There it is, friends

By Kamran Shafi

SO then, friends, here we are up to our necks in rather hot soup, to use a polite term to describe our predicament. It is a concoction really, neither this nor that, part mulligatawny and part clear beef broth, part potato and leak, part tomato and basil leaf.

Meaning of course that you can make neither head nor tail of the situation, that barring a few needed and very laudatory actions which the government took at the very beginning of its tenure, nothing seems to have changed.You only have to look at the ongoing efforts of super adviser, some say de facto prime minister, Rehman Malik, to get a hang of how things are going. Not a day passes when the man does not put his foot in it — the latest being his loud statement that the most stringent action needs to be taken in Khyber Agency. This, mark, during the efforts of the jirga to bring peace to the area!

A mere two days before this gem, he goes and says that demonstrations and protests in Islamabad will be limited to just one spot which will soon be chosen by the police and notified. How can the government possibly take away a citizen’s right to congregate with his or her fellows at a place of HIS or HER choosing?

Where else in the world are you prohibited from demonstrating where you will? Will this be a new First for the Land of the Pure? Does the present elected government want to surpass dictatorships in enacting this silly rule that even infringes the most basic human right of its citizens: to go where they will, in their own country? Can no one put a halter on the man?

You only had to go to the camp set up by the families of the disappeared at Aabpara Chowk on Friday afternoon to see the same faces of the old and feeble parents; the very same worn faces of the wives; the very same sad faces of the children of the disappeared that one saw at every protest demonstration that one attended.

The very same tears came welling up when you went up to them to say salaam and to assure them that the Almighty would listen to their anguished prayers — one day. “Why don’t they tell me where my son is,” an old lady asked me for the tenth time. “Where is my father,” said a twelve-year-old boy? “Is he alive; is he dead; where he is he?” “Why don’t they tell me?”

What could one do but cry with them the tears of a helplessness that breaks one’s heart; tears of a soul-searing agony? And then, when one’s thoughts went back to the way in which these human beings were sold into captivity, at US$5,000 a pop, what could one do but cry the tears that come from a realisation that there are among us people who simply do not deserve to be called human? (Everybody please read Pervez Musharraf’s In the Line of Fire which describes the ‘SALE’ of these poor things — stand up Humayun Gauhar.)

Much more than the shameless bounty-hunting, 90 per cent of those that were sold by us Pakistanis (shame on us; shame on us!) to the American administration have been deemed to be innocent of all charges of terrorism! In one case, an Afghan farmer handed over his neighbour to the Mother of All Pakistani Agencies just because he had a land dispute with him! The usual $5,000 duly changed hands of course. Shame on you sirs; shame on you.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, was here recently. HRW has done yeoman service in aid of human rights in general and for the ‘disappeared’ as they refer to those who are in extra-legal confinement wherever. HRW is based in New York, and yet its harshest condemnation is for the United States for so cruelly incarcerating so many innocents just because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was such a pleasure to meet this most gentle of persons, but someone with a steely resolve who has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would go to the ends of the earth to point out injustice and cruelty. Wherever there are human rights violations you will find HRW and Kenneth Roth. And of course, people such as the courageous and outspoken Ali Dayan Hasan, HRW’s representative in Pakistan. There are too few like them; would that we had more.

I had Ken Roth on ‘Wide Angle’ on DawnNews a few weeks ago. It was moving in the extreme to hear the stories of the victims of Guantanamo Bay and what HRW was doing for them. He also came down heavily on the Musharraf government for precipitating the judicial and constitutional crises in which we find ourselves mired today.

Which brings me to ask why it is that we are still ‘mired’ where we were a year or more ago. Whilst the American administration and its foolish support to the Commando is basically to blame, why can’t our elected political leaders, basically those of the PPP, not be done with the man and the issues?

They say the Americans have Asif Zardari by the neck because of the ‘deal’, but does he not realise that ‘they’ will get rid of him as soon as it is clear that the PML-N has finally got fed up and has walked away from the coalition? I mean, ‘they’ have already managed to drive a dagger through the heart of the party with the murder of Benazir Bhutto.

Meanwhile, back at the Commando’s ranch, the most incendiary language was used by Karachi’s nazim, Mustafa Kamal, a recent VVVIP visitor to Foggy Bottom and Langley, USA, whilst Musharraf sat on the dais at a recent Karachi gathering.

Not only did Kamal bad-mouth the PPP for being in a coalition with the PML-N, he also told “businessmen” not to take their money out of Pakistan for when they returned “after six months or one year the region and its geography may not be the same” or words to that exact effect.

Musharraf was not moved, choosing only to say, and I kid you not, words to the effect: “I am a commando and know offence”. Now Asif can put whatever connotation he likes on this; I can only advise extreme caution. And immediate action.

And can he please stop grinning? There is nothing to smile about in the Citadel of Islam; not yet anyway.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk