Picture of secret jailing emerging in Pakistan

Nearly 100 freed, told to keep quiet, but stories coming out

Carlotta Gall

The New York Times (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/12/20/MNB6U1083.DTL)

Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies, apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged, human rights groups and lawyers say.

Those released, they say, are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with the United States' fight against terrorism since 2001.

No official reason has been given for the releases, but as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, the government has decided to jettison some suspects and thereby spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system, its opponents say.

Interviews with lawyers and human rights officials and a review of cases and court records by the New York Times show how scraps of information have accumulated over recent months into a body of evidence of the detention system.

In at least two other instances, detainees were handed over to the United States without any legal extradition proceedings, Pakistani lawyers and human rights groups say. U.S. officials here and in Washington refused to comment on the cases.

"They are releasing them because these cases are being made public," said Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, a lawyer working at the Supreme Court who has taken up many of the cases of the missing. "They want to avoid the publicity."

In addition, human rights groups and lawyers contend, the government has swept up at least 4,000 other Pakistanis, most Baluchi and Sindhi nationalists campaigning for ethnic or regional autonomy who have nothing to do with the U.S. campaign against terrorism.

In total, human rights groups and lawyers describe the disappearances as one of the grimmest aspects of Pervez Musharraf's presidency, and one that shows no sign of slowing.

Under previous governments, "there were one or two cases, but not the systematic disappearances by the intelligence agencies under Musharraf," said Iqbal Haider, secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent nonprofit organization.

The Pakistani government denies detaining people illegally and says that many of the missing are actually in regular jails on criminal charges, while other cases have been fabricated.

The issue of the missing became one of the most contentious between Musharraf and the Supreme Court under its former chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

The releases are particularly galling to lawyers because as one justification for imposing emergency rule on Nov. 3, Musharraf accused the courts of freeing terrorism suspects. That decree was lifted Saturday, but the former chief justice and other judges were dismissed and remain in detention. The Supreme Court hearings on the missing have been halted.

While Musharraf criticized the court as being soft on terrorists, court records show that Chaudhry was less interested in releasing terrorism suspects than in making sure their cases entered the court system.

He said at each hearing that his primary concern was for the families of the missing, who were suffering great anguish not knowing where their loved ones were.

His main aim was to regularize the detention of the missing, not to free them, Siddiqui said. "Not a single person who was convicted was released on the Supreme Court's order," he said.

Detainees have been warned on their release not to speak to anyone about their detention, yet fragments of their experiences have filtered out through relatives and their lawyers. A few even appeared in court and told their stories, and it became increasingly clear that the "disappeared" men had in fact been held in military or intelligence agency cells around the country, often for several years without being charged.

Still, the government denies detaining people illegally or torturing them. Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior and leader of the national crisis management cell that deals with terrorism, said many of the men said to be missing had been found in jails or police cells and had been charged with crimes.

Others, he said, may have gone to the hills or Afghanistan to fight and died there. Still others, he suggested, were fabricated. "Let me assure you that there's a lot of politics going on into the missing persons also," he said.

Critics say that abuses continue. The director of the human rights commission, I.A. Rehman, said the government had set up a nearly invisible detention system. "There are safe houses in Islamabad where people are kept," he said, citing accounts from the police and those who have been freed. "Police have admitted this, flats are taken on rent, property is seized, people are tortured there."

In some cases, detainees recounted that they had been interrogated in the presence of English-speaking foreigners, who human rights officials and lawyers suspect are Americans.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said she could not comment on the allegations and referred all questions to Washington. A spokesman for the CIA, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on Rehman's accusations, or on any specific detainees.

One detainee, a Jordanian named Marwan Ibrahim, who was arrested in a raid in Lahore, where he had been living for 10 years, said he was sent to a detention center in Afghanistan run by Americans, then to Jordan and Israel, and was finally released in Gaza, according to an account Ibrahim gave to Human Rights Watch, another independent group.

