VIEW: Challenging disappearances —Asma Jahangir
In the coming months the HRCP will translate the Convention text and post it on its website. Other relevant information contained in the Convention will also be disseminated to relevant institutions and bodies
The United Nations Human Rights Council in its first session in June this year adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All persons from Enforced Disappearances and recommended that the General Assembly adopt it too. It will subsequently be opened for signature, ratification and accession at a signing ceremony in Paris. More importantly, that the protection of human rights is no longer a domestic issue. It concerns the finer values of the global human community.
There are many routes, domestic and international that we can follow in seeking relief and, ultimately, justice. At the international level,
The Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) considers all cases that are fairly well documented.
The WGEID does not establish criminal liability nor does it declare state responsibility. Its primary goal is to assist families in determining the fate and whereabouts of their relatives who, having disappeared, are placed outside the protection of the law.
The crime of disappearance is a continuous one and therefore WGEID keeps cases under consideration until the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person become known
The WGEID endeavours to establish a channel of communication between the complainants and the governments concerned to ensure investigation with the objective of clarifying the whereabouts of disappeared persons.
While the WGEID is not a substitute for domestic judicial remedy, nor does it declare criminal responsibility, it can exert pressure on governments to discontinue such heinous practices. Eventually, national governments and institutions, particularly the judiciary, bear the responsibility of guaranteeing protection to individuals.
Pakistan has been recently elected to the newly formed Human Rights Council and should be obliged to respond to allegations against it for having violated human rights. The WGEID should make a formal request to the government of Pakistan to invite it to conduct a fact-finding mission.
The Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances obliges governments to take “effective legislative, administrative, judicial, or other measures to prevent and terminate acts of enforced disappearance in any territory under its jurisdiction.” It stipulates that all acts of enforced disappearances shall be offences under criminal law and that there be no impunity or amnesty for perpetrators of this crime. It is important to note that the Convention denies impunity for anyone engaged in the crime of disappearances even if it is carried out under official instructions.
Anyone involved in the crime of disappearances, regardless of their position, bears an individual responsibility. However, “mitigating circumstances may be established for those who, having participated in enforced disappearances, are instrumental in bringing the victims forward alive or in providing voluntary information which would contribute to clarifying cases of enforced disappearance”. In addition, domestic legislation should not place any limitation of time for seeking redress in cases of disappearances.
In the coming months the HRCP will translate the Convention text and post it on its website. Other relevant information contained in the Convention will also be disseminated to relevant institutions and bodies. It will also be involved in raising awareness on the issue. The media can play a pivotal role in this campaign and they ought to be commended for the positive contribution they have made so far. Indeed a number of working journalists have themselves been victims of this abhorrent practice.
Incidents of involuntary disappearances have been reported from all parts of the country — Balochistan, Sindh, NWFP and Punjab. The HRCP has received reports of over 600 incidents of disappearances during the last three years. Our sources include media reports, complaints from victims’ families, information received from human rights defenders, lawyers, political parties, trade unions and other individuals. The HRCP has not been able to verify all the cases brought to its notice, partly because of lack of capacity but mostly because of the inaccessibility of those close to the victims.
Witnesses, in a number of cases, do not come forward or are threatened by offenders. An important number of incidents have occurred in places which remain inaccessible for activists in carrying out their work satisfactorily. Verifying cases of disappearances requires special skills. The HRCP has so far been able to verify 170 cases in the last two years but will continue to carry out its obligation so that it can verify all cases brought to its notice. It is our belief that the figures represented here do not indicate the full extent of the numbers of disappearances taking place in the country.
There are several cases where victims have requested confidentiality as they have been released on assurances of maintaining their silence. The actual number of disappearances cannot therefore, be estimated but some patterns do emerge from the available information.
Broadly speaking, there are five categories of people who are picked up by plainclothes men in Pakistan. A category of reports received by the HRCP indicates that at least 50 journalists have been picked up by members of intelligence agencies during the last two years. They are usually warned of dire consequences and released after a few days. Their family members receive phone calls threatening them and asking them to remain silent. They are told that if they alert the press, the victim will be dealt with harshly. There is a constant turnover of journalists, mostly from remoter areas of the country, who are picked up, threatened and then released — a revolving-door policy of involuntary disappearances.
