Protesters gather outside the Lahore Press Club in the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province on July 12, 2016 to demand justice for victims of sexual violence. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Feb 3 2017 (IPS)

Amid a wave of reforms to tighten the country’s laws on honour killings and sexual assault, on Feb. 2, the Sindh Assembly passed a law making DNA testing in rape cases mandatory in the province.

It follows on the heels of a unanimous vote by Pakistan’s Parliament last October to plug gaps in the criminal justice system and boost the rate of conviction in rape cases.The conviction rate for rape in Pakistan has been less than four percent, prompting protests and legal reforms.

For long, the sole reliance on eyewitnesses and circumstantial evidence has benefitted the accused in rape cases and conviction rates have remained negligible in the country.

The new national law, called The Anti-Rape Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act, also makes DNA evidence admissible, calls for verdicts in rape cases to be announced within three months, and allows filing of appeals within six months.

It also gives approval to holding of in-camera trials and use of technological aids to record testimony of victims and witnesses in order to save victims from humiliation. In the past, many victims and their families would not pursue cases for this very reason.

Another important feature of the law is that it tries to ensure protection of victims’ identity in the media. Those who violate victims’ privacy face jail terms of up to three years and fines. Mass media in the past has been criticised for disclosing names and sometimes even publishing the pictures of rape victims.

Fauzia Viqar, chairperson of the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), told IPS that the law will require police to collect evidence from rape victims in the presence of a female officer.

She added that stringent action has also been recommended in cases of custodial rape by police officers. Furthermore, the past conduct of a rape victim and her acquaintance with the alleged rapist will not imply that the sexual act was done with the former’s consent, as it would often happen in the past.

Cases “mishandled from the very start”

Amina Bibi, an 18-year-old from Pakistan’s Punjab province, was allegedly raped by four men on Jan. 5, 2014. All the accused were granted bail. A desperate Amina set herself on fire outside a police station on Mar. 13 that year and succumbed to her burn injuries the next day.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan took up the case and sought a report from police. The report was presented Apr. 21, 2014, only to be dismissed by the court. The report claimed that Amina had not been raped – something the court was not ready to believe, especially when it could find no other reason for her suicide.

Amina’s case trained the spotlight on the plight of thousands of rape victims in Pakistan who suffer due to flaws in the criminal justice system, socio-cultural inhibitions, the negative attitudes of investigators, police failure to collect evidence and the humiliation of victims in trial courts.

According to the National Police Bureau (NPB) of Pakistan, around 3,000 cases of rape are reported every year – 3,173 cases were reported in 2012 and 3,164 in 2013. The conviction rate, however, is less than four percent, according to a report released by the NGO War Against Rape (WAR).

“One of the foremost reasons for the poor conviction rate is rape cases are mishandled from the very start,” Asad Jamal, a Lahore-based lawyer who has represented several rape victims, told IPS.

He says very few police officials know how to collect scientific evidence in rape cases or record the statements of traumatised rape victims. Citing the example of a case he is fighting right now, Jamal says the police investigator concerned even forgot to preserve the clothes that the victim was wearing at the time of the sexual assault.

In the case of Amina Bibi too, it was found that police had failed to conduct timely forensic and DNA tests. Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif suspended several senior police officers and ordered the arrest of others in connection with the case.

Jamal said sometimes police insist on including the names of fake witnesses to strengthen rape cases but such practices end up benefiting the accused, especially in appellate courts. “Ideally, scientific and DNA evidence should be enough to convict an accused, but unfortunately trial courts depend a lot on eyewitnesses for primary evidence,” he says.

Jamal pointed to another reality – rape victims often belong to disadvantaged sections of society while rapists are mostly powerful people.

He says crime data indicates that girls in the 9-19 age group from lower income families are most vulnerable to rape. “That’s why the number of domestic workers subjected to rape is on the rise,” he said.

Zia Awan, founder of the Madadgar National Helpline for women and children, told IPS, “The number of rape cases reported in Pakistan is only a fraction of the actual number.”

He receives a large number of calls from women who are undecided on whether to report the case or remain silent in order to avoid humiliation and life-long stigma. The impunity of rapists and the ordeal of rape victims deter the latter from seeking justice, he says.

“The shameful attitude of society, police and lawyers towards rape victims is the biggest hurdle in securing justice,” said Faisal Siddiqui, a Karachi-based lawyer.

His own client, a rape victim, had to seek psychological treatment for two years after appearing in court for cross-examination, he says. The defence lawyer, he says, asked her about the minutest details of the assault and made her recall the traumatic incident over and over again.

Unfortunately, he says, many lawyers deliberately confuse rape victims during cross-examination in order to get relief for the accused. “They ask shameful questions which no woman can answer.”

Sources privy to rape investigations reveal that due to socio-cultural mores police usually try to put the blame on complainants and prove that rape victims are women of loose morals. Their perception is that a woman who has really been raped would not dare to report the crime out of shame and fear of public humiliation.

If the victim has had any association with the alleged rapist or has been socially active or has a ‘modern’ lifestyle, police tend to believe that her allegations are fabricated.

In the past, legal provisions in Pakistan also made this possible. Shahid Ghani, a Lahore-based lawyer, cites such a provision: “When a man is prosecuted for rape or an attempt to ravish, it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character.”

He says this provision allowed for looking into a victim’s history to prove that she may not be innocent and may be sexually active.

Speaking to IPS in 2014, top police officials admitted that investigators needed to handle rape cases differently.

Inspector Amjad Naeem, master trainer at the Police Training College, Lahore, said there has to be an element of empathy in rape cases and special care must be shown by investigators in seeking information from victims.

“The victim has to be told not to change clothes, wash herself or go to the washroom before evidence is collected,” he told IPS. “In case it is necessary to go to the washroom, the urine and stool should be collected for later examination.”

Thanks to a project called Gender Responsive Policing (GRP), launched by the German development agency GIZ in collaboration with NBP, many policymakers have begun to believe that more women should join the police force and handle cases of violence against women.

Ali Mazhar, communication manager at GIZ, told IPS that a large number of policewomen have been trained under the programme to understand cases of violence against women.

Under the programme, he says, Ladies Complaint Units (LCUs) are being set up at police stations where women officers attend to women’s complainants in an environment that is free of harassment and fear.

Excerpt:

Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
DUBAI, Sep 21 2016 (IPS)

In the Al Quoz industrial area of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a number of medium and large-sized buses can be spotted transporting workers clad in company uniforms to distant worksites early in the morning. In the evening or, in certain cases, late at night, these workers are brought back to labour camps in the same buses.

At the camps, the migrant workers barely have time to rest before the next workday. They huddle inside small, dingy quarters and the number of occupants may rise up to eight per room. With their belongings stuffed into every corner, they hardly have space to move and are vulnerable to catch infections from each other. Their day starts too early as they have to cook their food to carry to the site and ends late due to long journeys amid frequent traffic jams.“The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in the Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.” -- Khalid Mahmood of the Lahore-based Labour Education Foundation

The workers at a typical camp hail from different countries, so the common practice is to allocate shared rooms according to their nationalities. At a typical labour camp there can be a Pakistani block, Indian block, Nepali block or Bangladeshi block.

