Category: Terrorism

KOHAT, July 25 — Niaz Bibi’s son disappeared into the night, whisked away by Pakistani soldiers who accused him of being a Taliban fighter. For 18 anguishing months, she could find no word of his fate. Then she got a phone call.

“Come to Kohat prison,” said the man on the other end. “Tell nobody.”

At the prison, in northwestern Pakistan, she was directed to a separate, military-run internment center where her son, Asghar Muhammad, was brought to her. They touched hands through a metal grill, and she wept as he reassured her that he would be home soon.

But when the phone rang again, one month later, an official delivered crushing news. “Your son is dead,” he said. “Come collect his body.”

Mr. Muhammad was one of dozens of detainees who have died in military detention in Pakistan in the past year and a half, amid accounts of torture, starvation and extrajudicial execution from former detainees, relatives and human rights monitors. The accusations come at a time when the country’s generals, armed with extensive new legal and judicial powers, have escalated their war against the Pakistani Taliban by sweeping into their strongholds and detaining hundreds of people.

Critics warn that those gains may be coming at the cost of human rights, potentially weakening Pakistan’s fragile democracy and, ultimately, undermining its counterterrorism effort.

“People live in abject fear of speaking out about what the military is doing,” said Mustafa Qadri of Amnesty International, which received reports of more than 100 deaths in military custody in 2014.

At issue is a network of 43 secretive internment centers dotting Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and the tribal belt. Little is known about the centers, formally established in 2011 and given greater powers by a tough antiterrorism law passed last year. Most are based in existing jails and military bases and operate far from public view. The total number of detainees has not been made public.

Relatives of missing people have filed 2,100 cases with the Peshawar High Court, seeking news of their fates.

In many instances, the first news comes when a body is sent home.

Last year, for instance, a man from the Kurram tribal district told the court that three of his six sons who were detained in Kohat had died in custody. The man’s lawyer said he had not brought a criminal complaint against the military out of fear that his remaining sons would meet a similar fate.

The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about conditions at the internment centers.

Classified documents leaked last year by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden made clear that American officials were aware of widespread human rights violations by the Pakistani military, even as billions of dollars in American military aid kept flowing to Pakistan.

Pakistani military officials tortured and killed people suspected of being militants “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers,” said one American assessment in 2011.

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“The military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas,” said the document, first cited by The Washington Post.

The Obama administration, which has gradually improved its relationship with Pakistan this year, has been muted in its public criticism of the violations and has not invoked a provision of American law that limits assistance to foreign militaries guilty of human rights abuses.

Instead, the administration approved more weapons for the Pakistani military: In April, it approved almost $1 billion worth of helicopters and laser-guided Hellfire missiles for use in counterterrorism operations.

State Department officials say they have warned the Pakistani military that the accounts of rights violations could lead to future restrictions on military assistance.

Until recently, accusations of such abuses by Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officers have been sharpest in western Baluchistan Province, where the army has faced accusations of abducting, torturing and killing people suspected of being Baluch nationalists as part of a decade-old effort to quell a separatist rebellion there.

The deaths at internment centers have come in conjunction with the military’s battlefield gains — in the past year, it has seized control of much of North Waziristan — and a general hardening of public opinion against the Pakistani Taliban.

Tough new antiterrorism laws have given the army greater legal powers, and the number of deaths in military custody has declined in recent months since a military court system, authorized by Parliament in January, became active. Fayaz Zafar, a journalist in the Swat Valley, counted 48 bodies being returned to that area in 2014 and five so far this year, the latest on June 2.

Experts say the military-run courts fall far short of international standards, and their authority is being challenged in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But public opposition to the courts has been muted, particularly since a Taliban massacre that killed 150 people, most of them children, in December. The authorities have taken harder action against militants on other fronts, too, lifting a moratorium on executions that has led to 178 convicts being hanged.

The executions have drawn repeated protest from the United Nations and the European Union but barely a whimper of public complaint.