The second category is of a large number of Baloch nationalists. A large number remains missing but some have since been released. In the third category are people from Sindh belonging to groups opposing the government. Members of the Jeay Sindh Mutahidda Mahaz party are among the disappeared persons.
The fourth category is of people who are picked up on suspicion of being terrorists. Among them are people belonging to religious minorities and women. Some returnees from Guantanamo Bay prison disclosed that they were initially picked up by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and kept in illegal custody. They were interrogated in Pakistan and later handed over to the US authorities. They disclosed that money changed hands at each transfer of illegal custody.
The last category comprises people who are picked up by either the law enforcement or the intelligence agencies for settling scores. They act either on their own or at the behest of well-placed individuals. In such situations, the victim’s family simply gives in to the demands made on them.
The families of a number of victims of disappearances have filed habeas corpus petitions. Our courts dismiss many such petitions following a statement by government agents that the ‘detainee’ is not in their custody. This practice is followed despite eyewitness accounts of evidence indicating involvement of state functionaries.
The issue of disappearances in Pakistan is closely linked to the ‘war on terror’. A number of individuals who have vanished were ostensibly picked up on suspicion of being affiliated with militant groups. Moreover, the new methodology of interrogation — by administrating injections — has evolved during the war on terror.
Most shockingly, such grave human rights violations are being carried out on a daily basis while the international community looks away. The HRCP’s report on Balochistan, its annual report, media reports, press releases and conferences on this issue as well as protests by families of victims have not received any response from the government.
The law enforcement and more importantly the intelligence agencies remain unaccountable. The callous lack of concern by the government strongly indicates that they tolerate, if not approve, of this crime. A few recommendations put forward by the HRCP include urging the judiciary of Pakistan to act in an independent manner and to effectively use its authority in recovering all disappeared individuals. The HRCP also calls upon WGEID to request for a mission to Pakistan and demand that the government invites them.
Pakistan should sign and ratify the ICCPR and the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and parliamentarians to urgently set up a Working Group to document cases of disappearances and use their authority to investigate these cases so that the perpetrators are brought to justice. Finally, all human rights organisations should work in partnership in advancing the campaign against involuntary disappearances. In order for a person to be considered ‘disappeared’, three conditions must be fulfilled: the deprivation of liberty against the will of the person concerned; involvement of government officials, at least indirectly by acquiescence; and the refusal to disclose the fate and whereabouts of the person concerned.
A hundred beats
By Fatima Bhutto
The first time I came into contact with an image of the disappeared was a year ago. My mother and I had gone to a rally being held near the Karachi Press Club. We had walked from Regal Chowk in a crowd of people and stood outside the Press Club to listen to the many speakers who had converged that day in protest against the city government’s forced evictions. After everyone had spoken and the crowd began to disperse my mother’s face turned towards the gates of the club. A young woman was sitting in front of a photograph, her fingers were tightly wrapped around the edges of the frame and her eyes had a distant, angry look to them. Her two children sat beside her and picked at the carpet they were sitting on. We went over to be with them. The woman’s husband had been picked up in the middle of the night some months before. No one told his family where they were taking him or why. There was no warrant for his arrest; no charges had been filed against him. She had not seen her husband since.
A few days later we were at a Karachi stadium, not alas for sports, but to attend a series of talks set up by the World Social Forum, and it was there that we saw the faces of the disappeared once again. Relatives handed out photographs of loved ones snatched away by intelligence authorities, photocopied papers were passed around listing the details of many midnight abductions, and people sat in solidarity with those who lay in an unimaginably painful limbo — not knowing whether to mourn the men they assumed were dead — or to carry on clinging to the hope that they might still be alive.
Amnesty International, citing the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, says that while disappearances were relatively rare in Pakistan before 2001 — the year the twin pantheons of American free trade were brought to the ground — they have since become rampant, even outside of the ‘war on terror’ aegis. It has recently been reported that as many as 4,000 Pakistani citizens have disappeared under Pervez ‘nobody-voted-for-me’ Musharraf’s government and are thought to have been illegally detained and tortured in secret prisons, packed off to Guantanamo Bay, or killed.