Javed Iqbal, 29, lives in one such labour camp. He has come to Dubai from Pakistan through a middleman who sold a work visa to his family for Rs 300,000 (about 3,000 dollars). The family borrowed money from relatives to complete this transaction. Having not attended school beyond grade 4, Javed cannot read and write and couldn’t find a job in his home country. The same lack of education and any proper skill set makes him ineligible for regular recruitment abroad as well.

The only option he had was to come to Dubai on whatever salary he could get and gradually build his fortune there. But things did not work out well and he is stuck in a construction sector job that pays a paltry 240 dollars per month. He says it’s hard for him to cover his personal expenses, let alone send anything back home. Meanwhile, he is under immense pressure from his family to pay back the loan that bought his visa.

A labour camp in Dubai. Workers are allocated sleeping quarters based on nationality, and the number of occupants may be as high as eight per room. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

Javed is not the only one in this situation. There are thousands of Pakistanis like him who are told fairytales about career growth prospects in UAE but once there, nightmares await them. These workers are mostly unskilled and employed in the construction sector, which is not performing well in the oil-rich countries of the Gulf region. With oil prices down in the global market, the government is facing difficulty clearing payments of construction companies.

“I was inspired by the story of a village fellow who went to Dubai as a mason three decades ago. Now he owns two houses and several acres of land in the village,” Muhammad Iqbal, a migrant worker from Gujranwala district, told IPS. Everybody in the village wants to emulate him regardless of the situation that exists in the Gulf region, he adds.

Dependence on remittances

Pakistan relies heavily on remittances to build on its foreign reserves and they constitute around 6.9 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a World Bank report. More than half of the remittances come from two countries – Saudi Arabia and Dubai. There are around 1.3 million Pakistani workers in the UAE and close to 4.3 million in Saudi Arabia.

In the last fiscal year, the country received remittances worth 19.9 billion dollars, but in July they dropped by 20 per cent as compared to the figure of the same month last year. There are speculations that layoffs and non-payment of salaries to migrant workers in this region are the cause of this drop in volume. Some fear there is more to come as a large number of Pakistani workers could face job losses due to the slump in the construction sector where they are mostly employed.

But Ashraf Mehmood Wathra, governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, argues it is a temporary phenomenon and things will improve as these countries are revising their economic policies to offset the impact of the crash in oil prices.

Skills matter

A major problem with Pakistani migrant labour in Gulf region is that it is not diversified and has remained confined to mostly one or two sectors. The Pakistani government has long ignored this aspect and left the shaping of international labour migration trends at the mercy of the private sector. Of late, following the layoffs of around 9,000 Pakistani workers by construction companies in Saudi Arabia, there is a realization that an overwhelming dependence on this sector will not be a safe bet in the future.

Zahid Mahmood, General Manager at Material Lab, a leading material testing company in Dubai, says Pakistani labourers are considered matchless for working in the construction sector. “They can survive in the worst possible working conditions and endure extreme heat,” he told IPS.

He said that Pashtuns from the northwestern part of the country are high in demand for this very reason. But this, he says, has a negative side as well because little has been done to capture share in other sectors. These workers may be employed for as low as 210 dollars per month, although masons, carpenters, fabricators, supervisors, welders and other skilled workers can earn more.

Zahid says there are very few Pakistanis in the services sector, which is dominated by Indians due to their skills and better educational status. There are very few Pakistani security guards or hospitality sector workers despite the existence of a heavy demand for these professions.

The country will have to devise a proper human resource development strategy to stay in the highly competitive and evolving labour market of the Gulf region, he adds. He is also worried about the low wages paid to Pakistani workers and says there should be official efforts to set a minimum benchmark, for example, 300 dollars per month.

Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who recently authored a Migration and Development brief, points out that the Gulf region construction boom funded by oil-based revenue is over and now there is less need for unskilled migrant labour. These economies are also trying to create space to employ their own nationals – something that will further shrink the job market for foreign nationals.

Government initiatives

Though there is a lot to be done, the government of Pakistan has announced certain initiatives that it claims will promote safe and decent employment for its migrant workers. These include production of trained, skilled and certified workforce with enhanced employability.

Irfan Qaisar, chairman of the Technical Education & Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA) of the most populous Punjab province, told IPS that they have a developed a Labour Management Information System (LMIS) that maintains the latest information about local and foreign job markets. He says the focus of this government-run institution is on producing demand-based labour and doing away with the unplanned policies of the past.

TEVTA is training people for the hospitality industry, drivers with the help of national Motorway Police and security guards. “Recently, we have announced training of 50,000 security guards on modern lines and with the support country’s law enforcing authorities,” he said. “I am quite hopeful they will be high in demand in international markets once trained on these lines.”

Way forward

Government efforts notwithstanding, there are calls for active engagement between labour-sending and receiving countries to improve the lives of migrant workers. Expecting desired results without government-to-government level negotiations is asking for too much, especially in monarchies.

Khalid Mahmood, director of the Labour Education Foundation (LEF), a Lahore-based labour rights group, put it this way: “The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.”

Women are responsible for providing water for their families. Many spend hours travelling to the wells and back home every day, carrying heavy clay pots on their heads. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
MITHI, Pakistan, Jan 16 2015 (IPS)

The main entrance to the Civil Hospital in Mithi, headquarters of the Tharparkar district in Pakistan’s southern Sindh Province, is blocked by a couple of men clad in traditional dress and turbans. They are trying to console a woman who is sobbing so heavily she has to gasp for breath.

She lost her two-year-old son just moments ago and these men, both relations of hers, were the ones to carry the child into the hospital where doctors tried – and failed – to save him.

The death toll hit 650 at the close of 2014, but continues to rise in the New Year as scant food stocks wither away and cattle belonging to herding communities perish under the blistering sun.

Among the dead are three-week-old Ramesh; four-month-old twin girls named Resham and Razia; and the yet-unnamed sons of a couple who are inconsolable after the passing of their newborn children.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Seven percent of all young boys are married before the legal age in Pakistan. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Jul 16 2014 (IPS)

At first glance, there is nothing very unusual about Muhammad Asif Umrani. A resident of Rojhan city located in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, he is expectantly awaiting the birth of his first child, barely a year after his wedding day.

A few minutes of conversation, however, reveal a far more complex story: Umrani is just 14 years old, preparing for fatherhood while still a child himself. His ‘wife’, now visibly pregnant, is even younger than he, though she declined to disclose her name and real age.

The young couple sees nothing out of the ordinary about their circumstances; here in the Rajanpur district of Punjab, early marriages are the norm.

Girls in rural areas are often given in marriage in order to settle disputes, or debts. Some are even ‘promised’ to a rival before they are born, making them destined to a life of servitude for their husband’s family. -- Sher Ali, a social activist in Rojhan city
Umrani’s father, a small-scale farmer, tells IPS he is “proud” to have married his son off and “brought home a daughter-in-law to serve the family.”

Similar sentiments echo all around this country of 180 million people where, according to the latest figures released by the Pakistan Demographic Health Survey (2012-2013), 35.2 percent of currently married women between 25 and 49 years of age were wed before they were 18.

According to the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, seven percent of all boys are married before the legal age in Pakistan.

Families like Umrani’s are either blissfully unaware of, or completely indifferent towards, domestic laws governing childhood unions.

