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Killing of newborn babies on rise
[Pak Daily Times] The bodies of two newborn babies were given their final bath before they were buried in Bloody Karachi, after they were discovered in the city's garbage dumps."They can only have been one or two days old," said volunteer worker Muhammad Saleem, pointing at the two small corpses being gently washed by his colleagues at a charity's morgue. Infanticide, a crime in Pakistain is on the rise. More than 1,000 infants -- most of them girls -- were killed or abandoned to die in the country last year, according to conservative estimates by the Edhi Foundation, a charity working to reverse the grim trend. The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistain's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the rural areas, and the charity says that in December alone, it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers. The number of dead infants found last year -- 1,210 -- was up from 890 in 2008 and 999 in 2009, said Edhi Foundation Manager in Bloody Karachi, Anwar Kazmi. Kazmi recounts the discovery of the burnt body of a six-day-old infant who had been strangled. Another child was found on the steps of a mosque having been stoned to death on the orders of a holy man who has since disappeared, he said. "Do not murder, lay them here," reads a sign hanging outside the charity's Bloody Karachi base where it has left cradles in the hope that parents will abandon their unwanted children there, instead of leaving them to die. "People leave these children mostly because they think they are illegitimate, but they are as innocent and loveable as all human beings," says the charity's founder, well-known humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi. Most children found are less than a week old. Khair Mohammad, 65, works as a watchman in the charity's vast graveyard in the city outskirts. It is dotted with tiny unnamed graves. "We acquired this land to bury children after another plot was filled with hundreds of bodies," he said. The corpse count is far worse among girls, says manager Kazmi, with nine out of ten dead babies the charity finds being female. "The number of infanticides of girls has substantially increased," Kazmi said, a rise attributed to increased poverty across the country. Girls are seen by many Paks as a greater economic burden as most women are not permitted to work and are considered to be the financial responsibility of their fathers, and later their husbands. A Pak family can be forced to raise more than one million rupees to marry their daughter off.
According to the country's law, anyone found to have abandoned an infant could be jugged for seven years, while anyone guilty of secretly burying a child can be imprisoned for two years. Murder is punishable with life imprisonment. But crimes of infanticide are rarely prosecuted. "The majority of cop shoppes do not register cases of infanticide, let alone launch investigations into them," said lawyer Abdul Rasheed. Posted by: Fred 2011-01-18 |
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