Aurat Foundation condemns the killing of Perveen Rehman

Lahore: Aurat Foundation Lahore strongly condemned the brutal killing of Perveen Rehman, a dedicated social activist and Director of the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi.

It expressed deep sorrow at the loss of this brilliant and peace loving development worker, loved by all, who had dedicated her entire life to working selflessly for the poor and marginalized people, thuschanging lives of hundreds of people in katchiabadis where she worked.

She was doing research on land mafia and made many enemies in this course. Whenever others tried to warn her, she used to reply that she would work till she was aliveand her pro-poor approach was unique and
Orangi Pilot Project is one of Asia’s largest slum projects that has been focusing on low cost sanitation, housing, health and family planning, education and micro finance for the poor. The NGO was set up by the well-known social activist Akhtar Hameed Khan in 1980 and Parveen Rehman had been associated with this NGO for over two decades.

Aurat Foundation Lahore press release further stated that Parveen’s death came on a day when seven other citizens of Pakistan have fallen prey to the target killings in Karachi, a city where violence has become routine; members questioned the state’s inability to check rampant lawlessness and target killings of its citizens.
It was stated that Rehman’s death is a direct result of the growing environment of impunity that surrounds such incidents, where even personal scores and enmities are settled by resorting to cold-blooded murder and go unchallenged.

Members stressed the importance of understanding the political reasons behind these ‘seemingly’ random incidents of violence. “Rehman’s work and passion for documenting and compiling records of land grabbing that has been rampant in the area was well known. She had claimed and shown through her painstaking research work that 1500 ‘goths’ (villages) on the fringes of city had been merged into Karachi in the last 15 years and subdivided into plots at the cost of the poor inhabitants who were living on these lands for many decades.”

Aurat Foundation strongly demanded a thorough investigation of the death threats that Parveen Rehman had been receiving from the land mafia in the area, and stressed that those who had deprived the nation of a dedicated friend of the poor and an exemplary citizen of the country must not be allowed to escape punishment.