Innocent Before the Inquiry Began

Be careful, we tell our daughters. Get educated. Serve your country. Live inside the fence the state built for you.

Dr. Shazia Khalid did all four.

She was a physician at the hospital of state-owned Pakistan Petroleum Limited in Sui, Balochistan. A woman doctor in that town was rare and needed. She lived alone inside the gas-plant compound, behind the army’s Defence Security Guards.

On the night of January 2, 2005, a masked man got through that fence. He tied her with a telephone cord, beat her, blindfolded her, and raped her. When he left, she freed her own hands and went for help.

What she got was advice. Company men, she has said, told her to keep quiet. Her reputation was the problem. Not the guard’s. Not the company’s. Not the army’s.

Police reports and the Bugti chief, Nawab Akbar Bugti, named a captain of the Defence Security Guards — Hammad — as the man they wanted answered for. The captain went on television and called himself innocent. Then the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, said the same thing on national television: not guilty. Not acquitted. Not tried. Cleared, by one military man, of another, while the inquiry was still open.

Innocent until proven guilty is a fine principle. Nobody applied it to her. Every doubt went to the man. Every consequence went to the woman.

Sui sits in Dera Bugti. Akbar Bugti treated the assault on a doctor under his sky as an assault on everyone he claimed to........

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