Tag: war on terror

Aafia Revisited

The issue of Aafia Siddiqui is very delicate and complex. We all have questions but very few of us manage to get reasonable answers. Some questions are not questions; they are merely hallucinations of our limited “unlimited” grey matter. And some of them are not ours, rather are shoved into our grey matter following sophisticated brainwashing techniques and therefore ‘our’ quest doesn’t bring any good results whereas others deal with petty issues, again induced within us using the same techniques, so that we ignore the bigger picture.

We all have critics either because we did something extraordinarily good or we did something extraordinarily bad. But, Aafia’s critics don’t fall into either although the questions raised against her fall into all three categories that I mentioned above as well as many others. The complexity of the questions raised truly reflects the complexity of her case. I’d like to reiterate few important facts in her story beginning from her abduction and eventually her judicial rape.

  • 18/03/03 | FBI issues an alert regarding Aafia’s potentiality being a terrorist
  • 29/03/03 | Aafia declared an al Qaeda ‘fixer’*
  • 30/03/03 | Aafia disappears while on her way to Rawalpindi (from Karachi); and according to      my research, she was abducted from Karachi by our LEAs (Law Enforcement Agencies) following post-9/11 pressure coming from US end
  • 04/04/03 | FBI denies any hand in her disappearance
  • 26/05/03 | FBI officially declares her an al Qaeda operative
  • 28/05/04 | Pakistan’s Interior Ministry accepts they handed Aafia
  • ??/??/05 | Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHR&GJ, New York University School of Law) published a report titled: “Fate and Whereabouts Unknown: Detainees in the “War on Terror.” It presented “factual summaries of (28) individuals who may be in secret (US) detention sites” and included known information about Aafia at the time
  • ??/??/06 | Amnesty International declares Aafia one of the ‘disappeared’ persons in the ‘war on terror’
  • 28/02/07 | Ghost Prisoner by Human Rights Watch says Aafia “may have once been held” in secret CIA detention
  • ??/02/08 | Aafia was brought back to Karachi and tortured, according to Asian Human Rights commission
  • 11/07/08 | No women held in Bagram, according to a US Army Colonel
  • 31/07/08 | Aafia’s brother is informed by FBI that she’s in US custody
  • 04/08/08 | A press release shows that Aafia has been arrested in Ghazni (Afghanistan)
  • 06/08/08 | A US magistrate rules to hold her without bail
  • 12/08/08 | Pakistani Embassy in Washington issues a repatriation request
  • 13/08/08 | Never held Aafia, US military (in Afghanistan)

Now let’s pause here and connect the dots. Aafia disappeared in March of one year and our Interior Ministry’s acknowledgment (which came after FBI declaring her an al Qaeda operative) is coming in May of the next year and coupled with FBI’s denial of any hand in abduction leads us to the conclusion that b/w March of 2003 and May/April of 2005 she was either in the custody of our LEAs or the CIA. Also, have you ever asked yourself what ‘alerted’ FBI, what was she up to? More importantly, what kind of lifestyle she was living that alerted the FBI? By the way, she wasn’t alone when she was abducted, she had three kids with her at that time, why we always ignore them while pointing fingers at her? What took Amnesty International so long to acknowledge her disappearance? Who is responsible for that slack, the free media of Pakistan or its dead-soul inhabitants? Were any legal procedures followed while handing her to FBI? Why was she brought back and more importantly why was she tortured? If no women was ever held in Bagram then who was the female detainee that her co detainees always relate to? More importantly, why the US simply not tell who she was if she wasn’t Aafia? If Pakistan handed her over to US and if she wasn’t been held in Bagram then where was she in all those years; in the US? OK, let’s assume she was in the US but then why US let her go back to Pakistan and how she managed to end up in Afghanistan? And in all this mayhem, where were her kids?! Most importantly, why we always skip this question? If she went into US custody in 2008 then whose custody was she in during all those years? Let’s move on!

  • 02/10/2008 | Aafia sent to a Federal Medical Centre for psychiatric evaluation
  • 06/10/2008 | Pakistani senators meet her, she tells them how she was “abducted in 2003, given an injection, found herself in a cell, and was forced to sign papers and confess to things she didn’t do; her children’s lives were threatened and she was abused grievously”
  • 17/11/2008 | Aafia declared “not competent to proceed as a result of her mental disease, which renders her unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her;” by Judge Richard Berman
  • 09/03/2009 | The tentative date for Aafia’s trial to begin

Few more points straight from my end:

  • What caused her to end in such a destructive psychological state?
  • One of her kids is back but what about the other two? Probably, her youngest kid has died, yes, it’s unofficial but true. · Above all why she was abducted from Pakistan for a crime committed in Afghanistan to be tried in the US?
  • What Aafia had to go through during illegal detention in Bagram is in grave breach of US War Crimes Act (1996) as well as Geneva Conventions (1949).
  • The very act of her enforced disappearance is a clear breach of UN’s Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
  • Let us assume Aafia did shoot at US military personnel and FBI agents but why DOJ (Dept. of Justice) while indicting her ignored more than 5 years of torture altogether?  Why they ignored the common sense element altogether that how on earth can a woman so thin and pain stricken cause damage to army personnel so well trained.
  • As her attorney put it: “Picture this woman who is very tiny (and extremely frail and weakened from her ordeal), and ask yourself how she engaged in armed conflict….with six (armed and well-trained) military men, how did this happen? And how did she get shot? I think you can answer that, can’t you (and question the absurdity of DOJ’s charges against her)?
  • What happened to FBI’s alert, by the way, and their declaration as well, not to mention none of them showed up in the court proceedings? All seven counts had to do with her staged clash at Ghazni where she fired at armed military personnel with bullets that left no marks on the walls, didn’t injure anybody (although it was close range encounter) and the only injured party was none other than herself.
  • The rape and victimisation that she had to go through isn’t an unexpected one. If an army, who’s on a mission of moral policing of the world, belonging to world’s most civilised country, can rape and mutilate men then it can definitely rape and victimise women but what she went through inside the US (not in a secret detention) is utterly disgusting! In Bagram, she only had to face unofficial degradation (rape) but in the US she had to face official degradation (strip-search) as well.
  • 86 years imprisonment for firing a gun that she couldn’t hold, for firing bullets that left no trace, for firing from a close range causing nil injury or for getting injured herself?

So, next time some miserable apologists try to confuse you regarding Aafia being innocent or not, please remind them:

She stayed in illegal detention for more than five years for no good reason. The charges that were levied against her by FBI had no factual stand whatsoever and that’s the only reason they never made it to court proceedings but HEY she lost her kids, she lost her chastity (she was raped in Bagram as well as in the US), she lost her psychological balance, she lost her honour, she lost her dignity, she lost everything, for what? For the stupid reasons made by a force known to the world for their crimes, lies and atrocities? And yes, her 86 years imprisonment is based on no forensic evidence whatsoever.

Oh, really sorry, even I forgot to mention about the real Aafia. She was a neuro-scientist, the only one in the world to have an honorary degree from Harvard University; she was Hafiz-e-Quran and had 144 honorary degrees & certificates. She went to MIT and Brandeis, raised money for charities, did voluntary social work, hosted play groups in her apartment, loved her religion, and distributed Qur’ans to inmates in area prisons. She was living a normal American life until the FBI called her a terrorist, a high-profile Al Qaeda operative. Aafia was indeed a woman guilty only of being Muslim at the wrong time in America.  (Boston Magazine’s Katherine Oxment asked: Who’s afraid of Aafia Siddiqui?)

Of cycles of hate and feet on the pedals..

A life packed away in a few cardboard boxes. The bare room started back coldly. It looked alien already.

“Mom”

A small voice called. She turned to the silhouette in the doorway and wiped the tears, trying to make the motion as inconspicuous as possible but it was too late. The tender 6 year old frame ran in to her arms.

“It’s going to be alright mom”

Her comment lingered on, magnified as the conviction behind them filled the emptiness of the room. Rebecca responded by tightening her arms around the small frame that didn’t seem as dainty as she did a while ago.

“Yes Honey. It will be. Sure it will be”

She stood up and wiped the tears. This time there was no effort to hide them. A car honked outside and she stooped down to pick up Angela, who clasped her hands behind her neck almost as a reflex. Over the next few hours they loaded the cardboards that their worldly possessions seem to have disappeared in to in an old Hyundai that had obviously seen better days. Its owner wrestled one last box in to the trunk and managed to wrestle it closed.

“There now. I’m not that old after all … am I?”

She said trying to stoop down as much as her octogenarian frame would allow as Angela smiled back. For a moment Rebecca focused on Becky’s radiant smile and wondered about its genuineness. She had lost her only son in Afghanistan 3 months ago. The funeral had been a fortnight later. The IED had exploded right under the armoured vehicle almost ripping it in to two. The military repatriated whatever remains they could find. The entire town seemed to have shown at the funeral. Becky had cried in private but refused to mourn her son in public. He had died bringing freedom, democracy and liberation. She had recorded the speech delivered by President Bush on September 20th 2001 and played it many a times:

“Americans are asking “Why do they hate us? ….

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.”

