NYT : Pakistani Wife Embodies Cause of ‘Disappeared’

Pakistani Wife Embodies Cause of ‘Disappeared’

By JANE PERLEZ | July 19, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Sitting in the sparsely furnished office of her missing husband, Amina Masood Janjua counted the calls on a recent day from Pakistanis who have suffered a fate similar to hers. More and more are coming forward, she says, to report that their husbands, brothers or sons have disappeared under the rule of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

“It used to be two cases every week,” she said. “Today, there were three. The numbers are incredible. I get cases when I’m driving. I have three diaries full of names.”

She and Pakistani human rights groups say that those who are missing have disappeared into the hands of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services since 2001. The total could be more than 400, they say.

While American intelligence officials say that General Musharraf has not done enough to crack down on militants in the country, human rights groups here assert that Pakistan’s security services have been sweeping up civilians and holding them incommunicado without charges since 9/11, when the government forged an alliance with the United States to fight terrorists.

They say the Bush administration has pushed the government to arrest people who are overtly religious or show an interest in radical Islamic thought. Most of the men who are reported missing wore full beards, a sign of religiosity.

The movement to free the missing men gathered momentum in October when Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, decided to take up the cases. His boldness may have contributed to the decision by General Musharraf to suspend him on March 9.

But Mr. Chaudhry’s determination to challenge that decision by appealing to the Supreme Court and holding a series of rallies over the last few months has weakened the president and left other Pakistanis less fearful of standing up to the government. He has become the focus of a growing popular movement to restore civilian rule even as General Musharraf also comes under increasing pressure from radical Islamists.

That popular outpouring has given momentum to Defense of Human Rights, a group founded by Mrs. Janjua, and the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who are trying to locate and free the missing men.

Every two weeks in crowded sessions of the Supreme Court here, judges listen to the pleadings of women demanding to know the whereabouts of their husbands and sons and brothers, who they believe are locked up in government jails and safe houses.

Security officers, dressed in pressed khakis and black berets, are regularly dragged before the bench and asked to explain where the men — known here as the “disappeared” — are being held.

“At least tell me whether my husband is alive,” Mrs. Janjua pleaded at a recent Supreme Court hearing here in Islamabad.

The officers professed to have no inkling of the whereabouts of Masood Ahmed Janjua, 45, whose slightly smiling portrait Mrs. Janjua has held aloft outside government buildings for nearly two years.

One mother, Syeda Nargis, a diminutive woman swathed in black, travels four hours by bus from Lahore to the capital to attend the court hearings. It is a year since she waited at the Islamabad airport to greet her son upon his arrival from Dubai.

“He landed at 7 p.m.; I stayed until 1 a.m.,” she recalled, a color poster of her son Syed Imran Naqvi, 31, dressed in a tartan shirt, blazer and trim beard, clutched in her hands. “They said, ‘Maybe he will come after two or three hours.’ Now it is 12 months, and nothing has happened.”

Her son, a software engineer, was her main source of income, she said. “We spent so much money for him to be an engineer, not to go to jail,” she said. “Musharraf should tell us the reason, what is the problem?”

Asked specifically about the cases of the 400, a senior Pakistani government official said many of the people on the list had “religious links” with Afghanistan and had joined “militant organizations” there.

The official, Javed Iqbal Cheema, the director general of the National Crisis Management cell at the Ministry of Interior, said, specifically, that Mr. Janjua was close to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and was not in the Pakistani government’s custody.

Mrs. Janjua denies that assertion, saying that her husband was close to Tablighi Jamaat, a large Muslim organization involved in proselytizing whose membership includes former government officials. That group is also active in Britain, where some authorities contend that it serves as a conveyor belt for extremists.

Some of those who have been released by the government have been tortured, and their experiences have been sparingly reported. But for the most part they remain too afraid to describe publicly what was done to them, the leaders of the groups say.

About 60 of the detained have been released but as they have been freed others have been jailed, keeping the number of the missing at a fairly constant 400 since the beginning of the year, said Mrs. Janjua and the secretary general of the Human Rights Commission, Iqbal Haider.

The list of 400 does not include many more people, “perhaps thousands,” who have been arrested in Baluchistan and kept secretly for supporting the separatist movement in that province, said Mr. Haider, a former minister of justice in the government of Benazir Bhutto.

The most recent United States State Department human rights report on Pakistan said its human rights record “remained poor,” though that has not diminished the Bush administration’s support for the Musharraf government.

Among the methods of abuse used against people in custody, the report said, were “beating, burning with cigarettes, whipping the soles of the feet, prolonged isolation, electric shock, denial of food or sleep, hanging upside down, use of electric shocks and forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters.”

A former officer in the Pakistani Air Force, Khalid Khawaja, 56, who is well known for his good relations with a number of Islamic radical groups, was released from the Rawilipindi jail in late June after six months in custody.

Mr. Khawaja, a force behind Defense of Human Rights, said he was arrested and blindfolded in January, then shuffled around several prisons, including a new maximum-security one in Faisalbad. He was held in solitary confinement for long periods and denied medicine, he said.

His wife, Shamama Malik, turned up at every demonstration, and his son worked the phones to win his father’s freedom. “The Americans are getting all the people with religious motivation and taking them away,” Mr. Khawaja said angrily in an interview at his home the morning after his release.

Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, the lawyer who has led the effort in the Supreme Court for the Defense of Human Rights, said the government had three laws, including the Security of Pakistan Act, under which it could detain people for specific periods. But none of them had been applied in the cases he was handling, he said.

“Even if some of the missing persons have some link with Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Siddiqui said, “they have to be treated in accordance with the law.”

So far, the Supreme Court seems to agree. Even with the chief justice’s suspension, the other justices have not shied away from hearing the cases, though Mrs. Janjua says she is convinced that Mr. Chaudhry’s determination to do so led to General Musharraf’s attempt to oust him.

“He was very fatherly,” she said, recalling a hearing on March 8 before Mr. Chaudhry. “I was insisting hard. I was in tears. He said: ‘Be comforted. We are using every channel, and every person is going to be released, and we are going to continue the hearings until the last person is released.’ ”

She added: “On March 8, he was speaking like this. The very next day, he was not in his chair.”