Pakistani acid victim commits suicide
A woman who became the
disfigured face of the shunned and forgotten women of Pakistan committed
suicide, jumping from her sixth floor apartment window in Italy last week.
Fakhra Yunus was only
22 when her husband of three years, Bilal Khar, a member of Pakistan's
politically elite Khar family, allegedly threw acid on her face while she slept
Prominent Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Younushad
endured more than three dozen surgeries over more than a decade to repair her
severely damaged face and body when she finally decided life was no longer
worth living.
The
33-year-old former dancing girl — who was allegedly attacked by her
then-husband, an ex-lawmaker and son of a political powerhouse — jumped from
the sixth floor of a building in Rome, where she had been living and receiving
treatment.
Her March 17
suicide and the return of her body to Pakistan on Sunday reignited furor over the
case, which received significant international attention at the time of the
attack. Her death came less than a month after a Pakistani filmmaker won the
country's first Oscar for a documentary about acid attack victims.
Younus' story
highlights the horrible mistreatment many women face in Pakistan's
conservative, male-dominated culture and is a reminder that the country's rich
and powerful often appear to operate with impunity. Younus' ex-husband, Bilal
Khar, was eventually acquitted, but many believe he used his connections to
escape the law's grip — a common occurrence in Pakistan.
More than
8,500 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women
were reported in Pakistan in 2011, according to The Aurat Foundation, a women's
rights organization. Because the group relied mostly on media reports, the
figure is likely an undercount.
"The
saddest part is that she realized that the system in Pakistan was never going
to provide her with relief or remedy," Nayyar Shabana Kiyani, an activist
at The Aurat Foundation, said of Younus. "She was totally disappointed
that there was no justice available to her."
Younus
was a teenage dancing girl working in the red light district of the southern
city of Karachi when she met her future husband, the son of Ghulam Mustafa
Khar, a former governor of Pakistan's largest province, Punjab. The unusual
pairing was the younger Khar's third marriage. He was in his mid-30s at the
time.
The
couple was married for three years, but Younus eventually left him because he
allegedly physically and verbally abused her. She claimed that he came to her
mother's house while she was sleeping in May 2000 and poured acid all over her
in the presence of her 5-year-old son from a different man.
Tehmina
Durrani, Ghulam Mustafa Khar's ex-wife and his son's stepmother, became an
advocate for Younus after the attack, drawing international attention to the
case. She said that Younus' injuries were the worst she had ever seen on an
acid attack victim.
"So many
times we thought she would die in the night because her nose was melted and she
couldn't breathe," said Durrani, who wrote a book about her own allegedly
abusive relationship with the elder Khar. "We used to put a straw in the
little bit of her mouth that was left because the rest was all melted
together."
She said
Younus, whose life had always been hard, became a liability to her family, for
whom she was once a source of income.
"Her
life was a parched stretch of hard rock on which nothing bloomed," Durrani
wrote in a column in The News after Younus' suicide.
Younus'
ex-husband grew up in starkly different circumstances, amid the wealth and
power of the country's feudal elite, and counts Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina
Rabbani Khar as a cousin.
Bilal Khar
once again denied carrying out the acid attack in a TV interview following her
suicide, suggesting a different man with the same name committed the crime. He
claimed Younus killed herself because she didn't have enough money, not because
of her horrific injuries, and criticized the media for hounding him about the
issue.
"You
people should be a little considerate," said Khar. "I have three
daughters and when they go to school people tease them."
In
February, Younus said in one of her last interviews that powerful Pakistanis
brutally treat ordinary citizens and "don't know how painful they make
others' lives."
"I
want such people to be treated in the same way" as they treat people whose
lives they ruin, she told Geo TV over the telephone from Rome.
Younus
was energized when the Pakistani government enacted a new set of laws last year
that explicitly criminalized acid attacks and mandated that convicted attackers
would serve a minimum sentence of 14 years, said Durrani. She hoped to return
someday to get justice once her health stabilized.
"She
said, 'When I come back, I will reopen the case, and I'll fight myself,' and
she was a fighter," Durrani said.
Durrani
had to battle with both Younus' ex-husband and the government to send her to
Italy, where the Italian government paid for her treatment and provided her
money to live on and send her child to school. Pakistani officials argued that
sending Younus to Italy would give the country a bad name, Durrani said.