She had outgrown the fondness of it over the last few years. She also could not reconcile Bush’s words about Egypt with the Arab spring. The people of Egypt had thrown out their government. The week Hosni Mubarak’s government finally caved in, Beck drove down to the nearest Walmart to finally get a world map. She remembered being struck by how far Egypt and Afghanistan had seemed. She wondered: “How many mad men are running out there to leave the world so vulnerable? Why didn’t the Iraqis do the same with Saddam?

The following week she wrote the last letter to Andy telling him how proud she was of him. He never got to read it. For now the three occupants in the old Hyundai pulled up in front of a small house. The need for repairs was obvious.

“Sorry about the mess. I was hoping Andy would …..”

She stopped midsentence. Rebecca rubbed her hands on her back as she recomposed herself. Over the next hours the three generation of ladies moved pulled, dragged and carried things of immediate need. There used to be an abundance of well natured young men willing to help out in this town of 2000 or so. 90% had signed up for the military in recent years and many were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many had been motivated by patriotism and the willingness to spread the good that they enjoyed within the borders of this great country of theirs. Yet more saw it as a means of a better future. The promise of a college education eclipsed the danger in the odds.

Meanwhile in Karachi,

Zaman woke up with a start. It took him a while to figure out that he was no longer in North Waziristan. The rain pouring fast and heavy on the tin roof of the cramped one bedroom home sounded like the explosion that awful day. He shuffled through the thin sheet in a frenzy to reassure himself. 6 year old Amina was still there, curled up in a ball. The rain had left the floor colder. He lent her his bedsheet and doubled it on her. He was shivering but not all from the cold. His heart was beating so fast, he worried about waking her up. He tried to block it out but couldn’t.

He was shaking uncontrollably now. He slipped outside the room where a clay pot lay in the corner and poured him a glass of water, struggling to keep his hands steady. The drone attack that day had wiped out his son and wife along with 45 other people from the village. Their remains were never found. A few hours later 20 more people perished in an attack on those trying to rescue any survivors, Zaman had spent the next four months recovering in a hospital in Peshawar. He lost his left eye, walked with a limp and had irretrievable shrapnel to blame for constant agonizing pain that he had no money to buy pain medications for. His doctors had told him he was lucky.

Amina on the other hand had not been that lucky. She had lost both her legs in below the knee amputations. A local NGO had found some ill-fitting prosthesis for her.

Zaman remembered as his wife had proudly beckoned him in to the house to show how Amina had started walking at only 8 months of age. It would take her exactly 8 months since the drone attack to take her first strides with crutches. Zaman was grateful to have her. He went back to the door and peaked inside. She seemed more comfortable now. It had stopped raining.

“Alhamdulillah …”

She was his strength. His uncle, Waleed Khan, who had been by his side in Peshawar throughout their recovery, was an old man now. A labourer in Karachi, he was by no means a man with many resources. Mostly, he would spend the day on a footpath near a busy shopping centre in Karachi, praying that one of the many millions of rupee worth cars would stop and ask him to come by for repairs in their house or a contractor would offer a project. He frequented the nearby mosque and prayed for Amina often. He did not quite understand why his once peaceful village had seen so much bloodshed recently or what technology was pitted against those very modest homes of his loved ones. He just knew that his dreams and the lives of his loved ones were bartered away by a handful of people so shameless and greedy that he paused recently when Amina asked him if we can see Satan. He could have sworn he had. Later, that night he watched in disbelief as former President Musharraf between some nervous laughs admitted that he had written in his book that he handed over a 6 month old baby as a terrorist.

He fought back tears and just looked upwards towards the sky. Later that night he made Wudu (Ablution) and began to read:

“And indeed We have created man, and We know what his ownself whispers to him. And We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” Sura #50, Verse 16

Around the same alignment of the stars, moons, planets and everything else in this universe Becky found herself getting sad watching Angela run around the house. It reminded her of the time Andy had been young. He had practically spent all his childhood in the same house. She opened the bible and began to read:

“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” – Psalms 34:18

In the background she could vaguely make out someone on TV talking about a clash of civilizations..

 

 

Is The Silent Majority Awake Now?

Nearly two decades of ‘slow but steady’ struggle which sometimes looked like a ‘one-man’ show and labelled as ‘just a fan club’ by critics has surely turned the tables in one big show of strength. “The Lahore Jalsa” has shaken repeatedly tested corrupt giants. There is a fear in their tone, and you can sense it.

Pakistan is a country where:

– 60% of the people enjoy the day of election as a ‘day off-work’ at home and opt not to vote
– one-third of the voters list constitutes fake and non-existent names
– majority of the voters decide overnight to cast their votes due to pressure, fear or incentives like a day’s ration, sewing machines, or ‘Ghee ke dabbay’.