Intazar Medhi, a lawyer based in Lahore, tells IPS that the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 – which prohibits girls under the age of 16 and boys under the age of 18 from being legally wed – is one of the least invoked laws in the country.

While the Act is in force in every province, and was recently amended by the government of Sindh to increase the legal marriage age of both boys and girls to 18, it is hardly a deterrent to the deeply embedded cultural practice.

For one thing, violators are fined a maximum of 1,000 rupees (about 10 dollars), what many experts have called a “trifling sum”; and for another, the law doesn’t extend to the many thousands of ‘unofficial’ marriage ceremonies that take place around the country every day.

In a country where 97 percent of the population identifies as Muslim, few nikahs (marriage agreements under Islamic law) are registered with an official state authority.

Scores of married couples live together for years without any documentary evidence of their union, with many families preferring to avoid legal formalities.

It is thus nearly impossible for government officials to estimate just how many such ‘illegal’ unions are taking place, or to dissolve contracts that entail nothing more than the presence of a religious person and witnesses for the bride and groom.

Some advocates like Intezar believe the problem can be rectified by following the example of the Sindh province, whose amendment of the 1929 Act upped its punitive power to include a three-year non-bailable prison term and a 450-d0llar fine for offenders.

He thinks setting 16 as the official marriage age – the same age at which Pakistanis receive their Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs) – will make it easier for law enforcement officials to take action against those responsible for marrying off young children.

The government, he says, must also take steps to ensure timely birth registrations as millions spend lifetimes without any documentary proof of their existence.

Tradition trumps law enforcement

But for Sher Ali, a social activist based in the same city as Umrani’s family, a single law will not suffice to clamp down on a centuries-old practice that serves multiple purposes within traditional Pakistani society.

For instance, he tells IPS, girls in rural areas are often given in marriage in order to settle disputes, or debts. Some are even ‘promised’ to a rival before they are born, making them destined to a life of servitude for their husband’s family.

Various tribes also have different standards for determining an appropriate marriage age. For example, Sher explained, in some regions like the Southern Punjab, a girl is deemed ready for marriage and motherhood the day she can lift a full pitcher of water and carry it on her head.

In a country where the annual per capita income hovers at close to 1,415 dollars and 63 percent of the population lives in rural areas, girls are considered a burden and cash-strapped families try to get rid of them as early as possible.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to ending child marriages is the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), an unofficial parliamentary advisor, which also wields tremendous power to influence public opinion.

When the Sindh government announced its plans to extend the marriage age, CII Chairman Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani denounced the move as an effort to “please the international community [by going] against Islamic teachings and practices.”

Comprised of prominent religious scholars, the Council has repeatedly urged the parliament to refrain from setting a “minimum marriage age”. Though parliament is not legally bound to any suggestions made by the body, many allege that the extent of its political power renders any ‘advice’ a de facto order.

Indeed, repeated assertions by religious groups that puberty sanctions marriage has led to a situation in which girls between eight and 12 years, and boys in the 12-15 age bracket, find themselves husbands and wives, while their peers are still in middle-school.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Malaysia, Dr. Javed Ahmed Ghamidi – who is known as a moderate and had to leave the country after receiving several death threats from extremists – said that since Islam does not specify an exact marriage age, it is up to the government to draft necessary laws to protect the rights of its citizens.

He fully supports the implementation of a law that only allows legal unions between people who are old enough to run a household and bring up children.

“Such laws are not at all in conflict with the teachings of the religion,” he insisted.

Qamar Naseem, programme coordinator of Blue Veins, an organisation working to eliminate child marriages, pointed out that such a law is not only a domestic duty but also an international obligation, since the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution against child, early and forced marriages in 2013.

Supported by over 100 of the world body’s 193 members, the resolution recognises child marriage as a human rights violation and vows to eliminate the practice, in line with the organisation’s post-2015 global development agenda.

Various studies have documented the impact of child marriage on Pakistani society, including young girls’ increased vulnerability to medical conditions like fistula, and a massive exodus from formal education.

Experts say Pakistan has the highest school dropout rate in the world, with 35,000 pupils leaving primary education every single year, largely as a result of early marriages.

Slowly, thanks in large part to the tireless work of activists, the tide is turning, with more people becoming aware of the dangers of early marriages.

But according to Arshad Mahmood, director of advocacy and child rights governance at Save the Children-Pakistan, much more needs to be done.

He told IPS there is an urgent need for training and education of nikah registrars, police officers, members of the judiciary and media personnel at the district level in order to discourage child marriages.

Effective laws must be coupled with the necessary budgetary allocation to allow for implementation and enforcement, he added.

“People will have to be informed that child marriages are the main reason behind high maternal and newborn mortality ratios in Pakistan,” he concluded.

(END)

Amina Bibi, an 18-year-old from Pakistan’s Punjab province, was allegedly raped by four men on Jan. 5 this year. All the accused were granted bail. A desperate Amina set herself on fire outside a police station on Mar. 13 and succumbed to burn injuries the next day.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan took up the case and sought a report from police. The report was presented Apr. 21, only to be dismissed by the court. The report claimed that Amina had not been raped – something the court was not ready to believe, especially when it could find no other reason for her suicide.“One of the foremost reasons for the poor conviction rate is rape cases are mishandled from the very start."

Amina’s case has once again thrown the spotlight on the plight of thousands of rape victims in Pakistan who suffer due to flaws in the criminal justice system, socio-cultural inhibitions, the negative attitudes of investigators, police failure to collect evidence and the humiliation of victims in trial courts.

According to the National Police Bureau (NPB) of Pakistan, around 3,000 cases of rape are reported every year – to be precise 3,173 cases were reported in 2012 and 3,164 in 2013. The conviction rate, however, is less than four percent, according to a report released by the NGO War Against Rape (WAR).

“One of the foremost reasons for the poor conviction rate is rape cases are mishandled from the very start,” Asad Jamal, a Lahore-based lawyer who has represented several rape victims, told IPS.

He says very few police officials know how to collect scientific evidence in rape cases or record the statements of traumatised rape victims. Citing the example of a case he is fighting right now, Jamal says the police investigator concerned even forgot to preserve the clothes that the victim was wearing at the time of the sexual assault.

In the case of Amina Bibi too, it was found that police had failed to conduct timely forensic and DNA tests. Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif suspended several senior police officers and ordered the arrest of others in connection with the case.

Jamal says sometimes police insist on including the names of fake witnesses to strengthen rape cases but such practices end up benefiting the accused, especially in appellate courts. “Ideally, scientific and DNA evidence should be enough to convict an accused, but unfortunately trial courts depend a lot on eyewitnesses for primary evidence,” he says.

Jamal pointed to another reality – rape victims often belong to disadvantaged sections of society while rapists are mostly powerful people.

He says crime data indicates that girls in the 9-19 age group from lower income families are most vulnerable to rape. “That’s why the number of domestic workers subjected to rape is on the rise,” he says.

Zia Awan, founder of the Madadgar National Helpline for women and children, told IPS, “The number of rape cases reported in Pakistan is only a fraction of the actual number.”

He receives a large number of calls from women who are undecided on whether to report the case or remain silent in order to avoid humiliation and life-long stigma. The impunity of rapists and the ordeal of rape victims deter the latter from seeking justice, he says.

