Mystery 'missings' haunt
Pakistan By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Saud Memon, one of the key
suspects in the murder of US reporter Daniel
Pearl, was buried last Friday amid unprecedented
scenes in Karachi. Pearl's body was found in 2002
on a plot of land owned by Memon in this Pakistani
port city.
When news broke of the death in
hospital of Memon, who was in his early 40s,
thousands of people descended on a radical mosque
associated with the banned al-Rasheed Trust for
funeral rites. According to the hospital, Memon
died of tuberculosis and
meningitis.
Slogans
seldom heard in Karachi were shouted, such as
"Long live al-Qaeda," "The remedy for [President
General Pervez] Musharraf is al-jihad," "The
remedy for America is al-jihad." The mood of the
crowd, which included several figures on the
Ministry of Interior's wanted list, was one of
anger.
Businessman Memon, too, figured
high on Pakistan's most-wanted list in connection
with the Pearl case and as a suspected al-Qaeda
financier through such outfits as al-Rasheed
Trust.
Memon, a cloth merchant, was never
formally charged over the Pearl case. He is
believed to have slipped out of the country after
Pearl's murder and was then thought to have been
seized in South Africa in March 2003 by the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was reportedly
then held at the US detention facility at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than two years
before being handed over to Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence.
His family
filed a case in the Pakistani Supreme Court
against his "illegal detention", but intelligence
agencies refused to acknowledge his detention. He
was simply classified as "missing".
Recently, he was abandoned near his
residence in extremely poor condition. According
to his family, he had lost his memory and could
not identify any of them, and he could not speak.
Memon's case highlights the plight of
"missing" people in Pakistan, said to number in
the hundreds.
Previously, missing persons
who have been dropped off at their homes after
lengthy absences were found to have been detained
for long periods by the intelligence agencies
without their cases ever being officially
acknowledged.
As a result, Chief Justice
Iftikhar Chaudhry summoned the chiefs of the
agencies into court to explain themselves. These
included serving generals. Subsequently in March,
Chaudhry was suspended by a "presidential
reference" over accusations of abuse of power and
later made "non-functionable". This sparked
countrywide protests. The Pakistani media believe
the issue of missing people and the summoning of
the generals had upset the establishment.
But at a public rally, Musharraf dismissed
claims that the saga of missing persons had
anything to do with Chaudhry's suspension. He then
said nobody was "missing" and no intelligence
agencies detained anybody. Instead, the president
said those who were claimed to be missing were
terrorists who had gone to Afghanistan, where they
killed themselves in suicide missions.
According to the Human Rights Commission
of Pakistan, the missing include jihadis and
radical Islamists as well as a number of Baloch
separatists. And, it said, there was little anyone
could do, the courts were not helping and it was
pointless for jihadis to communicate with the
establishment. People were looking for a savior,
and now they appear to have found one.
On
the day that Memon died, Maulana Abdul Aziz of the
Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), the flagbearer of the
Islamic Center for the Defense of Human Rights and
the first organization to champion the cause of
missing persons, announced that if the government
continued to detain people unlawfully, the mosque
would do the same with security officials.
Brothers Aziz and Maulana Abdul Rasheed
Ghazi head the influential Lal Masjid in
Islamabad. They have strong pro-Taliban leanings
and have frequently clashed with the government.
Within hours of their warning, vigilantes from the
Lal Masjid seized four policemen.
The
Lal Masjid brigade The brazen capture of
the policemen was a direct challenge to the writ
of the state right in the capital. The mosque
rejected pleas for their release, instead coming
up with a list of its own of detainees it wanted
freed, which was presented to the local
administration.
This was passed on to the
leading intelligence agencies and a grand meeting
was called at General Headquarters Rawalpindi,
attended by all top security officials. They were
directed to summon the provincial heads of their
departments with summaries on the security
situation.
Their reports suggested a
serious wave of radicalization. The
Tehrik-i-Nizam-i-Shariat-i-Mohammedi, which sent
about 10,000 youths to Afghanistan in 2001 to
confront the US invasion, has revived in North
West Frontier Province (NWFP) and will begin an
armed struggle for Islamization, as it did in the
1990s. Units of jihadist organizations have
regrouped in Karachi and other parts of the
country.
This is in addition to the
restive situation in the tribal areas of North
Waziristan and South Waziristan on the Afghan
border and the districts in NWFP of Tank and Dera
Ismail Khan where armed mobs are trying to take
over control and enforce Islam.
And
tellingly, the reports cited Lal Masjid as the
"Mecca of Pakistani jihadis". Prayer leaders in
the Waziristans have taken pledges from the
faithful to combat coalition troops in
Afghanistan, to strive for the Islamization of
Pakistan and to rise to the defense of Lal Masjid.
The meeting in Rawalpindi did not formally
come to any decisions, but on Sunday evening
hundreds of policemen were deployed around the
mosque. Paramilitary forces staged snap checks at
all of Islamabad's exit and entry routes. Rumors
of a grand operation spread like wildfire.
A defiant Aziz announced on megaphone the
call for jihad, and students armed with sticks
took up positions around the mosque as thousands
of onlookers gathered. Aziz warned that if the
government began an offensive, official
installations across the country would be hit by
suicide attackers. The provincial commanders at
the meeting in Rawalpindi had pointed out that
Aziz was capable of backing up his words with
action.
The head of the national
crisis-management cell of the Ministry of
Interior, retired Brigadier Javed Cheema, appeared
on television to rule out an operation,
contradicting cabinet ministers and even his own
minister, who had said earlier that something had
to be done. In the early hours of Monday, the
troops were called off and Lal Masjid released two
of the policemen after a few of the detainees on
its list were freed. The other two policemen were
still being held.
The "ping-pong"
abductions continued when the Lal Masjid's
associated seminary for boys, Jamia Faridia,
abducted three policemen after two of its students
had been detained. The detainees of both sides
were later swapped.
Fire burns afresh
For many months after 2003 Pakistani
security forces fought against militants in the
Waziristans. With the aftershocks of that conflict
still rippling throughout the country - despite a
ceasefire agreement - it appears Pakistan could be
in for another bloody season.
This
conflict features a new cast of combatants in the
Pakistani tribal areas consisting of breakaway and
splinter groups of more established jihadist and
other organizations with new organizational setups
and ambiguous aims.
Once again Pakistan is
at a crossroads: Should it retreat from the
pro-American policies implemented in the name of
the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, or
should it carry on, even though these policies
have brought little but trouble for Musharraf's
regime?
Syed Saleem Shahzad is
Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can
be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
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