Aboard the Democracy Train (25 page)

For the Taliban and its Al Qaeda benefactors, their abandonment by the Pakistani military was a cue to attack anything remotely Western. Driven out of Afghanistan, these militant groups headed straight to Pakistan where they went on a killing spree against non-Muslims.

On September 25, 2002, the terrorists massacred eight of my Christian friends and colleagues from the Institute for Peace and Justice in Karachi. They tied up eight people with tape and shot them in cold blood – leaving a ninth struggling for dear life.

As the news filtered into my apartment in Sunderland, Massachusetts on September 25, 2002, it made my blood curdle. Their faces flashed before my eyes: Aslam Martin was a broad-shouldered, strong man who would enter our reporter’s room with a diffident smile. Making a beeline for my desk, he would put his heavy motorcycle helmet on my table and discuss his institute’s press release.

The murder of the gentle and innocent Johnny Mascarenas, who was known to our family, was no less painful. Johnny was a tall gangly youth with a shy laugh, who worked for just causes. He was so gentle and innocent that it made me wonder about the savagery of the terrorists who had killed him.

My niece, Nadia – who then studied at Columbia University, New York – had telephoned me right away after the incident. The moment I picked up the phone, I heard her sob. Struggling with bewildered grief, she asked me a question for which I had no straight answer: “Why, oh why would anyone want to murder Uncle Johnny?”

I reflected with a heavy heart. For me, who had grown up in a multi-religious Karachi that also included Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians and Jews, our non-Muslim neighbors were a bigger extension of our family. In the 1960s, as our Christian neighbors left our neighborhood and migrated to the West, Martin and Johnny had remained among the few brave souls who mobilized to make Pakistan a religiously tolerant society.

I covered their protests against the blasphemy laws, passed in 1984 by Gen. Zia ul Haq. These laws have led to the persecution, imprisonment and murder of thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims on suspicion of defamation of the Prophet of Islam. Benazir Bhutto, for all her personal liberal beliefs, dared not touch the blasphemy laws and Gen. Musharraf hastily revoked pronouncements to undo them in 1999 when the Islamic parties growled at his attempts.

Ten days after my Christian friends were murdered, I visited Karachi – where a year of terrorism had made the political climate hotter than the weather. It had been only a year since the US invaded Afghanistan, but Karachi already had a new
and dangerous feel to it. As a former reporter with my finger on the pulse of the city, I witnessed how the waves of change had washed down to the nation’s southernmost shores.

In the middle of Karachi, giant Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and police mobiles had cut off entry to the American consulate. The embassy had already stopped its sought-after visa services since 1997, when a terrorist attack had killed four American employees. Still, shortly before my arrival, the militant Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami had crashed an explosives-packed vehicle into the building and killed over a dozen local pedestrians.

Only a couple of blocks away another Kashmiri militant group – Harkat-ul-Mujahideen – had exploded a car bomb next to a bus parked across the Sheraton Hotel. It killed French naval engineers who had arrived that summer to help Pakistan build a naval submarine. Following the tragedy, the French prime minister immediately recalled the remaining engineers.

In the aftermath of the murders of French engineers, the Harkat ul Mujahideen chief, Asif Zaheer had said with a tinge of regret, “We had been led into believing they were Americans.”

But today many French people are not convinced that the engineers were killed in the post-9/11 wave of terrorism. Instead, a lawsuit filed by the victims’ relatives has forced the French government to investigate whether the attack was carried out because its previous government cancelled commissions for the arms deal with Pakistan. The case involves both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and President Asif Zardari as the beneficiaries of the commissions.

I met up with the sole Muslim survivor of the massacre, Rahim Baksh Azad, who worked at the dirty, congested Rimpa Plaza building where the Christians were murdered. That fateful morning Azad had arrived late at the Institute, knocking the door to find a watchman gagged with tape stagger to open the door. The watchman had been knocked unconscious by the fleeing terrorists and apparently left for dead.