True, along with the corrupt ruling elite, the silent majority is equally to be blamed for the mess. The majority who either do not know the power of their vote or cannot think of a reason to come out of their comfort zones to vote. They dwell in air-conditioned rooms, cars and offices, hardly knowing the problems of a common man, so why bother?

I feel lucky to have witnessed a day when people, especially youth, from all social backgrounds, some wearing Shalwar Kameez and headscarves and others in jeans and designer sunglasses, some travelling by public transport and others in their valuable and comfy cars, some speaking the Lahori style Punjabi and others insisting on their ‘dude’ style English, all came out to gather in the heart of Punjab under Jinnah and Iqbal’s posters, Pakistani flags, National Anthem and songs on the 30th of October on  Imran Khan’s call to be part of  ‘Tsunami of change’.

After carefully watching the big day in the history of Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf and the utter failure of media to ‘change the topic’ or turn a blind eye to the mammoth crowd, one wonders as to what has brought the sleeping silent majority out. Fifteen years is not a long time, keeping in mind the fact that a sport hero turned politician, with no roots in established political houses of the country, and with no experience of fraudulent short cuts, talks about dreams which this nation had probably dumped into cold storage for years.

The critics may, very rightly, say that this big crowd doesn’t mean anything electorally and wouldn’t constitute a single seat constituency but it cannot be ignored or taken lightly that people from all walks of life, from labourers, hawkers, rickshaw drivers to educated youth from all colleges and universities including the most ‘westernised’ reached the uneven ground of Minar-e-Pakistan which most of the elite youth might not have been to in years.

What was the motivation? What was the call for? The question is extremely significant. The ruling class has always talked about problems of common man but all we have seen is years of hopelessness, heaps of broken promises and blatant lies. No one has delivered. Standard of living changes after elections but only for those who reach the Parliament houses, ever expanding offices, ministries and ranks created every day. It has never trickled down to the commoners.

The call to gather was for ‘change’. Imran Khan talks of the common man and he has delivered, although on a smaller scale (Shaukat Khanum  and Mianwali University Projects). He talks of the ‘Rule of Law’. Having explored the Western culture and comparatively studying Islam, he takes pride in owning Islamic values and systems. He promises not to bow for anyone’s interest and keep the interest of Pakistan supreme. He opposes Pakistan’s alliance with US War on terror and condemns the innocent casualties as a result of US drone strikes in Pakistan.

‘Friends with all, slaves of none’ was his message boldly sent out from the stage surrounded by thousands of chanting and adrenaline pumped Pakistanis.  And most important of all, he takes inspiration from the Qur’anic principles of social justice and equality, Iqbal’s philosophy of ‘Khudi’ (self-respect) and Jinnah’s concepts of Islamic democracy. He strongly believes  in Pakistan being an ideological state based on Two Nation Theory , a concept disputed by westernised ‘liberals’ in the country who are bent upon labelling him as ‘Taliban Khan’. Call it wishful thinking, but if the right-wing hardliners do not see him ‘up to the mark’ and the secularists see him as a ‘Mullah’, the nation would look up to him as a moderate leader capable of establishing a modern Islamic state.

Excerpts from Imran Khan’s latest book: Pakistan-A Personal History:

“Gone were the insidious humiliations of colonialism and the fear of being drowned in an overwhelming Hindu majority in an independent India. We were free people, free to rediscover an Islamic culture that had once towered over the subcontinent. Free, too, to implement the ideals of Islam based on equality, and social and economic justice. A democracy, as Pakistan’s founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah said, not a theocracy. We were to be the shining example in the Muslim world of what Islam could achieve were it allowed to flourish. Such dreams we had…”

“ …Iqbal not only conceived of a self-governing Muslim state, his passionate voice awakened and activated Indian Muslims motivating them not only to strive to free themselves from the bondage of imperialism and colonialism, but also to challenge other forms of totalitarian control. Believing fervently in human equality and the right of human beings to dignity, justice and freedom, Iqbal empowered the disempowered to stand up and be counted.”

This rally is not less than a wave of big change and a practical demonstration of the Gallup survey and also the WorldPublicOpinion.org survey in collaboration with U.S. Institute of Peace with statistics inferring:

‘..strong public support for a wider role for Islam. Asked to gauge the importance of living “in a country that is governed according to Islamic principles” on a 10-point scale, 61 percent give an answer of 10 (meaning “absolutely important”). The mean response is 9.0’

So, Pakistanis want rule of law, and self-respect and a society based on Islamic principles, exactly the things promised by Imran Khan. That is why they came out in numbers to show their unconditional support. A ‘clean sweep’ in coming elections still looks unrealistic for Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf. However, by joining hands with honest forces, without compromising his principles, Imran Khan is capable enough to change Pakistan for better.