Author: Adnan Adil
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 25, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/8688.html
Sarwari Begum, an old woman from Chungi Amarsidhu,
Lahore, says that two years ago her son, Atif Idrees, was taken into custody
by the military authorities. She has not been allowed to contact him ever
since, and neither have there been any legal proceedings against him.
In May, Sardar Rauf Kashmiri, a militant of
the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, returned to Pakistan after 15 years of
detention in India on charges of terrorism. However, his wife says that neither
has he been freed by the military authorities nor has his family been allowed
to see him.
Khurram Nawaz, a boy from Lahore, was freed
by Indian authorities last month, but upon entering Pakistan he has not been
allowed to go home, and is missing like so many other prisoners freed by Indian
authorities in recent months.
The disappearance of these citizens is being
attributed to the Pakistani intelligence agencies and military authorities,
who ostensibly take them into custody on charges of having links with terrorist
outfits like Al-Qaeda, or on the suspicion of being cultivated by the "enemy"
country.
This has become the norm since 9/11 spurred
operations against extremist Islamic elements as well as the beginning of
the normalisation process between Pakistan and India, which included the exchange
of prisoners.
Rauf Kashmiri's wife, Tasneem, a resident
of Pulandri, says her husband was arrested in Kashmir in June 1991 on charges
of terrorism and was convicted for 10 years under TADA. He served his sentence
in Jodhpur Jail in Rajasthan, where his detention was subsequently extended
under the safety laws of India.
Meanwhile, Rauf's wife got a job to make both
ends meet and delivered his son, who is now 15 years old and has never seen
his father. Rauf's father died waiting for him to be released from the Indian
prison.
On the intervention of human rights groups
in Kashmir, led by Bhim Singh, the Indian Supreme Court ordered his release.
On May 17 last, India freed six Pakistani citizens and handed them over to
Pakistan at the Wagah checkpost. Among them was Rauf Kashmiri but he was immediately
taken into custody by the Wagah police and handed over to the military authorities.
His family has not been given a chance to
see him since and has not heard from him either. His wife, Tasneem, has now
moved to Lahore from Pulandri and has filed a habeas corpus petition in the
Lahore High Court. The case is currently under way.
Similar is the story of 11-year-old Khurram
Nawaz, who was handed over to Pakistan along with Rauf Kashmiri, but is still
in custody of the authorities. He used to stay with his aunt in Lahore and
went missing on August 13, 2005. A journalist from Indian Punjab wrote a story
on him when he visited Faridkot jail, which is how the family came to know
of his whereabouts.
After going through the lengthy procedure
of recognition and identification as a Pakistani citizen, Khurram's family
managed to secure his release from the Indian jail, but are clueless as to
how to get him freed from their own country's military authorities. They have
written several letters to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which
has pursued the case with the federal government.
Most people freed from Indian jails meet the
same fate, be it children who strayed into the other side of the border or
fishermen, or militants like Rauf Kashmiri.
According to the HRCP, two Christian brothers
from Faisalabad, Imran Masih and Mitthan Masih, were also handed over by India
to Pakistan on May 17, only to be taken into custody by the Pakistani authorities.
There are many who have not been able to approach the media, courts or some
human rights body.
"The intelligence wing of the local corps
keeps such people in custody to gauge whether they have been cultivated by
India as spies," says a senior government official in the Interior Ministry.
S M Zafar, lawyer and current Pakistan Muslim League Senator, raised this
issue in the Senate, calling it a matter of grave concern.
Even worse is the condition of those who have
been picked up by authorities on the charge of having links with Al-Qaeda,
such as 28-year-old Atif Idrees from Lahore. His late father was a chief warrant
officer in the country's air force. His mother, Sarwari Begum, is old and
an asthma patient. She held a news conference at Lahore Press Club, but could
hardly complete a sentence without breaking into tears.
Atif's younger brother, Asif, says Atif went
missing after he stepped out to attend classes at the Allama Iqbal University
in Gulberg on August 13, 2004. After a few days, his friends came and informed
them that intelligence authorities had picked them up along with Atif. They
were freed, but Atif was detained though there were no charges against him.
Asif says that after a year of Atif's disappearance, a military officer, introducing
himself as Major Usman, came to their residence and returned some of Atif's
belongings, including his mother's pension book and a motorbike, and told
them that he was in their custody.
Asif says, Atif used to work for a religious
seminary in the Gulshan-i-Ravi area and sported a beard, but to the best of
his knowledge, he did not have any links with any religious extremist group.
Sarwari Begum has been requesting the authorities to allow her to meet her
son once, so that she knows he is alive. She says the family did not go to
court for fear of angering the authorities who might harm Atif to exact revenge.
However, even those who have approached the
superior courts have failed to get immediate relief. One such case pertains
to Hafiz Abdul Basit, a 12-year-old boy from Faisalabad, who has been missing
for the past two-and-a half year. His old and ailing father, Basher Ahmad,
appealed to the Lahore HC in December last, but after six months of proceedings,
the case was re-directed to the police for further investigation.
In his court statement, Tariq Gujjar, deputy
superintendent of the police in Faisalabad, admitted to having taken Abdul
Basit into custody in January 2004 in connection with a 'sensitive' case.
Later, he says, he handed Basit over to the District Police Officer who would
know of his current whereabouts.
The DPO Faisalabad, in turn, denied that Basit
had ever been taken into custody or that he was wanted by the police. The
DPO's statement quotes DSP Tariq Gujjar as saying that he had handed Basit
over to a military officer on the instructions of the CID, Punjab, which deals
with anti-terrorist cases. The family says that DSP Gujjar had arranged for
them to have a telephone conversation with Basit a year ago, but after that,
they had not heard from him. Dissatisfied with the Faisalabad police officer's
statements, the judge, Bilal Khan, directed the Inspector General of Police
Punjab to look into the issue and eventually dispose of the habeas corpus
petition. This, of course, did not provide any relief to the distressed father.
In the Punjab, people started disappearing soon after the US operation in
Afghanistan. In October 2002, Amir Aziz, a renowned orthopaedic surgeon, was
among the first to be taken into custody on the charge of having Al-Qaeda
links. The Federal Interior Minister kept denying that he was in their custody,
but after a month of interrogation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), he was freed on the orders of the Lahore High Court.
A month later, an Iraqi doctor, Shaukat Nafeh,
living in Lahore's Allama Iqbal Town area with his family, was taken into
custody by the authorities, but the arrest was never officially acknowledged,
and nobody knows what became of him. The doctor had treated Arab patients
at a clinic in Quetta, near the Chaman area bordering Afghanistan, before
moving to Lahore when the crackdown on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda began in that
region.
The country's security agencies, by the arrests
of foreigners allegedly in league with Al-Qaeda, were emboldened to fine-tune
their skills of "abducting" other people and keeping them in custody
without any legal proceedings. Of late, they have have been applying these
tactics on Pakistani citizens as well, especially those returning to the Punjab
after their stints in Indian jails.
In Balochistan, activists belonging to nationalist
parties are the latest on the list of missing persons, and though the number
runs into dozens, the world has looked the other way. For Pakistani authorities,
pressure from the developed world had been a source of worry, but that has
dissipated since the United States set up Guantanamo Bay prison. Meanwhile,
innocent Pakistanis who are suspects in the eyes of the authorities are at
the mercy of these so-called "security" agencies. And the less said
about legal remedial action, the better.
-From Newsline, Pakistan
