Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  On 29 August 2013, things briefly looked up for Dr Afridi who had been charged with links to the banned terror group Lashkar-i-Islam led by the dreaded Mangal Bagh. An FCR commissioner in Peshawar set aside his trial and the thirty-three-year sentence. It was Samiullah who gave me all the details, thanks to a local journalist who gave me his number. A fresh trial was to begin within a month’s time in the court of a political agent authorized by the FCR. The order came after an appeal against the trial. The assistant political agent of the Bara subdivision, Iqbal Durrani, who had passed the judgment had no authority to try the offence or pass sentence, it was ruled, and it would have to be tried by a political agent in a sessions court who must act as assistant judge. However, Dr Afridi would remain in the Peshawar central jail. While he was arrested in 2011 in connection with the Abbottabad incident, the charges in his case did not refer to that matter; instead, the FCR was invoked which has stringent provisions, including suspension of fundamental rights. Samiullah was clear that this was done to keep Dr Afridi in jail and that it was a false case. He wanted the case tried by a sessions judge. Since British times, the FCR meant for the tribal areas has had a different system where the political agent is a judicial functionary.

  There was to be no respite for Dr Afridi who was slapped with another charge—that of medical negligence, in November 2013. The trial was scheduled to begin in December. It was a case of 2006–07 where he had operated on a boy in a private hospital in Bara, who died. The complaint was filed by the boy’s mother. Before Dr Afridi’s lawyer was killed in 2015, the FCR Commissioner Sahebzada Anees-ur-Rehman—who overturned his sentence—died in a mysterious fire and explosion in Islamabad in October 2013. In December, a three-member tribunal disposed of his review petition demanding a fresh trial by a sessions judge by asking for clarification from the FCR commissioner on whether the trial should be held by a political agent or a sessions judge. He did get some relief from his sentence once again when it was commuted by ten years to twenty-three years in March 2014. The FCR commissioner, Munir Azam, directed the political agent of the Khyber agency to adduce evidence with the help of intelligence agencies and prepare a case against Dr Afridi and file it in an appropriate court. Instead of ruling on the plea for a retrial, Samiullah explained that the commissioner called for framing of charges.

  By then, Samiullah was getting death threats for defending his client. It was not new but this time they had set a deadline for him. When I spoke to him on 10 May 2014, a week before I left Pakistan, Samiullah said some unidentified people had come to his office and threatened him—if he didn’t back off from this case, they would attach a magnetic bomb to his car. He was one of the few who dared to take up the case and the threats were coming from the start, but now he’d had enough and wanted to back off. He said other lawyers would take up the matter.

  The Pakistan government was on the back foot after the foreign office spokesperson made a faux pas in her weekly briefing. On 8 May 2014, Tasneem Aslam, the foreign office spokesperson, in response to questions on travel advisories after the high number of polio cases in Pakistan, said ‘a fake campaign of vaccination was conducted in Pakistan in which the UN agencies were also used. I am referring to Dr Shakil Afridi’s case. This further reinforced the negative perception about the agenda behind the polio eradication campaign. We have been trying to overcome that.’ The WHO immediately took up the matter and issued a clarification that the UN agencies or WHO were not involved in Dr Afridi’s actions.

  After the US proposed to withhold $33 million because of Dr Afridi’s imprisonment, the foreign office in an outraged statement said that Dr Afridi was accused of violating Pakistani laws and that his action had also caused immense damage to the polio campaign in the country. The statement said that his case was sub judice and that he remains entitled to due process under the law. Consequently, any linkage of US assistance to this case was not in keeping with the spirit of cooperation between the two countries. The government also reiterated that there was no possibility of releasing him at the request of the US.

  Dr Afridi’s case looks bleak—the judicial commission on Abbottabad, too, had demanded he be tried as per the law of the country. As a suspected undercover agent for the CIA, many believe he has little chance of justice—an assessment shared by his late lawyer.

  Terror and polio

  There was a time in December 2012 when Pakistan could have been polio free. But that was not to be. It was an outbreak in Syria that was traced to Pakistan in 2013 that drew me to write on the issue of polio. I interviewed WHO’s Dr Elias Durry, the emergency coordinator for polio eradication in Pakistan, for the story. Sitting in his small, well-guarded office, Dr Durry showed me large, colourful maps on the wall with dots to indicate the polio cases. He was an optimist about polio eradication in a country where giving a child immunity can mean death for the vaccinator or the policemen guarding the teams. Unlike in India where women can freely go around from house to house, in Pakistan in some places, it is too dangerous. India has managed to be polio free and has celebrities endorsing the campaign. I didn’t see anything on those lines, though the government spoke with great sincerity and concern about the situation.

  While the anti-polio campaign was launched in 1994, it was not until 2011 that it was taken seriously when Pakistan formulated a National Emergency Action Plan, making district deputy commissioners directly accountable for the polio immunization programme. From ninety-eight cases in 2011, the intensity of the virus was curbed and environmental surveillance of sewage samples which used to show a high incidence of the virus was recording new lows. The last low season was December 2012, and that would have been a good time to intensify efforts, Dr Durry said. The rush of optimism ended with nine vaccinators killed in two days in Peshawar, Karachi and Charsadda, which inevitably disrupted the entire campaign.

