In its today's edition it has the news story of enforced disappearances in Pakistan with an angle to the suffering of Janjua family. It has also incorporated two photos in the story. I am reproducing it in full.
Kin and Rights Groups Search for Pakistan’s Missing
Amina Masood Janjua, with two of her children, protested in Rawalpindi last month over the disappearance of her husband, Masood Ahmed Janjua. Rights groups say intelligence agencies have detained hundreds. By SALMAN MASOOD
Published: January 14, 2007
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Jan. 9 — Amina Masood Janjua has been fighting for some word on the fate of her husband since he vanished from a bus station here in July 2005. In recent months, she and her two teenage sons and 11-year-old daughter have begun a campaign of court petitions, protests and press releases.
Mrs. Janjua’s son Muhammad, 17, was beaten as police officers broke up the march. They lowered his trousers as a means of humiliating him. More than 30 families of other missing men have joined her, all seeking to locate what they and human rights groups say are hundreds of people who have disappeared into the hands of the country’s feared intelligence agencies in the last few years.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group, estimates that 400 citizens have been abducted and detained across the country since 2001. Amnesty International says many have been swept up in a campaign against people suspected of being extremists and terrorists. But some here also charge that the government is using the pretext of the war on terror to crack down on opponents.
In addition to some with ties to extremist groups, those missing include critics of the government, nationalists, journalists, scientists, researchers and social and political workers, the groups say. Mrs. Janjua says she has compiled a list of 115 missing persons, and says the list could grow as more families gain the courage to come out in the open.
Pakistani officials deny any involvement in extrajudicial detentions or any knowledge of the men’s whereabouts.
This week a Supreme Court judge nonetheless ordered the government to speed up the process of finding 41 men listed as missing by Mrs. Janjua and her supporters after the court took up their cases in an unprecedented decision in October.
At the court hearing on Monday, the government acknowledged that it had located 25 of the 41 men listed by Mrs. Janjua, “who are now free,” according to Nasir Saeed Sheikh, the deputy attorney general, though it refused to say from where they had been released.
Mrs. Janjua and others said the men were held in detention centers and safe houses of military intelligence, though most of those freed were reluctant to talk about their experiences. Mrs. Janjua maintained that only 18 persons had actually been freed.
Her husband, Masood Ahmed Janjua, 45, an educator and businessman, was not among them. Mr. Sheikh told the court that, according to a report by the Interior Ministry, all intelligence agencies had denied detaining Mr. Janjua.
Mr. Janjua left his home around 9:30 a.m. on July 30, 2005. He was heading to Peshawar in the northwest to attend a religious gathering with a friend, Faisal Fraz, 26, a mechanical engineer from the eastern city of Lahore.
Both had reservations on a 10 o’clock bus bound for Peshawar, but never made it to their destination, according to the families. “Before even reaching the bus stop, somewhere on the way, they were picked up,” Mrs. Janjua says.
Relatives of missing persons and rights advocates here say Mr. Janjua and the others are among the many “forced disappearances” or “illegal detentions” that were rare before 2001. In many cases, family members have received no news of the presumed detainees for months and even years.
“Hundreds of people suspected of links to Al Qaeda or the Taliban have been arbitrarily arrested and detained,” a report by Amnesty International issued in September said. “Scores have become victims of enforced disappearances; some of these have been unlawfully transferred (sometimes in return for money) to the custody of other countries, notably the U.S.A.,” the report said.
“The clandestine nature of the arrest and detention of terror suspects make it impossible to ascertain exactly how many people have been subjected to arbitrary detention or enforced disappearance,” it added.
I. A. Rahman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said the government was using the cover of a war on terrorism to flout the law. “Unstable states like Pakistan are taking full advantage of ‘war on terror,’ ” Mr. Rahman said. He said the government was using the antiterror campaign to crack down on its opponents and critics, especially in Baluchistan, where government forces are fighting a nationalist insurrection.
“It is correct that many of those arrested or detained were connected with Al Qaeda or extremist organizations,” he said. “But a number of people have been taken into custody whose only crime seems to be that they are nationalists in Baluchistan or Sindh. In Baluchistan, there is no Al Qaeda activity,” he said.
