Growing Unrest: Pakistan's Security Agencies and Missing Pakistanis
Pakistan police tactics spark ire
A RAND report released last week accuses them of human rights abuses and suggests that the US suspend aid.
By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – Amina Masood Janjua recalls the date as if it were her own name: July 30, 2005 - the day intelligence agents took her husband from a Rawalpindi street. She hasn't heard from him since.
Like hundreds of others, Ms. Janjua has taken to protesting on the streets, bringing international attention to what some say is the dark side of Pakistan's lauded counterterrorism efforts: the arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance of hundreds, if not thousands, of suspects.
"There's no option for me but to protest on the roads. I think in terms of seconds - how long will I be kept from my husband," Janjua says.
As these families wring their hands, developments in Pakistan's court system highlight a different but equally troubling trend. Alleged militants, many considered top Al Qaeda recruits, are being released from jail, their sentences having been overruled - a result, apparently, of Pakistani police resorting to methods of incrimination that don't stand in court.
The two trends show how, a world away from the restive tribal zones where the Taliban hold sway, the war against terrorism may be faltering on another key battleground: within the ranks of the Pakistani police.
"The United States should significantly restructure or even withdraw its assistance to repressive regimes if their internal security agencies fail to improve transparency, human rights practices, and overall effectiveness," reads a RAND Corp. assessment of Pakistani police published last week.
The report's authors, who also evaluated security forces in El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, recommend that the US government should "rethink the type and amount of assistance it provides Pakistan's law enforcement agencies."
Such a change would constitute a significant reversal. Buoyed by tens of millions of dollars in US and other foreign assistance, Pakistan has cracked down on Al Qaeda at a significant cost to law-enforcement lives, rendering more terror suspects to the United States than any other counterterrorism partner, as the RAND report points out.
Searching for the disappeared
But recent critiques claim that those efforts have gone too far.
Pakistan's Supreme Court on Monday criticized as insufficient efforts by authorities to trace at least 16 people believed to be held by Pakistani intelligence agencies for suspected links with Islamic militants.
Judge Mian Shakirullah Jan, hearing a case brought by relatives of the missing, accused the government of wasting time. He said the efforts of "concerned authorities" to trace the missing "are not satisfactory" and urged them to "speed up." The judge adjourned the case until Jan. 15.
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations estimate that between 1,000 and 2,000 men have been arrested in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Detained on little or no evidence, none have been formally charged, a flagrant violation of Pakistan's constitution, analysts say.
Pakistan's government dismisses claims of arbitrary arrest. "Yes, some of their relatives are not traceable," says Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao. "But that doesn't mean that the intelligence agencies have custody of them. Some of them have just gone missing, and we're trying to find them."
Most of the cases are kept in the dark, but activists and family members like Janjua have pieced together accounts from a handful of suspects who were freed, including those from 10 prisoners recently released by Supreme Court decree. Those familiar with the cases say the arrested come from all walks of life, rich and poor. A strong sense of religious faith seems to have been their common trait.
Many argue that the arrests have spawned a new level of public rancor against the country's intelligence services, a fount of discontent that militants can draw upon.
"Two or three years back, nobody could openly speak about the [intelligence services]. Now we are speaking out, and people are becoming more brave," says Khalid Khawaja, whose Islamic Center for Research and Defence of Human Rights in Islamabad has negotiated the release of some 20 suspects.
Faltering evidence
But it is not only alleged disappearances that are raising concerns about the war on terrorism.
Even where the police have brought cases against high-profile militants, many trials have collapsed because of flimsy evidence.
Abdul Waheed Katpar, an octogenarian advocate in Karachi, has found a particular stride. In the past five years, he estimates, he has helped overturn almost 100 terrorism-related cases.
His strength, he says, is the weakness of the Pakistani police.
"They do not investigate scientifically, like in England or France. No. 1, they don't know how to do it. No. 2, they're corrupt. And No. 3, they have to bring a case to show they're doing something," the lawyer says.
Assessments from international observers would appear to corroborate Mr. Katpar's claims.
"The police lack basic investigative skills in collecting evidence and following chains of custody, and have few technical resources at their disposal," says the RAND report. "The state has no centralized criminal database, and until recently, no forensic laboratories were available for collecting and assembling evidence against criminal or terrorist suspects."
Pakistani police officials, who will speak only on background, agree that their capabilities are limited. They say that the main difficulty is in bringing credible witnesses to trial. Pakistan has no witness-protection program, so there is little to assuage the public's fear of retribution.
Fears like this underscore the fact that the country's largest cities continue to be centers of militant activity, even though attention in the fight against terror is fixated on the tribal zones bordering Afghanistan.
"[S]ince the Army's 2004 incursions into South Waziristan, the problem has steadily shifted to the country's hinterlands as well as large towns and major cities such as Quetta, Lahore, and especially Karachi," says the RAND report.
"The direction of Washington's counterterrorism assistance has not kept pace with these developments."
Friday, January 19, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
America's Road to Guantanamo
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families for Peace and the Camp Casey Peace Institute. She has written three books, including "Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey through Heartache to Activism", "Not One More Mother's Child", and "Dear President Bush".
The following piece is by her and is being reproduced from BuzzFlash
01/15/2007
by Cindy Sheehan
Asif Iqbal is a quiet, but funny and quick-witted 25 year old British man of Indian descent who was detained illegally in Guantanamo Bay prison for 2 and ½ years before his government was finally able to obtain his release.Asif's story is a traumatic tale of survival. From the first moment that he was sold to the Americans by bounty hunters; was forced to leave Afghanistan; miraculously lived through hails of bullets that killed hundreds in the back of truck containers to arriving in Guantanamo prison camp where he was actually relieved to discover that he would be in the hands of Americans. Asif was under the tragic and very mistaken impression that Americans were good and would treat him more humanely than his captors. He soon found out that Americans could be just as brutal as the next person.
Asif was put through the most horrendous torture and lived to survive and have his and 2 other detainees' stories told in The Road to Guantanamo. Matthew Whitecross the filmmaker documented 700 pages of testimony to produce this factual and brutal movie. I don't know how anyone, even one with the tiniest, blackest heart of all, could not be intensely affected by this movie and Asif's unspeakable experiences. Asif came to Cuba this past week to protest with us on the other side of the gates.
Zohra's road to Guantanamo probably affected me the most. Her son, Omar DeGhaye, has been detained there almost since the infamous prison debuted its vicious and illegal purpose on January 11, 2001. Omar was sold by a bounty hunter in Pakistan as he tried to get a visa for his new wife to travel to London with him. Zorah and her other son, Taher DeGhaye traveled all the way to Guantanamo from Dubai.
Zohra sobbed as she watched Asif's story. One can imagine that her distress was bad enough when she only imagined the inhumane treatment that her son was receiving at the hands of the "good" Americans, but seeing a factual account in living color on a movie screen and hearing Asif's testimony was so heartbreaking to her. I, myself, was heartbroken when she approached me at the torture chamber's front gate and said in her soft broken English: "If only they would let me talk to Omar. To hear his voice would be a miracle to me."
Adele Welty's road to Guantanamo closely parallels mine. Her courageous and handsome son, Timmy, was killed in one of the towers on 9-11. Adele is a member of "9-11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" and has traveled both to Afghanistan and Iraq as a good-will ambassador whose heart is filled with love and compassion for the people that BushCo are destroying by exploiting her son's death: constantly. It took Bloody George 3 ½ paragraphs before he used 9-11 as one of the rationales for wreaking more havoc in Iraq in his escalation speech. Adele urgently called for all Americans to persistently harass their elected officials to give the prisoners at Guantanamo due process and then shut the gulag down.