“The shameful attitude of society, police and lawyers towards rape victims is the biggest hurdle in securing justice,” says Faisal Siddiqui, a Karachi-based lawyer.

His own client, a rape victim, had to seek psychological treatment for two years after appearing in court for cross-examination, he says. The defence lawyer, he says, asked her about the minutest details of the assault and made her recall the traumatic incident over and over again.

Unfortunately, he says, many lawyers deliberately confuse rape victims during cross-examination in order to get relief for the accused. “They ask shameful questions which no woman can answer.”

Sources privy to rape investigations reveal that due to socio-cultural mores police usually try to put the blame on complainants and prove that rape victims are women of loose morals. Their perception is that a woman who has really been raped would not dare to report the crime out of shame and fear of public humiliation.

If the victim has had any association with the alleged rapist or has been socially active or has a ‘modern’ lifestyle, police tend to believe that her allegations are fabricated.

Legal provisions in Pakistan also make this possible. Shahid Ghani, a Lahore-based lawyer, cites such a provision: “When a man is prosecuted for rape or an attempt to ravish, it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character.”

He says this provision allows for looking into a victim’s history to prove that she may not be innocent and may be sexually active.

Top police officials admit that investigators need to handle rape cases differently.

Inspector Amjad Naeem, master trainer at the Police Training College, Lahore, says there has to be an element of empathy in rape cases and special care must be shown by investigators in seeking information from victims.

“The victim has to be told not to change clothes, wash herself or go to the washroom before evidence is collected,” he told IPS. “In case it is necessary to go to the washroom, the urine and stool should be collected for later examination.”

Thanks to a project called Gender Responsive Policing (GRP), launched by German development agency GIZ in collaboration with NBP, many policymakers have begun to believe that more women should join the police force and handle cases of violence against women.

Ali Mazhar, communication manager at GIZ, told IPS that a large number of policewomen have been trained under the programme to understand cases of violence against women.

Under the programme, he says, Ladies Complaint Units (LCUs) are being set up at police stations where women officers attend to women’s complainants in an environment that is free of harassment and fear.

Pakistani NGOs fear that a new law will restrict civil society freedom. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS.

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Pakistan, Dec 31 2013 (IPS)

A new policy by the Pakistani government to regulate foreign-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has come in for sharp criticism from the social sector, with many saying it could stifle rights-based groups and affect crucial services provided to the needy.

The government says it wants to ensure transparency in the working of NGOs that receive foreign contributions, but few are willing to buy that line.

Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Awami Workers Party (AWP), minces no words. He alleges that whenever the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) comes to power, it tries to control social organisations through coercive measures.“Civil society on the whole supports transparency, but it cannot compromise on its freedom and autonomy.”

The PML-N sees rights-based social organisations as irritants and does not tolerate independent criticism, Tariq says, pointing out that in the past one of its ministers had called NGOs foreign agents.

He condemned the government for trying to establish its hegemony over politics as well as the social sector. “They are trying to imitate the way Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa government controls NGOs,” he alleges.

The new policy will be applicable to national NGOs that receive foreign contributions as well as international NGOs. It calls among other things for prior agreements between the government and these NGOs, disclosure of sources of funding, details of proposed projects, areas of work, and details of the geographic location of the projects.

The policy was approved by the economic coordination committee of the federal cabinet last month and will remain in force till the bill, the Regulation of Foreign Contributions Act 2013, becomes law.

Some see it as a move to check spying activities carried out by foreign agencies in the name of social work, especially in the wake of the Shakil Afridi episode.

A doctor by profession, Afridi was allegedly used by the U.S. intelligence agency CIA to run a fake polio vaccination campaign in Abbottabad in 2011 to track down Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. U.S. forces killed bin Laden the same year.

The allegation that an employee of the global charity, Save the Children, facilitated Afridi’s meeting with the CIA raised suspicion about NGO activities in Pakistan.

PML-N Senator Tariq Azeem, who worked on the draft bill, says there is no ulterior motive behind the regulation of NGOs.

International donors have raised similar concerns, he says. Azeem says USAID has for example asked people to inform it about any corruption complaints regarding its projects.

Imtiaz Alam, secretary general of the NGO South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA), believes the new regulations would significantly increase bureaucratic hurdles for NGOs.

He thinks there should be no need for NGOs to share too many details if they get their accounts audited by firms of international repute. “Civil society on the whole supports transparency, but it cannot compromise on its freedom and autonomy.”

According to a 2001 United Nations Development Programme publication (the last year for which figures were available), the number of registered NGOs in Pakistan was around 16,000. If unregistered NGOs were to be included, the figure could be around 35,000. Most of them are involved in areas like health, education and poverty reduction.

NGOs play a crucial role in Pakistan, where the unemployment rate is 11.2 percent, 60 percent of the population is poor, the maternal mortality rate is 276 per 100,000 live births and more than 350,000 children die before their fifth birthday. Pakistan ranks 180th out of 221 countries in its literacy rate.

NGOs fear that the new policy will affect their supply of funds in the new year.

The draft bill proposes a maximum limit of 20 percent on the use of foreign funds for administrative purposes, confiscation of funds in case of non-compliance, and a five-year ban on receiving foreign contributions for those convicted twice.

Salman Abid, Punjab head of the human rights organisation Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO), fears that the bill once passed can be used to intimidate NGOs.

The proposed law prohibits NGOs from executing projects that harm the sovereignty, integrity and security as well as strategic, scientific and economic interests of the state, he points out. “The question here is who will decide what is against national interest and what is not.”

He thinks the bill should have been introduced after a consultative process that includes all stakeholders, especially NGOs. “Unfortunately they were not consulted.”

Salman Abid believes the state’s concern about spying activities carried out in the garb of development work may be genuine, but says it is not right to rein in the entire social sector under this pretext.

The government should use its security apparatus to identify unwanted personnel instead of making things tough for NGOs, he says.

Many also believe that by asking NGOs to declare the geographic location of their operation, the state wants to keep them out of sensitive areas. Others say there may be a more reasonable explanation for this stipulation.

Abid Suleri, executive director of the think tank Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), says it could help NGOs avoid duplication of effort.

Quite often different NGOs carry out similar work for the same set of people. The government will be able to guide them where they are most needed, he says.

Abid Suleri thinks the government, which is reeling under a funds crunch, may gain from these measures as many international donors may now want to partner with the state directly to avoid cumbersome procedures.

He hopes the government will also look into the accounts of religious organisations and their militant wings that allegedly receive foreign aid.

But he too feels that such a law could be used to curb a vibrant and dynamic civil society.

NGOs, he says, have fought for restoration of democracy and the judiciary, recovery of missing people, and an end to human rights violations by the state machinery, among other things. “What will happen if the government declares all these activities anti-state?”

Had the provincial governments of Pakistan heeded their apex court, the country’s four provinces – Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – would have had local governments in place by now. The Supreme Court of Pakistan had in July this year directed that local government elections be held by Sep. 15.

As things stand now, such elections will be held in 42 of the country’s 43 cantonments, and that too on Nov. 3.

Reluctant both to devolve power or part with development funds, the federal and provincial governments have been holding back. Pushed by the Supreme Court, however, Punjab and Sindh passed legislation last month, but in a much diluted form.

The absence of local administration results in a curious situation for people at the ground level. Take the case of Barkat Ali, a brick kiln worker in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province. The 32-year-old has been trying to switch jobs and his employer for some time now.