Azad told me when he ran toward the library, he found some of his colleagues on chairs and others lying on the floor – blood dripping from them. Two of the Institute’s members, Edwin
Foster and Robin Sharif were barely alive and writhed like fish, just pulled out of water. Seeing his colleagues wallow in a pool of blood stunned Azad. He grew confused and kept dialing 15 – the police emergency number – forgetting that he needed to dial 9 first to get an outside line.

Edwin Foster did not survive. Robin Sharif recovered in hospital and narrated to the local press that the terrorists – later identified as the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a sectarian form of the Punjabi Taliban – had barged in and asked for Aslam Martin and Father Arnold Heredia. The slender, bespectacled council member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Father Arnold would speak passionately at the Commission’s meetings against the growing cancer of fundamentalism in society. Luckily for Father Arnold, he had already migrated to Australia.

At the HRCP, its prominent leader, Asma Jehangir – who then also served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings – told me in her clear, forceful and unblinking style that she held the military government responsible for its failure to put extra security on a predominantly Christian organization like the Institute. “We had repeatedly asked them to do so, but they refused,” she said.

The murders of the Christian activists sent shock waves in the community. There were touching scenes of anger, mixed with sorrow as thousands of Christians, Muslims, Hindus and people of all faiths lowered the human rights activists into the ground.

At a memorial meeting for the slain Christians, the executive director of Aurat Foundation (Women’s Foundation), Anis Haroon reminisced: “When I went to the Church services for our friends from the Institute, it was a bit like going to my own funeral.”

A hush fell over the room as the Women’s Action Forum – which had, for decades, fought alongside the Institute for Peace and Justice against discriminatory laws – reflected over her heartfelt sentiment.

While Christians became prime targets, the militants who fled Afghanistan next picked on Shia doctors. The Pakistan Medical Association’s secretary general, Dr Shershah Syed – an energetic gynecologist, driven by social concerns – and his staid colleague,
Dr Mirza Ali Azhar told me that in 2002, medical practitioners removed billboards from private clinics which displayed Shia names like Husseini and Ali. Apparently, the militants had been breaking into clinics and killing doctors, merely because they did not belong to their Sunni Salafisect of Islam.

“Why kill doctors?” I asked.

“Because they are high profile members of society and by targeting them the militants terrorize society,” they answered.

The terror tactics seem to have worked in the society where news spreads through word of mouth. Doctors felt threatened, not just because they belonged to the “wrong” Muslim sect, but because high-profile Sunni doctors were killed in reprisals. Panicked doctors refused to accept police assurances that these were “isolated incidents” and quietly packed their bags to resettle overseas.

The Pakistan Medical Association office bearers began serious negotiations with the administration to change the situation. Aware that the Musharraf administration had given a free hand to sectarian outfits like the Anjuman Sipah Sahaba (ASSP) to hold public rallies, intended to mop up anti-US sentiment, they were not convinced by the administration’s argument that it did not have sufficient police force to catch the criminals.

“We told him that was their problem and if they did not catch the culprits, we would bring out doctors on the streets,” Dr Azhar told me. The pressure worked and the killings stopped.

During my three-week sojourn in Karachi in 2002, I did not see a single European face. For someone used to the occasional Western journalist popping in and out of the Karachi Press Club, it was strange that even a major event such as the October 10 elections, introduced by Musharraf to bring back “phased democracy,” had failed to attract Western reporters. Instead, 9/11 ushered in a season of discontent between the US and the Musharraf administration.

In 2001, as Al Qaeda militants fled from US bombing in Afghanistan, they crossed over into Pakistan. There they found
safe refuge not only in the tribal Waziristan belt but their top leadership relocated to urban areas of the north-west and down south. They were selectively caught in lieu of reward money offered by the US, as were some of their local abettors in the Islamic parties.

Musharraf’s autobiography offers a glimpse into the role he played in catching some of these high value targets. “Since shortly after 9/11 – when many Al Qaeda members fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan – we have played multiple games of cat and mouse with them. We have captured 672 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars…”

For relatives of families who were disappeared under Gen. Musharraf, his words are no less than a confession. Amna Masood Janjua, a petite woman in headscarf, whose husband Masood – from the prosleytizing Islamic group, Tablighi Jamaat – mysteriously disappeared in 2005, has presented Musharraf’s quotation to the Supreme Court as self-incriminating evidence. The former housewife, who denies that her husband engaged in militant activities, says that the former military ruler can scarcely deny he caused people to disappear when he admits to their capture and “sale” to the US.