Colonel Ann Wright who is a dear friend and a companion in the struggle, arrived at Guantanamo through a life in which her entire adult years were taken up by service to our country in the Army Reserves and as a diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War. What acutely stabs Ann in the heart is that American soldiers act so viciously towards fellow human beings. The kind of behavior demonstrated by U.S. soldiers in Guantanamo not only lowers themselves to the level of animals, but endangers their brothers and sisters in arms who may be targets of reprisals and brutality themselves.
Bill Goodman, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and his group represent almost all of the prisoners who are incarcerated there against our own Constitution, international law and the Geneva Conventions. It saddens Bill that we have a renegade and rogue government in DC that sanctions and has, in fact, codified torture and taking away the basic human rights of prisoners of which not one has been found guilty of anything, and in fact, very few have even been charged.
My road to Guantanamo began on April 04, 2004. My son was killed for the insatiable greed, immoral stupidity, and cruelty of BushCo. Casey and my family were used as pawns in the bloody game of corporate greed and militarism that abused Asif and Omar and devastated Adele and Zohra; the same ineptitude and callousness that have saddened Ann and Bill who both have been such noble servants of our Constitution and defenders of true freedom. Bloody BushCo brought us all together in an unlikely spot on a somber day.
Not one of us, not even Bill the attorney, can judge the guilt or innocence of a single inmate at Guantanamo. We are not saying they are all innocent and should be freed. We say that they deserve their day in court. Each and every one of them deserves to be charged, hear the evidence against him, be allowed to present a defense, and then be judged. BushCo refuses to call them prisoners of war, so they should be tried in criminal courts, not by military commissions without their rights to habeas corpus.
In the old and now quaint US system of justice, one was held to be innocent until found guilty. In the BushCo system of justice anyone can be held guilty for an indefinite amount of time without due process or basic human comforts. A person in Bloody George's world can have menstrual blood spread on his face by a female guard, or be subjected to temperature or noise extremes. A human being in the Bloody George prison system can even be water-boarded or have his religion mocked and desecrated by the same people who claim to revere the Prince of Peace and Love. In America many of the same people who condone the sadism of Guantanamo would raise a bloody uproar if animals were treated half as badly as the humans of Guantanamo.
It is just plain wrong. And it is wrong to either condone it, or condemn it without corresponding action.
We eight converged in Guantanamo together from different paths. Some of our paths were marred by unrelenting pain and some by a sense of injustice, but all with the common mission to finally call this violence what it is: barbarism and to call our leaders what they are: barbarians.
The USA is no longer admired as a nation that can be respected because of the blatant atrocities of Bloody George the Torturer's reign of terror. We the people who are inhabitants of this planet and intimately connected to both the tortured and torturer in Guantanamo need to demand some basic changes:
Charge the prisoners and appropriately punish them or let them go.
Close the torture chamber of Guantanamo prison and other prisons or torture chambers around the world.
Repeal the Military Commission's Act and restore habeas corpus.
Hold BushCo accountable for the heartache and heartlessness they have forced on the world.
Get on the phone this minute.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
The New York Times' Coverage of Enforced Disappearances In Pakistan
The New York Times has finally caught up with the story.
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.”
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.”
Pakistan’s intelligence monster
Pakistan’s intelligence monster —Khalid Hasan
While there has been an explosion of television and radio stations in a country with an already well-established print tradition, a pattern of brutal attacks is silencing those journalists who pursue stories that make the government uncomfortable
The roughing up of New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall by intelligence hoods in her Quetta hotel room on 19 December and the despicable treatment given her photographer has brought shame to Pakistan. I have been speaking to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York as to what response their protest to the interior minister Aftab Sherpao has received. As of Friday 12 January, CPJ had heard nothing and was not expecting to hear anything either. That sums up the gangsterland that parts of Pakistan have become.
The intelligence establishment in Pakistan is now a government within a government, a dread entity that has gone rogue, that recognises no law, respects no rules, is bound by no code of conduct and brings the people of Pakistan, in whose name it acts, nothing but disgrace. In the last sixty years there has been only one attempt to look into the state of the intelligence establishment in Pakistan and to see how it could be reformed. Strangely enough, this exercise was ordered by Gen. Yahya Khan, though nothing came of it. Both that committee and the government that had appointed it were overtaken by the cataclysmic events that reached their blood-soaked climax with the breakup of Pakistan in December 1971.
For the last six and a half years, Pakistan has been under a military government and under military governments, not only intelligence agencies but all public servants are known to throw accountability to the winds. Military governments are by their very nature unaccountable since they dance around the commands of a single individual. The question is where will reform start and how? So corrupted and power-drunk have, what the Urdu press calls ‘sensitive institutions’, become that they will have to be dismantled as they exist and rebuilt in accordance with law and a code of conduct.
Carlotta Gall is the daughter of Sandy Gall, a British television reporter who was in and out of Pakistan during the Afghan war and though he is now retired, there are many in Pakistan who know him as a friend. What happened to her is shameful in the extreme. CPJ told me that her great concern is not for herself but for Akhtar Soomro, the Pakistani photographer, who was handled with great brutality and who remains in fear of the hoodlums who beat him up and dealt with him as if he were a common criminal. In a letter Ms Gall sent out to Aftab Sherpao and some others, including CPJ, she detailed her ordeal in dispassionate language.
She wrote, “At 9.43 pm (on 19 December), I was speaking on the telephone when men broke open the door of my room and four men entered the room and began to seize my belongings. One snatched my handbag and when I tried to take it back, a second man punched me twice in the side of the face and head with his fist. I fell backwards onto a coffee table smashing the crockery. I have heavy bruising on my arms, on my temple and my cheekbone and swelling on my left eye and a sprained knee. The men searched my belongings, took my three notebooks, my laptop, my satellite telephone, two cell phones (although they gave one back when it rang) and several other papers and items. They were extremely aggressive and abusive. The leader, who spoke English, refused to show any ID, said I was in Quetta without permission (she wasn’t), that I had visited Pashtunabad, a part of the town, which he said was not permitted, and that I had been interviewing the Taliban.”
They also told her that Akhtar Soomro was a Pakistani and they could do to him what they wished. In other countries, being a citizen has advantages: in Pakistan it seems to be becoming a liability.
Tariq Azim is emerging as the government’s ‘damage control guy’ because by midnight that day, he had managed to have Ms Gall’s belongings returned and her colleague released and his equipment restored to him. While on the one hand, the government has made no statement, those who roughed up the two journalists were obviously government agents, otherwise how would Tariq Azim have managed to get done what he got done?
CPJ’s Asia programme director Bob Dietz told me that the attack on Ms Gall and her colleague is typical of what has been happening increasingly to Pakistani journalists. Virtually all the incidents have gone unexplained and apparently un-investigated by the government. This week, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Many Pakistani journalists are intimidated and reluctant to speak publicly about their attackers. But the few incidents that have been made public follow a similar pattern.”