By several accounts, conditions at the internment camps can be brutal. One former detainee from Swat said he had been thrashed with barbed wire, reduced to eating soap because he was fed so little and forced to give false testimony against other detainees in court.

“I felt guilty, but I knew I would be beaten if I refused,” said the man who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further trouble.

Relatives of detainees who die in custody say they have been pressured into conducting hurried funerals, often at night, and sometimes coerced into declining an autopsy, even if the corpse bears signs of ill treatment. In other instances, they say, local mullahs are forbidden from offering prayers for the dead.

Asma Jahangir, a leading human rights lawyer, has brought a Supreme Court case challenging the detention of 33 men. When brought to court two years ago, two of the men said they had been tortured. They have since died in custody. “They supposedly had heart attacks,” Ms. Jahangir said.

In Swat, several women have formed a protest group to seek news of their missing relatives through street demonstrations and court actions. Their leader, Jan Saba, said in an interview that she had “knocked on every door” in search of news of her missing husband, but that she still had heard nothing.

Few dispute that many of the military detainees are linked to the Taliban. Mr. Muhammad, the detainee who died in Kohat last year, admitted to his family that he had spent eight months in the company of Taliban fighters before being arrested, relatives said.

One of his brothers, Abid, said that when the family asked Mr. Muhammad what he was doing during that time, he replied, “The less you know, the better.”

Such tales have led civilian officials to turn a blind eye to conditions at the internment centers. Jamaluddin Shah, the top civilian official in Kohat, said in an interview that he did not believe the military practiced torture or conducted executions at the center. But, he added, “even if such cases were true, why would that be an issue?”

“Have you seen them slaughtering people and distributing those videos?” Mr. Shah asked, referring to Taliban execution videos. “Do you think they deserve any human rights?”

But although the army has clearly weakened the Taliban in recent months, experts warn that reports of abuse could ultimately hurt its counterterrorism effort, in much the same way that harsh American tactics after 2001 led to global condemnation and bolstered militant recruitment.

Ms. Jahangir, the lawyer, calls the network of internment centers “Pakistan’s little Guantánamo Bay.”

“These laws risk turning Pakistan into a security state,” Ms. Jahangir said. “We cannot afford torture and killings on a mass scale, even in a time of war.”

Taha Siddiqui reported from Kohat, and Declan Walsh from London. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and an employee of The New York Times contributed from Pakistan.

ON the recent occasion of Benazir Bhutto’s 62nd birth anniversary, her husband and PPP’s co-chairman spoke about her murder and said: “We cannot withdraw the FIR, no matter how much pressure you exert on us and how much you fight for that.”

Heraldo Munoz of Chile, the head of the UN commission that probed Benazir Bhutto’s murder concluded as follows: “Probably no government will be able or willing to fully disentangle the truth from the complex web of implication in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.”

I read the former Chilean diplomat’s personal account in his book Getting Away With Murder with great sadness because the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) under my command on Aug 6, 2009 was entrusted with the responsibility of taking over the investigation from Punjab police. The Special Investigation Group was given the task of putting together a joint team of various law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to carry out further investigation and interrogate possible suspects.

The investigation into Benazir Bhutto’s murder has hinted at a complex web of implication.

I distinctly recall that night of Oct 18, 2007 when as inspector general police, Balochistan, I was glued to the TV watching the huge procession Ms Bhutto was leading in Karachi after finally returning home from a nine-year exile. The bombings that targeted her cavalcade that night resulted in 149 deaths and injuries to 402.

Ms Bhutto survived that deadly attack and lodged an FIR by becoming a complainant herself. Police did not register the case that she filed on Oct 21, 2007 in which she wrote: “I was informed by the government that certain militant groups wanted to attack me. After receiving this information I wrote a letter dated Oct 16, 2007 to the president of Pakistan informing him of my grave concern regarding my security and specified the forces and persons behind them whom I suspected were likely to harm me physically.”

The investigations remained stalled until she was assassinated on Dec 27, 2007. The Karsaz case was finally re-registered on Oct 17, 2008, after Gen Musharraf was forced to quit as president in August that year and Mr Zardari had become president.

