As Malala recovers, U.N. marks International Day of the Girl Child

As Malala Yousafzai lay in a Pakistani hospital recovering from gunshot wounds, the United Nations on Thursday marked its first International Day of the Girl Child.

The U.N. event, planned long before Malala was shot this week, focused on an end to child marriage and emphasized the importance of educating girls, the cause that put Malala in the sights of a Taliban gunman.

“Education for girls is one of the best strategies for protecting girls against child marriage,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “When they are able to stay in school and avoid being married early, girls can build a foundation for a better life for themselves and their families.”

Ban urged all members of society, including governments, community and religious leaders and families -- especially men and boys -- to promote the rights of girls.

“Let us do our part to let girls be girls, not brides,” he said.

The Tuesday attack on Malala, who angered militants by speaking out against efforts to ban education for girls, appalled Pakistanis and again thrust the issue into the global spotlight. The 14-year-old, who was reportedly out of danger of dying from her wounds, was on a school bus when she was shot.

A new report released Thursday by Plan International says that while the average teen girl now gets more years of education than ever before, the numbers largely reflect strides made by China and India, masking the fact that many poor countries have made little or no progress in educating girls.

Girls are thwarted from going to school for a long and varied list of reasons, some of which also keep boys out of school. The obstacles include poverty, prejudice against women, early marriage and safety threats.

Less than a fifth of girls in Niger, for instance, are in school. In Mali, roughly a third attend classes. And in Senegal and Guinea, less than half are in school. Education rates are also dismal for Roma girls in eastern Europe; only 9% of Roma girls in the Slovak Republic go to high school, the group wrote.

The bulk of young people who are not in school are in South Asia and Africa, regions that also have glaring gender gaps, the report said. Rural girls are even less likely to go to school than urban ones, as girls are tasked with gathering firewood, finding water and childcare to help their families scrape by.

Other girls are kept out of school by marriage. UNICEF estimates a third of young women worldwide -- 70 million -- are married before they turn 18, including 23 million girls wed before the age of 15. Marrying young almost always ends schooling for girls, the United Nations said Thursday.

School fees and hidden costs block other girls from school. Others are turned away by lengthy treks on roads riddled with danger. And still others fear sexual abuse perpetrated by teachers or classmates, the report found. In some Francophone countries in West Africa, sexual coercion by teachers is so familiar that students coined the phrase ‘moyennes sexuellement transmissibles’ -- sexually transmitted grades.

Pakistani teen shot by Taliban undergoes surgery, out of danger

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Outrage swept across Pakistan on Wednesday over the Taliban’s attempt to kill a 14-year-old girl who had spoken out against militants’ attempts to ban education for girls.

Malala Yousafzai was recovering from surgery to remove a bullet that had lodged in her neck and appeared to be out of danger, doctors said.

On Tuesday, gunmen in the Swat Valley city of Mingora stopped the school bus she was riding in and shot her in the head. Two other girls were also shot but not seriously hurt. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it revenge for the girl's advocacy against the group.

While Pakistan has grown accustomed to years of suicide bombings and other terror acts by Islamic militants, the attempt on Yousafzai’s life sent shock waves through the country, largely because this time the target was a young girl admired for her defiance of a movement bent on denying girls the chance to go to school.

Yousafzai emerged as a national figure in 2009 when she contributed diary entries to a blog published by the BBC Urdu Service. Those missives described the trials of trying to attend classes at a time when Taliban fighters had taken control of her Swat Valley homeland and were bombing schools and issuing edicts barring girls’ education.

On Wednesday, Pakistani commentators and columnists denounced the attack on Yousafzai as a barbaric act and expressed hope that it would galvanize the country against Islamic extremism. One newspaper, the News, wrote in an editorial that Pakistan was “infected with the cancer of extremism, and unless it is cut out, we will slide even further into the bestiality that this latest atrocity exemplifies.”

Gunmen in Pakistan shoot teenage advocate for girls' education

This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Gunmen in Pakistan’s Swat Valley opened fire Tuesday on a 14-year-old girl who won national acclaim for championing the cause of girls’ education in the country’s troubled northwest, injuring her and another girl as they sat in a school bus.

Malala Yousafzai has been hailed across the country as a symbol of defiance against the brutality of Taliban insurgents who had overrun Swat before a Pakistani military offensive retook the region in 2009.

