 2005.

All I have is a hazy memory of a tall fellow in a pistachio coloured, half-sleeved shirt tucked inside his jeans and a maroon backpack on his left shoulder. And oh, that he smoked and would later go on to proudly count his many sutta-converts (converts to cigarette smoking), who would join him on the terrace canteen of MCRC between training and theory classes. 

Danish was energetic, fun and hot-headed and I think everyone wanted to work on their student films with him. To have him in the crew meant one could focus more as a director on the day of the shoot. Unless, of course, you had gotten on his wrong side and he decided to not cooperate. But even then, I have a feeling he would return to the shoot within an hour of the scheduled start, making some generous comment about the ‘director’ and get to work. If you were lucky to be his friend, then he would be there for your shoot even if he was not in your official film crew. 

I cannot remember any film that I made as a student without Danish. Our final graduation film Rihhaiish (Residence, 2007) was filmed in and around Jamia Nagar in New Delhi, with a crew that consisted of our mothers, relatives and friends. In this part-autobiographic, part-political film, we poured our hearts, lives and tussles of growing up a middle-class religious minority in an increasingly majoritarian, right-wing climate in India. 

My 15-year-long friendship with Danish unfolded against each of us trying to make sense of the threat of violence that hovered over our abstracted lives. Until I joined Jamia as a postgraduate student, I dealt with my identity as an Indian Muslim woman by denying it as much as possible or limiting it to a very personal arena of family.

Danish, on the other hand, embraced his identity fully, wore it like a badge of honour and his jokes were peppered with tongue-in-cheek Islamic utterances. I too became more comfortable with myself and my history around him. 

A friend pays tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters photographer who lost his life in Afghanistan on July 16, while covering the fighting there

We, of course, had many arguments during and after our shoots, as we led high voltage lives in Delhi, our bodies and minds confused and consumed by the world that unfolded around us after 9/11. It bothered me even then that viral objects shot in lands faraway had started making their appearances in our phones. While we were studying how to make media and make meaning of media, as 21-year-olds we were also encountering instantaneous atrocity in the form of videos from Iraq and Afghanistan where the United States was fighting their ‘war on terror.’

I protected myself from these captures, while the ‘boys’ watched and shared. On a couple of occasions, I also preached some half-baked media effects theory about how instead of sensitising to human life and misery, these unreliable viral videos on our low-grade Nokia phones in 2005-06 were making us resilient to violent content. I must have been really annoying for we argued hard, fought loudly and then went to our respective partners to calm down.

But we soon made up, for it was hard to stay cross with Danish for long and he always promised company that was joyful, comforting and fast-paced. 

After Jamia, my friendship with Danish became less argumentative and more affectionate. We made another short film in 2009. His lens drew unanticipated sensitivity and tenderness from an otherwise stern and restrained Dr David Baker, the protagonist of the film.

Around this time, Danish moved to Mumbai and I occasionally crashed at his pad, envious of his plucky freedom and grateful for his friendship. I moved to the UK to pursue my PhD and we met every year either in Mumbai or Delhi.

He had joined Reuters as a photo journalist and was travelling frequently for high-risk assignments. In over ten years with Reuters, he captured many images of human conflict and resilience. My favourites remain the series on Kabul’s silver screens, the migrant labourers during Covid-lockdown in India, and the Rohingya exhaustion, which won him the prestigious Pulitzer prize. 

What was unique about Danish’s work was his desire to follow his subjects beyond the frame of iconic photographs and into the ebb of each crisis. He visited labourer Dayaram in a Bundelkhand village  and was relieved to find Zubair of Delhi riots convalescing in a local hospital. Danish cared enough to see that people were more than iconic photographs and fearlessly sought to represent human lives in as ethical a manner as is possible in these moments of crisis. 

It was Danish’s strong attachment to his lived community in Jamia and an imagined one in India and beyond, that made him take up many risky assignments. The dialectic of Muslim terror and Muslim persecution suffused his work and thought. His courage was a quest, a drive to dive deep into the heart of the problem of sectarian violence, if such a heart can ever be located. 

We met for the last time in March 2020, right after his coverage of the Delhi riots. I was visiting for a few weeks and he was ‘lying low’ after receiving unending umbrage from the online right-wing trolls. He described how he got that iconic photo of a man being beaten to near-death by Hindutva mobsters. It involved subterfuge, pretending to be a newsperson sympathetic to the mobsters who invited him to join them on their rampage.

