Special Tribute to Mukhtaran Bibi, Pakistan
Meeting Global Challenges: Healthy Women, Healthy World
IWHC's Fifth Annual Gala
January 19, 2006

Introduction by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof
I am delighted to be back and especially to introduce the next speaker. The dominant moral challenge in the nineteenth century was to defeat slavery. In the twentieth century it was to overcome totalitarianism. And in this century I firmly believe the paramount moral challenge we face will be to address gender discrimination in the developing world. That is what the IWHC does. And that is what Mukhtaran Bibi is all about.

Mukhtaran's life underscores both the challenges that women face on a daily basis in many parts of the world and that IWHC addresses, and also the hope for progress. A couple of years ago in the middle of nowhere in eastern Pakistan, in a poor peasant village, I met Mukhtaran for the first time.

A village tribunal had tried to punish her younger brother for supposedly having an affair by ordering her to be gang raped. And then, after the sentence was carried out, she was forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. As the mother of one of her attackers told me, Mukhtaran and her entire family were now in that culture shamed for life, ruined. And, the mother added, the only honorable course out for Mukhtaran at this point was to kill herself.

Well, Mukhtaran found the incredible courage to live. She prosecuted her attackers. She sent them to prison. And then she used compensation money to start schools in her village. She herself was illiterate and had virtually no education, but she profoundly believed that the way to overcome the kind of traditional brutality that she had encountered was through education.

And then she enrolled in her own school, in her own elementary school, to learn how to read and to write Urdu and in fact today she rang the closing bell at NASDAQ and wrote her name in Urdu as she had learned in her school, and there it was flashed up in Times Square.

Well, today Mukhtaran is going to be speaking in her native dialect, which is Seraiki, and she will be interpreted by Amna Buttar, who is a physician from Wisconsin, and very much in her own right a dynamo and a passionate advocate, and also the head of the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights.

Well, Mukhtaran helped change the tide in Pakistan. Other women began reporting and prosecuting rapists, and the upshot has been fewer rapes. She has also started her own aid organization, and she is starting an ambulance service in the area.  

These days Mukhtaran has been feted at the White House and at the State Department. On her way here she stopped off in Paris and was greeted by the French Foreign Minister. But when this banquet is over and the applause has faded, she is going to go back to her village of Meerwala in Pakistan, and there her life daily is in danger. She has death threats constantly. And frankly, the Pakistani government hasn't been much help. Last year when she tried to come to this country President Musharraf ordered her barred from leaving the country, and then when she protested, he in effect had her kidnapped to stop her from leaving. Even now her mail is intercepted, as well as her phone calls. 

But she has refused to leave her village for the safety of another country or of a larger city because she says that the place where the greatest change is needed is in the countryside, and that that is where she can do the most good.

She may not be enormously educated but this is one woman who can teach us all a huge amount. And so I am very, very proud to introduce to you my friend, and my hero, Mukhtaran Bibi.

Statement by Mukhtaran Bibi (translated by Amna Buttar)
Thank you very much. As-Salaam Alaikum. First of all I want to thank all the organizations that helped me and stood by me in all my sorrows. I believe that oppression and cruelty against women will not end until women raise their voices against these things themselves. I am thankful to you, and I am especially thankful to Nicholas Kristof, who stood by me when I didn't have money to pay the salary of even one teacher. My slogan is "End Oppression with Education." The evening is sad, but it does not matter. In the light of dawn, mothers, sisters, and daughters will be recognized.