By Asian Pacific News Service

On a scorching June day three years ago in the village of Meerwala, which is a 12-hour drive southeast from Pakistan's capital of Islamabad, 14 men in a darkened room volunteered to gang rape Mukhtaran Mai.

The rape was ordered by a self-appointed village jury or jirga from the Meerwala's dominant Mastoi tribe.

Mukhtaran Mai

She apologised. They gang raped her anyway.

Mai, the unmarried 30-year-old daughter of a family deemed "low-caste" was then ordered to walk home naked before hundreds of villagers who were dancing with joy. She was helped by her weeping father who only had a shawl to cover his bloodied daughter.

In this remote part of the world where dominant tribes rule under an Islamic and often brutal code calculated to dishonour and defile 'sinners', Mai had only one option.

She had to kill herself to avoid further shame to her family.

After all, the local tribal elders decreed, a girl in the next village was gang-raped around the same time and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.

Mukhtaran Mai

The type of court that sentenced Mai, known as a panchiat court, is not at all uncommon in rural Pakistan and her punishment, known as karo kari, is not the norm but neither is it unheard of - more than 150 Pakistani women were raped by order of panchiat courts in the first half of 2004.

When the local imam, or Islamic cleric, heard of what had happened to Mai, he used his position at the pulpit to speak out against the injustice that had been done and to call for Mai's condemners and attackers to be brought to trial before a civil court.

Mai filed a police report which was at first ignored.

She did not give up. Her attackers had assumed she would be too ashamed to reveal what had happened, but with the assistance of her friends and the imam, she got word out to the local and international media.

In a post-9/11 world where the Pakistani government was eager to prove that it was on the side of law and order, this media attention was enough to shame the authorities into action.

The tribal elders and the volunteer rapists were brought to trial; some were sentenced to hang. As part of the settlement, Mai was given the equivalent of about C$9,900 in compensation - a very large sum in rural Pakistan.

Fearing that Pakistan's reputation would be hurt further if Mai were to suffer any retribution in her village, the government also offered to buy her a home in cosmopolitan Islamabad, where she would live a life of relative luxury in a place where no one knew anything about her past.

Mai declined those offers. Instead of leaving, she took the money and used it to start a school for girls in Meerwala, the village's first.

At this school, Mai and her friends work to provide young girls with the knowledge and understanding that will give them more power in the world, more awareness of their rights, and more dignity to fall back on when those rights are challenged.

"I hope to make education more readily available to girls, to teach them that no woman should ever go through what happened to me," Mai says. "And I eventually hope to open more school branches in this area of Pakistan. I need your support to kill illiteracy and to help make tomorrow's women stronger. This is my goal in life."

Sympathisers around the world donated more than C$100,000 which Mai has used to set up a shelter for abused women and buy a van which is now used as an ambulance in the area.

Last March, Canadian High Commissioner to Pakistan Margaret Huber visited the Mukhtar Mai Girls School in Meerwala, She announced that Canada, through the Canadian International Development Agency, will pay for the school's expansion to benefit the students already enrolled there and to accommodate those on the waiting list. Canada's funding of about $60,000 will also establish a small dairy farm to help finance the cost of running the school.

Sources told The Asian Pacific Post that Mai was offered Canadian citizenship recently by Huber after her case took a depressing turn on two fronts.

A court in Lahore has refused to extend a 90-day detention order and 12 of the 14 accused were ordered to be released. The case has gone into appeal, and is now expected to go to the Supreme Court.

According to an Islamabad daily, The News, "The police failed to provide the prosecution with the damning evidence even though some 150 onlookers could have testified. In the village, the men's homes are right across from Ms. Mai's. Every day she must face the men who raped her and who threaten to do it again," said the paper.

Mai was also scheduled to visit America this month to publicise her schools and voluntary efforts at the invitation of an NGO.

President General Pervez Musharraf

He described NGOs as "Westernised fringe elements" which "are as bad as the Islamic extremists."

Reports from Pakistan said Mai was placed under house arrest and her telephone lines severed.

She has reportedly said that when she attempted to leave her home, police pointed their guns at her.

Mai's name was also put on a blacklist, normally reserved to curtail the movement of political extremists, called the Exit Control List and her passport had been confiscated.

Officials like, Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Jahangir Karamat, who reportedly pushed for her ban on travel to the United States, are desperate to hush up the brutal justice of the tribal hinterlands in Punjab.

General Musharraf is also enraged at how Mai's case has brought infamy to Pakistan. The President even threatened to "slap" a reporter "in the face" for publishing details in an international magazine about Mai's defiance.

After the ban was made public earlier this month, a trembling Mai called a press conference in Islamabad to deny that her passport was confiscated and that she had not been under detention in her home village, but guarded for her own protection.

"I came to Islamabad to discuss my crisis centre back in the village," she said. "I decided of my own free will not to go abroad, because my mother is ill."

Reporters and activists who attended the "show conference" did not believe her.

Farzana Bari, a women's rights activist said Mai's mother is fine, "but Mukhtar looks completely terrorized."

"The Government was afraid she would tarnish its image," she said.

Insiders say Mai is frightened that government agencies will "whisk her away" if she dares speak out again.

The case has indeed embarrassed President Musharraf, a "modern" general who is keen to play down the religious extremism in backward parts of his country.

He has been promoting "an enlightened Islam" but activists say that this vision seems to exclude women.

As for Mai, she swears she wouldn't allow anyone to use her name to tarnish the image of her country.

Her comments came a day after General Musharraf, said that he ordered the recent travel ban on her because foreign private groups wanted to take her to America "to bad-mouth Pakistan" over the "terrible state" of the nation's women.

"Pakistan is my country, and how can I allow anyone to bring (a) bad name to Pakistan," Mai said in Meerwala.

She also said she had no plans to settle abroad.

"I will live and die here, and I assure the president that I would never do anything against Pakistan," she said.

At Press time, news reports from Pakistan said the government had lifted the travel ban on Mai, following US intervention and the offer of citizenship from Canada.

However, it was unclear if the woman hailed as an Asian heroine would go to the United States and incur the silent wrath of the men who rule her country.