This tragic story of a suicide is from The Telegraph London (April 17,
2012): the Obituaries.Fakhra Younus. Regret the accompanying photograph
you cannot see. You can still have a look at it if you open today's The
Telegraph (Obituaries page)
-bhuban
Fakhra Younus, who has committed suicide aged 33, gave a face to the
thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured as a result of acid
attacks, typically carried out by husbands who accuse their wives of
dishonouring them; her attacker has not been brought to justice.
Fakhra Younus before and after the acid attack Photo: AP
5:51PM BST 16 Apr 2012
Born to a heroin-addicted mother on Napier Road in Karachi’s red-light
district, probably in 1978, Fakhra Younus was 18 and working as a
“dancing girl” (a euphemism for a prostitute) when she met Bilil Khar,
a former Member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a
former Punjab governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar. The Khar family owns vast
swathes of farmland in the province and is a major political force in
Pakistan. A cousin of Bilal’s is Pakistan’s current Foreign Minister,
Hina Rabbani Khar. When he met Fakhra, Bilal Khar had already been
married and divorced three times and was married at the time to a
fourth wife with whom he had two children, facts of which Fakhra was
unaware.
The two married after six months, but, by her account, from the very
start her husband subjected her to a sustained campaign of sexual,
physical and verbal abuse that lasted three years before she eventually
escaped and moved back to live with her mother. But her peace did not
last long.
On the afternoon of May 14 2000 she was disturbed by an intruder. She
later said she had been asleep in her drawing room when she heard a
man’s voice telling her: “Fakhra ... Fakhra wake up!” “I jerked as he
held me by my hair and opened my mouth. Because I resisted he couldn’t
get me to swallow. But then he threw something on me. At first I
thought it was a joke. I did not understand what had happened to me.
Then he left, so I ran after him. My house was on the second floor and
by the time I got to the first floor, I realised I could not see.”
Feeling her clothes melting to her body, she collapsed on the floor,
screaming. By the time the acid had done its work the hair had been
burned off her head; her lips had fused together; her left ear was
obliterated; she had been blinded in one eye; and her breasts had
melted to the bone. She could breathe only with extreme difficulty.
When her four-year-old son, Nauman, first visited her in a crowded
public hospital, where she remained for the next three months, he ran
away crying.
Fakhra’s family sought to prosecute Khar for attempted murder and the
case came to court in 2003. Although four witnesses testified to seeing
him enter Fakhra’s home on the day of the attack, all later retracted
their statements. They had complained of receiving death threats, but
the judge in the case took no notice and in December 2003 he dismissed
the charges. Khar continued to protest his innocence, claiming the
perpetrator was a pimp with whom his wife had been having an affair.
After her release from hospital Fakhra Younus found that she had become
a liability to her family, for whom she had once been a source of
income. She and her son were subsequently taken in by Tehmina Durrani,
a stepmother of Bilal’s and a women’s rights activist who had
chronicled “the Khars’ way of treating women” in her book My Feudal
Lord, in which she described the abuse meted out to her by her
ex-husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
In 2001, after some difficulty (the government, concerned about
Pakistan’s image abroad, dragged its heels over issuing a passport),
Tehmina Durrani helped Fakhra to move to Rome where, over the next 11
years, she underwent 39 major operations. By the 38th operation, in
2011, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though still
badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape. By this time she had
learned Italian and co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato (“The
Erased Face”), which brought in some income to add to a monthly
disability allowance from the Italian government.
But the operations exacted a heavy psychological toll, and she was said
to be depressed by the impossibility of returning to Pakistan, where
friends were worried that her life would be in danger.
On March 17 Fakhra Younus climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her
apartment building in Rome and jumped. In a suicide note she gave her
reason as “the silence of law on the atrocities and insensitivity of
Pakistani rulers”.
News of her death arrived in Pakistan as the country was celebrating
its first Oscar — awarded to the Karachi film-maker Sharmeen
Obaid-Chinoy for Saving Face, a documentary focusing on victims of acid
attacks. As Fakhra’s coffin arrived for burial, protesters were
demanding that the case against Bilal Khar be reopened.
But Khar continued to deny that he bore any responsibility for his
wife’s death: “My hands are clean,” he told interviewers. Fakhra Younus
is survived by her son, who is in the care of an Italian family.
Fakhra Younus, born in 1978, died March 17 2012
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