Before the offensive, Yousafzai spoke out against Taliban destruction of girls’ schools in Swat and atrocities committed by the insurgent group’s fighters. In December, then-Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani awarded her the country’s National Peace Award for Youth.

Local authorities and witnesses said she was inside a school bus that was taking her and other girls home from their school in Mingora, Swat’s largest city, when gunmen on a motorcycle approached. The assailants stopped the bus, opened fire at Yousafzai, injuring her in the head and neck, and sped off.

Pakistan bars anti-drone rally from reaching South Waziristan

TANK, Pakistan — Pakistani cricket legend Imran Khan emerged as a powerful political force late last year by engineering massive rallies in big cities. On Sunday, he tried — and failed — to take his people power campaign to the unlikeliest of venues — South Waziristan, a perilous tribal region that remains a viable stronghold for the deadly Pakistani Taliban insurgency.   

Khan held his rally anyway in Tank, 25 miles outside of the Waziristan border, an event trumpeted as a demonstration protesting the CIA’s drone missile campaign against Islamic militants in Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas. But among analysts and most political commentators, the rally was criticized as a poorly disguised attempt at revving up support for Khan’s campaign ahead of national elections in 2013.

Criticism was particularly intense, given the risk involved in trying to lead thousands of supporters into South Waziristan, where pockets of militancy still thrive. That risk was aggravated by the inclusion of more than 30 U.S. citizens who are members of an anti-drone group called CODEPINK, and who flew to Pakistan to join Khan’s rally.

Led by Khan, demonstrators in a long caravan of vans and cars left Islamabad on Saturday morning and stayed overnight near the western city of Dera Ismail Khan before making their bid to reach the originally scheduled rally venue at Kotkai, a small village in a relatively peaceful section of South Waziristan.

At one point, it appeared Khan was on the verge of achieving his goal. At two locations on the road to South Waziristan, demonstrators got out of their cars and moved out of the way large freight containers placed by police to block the path. Dozens of police manned those locations, but stood idly as demonstrators plowed their way through.

Imran Khan leads drone protesters into volatile Pakistan region

MIANWALI, Pakistan — Led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, a large caravan of demonstrators, including more than 30 U.S. anti-war activists, embarked on a two-day journey Saturday to Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas to rally against the CIA’s drone missile campaign, a protest that triggered warnings of possible militant attacks on demonstrators.

The caravan had more than 100 vans and cars when it left Islamabad, the capital, Saturday morning, and steadily grew in size as it made its way across western Punjab province toward South Waziristan, where demonstrators were scheduled to stage a rally in the village of Kotkai on Sunday.

The Pakistani army has control over large sections of South Waziristan after carrying out a major offensive against militant strongholds there in 2009. However, pockets of Pakistani Taliban militants continue to exist in parts of South Waziristan, and it remains a region extremely dangerous for Pakistanis to venture into and off-limits to foreigners.

South Waziristan is much less targeted by U.S. drone missile strikes than North Waziristan, home to the deadly Afghan Taliban wing known as the Haqqani network, as well as pockets of Al Qaeda militants and other extremist fighters. However, Khan backed off of his initial plans to carry out the anti-drone rally in North Waziristan because of the widespread presence of militants, and instead moved the proposed venue to South Waziristan, where local tribesmen gave their assurances that rally participants would be safe.

The Pakistani government, however, disagreed that a large rally, particularly one including American citizens, could be safely held in South Waziristan, and notified Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, that the caravan would not be allowed to enter the tribal region on Sunday. Khan said last week that he would forge ahead with the rally, but if confronted by police at the Waziristan border and told to turn back, he would not resist and instead hold the event outside of Waziristan.

Factions of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s homegrown insurgency, have warned that rally participants could be targeted with suicide bombings and other attacks if they proceed to South Waziristan.     

Speaking in Mianwali, a small city 120 miles southwest of Islamabad, Khan told thousands of caravan participants that his “Peace March” will “create a new Pakistan. We are going to tell the people of Waziristan that we did not forget them. We stand with the people of Waziristan as they endure these brutalities by America.”

The rally will focus on the U.S. drone missile program that targets Islamic militants in Pakistan’s tribal region along the Afghan border, a campaign hailed by Washington as an effective tool in combating militancy but reviled in Pakistan because it breaches the country’s sovereignty and has resulted in scores of civilian deaths.