In cases that are brought before a court, he noted, a government denial of detention basically closes the case on a habeas corpus petition. “It was only in the end of 2006 that the Supreme Court said the government must find out where are these people,” he said.
While many of those missing persons were suspected of having links to extremist or terrorist activities or have been involved in them, many among them were innocent, the relatives maintained.
Majid Khan, 26, a computer engineer, disappeared from of Karachi, a southern port city, four years ago and is now in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said his wife, Rabiya Majid. “We don’t why he was arrested,” she said.
Mrs. Janjua, too, says she has no clue as to why her husband disappeared. The Janjua family lives in Rawalpindi, in the neighborhood of Westridge, a relatively well-off enclave inhabited mostly by active and retired military officers.
Before his disappearance, Mr. Janjua, who holds a bachelor’s degree in marine engineering, was working as managing director of a private institute here, the College of Information and Technology. He was also running a travel agency and involved in charity work, his wife said.
“He had no links with any extremist organization,” Mrs. Janjua said, though she acknowledged that he worked “off and on” with Tablighi Jamaat. The group characterizes itself as a nonpolitical, nonviolent movement that seeks to spread Orthodox Islam by proselytizing, but it has also come under suspicion by authorities as a potential recruiting ground for extremists.
Since her husband’s disappearance, Mrs. Janjua has taken over his business and his work at the college in addition to leading the drive, with the other families, to find the missing. Together they have formed a group called Defense of Human Rights.
In the last week of December, wives, daughters and sisters of dozens of missing men, led by Mrs. Janjua, gathered in Rawalpindi, holding up posters and portraits of the missing men and shouting, “Give our loved ones back.”
But their protest was quickly thwarted by the police. The photographs of the missing men were snatched. The posters were confiscated.
Mrs. Janjua’s eldest son, Muhammad, 17, was beaten by the police, who removed his pants to humiliate him before they whisked him away in a police van. He was freed that evening but the next morning the image of Muhammad with his baggy trousers pulled down by the police appeared in newspapers across the country. Op-ed columnists and editorials expressed outrage at police “brutality” and sympathy for the missing people’s families surged.
Some of those released, like Muhammad Tariq, 35, have returned home. He is one of the few willing to talk. Mr. Tariq acknowledges that he formerly belonged to Jaish-e-Muhammad, a banned extremist group, but says he just gave the group money and was not an active member.
Mr. Tariq, a business owner from Gujranwala in the east who sells iron pipe, was “picked up in broad daylight on June 14, 2004, by around a dozen plainclothesmen and elite police commandos,” his father, Nizamud Din, said in an interview.
Mr. Din said he had been unsuccessful in locating his son through the courts, police officials and even the Senate’s Standing Committee on Human Rights. “He was portrayed as a big catch — a big terrorist,” Mr. Din said.
President Pervez Musharraf even alluded to the case, without mentioning Mr. Tariq by name, in his book “In the Line of Fire” in connection with a failed assassination attempt in December 2003, Mr. Din said.
General Musharraf wrote in his memoirs that a person from Gujranwala gave refuge to Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the No. 3 Qaeda leader. He was arrested in Pakistan in May 2005 and accused of organizing the failed assassination.
“It is all nonsense,” Mr. Tariq said. “I have no link. I don’t even know Libbi.”
Mr. Tariq says he was singled out because in 2003 he briefly put up a family, introduced to him through a friend, of an Arab man who had been arrested in Quetta.
Mr. Tariq, a father of five, stammers while recounting his time in detention.
“For two years, I did not see the sky, the sun or the moon,” he said. He said he was kept in a 4 foot by 7 foot cell in this city, was interrogated by Pakistani military officers, mostly about Mr. Libbi, and endured “all kinds of imaginable torture.”
He was released Nov. 27 and pushed from a vehicle at night at an intersection near Islamabad. He said he had never been brought before a court. Mr. Din and Mr. Tariq said they believed the release was a result of the pressure from Mrs. Janjua’s group and the Supreme Court case.
Mrs. Janjua hopes her husband will return the same way, some day soon. “At every doorbell,” she said, “I think he is back.”
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