Dietz cited several cases that should make us hang our heads in shame. There is
Mehruddin Mari, a Sindhi journalist who was held illegally for four months with the government saying it knew nothing about it. The killing of Hayatullah Khan in NWFP remains unexplained, but everyone knows who his killers were. He was the eighth journalist to be killed in Pakistan since the murder of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
When a CPJ delegation visited Pakistan last year, government officials promised to make public all information they had on CPJ’s lengthy list of unexplained cases. “Now, almost six months later, they still have no explanations,” Dietz wrote. He added, “Talk to officials in Pervez Musharraf’s government and you will hear how the media are freer now than they have ever been. And while there has been an explosion of television and radio stations in a country with an already well-established print tradition, a pattern of brutal attacks is silencing those journalists who pursue stories that make the government uncomfortable. Today, many Pakistani journalists fear their government’s intelligence agencies more than any Islamic militant.”
I should close this with the reminder that you are reading this in a newspaper whose editor Najam Sethi was abducted from his home, beaten up, kept in solitary confinement and physically and psychologically traumatised, though not by this government, but it could well have been this as that government. The fact is that as long as the intelligence establishment in Pakistan is not dismantled and rebuilt, what happened to Najam Sethi and Hayatullah and Mehruddin will happen again and again and again.
Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Masood Janjua's Family Suffers As Do Others
I have received a kind of activity report or you may call it a diary of the wife of Masood Ahmed Janjua who was abducted in July 2005 by Pakistani agencies and been missing for seventeen long months.
Mrs. Amina Janjua got together with three other families and started a campaign for the release of her husband and other people like him. She tells the story of the hardships and abstacles she, her family and other families have to meet and overcome.
She has been appointed the in charge of the women's wing of Defense of Human Rights, Islamabad.
I am reproducing this activity report to draw attention to human rights violations in Pakistan.
--------------------------------
Defence of Human Rights
Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan
Thousands of cases of mysterious missing and abduction in Pakistan have become a point of international concern and it is a clear violation of basic human rights.
Thus from the beginning of September 06 three victim families of missing persons joined hands to launch a massive campaign of protests in order to surface their dear ones. Defence of Human Rights appointed Mrs.Masood Janjua, one of the vicims, incharge of this campaign. Prior to this these unfortunate families registered FIRs and knocked at every door but no action was taken by the Government and Judicial levels although it is the responsibility of the government to find them, make efforts to release them and send them blissfully to their homes.
In this presentation we will be discussing the following points.
• Details of missing persons.
• Efforts, Rallies, Walks and Sit-downs etc. made for recovery of our missing persons.
• Details of the meetings with the Important Government and Military Officials.
• Plight of the families and their demand.
Efforts, Rallies, Walks and Sit-ins etc. made for recovery of our missing persons
Defence of Human Rights coordinated with the missing person’s families, who were denied of Justice and invited them to Islamabad for a series of protests. First demo was staged on the 4th of September 06 in which five families participated:
1. Family of Masood Ahmed Janjua form Rawalpindi.
2. Family of Fasial Faraz from Lahore.
3. Family of Atiq-ur-Rehman from Abbotabad.
4. Family of Majid Khan from Hyderabad.
5. Family of Muhammad Mansoor from Karachi.
The families started from the Parliament Lodges at 04:00 pm marching towards the Parliament House. The protesters were holding placards and banners and were also chanting slogans for the release of their dear ones. Both electronic and print media were invited to witness the grand protest. The procession, after reaching the Parliament House, organized its camp there and appeared for photo session and press briefing.
Activities in the Camp:
Members of these families remained busy giving interviews to the press and channels. A few members, with the help of MNAs , were able to go inside the National Assembly. In every session the issue of the missing persons were forcefully raised and projected. On the occasion the interior Minister Zaffar Warraich asked for 3 days to trace the missing persons. But after 6 days he only said that the persons were not found with the Government. The struggle however continued on the part of families who were very much determined to pressurize release of their dear ones.
10th Sep 2006:
The families held a press conference in the Islamabad Press Club. Latest information and details of the issue were given to the press. Many members of the National Assembly supported this issue aloud.
11th Sep 2006:
It was the great support and participation by MNAs, colleges, youth organizations like Muslim League Youth Wing, Shbab-e-Milli, friends and public which made the grand protest of 11th Sep a success. The issue was strongly projected in both local and foreign media.
Parliament Closes Doors for the Protesting Families:
On the eve of 14th Sep a group of 16 MNAs visited the camp. It was headed by Zamurrad Khan. These MNAs asked the families to come along with them in the National Assembly where they would raise their voice in the Assembly cafeteria. As the procession reached the main gates, they were immediately closed for them. Members of the families and 16 MNAs tried their level best but they were not allowed to enter. For the first time in the history of Pakistan the gates of the National Assembly were closed for their own members for 45 minutes. Traffic jammed on both sides and the tussle with the security staff continued. All the while media was fully active, captured and projected the event very effectively in the news papers.
Barefooted Walk and Sit-ins of Protesting Families:
This barefooted walk started in front of the Parliament House, the participants marched towards the President House. Women including children marched on the roads. On the way they chanted slogans like RETURN DEAR ONES and WE WANT OUR DEAR ONES BACK etc. The participants made enthusiastic speeches against the government to be against its own people. The speakers stressed that our leaders sleep comfortably in there luxurious palaces but the innocent people, they are ruling on, stay awake day & night, mourning their missing dear ones. Agony, despair and depression is their fate, gifted by the Government and Agencies of Pakistan. The barefooted walk continued towards the gates of Parliament house, where the protesters sit down for a dharna. Slogans demanding immediate release of dear ones were chanted. There is no end to the sufferings of the missing persons’ families, just to record their grievances and put forward their demand and handover a signed declaration to the government representative, they had to wait anxiously for 2& a half hours on the road. At last Minister of State for Information Mr. Tariq Azeem came. He heard their demands and promised to surface their dear ones within a week, a promised which was never fulfilled.
Walk from Murrir Chok to the R.Pindi Press Club and a Press Conference:
Affected families started the procession from Murrir Chok marching on the Murree Road reached The Daily Jang building. While recorded their complain and chanting slogans, they reached Pindi Press Club. Press Briefing was given to the Press by the members of 12 families.
The natural environment of the camp.
Grand Protest of 22nd Sep (Aapara Chok):
Families of the missing persons gathered at Lal Masjid Islamabad. They started their protest opposite the mosque. There, they had speeches then the protest was rallied towards Aapara chok. The families expressed their emotions over there and addressed to the grand gathering of about 2 thousand people. M.M.A. leaders also showed solidarity with the issue and the victim families.
Visit to the Supreme Court:
The families gathered at their camp opposite Parliament House. Interviews were given to the Amnesty International. Mrs. Masood Janjua went to the Supreme Court to attend the hearing of Saifullah Paracha in the court No.1. By the time other families along with Khalid Khawaja came to the Supreme Court. But the gates of the Supreme Court were closed for them but with a great pulling and snatching they were allowed to meet the Registrar. The Registrar of the Supreme Court reassured the families to help and forward the application to Chief Justice of Pakistan.
Families Participated in the AI Conference:
Amnesty Internationl, in close collaboration of Defence of Human Rights and Human Rights Commission of Pakistan held a seminar on the issue of the enforced disappearances. The seminar was projected in media up to the maximum level i.e 29, 30 of sep06and1st October 06.