Meanwhile, the UN mission started the formal probe in July 2009 and the federal government entrusted further investigation to the FIA on Aug 6, 2009. Codenamed ‘Operation Trojan Horse’, the case investigation team was tasked with collecting ocular testimony as well as documentary, forensic and circumstantial evidence prior to the Oct 18 Karsaz attack, events between Oct 19 and Dec 27, and post Dec 27, 2007 developments.

It was decided to record testimony of all those travelling in the vehicle along with BB: driver Javed; SSP Security Imtiaz Hussain; Makhdoom Amin Fahim; Naheed Khan; Safdar Abbasi; and valet Razzaq. Senator Safdar Abbasi and his wife Naheed Khan had publicly claimed that “sharp sniper fire and a typical intelligence operation” was carried out to eliminate their leader. PPP spokeswoman Sherry Rehman declared she had died from a bullet injury. These statements and the suspicious conduct of Khalid Shahenshah, a security guard who had been caught on TV footage making suspicious signals from near the stage close to BB prior to the exit from the rally where she was murdered, required a thorough probe.

We decided to start our investigations by seeking assistance from interior minister Rehman Malik, who was Ms Bhutto’s chief security officer. Accordingly, I sent across to him in writing on Aug 12, 2009 a note through his trusted staff assistant director of FIA, seeking the following: 1) copy of the letter sent by BB to Gen Musharraf on Oct 16, 2007 naming three suspects; 2) copies of emails sent by BB to Mark Siegel and others identifying threats from Gen Musharraf; 3) a copy of BB’s original will; 4) a copy of the final agreement exchanged between BB and Gen Musharraf; and 5) copies of correspondence between CSO [Rehman Malik] and the governments of Pakistan and Sindh on security-related matters. There was no response.

Meanwhile, interrogation of five arrested accused, namely Aitzaz Shah, Sher Zaman, Hussnain Gul, Muhammad Rafaqat and Rasheed Ahmed, as well as some other crucial leads led us to aim for arrest of one Ibadur Rahman resident of Malakand who, we believed, played a key role in BB’s murder. (However, this key plotter was reportedly killed in the first-ever drone strike in Khyber Agency in May 2010 or in an attack carried out by a Pakistani fighter plane.)

Another suspect was al Qaeda’s No 3 leader and financial and operational chief Mustafa Abu Yazid alias Sheikh Saeed Al-Masri who was said to have claimed responsibility for “terminating the most precious American asset who vowed to defeat Mujahideen”. He was reportedly killed in a CIA drone attack on May 22, 2010 in North Waziristan.

Similarly, the crucial suspect or witness Khalid Shahenshah, the security guard hired allegedly by a trusted confidant of the party leadership, was killed in Karachi a few months after Ms Bhutto’s murder.

An important meeting of the FIA investigation team was held on Oct 28, 2009 in the interior minister’s presence. My directions were clear: place all the evidence and leads before the UN team. While the UN commission was generally critical of the conduct of relevant stakeholders, including the earlier Punjab police JIT, it did note in its report that the second JIT by the FIA “has been more vigorous in carrying out its investigations”.

In yet another important meeting held at the interior minister’s residence on Nov 25, 2009, the FIA investigators reviewed the progress and asked the agencies concerned for apprehension of key suspect Ibadur Rehman from Khyber Agency. They were also given the go-ahead to visit Madressah Haqqania in Akora Khattak for adducing further evidence. Officers were also assigned to visit the UAE, Saudi Arabia and United States for obtaining evidence from key sources that could shed further light on the conspiracy.

Within days of setting a clear direction for the investigators to move forward on the case, I was transferred from the FIA.

The case is under trial and I will avoid drawing conclusions. The UN commission submitted its report in May 2010 and their conclusions and recommendations were commented upon by me as a professional in a confidential letter addressed to the then prime minister. The political and security establishment consigned those recommendations to the dustbin of history. Truth hopefully shall prevail eventually.