Another detainee, Majid Khan, 27, a Pakistani computer engineer who disappeared from Karachi four years ago, surfaced April 15 this year before a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His American lawyers say he was subjected to torture in CIA detention in a secret location. Mansfield, the CIA spokesman, declined to comment, except to say that the "CIA's terrorist interrogation effort has always been small, carefully run, lawful and highly productive."

"Fewer than 100 hardened terrorists have gone through the program since it began in 2002," he said, "and, of those, less than a third required any enhanced interrogation measures."

As more and more such accounts have come to light, Musharraf has fought vigorously to keep the details of Pakistan's secret detentions hidden.

A week into emergency rule, he passed a decree amending the 1952 Army Act to allow civilians to be tried by military tribunals for general offenses. The tribunals are closed to the public and offer no right of appeal.

The amendment was made retroactive to January 2003. Haider of the human rights commission said the amendment was to cover the illegal detentions by the intelligence agencies. "These agencies have gone berserk, and Musharraf is legitimizing their acts," he said.

Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, acknowledged that prosecutors and investigators had had difficulty pinning crimes on detainees. Hundreds of people in Guantanamo have not been charged either, he pointed out. The Army Act amendment would resolve much of the problem, he said.

"Sometimes it becomes difficult to prove a case, but you have reasons that a person poses a threat to humanity and to society," he said.

The intervention of the Supreme Court under Chaudhry was undoubtedly exposing this system of secret detentions.

He first took up the cases of the missing in 2006, demanding that the government trace the detainees and account for them.

His steady requests for information from senior police, Interior Ministry and military officials in court helped to trace nearly 100 detainees. Most of those were subsequently released without charges.

"This was very embarrassing to the government because the people who were supposed to be found and released, they told all their stories," said Rehman, the director of the human rights commission.

Amina Masood Janjua, who has led a campaign to trace the missing, first learned about news of her husband, who disappeared in July 2005, from a written account by another detainee. Later the detainee, Imran Munir, was produced in court and told her he had been held in the military base at Chaklala, in Rawalpindi, and saw her husband in another cell.

Another detainee, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir, was brought before the court and told the judges he had been ordered by the police to give a false account of his detention and charges against him, Janjua said. In fact he had been held secretly for three years without charge. The chief justice ordered him to be freed, and he was released the same day.

But only four or five detainees ever appeared before the Supreme Court. The majority of the 100 detainees released this year have been freed surreptitiously by the police and intelligence agencies, lawyers and human rights officials said.

"They cannot admit that they had these people because they have no charges against them, no documentation," Janjua said.

Thwarting Justice Khwaja Sharif

Justice Khwaja Muhammad Sharif, Poker, Snow-white’s Whirling Rings of Cigarette Smoke – Going Crazy

Omer. G

Justice Khwaja Sharif of the Lahore High Court, one of those judges who refused to take oath under the PCO, was supposed to give a talk at Aiwan e Adal Lahore, at 10 30am today, Tuesday. Lawyers had planned to take him in the form of a procession from his house in S Block DHA to Aiwan e Adal. Students also had token representation to express solidarity with the judges. At around nine in the morning, a friend who was gracious enough to wake up at this early hour (considering the usual owl-like routine in our university) drove me to the place.

Looking around, we found street after street blockaded. In the vast leafy and quit streets of DHA, polices blockades, manned by policemen in riot gear, presented a very depressing sight. The regime’s PR team is doing a pathetic job. They are not giving us any excuse to believe their claim that the emergency has been lifted. With riot police blockading posh neighborhoods, what kind of a fool will believe that things are back to normal. I asked a senior-sounding police officer standing at one of the barricades about where Justice Sharif’s residence was. He pointed to a street. We went in there and then further until we found another blockade, then another. The policeman was a liar. He had standing right at the opening of Justice Sharif’s street while misguiding me. In any case, I asked the policemen at the other barricade about whether they were there to prevent Justice sahib from coming out. They nodded. At least, they weren’t lying this time. I had a brief chat with them. Then, I walked into another street. I greeted a man just walking past me and asked him how he felt about what was being done to his neighbor Justice Sharif. “It’s wrong, of course.” he said angrily, resuming, “How can there be two views about this?” Then, he went away. After that, I waylaid a middle-aged woman engaged in what appeared to be her daily morning walk, and asked her the same question.