Amna’s husband was scheduled to depart from their home in Rawalpindi for Peshawar on July 30, 2005 when he was picked up. As she searched for him, she was mystified to find an army man spying on her family home and the college, which was run by her husband. Acting on a tip off from a member of the intelligence agencies, she discovered that her phone was bugged. Amna – who had, by then, taken over her husband’s travel agency in Islamabad – hired a lawyer.

When she approached the Supreme Court as a wife and a mother, Amna was contacted by a growing number of family members whose loved ones were disappearing in Pakistan after September 11. It would lead her to form the Defense of Missing Persons, which by 2010 included 788 families whose members were held in illegal detention.

Many of those on Amna’s list were Baloch nationalists who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or Taliban and were picked up
by the intelligence agencies for their alleged links with India and other spy agencies which support the Baloch armed struggle for secession.

Amna says that US agencies in Pakistan partnered with local intelligence agencies to interrogate suspects through torture methods that included beatings, isolation, sleep and toilet deprivation and repeatedly questioned them about their alleged meetings with Osama Bin Laden. Detenus wore orange jump suits at detention centers located in Pakistan’s garrison city of Rawalpindi, Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in US-administered Guantanamo Bay.

When Amna contacted former US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson and told her that her husband was missing, the ambassador reportedly replied, “I know nothing about the case.”

But Amna says that US intelligence agencies had also denied knowledge of the whereabouts of Saud Memon – the businessman who owned the shed in Karachi where Daniel Pearl’s body was found. In 2003, the FBI picked up Memon and moved him to Guantanamo Bay. Four years later, he was produced in Pakistan’s Supreme Court emaciated and with memory loss after no evidence was found to tie him to Pearl’s murder. His family claims he had been “severely tortured.” Memon died shortly afterwards – a victim of “collateral damage.”

Her group also lobbied for the release of suspected jihadist, Dr Aafia Siddiqi, who went missing in Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan highlighted Dr Aafia’s case among the disappearances under Musharraf. When a New York court eventually sentenced her to life imprisonment – in spite of the fact that she was suffering from a confused mental state – Pakistan reacted with a wave of sympathy.

In 2007, the HRCP presented the cases of 200 missing persons in front of the Supreme Court with an appeal to investigate the disappearances. But on March 3, 2007, when Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry summoned the intelligence agencies to elicit a report on the disappeared persons, he was put under house arrest by Gen. Musharraf. Given the tumultuous political events of 2007, it
was not until two years later that the Supreme Court held its next hearing on missing persons.

While President Gen. Pervez Musharraf got prize money for handing over high value Al Qaeda militants to the US, the military never really cut ties with the Taliban. Even as Musharraf made a U-turn to align with the US in the “War on Terror,” he encouraged an electoral alliance of Islamic political parties that were banded in the Mutehidda Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), the United Council for Action and the sectarian ASSP to soak up the anger caused by the aftermath of the US bombing in Afghanistan.

It was an old nexus between the military and the Islamic parties banded in the MMA – the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam (F – Fazlur Rehman) and the Jamaat-i-Islami, led by Qazi Hussein Ahmed – which secular politicians cynically dubbed the Mullah Military Alliance. Mindful of the military’s larger goals of keeping the Taliban intact for future use in Afghanistan and Kashmir, Musharraf weeded out foreign Al Qaeda militants, putting bounties on their heads, even as he used the MMA to keep a light hand on the Taliban.

The secular Awami National Party (ANP) chief, Asfandyar Wali Khan – whose party was routed by the MMA in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the October 2002 election, told me that the ISI had openly rigged that election. Under Musharraf, the secular ANP was sidelined in favor of the bearded, turbaned JUI chief, Maulana Fazlur Rehman whose party trained the Taliban in
madressahs
(Islamic schools) for
jihad
in the 1990s.