By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
HOW much is a human life worth? Why is it held to be invaluable in the developed democracies of the West but dirt cheap in a Third World country like Pakistan? This contradiction emerged clearly last month when the annual World Health Assembly of the WHO adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) on May 21 in Geneva after four years of protracted negotiations interspersed with hot bargaining.
Continue reading Will Pakistan sign tobacco treaty?
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
AS India-Pakistan relations, which move in a cyclic pattern, enter one of their friendlier phases, it is heartening to hear voices of sanity in support of peace and normalization between the two countries. It seems that war fatigue has set in and the “voices of sanity” are getting louder.
Continue reading What next in Kashmir?
By Zubeida Mustafa
The ugly tradition of protecting honour by killing and violating women is not limited to Pakistan. Girls from Pakistan living in the UK have been forced into marriages with cousins back home to protect honour, writes Zubeida Mustafa
Five years ago 19-year-old Rukhsana Naz was strangled to death by her brother while her mother held her down by her feet. This happened in Britain, the country Naz’s parents had migrated to from Pakistan and where she had been born and bred. The murdered girl’s crime? She had “shamed her family.” First she had refused to stay in marriage to the man in Pakistan whom she had been wedded to when she was 16. Second, she had decided to return to the man she loved.
Continue reading Against their will
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
HOW many birthdays should one have celebrated to be called old? In other words, at what age does one qualify to be a ‘senior citizen’? Or rephrased in very mundane terms the question would be, when does one become a pensioner? Of course, many would give cliched answers such as the one in self-help books, if you are young at heart you never grow old. There are others who comfort themselves by saying that the body might age but the mind doesn’t: it improves with age and experience!
Continue reading The burden of old age
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
LAST week Baghdad fell. It signalled the end of the aerial attacks which devastated Iraqi cities in the three weeks of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. The day of the fall of the Iraqi capital was a sad day for the Arab world, the Third World and the activists of the global peace movement. Another form of war has now begun — the one that follows on the heels of a military victory. That is the battle the conquerors have to wage to win the hearts and minds of the vanquished.
The end was not unexpected. Given the tilted balance of military power between the two, the rout of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been a foregone conclusion even before the so-called coalition forces launched their massive assault on March 20.
Continue reading The day Baghdad fell