[Peace-discuss] Obama and torture

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The Obama administration claims to have stopped torture.  There seems to be no 
reason to believe them.  --CGE]


	The Terrifying World of Pakistan’s ‘Disappeared’
	Posted on Mar 19, 2010
	By Robert Fisk
	This article was originally printed in The Independent.

If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet 
Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast 
sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi—a room that somehow accentuates her 
loneliness—scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the 
middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has 
ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country’s cruel oppression. 
Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan’s “disappeared”.

It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not 
where Masood Janjua has gone—Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the 
President—for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of 
Pakistan’s missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or 
from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence 
agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 
“torture houses” just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from 
the basements could be heard by residents—who complained only that the buildings 
might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than 
compassion.

Masood Janjua was 44 when he was “disappeared” on 30 July 2005. He ran an IT 
college and a travel agency, the father of two boys—Mohamed and Ali, and a girl, 
Aisha. He just never came home. Nobody saw what happened. Amina, who was 40 at 
the time, glows when she speaks of him. “We were so extremely close, so happy, 
our world was so heavenly—we were always visiting friends, having parties at 
home. He was so caring and kind to our children, so affectionate. That he should 
be taken from me! I think it was a very big mistake that they did. But when they 
do it—like this—they never say they were wrong.”

“They”. Everyone I talk to here talks about “they”. Many refuse to talk in case 
it provokes “them” to undertake a quick execution. “They” is the Inter-Services 
Intelligence. “They” is military intelligence. “They” are the Americans, some of 
them present—according to the few “disappeared” who have been released—during 
torture sessions. The Defence of Human Rights Pakistan (DHRP), the movement 
which Amina founded with 25 other bereft families, has gathered evidence of 
English-speaking interrogators who calmly ask victims questions during their 
torment. Ironically, Amina lives in a military district of Rawalpindi, beside an 
old British barracks, where US soldiers are observed in Pakistani 
uniforms—sometimes female American soldiers dressed, so she says, in the 
uniforms of Pakistani military paramedics.

Even more ironic was the first word she had of her husband after he disappeared. 
“When I went to the Supreme Court to demand his return, witnesses came forward 
to say they saw Masood inside an army barracks here in Rawalpindi, very close to 
his family. Just think—it was within walking distance from our home! He was 
inside a cell at 111 Brigade barracks. It was so sad for me—it was as if they 
were being cynical, to keep him so close to his family.”

Amina Janjua found that one of the court witnesses lived in Peshawar and she 
travelled to the North West Frontier Province to speak to him five months after 
her husband disappeared. “He had been in the army facility in Rawalpindi. The 
prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only when they were taken to the 
lavatory did they come close to other prisoners. They were forced to wear big 
hoods—hoods that went right down and covered their shoulders—and the detainees 
would get no chance to talk to another human being. This man said my husband was 
there—he even heard the guard call him ‘Janjua’.”

There is evidence that Pakistan’s “disappeared” are moved around, between 
barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in 
different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours—fostered, some say, 
by the security authorities—that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, 
that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open 
countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture 
before the bodies are found. But Amina Janjua believes most of them are alive. 
You might say she has to believe that.

“After 9/11, everyone was worried. People were ruthlessly disappeared after the 
New York attacks. No one knew why their loved ones were taken. The first few 
months were like hell for me. Then I regained my consciousness and said I could 
not accept all this. I said I would fight. I said I would get my husband back.” 
Brave words. Brave lady.

So she turned to the only brave institution still fighting in Pakistan: the 
lawyers and the judges and the courts. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad 
and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around 200 detainees out of the maw of 
the country’s security apparatus—those, that is, who were still in Pakistan. 
Many are known to have been freighted off to the tender mercies of the Americans 
at Bagram in Afghanistan, where Arab detainees have long ago testified to being 
beaten and sodomised with broom sticks. There have been prisoner murders, too, 
in Bagram, the jail that President Barack Obama refuses to close.

