Marriage at Gunpoint

By Massoud Ansari
MIRPUR (PAKISTAN): I was on my way to meet “I was married by
l9-year-old Mariam in a hospital in the heart of force,” says Sultana. “My
Mirpur — a large industrial town in Pakistani husband doesn’t know the
controlled Kashmir. This was to be secret basics of cohabitation. With
assignation: no one was to know that we had him, sex is always rape. I had
arranged to meet. I was excited, but also wary. The never imagined I would one
former because Mariam, a UK national, had agreed day have to live in such an
to talk to me of how she had been forced into environment, where I would be
marriage to a distant relative living in Kashmir, sharing a house with animals,
nervous for our safety— if any of her family like water buffalos and cows.
members caught us together, there could be serious Besides, I am made to cook in
reprisals for both. shabby pots on an open fire,
and have to share an open
At the hospital, I wondered how I would toilet with the rest of the
recognize Mariam. But I needn’t have worried — family.”
she showed up exactly where and when had been
designated. Attired in a shalwar kamiz, head covered by an embroidered black scarf, she
walked over to Salma, our contact who was accompanying me, whispering, “I’m with my
husband’s younger brother. He’s parking the car, but will join me as soon as he’s done.
I’ll try to arrange some time to meet you privately; I can’t talk when he’d around.”

Sure enough, a big, burly man soon appeared and joined her in the queue for the
gynecologist. She was very careful to give no indication that she knew us. After coming
out from consulting with the physicians she handed her brother-in-law the doctor’s
prescription with some money from her purse, and despatching him, sat down in the
waiting area. A few minutes later, she cautiously beckoned us to her. “I’ve told him not
to buy the medicines from the drug store in the hospital premises, saying these are the
doctor’s instructions. So my brother-in-law has gone to the bazaar to buy them while I
wait. That should give us about 20 to 30 minutes. This is all I can manage at the
moment,” she said apologetically.

Mariam was emphatic about how she wanted her story to be told. “Let me make
this very clear. I’m not telling you this because I need your help, but because I wish to
warn other girls about falling into a similar trap,” she said. Mariam also asked us to
promise we would not disclose her identity. We readily agreed, and Mariam began to
recount her story. During the course of our interview her voice choked over many times,
and she broke down at least once.

“My brain has stopped working... I don’t know what to do. I think I have no
future now,... It’s been sealed, completely sealed...” she said, as she started talking.

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Mariam was raised in an orthodox household. “My mother often used to lecture me on
the importance of being a ‘good girl.’ I was warned that boyfriends were not acceptable
in my religion and culture, and if I were to choose my own husband, I would be inviting
God’s wrath upon the whole family,” she continued. “Everything was fine until I
completed my university degree from Manchester Metropolitan University. Thereupon
my parents started to worry about my contracting a marriage. Initially I thought this was
no big deal; this kind of anxiety about a daughter’s marriage is common in most Asian
families. And I wasn’t worried because I genuinely believed my parents would consult
me and consider my feelings before they arranged my marriage. Unfortunately, this is not
how things worked out”

Just weeks after she received her university degree, Mariam’s father announced
that the whole family was to embark on a trip to their hometown, Mirpur, to attend a
family wedding. But as soon she arrived, Mariam discovered it was her marriage they had
come to attend. Said Mariam, “I resisted for a while, but finally consented under duress
after my mother downed an entire bottle of sleeping pills.

“Getting along with my husband is a big problem; he is an uneducated vil-

lager — we come from two completely different worlds. I have thought of running away,
but cannot. My passport is in my parent’s custody, and my husband will soon apply for
residency in the UK,” Mariam added.

I offered to try to help Mariam escape her situation, but she refused. “I reckon it’s
too late now. I know even if I do escape, they will catch me. They are very resourceful
people. It would only be a matter of time before I’d be brought back. And they will kill
me if I’m caught. So I’m trying to learn to live in the new environment,” she responded.
Since time was running out, with Mariam looking over her shoulder for her brother-in-
law every few minutes, I decided it was time to say goodbye. But not before extracting a
promise from her to call me if she needed anything. Mariam accepted my visiting card
before getting up to leave.

Mariam’s story though disturbing, is far from unique. Every year, hundreds of
young girls belonging to expatriate families are forced to marry relatives living in the
home country. Many of these men have never stepped beyond Mirpur, many are illiterate,
and often they are twice their brides’ age.

Small wonder then, that many girls have tried to flee. However, most attempts
have been foiled, and many of these marriages have culminated in battery, some in
divorce and others in ‘honour killing.’