The writer is former DG, FIA.

The coercion worked. Fearing for her life, Dr Bernadette Dean, an eminent Pakistani educationist and one of the 12 members of the Government of Sindh’s advisory committee on school curricula reform, has fled the country. She is a victim of a decades-long effort by religious extremists to control our education system.

The driving force behind the campaign against her has been the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). On March 28, 2015, its student wing the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT) organised a multiparty conference on curriculum change. JI’s Sindh emir, Dr Meraj-ul-Huda Siddiqui, declared as “intolerable” the Sindh advisory committee’s efforts to remove mandatory religious lessons from general knowledge, Sindhi, Urdu and Pakistan Studies textbooks
Singling out the only non-Muslim member of the committee, the JI and IJT launched a personal attack on Dr Dean. Karachi was plastered with inflammatory banners targeting her. She was accused of being “a foreigner woman who has single-handedly made changes to the curriculum and textbooks that made them secular” and called an enemy of Islam. The truth is that she was targeted for trying to ensure that school textbooks meet the requirements of the Pakistani Constitution.

Empowered by the 18th Amendment, the Sindh government set up an expert advisory committee in October 2013 to reform the existing school curricula. The committee was mandated to review “the curriculum of primary schools, from class one to five, in order to identify the missing links, gaps and concepts in it … While proposing changes in curriculum the committee will also point out the duplication, overlapping, repetition, bias and other negative values affecting the learning, growth and worldview of the students”.
It was inevitable that in reviewing the curriculum, the committee would confront the fact that the National Curriculum 2006 and public school textbooks based on it clearly violate Article 22(1) of the Constitution. This article says: “No person attending any educational institution shall be required to receive religious instructions, or take part in any religious ceremony, or attend religious worship, if such instruction, ceremony or worship relates to a religion other than his own.”

Article 22(1) of the Constitution clearly means that teaching any particular faith as part of the curriculum must be restricted to students of that faith and such teaching must not be imposed on students of other faiths. It is a simple protection of religious freedom. In practice, this means that the teaching of Islam should be confined to Islamiat classes and textbooks, and should be studied only by Muslim students. Islamic teachings should not be included in classes and textbooks on Urdu, English, social studies, etc which are used by all students, including children from non-Muslim families.

Despite the constitutional obligation, the National Curriculum 2006 required children of all faiths from classes one to three to be taught to “recite and memorise Kalima Tayyaba with its meaning”, and “memorise and recite Darood Sharif with translation” and “memorise and recite prayers for starting and ending fasts in Ramzan”.

Then there are outright expressions of hate against people of other faiths in parts of the curriculum and textbooks covering independence and partition.

The advisory committee was performing its task according to the terms of reference it received. It was trying to purge the curriculum and textbooks of this kind of material. Dr Dean explained that the new textbooks which tried to be consistent with the Constitution had Muslim authors and that she was only a co-author. She also explained that all the books were reviewed multiple times before being approved by the authorities. Regardless, the Sindh government did not come to her defence.

It is not just in Sindh that Islamist parties and activists and their supporters are trying to protect an intolerant national curriculum that violates the Constitution. In Punjab, textbooks written and approved in the past few years continue to violate Article 22(1). In KP, the JI has allied with the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government to reverse reforms in textbooks that had been initiated by the previous Awami National Party government.

Thirty years ago, in 1985, Pervez Hoodbhoy and I had written an essay Rewriting the History of Pakistan in which we argued that Gen Zia and his political ally the JI “view education as an important means of creating an Islamised society” and that this effort included “the revision of conventional subjects to emphasise Islamic values”. We had warned then, “the full impact … will probably be felt by the turn of the century, when the present generation of schoolchildren attains maturity”. The religious violence the country is now suffering, directed especially at religious minorities, is one result. Without urgent fundamental reform of our education system, this terrible war may last at least another generation.

The writer is a retired physicist who taught at Quaid-i-Azam University and LUMS.