Details of the meetings with the Important Government and Military Officials
During the campaign families met a large number of Government officials. All of whom promised to help but their promises never came true. The families met Zummrud Khan, Main M. Aslam, Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, Nilofer Bakhtiar and Zafar Warraich. All the MNAs pledged support in every respect. The families also met Brig. Cheema of Crisis Management Cell, Mr. Tariq Azeem Minister of State for Information and Syed Kamal Shah Secretary Interior.
Plight of the Families and their Demand
The families are now in extremely desperate condition and they demand immediate release of their dear ones. Their request is that the Government and Judiciary should take up this matter and solve it on priority bases. We request the media to continue to give coverage to the issue in both print and electronic media. We appeal directly to the Chief Justice of Pakistan to call on the heads of ISI and MI to appear in court and account for the case of enforced disappearances. They all hope and pray that justice would be done. They are determined never to give up till they achieve they get their dear ones.
Activities of Defence of Human Rights in October 2006:
Families of missing persons join hands to march towards Supreme Court. Many other N.G.O s were also present on the occasion. On 2nd Oct 06,for example Cage Prisoners Reprieve .BOS, SNC and HRCP were with the familis. The procession launched a protest in front of Supreme Court and met the Registrar and president Ver Associate Mr. Abdul Qauym to use their influence for the recover of the missing deer ones.
Activities of 7th October 2006:
Chief coordinator of Defense of human Rights, Mr. Khalid Khawaja told that he is in process of negotiations with Dr. Farooq Sattar MNA over the joint issue of Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan. Soon they are going to launch a joint campaign for their missing dear ones.
Members of National Assembly Mr. Zamarud khan too, while talking to Mrs. Masood Janjua, conveyed Mohtarma Benazir’s concern over this issue of Enforced Disappearances and grave violations of human rights in Pakistan.
Members of the victim families expressed their shock and grief over the attitude of the responsible government officials, Mr. Tariq Azeem, Mr. Zaffar Warraich and Mr. M.A Durrani who promised to surface the dear ones many times but practically did nothing to solve their problem.
This fact is even more astonishing that in spite of the tireless protests of the victim families, no action was taken by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Furthermore the pending cases were not given a date of hearing.
Under these gloomy circumstances the unfortunate families now 25 in number from all over Pakistan, decided to continue their struggle.
They gave a call for a huge demonstration protest on Sunday 8th October 2006 at 3:00 pm. at Aabpara Chok Islamabad. All sympathizers, human rights activists, media and press were invited to make it a success.
Protest of Aabpara and Walk till ISI Office:
The Defence of Human Rights, our organization working on the issue of Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan, invited on the 8th October 2006, families of missing persons and gathered at Aabpara chock at 3 p.m. and established their Camp there. The families gave interviews to media and press. They started their march towards the ISI office near zero point. The families were holding placards and photos of their dear-ones, chanting slogans for the release of their dear-ones from the custody of Army intelligence agencies. The women and children chained themselves saying, “If you chain our dear ones, you chain us too. “The placards were also saying ,”Fear Allah ! Release your own brothers in Ramzan.” “Give us the most Valuable Eid Gift: OUR DEAR-ONES”.
Emotional scenes were seen when the procession reached at the ISI office. The families were badly hurt because their dear ones were targeted by its own Army. But ISI were not ready to listen from their families. Not a word was ever conveyed to families. The desperate wives, daughters and mothers sat down in front of the office gates shouting sologans and insisting, You have our dear ones, come out and answer what have they done! The only crime we know is that they were all religious and keeping beards ! Come and Arrest us too ! Kill us ! We don’t want to Live Anymore! If such is the law and order situation in our country we prefer to be in torture cells along with our loved ones ! Police in huge numbers gathered all around and threatening to pick all families, pressurized the protestors to disperse from that highly sensitive area. The procession marched back to Aabpara chok and the devastated families opened their fast on the road side. This was a historic event as never in the history of Pakistan, a protest was made in front of ISI.
Activity of 16th of October 06:
On an Iftar Dinner on Monday16th October 2006 at Jamia Hafsa G-6, Islamabad, all media, press and wellwishers were invited by the families of the Missing Persons. It was to express gratitude for all their supporters.
The programe started with Tilawat and welcome address by Allama Abdul Rashid Ghazi and introductory speech was given by Mr.Khalid Khawaja Chief coordinator DHR , then a speech by Mrs.Masood Janjua, Incharge Woman Wing of DHR to throw light on the movement of Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan . Speech by Mr.Hasmat Ali Habib, Advocate of Supreme Court/Legal Adviser DHR. Member National Assembly Mr.Zamurrad Khan expressed solidarity with this great human rights cause in his speech. Some families also conveyed their feelings and expressed thanks for the brave stance and extraordinary support shown by the media and press . A touchy Duaa by Maulana Muahmmad Abdul Aziz , Khateeb Markazi Jamia Masjid ended up the ceremony with a tearful note.
Defence of Human Rights Update:
The Defense of Human Rights demanded of the government to make all necessary efforts to bring back a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist Mr.Saifullah Paracha and a computer engineer Majid Khan who were picked up from Karachi and were handed over to the US from where they were sent to Guantanamo Camp. A meeting of the Executive Committee of DHR that was held with its Chief Co-coordinator Wing Commander (Retd) Khalid Khawaja in the chair on Tuesday expressed deep concern the way Pakistani nationals are picked up illegally and handed over to the US for no crime on their part and without due legal proceedings.
The meeting termed the phenomenon as the blatant violation of the basic human rights enunciated under the constitution and all international and UN conventions on human rights as every individual is to be taken as innocent unless proved guilty by some competent court of law. The meeting lamented the apathy of the government on the agony and plight of the families of these people who are running from pillar to the post in the pursuit of justice but the government turned a deaf ear to this sorry state of the affairs. Mr.Saif Ullah Paracha a sixty years old ailing businessman of Karachi was handed over to the US authorities in July 2003. Kept in Bagram for 18 months and then shifted to Camp Delta 5 of US military prison of Guantanamo Bay where he suffered two heart attacks. He is a diabetic and a patient of blood pressure as well. It is now the responsibility of the government to bring him back the meeting noted and regretted that medical treatment given to Saifullah is not satisfactory at all.
Majid Khan, a Computer engineer was picked up from Karachi and his brother, sister in law and an infant were also picked along with him in the year 2003 by law enforcement agencies and the personnel of US intelligence agency of FBI. Majid was handed over the US. In the recent past, some time in September 2006, he was moved to notorious US military prison of Gautanamo Bay from a secret CIA detention center. The government must bring back Majid Khan along with other Pakistani detainees, the meeting demanded.
Missing persons movement gains momentum:
Defence of Human Rights, an N.G.O. campaigning the release for Enforced Disappeared Persons of Pakistani announces that today their list registered 115th case. They refused to celebrate EID and rather launched a series of vigorous peaceful protests and negotiations. This issue has been one of the most important, being highlighted by both electronic and print media, nationally and internationally.
• The Defence of Human Rights office bearers greatly stress and demand immediate release of enforce disappeared persons. There are no charges established on these persons yet they are kept in secret detention centers. The families are completely ignorant of their whereabouts and are in a state of acute mental torture. Even more torturing is the fact that these prisons are run by our own Army.
