Relatives and rights group search for Pakistan's missing 

By Salman Masood
January 14, 2007
The International Herald Tribune
Original Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/14/news/pakistan.php

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan Amina Masood Janjua has been fighting for some word on the fate of her husband since he vanished from a bus station here in July 2005.
In recent months, she and her two teenage sons and 11-year-old daughter have begun a campaign of court petitions, protests and news releases.
More than 30 families of other missing men have joined her, all seeking to locate what they and human rights groups say are hundreds of people who have disappeared into the hands of the country's feared intelligence agencies in the last few years.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group, estimates that 400 citizens have been abducted and been detained across the country since 2001. Amnesty International says many have been swept up in a campaign against people suspected of being extremists and terrorists. But some here also charge that the government is using the pretext of the war on terror to crack down on political opponents.
In addition to some with ties to extremist groups, those missing include critics of the government, nationalists, journalists, scientists, researchers, and social and political workers, the groups say. Janjua says she has compiled a list of 115 missing persons and believes the list could grow as more families gain the courage to come out in the open.
Pakistani officials deny any involvement in extrajudicial detentions or any knowledge of the men's whereabouts.
This week a Supreme Court judge nonetheless ordered the government to speed up the process of finding 41 men listed as missing by Janjua and her supporters after the court took up their cases in an unprecedented decision in October.
At the court hearing Jan. 8, the government acknowledged that it had located 25 of the 41 men listed by Janjua, who are now free, according to Nasir Saeed Sheikh, the deputy attorney general, though it refused to say from where they had been released.
Janjua and others said the men were held in detention centers and safe houses of military intelligence, though most of those freed were reluctant to talk about their experiences. Janjua said that only 18 persons had actually been freed.
Her husband, Masood Ahmed Janjua, 45, an educator and businessman, was not among them. Sheikh told the court that, according to a report by the Interior Ministry, all intelligence agencies had denied detaining Janjua.
I.A. Rahman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said the government was using the cover of a war on terrorism to flout the law. Unstable states like Pakistan are taking full advantage of 'war on terror,' Rahman said. He said the government was using the anti-terror campaign to crack down on its opponents and critics, especially in Baluchistan, where government forces are fighting a nationalist insurrection.
It is correct that many of those arrested or detained were connected with Al Qaeda or extremist organizations, he said. But a number of people have been taken into custody whose only crime seems to be that they are nationalists in Baluchistan or Sindh. In Baluchistan, there is no Al Qaeda activity, he said.
In cases that are brought before a court, he noted, a government denial of detention basically finishes a habeas corpus petition. It was only in the end of 2006 that the Supreme Court said the government must find out where are these people, he said.
While many of those missing persons are alleged to have links to, or involvement in, extremist or terrorist activities, many among them are innocent, the relatives said.
Majid Khan, 26, a computer engineer, disappeared from of Karachi, a southern port city, four years ago and is now in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his wife, Rabiya Majid, said. We don't why he was arrested, she said.
Janjua, too, says she has no clue as to why her husband disappeared. The Janjua family lives in Rawalpindi, in the neighborhood of Westridge, a relatively well-off enclave inhabited mostly by active and retired military officers.
Before his disappearance, Janjua's husband, who holds a bachelor's degree in marine engineering, was working as managing director of a private institute, the College of Information and Technology, here. He was also running a travel agency and involved in charity work, his wife said.
He had no links with any extremist organization, Janjua said, though she acknowledged that he worked off and on with Tablighi Jamaat. The group characterizes itself as a nonpolitical, nonviolent movement that seeks to spread Orthodox Islam by proselytizing, but it has also come under suspicion by the authorities as a potential recruiting ground for extremists.
Since her husband's disappearance, Janjua has taken over his business and his work at the college in addition to leading the drive, with the other families, to find the missing. Together they have formed a group called Defense of Human Rights.
In the last week of December, wives, daughters and sisters of dozens of missing men, led by Janjua, gathered in Rawalpindi, holding up posters and portraits of the missing men and shouting, Give our loved ones back.
But their protest was quickly thwarted by the police. The photographs of the missing men were snatched. The posters were confiscated.
Muhammad, 17, Janjua's eldest son, was beaten and stripped by the police before they whisked him away in a police van. He was freed that evening, but the next morning the image of Muhammad with his baggy trousers pulled down by the police appeared in newspapers across the country. Op-ed columnists and editorials expressed outrage at police brutality and sympathy for the missing people's families surged.
Some of those released, like Muhammad Tariq, 35, have returned home. He is one of the few willing to talk. Tariq acknowledges that he formerly belonged to Jaish-e- Muhammad, a banned extremist group, but says he just gave the group money and was not an active member.
Tariq says he was singled out because in 2003 he briefly played host to a family, introduced to him through a friend, of an Arab man who had been arrested in Quetta.
Tariq, a father of five, stammers while recounting his time in detention.
For two years, I did not see the sky, the sun or the moon, he said.
He said he had been kept in a 1.2-by- 2.1-meter, and 4-by-7-foot, cell, was interrogated by Pakistani military officers and endured all kinds of imaginable torture.
He was released Nov. 27 and pushed from a vehicle at night at an intersection near Islamabad. He said he had never been brought before a court. Din and Tariq said they believed the release was a result of the pressure from Janjua's group and the Supreme Court case.
Janjua said she hoped her husband would return the same way, some day soon. At every doorbell, she said, I think he is back.
Mixed-sex marathon held
The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, officially attended a mixed- sex marathon race on Sunday in the eastern city of Lahore, despite opposition by radical Islamic parties who said the event should be segregated by gender, The Associated Press reported.
More than 30,000 people, including 50 athletes from 15 foreign countries, registered themselves in Lahore to participate in different categories of the Lahore Marathon, said Ghaus Akbar, the event's organizer.
Although some religious elements had opposed the marathon, he said, we have made best possible arrangements to avoid any untoward incident.
The Lahore police chief, Khawaja Khalid Farooq, said the police were guarding the routes of the race.
Two years ago, supporters of the country's Islamic parties had thrown stones at some of the runners, claiming that such events were not allowed by Islam.