Devil’s Seminaries in feudal Pakistan

When six-year-old Abdul Rehman of Multan was rescued from a deeni
madarassa (religious school), he had 27 deep wounds on his body and
was suffering from gangrene.

He said his teacher, Qazi Ajmal, used to take him into his private
chamber in the mosque, strip him and dig his teeth into his naked
body. There are 5,500 deeni madaris in Pakistan. These institutions
are not concerned with imparting a well rounded education to the
children. Instead, they are missionaries in the narrow sense of the
term. "They aim to pass on their corpus of sectarian beliefs and to
raise a new generation hardened and militant in its devotion to those
beliefs", according to the State of Human Rights in 1997 report by the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Several of these institutions were also known to send volunteers to
fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. In one instance, a
13-year-old in Karachi was sent off to Afghanistan within days of his
admission and without any reference and warning to the parents. The
father, surprised at the discovery, petitioned the high court which
issued notices to the principal, the IG police and the federal
ministries of interior and foreign affairs. It took several days for
the institution to trace the whereabouts of the child in Afghanistan
and have him returned.

The treatment inside these seminaries is harsh, even cruel. At many
such schools, the students were kept in chains. Mohammad Azam Dogar,
14, of Madressah Behalvia of Shujaabad became a subject of newspaper
headlines when he escaped from captivity and sought to release himself
of his chains by positioning them under the railway tracks. The train
cut him to pieces. Sajjad Mahmood, who escaped from Jamia Madina
Faiz-i-Alam in Rawalpindi with chains still on his legs and torture
marks all over his body, was spotted by someone and released from the
chains.


The report notes that violence against children was not confined to these schools. Among the other seminaries of the Feudal culture was the Police. Ten-year-old Arshad Kaka, of Shaukat Town, was picked up on an allegation that he had stolen a tractor tyre and tortured for three days in a police station. People of the area demonstrated on the streets against the police. One youth, Mohammad Ali, 18, of Kahna died of police torture. Another sad case was that of Mujahid, 12, of Multan who was actually making his first attempt at stealing. He was trying to unscrew the faucet of a tap because he and his three brothers had not eaten for three days and he was desperate for money. What he got instead was 15 days of kicks, blows and lashes at the hands of the police.