• The Defence of Human Rights is in contact with the recently released persons and preparing the fact-finding reports to submit in the Supreme Court. Some more names of the recently released persons are:
1. Saif Ullah Nasir of Karachi released on Dec 2006
2. Uffan Laghari of Karachi released on 25th Dec 2006
3. Hassan of Lahore released on 20th Dec 2006
4. Abdul Haleem of Sadiqabad released on 31st Dec 2006
5. Omer Razzaq of Islamabad released on 31st Dec 2006
6. Abid Raza of Gujrat release on 3rd Jan 2007
Besides that cases of Omer Rehman and M. Ramzan have been opened in Lahore and Quetta respectively. Some of the detainees who have recently been released, after the movement by DHR, have mentioned again that while in custody they were in custody they saw: Masood Ahmed Janjua, Muhammad Mansoor, Saud Memon, Ali Hassan (Abdul Qadir), Aslam Zahid, Shokat Hayat, Osama Nazir, Ansar, Abdul Basit, Habeeb, Adeel, Siddque Akhter, Mufti Muneer, Saifullah Akhter, Mehboob Ilahi etc. Moreover they confirmed that they remained in the custody of the security agencies.
• The information given by them is that Saud Memon, Muhammad Mansoor, Ali Hassan Rana, were seen in ISI custody in Lahore. Whereas Abdul Basit, Osama Nazir of Faisalabad and Hafiz Tahir of D I K are with M I in Rawalpindi. A 10-year-old Abdullah reports seeing Aslam Zahid of Qasur in Army custody when he was abducted by agencies along with his father Mufti Muneer Shakir.
• The released persons plead to eliminate schedule 4, which is like a bigger prison and a lot of botheration for them.
• The Defence of Human Rights regrets the fact that on 28th Dec 06, 110 families of missing persons were subjected to worst kind of torture and harassment as they were protesting for their dear and nears ones. Even a young boy Muhammad Bin Masood of 16 son of Masood Ahmed Janjua was beaten, stripped and arrested. Police was showing exemplary brutality obviously upon higher-level orders. They wanted to teach the protestor a bitter lesson once and for all. Some 20 women were batten charged dragged and pushed by force into police mobile vans for arrests .An old man Abdul Ghaffar Parvana whose son is missing for the last six years and he is constantly on the roads protesting throughout the country, was also arrested. His cycle and portrait of his son was taken away and these thins were broken into pieces. He was released but this old man was taken away by agencies for one week that 28th Dec to 6th Jan, he was beaten badly, his cycle and portrait of his missing son was broken down. He was also ordered not to protest any more but he said as long as I am alive I will keep shouting for my son Abdul Sattar missing since 2001.
• A recently released person requesting an anonymity while telling about Masood A Janjua that he met him several times in MI detention in Rawalpindi.
• A series of protests are building up pressure on the government for example after 28th Dec 29th a big procession express solidarity with the missing persons families in Islamabad. On EID day protest demonstration was held in Faisal Masjid. The same day unsuccessful visits paid to Prime Minister House and Present House. Although the protocol officer conformed the meeting time with Mrs. Amina Masood.
• On 4th Jan missing persons staged another demo in front of the UNO office in Saudi Pak Towers and handed over a three-paged memorandum to Mr. Vandemoortele of UNO regarding the human rights violations committed by Army agencies.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Human Rights Watch Year 2006 Report
Today is the day when five years ago America sent the first batch of detainees to Guantanamo Bay concentration camps.
Since then, as the world watched helplessly, the Bush administration, in the name of War on Terror, successfully disfigured beyond recognition the beautiful face of guarantees and safeguards envisioned by the founding fathers and enshrined in the US constitution. His sycophants and parasites in other countries, such as Musharraf in Pakistan, who enthusiastically adopted him as a role model, under the same pretext, aped his dubious record of violating human rights and played havoc with the peoples' lives, in their own countries by detaining them without trial and torturing them in dark dungeons.
Today, the world stands forlorn and leaderless in the middle of unprecedented chaos and turmoil. Human rights as orphans are crying for help and the civilization stands frozen inactive.
countries against their political opponents. EU Should Fill Leadership Void on Human Rights - Human Rights Watch Launches World Report 2007 on Guantanamo Anniversary
(Washington, DC, January 11, 2007) - With US credibility undermined by the Bush administration’s use of torture and detention without trial, the European Union must fill the leadership void on human rights, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2007.
Today marks five years since the United States first sent detainees to Guantanamo. The Bush administration has proven largely incapable of providing leadership on human rights, while China and Russia are embracing tyrants in their quest for resources and influence. But rather than assuming the leadership mantle, the European Union's approach is mired in procedures that emphasize internal unanimity and rotation over the effective projection of EU influence to protect human rights, said the 556-page volume's introductory essay.
"Since the US can't provide credible leadership on human rights, European countries must pick up the slack," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "Instead, the European Union is punching well below its weight."
Human Rights Watch lamented the "lowest common denominator approach" to rights protection by EU member states, in which governments that favor accommodation drag down those seeking a tougher approach to serious rights abuses. Examples include the EU's backtracking on the sanctions it imposed following the May 2005 massacre in the Uzbek city of Andijan and its weak response to the 2005 royal coup in Nepal. Similarly, while abusive governments banded together to block effective action at the United Nations' new Human Rights Council, the EU's ability to respond was crippled by its micromanaging approach and need for consensus.
The report identifies many human rights challenges in need of urgent attention. Iraq has degenerated into sectarian and political blood-letting, with civilians the principal victims. Ruthlessly repressive governments in North Korea, Burma, and Turkmenistan deprive their people of fundamental rights and dignity. Dictatorships persist in Saudi Arabia and Syria. China is moving backwards. Russia and Egypt are cracking down on non-governmental organizations. Iran and Ethiopia are silencing dissident voices. Robert Mugabe would rather drive Zimbabwe to ruin than tolerate political opposition. Civil war is reigniting in Sri Lanka and intensifying in Afghanistan and Somalia, while conflict continues in Colombia. Israel launched indiscriminate attacks in Lebanon and littered southern Lebanon with cluster bombs during its war with Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah attacked Israeli cities without distinguishing between military and civilian objectives.
No situation is more pressing than the bloody crisis in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said, with more than 200,000 dead, approximately 2 million displaced, and around 4 million dependent on international food relief. The conflict is now destabilizing Chad and the Central African Republic.
"Civilians in Darfur are under constant attack and the conflict is spilling across Sudan's borders, yet the five permanent members of the UN Security Council managed little more than to produce stacks of unimplemented resolutions," said Roth.
US abuses against detainees in the "war on terror" remain a major concern. In September, President George W Bush even defended torture - referring to it euphemistically as "an alternative set of [interrogation] procedures" - and secret CIA prisons. In October, the US Congress, acting at the behest of the Bush administration, denied Guantanamo detainees the possibility of challenging their detention in court via the hallowed right of habeas corpus. Human Rights Watch called on the United States to close the Guantanamo camp, noting that it is long past time to either bring to trial or set free the detainees who remain there.
"The new US Congress must act now to remedy the worst abuses of the Bush administration," Roth said. "Without firm and principled congressional action, the loss of US leadership on human rights will likely persist."
Human Rights Watch noted some positive developments coming out of the global South, including African leaders' support for the human rights trials of former Liberian President Charles Taylor and former Chadian President Hissène Habré, and Latin American support for the International Criminal Court. But it also urged southern democracies to do more to support human rights, such as by breaking with abusive regional leaders to play a more constructive role at the UN Human Rights Council.
