In Pakistan Detainees Are Vanishing in Covert Jails
By TAHA SIDDIQUI and DECLAN WALSH JULY 25, 2015
KOHAT, Pakistan — Niaz Bibi’s son disappeared into the night, whisked
away by Pakistani soldiers who accused him of being a Taliban fighter.
For 18 anguishing months, she could find no word of his fate. Then she got a
phone call.
“Come to Kohat prison,” said the man on the other end. “Tell
nobody.”
At the prison, in northwestern Pakistan, she was directed to a separate,
military-run internment center where her son, Asghar Muhammad, was brought to
her. They touched hands through a metal grill, and she wept as he reassured her
that he would be home soon.
But when the phone rang again, one month later, an official delivered
crushing news. “Your son is dead,” he said. “Come collect his body.”
Mr. Muhammad was
one of dozens of detainees who have died in military detention in Pakistan in
the past year and a half, amid accounts of torture, starvation and
extrajudicial execution from former detainees, relatives and human rights
monitors. The accusations come at a time when the country’s generals, armed
with extensive new legal and judicial powers, have escalated their war against
the Pakistani Taliban by sweeping into their strongholds and
detaining hundreds of people.
Critics warn that those gains may be coming at the cost of human rights,
potentially weakening Pakistan’s fragile democracy and, ultimately, undermining
its counterterrorism effort.
“People live in abject fear of speaking out about what the military is
doing,” said Mustafa Qadri of Amnesty International, which received reports of
more than 100 deaths in military custody in 2014.
At issue is a network of 43 secretive internment centers dotting Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa Province and the tribal belt. Little is known about the centers,
formally established in 2011 and given greater powers by a tough antiterrorism law passed
last year. Most are based in existing jails and military bases and operate far
from public view. The total number of detainees has not been made public.
Relatives of missing people have filed 2,100 cases with the Peshawar
High Court, seeking news of their fates.
In many instances, the first news comes when a body is sent home.
Last year, for instance, a man from the Kurram tribal district told the
court that three of his six sons who were detained in Kohat had died in
custody. The man’s lawyer said he had not brought a criminal complaint against
the military out of fear that his remaining sons would meet a similar fate.
The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, did not respond to a
detailed list of questions about conditions at the internment centers.
Classified documents leaked last year by the former National Security
Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden made clear that American officials were
aware of widespread human rights violations by the Pakistani military, even as
billions of dollars in American military aid kept flowing to Pakistan.
Pakistani military officials tortured and killed people suspected of
being militants “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers,” said
one American assessment in 2011.
“The military took care to make
the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from
natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas,” said the document,
first cited by The Washington
Post.
The Obama administration, which has gradually improved its relationship
with Pakistan this year, has been muted in its public criticism of the
violations and has not invoked a provision of American law that limits
assistance to foreign militaries guilty of human rights abuses.
Instead, the administration approved more weapons for the Pakistani
military: In April, it approved almost $1 billion worth
of helicopters and laser-guided Hellfire missiles for use in counterterrorism
operations.
State Department officials say they have warned the Pakistani military
that the accounts of rights violations could lead to future restrictions on
military assistance.
Until recently, accusations of such abuses by Pakistani soldiers and
intelligence officers have been sharpest in western Baluchistan Province, where
the army has faced accusations of abducting, torturing and killing people
suspected of being Baluch nationalists as part of a decade-old effort to quell
a separatist rebellion there.
The deaths at internment centers have come in conjunction with the
military’s battlefield gains — in the past year, it has seized control of much
of North Waziristan — and a general hardening of public opinion against the
Pakistani Taliban.
Tough new antiterrorism laws have given the army greater legal powers,
and the number of deaths in military custody has declined in recent months
since a military court system, authorized by Parliament in January, became
active. Fayaz Zafar, a journalist in the Swat Valley, counted 48 bodies being
returned to that area in 2014 and five so far this year, the latest on June 2.
Experts say the military-run courts fall far short of international
standards, and their authority is being challenged in Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
But public opposition to the courts has been muted, particularly since a Taliban massacre that
killed 150 people, most of them children, in December. The authorities have
taken harder action against militants on other fronts, too,lifting a moratorium on
executions that has led to 178 convicts being hanged.
The executions have drawn repeated protest from the United Nations and
the European Union but barely a whimper of public complaint.
By several accounts, conditions at the internment camps can be brutal.
One former detainee from Swat said he had been thrashed with barbed wire,
reduced to eating soap because he was fed so little and forced to give false
testimony against other detainees in court.
“I felt guilty, but I knew I would be beaten if I refused,” said the man
who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further trouble.
Relatives of detainees who die in custody say they have been pressured
into conducting hurried funerals, often at night, and sometimes coerced into
declining an autopsy, even if the corpse bears signs of ill treatment. In other
instances, they say, local mullahs are forbidden from offering prayers for the
dead.
Asma Jahangir, a leading human rights lawyer, has brought a Supreme
Court case challenging the detention of 33 men. When brought to court two years
ago, two of the men said they had been tortured. They have since died in
custody. “They supposedly had heart attacks,” Ms. Jahangir said.
In Swat, several women have formed a protest group to seek news of their
missing relatives through street demonstrations and court actions. Their
leader, Jan Saba, said in an interview that she had “knocked on every door” in
search of news of her missing husband, but that she still had heard nothing.
Few dispute that many of the military detainees are linked to the Taliban.
Mr. Muhammad, the detainee who died in Kohat last year, admitted to his family
that he had spent eight months in the company of Taliban fighters before being
arrested, relatives said.
One of his brothers, Abid, said that when the family asked Mr. Muhammad
what he was doing during that time, he replied, “The less you know, the
better.”
Such tales have led civilian officials to turn a blind eye to conditions
at the internment centers. Jamaluddin Shah, the top civilian official in Kohat,
said in an interview that he did not believe the military practiced torture or
conducted executions at the center. But, he added, “even if such cases were
true, why would that be an issue?”
“Have you seen them slaughtering people and distributing those videos?”
Mr. Shah asked, referring to Taliban execution videos. “Do you think they
deserve any human rights?”
But although the army has clearly weakened the Taliban in recent months,
experts warn that reports of abuse could ultimately hurt its counterterrorism
effort, in much the same way that harsh American tactics after 2001 led to
global condemnation and bolstered militant recruitment.
Ms. Jahangir, the lawyer, calls the network of internment centers
“Pakistan’s little Guantánamo Bay.”
“These laws risk turning Pakistan into a security state,” Ms. Jahangir
said. “We cannot afford torture and killings on a mass scale, even in a time of
war.”
Taha Siddiqui reported from Kohat, and Declan Walsh from London. Eric
Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and an employee of The New York
Times contributed from Pakistan.
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