As many as 600,000 Pakistanis who have immigrated to Britain in the past half
century come from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir. Like other immigrant communities from
South Asia, Mirpuris tend to live together, isolated from the locals. They try to bring up
their children in a traditional manner and eventually to find spouses for them from
Pakistan, usually family members, most of whom are complete unknowns for the
prospective brides and grooms.

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 “When Pakistan was a member of the Commonwealth, General Ayub Khan
negotiated thousands of work permits in the UK for locals displaced by the construction
of the Mangla, dam,” says Roshan Mughal, a journalist from Muzaffarabad, Azad
Kashmir’s capital. With the passage of time, many more Pakistanis followed in the first
wave of expatriates footsteps, often devising unorthodox means to attain legal residence
the UK.

“These immigrants are spread across at least 40-45 counties in England,”

contends Abdul Rasheed Malik, a retired bureaucrat. However, he adds that those who
went to Britain in the ‘60s never severed ties with home. “They attend marriages and
funerals of family members in Pakistan, mostly they marry their sons and daughters to
relatives back home, and often they even ask to be buried in Pakistan, never mind that
they died in England.”

With so much traffic between Mirpur and Britain, it is not surprising that the
town of Mirpur is more developed today than any other in Kashmir, and is actually
known as ‘mini-England.’ “Every second home in Mirpur has a family member settled in
England, and those who remain are trying to find ways to move,” says Mushtaq Ahmed, a
local Kashmiri. According to him, since marriage to a British citizen is considered the
easiest way to gain legal residency in the UK, every other youth living in Mirpur is vying
for the hand of any one of his British cousins.

The count of expatriate Kashmiri-Pakistani marriages every year, runs into

several hundred, and private sources estimate that a large percentage of these are forced
marriages. Sometimes, the victims of such marriages seek help from the UK consulate.
According to the officials of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Community
Liaison Unit, they have handled over 450 such cases since October 2000, and have
helped to repatriate over 80 young victims of these marriages. Eighty-five per cent of
these cases involve girls, and the remaining 15 per cent involve males. “In 2002 we
handled 115 cases of forced marriages [of UK citizens] in Pakistan,” says Rachael
Jamieson, an official of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Islamabad.
Additionally, she states, other agencies around the UK also deal with such cases, so the
full extent of the problem is difficult to gauge.

“There are various reasons for this phenomenon— cultural, religious and
economic. Some parents will settle for their daughters marrying unrelated men, as long as
they belong to their community and religion. Others insist on marrying their girls to their
cousins back home, in the belief that this will also benefit the latter by opening doors for
them in the UK,” says a local journalist from Azad Kashmir.

Hanif Awan, who lived in the UK for over 30 years but returned to Mirpur to
spend his retirement years there, believes that religious and cultural bonds are the biggest
factors in determining young expatriate girls’ fates. “Islamic law doesn’t allow for
marriages to non-believers unless they convert to Islam,” he says. “And boys from
Kashmiri families, educated and raised in Britain, are not willing to marry their female

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cousins in England. They prefer marrying girls from villages back home because they
know that girls raised in England will be more independent and demand their rights.
Local girls are submissive, willing to wait on their husbands hand and foot without
demanding anything in return. Thus, because the UK-based Kashmiri boys refuse to
marry their cousins in England, there is a big vacuum, and the girls end up being made to
marry uneducated villagers from back home.”

Ghulam Hyder, an Islamabad-based Kashmiri, however, contends, “This is not the

main problem.” He believes that many Muslim parents think that forcing their offspring
into an arranged marriage is the Islamic thing to do. “Of course the girl will resist
initially, be shy and make a fuss, but once married she will accept it as fait accompli —
and may even end up being blissfully happy,” he says.

Mrs. Geelani, a professor of English in the Kashmir University, recalls a recent

case within her own family that ultimately ended in divorce. According to her, a father
took his daughter who had been raised in Britain, to Saudi Arabia to perform Umra —the
second most sacred ritual after Hajj — where he asked her to take an oath to do whatever
would be required of her for the honour of the family. Emotionally blackmailed, both in
the name of religion and family honour, she complied. She was then taken straight from
Saudi Arabia to Mirpur, where she was married to a cousin — her paternal aunt’s son,
who had not even completed his basic schooling. Soon after the marriage her husband
applied for British nationality, and thereafter proceeded with his wife to the UK. Once
they got there, however, the girl ended the marriage, telling her father that she had
obliged him as long as she could, but could not do so any longer. Deeply upset with her
decision, her father then forced his only son to marry the sister of his daughter’s ex-
husband as compensation. “He forced his son to marry a handicapped girl to please his
sister back home,” she said.

