Business Recorder Column Oct 23, 2017

Widening circle of disappearances Rashed Rahman As often happens with ill thought through measures, the ruling PML-N is being increasingly hoist by its own petard in terms of the ‘disappearance’ of its activists on the social media. The issue was highlighted by the party chief, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, on October 21, 2017. The matter relates to about six members of the media cell operating under Nawaz’s daughter Maryam Nawaz, who have ostensibly been ‘disappeared’ for posting matter on social media critical of the judiciary and the armed forces. The crackdown on critical or dissenting voices on social media can therefore be seen as continuing, expanding and widening. It may be recalled that five critical bloggers were ‘disappeared’, followed by blasphemous material being posted on their blogs and websites. These days, as everyone by now knows, a mere accusation of blasphemy is a death sentence at the hands of fanatics, let alone actual postings of this sort. The five disappeared bloggers did eventually surface, but had to flee the country for safety. While it is possible to sympathise with the disappeared PML-N activists and their families, it is necessary to remind ourselves that it is the PML-N government itself that rammed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2017 (PECA) through parliament last year. Free speech advocates, human rights activists and opposition figures had warned at the time that PECA seemed designed to usher in more abuse of power by state officials because of its vague and overly broad language and draconian provisions. Those warnings fell on deaf ears. Now the chickens seem to be coming home to roost in this regard for the PML-N. There is an argument that the growing use of the internet for online propaganda by terrorists suggests the need for regulation. But PECA does not appear to fit the bill. This is not the first instance of the PML-N stumbling into territory where its ill thought through steps returned to haunt it. Arguably, allowing the Karachi operation against terrorists and criminals to conflate into a crackdown on the MQM, replete, that party claims, with unlawful detentions and excessive use of force, still haunts us. Then too human rights and free speech defenders warned of the slippery slope of greater curbs on political speech and lawful politics. Now the war against critical voices on social media and the internet has taken within its fold not only mainstream politics but also rights advocates, civil society and independent voices deemed unacceptable to the deep state. Mainstream media, both print and electronic, has by and large, honourable exceptions notwithstanding, surrendered to the establishment’s narrative on national and international affairs. Now with the expanding and widening crackdown on dissident opinion on the social media, the space for free and independent thought and speech appears to have shrunk to a virtual singularity. Now that the ruling party has been stung by the poison of censorship and its ugly cousin disappearances, the alarm bells have been rung by Nawaz Sharif himself. Apart from Maryam Nawaz’s media cell activists who have been disappeared, he has referred to the disappearance of PML-N activists on the eve of the NA-120 by-poll in Lahore, the seat Nawaz had to vacate after being disqualified and which was then won by his wife, Kulsoom Nawaz. Nawaz Sharif asked the interior ministry to look into the issue of such disappearances. Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal duly asked the FIA which, unsurprisingly, drew a blank. And there the matter seems to have ended. These goings on are a familiar pattern. Take the case of the recent ‘recovery’ of Zeenat Shahzadi, a young woman journalist from Lahore. After a two-year disappearance, she is said by the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (CoIoED) to have been recovered from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Two years ago she was abducted by armed men from Lahore on August 19, 2015. Why? For daring to take up the case of an Indian national, Hamid Ansari, who had gone missing in 2012 after being arrested for crossing illegally into Pakistan from Afghanistan. Shahzadi managed to contact his family in Mumbai and filed a habeas corpus petition in the Peshawar High Court and applications to the Supreme Court’s Human Rights Cell and the CoIoED. Soon after, she became a missing person herself. Similar stories have surfaced of late in Sindh. It seems that for the deep state, even attempting to question the practice of Enforced Disappearances (EDs), let alone being active in campaigns to recover the missing persons is a sin or crime deserving of ED being visited on such idealists. These practices began in Balochistan in the context of the nationalist insurgency in that province but have by now spread incrementally to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (more related to terrorism), Sindh (nationalists), southern Punjab and now Takht Lahore itself. It has flourished because of the cloak of impunity in which the agencies of the deep state have wrapped themselves, a cocoon neither the courts nor the CoIoED have been able to unravel. Because of this sense of being beyond being held to account, the perpetrators of EDs have become more brazen. Abductions are now carried out in broad daylight even in the cities. I am witness to one such incident a few years ago when our seminar at the Quetta Press Club was interrupted by the news that two people had been abducted in the clear light of day at the traffic intersection in front of the Club. Journalists, rights activists, social workers and now political cadres even of the mainstream political parties are all potential targets. Several thousand people are still missing all over the country. The CoIoED, set up amidst much fanfare six years ago under the chairmanship of Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal, formerly a Supreme Court judge, has proved toothless, inefficient and with neither the resources, inclination nor power to do more than document a few (in the hundreds) cases of ED. Not one perpetrator has been held to account to date. Now that the good Justice has moved on to the post of Chairman National Accountability Bureau, and with no successor at the CoIoED named so far, perhaps the latter should be given a decent burial. What the disappeared go through during their detention can only be guessed at. In most if not all cases, the ones who make it back without any obvious signs of injury develop a deep and unrelenting silence on their experiences, no doubt for fear of a repetition. What their families go through, especially in cases where there is no news of their loved ones year after year, needs no guesses. The evidence is before our eyes. Shahzadi’s brother, inconsolable at her disappearance, committed suicide in 2016. Mama Qadeer of the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons made a long march from Quetta to Islamabad to dwarf anything Mahatma Gandhi ever undertook during the Independence struggle, and not a leaf stirred. The families of the missing can be found in protest camps outside the Quetta Press Club and similar locations in other cities. A state and society that has sunk to this level of unlawfulness and brazen violation of every conceivable legal, human, citizen right is a state and society asking for trouble. rashed.rahman1@gmail.com rashed-rahman.blogspot.com