Dr Afia Siddiqui's Case

To the world


The detention of Dr. Afia Siddiqui and her alleged manhandling in Afghanistan is making news these days. The stereotypical groups in media, the militant-turned-HR-activists and of-course, website hosts(with all the ‘Release Her’ requests) have all suddenly sprung to life after a dormant sleep. After pressure form the media, bewildered US government has moved Dr Afia to the US, to present her before a court. A case has been filed against her, and she is defending herself. Her case and its proceedings, however, are not my subject here, but instead the befuddled question of her past five years which is still in a whirlpool of confusions. The question that now arises is: Five years of her life, her children who are still missing and the assaults on her in the Baghraam jail - can all of this be moved under the carpet to start a fresh inquiry? Can we so conveniently brush so many atrocities aside? Every now and then, while we chant rosy anti-terror slogans and while we drool of how we can convince people about the menace of terrorism, stifling gusts from Baghraam jail, crazy screams from Abu-Gharib’s dungeons and outrageous humiliations from Guantanamo Bay, tell tales about the nasty iceberg of injustice down there. While we talk endlessly of rehabilitation and progress, our opponents easily get fresh recruitments of hordes of militants by conveniently showing photos of these gory places.


True, she may be a leading Al-Qaeda terrorist, a key in the 9/11 attacks and more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden, but does that all give us the right to strip anyone on the road and keep him in the gloomiest slums of the world, and subject him to anything from sexual harassment to physical assaults? Is this war-on-terror or an exercise of capricious castigation of a bunch of people hand-picked at will? Does anyone’s crime give us the authority to subject him to rape, sodomy and all the hideous kinds of crimes humanity has ever known? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then there is a more emphatic, more convincing and more obvious question mark on the correctness of the direction of war-on-terror.

So, sane people from the two disparate worlds - US and Pakistan- need to glean truth from popular rhetoric. While one is in demand of a massive overhaul of everything from Judiciary to Governance, the other needs a dose on giving precedence to fundamental human rights of the people. And while there is no dearth of people asking for her release and her handing over to Pakistan, I maintain my demand that a complete inquiry be made into whereabouts of Prisoner 650. Who was he/she and what was the type/status of torture used against him/her? When was he/she arrested and where was he/she kept during the course of last five years? The actual prisoner 650 may not be Dr. Afia , and he/she may not be an MITian, nor a Muslim, but that does not forgo his/her right to reach the site of a camera, a lawyer and a hospital.


To Pakistanis

Every now and then, screams from the darkest dungeons of Guantanamo Bay form news. Dr Afia was picked up from our midst – no brows raised. Teeny-weeny news items of her handing over to the US were published – nobody flinched. The Chief Justice taking notice of such disappearances was sacked, and we asked questions of how his sacking would affect us! We all saw these atrocities being perpetrated on the expense of state apparatus, and we absolved ourselves by blaming this or that for it. But deep inside, we all know we need this unabashed orgy to continue, so that our wells don’t dry up, our aids are not stopped, and our rupee does not plummet. We all know of this clandestine prostitution, are contributing to it, are happy over it. While I write these lines, hordes of motorcyclists celebrating independence, singing ‘hum zinda qaum hain’ throng the roads and the best I could find for this whore of a nation was:


Tum na ram kay monis na hanuman kay dost
tum na kafir kay sana-khoan na musalman kay dost
tum na kufr kay hami na ilhaad kay dost

tumto sikhon ki lapakti hoi awaazon mein
Apni maaoon ko utha latay hoo bazaroon mein!

-- Mustafa Zaidi