While some girls are fortunate enough to have the wherewithal to end their sham
marriages, there are many Sothers who cannot. A case in point: 21- year-old Muneeza
was beaten up by her parents after she was tricked to Karachi in a similar fashion from
UK until she agreed to marry her cousin back home. “There was a huge age difference
and that was obviously one reason for my refusal — he was over 40, while I was just19 at
the time. Secondly, I had never seen the man, not even his photograph — there was no
way I could have said yes,” she later told a woman activist of a local NGO. Forced to
marry him, Muneeza was sent to Jeddah with her new life partner, where she was
subjected to immense torture. Her husband, according to her, never let her out of the
house. “He was an alcoholic and used to beat me up for no reason,” she says. It took her
two long years to find the strength to flee. But it was not easy. Her travel documents had
been confiscated by her husband. Luckily, the Pathan cab driver who she flagged down to
make good her escape was sympathetic when she told him her story. He put her up at his
house and arranged for an emergency Pakistani passport for her.

She finally managed to travel to Pakistan, arriving here on June 6, 2001. At the
airport, she told the immigration officials that she was being chased and that there were
probably some people waiting to kill her in the airport compound. The officials

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immediately called up activists of Madadgaar Helpline, a joint programme run by the
Lawyers for Human Rights, Legal Aid and UNICEF, and sought their help. “She is
completely distressed and crying for help. We need to evacuate her immediately and shift
her to a safe location,” Madadgar was told.

The girl was collected by the programme’s workers and taken to a shelter.
However, she disappeared from there after one week, never to be heard of again. “She
was very paranoid — she would even question the identity of the shelter staff. She was
scared they might be her enemies,” recalls Musarrat, a psychiatrist at Madadgaar.
Musarrat believes Muneeza had suffered severe mental trauma. “She used to repeat
things a lot. We were waiting to question her about her ordeal once we had earned her
confidence,” she says. “We never got that chance.” Zia Awan, president of the Legal Aid
Forum, says, “We cannot say what has happened to her. No one from her family has
approached us, and she has not returned.”

A similar story is that of Sultana’s, a girl from Bradford. “I was married by

force,” she says. “My husband is a sexaholic and doesn’t know the basics of cohabitation.
With him, sex is always rape. I had never imagined I would one day have to live in such
an environment, where I would be sharing a house with animals, like water buffalos and
cows. Besides, I am made to cook in shabby pots on an open fire, and have to share an
open toilet with the rest of the family.” Sultana says she tried to escape at least twice in
the three years she has been married, but both times she was caught. “She was beaten up
like an animal, and is not allowed to leave the house alone now,” says one of her friends.
Meanwhile Sultana has given up all hopes of escaping, as she has been told that her
husband will kill all her family members if she tries to do so again.

The British government in Pakistan has faced several problems in dealing with the
problem of forced marriages of Pakistani-British girls. First among these is the lack of
legislation regarding such situations. “There is no law specifically against forced
marriage; however, existing laws cover several serious offences committed in bringing
about a forced marriage (assault, kidnap, rape, abduction),” says an official at the British
High Commission. “The decision to bring proceedings against any individual in relation
to offences committed surrounding a forced marriage is a private matter for those
involved, and the prosecuting authorities.” He believes that there is a danger in
introducing legislation specifically against forced marriage. “The victims may be too
afraid to ask for help because of fears that their parents may get into trouble. However,
we do not wish to deter anyone from seeking help for this severe human rights abuse,” he
says.

These handicaps notwithstanding, dozens of girls and boys in forced marriage

situations have been evacuated by the British High Commission in Pakistan. Says an
official of the BHC, “We have filed habeas corpus petitions in the Pakistani courts, where
young persons who may be kept against their will to be forced into marriages are able to
state publicly their own wishes. Where the individuals state that they are being held
against their will, the courts have released them.” And, he adds, “If they wish to return to
the United Kingdom we do everything we can to assist them.”

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 BHC officials refuse to divulge the identities of the people involved in such cases
saying, “We strongly believe that if we raise the profile of any case it may have a
detrimental effect on the welfare and safety of those involved. As each case is individual,
we provide assistance that is best suited for that case.”

The problem is that many girls in this plight cannot access the British High
Commission. The latter has only one functional office in Islamabad. “In a conservative
Pakistani society, it is very difficult for girls to travel hundreds of kilometers by bus or
coach alone, and then get beyond the high-walled offices of the British High Commission
to find help,” says a human rights activist. Thus, more often than not, women forced to
marry against their will are bonded for life.

And all this, in the 21st century.

Courtesy: $ewsline, April 2003