"Because many new democracies of the global South have emerged from periods of extreme repression, whether colonialism, apartheid or dictatorship, they could have special moral authority on human rights," Roth said. "But few have shown the consistency and commitment to emerge as real human rights leaders."
Human Rights Watch's World Report 2007 contains survey information on human rights developments during 2006 in more than 75 countries. In addition to the introductory essay on the European Union, the volume contains essays on freedom of expression since 9/11, the plight of migrant domestic workers, and a human rights agenda for incoming UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Since then, as the world watched helplessly, the Bush administration, in the name of War on Terror, successfully disfigured beyond recognition the beautiful face of guarantees and safeguards envisioned by the founding fathers and enshrined in the US constitution. His sycophants and parasites in other countries, such as Musharraf in Pakistan, who enthusiastically adopted him as a role model, under the same pretext, aped his dubious record of violating human rights and played havoc with the peoples' lives, in their own countries by detaining them without trial and torturing them in dark dungeons.
Today, the world stands forlorn and leaderless in the middle of unprecedented chaos and turmoil. Human rights as orphans are crying for help and the civilization stands frozen inactive.
countries against their political opponents. EU Should Fill Leadership Void on Human Rights - Human Rights Watch Launches World Report 2007 on Guantanamo Anniversary
(Washington, DC, January 11, 2007) - With US credibility undermined by the Bush administration’s use of torture and detention without trial, the European Union must fill the leadership void on human rights, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2007.
Today marks five years since the United States first sent detainees to Guantanamo. The Bush administration has proven largely incapable of providing leadership on human rights, while China and Russia are embracing tyrants in their quest for resources and influence. But rather than assuming the leadership mantle, the European Union's approach is mired in procedures that emphasize internal unanimity and rotation over the effective projection of EU influence to protect human rights, said the 556-page volume's introductory essay.
"Since the US can't provide credible leadership on human rights, European countries must pick up the slack," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "Instead, the European Union is punching well below its weight."
Human Rights Watch lamented the "lowest common denominator approach" to rights protection by EU member states, in which governments that favor accommodation drag down those seeking a tougher approach to serious rights abuses. Examples include the EU's backtracking on the sanctions it imposed following the May 2005 massacre in the Uzbek city of Andijan and its weak response to the 2005 royal coup in Nepal. Similarly, while abusive governments banded together to block effective action at the United Nations' new Human Rights Council, the EU's ability to respond was crippled by its micromanaging approach and need for consensus.
The report identifies many human rights challenges in need of urgent attention. Iraq has degenerated into sectarian and political blood-letting, with civilians the principal victims. Ruthlessly repressive governments in North Korea, Burma, and Turkmenistan deprive their people of fundamental rights and dignity. Dictatorships persist in Saudi Arabia and Syria. China is moving backwards. Russia and Egypt are cracking down on non-governmental organizations. Iran and Ethiopia are silencing dissident voices. Robert Mugabe would rather drive Zimbabwe to ruin than tolerate political opposition. Civil war is reigniting in Sri Lanka and intensifying in Afghanistan and Somalia, while conflict continues in Colombia. Israel launched indiscriminate attacks in Lebanon and littered southern Lebanon with cluster bombs during its war with Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah attacked Israeli cities without distinguishing between military and civilian objectives.
No situation is more pressing than the bloody crisis in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said, with more than 200,000 dead, approximately 2 million displaced, and around 4 million dependent on international food relief. The conflict is now destabilizing Chad and the Central African Republic.
"Civilians in Darfur are under constant attack and the conflict is spilling across Sudan's borders, yet the five permanent members of the UN Security Council managed little more than to produce stacks of unimplemented resolutions," said Roth.
US abuses against detainees in the "war on terror" remain a major concern. In September, President George W Bush even defended torture - referring to it euphemistically as "an alternative set of [interrogation] procedures" - and secret CIA prisons. In October, the US Congress, acting at the behest of the Bush administration, denied Guantanamo detainees the possibility of challenging their detention in court via the hallowed right of habeas corpus. Human Rights Watch called on the United States to close the Guantanamo camp, noting that it is long past time to either bring to trial or set free the detainees who remain there.
"The new US Congress must act now to remedy the worst abuses of the Bush administration," Roth said. "Without firm and principled congressional action, the loss of US leadership on human rights will likely persist."
Human Rights Watch noted some positive developments coming out of the global South, including African leaders' support for the human rights trials of former Liberian President Charles Taylor and former Chadian President Hissène Habré, and Latin American support for the International Criminal Court. But it also urged southern democracies to do more to support human rights, such as by breaking with abusive regional leaders to play a more constructive role at the UN Human Rights Council.
"Because many new democracies of the global South have emerged from periods of extreme repression, whether colonialism, apartheid or dictatorship, they could have special moral authority on human rights," Roth said. "But few have shown the consistency and commitment to emerge as real human rights leaders."
Human Rights Watch's World Report 2007 contains survey information on human rights developments during 2006 in more than 75 countries. In addition to the introductory essay on the European Union, the volume contains essays on freedom of expression since 9/11, the plight of migrant domestic workers, and a human rights agenda for incoming UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The Vanished Will Return ... If...
Names of some of the missing Pakistanis who have been abducted by the Pakistani security agencies and are being kept incommunicado in unknown places. Let us do something, anything, to help them return to their loved ones, homes and lives. Will we?