He cannot because that requires a Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC). Ali cannot get one because the registration authority has refused to accept the endorsement by a leader in his village Jiya Baggah on the outskirts of Lahore. “Earlier,” Ali tells IPS, “they would honour the attestations of councillors.”“Instead of preparing themselves for any transfer of power in a true sense, the provincial governments concentrated on devising ways to wield influence on local governments once they are in place."

A local councillor or similar official is exactly what people like Ali need to fulfill administrative needs at the grassroots.

Democratically elected governments in Pakistan have always ignored this highly important tier of governance, regarded as the best means of service delivery at the local level. The previous Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government suspended in 2009 the local government system instituted by former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf in 2001, and transferred charge to provincial assemblies.

A federal subject so far, the 18^th amendment to the Pakistan Constitution in 2010 vested the responsibility of holding local government elections with the provincial governments. According to the Article 140A it introduced, “Each province shall, by law, establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments.”

However, no such elections were held in the remaining years of the PPP regime. The Nawaz Sharif government too did not show much enthusiasm after coming to power in May this year. It was left to the Supreme Court, therefore, to push the issue and set Sep. 15 as a deadline for local body polls to be held.

However, “instead of preparing themselves for any transfer of power in a true sense, the provincial governments concentrated on devising ways to wield influence on local governments once they are in place,”  Salman Abid, the Punjab head of the civil society group Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) tells IPS.

Lahore-based lawyer Intazar Mahdi offers a possible explanation. Members of provincial assemblies want to be seen as doing something for their electorate and claim credit for it rather than just make laws, he tells IPS. “Voters here want jobs, development work and patronage from their elected representatives,” he says. “They are not interested in what laws you can make for them.”

Therefore, even as the provincial governments of Sindh and Punjab worked towards finalising a legal framework for local government elections, they drafted it in a manner where they retained ultimate control. The bills they passed on Aug. 19 and Aug. 21 respectively have understandably come in for much criticism.

Under the Punjab Local Government Act, 2013, for instance, the chief minister has the powers to suspend the head of a local government, the provincial government will have a municipal local government working under its direction, and maintenance of law and order will be the responsibility of the administrative officers who, instead of reporting to the head of the local government, will be answerable to the provincial government.

Clauses such as these render the whole exercise meaningless, says Anwar Hussain, executive director of the Local Councils Association of the Punjab. “The real test of the Pakistan Supreme Court starts now,” he tells IPS. It must ensure that local governments get all the powers granted by the Constitution, he adds.

Lahore-based journalist Tanvir Shahzad, who is also a member of a civil society working group on local bodies, cautions against a common practice in party-based local elections which the Sindh local government act has opted for. “Members of the central and provincial governments fear losing their seats in party-based elections and so try to buy the loyalties of candidates who return successful in these polls,” he tells IPS. This has to be strictly discouraged.”

Shahzad is also opposed to the idea of provincial bureaucracies keeping with themselves the powers to post and transfer local government officers. “Even their salaries will be paid from provincial government funds,” he says.

This will compromise the independence of local governments, he feels. “There should be a separate service cadre for local government officials. They must also get more power to collect revenues,” he says.

SPO’s Abid calls for a constitutional cover for local governments so that no government can suspend them for indefinite periods. He also calls for an amendment to the Constitution which provides for a time-frame within which local government elections should be held once the outgoing government has completed its tenure.

Local governments have a crucial role to play at the grassroots level, especially in times of natural disasters. The absence of local governments has harmed disaster response, says Tasdaq Shah, an advisor on disaster risk management for aid organisation PLAN International. “No one else is better equipped or prepared than them to carry out successful rescue operations in emergencies,” he tells IPS.

Shah says he hopes to see local governments in action soon and work with them on local preparedness plans for their respective areas.

The establishment of a local government system is also necessary to fight terror and discourage human rights violation, says Mujtaba Chishti, a former union council member in Lahore. “People have trust in local government representatives as they are residents of the same areas and therefore answerable to them.”

Some voters waited in line for up to eight hours to cast their ballots on May 11. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim, Irfan Ahmed, and Ashfaq Yusufzai
LAHORE, May 13 2013 (IPS)

Flanked by loyalists, friends, journalists and excited family members, former Pakistani premier Mian Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), seemed relaxed on the night of the May 11 general elections.

With a remote control in his hand, he sat back on a soft leather sofa in the heavily guarded executive room of the party’s headquarters in Model Town, Lahore, and scanned TV channels to find the most current results.

Outside, hundreds of raucous PML-N supporters, crowded around giant screens erected for the public, cheered loudly every time a favourable result was announced.

The party and its loyalists had good reason to celebrate. Before the night was over, it was clear that the PML-N had won an overwhelming number of votes in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, which accounts for 148 out of 272 National Assembly seats.

By Monday morning, though several provinces’ votes had yet to be counted, congratulations for the prime minister-in-waiting had already come in from neighbouring India, and from Pakistan’s closest western ally, the United States.

Watershed moment

This past weekend’s elections marked a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history. Accustomed to long periods of military rule, generally imposed via coup d’état, the country has not experienced a proper democratic transition since 1962.

This year, fears were running high that the Taliban would follow through on its May 1 warning that it would bomb all the polling stations to prove its disdain for the “system of infidels, which is called democracy.”

The lead-up to Election Day was marred by violence, with 121 people lying dead by the time campaigning closed 48 hours ahead of voting.

In Karachi, tensions between rival groups like the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket legend Imran Khan, hung thick in the air, with analysts predicting bloody skirmishes at polling stations.

The caretaker government, meanwhile, dispatched over 70,000 troops onto the streets to ensure that peace and order prevailed.

The day began with a bomb blast in eastern Karachi’s Landhi area, killing 11 and injuring over 40. Despite this initial tragedy, it quickly became clear that the mood among the people was not one of violence and terror, but of enthusiasm and camaraderie.

Defying all threats by the Taliban and intimidation by armed political activists, voters came out in droves, determined to cast their ballots.

The Election Commission of Pakistan reported a voter turnout of 62 to 70 percent, the highest ever in this country of over 170 million.

Heartening sights such as a man being carried into a polling booth on a stretcher caused people to “burst out in applause,” tweeted Kamal Siddiqi, editor of the English daily ‘Express Tribune’.

Indeed, many of those out on the streets said they were casting the vote for the very first time. “I had never bothered before; but this time I am completely mobilised,” a woman in her early fifties, waiting patiently in a long queue in a school-turned-polling station in the affluent Clifton area, told IPS.

Not far away, in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority, 48-year old homemaker Tarrannum Lakda was frustrated by the eight-hour wait to cast her vote but she refused to call it a day – she wanted her voice to be counted in this historic election, she told IPS.

Still, the voting process was not without its flaws.

As Lakda stood in the sun, the presiding election officer ventured out to inform the waiting citizens that the ballot papers, boxes, voter lists and stamps had still not arrived.

Similar hold-ups were experienced across the city. Analysts and election observers have blamed the MQM for engineering delays in a bid to deter the PTI’s urban youth base, many of them first-time voters, drawn to Khan’s condemnation of drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt and his vow to end corruption.

Various sources told IPS that pre-poll rigging had begun the night before.

