Fakhra Younus: an obituary

Fakhra Younus, who committed suicide aged 33, gave a face to the thousands of Pakistani women who are disfigured as a result of acid attacks, typically carried out by husbands who accuse their wives of dishonouring them; her attacker has not been brought to justice.
Born to a heroin-addicted mother on Napier Road in Karachi’s red-light district, probably in 1978, Fakhra Younus was 18 and working as a “dancing girl” (a euphemism for a prostitute) when she met Bilal Khar, a former Member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a former Punjab governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
The Khar family owns vast swathes of farmland in the province and is a major political force in Pakistan. A cousin of Bilal’s is Pakistan’s current Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar.
When he met Fakhra, Bilal Khar had already been married and divorced three times and was married at the time to a fourth wife with whom he had two children, facts of which Fakhra was unaware.
The two married after six months, but, by her account, her husband subjected her to a sustained campaign of sexual, physical and verbal abuse from the very start that lasted three years before she eventually escaped and moved back to live with her mother. But her peace did not last long.
On the afternoon of May 14, 2000, she was disturbed by an intruder. She later said that she had been asleep in her drawing room when she heard a man’s voice telling her: “Fakhra… Fakhra wake up!”
“I jerked as he held me by my hair and opened my mouth. Because I resisted, he couldn’t get me to swallow. But then he threw something on me. At first I thought it was a joke. I did not understand what had happened to me. Then he left, so I ran after him. My house was on the second floor and by the time I got to the first floor, I realised I could not see.”
Feeling her clothes melting to her body, she collapsed on the floor, screaming. By the time the acid had done its work, the hair had been burned off her head; her lips had fused together; her left ear was obliterated; she had been blinded in one eye; and her breasts had melted to the bone.
She could breathe only with extreme difficulty. When her four-year-old son, Nauman, first visited her in a crowded public hospital, where she remained for the next three months, he ran away crying.
Fakhra’s family sought to prosecute Khar for attempted murder and the case came to court in 2003. Although four witnesses testified to seeing him enter Fakhra’s home on the day of the attack, all later retracted their statements.
They had complained of receiving death threats, but the judge in the case took no notice and in December 2003, he dismissed the charges.
Khar continued to protest his innocence, claiming the perpetrator was a pimp with whom his wife had been having an affair.
After her release from hospital, Fakhra Younus found that she had become a liability to her family, for whom she had once been a source of income.
She and her son were subsequently taken in by Tehmina Durrani, a stepmother of Bilal’s and a women’s rights activist who had chronicled “the Khars’ way of treating women” in her book My Feudal Lord, in which she described the abuse meted out to her by her ex-husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
In 2001, after some difficulty (the government, concerned about Pakistan’s image abroad, dragged its heels over issuing a passport), Tehmina Durrani helped Fakhra to move to Rome where, over the next 11 years, she underwent 39 major operations.
By the 38th operation, in 2011, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though still badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape.
By this time, she had learned Italian and co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato (The Erased Face), which brought in some income to add to a monthly disability allowance from the Italian government.
But the operations exacted a heavy psychological toll, and she was said to be depressed by the impossibility of returning to Pakistan, where friends were worried that her life would be in danger.
On March 17, Fakhra Younus climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in Rome and jumped.
In a suicide note, she gave her reason as “the silence of law on the atrocities and insensitivity of Pakistani rulers”.
News of her death arrived in Pakistan as the country was celebrating its first Oscar – awarded to the Karachi filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for Saving Face, a documentary focusing on victims of acid attacks.
As Fakhra’s coffin arrived for burial, protesters were demanding that the case against Bilal Khar be reopened.
But Khar continued to deny that he bore any responsibility for his wife’s death: “My hands are clean,” he told interviewers. Fakhra Younus is survived by her son, who is in the care of an Italian family.