“It’s our responsibility as good Americans to come here to Pakistan and show the face of the American people that have a conscience,” Medea Benjamin, a cofounder of Code Pink, a U.S. anti-drone activist group, said last week. “To show the face of the American people that believe that the lives of Pakistanis are as valuable as the lives of any American.”

However, many Pakistani observers see the rally as Khan’s thinly veiled attempt to generate a raft of publicity for his campaign to unseat the ruling Pakistan People’s Party in national elections next year. In an editorial last week, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn wrote that the PTI’s anti-drone, anti-war on terror policy was already well-known, and that a “made-for-TV” rally would be “at best peripheral to its electoral success.

“The downsides, however, are very real and potentially serious, for the country if not for PTI,” the editorial continued. “South Waziristan is an area no one, not even the most optimistic military official, would claim is anywhere near an acceptable normal.”

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-- Alex Rodriguez and Nasir Khan. Staff writer Alex Rodriguez reported from Islamabad and special correspondent Nasir Khan reported from Mianwali, Pakistan.

Pakistani officials distance themselves from minister's bounty offer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s government on Sunday distanced itself from remarks made by a federal minister who offered up to $100,000 to anyone who would kill the maker of an anti-Islamic film that sparked a wave of violent protests across the Muslim world.

Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour announced his intent to put up the bounty Saturday, a day after a wave of unrest sparked by the film swept through Islamabad and other major cities in Pakistan, leaving more than 20 people dead and more than 100 injured. One of the people involved in making the film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Southern California who has gone into hiding.

A 14-minute trailer for the film released on YouTube portrays the prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and a fraud. On Saturday, Bilour told reporters in the northwest city of Peshawar that he would be willing to face arrest for announcing the bounty if necessary.

“If any international court declares me guilty for announcing the bounty, then I am ready to be hanged in the name of the holy prophet Muhammad,” Bilour said. “We are not against freedom of expression, but the misuse of that right to hurt the religious sentiments of others is totally wrong and intolerable.”

Bilour’s remarks triggered a strong disavowal from members of his party, the Awami National Party, which is aligned with President Asif Ali Zardari’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), as well as from top government leaders. A spokesman for Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf told the BBC in an interview that the government had disassociated itself from Bilour’s comments.

“He is not a member of the PPP. He is an Awami National Party politician and therefore the prime minister will speak to the head of the [Awami] party to decide the next step,” Shafqat Jalil, Ashraf’s spokesman, told the BBC. “He will stay in his post for now.”

The controversial video trailer triggered massive protests across the Muslim world. In Libya, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed Sept. 11 when gunmen attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi following a demonstration against the film.

In Pakistan, advertisements featuring President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the video failed to discourage thousands of angry Pakistanis from rampaging through the streets of Islamabad, Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore and other cities on Friday in some of the worst popular unrest that the country has seen in years.

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--Alex Rodriguez. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali from Peshawar contributed.

Photo: A file photo dated May 19, 2011, shows Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, Pakistan's minister for railways, being interviewed during a visit to Amritsar, India. Credit: Ramindar Pal Singh / European Pressphoto Agency.

 

U.S. ad rejecting film fails to persuade Pakistani protesters

As violent demonstrations swept through Pakistani cities on Friday, protesters infuriated by a film made in Southern California that mocked Muhammad said they were unconvinced by U.S. efforts to tamp down the anger it has created.

Washington spent $70,000 for an ad broadcast on Pakistani television Thursday that featured President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rejecting the 14-minute film trailer's contents and message and touting America’s espousal of religious tolerance. The ad was in English but subtitled in Urdu, Pakistan’s primary language.

The move, however, appeared to do little to appease Pakistanis in a country where anti-American sentiment has pervaded society for years and continues to grow.

Several protesters marching toward the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad said they wanted to see Washington do much more, including taking action against Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian immigrant from Cerritos, Calif., behind the “Innocence of Muslims” video.

“Instead of punishing the blasphemer, the U.S. is protecting him,” said Kashif Yaseen, a student from Islamabad. “Our anger will only calm down when the U.S. punishes this man. And the punishment should be the death sentence.”

The Pakistani government’s declaration of Friday as a day of protest was meant to give Pakistanis an opportunity to vent their anger, though officials had urged demonstrators to not resort to violence.