Disappearances are not unique to Pakistan, not at all. But we have finally caught up with the many, and may I add dictatorial regimes, around the world that have used this tactic against their own people to silence dissent, quell resistance, and crush ‘anti-state’ activity. It was mothers, old women, tired of waiting for their sons to return home, who had led the movement to uncover the truth behind disappearances in Argentina during the military junta that presided over 30,000 unlawful abductions in the late 1970s. In Chile, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet (who now lies in a Santiago hospital recuperating from a heart attack — an organ many people assumed could never hurt him on account of its being wholly absent in his body before), 3,000 men and women have disappeared. The Gestapo dabbled in disappearances too, as has the CIA in the various countries it unpopularly lorded over for the better part of the twentieth century. And now the state of Pakistan can claim its own unknown victims.
Who are the disappeared?
They are Baloch nationalists, Sindhi activists, professors, labour leaders, and political workers. They are fathers and sons. But they are denied even their names and identities as their cases are often unkindly reported in the media with the importance of ticker news ‘Man, 48-years-old, suspected of having links with terror organisations reported missing’. It just scrolls by. Before you have a chance to register the information, you’ve already missed it.
Why had they been taken? What were their crimes?
Distributing illicit pamphlets? Speaking out against the state? We’re never told. That is part of the secret. That is part of why the disappeared can never be seen again. But because of the eerie and almost daily sight of women holding up photographs at public gatherings and outside government plazas and offices, at least we have seen the faces of the disappeared — proof that they once existed, even if they will never again be found.
Why disappearances in particular?
Because with the absence of a body and no press conference listing the crimes of the accused to contend with, the state is officially distanced from any acts of violence or barbarism. They cannot be held accountable for what you never saw; silence and invisibility greatly benefits the brutality of the state. It is a terror enacted wholeheartedly on the populace’s imagination — as opposed to their bodies. You could have disappeared and no one would ever know what happened to you; your guilt presupposed over your innocence without having been tried in a court of law, condemned to a life — or death — forever unseen and unsung.
This week the government, for so long playing a tedious game of see no evil/hear no evil, has finally outed itself. Last Saturday the deputy attorney-general admitted that the whereabouts of 20 men picked up by intelligence agencies were known to the government. A case registered with the Chief Justice of Pakistan has forced an end to the authority’s silence. On Monday seven other men who had disappeared two years ago were finally released, no charges had been proven against them. Four other men were also ‘found’ and returned to their homes in Swat, Kohat, and Hazara. Oops! Just kidding! They weren’t Al Qaeda operatives after all, sorry about that whole hide and seek thing, here are your family members back — You’re welcome! The Supreme Court didn’t find this charade funny and following this week’s unexpected developments in justice for the disappeared is set to take up several other cases detailing illegal abductions filed by relatives of Pakistan’s many missing men.
Today is international human rights day. While I have problems celebrating these sorts of days — shouldn’t every day be international human rights day? — the time is upon us to mark this occasion in a meaningful and powerful manner. Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright and poet, writing on the thousands of disappearances in his country said “distance has become necessary to kill comfortably, to erase that killing before it happened and after it happened. So it can happen again”. Our passivity to the injustices being perpetrated against our society only makes killers more comfortable.
Do something different today, be active, be enraged. Visit the Asian Human Rights Commission website at www.ahrchk.net and read their latest release on disappearances in Pakistan. The AHRC have demanded a commission be set up to investigate illegal abductions and appeals to “all concerned people, including journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers and relatives of victims, to become actively involved in pressing the government to see such a commission established and the persistent abductions and killings brought to an end at once”. They’re speaking to you. Sign up today and raise your voice in solidarity with the thousands of disappeared all over our country.
Email: fatima.bhutto@gmail.com
Agony of the missing ones
By Amir Usman
THE sight of women, children and the elderly holding placards demanding the return of loved ones who have been picked up from their homes or workplace, and who are not in a position to communicate their whereabouts, is not an uncommon one in Islamabad these days.
So far, the protests of anguished relatives and friends have evoked no response from the authorities.