When he started clicking photos that they did not wish to be captured, the mob got suspicious. They demanded his photo ID and it was his Hindu colleague who managed to lead him out of the tangle, which also involved a good amount of fast running to escape the situation. 

I was stunned as to how three decades of mediatised stories of riots that our generation has grown up with in India starting from the 1990s, had come to inhabit my friend’s body. I knew what having that body meant, one where no personal memory resides outside of the shadowy geographies of hate. He had sought to document these as a duty, and his responsibility to the weak and persecuted. 

The CAA, he pointedly told me, if it comes, will not affect us.

“It is the rickshawallah in Jamia who will have no papers to prove where his forefathers came from and where they went,” he said.  I had been worried about his health and well-being for over a year now, and our messages had lost some of the earlier political piquancy. I was sounding more and more like a mother, a sister and a politically disinterested friend. After his brief arrest in Sri Lanka in 2019, those close to him were worried about the calculated risks he was taking to report his stories.  

Last month when he mentioned his upcoming trip to Afghanistan, I was more relieved than worried, since his Covid-19 coverage in India had caused him much personal angst as well as the usual online hate.

“Afghanistan mein zyada adventure karne ki zaroorat nahin hai (No need to go on an adventure in Afghanistan),” I wrote.

“Let’s see, Afghanistan is an adventure itself,” he replied with a laughing emoji.

Two days ago, when I watched the WhatsApp videos he was making in the Humvee, I lightly chuckled at how he must be enjoying all the action, the shaky camerawork and being the star that he was. 

An avid biker himself, Danish also liked to shoot in moving vehicles. These viral videos are no longer as grainy as they were in 2005 and, at least, I could no longer argue about the veracity of these images since he was filming the violence himself. I responded with animal emojis, cloaking my anxieties with funny symbols, half-worried that anything more will encourage him to take further risks against the Taliban.

But he was already also sharing everything on Twitter, and the platform that brought him much hate also fetched him much adoration and admiration. 

As Danish’s friend who intensely felt and shared his curiosity about the experiential patterns of Muslim minority and majority contexts, I will grieve my buddy endlessly.

When we spoke a few months ago, he asked me what was keeping me so busy. When I said “writing”, he brought forth his usual dismissive, funny self: ‘Abey kitna likhogi tum [‘Dude, how much will you write’]!”

I regret not telling him then that I too had been touched by his incandescence and curiosity, and that meeting him in Jamia perhaps changed me forever. Rest in peace my beloved friend, the good fight will go on. 

Salma Siddique is a writer and researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin

Republished from The Wire

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 25th, 2021

In-Depth
The untamed market for wild animals in Pakistan

Haniya Javed

THE HERALD

PAKISTAN

A white lion cub in a private zoo in Karachi | Tahir Jamal, White Star


Chaudhry Usama Wains received a message on his Facebook page in January 2018. An aspirant for a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly seat was interested in buying a lion and wanted it delivered to a specific location in Peshawar. Wains, who deals in animals, drove from his home in Faisalabad along with an African lion and a couple of companions a few days later. As they were about to reach the designated spot, two cars approached them. Some men got out of them and took away the lion forcibly — without paying a penny for it.

Wains does not know who the lion snatchers were but he suspects that they were sent by the politician who had sought the lion’s delivery.

Politics and lions have a close association in Pakistan. Politicians who make a name for themselves often come to be known as the lions – undisputed rulers – of their respective constituencies or districts. A few of them have gone on to earn the title of Sher-e-Punjab — the lion of Punjab province; the most famous of them being a former chief minister and provincial governor, Malik Ghulam Mustafa Khar. At least one political leader, Nawaz Sharif, has been elevated by his supporters to the exalted status of a babbar sher — a lion king. When he arrives to address public gatherings, he is always greeted with cheers of dekho dekho kaun aya, sher aya, sher aya (look, who is here — a lion).

For some inexplicable reason, however, a lion is not included in the list of election symbols approved by the Election Commission of Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif’s party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), has, therefore, settled for the next best thing – a tiger – as its election symbol. By a stroke of linguistic luck, they are still able to call their symbol a sher — a word locally used for both a lion and a tiger.

