Years After Acid Horror, Suicide Stirs Pakistan

Dr. Valerio Cervelli, a plastic surgeon who led the work, said it was difficult at first “because her lower lip was attached to her torso, she had no neck, and her eyes were permanently open.” Complicating matters, she ignored postoperative advice. “She was so headstrong, so independent,” he said.       
Still, things improved: by the 38th operation, in early 2011, Ms. Younas could move her mouth and one eye. Her once strikingly beautiful face, although still charred, had regained some of its shape. She had learned Italian, befriended local traders and co-written a memoir, “Il Volto Cancellato,” or “The Erased Face,” which brought in some income.       
She ventured outside fearlessly, armed only with a bawdy sense of humor ingrained on the streets of Karachi. During a soccer match in Rome, when the noise grew too loud, Ms. Younas turned to fellow fans and “threatened to throw her false ear at them,” Ms. Durrani recalled with a chuckle.       
But the grueling operations extracted a heavy physical and psychological toll, said Rachele Bonani, an aid worker who helped her. And, Ms. Bonani added, “she always wanted to go home.” But a return to Pakistan was out of the question for Ms. Younas, partly for security reasons: friends worried that her life would be in danger.       
She vented her frustration at the local Pakistani Embassy. About two years ago, according to several accounts, Ms. Younas turned up, demanding to meet the ambassador. A heated confrontation developed during which “security was called,” a senior embassy employee said in an e-mail. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Ms. Younas was persuaded to leave the building voluntarily; Ms. Durrani insists that she was forcefully ejected by the Italian police, who later apologized.       
“She gave up on justice,” Ms. Durrani said. “She gave up on the fact that she could ever come back. She knew how she would be treated.”       
Since Ms. Younas’s death, those close to her have recalled signs of deep-rooted depression. Her son, Noman, said he was not surprised by the suicide, because she had tried twice before to kill herself.       
“It was a bad time for her, because of a lot of things,” he said in a telephone interview. “I guess she had her reasons.”       

Now in his first year of high school, Noman, 15, is in the care of an Italian family. He says he does not intend to return to Pakistan.       
Pakistani advocacy workers point to promising signs that future acid victims will be treated better. Legal reforms enacted last year mandate stiff penalties, including a minimum 14-year sentence and a one million rupee ($11,100) fine for attackers. A new Acid and Burn Crime Bill, due to come before Parliament soon, provides for better police investigations, trials and victim treatment. Further off, there are plans to regulate the sale of nitric and hydrochloric acids.       
Some experts, however, worry that a notoriously weak police force and lower-court system in Pakistan could undercut any legal revolution. “It’s a systemic problem,” said Faisal Siddiqi, a lawyer who works with acid victims. “Regardless of the laws you bring, if you are poor and a woman, you will not get justice from the courts in Pakistan.”       
Ms. Younas never saw “Saving Face,” but was buoyed by the acclaim it received, friends said.       
On Monday, Ms. Obaid-Chinoy, the filmmaker, said: “The tragedy is that it took a film and a suicide to bring the problem of acid violence to the national consciousness. Sometimes it takes extremes for a nation to wake up to what’s wrong within its borders.       
“Now I just hope that the man who is responsible for this will face justice,” she added.         
Despite the film’s success, Ms. Younas’s friends say it could not overcome her sense of isolation, heightened by the pain that the attacker who had stolen her beauty and crushed her life remained free.       
“Had she been a politician’s daughter or a general’s daughter, then we would have seen what would have happened,” Ms. Durrani said. “But who was going to fight for a dancing girl?”