  Official sources said that from 2012 to January 2014, thirty-three polio workers had been killed, as also eleven security personnel, while nine were injured in the attacks. The Taliban had issued a warning against polio vaccination and these attacks were believed to take place in areas where they had a base. The number of deaths has gone up by now. Vaccination rounds are held under tight security and in some parts of the country, policemen keep a lookout for terrorists while children are given the doses. The army, too, was roped in to ensure protection for vaccination.

  The attacks on polio teams began on 17 July 2012 in Gadap Town, Karachi, during a polio drive when a doctor attached to the WHO was injured when gunmen opened fire on his vehicle. His driver, too, was hurt. The next day, on the second day of the immunization programme, a polio worker, Ishaq, was shot dead in the same area. In Quetta in October 2012, one worker was killed during a campaign in Alizai Town.

  In four attacks in Karachi in December 2012—three in one day—five persons, including four women—two of them in charge of the area programme—were killed, and two were injured. The polio programme is driven by optimism and bravery. Apart from areas in FATA, Machar Colony in Karachi city is off limits for polio teams and that’s where some of the team members were killed. Except for FATA, all other provinces which had a high rate of polio have virtually eliminated the virus by 50 to 100 per cent. The mobile population of Pakistan is also targeted at permanent transit-point vaccination centres at key places in the country involving 200,000 government lady health workers. The WHO maintains that polio in Pakistan poses a significant risk to neighbouring countries, including the border areas of Afghanistan which are polio free.

  Pakistan, along with Afghanistan, remains the two polio endemic countries in the world, and terrorism has played a major role in that, making areas inaccessible to vaccinators. Shooting security personnel guarding polio teams or the vaccinators themselves is a popular sport for the Taliban, and in January 2016, some fifteen people were killed when a suicide bomber ran towards a van full of guards about to set off with a polio vaccination team. The teams persist despite grave threats to their life. In North and South W
aziristan, the TTP head, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, had banned the entry of polio teams since June 2012. In 2013, as a result, nearly three quarters of a million children under the age of five were not immunized against polio, and the virus is thriving in the frontier areas, as well as Karachi. That year (2013), the polio outbreak reported from Syria was traced to Pakistan after the WHO conducted genetic sequencing.

  Vaccinating children against polio is a supreme act of heroism in Pakistan. The idea that this innocuous activity needs armed security escort sounds ludicrous at first. The Taliban’s retrograde ideology which believes that polio immunization is a Western idea (it is opposed to all ideas that could interchangeably be called Western/American/imperialist, and polio vaccination is, in its scheme of things, similar to women’s education) which must be opposed, has led to thousands of children not being vaccinated and polio spreading to other parts of the world from Pakistan. The arrest of Dr Shakil Afridi, who allegedly took part in an undercover vaccination drive to identify Osama bin Laden, has made matters worse.

  In November 2013, a young special police force member, Zakir Khan Afridi, was shot in Peshawar for protecting a polio team, a few days before his wedding. The teams were often under attack and even the poor gun-toting security guards would fall victim to determined suicide bombers. Sometimes people refused to be part of this activity as death threats were frequently issued to vaccination team members.

  In the capital, 1000 policemen guarded the vaccination drive in November 2013. In fact, the police held a press conference where they were justifiably proud of their role in ensuring that the drive went off smoothly. In probably no other country in the world would one attend a press conference on polio with enthusiastic participation of the police.36

  Before this, the poliovirus from Pakistan had already been found in Egypt (in 2012) as well as in Palestine and Israel (in 2013), according to the WHO. Pakistan was responsible for the international spread in 2011 and the virus from the country caused an outbreak in western China (according to the WHO).37 In January 2014, Peshawar had emerged as the largest reservoir of endemic poliovirus in the world, with more than 90 per cent of the polio cases in the country genetically linked to Peshawar. The explosive poliovirus outbreak in FATA, which left sixty-five children paralysed during 2012–13, owes its origins to Peshawar. As much of the population of the area moves through Peshawar, the city acts as an amplifier of the poliovirus (WHO statement, 2014).

  The WHO declared the international spread of wild poliovirus (WPV) in 2014 a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)’. A WHO advisory made it mandatory for all those travelling from Pakistan to have polio drops and produce a certificate if asked at immigration points. All travellers from Pakistan had to be vaccinated and a certificate produced at the immigration post. I didn’t imagine that at this late age, I would need to be vaccinated again for polio. However, despite all the trouble we took, no one checked either my husband or me when we returned to India, though we did have the required certificates.

  Drone strikes and other wars

  Drone strikes didn’t only kill the likes of Hakimullah Mehsud. There was a grave humanitarian aspect to these attacks and that was the killing of civilians. Reprieve, an international human rights organization which worked with several issues in Pakistan, was in the forefront fighting for the cause of the surviving families. There were cases filed in the Peshawar High Court which passed a landmark order in May 2013. A litigation of which little was expected changed the narrative of the drone strikes. It was in 2009 that lawyer Shahzad Akbar decided to challenge the drone strikes; he was not sure where it would lead. There wasn’t much noise about them till then, though in 2006, a madrasa had been struck, killing eighty-one people.