Love for shers runs high in the PMLN’s echelons. In 2009, Nawaz Sharif’s nephew Salman Shahbaz obtained a special permit from the federal government to import two Siberian tigers from Canada. His father, Shehbaz Sharif, was Punjab’s chief minister at the time.

The issuing of the permit created a big stir in the news media. Siberian tigers – scientifically called panthera tigris altaica – face a threat of going extinct and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a global covenant which Pakistan is a signatory to, prohibits their trade. The media coverage of the whole affair and the criticism it generated forced Salman Shahbaz to hand over a male tiger he had imported before the news broke to Punjab’s wildlife department which has kept it at the Murree Wildlife Park in Bansra Gali since then.

Park officials disclose that the tiger has become weak. It is also living a solitary life since its intended partner was never brought to Pakistan.

Some other shers – caged or chained – have been spotted at PMLN’s election gatherings and protest rallies. Many of the party’s candidates in past elections have also paraded lions during their campaigns to mobilise support.

More often than not, these animals have been sold and purchased by skirting around, if not entirely flouting, rules and regulations.

The latest scramble among politicians to procure lions was witnessed in the run-up to the general elections on July 25, 2018. In a phone interview, Wains says he sold as many as 12 white lions and 19 brown lions between the months of April and July this year to different PMLN candidates in various parts of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces. “I do not share the PMLN’s political ideology but the party was good for my business.”

Simba chained in his enclosure on Hamza Hussain’s rooftop in Karachi | Haniya Javed

Wains first saw a lion up-close at the house of a friend in Lahore about two and a half years ago. The animal scared him. “I had kept dogs as pets but there is a huge difference between a dog and a lion,” he says. In subsequent visits to his friend’s place, he gradually started feeling comfortable around the lion.

By December 2016, he fell so much in love with the animal that he decided to buy one for himself. He obtained an import permit and contacted a trader in South Africa who promised to send him a lion for 300,000 rupees (inclusive of delivery charges). Wains paid him around 200,000 rupees in advance – around 65 per cent of the total – as was agreed between the two. After receiving the advance money, the trader stopped taking his calls and disappeared.

In March 2017, Wains made another attempt. The deal went through successfully this time round and he received his first African lion around a month later. It was not a wild animal, according to Wains, but was bred at a farm.

Soon, he started thinking of setting up his own lion breeding farm. He spent some time learning animal farming from two other wildlife breeders – one based in his own hometown, Faisalabad, and the other operating in Karachi – who breed a variety of animals such as deer and ostrich. He then imported eight more lions and set up two farms — one in Islamabad and another in Muzaffargarh. The second one is still under construction, he says.

Wains started his lion breeding business while he was still a student. His family often reprimanded him for indulging in it, especially when he would bring some lions home. “My brothers have small children. They were terrified to let their children be close to the lions,” he says. Overtime, though, they all became supportive of his venture.

Wains has three personal profiles on Facebook. In one of them, he calls himself a zoo owner; another describes him as the CEO in Wild Pets Club; the third has a picture of a man in his early twenties. “I am [a] Wild Animals Exporter. I have all wild animals for sale. I have three offices in South Africa, Mexico and Pakistan,” reads his personal description in one of the profiles.

Wains now has several animals at his farms, including a snake, two deer – each four months old – several parrots and many big cats: a 10-month-old pair of white lions, an 11-month-old female white lion, a 10-month-old wild lion and a farm-bred one of the same age. He sells the African lions he breeds for a minimum price of 550,000 rupees (inclusive of delivery charges). Stung by what happened to him in Peshawar, he has started collecting 50 per cent of the price before making a delivery.

In August 2018, an Indian named Karthik used a Facebook forum to accuse Wains of scamming him. Karthik’s post alleged that Wains had promised to send him a lion in India via a train from Pakistan for 3,000 US dollars that were to be deposited in a bank account in Malaysia. After Karthik transferred the money in two installments, he alleged, Wains stopped responding to his calls.

Wains denies the allegations. He says he does not export lions. “It is difficult to have them cleared from the customs to take them out of the country,” he says. “You need to pay a lot of money and also procure a CITES permit from the government.” It “is a hassle” he prefers avoiding.

Atif Imtiaz with one of the white lions at the Wildlife Experience Center in Karachi | Haniya Javed

On a recent Sunday evening, Hamza Hussain climbs a flight of stairs along with two young men to enter a roofless enclosure at the top of his 350 square yard house in Karachi’s PECHS area. A three-year-old brown African messai lion is lounging in the enclosure, tied to a concrete pillar with a chain and holding a meaty bone in its mouth. It stares vacantly at Hussain and his companions. The two men want to photograph themselves with the lion. They take turns to pose just behind it. The lion looks unperturbed. It seems accustomed to people moving around it.

