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EDITORIAL: Dismal state of the habeas corpus in Pakistan

No one should stint praise due to the Supreme Court of Pakistan under Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for getting the government to cough up citizens that have simply ‘disappeared’ from the face of this country. There is no novelty in the growing complaint that ‘secret’ government agencies (which are actually not secret at all!) routinely pick up people without acknowledging that they have done so, and the victims are not traceable for months and years, depending on the whim of these investigation agencies. This has been happening in Pakistan for many decades and accounts for the label of ‘soft state’ put on the country. It violates the first principle of governance: the habeas corpus or the duty of the state to publicise that it has brought a citizen under its custody.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had taken note of the list of 41 people who had simply ‘disappeared’ and asked the government to produce them: the government has obliged by releasing 20 of them. The fact that the rest have not been traced indicates the extent of the deterioration in the quality of governance and survivability of the state. It means that despite the ‘facility’ of the ‘remand’ granted to the executive by the courts repeatedly, state functionaries are not content with the overwhelming powers of detention they enjoy. It also indicates the growing tendency to encourage incompetence in state functionaries and permit personal satrapies in the branch-line bureaucracy. For many years, this has been dangerously true of the intelligence agencies.

We are informed that our gallant intelligence agencies have traced (read surrendered) 20 out of 41 people who were reported ‘missing’ by their relatives for the last several months; and 10 of them have ‘reached their homes’. Well done! But the honourable Full Bench that is hearing the case should not let the state agencies off the hook. Everyone who has been picked up and has not been treated in accordance with the law should be set free and be proceeded against, if need be, under direction of the court. The interior ministry’s role has also been depressingly negative. It has acted as if it was innocent in the matter and knows nothing of what is going on. It has in fact given proof of its lack of moral health instead by taking the provincial home secretaries to task and asking them to produce the citizens who are being kept in illegal custody. The Chief Justice has now asked the interior ministry to contact the intelligence agencies (ISI, MI, CID, Special Branch, IB, etc) and get them to release the ‘missing’ citizens.

It is also sad that the representative of the interior ministry tried to get the SC to forget about one person who was reportedly arrested in Azad Kashmir by the military authorities because “the man could have escaped into Afghanistan”. This statement says it all about the tolerance developed by our governments — civilian as well as not so civilian — for the agency practice of picking up dissident elements and ‘disposing’ them of as they deem fit. The SC correctly rebuked him and asked him to do his job instead of advising the court to forget about him.

The hearings in the present case show the general tendency of the executive not to have the ability to prepare effective cases against people accused of contacts with terrorist organisations, including Al Qaeda, and simply keeping them in unknown places of confinement for months and years or deporting them to foreign countries for prosecution and punishment.

The Supreme Court has unearthed a big scandal, a scandal that reveals the abysmal state of professionalism in the intelligence agencies and the police. A number of people released were arrested in connection with the earlier arrest of Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Faraj Al Libbi and Jandullah’s attack on the Karachi corps commander. No proof of guilt or complicity could be unearthed against them but they were nevertheless kept in custody. The first criminal dereliction of duty is the arrest without notification to the judiciary and a formal provision of remand. The second crime is not letting the men go after finding that there is no proof of complicity that will stand up in a court of law. Whoever thinks this method will work against terrorism is wrong.

The Supreme Court must look at the root of the matter of ‘disappearances’ in another context too. There are two aspects of the problem that cannot be ignored after looking at the performance of our institutions over the past decades. The first relates to the training of police officials in charge of investigating crime and the preparation of a case for presentation in court. It is common knowledge that a lawyer of average ability can get a criminal released because the prosecutors cannot effectively defend the case they are presenting. The other relates to the safety of the judges at the mid-level judiciary where a judge may let a terrorist go simply because other terrorists standing outside the court have threatened to kill him. *

SECOND EDITORIAL: Chitral ‘an area of concern’

It is now some months that the press in the West has been pointing to Chitral as one place where Al Qaeda’s top leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri could be hiding. Chitral came into the picture literally when a video cassette issued by Al Qaeda showed bin Laden standing in front of trees found only in Chitral. Then Abu Khabaib, an Arab explosives expert, was reportedly ‘spotted’ several times in the hills of Chitral. The man is known to have helped Sheikh Ahmed Saleem of Al Qaeda, who is said to have given money to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi for recruiting militants for Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Chitral could be a good refuge because of its restricted accessibility from the rest of Pakistan and its easy approach from Afghanistan. Over the years someone in Islamabad has been busy changing the sociology of the Northern Areas and Chitral. Hardline anti-Shia elements of the Deobandi school have been settling there to offset the local Shia presence (35 percent) who have been reluctant to participate in the Afghan jihad against the Northern Alliance. In 2004, the offices of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme were attacked by religious extremists in the Northern Areas in general and Chitral in particular. The latest outrage was committed only last week. Anyone apart from Bin Laden who has the money to bribe the local people can hide there without the government in Islamabad doing anything about it. In fact, the last time the government tried to assert in Waziristan it ended up in capitulating to the locals. *

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