Also see:
AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications •
Go to Original
Pakistan's Missing Are Doubly Lost
By Bruce Wallace
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 27 December 2007
With a Supreme Court installed by Musharraf,
hundreds allegedly picked up by security forces have no champion in the judiciary.
Karachi, Pakistan - Abid Raza Zaidi winces occasionally as he tells how
police hung him upside down and beat him with leather straps to get him to confess
to taking part in a deadly bombing in Karachi.
He remembers being forced to stand for hours without rest, and the strange
serenity he felt when police said they had determined he was guilty and would
execute him in the morning.
The police eventually let him go. The 35-year-old doctoral student is home
now, surrounded by his beloved books on zoology again, sunlight and the squeals
of children filtering into his house in the warrens of a poor Karachi neighborhood.
But for four months last year, Zaidi's friends and family had no idea where
he was. He is one of hundreds of Pakistanis allegedly swept up by the country's
security forces in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United
States, when President Pervez Musharraf began a crackdown on Islamic extremists.
Human rights activists say the government has since extended its dragnet to
include others who oppose it. At least 600 people, and perhaps hundreds more,
are missing, they say, held without charge in undisclosed locations with no
access to family or a lawyer.
The battle over the fate of Pakistan's so-called disappeared has been a major
source of friction between Musharraf and the country's Supreme Court, which
over the last year had begun to call the government to account for its missing
citizens.
In rulings that encompassed more than 100 cases of missing people, then Chief
Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry ordered the government to disclose the whereabouts
of the missing and file charges or release them.
Musharraf accused the court of endangering public security by setting terrorists
free, and the tension was central to the escalating clash of wills between the
president and the judiciary.
Although Musharraf's decision to fire the country's top judges last month came
just before a Supreme Court ruling that could have disqualified him from the
presidency, lawyers point out that he was already furious with what he considered
to be grand-standing judges poking into areas where police, the army and intelligence
services have long operated with impunity.
The government has been cagey about media reports last week that it freed,
or was set to free, about 100 of the missing to assuage international criticism.
"I don't want to say anything about that which I don't know," said
Afzal Hayder, the law minister, when asked about the reports.
But human rights activists say none of the missing have been released. They
say that any move to suddenly do so would only highlight the arbitrary nature
of the detentions.
"The chief justice did not release a single terrorist; it is Musharraf
who has released 25 of the most barbaric terrorists," says Iqbal Haider,
secretary- general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, referring to
Taliban prisoners the president agreed to exchange last month for 213 captured
Pakistani soldiers. "His strategy was to shut down a judiciary that was
showing some clout on the illegal activities of the intelligence services. That
is what he could not tolerate."
Whatever the cause, the dismissal of the Supreme Court has brought a halt to
the process of tracing those alleged to be missing. At the time of its dissolution,
the court was hearing evidence in cases involving 487 people. The new Supreme
Court, made up of judges handpicked by Musharraf, has so far shown no sign of
resuming those hearings.
"All human rights cases have been shelved," said Haider, the human
rights official. "Whatever relief the families of the missing were receiving
is no longer available."
Critics also say Pakistan's army and intelligence services have used the cover
of the fight against Islamic extremism to intimidate other political enemies
of the government, such as nationalists from the provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan.
Most of those reported missing from impoverished Baluchistan are alleged to
have links to the underground Baluchistan Liberation Army, which has been designated
a terrorist organization.
"Missing people are asked if they have any links to the BLA," said
Hasil Bazinjo, a nationalist leader in Baluchistan. "They are pressured
to reveal who provides money and ammunition to the BLA."
Bazinjo says his party has evidence of 600 missing people, mostly students
and journalists. One such is Muneer Mengal, a journalist who attempted to start
broadcasting an independent Baluch TV channel into Pakistan from Dubai, United
Arab Emirates. Mengal has been held since April 2006.
"When you have no accountability on the intelligence service, you have
fear," said Athar Minallah, a lawyer who has been a leading organizer of
the judicial protests against Musharraf and was briefly held last month. "If
you pick up hundreds of people in Baluchistan who are simply fighting for their
rights, then you create fear right across the country. People now believe that
anyone can disappear."
Zoology student Zaidi said the police eventually acknowledged that they had
made a mistake in detaining him, but kept him in custody because the intelligence
services remained convinced that he was linked to a bombing that killed more
than 50 people.
His two sisters said they first thought he had been kidnapped, then realized
after a police raid on their home a month later that he must be in custody.
"Everybody knows that people disappear," said sister Sarwat Hasan,
28, a teacher. "But we couldn't understand why they would take him, because
he was not involved in politics or any sectarian activities."
They had no money to hire a lawyer and no idea where their brother was until
he showed up one day barefoot, after being pushed out of a police car, handed
a few rupees and warned not to talk about what had happened. But he does talk,
methodically recounting his story, though he remains afraid he is being watched.
"I refuse to submit to the fear they tried to create in me," Zaidi
said as his sisters watched protectively from across the room.
"When I was being held, they said, 'We can kill you.' I said, 'Go ahead.
Do it. But I will not tell a lie.'
"I had done nothing," he said.
----------
bruce.wallace@latimes.com
Wallace recently was on assignment in Pakistan. Special correspondent Shahid
Husain contributed to this report.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story