Voices in the Wilderness?

Everyone is decrying the fact that Pakistan's security agencies (ISI amd MI) have become the abducting agencies and been playing havoc with Pakistanis' civil rights. Last September, human rights organisation Amnesty International criticised Pakistani intelligence officials. It said they were abducting people with little or no proof of al-Qaeda connections and selling them to the US.

Then in the second week of January this year, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2007 and said that the "US credibility had been undermined by the Bush administration’s use of torture and detention without trial". It also said that the European Union which should have filled "the leadership void on human rights", its "approach is mired in procedures that emphasize internal unanimity and rotation over the effective projection of EU influence to protect human rights".

The same organization in its report for 2006 has said, "The United States has notably failed to press strongly for human rights improvements in the country, muting its criticism in recent years in exchange for Pakistan's support in the US-led 'war on terror'", and the international donors who have poured billions of dollars "have not used their leverage to insist on improvements in human rights practices and the rule of law".

The major international print media such as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and now the BBC have finally caughts up with this story of human misery and state depredation of its citizens' rights.

But General Musharraf is not paying attention. Neither do the Westen countries whose dirty work the Musharraf regime has taken upon itself to do since 2001. The war on terror is the pretext that has become a handy tool for him as it have for all the dictators and despots the world over. Now, they can crush the descenting voices and political opposition with impunity. The war on human rights is being waged in the name of war on terror.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan gingerly moved suo moto and timidly asked the agencies and the interior ministry to spit out the missing they had abducted and were keeping in their torture dongeons, but then retracted its neck back into its shell when it saw it had moved too far for its spine to handle. Defense of Human Rights, a human rights watchdog in Islamabad, was not satisfied and was asking the apex court to use its constitutional powers to be the bulwark for the helpless and hapless. But ...

Now another human rights organization, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which says that it has investigated and recorded 241 cases of "enforced disappearances", most of them from Balochistan, is going to file a court petition next week to seek their recovery. At least one woman suspected by the US of having links to al-Qaeda, Dr Afia Siddiqui, has been missing since 2003 along with her three children.

I can only wish the HRCP good luck. It is barking under the wrong tree, I think.