Hussain, who is in his mid-twenties and works as a freelance videographer and restaurateur in Karachi, purchased the animal from a dealer in Lahore when it was a small cub. He named it Simba and initially housed it in a small room – on the floor right below the enclosure – which has enough space to accommodate just a single bed and a cupboard.

Simba was born in Lahore with deformed legs (probably due to the deficiency of Vitamin D) but his deformity has been cured now. “It was very social when it first came into my house. It would sleep with me in my bed,” says Hussain.

As Simba grew up, Hussain arranged a bigger space for it. He built a 2,000 square yard facility to house it near a village in Thatta district — just outside Karachi. The lion got 1,000 square yards of space to just move about — almost double of what it needs according to WWF-Pakistan’s guidelines. Hussain now brings it home only on weekends.

He also keeps some other animals, including 35 pythons, at his Thatta facility. The smallest python is five feet long. He initially purchased 100 of them from Jay Brewer Prehistoric Pets, a company in the United States – having contacted the seller through its website – but some of them died and some others he sold.

These days, Hussain is looking for a female companion for Simba. “If I cannot find one locally, I will import it from South Africa,” he says.

Finding the animal locally should not be hard. Multiple Facebook groups offer African lions, scientifically known as Leo Panthera, for sale. Three cubs, each four months old, are available for 750,000 on one group’s page. Another group offers two brown East African cubs of messai variety for 450,000 rupees (available for delivery at any location in Pakistan with an additional charge of 15,000 rupees).

The video of a four-month-old white cub lounging on a chair in the lawn of a private property in Karachi also made rounds on social media in September this year. It was available for sale at 750,000 rupees.

Some traders are peddling – both online and offline – body parts of lions as well. Lion fat is available for use in medicine meant to relieve muscular and joint pains. A Lahore-based trading website, Bolee, has a lion claw for sale for 35,000 rupees. Another online trader displays lion nails enclosed in a silver frame and attached to a metal chain. Price: 8,000 rupees. The trader claims to have imported the nails from Kenya.

Lion hides are also being sold and purchased, reveals a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) titled An Assessment of the Scale of Illegal Wildlife Trade in Pakistan. In 2016, the report states, the wholesale price of an African lion’s hide was 70,000 rupees and Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces were its top markets.

A red-eared slider, non-native to Pakistan | Tahir Jamal, White Sta

These days, lions are being sighted in many neighbourhoods across Karachi. Veterinarian Isma Gheewala confirms that lion visits to her clinic in Defence area have become quite frequent. One of them is brought to her for declawing after every month and a half. Still, Summaiya Zaidi, a Karachi-based lawyer, could not believe her eyes when she saw a young lion inside a house in Defence.

She was returning home from a cinema around midnight in May this year. As her car stopped at an intersection, she saw a cub through a half-open gate. “At first I thought it was a cat but then I quickly realised that it was too big to be a cat,” she says in an email interview.

An intrigued Zaidi then started gathering more information with the objective to move a court against the practice of keeping lions inside homes. Along with another lawyer, Muhammad Ali Lakhani, she subsequently filed a petition at the Sindh High Court, seeking punishment for those who were keeping lions in captivity. The petitioners also asked the court to cancel all previously issued permits for the import, trade and possession of big cats. There is nothing much that the court could do.

The problem is that there is no law in Pakistan to prohibit the possession of a wild imported animal, says Uzma Khan, who works as a technical advisor for WWF-Pakistan. If, for instance, someone is keeping a lion as a pet inside their house and their neighbours do not like it, all they can do is go to the police and register a complaint under section 289 of the Pakistan Penal Code that pertains to “negligent conduct with respect to [an] animal”.

Zaidi and her co-petitioners wanted a lot more. They requested the court to order the federal government to set up a ‘scientific authority’ to determine whether or not importing lions was detrimental to the survival of their species. They also wanted clear court orders that those keeping lions as pets provide the animals enough space and other facilities they require to live in peace and comfort.

After a hearing this August, the court finally ruled that no permit/licence must be issued without fulfilling the requirements mentioned in the Pakistan Trade Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Act 2012.