1- Masood Ahmed Janjua, Educationist/Businessman, Rawalpindi, missing since 07/30/05
2- Faisal Faraz, Mechanical Engineer, Rawalpindi, missing since 07/30/05
3- Atiq-ur-Rehman, Scientist - Atomic Energy Commission, Abootabad, missing since 06/25/04
4- Majid Khan, Software Engineer, Karachi, missing since 03/05/03
5- Muhammad Mansoor, Computer Expert, Peshawar, missing since 02/12/05
6- Muhammad Altaf, Electrician NDC, Attock, missing since 03/10/03
7- Muhammad Tariq, Businessman, Gujranwala, was missing since 06/14/04, (released on 11/28/06)
8- Saif Ullah Paracha, Businessman, Karachi, missing since 07/01/03, was handed over to USA
9- Uzair Paracha, M.B.A., Karachi, missing since 03/28/03
10- Atif Idrees, Student M.B.A., Lahore, missing since 08/03/04 (released on 11/28/06)
11- Hafiz Abdul Basit, Teacher, Faisalabad, missing since 01/01/04
12- Ali Sher, Mechanic, Mardan, missing since 05/02/05 (released on 11/20/06)
13- Imran Shamsher Khan, Student, Bajaur, missing since 08/14/04 (released on 10/23/06)
14- Umer Siddique Kathio, Kotri, missing since 2004
15- Muhammad Ramzan, Kotri, missing since 2003
16- Saif Ullah Akhtar, Transporter, missing since 08/08/04
17- Obaid Ullah, Teacher, Multan, missing since 11/26/03
18- Hafiz Muhammad Idrees Abbasi, Teacher, Murree, missing since 10/04/04
19- Malik Zulfiqar Boxer, Businessman, Abbotabad, missing since 03/03/06
20- Hidayat Ullah, Imam Masjid, Karachi, missing since 08/07/04 (released 11/30/06)
21- Abid Raza, Construction Businessman, Gujrat, missing since 06/20/04 (realeased 3/1/07)
22- Omer Bin Razzaq, Electrician, Islamabad, missing since 07/26/06 (realeased 12/31/06)
23- Gul Muhammad, Building Contractor, Sibbi, missing since 11/18/05, was picked up in front of court room)
24- Muhammad Aslam Zahid, Imam Masjid - Army, Sialkot, missing since 04/17/04
25- Dr. Ali Raza, Physician, Hyderabad, missing since 6/5/2006, was picked up at Karachi Air Port
26- Dr. Abid Sherif, Physician, Rawalpindi, missing since 9/16/2005
27- Asad Muhammad Shah, KRL Computer Section, Islamabad, missing since 12/19/2002
28- Saif-ur-Rehman, Clerk - Girls High School, Faisalabad, missing since 5/28/2005
29- Aatif Javed, Textile Engineer, Faisalabad, missing since 7/29/2005
30- Shokat Hayat, Tyre Shop - Businessman, Peshawar, missing since 04/25/05
31- Ali Asghar Bangalzai, Quetta, missing since 10/18/01
32- Rana Ali Hassan (Abdul Qadir), Army Commando (Retd.), Lahore, missing since 06/22/04
33- Syed Mumtaz Hussain, Engineer, (worked in Dubai), was picked up at Karachi Air Port, missing since 7/3/2006
34- Imran Naqvi, Student, Karachi, was picked up at Air Port, missing since 7/1/2006
35- Umer Abdur Rehman, Student, Abbotabad, missing since 2/20/2005
36- Ali Bugti, Nephew of Akbar Bugti, Sangarh, missing since 12/06/06
37- Qasim Bugti, District Nazim Dera Bugti, picked up in Karachi, missing since 11/29/2006
38- Jangi, Manager, Sangarh, missing since 12/6/2006
39- Ghulam Nabi
40- Abdul Sattar, Driver, Peshawar, missing since 2/28/2001
41- Mansoor, Student, Rawalpindi, missing since 9/16/2005
42- Ali Akbar Mengal
43- Muhammad Saleem Baloch, Senior V.P. Jamhoori Watan Party, picked up from Karachi, was missing since 3/10/2006 (released 12/14/06)
44- Abdul Rauf Sasoli, picked up from Karachi, was missing since 3/3/2006 (released 12/14/06)
45- Muhammad Alim Tariq, Karachi, missing since 12/17/2005
46- Munir A. Mengal, Chartered Accountant, Karachi, missing since 4/4/2006 (had intention to start a Balochi TV Channel in Dubai)
47- Muhammad Saeed Barohi, Karachi, was missing since 3/10/2006 (released 12/14/06)
48- Ibrahim Saleh, Karachi, missing since 11/29/2005 Released
49- Muhammad Ibrahim, Karachi, missing since 7/12/2006
50- Muhammad Zahir, Swat, missing since 12/3/2004
51- Gohram Saleh, Cwadar, missing since 8/8/2004
52- Haji Jan Muhammad Marri, Quetta, missing since 7/6/2006
53- Syed Jaffar Ali Shah, missing since 2/18/2006
54- Dr. Muhammad Hanif Bugti, Physician, Quetta, missing since 12/1/2005
55- Mitha Khan Marri, Habb, missing since 1/13/2006
56- Raja Ahmad Khan, Quetta, missing since 12/29/2005
57- Samiullah Baloch, Engineer, Quetta, missing since 7/16/2006
58- Rehmatullah shohaz, missing since 5/7/2006
59- Saifullah Khalid, Student of Melsi, picked up in Islamabad, missing since 4/13/2003
60- Mufti Muneer Shakir, Teacher, Karachi, missing since 5/16/2006 picked up at Air Port
61- Fathah, Student, Karachi, missing since 5/16/2006 picked up at Air Port
62- Zai-ud-din, Student, Rawalpindi, missing since 9/23/2005
63- Abdul Sattar, Computer Hardware Eng., Rawalpindi, missing since 9/18/2005
64- Shahid Mehmood, PCO Owner, Khairpur, missing since 1/19/2005
65- Mir Ahmed Murri
66- Haji Shanawaz Murri
67- Haji Dawood Mengal, Dera Bugti, missing since 2/1/2006
68- Saleem Jan Bugti, Dera Bugti, missing since 8/26/2006
69- Dali Jan, Dera Bugti, missing since 8/26/2006
70- Rahim Buksh, Dera Bugti, missing since 8/26/2006
71- Kareem Buksh, Dera Bugti, missing since 8/26/2006
72- Bilal Bugti, Karachi, was missing since 7/14/2006 (released on 07, Oct 2006)
73- Murtaza Bugti, Karachi, was missing since 7/14/2006 (released on 23, Nov 2006)
74- Fahad Bugti, Sibbi, missing since 8/1/2006
75- Ansar Ali Raja, Property Dealer, Rawalpindi, missing since 1/7/2004
76- Naeem Noor Khan, Computer Engineer
77- Ammar, Computer Engineer
78- Alfa Ibrahim Bari, P.H.D., Owner of collages, Lahore, is being held at Kot Lakhpat Jail since 5/10/2004 without charges
79- Abid, Student of Gilgit, is being held at Kot Lakpat Jail without charges since 5/10/2004
80- Marwan Ibrahim, Computer Engineer, Lahore, missing since 5/10/2004
81- Waqar Bhatti, Kamonki, missing since 2/1/2003
82- Nouman Madni, Multan, missing since 10/1/2006 Picked up in Rawalpindi
83- Aasif Kashmiri, at Adiala Jail since 3/1/2006 without charges
84- Ismail, being held at Adiala Jail without charges since 3/1/2006
85- Saud Memon, Cloth Merchant, Karachi, missing since 2001
86- Khalid Siddique, Rawalpindi, Arrested in South Africa
87- Habib, Kabirwala
88- Adeel, Karachi, picked up in 2004
89- Qari Ashfaq, Dera Ismail Khan, has been released
90- Baba Abdul Kareem, Quetta, is being held at GHQ Rawalpindi
91- Abdul Khalid
92- Munzir Kareem
93- Yousaf
94- Hassan
95- Abdul Wahab, Islamabad, missinf since Oct. 2006
96- Omer Butt, Motor Cycle Mechanic, Rawalpindi, has been released
97- Mehboob Ilahi (borther of MNA Shah Abdul Aziz
98- Nazir Ahmed (osama Nazir), Bahawalpur, missing since 11/18/2003
99- Abdul Qadeer, Rahim Yar Khan, missing since 12/14/2006
100- Muhammad Izhar, Gujranwala, oicked up on Dec 14, 2006
101- Aasif Raza, Karachi, missing since 12/14/2006
102- Muhammad Akhter, Narang Mandi, missing since 5/19/2006
103- Muhammad Israr, Textile Mill Technician, Karachi, missing again since 10/20/2006 (was missing from Feb 2005 to Feb 2006)
104- M.Safdar, Attock, missing since 8/23/2001
105- Muhammad Safdar, Attock, missing since 8/23/2001
106- Ghulam Akber, Multan, missing since 3/24/2004
107- M. Akram, Army LNK, Bang - Kashmir, missing since Mar-04
108- Mirza Abdul Hameed Beg, Property Dealer, Islamabad, missing since 5/14/2002
109- Saifullah, Student, Melsi, missing since 4/16/2003
110- Hafiz Tahir, Lahore, missing since 2004
111- Hafiz Irfan Ali, Worked in Ittefaq Foundry, Lahore, missing since 2/21/2005
112- Nazir Khalis, Peshawar, missing since 2002
113- Rizwan Yousaf, Student, Kabirwala, missing since 8/18/2004
114- M. Uzair (Chotta Usman), Gujranwala, missing since 12/11/2005
115- M. Zaffar Yaseen, Businessman, Karachi, missing since 8/22/2006
Information provided by Mrs. Amina Masood Janjua of Defense of Human Rights, Islamabad.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
My Right Foot
This morning my wife woke me up saying Anam had missed her school bus because she was praying at that time. It meant get out of the bed and drop her and Somyyah at school.