In a recent report, Amnesty International has condemned human rights violations, including forced disappearances and illegal detentions, in Pakistan. It has, in fact, indicted the people of Pakistan, especially the parliamentarians and the courts, for not effectively raising their voice against such violations and for not providing relief to the affected people. Amnesty has attributed this indifference of Pakistani civil society to the fact that over a period of time the people have grown used to the abuse of their rights and to violence.
In the past, one used to hear occasionally of a person, usually a political activist, being picked up by Pakistani law enforcement agencies for interrogation. However, as soon as a habeas corpus petition was filed in a court of law, the person was either released or produced in court for a proper remand. Then it was for the court either to grant the remand or refuse it, depending on the strength of the evidence. Thus the requirements of the law were fulfilled. Habeas corpus was, indeed, a very powerful weapon in the hands of the aggrieved for seeking redress against a perceived injustice. The government of the day generally responded positively.
In recent years, however, the situation has changed and the number of missing persons has increased considerably. According to some reports, this figure is in the hundreds. Equally disturbing is that there has been no news of some of the victims for years. The category of such persons is not confined only to political activists but includes political dissidents, journalists, doctors, scientists, trade unionists and generally those opposed to the government of the day.
A recent press report, while commenting on the increasing number of missing persons, specially referred to persons such as Dr Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT graduate, of whom nothing has been heard for the last three years; Attiqur Rehman, a nuclear scientist who was picked up on his wedding day in 2004; Dr Safdar Sarki of Jeay Sindh; and Asif Baladi, president of the Sindh Nationalist Forum.
In the Senate, Shahid Bugti narrated the story of the disappearance of his nephew, brother and cousin who, according to him, had nothing to do with politics but were picked up to put pressure on him. A similar story was related by Senator Sanaullah Baloch about his missing relatives. The Senate opposition leader, Mian Raza Rabbani, also made a reference to the disappeared people of Sindh and Balochistan and quoted a figure of 60 for such individuals as given out by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Among the journalists who have been picked up, the most tragic story is that of Hayatullah Khan, an investigative journalist from Waziristan who was taken away in December last year. His bullet-riddled body was discovered six months after he went missing, despite the assurances of the government to his brother that he was well and would soon rejoin his family. There was also the story of journalist Mukesh Rupeta and cameraman Sanjay Kumar who were produced in a court of law three months after their disappearance. All this while, the government professed ignorance about their whereabouts.
As a result of the government’s indifference, the habeas corpus has lost its sting. Government agencies named in a certain petition and are called by the court to explain their position show complete ignorance about the whereabouts of a particular missing person. This usually spells the end of the case for all intents and purposes and the petitioner is left high and dry.
The GHQ in a similar case said that it had no operational control over the actions of the intelligence agencies and thus could not help the court.
Similar denials by the relevant government agencies regarding missing persons are bizarre indeed. Some authority should accept responsibility for the safety and security of citizens. In a hopeless situation, the role of civil society, lawyers’ associations, human rights organizations and the courts is crucial. It will be in keeping with the norms of justice and fair play if the courts give priority to such cases and arrange for speedy trials.
Why is all this happening? The government has the right, in fact an obligation, to protect its citizens from the harmful acts of bad elements in society. In civilized societies — and we claim to be one — remedial or constraining measures are taken within the purview of the existing law on the subject. In Pakistan, we have a host of laws that deal with similar situations. In addition, we have the anti-terrorism laws which are even more stringent and severe than ordinary laws. Why are we not applying these to all such cases? I am sure none of these have a provision to allow anyone to hold a person incommunicado for years, without producing him in a court of law.
Equally important is the humanitarian and moral aspects of such cases. The implications of such events for family members are enormous both in social and economic terms. Their agony is of immense proportions. When a person dies, one can come to terms with the tragedy after some time and get on with life. Not in the case of missing persons, where the hope of their return some day fuels agonizing thoughts about the present. Those who are charged with the task of detaining such persons themselves have families, and a conscience.
Considering the times we live in, no one is asking the government agencies to be lenient or complacent. What is urged is that the provisions of the relevant rules should be observed and that the due process of the law should be meticulously observed. The government’s silence on the plight of these unfortunate, missing Pakistanis is indeed deplorable.
The writer is a former ambassador.
http://dawn.com/2006/11/07/op.htm#3