This is exactly what Pakistani laws already require — at least on paper.

Afew years ago, Dr Farooq Sattar, a senior leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, met four young men, all friends, at some exhibition in Karachi. They were holding snakes that they owned as pets. An animal enthusiast, Sattar asked them if they had more animals and how and where they were keeping them. The young men had many other animals and they were keeping them inside their own homes.

Sattar made them an offer: he will arrange a public space as a habitat for their animals but they have to make them available for people’s viewing. The young men agreed. The deal looked beneficial to them: their animals would get a large place to inhabit as compared to the cramped spaces inside their homes. Letting others share the joy of seeing the animals was a small price to pay. More importantly, their partnership with the government would help them in getting import permits and possession licences.

This is how a public park in Karachi’s Nazimabad locality came to house the Wildlife Experience Center that has many local and foreign animals — a couple of crocodiles, a vulture, a toucan, flamingos, parrots, monkeys, an owl and a falcon among others. Its biggest attraction is two white lion cubs — a male and a female. On a recent evening, they can be seen roaming around in a large enclosure at the park, separated from the viewers by a glass wall. School children can be seen visiting the park on any day. Every now and then, various activities are also arranged there around the animals. The 50th birthday of the zoo’s resident tortoise was celebrated in August this year.

Every other day as night approaches and all the visitors leave, the four friends visit the park. After they get inside, the main gate is closed and a side door in the glass wall is opened. The cubs jump out eagerly, running about and cuddling with their owners.

A vulture perched on a branch in its enclosure | Tahir Jamal, White Star

Atif Imtiaz, one of the owners of the animals, has a video that shows the cubs playing with a football. They are jumping high in the air, trying to catch the ball. In their playfulness, they look like any domesticated pet.

The cubs belong to a rare breed – falling under Appendix II of the CITES – only found in the Timbavati Nature Reserve in South Africa. They have been imported under a permit issued by the federal ministry of climate change.

The process to obtain a permit is long and runs through many tiers of the government machinery. Those interested in importing animals first have to apply to get a No-Objection Certificate from the wildlife department of their province. The official cost of a certificate is 150,000 rupees but importers allege they often end up paying around 200,000 rupees in order to expedite the process of its issuance.

Provincial wildlife departments carry out their own checks to ensure that the intending importers have sufficient and suitable facilities to keep the imported animals and that they are registered with the provincial government concerned as non-commercial entities. “The provinces are required to get an affidavit from the importers that the animals being imported will not be used for commercial purposes or even for breeding,” says Samar Khan, a wildlife conservator at the federal ministry of climate change.

After a No-Objection Certificate is issued, importers approach the ministry of climate change in Islamabad which, after having received all the required fees and other documents, including a CITES permit from the country from which the animals will be imported, issues an import permit. Each permit is valid for no more than six months. Importers place their orders to buy the animals in advance so that their permits do not expire before their consignments arrive.

Once the imported animals land in Pakistan, a doctor, designated by the provincial wildlife department, checks them and issues a certificate on the state of their health. In normal circumstances, it takes an hour for an imported animal to get out of a seaport or an airport. “Once you bring the animals in the country,” asks Hameria Aisha, a wildlife manager at WWF-Pakistan, “is there a check and balance on their sale here?” There is none.

The closest thing to a regulatory regime is a set of guidelines issued in 2011 by the National Council For Conservation of Wildlife — now merged into the federal ministry of climate change. These guidelines for the acquisition and management of big cats state that trade of these animals should only be done by registered zoos and breeding farms and not by any individuals.

These guidelines, however, have no legal value, says Uzma Khan of WWF-Pakistan. These are merely recommendations. “We tried to push them into legislation,” she says, by filing a petition at the Lahore High Court in May 2013 through actor-writer-activist Feryal Ali Gauhar.

Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, an environment-conscious judge, was chief justice of the Lahore High Court at the time. Around 14 months after the petition was filed, he set up a commission to look into the import and possession of big cats and to devise a code of conduct for their public display during political events.

In 2016, the commission recommended that the 2011 guidelines be incorporated in wildlife laws. Wildlife is a provincial subject in Pakistan. Only provincial governments have the power to enforce laws related to the poaching and trade of wild animals and punish those found in violation of those laws. Each province has different kinds of wildlife facing different kinds of threats. It makes sense, in theory, that provincial laws are tailored accordingly.