When I tried to walk I could hardly drag my foot. My gout was back. This time it was the right foot. Towards the right side of the foot.
Now I am becoming familiar with the onset of my gout bouts: it starts with a funny feeling where it is going to get worse. My body tries to forewarn me but my mind somesow goes into a stste of denial. The same happened this time. I had started feeling a little nuisance at the spot where the pain is growning. I think it was day before yesterday, in the early morning when I woke up, when I felt it first time.
Anyway, I came back after dropping my daughtes at school and went straight to bed. Could not go back to sleep for a while. Then I turned off the alarm of my cell phone.
When I woke up it was about nine thirty and I did not want to go to work but I had to because Aleem is in Pakistan and I am the only one taking care of business.
Did not take shower just put my clothes on and after the breakfast took indomethacine capsule and cholchicine (2 tablets) and came to work. Did some paperwork, wrote a few checks and getting ready to go home.
Laura, the front desk clerk just walked in my office with a business card and handed it over to me saying that Eric Schrock, Quality Assurance Consultant from the Days Inn was here and she just checked him in. "This was the same person who came last time and was pain in the neck", she said. "He will start inspecting 8:00 o'clock in the morning".
When I tried to walk I could hardly drag my foot. My gout was back. This time it was the right foot. Towards the right side of the foot.
Now I am becoming familiar with the onset of my gout bouts: it starts with a funny feeling where it is going to get worse. My body tries to forewarn me but my mind somesow goes into a stste of denial. The same happened this time. I had started feeling a little nuisance at the spot where the pain is growning. I think it was day before yesterday, in the early morning when I woke up, when I felt it first time.
Anyway, I came back after dropping my daughtes at school and went straight to bed. Could not go back to sleep for a while. Then I turned off the alarm of my cell phone.
When I woke up it was about nine thirty and I did not want to go to work but I had to because Aleem is in Pakistan and I am the only one taking care of business.
Did not take shower just put my clothes on and after the breakfast took indomethacine capsule and cholchicine (2 tablets) and came to work. Did some paperwork, wrote a few checks and getting ready to go home.
Laura, the front desk clerk just walked in my office with a business card and handed it over to me saying that Eric Schrock, Quality Assurance Consultant from the Days Inn was here and she just checked him in. "This was the same person who came last time and was pain in the neck", she said. "He will start inspecting 8:00 o'clock in the morning".
Monday, January 08, 2007
Two Poems For The People Gone Missing
The Great Eternal Silence By Aquinas T. Duffy
1
Missing in the darkness,
vanished without a trace,
with only the memories and photographs,
to fill an empty place.
2
Frequent prayer and fervent cries,
is there anyone there?
But the only sound
was the silent eternal fanfare.
3
For a long time
its deafening sound
subdued by a path
through lost and found.
4
Laughter and sorrow,
anguish and grief,
all the moments of a life
but with no relief.
5
Everything and nothing
one within and between all,
gentle, loving, pervading,
the eternal silence falls.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Missing By Máiréad Tuohy Duffy
Missing?
Vanishing into the space of oblivion
In earth, sea or sky?
Who knows?
Gone into the wilderness
Of the unknown.
Leaving behind;
Fathers, mothers,
Brothers, sisters.
Bewildered Friends.
Watching, waiting,
Hearts aching,
Eyes peering,
Ears listening.
Minds hoping,
The door will open,
The vanished will return.
Like the prodigal son,
The father will say;
"Come into my open arms,
Oh! Child, how we missed you".
The Great Eternal Silence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1
Missing in the darkness,
vanished without a trace,
with only the memories and photographs,
to fill an empty place.
2
Frequent prayer and fervent cries,
is there anyone there?
But the only sound
was the silent eternal fanfare.
3
For a long time
its deafening sound
subdued by a path
through lost and found.
4
Laughter and sorrow,
anguish and grief,
all the moments of a life
but with no relief.
5
Everything and nothing
one within and between all,
gentle, loving, pervading,
the eternal silence falls.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Missing By Máiréad Tuohy Duffy
Missing?
Vanishing into the space of oblivion
In earth, sea or sky?
Who knows?
Gone into the wilderness
Of the unknown.
Leaving behind;
Fathers, mothers,
Brothers, sisters.
Bewildered Friends.
Watching, waiting,
Hearts aching,
Eyes peering,
Ears listening.
Minds hoping,
The door will open,
The vanished will return.
Like the prodigal son,
The father will say;
"Come into my open arms,
Oh! Child, how we missed you".
The Great Eternal Silence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Into Thin Air - Enforced Disappearances of Pakistanis
Eyes and ears are great witnesses to the truth. Once prevented, forcefully, from performing their primary functions - seeing and hearing - they cease to be so. A heartless repressive regime such as Pakistan's, like a thief at night on his tiptoes to loot and rob people of their lives, honors and properties, loves eye-less and ear-less people so it can do its dirty deeds unseen, unheard, uninterrupted.
The seeing, hearing and especially vocal people stand between regimes and their repressive policies. The regimes don't like them. They use their coercive powers to silence them through intimidation. Failing, they just make them disappear into thin air.
That is what Musharraf government has been doing, especially since 9/11. It has unleashed the state machinery and its agencies to pounce on whoever commits this unpardonable crime of speaking up.
A typical disappearance starts with a macabre knock at the door when night is at its most dark. The first thing a victim or a member of his family sees is the nozzle of a gun and then, man behind the gun with his bony finger at the trigger and a face contorted with disciplined hatred and rage. No warrants. No charges. No trace.
The trauma of abduction leaves families devastated. They find their lives and dreams shattered - in the bloody claws of incessant agony, uncertainty and helplessness. An interminable night of wait, long wait, awaits. After the initial hectic search of their loved ones they are left to float in the fathomless oceans of despair and despondence. The days turn into weeks; weeks into months; and moths into years. The families live in terrible 'Barzakh' (limbo), not sure to start mourning or to keep their hope alive that one day their loved ones will come back alive.
Everyday in the morning they go out looking for their sons, fathers, brothers, clutching onto their framed photos in their tired hands. They go door to door seeking justice but receiving stares of indifference and rejection. Dejected, at night, they come back to their empty homes to face long frightening nights of fitful sleep and nightmares.
They must be asking the inevitable question: Is this the country of their dreams?
We, you and me, should ask this question: should we stop seeing, hearing and, may be a little, speaking?
Let us say NO to blindness, dumbness and muteness. Let us start speaking up! All at the same time!! Let us find out in what dark dungeons OUR loved ones are rotting!!!
Let us not let the regime drink in one "deek" (continuous gulp - swill).
Relatives of the missing beaten up
Working to stop human rights violations in the "war on terror"
Demanding their freedom
The missing link
Spotlight on Pakistan's "disappeared"
Free our sons
700 Pakistanis missing since start of war on terror
'War on Terror' an Excuse for Disappearances
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