Mohtarma Bhutto Addresses Students in Seoul:
Says Women Rights Inseparable from Human Rights Highlights role of Islam as guarantor of Women Rights
Seoul - May 2, 2001

Former Prime Minister and Chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto has said that women's rights are inseparable from human rights, just as economic justice is inseparable from political liberty. ‘In the modern era, these issues determined the essence of morality, civility and a just society’.

She was addressing the student of Seoul University on Wednesday on the subject of "Women’s Rights’. The former Prime Minister is in South Korea on a five day visit as guest of the former South Korean President Kim Young Sam.

She said she was addressing the students with a unique double focus. "I wear the scars, on my body and my soul, of the abuse of basic human rights. Thus I view oppression through the eyes of the victim".

Mohtarama Bhutto said that the world can become a fair place only when each and every human being on the planet was treated equally. "Liberty is the most enduring and powerful personal and political value on earth". Communism was defeated by humanism and not by NATO forces, she said.

The former Prime Minister said that there was no human right more fundamental, and more universal, than equal rights for woman in the new century and added that the spirit of Islam guaranteed women’s rights. ‘Cast aside your preconceptions about the role of women in our religion’, she told the audience and said the fundamental ethos of Islam is tolerance, dialogue and democracy.

There is no religion on earth that, in its teachings, is more respectful of the role of women in society than Islam. ‘It is this tradition of Islam that has empowered me, has strengthened me, and has emboldened me. It is this tradition of Islam that has allowed me battle for political and human rights, and strengthens me today in this hour of crisis for my family, my nation and me’.

The former Prime Minister said that today in Pakistan the cause of human rights is being set back decades and that of women's rights is being set back a century.

‘My successor's attempt to turn back the clock on women's rights, on liberal society, on pluralistic democracy focused on me, on destroying me politically at home and destroying my reputation abroad. Only now did the world recently learn in the Sunday Times of London that the charges brought against me were concocted and contrived and the judges that convicted me and my husband were ordered to do so, were actually threatened to do so’.

Mohtarama Bhutto said that as Prime Minister she instituted a massive program to address the problem of women illiteracy in Pakistan, through the construction of thirty thousand schools with programs aimed at teaching girls as well as boys, in the cities and in the rural areas, to read. Those programs of women literacy have been abandoned, she said.

The former Prime Minister said that she condemned the honor killing, by members of their own families, of women but the military junta was now silent to these abominations. The military, currying favor with the fundamentalists, has reversed her government’s policy of encouraging women in sports and extracurricular activities, she said. .

Case by case, issue-by-issue, policy-by-policy, the military junta that rules Pakistan with a cane and a whip has reversed policies aimed at ameliorating the role and rights of women in Pakistani society, she said.

She urged the international community to help shape a world free from exploitation and maltreatment of women. A world in which women have opportunities to rise to the highest level in politics, business, diplomacy, and other spheres of life. Where women have economic freedom and independence. Where women are defined less by their fathers or husbands, but by their own achievements.

About democracy she said ‘none of us - not you, not me -- will be free until democracy is returned to Pakistan, to Burma and other places where it is under threat’.

None of us -- not you, not me -- will be free until women are no longer abused, exploited and persecuted in Pakistan, South Korea and other continents and countries.

She said that we are not free if girls cannot read. For a girl who cannot read has no future; and a girl with no future has no human rights.

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