Celebrating 61 Years of Broken Dreams
By Ali Hasan Cemendtaur
CA
Friends of South Asia, a Bay Area peace group, celebrated the 61st independence year of Pakistan and India by holding a movie gala it called the South Asian Human Rights Film Festival. The festival opened with the screening of "Missing in Pakistan ", a 29-minute documentary capturing Pakistan 's gross human rights violations tacitly supported by the US Government. The film was followed by a talk by Safdar Sarki, a Sindhi nationalist who was abducted by Pakistan 's intelligence agencies and was kept in illegal custody for twenty months before being declared detained.
Giving his personal background Sarki said he was a graduate of Sindh University Medical College, and that from the age of seventeen he got involved with the politics of Sindhi national rights movement. He said in his student days he was put in jail by the military regime of Zia Ul Haq, and was tortured.
In 1992 Sarki was elected the general secretary of Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz. Sarki described Jeay Sindh as non-violent "in its core and nature. It believes in non-violent resolution of conflicts. It is very secular because of the ancient Sindhi history and teachings. Its philosophy is based on ‘let and let live.’
“Sindhis are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. They have been living there since thousands of years. I come from that nation. We are peace-loving. We have hate for nobody and we believe all religions are for us. We are anti-fundamentalism.
“In our 5000 years of history we never invaded any country, any nation. We have been invaded, but we never invaded anyone.”
Sarki said that in 1989 there was an assassination attempt on his life “by the underground network of intelligence agencies.” He said he was shot with seven bullets, but he miraculously survived.
After becoming the secretary general of Jeay Sindh, Safdar Sarki started receiving threats, and so party affiliates and friends suggested to Sarki to move to the US .
Sarki came to the US and “started working for human rights through the platform of the World Sindhi Congress, a registered non-profit in the UK and the US . The World Sindhi Congress lobbies against human rights violations in Sindh and Balochistan” and is for “the right of self-determination of Sindh.”
In 2004 Sarki went back to Pakistan and was again elected as Jeay Sindh’s general secretary in 2005.
Sarki described how soon after reaching Pakistan he started getting threats; his family and friends were also intimidated. The warnings came through phone calls, and by personal visits to homes and offices. Sarki was asked to leave Pakistan or else get ready to be killed.
Safdar Sarki’s nightmarish ordeal began on February 24, 2006 when he responded to a knock on the door at his apartment in Karachi. On opening the door he found around twenty-five heavily-armed men. Sarki was asked to put his hands up.
Sarki said he asked the armed men who they were. “They said, ‘We never tell who we are. You will know very soon.’” Sarki asked them to show him the warrant. “They said, ‘We never show anybody any warrant. You are under arrest. Just shut your mouth and come with us.’”
Sarki was put on the floor, handcuffed behind his back, and was blindfolded. Sarki said he could hear them search the apartment and take whatever they wanted to take.
They put a mask on him that suffocated him, he fainted. Sarki’s tormentors gave him some air and brought him back to senses. Sarki said he then got used to the mask.
Sarki was put “in a 3X3 cell where you cannot sit and you cannot lay down. You can feel the walls with your arms.” Sarki was kept in that position for two days until he lost consciousness.
Sarki described how this torture resulted in his feet being swollen and soaked in his own urine. “They started torturing me on my feet. You cannot imagine what pain it creates when your feet are swollen and they hit you with stick on those swollen feet.”
Safdar Sarki was asked why he had come back from the US and what hidden agenda he had. Sarki remembered he told them, “The US is with you guys, the US is your partner. Why don’t you ask the US?” Sarki said he told them if he were working for the US, his interrogators would have come to receive Sarki at the airport.
Sarki believed “they” wanted to make an example of him so that Sindhi and Balochi nationalists who move to other countries would never come back.
Safdar Sarki told his audience that besides waterboarding he was subjected to another form of torture in which the handcuff that tied his wrists behind his back was hooked and then pulled away from his body. He said he could bear the pain only for a few minutes and then lost consciousness.
After a month’s interrogation, Sarki was put in a double-cabin truck and a twenty-four hour journey began. “Teams were changing every 200-300 miles.”
Sarki’s new detention site was in another cantonment area. "That cell was 5X7, dark, no air passage. You cannot tell if it is day or night.” The only time he was taken out of the cell was for defecation.
Sarki said that the interrogation continued for six months. “I was skinny, I was sick.” He thought he might lose his mind because “no one is allowed to talk to you. You are not allowed to talk to anyone.”
Safdar Sarki said his detention reminded him of the Islamic education that describes how angels would come to the grave, “angels will beat you for your sins, and angels will come to feed you.” For Sarki, the dungeon he was kept in was “a living man’s grave. Angels are coming to feed you and angels are coming to beat you.
“I was very angry. They never got anything out of me. And I never asked for any mercy. I preferred to die honorably, with dignity, than to beg for my life. I was on my principles. I had not done anything. Jeay Sindh is not an outlawed or banned party. It is the organization of Sindh, for Sindh’s national rights, its ownership, its resources.
“With that weak body I started a hunger strike till death.” He soon ended up in CMH (Combined Military Hospital). “I was in semi-coma. When I came back to senses I saw the chart where I read ‘CMH Lahore’. I realized I was in Lahore.