“My mother is a government teacher in a school in Bufferzone (an MQM stronghold) who was appointed to report for election duty,” a youth living in the area told IPS under condition of anonymity. “But on Election Day she was informed not to report for duty as she would be replaced by someone else.”

Other anomalies included MQM members entering the Nazimabad area and confiscating students’ identity cards, or “forcing residents to vote for them”, a local student who did not want to be named told IPS.

Five religious parties – the Jamaat-i-Islami, Sunni Tehrik, Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan, the Sunni Ittehad Council and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (Haqiqi) – pulled out of the race on Saturday, alluding to “irregularities and poll rigging” in Karachi. For its part, the MQM also “boycotted” the polls in a few constituencies, citing the very same reasons.

Across Pakistan, election violence claimed a total of 38 lives, with over 150 injured.

Taliban stronghold takes a turn

While rival parties battled it out in the southern Sindh province, and Sharif and his supporters basked in their glory in the eastern Punjab province, it was the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that really expressed a desire for change.

Devastated by the ongoing militancy and fed up with living under the Taliban’s boot, KP residents turned out in droves, buoyed by the presence of scores of PTI workers on the streets, monitoring the poll stations, encouraging voters to come out of their homes, and generally livening up a process that had promised to be, at best, dull and at worst deadly.

Unlike in previous election years, plenty of women were seen at polling stations in cities like Mardan and Peshawar.

By the end of the day the PTI had bagged 32 out of a total of 124 seats, becoming the largest political party in the province. Many senior politicians like ANP Chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, former KP Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti and former Federal Minister Ameer Madam lost to new candidates fielded by the PTI.

Though the party suffered huge defeats in Pakistan’s three other provinces and at the federal level, PTI activists flooded the streets and held processions in KP’s capital Peshawar to celebrate their victory in the north.

The climate was much less joyful in the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where most people failed to cast votes for the region’s 12 National Assembly seats.

The PTI is now poised to form a provincial government in the violence-wracked northwest with the Jamaat-i-Islam, though Khan has announced his intention to go into opposition at a national level.

According to Al Jazeera English, Khan said Sunday that the mark of a strong democracy is a “strong opposition”, which has been missing in Pakistan for ten years.

Looking ahead

Analysts say Pakistan must now look beyond the elections, and its prime minister-in-waiting must set his eyes on the many challenges that lie ahead, such as tackling terrorism and solving the energy crisis that has crippled the country: according to some estimates, Pakistan faces a shortfall of more than 7,000 megwatts, or 40 percent of total electricity demand.

Salman Abid, a political analyst based in Lahore, told IPS that relations with the United States and Afghanistan in the context of NATO’s withdrawal in 2014, peace talks with the Taliban, relations with India, increasing foreign investment and solving unemployment will be the new government’s priorities.

“The victory in elections may be a milestone,” he said, but the party has a long way to go before reaching its desired destination.

Tanvir Shahzad, a Lahore-based journalist, stressed that the PML-N must not fail to deliver its promises on incorporating youth into the country’s development, reducing poverty and ending load shedding.

*Irfan Ahmed contributed to this report from Lahore, Zofeen Ebrahim from Karachi and Ashfaq Yusufzai from Peshawar.

For 70-year-old Ghulam Fatima, the upcoming general elections on May 11 promise to be unlike any she has witnessed before in Pakistan.

Women’s advocate Shazia Bashir leading a rally in support of women’s right to vote in Paikhel, Pakistan. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

For the first time in her life she will step out of her house on Election Day and join the throng of people heading to the neighbourhood polling station in Paikhel union council, an administrative unit of Mianwali district in the northwest Punjab province, to exercise her right to vote.

Fatima and the roughly 6,000 eligible female voters in this community have been barred from the ballot box for half a century. They were disenfranchised in 1963 when tribal elders and rival castes decided that women must “respect traditional values” of tribes like the Niazi, which dominate this area.

According to Shazia Bashir, a programme specialist at the national advocacy group Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO), local male leaders agreed that the sight of women at polling stations was indecent, and would attract the unwelcome gaze of strangers. They also disliked the idea of women “confronting” or interacting with men at the ballot box, Bashir told IPS.

Tribal elders command a great deal of authority here. A local justice system known as “jirga” acts as a substitute for courts, and few political parties have a presence in the community.

Thus the ban remained in force until Herculean efforts by local activist groups succeeded in bringing stakeholders to the table to finally overturn the archaic law in December 2012.

Struggle to achieve voter literacy

Fatima says her son, who in previous election years had supported wholeheartedly her exclusion from the ballot box, has this year agreed to accompany her to the polling station, since she is completely ignorant of the voting process.

NGOs committed to bringing women into the electoral sphere are conducting practical trainings to develop basic voter literacy, but they face obstacles in the form of deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes.

The SPO’s repeated attempts to set up an adult literacy centre for women in Paikhel have been consistently thwarted since 2009 by locals determined to keep women “in their rightful place.” At most, two or three women would attend classes intended for at least 25 people.

For years, women themselves resisted attempts to reverse the ban, refusing to attend events on voter rights and preventing SPO activists from entering their homes.

Shazia says she even received death threats from some locals who wanted to maintain the status quo, but she stayed her course.

Eventually the campaign turned its attention to the men, spelling out the cost of keeping a huge section of the community out of the electoral process.

Seen by mainstream political parties as an “insignificant” electorate, Mianwali bears all the signs of government neglect, says Muhammad Ziaullah, president of Al Rehman Welfare Development Society.

Only one basic health unit, one dispensary and two secondary schools for boys serve this community of 4,000 households, he told IPS. There are no secondary schools for girls or higher secondary schools for male or female students.

Employment here is restricted to small-scale agricultural production, menial labour and honeybee farming, bringing families an average monthly income of between 30 and 50 dollars.

Children are forced to work to supplement their parents’ income, often employed as assistant mechanics in auto repair shops or helpers in tea kiosks. Inadequate health and education facilities feed this vicious cycle.

In a bid to promote voter participation, activists urged the influential District Steering Committees (DSCs) to revive welfare centres, known as Zakat Committees, capable of doling out funds to the needy.

SPO Regional Head Salman Abid told IPS the ensuing influx of government aid “helped locals to understand the benefits of staying in the political mainstream. They started listening to us seriously.” From there, activists moved to advocating for women’s right vote as crucial to maintaining government support and financial assistance.

By Dec. 12, 2012, tribal chiefs aligned with leading political parties like the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) agreed to lift the ban on women voters, with endorsement coming directly from the descendants of those who imposed it 50 years ago.

Raza-ul-Mustafa, a tribal chief whose grandfather was instrumental in implementing the ban, announced in a meeting held in December last year that his wife would be the first to cast her vote. He is currently contesting elections on the PTI ticket.

To help publicise their efforts, local advocates erected a large board at the main junction in Paikhel, in between the central bus station and rickshaw stand, and asked male members of the community who supported women’s right to vote to sign it.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has promised to set up women-only polling stations at a maximum distance of two kilometres away from the men’s, says Abid. It has been decided that husbands or sons will accompany their female relatives on Saturday.

Zaitoon Bibi, a middle-aged mother of two, told IPS she is “happy to go along with the change”.

“We refrained from voting as our elders decided it was against tradition; this time we will vote, as there is a unanimous decision on it,” she said simply.

