Asia-Pacific, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS: Musharraf Visit Draws Focus on Abuses

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 4 2006 (IPS) - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf’s visit to the United States and Britain has drawn new focus on human rights abuses in the country.

The two leading human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both used the visit to draw new attention to areas and activities about which little was said earlier.

Human Rights Watch reported widespread abuse of rights within Kashmir on the Pakistani side. Amnesty picked on Musharraf’s own claims to point out that Pakistan had ‘sold’ suspects to the United States in the name of the war on terror.

“In Azad (Kashmir, on the Pakistan side) there’s a general state of political repression,” Brad Adams from Human Rights Watch told IPS. “To run for office there, to participate in politics, to be a public figure, you have to sign up to the idea that Azad Kashmir should accede to Pakistan.”

The position is similar on the Indian side, he said. “You pretty much have to sign up to the same proposition in Jammu and Kashmir.”

In Pakistan there is widespread fear of offending the government over this, Adams said. “There is a great deal of torture of people involved in politics in Azad (Kashmir) and a lot of people won’t be involved because of the fears and the demonstration of brute force by the ISI, and by the military and by the police.”

Adams added: “We found people were more afraid to talk to us in Azad Kashmir on these subjects than almost anything else we talked to people about in Pakistan.”

Human Rights Watch produced a report on abuses in Kashmir on the Indian side in a report released in Srinagar, capital of Kashmir on the Indian side, on Sep. 12. The report was critical of both the Indian government and of support that militants enjoy within Pakistan.

“There are militant abuses on the Indian side that are fuelled from the Pakistan side and in the India report we dealt with that,” Adams said. “We made a big point of saying it’s not just the Indian army which engages in political abuses, and that the public is very unhappy with both sides in the Valley.”

The report on Pakistani Kashmir followed the Indian report, he said. “We thought as a matter of principle we need to take a look at what is going on in Azad (Kashmir) because there is a propaganda out there that life in Azad is paradise. The idea is less widely held now, but was widely held and is still fairly broad that if only the two Kashmirs would be united under Pakistan, then things would be well.”

That is not likely, Adams said. “In fact Pakistan runs a police state in Azad Kashmir, and if the two sides under the current political circumstances were unified, it would still be a police state. People would have another set of grievances to deal with.”

Musharraf’s claims while in the United States that Pakistan had earned millions of dollars in bounty money from the United States by handing over wanted suspects to U.S. police and intelligence agencies led Amnesty to look at the human rights side to that story.

“Amnesty has been monitoring human rights violations in Pakistan for decades, and it’s never been a country where we’ve particularly detected the phenomenon of disappearances, of people being removed by the police or by security forces and never again being seen,” Sarah Green from Amnesty International told IPS.

“That means they don’t have access to lawyers or their families, and they might be held in secret detentions. It may not be known how they are being treated.”

Green said that Amnesty believes that hundreds of people in Pakistan may have ‘been disappeared’ in this way.

“These people have first of all been apprehended by the Pakistani police and security agents, and many of them have then been handed over to U.S. intelligence agencies,” she said. “Of the people at Guantanamo Bay we are able to trace, we believe that two-thirds of them were originally apprehended in Pakistan.”

Green added: “The practice of detaining people, of not treating them with due process of law, of not letting them have access to lawyers, handing them over to other intelligence agencies, is a gross violation of basic human rights and is very, very worrying.”

Amnesty made two immediate demands.

“What we are demanding is that President Musharraf publish two things: he must publish a list of all detention centres. No detention centre should be secret. If people are being held by the authorities, then their friends and families should be able to get access to where they are.”

Secondly, she said, “we want the Pakistan government to publish a list of all detainees. We want their names, because we simply cannot have people disappeared like this.”