One of the many pretexts used by Pakistan to promote terrorism in Kashmir and the rest of India is to go on repeating its allegation of alleged human rights violation by the security forces in Kashmir. And once in a year the Pakistanis create a utopia when they observe what they call ‘Kashmir solidarity day’, which fell on February 5 this year, in the belief that they have moved another millimetre towards annexing Kashmir.

The purpose behind observing this day is to express Pakistan’s solidarity with all the militants, terrorists and separatists trained and aided by Pakistan under its policy of extending ‘moral, diplomatic and political’ support to the tribe of cold-blooded murders. From the dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf, down to his puppet prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, and the Islamabad-approved and -appointed rulers of Pakistan occupied Kashmir all sing in unison their one-note dirge on Kashmir, a theme song for the nation of the ‘pure’. Aziz was at his ‘lyrical’ best, outperforming his lisping master, in saying that the people of Pakistan ‘deeply felt about the travails and sufferings’ of the Kashmiris and called upon India to immediately ‘improve’ the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir.

Each year the strident anti-Indian tone of their speeches on the ‘Kashmir solidarity day’ looks more and more phoney. Musharraf, Aziz and other Pakistanis need to be reminded of the human rights situation in their own country and in the Kashmiri territories they grabbed from India in 1948. These violations have been recorded not by any Indian agency but by their own Human Rights Commission as well Western groups like Human Rights Watch.

It is ironic that almost about the time that the Pakistanis were hurling all manner of allegations against India, their own Human Rights Commission, headed by Asma Jehangir, released its annual report for 2005 which paints a very poor picture of not only the human rights situation in Pakistan. It says the military-controlled state administration is guilty of running the country’s affairs behind a thick veil of ‘secrecy’ and total lack of ‘transparency’ while ‘militarisation’ has spread to every part of Pakistan and the people are kept away from the process of ‘decision-making’.

That the military is all-powerful in Pakistan has been a fact for most of the 60 years the country has been inexistence. How it goes about trampling upon the rights of the ordinary people and has acquired a vice like grip over the country’s economy is illustrated by what happened some time ago in Okra district in West Punjab, a province regarded as Pakistan army’s traditional stronghold. The army wanted to acquire land and when the local farmers refused to give away their land they were tortured and many shot dead.

The human rights commission as well as the annual report (2005) of the Human Rights Watch has been categorical in stating that under Gen Musharraf Pakistan is becoming ‘less, not more, democratic which is undermining human rights, rule of law and social welfare.’ The National Accountability Bureau, an institution created by Gen Musharraf, is used, says Human Rights Watch, along with a host of other anti-corruption laws to jail political opponents or blackmail them into changing their loyalties to the General. While the exile of the leaders of Pakistan’s two principal political parties is well known to the world, many might have forgotten that another prominent political figure of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy in Pakistan, Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, was jailed in April 2004 for 23 years on trumped up sedition charges. His crime: he had read an anti-Musharraf letter before a gathering of journalists.

It is hardly a secret that US journalist Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan when he was hot on the trail of a story that was to establish the link between the establishment and terrorists. Two French journalists following a similar story were, however, slightly lucky. Marc Epstein and Jean-Paul Guilloteau and their Pakistani assistant, Khawar Mehdi Rizvi, were arrested on December 16, 2003 in Karachi when they were working on a story about the close ties between Pakistan government agents and the Taliban. The French were allowed to leave the country after over a month in prison but their local assistant was tortured in custody and sentenced to imprisonment.

The human rights situation in the Northern Areas, part of the Jammu and Kashmir state, the federally administered Waziristan areas and Balochistan has been of particular concern with frequent sectarian clashes in the former and increasing military attacks on the latter territories. Pakistan has converted the occupied Kashmir into its colony and knowing how it has alienated the Kashmiris in that territory, the Pakistanis have now become so ‘flexible’ that they are willing to abandon their long held demand for a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps very soon Pakistan may have to face the demand for a plebiscite in areas like Waziristan and Balochistan. The military operations by Pakistan near the Afghan border—routinely denied by officials in Islamabad—have set the entire region on fire. It has already resulted in ‘massive displacement’ of civilians and scores of deaths, says the Human Rights Watch.

The grim situation in Balochistan and the two Waziristans brought about by the army operations has been in focus for quite some time, more recently from the time a woman doctor was raped by Pakistan army men who, of course, suffered no harm. The victim and her husband were forced to flee to Canada to provide Musharraf an opportunity to run down the women of his country by saying that all they had to do to migrate to Canada was to allege that they had been raped.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report states that Pakistan had launched military operations in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (or FATA, which include the two Waziristans) as early as March 2004 but has refused to apply international humanitarian laws to the conflict. On March 16, 2004 nearly 5000 civilians in a village called Kalusha were encircled. In the subsequent fighting their homes were destroyed, forcing the civilians to flee. On their return they found their belongings and cattle stolen and several homes converted into military check-posts. Such actions are justified by claiming that the army had launched ‘an anti-terrorist’ operation. This gives Islamabad an excuse to impose collective punishments (a colonial legacy), order economic blockade of civilians, demolish houses, resort to arbitrarily detention and arrests, and hound local journalists and political activists.

If the sordid human rights record of Pakistan does not make much news in the West it is because of its utility to the US in its so-called war on terror. According to HRW, the US has not pressed Pakistan to introduce human rights related legal reforms in the country because Washington fears that it may lead to fighting that ‘war’ without Pakistan’s support. The Americans have made it easier for the Pakistani military to justify its acts of brutalities on civilians by raising the bogey of domestic ‘compulsions’ that require the government to appease the hard-line religious groups.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Pakistan has a poor record in ratifying some of the principal international human rights treaties. Islamabad has not signed, for instance, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. But then the Pakistani rulers have never cared about the human rights of people whose destiny they control; they only know how to bray, day and night, about human rights in Kashmir.


Courtesy : Syndicate Features

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