“At the beginning, I went to the International Red Cross about Masood,” Amina 
Janjua says. “I saw them over several months. There was no progress. My 
father-in-law went to many people, he even went to President Musharraf—he 
trained in the military with Musharraf and they knew each other very well—and 
Musharraf said, ‘I will do something for you’—but he never did. After that, when 
we called the President’s house, they would start avoiding us. We wrote to all 
the Pakistan intelligence agencies. All said my husband could not be found.”

Many families have been given false hopes. “In some villages way out in the 
country,” Amina recalls, “families were told by the authorities that their sons 
were coming home. These were poor people but they were so happy, so delighted. 
They would hold a party and give out sweets and slaughter valuable animals to 
show their happiness. But then the sons didn’t come home. Can you imagine 
treating people like this?”

Amina Janjua’s fraudulent hope came in a phone call in 2006, a year after 
Masood’s disappearance. “We had our first breakthrough when the military 
secretary of the President called Masood’s father to say that his son was alive 
and that they had heard about him, though he had been ill—in a fever. That was 
our first sign of relief.

“Then he started avoiding us again. There was no message after that. Then we 
were told ‘No, he is not with us, but we are making every effort because the 
President has made this request to help you.’ I went on asking senior people in 
the army what had happened to my husband, and they—I put it like this—they 
started shivering. They would shudder. They could not disclose any information.”

Teaching herself law and fighting her own case, Amina Janjua returned to the 
Supreme Court. “When I did this, I started hearing of many other cases and 
things that are happening. And that’s when I realised. It’s not about ‘missing’ 
people—this is about abduction. I started organising files on these abducted 
people and eventually I had 788 families on my list and I started conducting 
research. And we got about 200 prisoners released. The courts ordered this. They 
were all still in Pakistan. Others, we know, had been taken to Bagram, three or 
four to Guantanamo Bay where at least we knew they were alive.”

But Amina’s research could prove terrifying. She discovered not only that 
abducted men were alive. They were also dead. “I suspected some of them had 
died,” she said. “I know of three prisoners who are dead. One was Mohamed 
Shafiq; he was a coach driver and they released his death certificate—it said he 
died of ‘some illness’. He was in his 40s. One of the prisoners, a businessman 
called Said Menon, died shortly after he was released.

“All of the 200 we got released had been tortured. Initially, it was very 
ruthless—they were not allowed to sleep; there were beatings and thrashings; 
they were hanged upside down. There was loud music. There were actual torture 
rooms where the things were done to them. The prisoners told us they didn’t 
think their torturers were human beings at all. The faces of the torturers, they 
said, were horrifying. It was no longer a real world for them. The torturers 
seemed so powerful, like monsters, so big.”

The questions they were asked were repetitive, according to Amina Janjua. Where 
are the guns? Where are the weapons? Where is Mullah Omar? Two prisoners 
described to Amina’s committee how they were made to wear orange jumpsuits, 
shaven till they were bald and taken for questioning to Islamabad. “They were 
interrogated by foreigners—they could see them. They were English-speaking. They 
didn’t know if they were Americans or British.”

The DHRP now holds public protests in all the cities of Pakistan where the 
prisoners have their homes—in Lahore, Sagoda, Quetta, Faisalabad, Karachi, 
Peshawar—but the families focus on Islamabad where they demonstrate their fury 
and their anguish outside the Supreme Court and the offices of President Asif 
Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The DHRP files show that 
there are 1,700 missing from Baluchistan alone. At least 4,000 appear to be in 
the hands of the Pakistani interior ministry, while 2,000 have been handed over 
to what the DHRP describes as “foreign agencies”—usually, the Americans. Perhaps 
750 of the missing Pakistanis are believed to have been taken by the 
Americans—illegally, of course—to Bagram, the Policharki prison outside Kabul, 
or to Herat in western Afghanistan.

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