“First month in Karachi cantonment, then a year in Lahore, and then they were tired of my hunger strikes. They moved me again. This time it was (a drive of) only 3-4 hours. I could tell it was (again) a military area, because I could hear artillery fires and exercises. The cell was 8X10, but still dark; total incommunicado, same type of lentil soup and dry bread.
“They said, ‘Don’t go on hunger strike again, because your case is in process and you will be leaving very soon.” Sarki said he started eating, but when the detention continued he started his hunger strike again. He became very weak and ended up in CMH Rawalpindi.
Sarki said that after his twenty months’ custody by military intelligence, one day a major came and started taking his measurements. Sarki asked, “Are you going to make my coffin?”
“No, we will get new clothes for you,” came the reply. “But you have to start eating.”
Sarki remembered at that time, “I was unable to walk, unable to stand up, I could only crawl.” Then, the first time in twenty months Sarki was allowed to take proper shower.
Sarki was then put in a bigger cell, with a better sleeping place, and they started giving him better food. They even brought a barber to cut his beard. “I looked in the mirror. I cried for hours, I could not recognize myself. I thought it was my father standing before me but in worse form, a skeleton.
“But I never gave up. I had not done anything wrong. I was on my principles. I was telling then and I am telling now, whatever I was doing before I will do it again.”
After three months of a slightly humane treatment Sarki was again taken on a long journey, for almost forty hours, his face covered with a mask. They told him he was being taken home.
Safar Sarki was brought to Karachi, it was the month of Ramadan. One day they came at 11 pm. Sarki was asked to get ready, “You are now going home.” Sarki was taken in a car that drove for an hour and a half. When the car stopped, Sarki’s mask was removed, and the handcuff was taken off. Sarki said it must have been 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning of October 11. They were on a narrow road in a deserted place. Sarki was asked to come out of the car. He thought they were going to kill him. He told them, “Come on, shoot me, finish this up, hurry.”
Safdar Sarki was told, “We are not going to shoot you. You are leaving in another car and this gentleman will take you home.” Sarki went to the other car which hardly moved a furlong or two when a heavy contingent of police came to surround it.
The police told Sarki he was being arrested. Sarki argued that he had been under arrest for the last twenty months. “They said, ‘No, we just arrested you.’” Sarki asked about the driver of his car. “They said he ran away. And I said, ‘Of course, he ran away from you 40-50 people and I am in your custody.’” A false case was put on Sarki, but the good thing was that after twenty months of "disappearance" Sarki was finally announced to be in the custody of the Pakistani authorities.
This style of initial illegal abduction followed by a “legal” arrest of Safdar Sarki was recently repeated in the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui who “disappeared" in 2003 in Karachi, but was claimed to be arrested in Afghanistan by the FBI in July this year.
The session judge of Hub Court granted bail to Sarki, "but within two hours they transferred the judge, and said that because the judge was transferred we cannot release this man (cannot obey the orders of a transferred judge).”
And then, on November 3 Pervez Musharraf declared emergency. Sarki was transferred to Zhob. “I was thin, skinny, and suffering from different diseases. I had dual side hernia. My shoulder was bad. It was really cold (in Zhob). There, ninety-nine percent of the inmates were Pakhtuns. Many of them did not even speak Urdu.”
Safdar Sarki was kept there in an isolation cell for five months. During this time the session court of Zhob granted him bail. But on the petition of the attorney general, Balochistan’s new chief justice, Yasin Zai, dismissed the order of the session judge.
It was around that time that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. A few months later, elections were held. The new government that came to power released Safdar Sarki, “Akhtar Mengal and nine other political prisoners.”
“The new government has released 300-400 people, but still there are thousands missing; thousands in Balochistan, hundreds missing in Sindh, and thousands missing from other parts of Pakistan .”
Sarki accused the defunct Musharraf government of “camouflage this whole issue under the umbrella of war on terror. The West is pouring in billions of dollars, (and this is) what the Pakistani regime and military is doing (with that money). Safdar Sarki has nothing to do with fundamentalism. All those Sindhi and Balochi nationalist people have nothing to do with fanaticism and fundamentalism. Besides those other guys (pursuing a corrupt form of Islam), they (the Pakistani establishment) started crushing national movements of Sindh and Balochistan. Whoever they did not like was called a terrorist, and vanished.”
No one should doubt that not only that the new civilian government of Pakistan does not control the intelligence agencies of that country, gaining such a control after years of military rule would not be easy. In the West the term “establishment” may refer to a combination of entities, but in Pakistan the only entity that truly makes up the Pakistani establishment is the Pakistan Army. And the Pakistani establishment has its own ideas about Pakistan, the “Pakistani nation”, and the loyalty to the “ideology of Pakistan ”. In that muddled philosophy Pakistan and Islam are intertwined and anyone emphasizing regional identity over the "Pakistani identity" is an enemy of the state. The war on terror not only gave carte blanche to the Pakistani establishment to go after the "Islamic fundamentalists", the reluctantly accepted enemies, it also provided the establishment an opportunity to settle scores with the “enemies of the state”, the original targets.
See online photos at KarachiPhotoBlog.blogspot.com