But others see this as a monumental development, one that could impact other regions in Pakistan where women’s turnout at the 2008 general election, though not banned outright, was “abysmally low” according to Abid, who cited Punjabi districts like Attock, Chakwal, Sargodha and Jhang as examples of low female participation.

“The Paikhel decision is a historic one and could be an example to be followed,” he said. “If such a strong decision can be made here, why not in other places?”

Indeed, many women’s rights groups around the country have mobilised ahead of May 11 to provide protection to women voters on Election Day. Memories of 2008, when polling stations were torched to prevent women from casting their ballots, are fresh in people’s minds.

Analysts have praised the ECP for publicising the fact that “undue influence” on prospective voters is a punishable offence under the 1976 Representation of the People Act, carrying a one-year jail sentence or a fine.

Kashif Nawab, an election observer with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS that banning women from voting falls under this category.

Nawab’s duties include timely reporting of violations of the code of conduct issued Wednesday by the ECP. He says he witnessed religious groups attempting to convince women to remain home on May 11 during his recent visit to the Attock district in Punjab. After he recorded his observation, the district election commissioner reprimanded the groups involved.

In Paikhel, the SPO has engaged a local task force to observe and report on possible violations, and ensure that women reach polling stations in time to cast their votes.

This past week volunteers visited hundreds of households and conducted “voting exercises” with women to ensure that they understand the procedure.

Encouraging support for women voters has also come from the most unlikely place: the Pakistan Ulema Council, which issued a decree last month calling voting an “Islamic responsibility” and non-voting a sin, including for women.

On Mar. 9, 2013, Muslim mobs torched the Christian neighbourhood known as Joseph Colony in Lahore. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Younas Gill, a self-employed tax accountant, sits on the pavement in Joseph Colony, Lahore, staring at the place where, until about a month ago, his home had stood.

It was burnt to ashes on Mar. 9, when a mob of Muslims tore through this Christian neighbourhood in the Badami Bagh district of Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, torching homes and displacing over 150 families.

Gill and his family now rely on government support and charitable contributions while they struggle to piece their lives back together. On Apr. 22, the Lahore diocese of the Church of Pakistan distributed a fridge, ceiling fans, pedestal fan, a two-burner stove, bicycle and iron to each of the affected families.

“The provincial government helped with the reconstruction of our house and NGOs and relief organisations are constantly supporting the locals since the tragedy occurred,” Gill told IPS.

But the passage of time, and the return of a sense of normalcy, has not replaced the fear that swept through this settlement just over a month ago. Gill says residents “fear reprisal from accused arsonists who have won bail from the courts.”

They are now back on the streets, “some of them with vengeance”, Gill said.

Men like Gill, and his fellow community members, represent the precariousness of life for Pakistan’s 2.8 million Christian residents, a tiny minority in a country of 170 million people, who have borne the brunt of so-called blasphemy laws that prescribe the death penalty for defamation of the Prophet Muhammad and life imprisonment for those who desecrate the Holy Quran.

New clauses introduced between 1980 and 1986 during the reign of former president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq opened the door to broad interpretation of the law: between 1986 and 2013 1,100 cases of blasphemy have been brought to the courts, a significant number of which are against Christians, says Peter Jacob, secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCPJ), formed by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan.

Jacob and other experts say these allegations are often trumped up and fabricated, and used by clerics and other religious leaders to incite mobs to attack Christian communities.

Joseph Colony, a three-acre settlement, was caught in the line of fire of one such blasphemy charge when a resident named Sawan Masi was accused of making “objectionable” remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.

Christian residents from the colony told IPS that the fateful day began with police instructing them to vacate the area for their “security” and not to worry about their properties.  The locals complied – and returned the next day only to find their homes burnt to ashes by a mob of 3,000 Muslims.

As information trickled in, it became clear that the police had been expecting the attack on the colony, yet failed to prevent it.

Just hours after the police chief of Badmi Bagh vowed to bring his police force to heel, and ensure the protection and security of all Pakistan’s citizens, a violent mob attacked the Christian colony of Francis Abad in the northeastern city of Gujranwala.

The incident began when a quarrel between clerics and a Christian youth accused of playing loud music outside a mosque erupted into a full-fledged street brawl between members of the two communities, which the police once again failed to prevent or halt.

Haroon Suleman, a Lahore-based lawyer who often appears in court over blasphemy-related issues, told IPS, “Most of such cases have been filed… to take over prime real estimate that Christian minorities inhabit.”

Many Christians who came to the cities as menial labourers settled on vacant state land decades ago.

As Pakistan’s cities expanded and businesses sprouted around these informal settlements, the land became highly lucrative, selling for millions of dollars per acre and quickly attracting the attention of Pakistan’s notorious urban land mafia. In Joseph Colony, the site of the Mar. 9 attack, an acre of land costs 2.4 million dollars due to its location in the heart of a highly commercialised wholesale steel scrap market.

The first step of land acquisition involves middlemen bargaining with residents for compensation of the entire settlement in order to set up godowns (warehouses).

“When the settlers refuse to accept cash offers and vacate their properties, tactics like (violence and intimidation) are use to get the desired results,” Suleman told IPS.

The political leadership of the country is well aware of the issue, but fear of reprisals from religious extremist groups prompts many to remain silent. None of the major political parties, including the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), have raised the issue in their manifestos ahead of the May 11 parliamentary polls, knowing that those who dared in the past to speak up paid a fatal price.

For instance, former Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by his own security guard Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri in January 2011 for supporting a Christian Pakistani woman, Asia Bibi, sentenced on blasphemy charges.

Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian leader and then-federal minister for minorities, was killed the same year for his vocal opposition to the misuse of blasphemy laws.

With elections approaching in just a few weeks, the Christian community is calling attention to their total lack of representation in parliament, with some leading minority parties calling for a boycott of the 2013 polls.

The national assembly has 10 reserved seats for minorities, among 272 elected members. Under the current system, Christians and other minorities vote for Muslim candidates from various political parties and the reserved minority seats are then awarded to those parties in proportion to the seats they have won. The parties, in turn, award that seat to their “loyalist”.

Dr. Nazir S. Bhatti, founder of the Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC), told IPS his party is against this practice, saying his constituency wants to elect their own representatives on a one-person one-vote basis.

On Monday, Apr. 15, Bhatti submitted a letter to the election commissioner of Pakistan, urging the official to ensure the safety of minorities – Christians, Hindus and Ahmedis – who choose to stay away from the voting stations.

(END)

A worker at a factory in Lahore surrounded by piles of sportswear: the garments are in high demand in Europe, where they are sold for exorbitant prices. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-seven-year-old Muhammad Arif works at a steel re-rolling mill in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s northeastern Punjab province, producing steel ingots from scrap.

He holds no letter of appointment, does not know the name of his employer, receives his weekly wages in cash from a contractor and toils daily before a furnace burning at 800-1,000 degrees Celsius without any safety equipment.

Heat and steam from the furnace often cause him severe burns, but there is no first-aid kit to be found anywhere in this factory, which employs roughly 200 workers.

Medical leave is a luxury he will likely never experience, and if he stays away from work – for whatever reason – he risks pay cuts, or even dismissal.