  Shahzad Akbar, the legal director of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which was up against huge odds, championed the cause of the drone attack victims. Lawyers in FATA told survivors that they could not file a case against the drone strikes since in FATA, the courts did not have jurisdiction, according to the Constitution. Akbar said this was misleading and that the courts in FATA could look at cases if they were concerned with fundamental rights. He filed two public interest litigations in the Peshawar High Court in 2011—one on behalf of Noor Khan whose father was killed and one by the foundation. That year, a jirga, or tribal council, was targeted by a missile from a drone. After the historic verdict in May 2013, Akbar proved his academic exercise had legal standing but was disappointed that the Pakistan government didn’t take it seriously. The Peshawar High Court had ruled that drone strikes were a blatant violation of ‘basic human rights’ and were against the UN Charter and other resolutions, and thus, it is held to be a War Crime, cognizable by the International Court of Justice or the Special Tribunal for War Crimes. Thanks to Akbar’s petition, the political agents in Peshawar were forced to give data which was physically verified. In North Waziristan Agency, 896 civilian deaths had taken place from 2008 to 2012, with 209 seriously injured. Forty-seven others killed were foreigners. In South Waziristan, the toll was 553 dead and 126 injured in seventy strikes.

  In 2010 when Akbar started out, few victims of the drone strikes were coming forward. With some difficulty, he got in touch with Karim Khan whose brother and son had been killed in a drone strike. After Khan, others spoke out as well, and soon it emerged that the drones had killed quite a few civilians. Akbar also decided to involve the US and the CIA in the matter and served a legal notice on behalf of Karim Khan to the CIA station chief in Pakistan, asking why criminal charges should not be brought against him. He found out that under Pakistan law, the CIA station chief can be prosecuted. ‘For the first time we named the CIA station chief and my point was to prove there are no holy cows. We also filed murder charges against the station chief saying he was the one giving orders for the drone strikes,’ Akbar said. The immediate effect was that sixteen more families who were affected contacted him and there was a protest outside the National Assembly. The CIA station chief had to be replaced as his cover had been exposed, and in November 2013, after a drone strike on Hangu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, it was the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf which filed a complaint, naming the CIA station chief in Islamabad and the CIA director. The US embassy frantically tried to get the media not to report their names, even though Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf had made it public in the complaint filed at the Tal police station and in a press release. The Hangu strike was aimed at Haqqani members and one of them who was close to the top Haqqani commander, Sirajuddin, was killed. While filing the story, I had to rely on news reports which I could not confirm. In contrast, Imran Khan called a press conference where he was outraged that students and teachers of the madrasa were killed. There were also reports that this was a base for Afghan militants, but Imran brushed aside all this and maintained that innocent lives had been lost and even if they were from some network, they were killed on Pakistani soil where they had a constitutional right to life. I wondered about all the people killed by the Haqqani Network and if they didn’t have a right to life. He even promised to show photos of the children killed in Hangu and their names and make it public, something which we waited for in vain.

  Till the Peshawar case, no one had been talking about the families of drone strike victims. On 26 October 2013, a week before Hakimullah’s death on 1 November 2013, the Brave New Foundation premiered in the capital Robert Greenwald’s documentary, Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars; this was co-produced by Imran Khan’s first wife, Jemima Khan. The film-maker spoke to the survivors of drone strikes and for the first time the devastation came to light on screen just as the Pakistan government was mobilizing world opinion. The film interviews a drone operator in the form of Brandon Bryant who worked in the air force who says, ‘We kill people and break things.’ And he narrates the trauma of seeing on his computer screen while sitting in the US, the people who have been bombed and maimed.

  After the case was filed, people from the tribal agencies of Waziristan were mobilized and they attended a jirga i
n Islamabad. Though later, Tariq, a teenager who attended it was killed in a drone strike, one of the 300 children who have fallen victim. The film has interviews with friends of Tariq who died while preparing for a soccer match. One of the survivors says no one feels safe in North Waziristan any more. Neil Williams, who worked on the film, said he had met Tariq four days before he was killed. Survivors and others took part in a peace march in Waziristan in September 2012. The campaign brought drone strikes into the political debate and parties like the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf benefited from it by eventually forming a government in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

  While the Peshawar High Court order directed the government to take up the matter seriously before the UNSC and file a proper complaint, no progress has been made so far. Akbar was planning to file a contempt petition since the government had not followed the court’s orders to prepare a case against drone strikes with the UNSC. The court had asked the government to give complete details of the losses to the UN secretary-general and to constitute an independent War Crimes Tribunal which would have the mandate to investigate and decide if this was a war crime. The ministry of foreign affairs was directed to prepare a draft resolution condemning the drone strikes, and the plan was to get the UNSC and the UN General Assembly to pass it.