Her expression was part vacant, part melancholic, a queer mixture. She answered, after a pause: “It’s your fault; you the younger generation”. She repeated this again and again. I felt as if wanted to agree with her, adding “You too, ma’am” By this time, I ran into a young reporter from ARY. I said salam and told him that I has was there for the same reason as he was. He told me to go to the Caltex petrol pump nearby, where I would found others of my sort.

We drove out to the Caltex petrol station. There was no one there. I tried calling up some lawyers. One of them told me to call later because his plane was just landing in Lahore or Karachi. The other one told me that it was the Lahore Bar President who would know what was to be done now. Nonetheless, by that time, we could see black coats on the other side of the road. My friend had a class to attend, so he left.

More lawyers gathered until there were around fifty. Then, we walked as a rally, passing through a few streets of Defence Housing Authority, chanting slogans like “yeh general, colonel bay ghayret”, we made our way to the first blockade. The lawyers were quick to push the police and, after some resistance, managed to cross the first barbed wire. That moment, I felt very elated. Just yesterday, at a Students’ rally, the police had been much harder to negotiate with. Today, we had pushed them, at least one bit.

The next blockade, however, was harder. We tried very hard but the police refused to budge. Ultimately all we could make them concede was to allow just a few Lawyer leaders and a few media people to go and present the bouquet that the lawyers had brought for Justice Sharif. All this while, the lawyers kept making a lot of noise, and kept pushing and shoving, but weren’t allowed in. Who says the Judges are free to move?

By that time, despite frantic messaging, only four SAC members were there, while six or seven Jamiat Talaba representatives had also joined in. The Jamiat Talaba members were quite noticeable for their aggressive manner of dealing with the police. Ultimately, however, despite the students’ insistence, no student was allowed to go and meet Justice Sharif.

After a while, Justice Sharif’s son came and addressed the gathering from the other side of the blockade. He conveyed the Honorable judge’s message for the lawyers and civil society at large: Assault against the judiciary will be resisted by the deposed judges, even if it demanded the sacrifice of lives. The judges appreciate the support everyone is showing and they plan to hold fast. Justice Sharif’s son agreed to accompany the lawyers to Aiwan e Adal and speak in lieu of his besieged father.

By that time, I too had to leave for a class. I ran back all the way to LUMS. It took just five minutes or so. Back in LUMS, life was going on just as usual. As I passed a bench, crammed by quite a few guys and girls, dressed up in the latest fashionable western wear brands, I could overhear talk of poker. Poker, I thought, deserved a lot of attention. It’s all about poker, isn’t it.

Near the PDC, basking in the sunlight, a tall, slender, snow-white girl with long flowing ash-brown locks was sitting, smoking a cigarette, holding it between her long, thin, white, soft-looking fingers. She could not have been blowing ring with cigarette smoke, but it looked as though she did. Later, she was rolling something silver between her palms, completely absorbed in her task. For a moment, I thought she was rolling a joint, although at second thoughts, I dismissed the suspicion – you couldn’t do it so publicly. On any ordinary day, she would have looked so irresistibly beautiful. But that moment, smoking in that superbly insular frame of mind, she looked sickly.

I looked at her, and the people back at the bench, and all the merry crowd in between them and I thought about Munshi Prim Chand and his short story about Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Lucknow. One day, out of nowhere, British soldiers came in, passed by a few absorbed chess players, arrested the Nawab, dragged him through the streets passing by the chess player again, and went away. A lot of things that Muslim India had been proud of, went away with him, never to return. The chess-players, in their insular frame of mind, they did not so much as notice. Is it all about chess? I thought about this and a lot of other things and then my head began swimming – that moment, everything around me looked very sickly.