A toucan in a cage at the Wildlife Experience Center in Karachi | Tahir Jamal, White Star


In practice, this results in a situation where there is no uniform country-wide policy to deal with wildlife-related issues. While a federal law, as mentioned earlier, prohibits the possession and breeding of wild animals for any purpose other than research, education and conservation, each of the four provinces have allowed private zoos and breeding farms that may or may not have anything to do with any of the three purposes.

On top of all this, foreign trade being a federal subject requires compliance with federal laws. As far as wild animals are concerned, their trade is governed by the Pakistan Trade Control of Wild Fauna and Flora Act. This law was passed in 2012 after Salman Shahbaz managed to obtain an apparently unlawful approval to import an animal listed on Appendix I of the CITES.

The law specifies that any animal can be imported to Pakistan as long as they are not listed on Appendix I of the CITES. It also states that importers must provide a physical environment for the animals that is similar to their natural habitat.

These provisions exist in breach rather than in compliance as do the federal government’s guidelines on the inter-provincial transport and trade of wild animals. One of the major reasons for the law not being implemented is that its implementation falls in the domain of provincial governments which often do not like federal interference in their domain.

Provincial governments also do not have the resources required for law enforcement. Sometimes, their officials do not have the will and the capacity for enforcement and at other times they are simply complicit with those involved in illegal trade. “People often bypass provincial authorities,” is how Samar Khan of the climate change ministry describes the situation.

He does not agree to the suggestion that the federal government should place a blanket ban on animal trade, especially of lions, both within the country and with other countries, as long as enforcement mechanisms remain ineffective.

No problems arise during the import process, Samar Khan says. “Difficulties in law enforcement emerge when the animals are kept at home as pets.” His answer to the problem: “Existing laws should be enforced properly so the animals are not kept in captivity for commercial or breeding purposes.”

How will proper enforcement be ensured given the federal-provincial dichotomy, and the incompetence and corruption among officials responsible for compliance on the ground? He does not offer an answer.

Online trading is even harder to detect and stop. Hundreds of websites, selling exotic wildlife species, and numerous Instagram accounts and Facebook pages operate openly offering or seeking lions, turtles, snakes, scorpions and many other animals. “Law enforcers cannot ensure surveillance of every web page,” says Samar Khan, “because provincial wildlife departments are not efficient in using the Internet and information technology.”

Uzma Khan of the WWF-Pakistan agrees to the extent that wildlife departments suffer from a lack of resources, but she also believes that tracking down and blocking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses involved in animal trade is not impossible. “If wildlife departments do not have the motivation or the capacity to curb online trade, the government should involve the federal information technology and telecommunication ministry in the process,” she suggests.

The only obstacle that prevents this from happening is that laws that govern the Internet in Pakistan do not even mention wildlife trading, says Mansoor Khan, a director at the federal ministry of information technology and telecommunication. “Prevention of online trade in wildlife does not fall in our domain.”

Even if his ministry gets the mandate to do so, it will be difficult to prevent such trade in a globalised online world. Traders can easily operate websites and social media pages from territories outside the jurisdiction of Pakistani authorities. Without a concerted global effort, piecemeal, country-specific actions are never going to work.

Some recent developments suggest that global level efforts are being made in this regard. In 2017, eBay, an online marketplace, announced that it had removed about 45,000 wildlife trading listings from its website. Similarly, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a non-profit working for animal conservation globally, launched this October what it calls a global wildlife cybercrime action plan.

The plan urges countries like Pakistan – where wildlife trade is rampant – to prioritise the detection and prevention of wildlife-related crimes both online and offline. It also suggests embedding cyber investigations into a government’s operations in the field of wildlife conservation.

“There has to be an improved customer and user awareness [through the provision of] information on wildlife poaching, online trafficking and laws around protected species,” says Tania McCrea Steele who leads the implementation of the IFAW action plan. “National governments need to block advertisements and individual users that abuse wildlife policies.”

This story was produced by the Herald, written as part of the ‘Reporting the Online Trade in Illegal Wildlife’ programme. This is a joint project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The Global Initiative Against Organized Crime funded by the Government of Norway. More information at http://globalinitiative.net/initiatives/digital-dangers. The content is the sole responsibility of the author and the publisher.

The writer is a freelance reporter based in Karachi.

This article was published in the Herald's November 2018 issue. 

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