At least 18 dead in Pakistan anti-American rioting Friday

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Fiery anti-U.S. demonstrations swept through Pakistan's capital and several other cities Friday as thousands of people furious over an anti-Islam film privately produced in America clashed with police in one of the worst waves of violence to hit the nation in recent years.

In Islamabad, protesters turned the city’s tree-lined boulevards and avenues into a battle zone as they toppled freight containers set up as barriers and pelted riot police with rocks while unsuccessfully trying to storm a heavily guarded enclave housing the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic missions. Across the country, at least 18 people were killed in the violence and more than 100 more injured.

In the northwest city of Peshawar, protesters torched a movie house and clashed with police, who used tear gas to turn back demonstrators. There were reports of police opening fire to disperse protesters, and at least one person, a driver for a Pakistani television channel, died of a bullet wound, authorities said.

Photos: Protests over anti-Islam film spread

In Karachi, scene of one of the worst spasms of violence Friday, protesters set ablaze cars and several gas stations and movie houses. Pakistani media reported that at least 15 people had died in the violence and an additional 100 injured.

The Pakistani government had sanctioned Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, as a day to honor Islam’s prophet Muhammad and as a day to peacefully protest the release of a crudely made production whose trailer was posted on YouTube that portrayed Muhammad as a womanizer and a fraud. The release of the 14-minute film trailer sparked violent protests in the Arab world and several Muslim countries.

While furor over the video has waned to some degree in Arab nations, it has revved up in Pakistan, where hardline Islamist parties have seized on it to organize virtually daily demonstrations. The fervor peaked Friday, forcing the government to deploy soldiers to defend Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave and block cellphone service in the capital and other large cities. Freight containers were positioned on streets leading to the enclave to bar the way of protesters.

On one street leading to the enclave, throngs of demonstrators toppled two freight containers and clashed with police by the Serena Hotel, which regularly accommodates visiting diplomats and international dignitaries.

“We can never tolerate any blasphemous words against our beloved prophet,” said Shakeel Ahmad, a young shopkeeper, his eyes reddened from clouds of tear gas. “We are ready to sacrifice our lives for our prophet. And we want the Pakistani government to shut down the U.S. embassy, expel all Americans and end all relations with the U.S.”

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-- Alex Rodriguez

Photo: Pakistani Muslim demonstrators disperse after police fired tear gas during a protest against an anti-Islam film in Karachi on Friday. Credit: Rizwan Tabassum / AFP /GettyImages 

Pakistan declares Friday a day of protest against anti-Islam film

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan continued to seethe Wednesday over the release in the U.S. of a movie trailer mocking Islam, as legions of protesters rallied in several large cities for a sixth day and the government signaled its own discontent by declaring Friday as a national day “of peaceful protest.”

Officials said the move was meant to show the government's solidarity with the Muslim world and its anger over the film, which depicts the prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and a thug. Friday will be observed as a national holiday, and protests are expected to be held across the country.

“The message we want to convey to the international community by observing Friday as a protest day ... is that we cannot tolerate any kind of blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad,” said Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira.

Though U.S. leaders have denounced the film, Pakistanis have continued to channel their anger toward the American government. Throngs of protesters in Karachi and Lahore in recent days have tried to reach U.S. consulates in those cities.

More countries push to block YouTube over anti-Islam video

This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

As protests over an online video mocking the Islamic prophet continue to simmer in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere, more countries are trying to keep it from being seen around the world.

Google has already stopped the film trailer from being viewed on YouTube in Egypt and Libya “given the very difficult situation” and has restricted it in Indonesia and India over concerns that it violates local laws. Malaysian news media reported that the video was also inaccessible there late Monday after  government officials lodged similar complaints with the company about the amateurish video.

However, the company has turned down requests to pull down the video entirely so as to stop it from being viewed anywhere, saying it was “clearly within our guidelines” and widely available online.

That has failed to appease some of those disgusted by the “Innocence of Muslims” trailer, even in countries where the video has been blocked. In Egypt, attorney Mohamed Hamed Salem filed a lawsuit aimed at completely blocking the website, the Al Ahram state newspaper reported Tuesday.

"Not only has YouTube insisted on showing the original movie, but now there are at least 50 different videos showing various clips of the film," Salem told Al Ahram. "We need to block YouTube in Egypt because this would be a robust response, and we need a robust response so that what happened is not repeated again."