Arif is totally oblivious to his rights as a worker – in fact, he has no concept of labour laws at all, let alone that he is protected under them, even though Pakistan boasts over 70 pieces of legislation specifically relating to workers’ safety.

The sole breadwinner of a family of five, Arif assures IPS, “I am content. It’s better than being jobless – a state I have experienced for years.”

Widespread exploitation

Arif’s plight is quite common in this South Asian country of 150 million people: experts tell IPS that trade union activity is discouraged at all levels and across industries, leading to a widespread denial of workers’ rights.

The problem is particularly severe in the industrial sector, which produces textiles and garments, leather goods, sports equipment and sportswear, surgical instruments and cutlery for export.

To meet a growing foreign demand, cities like Lahore, Karachi, Faisalabad and Sialkot have been transformed into industrial hubs, sprouting factories that have drawn a workforce that typically earns between four and six dollars a day.

But even while export earnings increase, the country’s administrative machinery has been apathetic about working conditions in these factories, says Khalid Mahmood, director of the Labour Education Foundation (LEF) of Pakistan. He says this lack of concern over workers’ safety has dire, sometimes fatal, consequences.

Having visited Ali Enterprises – the apparel factory in Pakistan’s capital, Karachi, that went up in flames last September, killing 300 workers – he says he cannot fathom how the plant was awarded the prestigious SA8000 certification by Social Accountability International, a New York-based monitoring body tasked with assessing safety standards, just weeks before one of the worst recorded industrial disasters.

Reportedly caused by short-circuiting, the fire tore quickly through the factory, trapping workers behind locked doors.

Though the factory owners blamed the heavy death toll on the chaos that followed the blaze, experts say a lack of basic safety standards – like an absence of exit passages or adequate in-house emergency firefighting capabilities – was the primary factor behind the tragedy.

A good five months down the road, families of several victims are waiting to gain custody of their deceased loved ones: burnt beyond recognition, the bodies have not yet been identified, despite repeated DNA tests.

Accidents waiting to happen

The incident garnered considerable media attention but, as Khalid tells IPS, thousands of factories operating all over the country in similarly hazardous conditions represent equally devastating accidents waiting to happen.

He says officials of provincial labour departments, district governments and even international monitors hand out safety bills without conducting proper inspections.

Increasing production costs push factory owners to compromise on workers’ health and safety in order to remain competitive.

“Local and imported raw material such as iron and steel scrap, synthetic fibre, silk yarn, chemicals and petroleum products are becoming expensive. The Pakistan rupee is (falling) against the dollar, loan markups are burdensome, energy costs are increasing and technological upgrades are too demanding,” Khalid says. “Labour rights are compromised to offset all these burgeoning costs.”

Over the last few months, local and international entities have called on the government to implement better, more effective laws to safeguard labour rights but Dr. Sultan Pasha, acting director at the Lahore-based Centre for Improvement of Working Conditions and Environment (CIWCE) does not believe that a lack of legislation is the problem.

He tells IPS that Pakistan has no less than 70 different laws regulating standards on cleanliness, disposal of wastes and effluents, ventilation and temperature, dust and fumes, artificial humidification, overcrowding, precautions in case of fires, work on or near machinery in motion and employment of young persons to work dangerous machines.

But the laws are splintered and divided into specific areas, from the Dock Labourers Act to the Factories Act, making their implementation and enforcement a challenge, especially for bodies like CIWCE, part of the labour and human resources department of Punjab’s provincial government.

According to Pasha, factory inspections were discontinued in 2003 on the pretext of protecting the industry from “harassment” by government officials. This left regulatory obligations in the hands of the factory owners themselves, most of whom will sacrifice rights and safe working conditions for profits.

Ghulam Fatima, secretary general of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF) of Pakistan, tells IPS workers are seldom registered with the social security department, are underage and lack any access to first-aid, while working unusually long hours on outdated and dangerous machinery.

She claims “factory owners bribe labour department officers and do not bother to ensure safety standards”.

According to Pasha, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recently began consultations with the government of the Sindh province to devise a comprehensive strategy for the future.

“Though there is lot more to be done, we are content that a draft law on workers’ health and safety is ready. We hope it will shortly be taken up by the parliament and passed through the required legislative process,” he adds.

International cooperation

Though many are skeptical about the possibility of change, others believe the answer lies in holding consumers of products manufactured here accountable.

Currently, the European Union (EU) is Pakistan’s largest trading partner: trade between the two countries topped eight million euros in 2011, with Pakistan enjoying a billion-euro surplus.

Trade concessions announced in the aftermath of the floods that ravaged Pakistan in 2010 and 2011 offer even more opportunities for favourable trade relations and pass some of the burden for ensuring labour standards onto European consumers.

The work of the German Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) in the aftermath of the Karachi fire is an example of successful consumer lobbying.

When news emerged that jeans carrying the label of the German company KIK had been found in the smouldering remnants of the Ali Enterprises factory, CCC exerted enourmous pressure on the corporation, eventually forcing it to cough up compensation worth a million dollars to families of the victims in Pakistan.

“It was the company’s fault not to ensure that the workers of the factory from which it imports (garments) work in safe and hygienic environments,” said Symantha Maher, head of the CCC delegation that visited Pakistan last month.

She charged that the Italian company that carried out an audit of KIK seemed “more interested” in collecting inspection fees than ensuring workers’ safety.

Maher also revealed that the CCC plans to coordinate regularly with trade unions in Pakistan and exert pressure on the Pakistani government by educating prospective importers on the working conditions in Pakistani factories.

“If the government wants to avail (itself) of preferential trade concessions and even retain its export markets, it will have to (comply) with international (and) national labour laws,” she says.

Pakistan has so far ratified 36 ILO conventions but implementation remains weak.

(END)

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Pakistan, Jan 4 2013 (IPS)

The European Union (EU) is Pakistan’s largest trading partner, with overall trade between the two countries topping eight million euros in 2011.

Pakistan enjoyed a one billion-euro surplus that year and stands to gain even more from the EU’s generous trade concessions, announced in the aftermath of the devastating floods that ravaged this South Asian country in 2010 and 2011.

Still, in order to fully benefit from these concessions, Pakistan will have to enforce stricter labour standards and comply with the terms and conditions of several international conventions on human rights, governance and environmental safety to which it is a signatory.

Currently, most workers in Pakistan’s export sector do not receive social security benefits, work in hazardous conditions and are paid on a piece-by-piece basis in lieu of a regular salary.

These hands that enable trade to the EU often go home empty, feeding into a cycle of poverty that continues to consume this country of 176 million people.

Over four million brick kiln workers in Pakistan are bonded labourers, tied by debt to their employers. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Oct 3 2012 (IPS)

One does not always need a time machine to travel into the past – a visit to a typical brick kiln in Pakistan’s Punjab province is enough to evoke a time when human beings were traded like animals and slavery was rampant.

Overburdened by loans, generation after generation of workers, totaling about 4.5 million spread across 18,000 kilns around the country, toil for nothing more than the promise of freedom.

Ata Muhammad (28) and his wife work for 18 hours a day at a kiln in the outskirts of Lahore, where they are paid 450 rupees (roughly 4.8 dollars) per 1,000 bricks, irrespective of how long it takes to complete the task.

According to estimates from the labour department, it takes a standard family of five, including children, a whole day to make 1000 bricks.

A study by the Centre for the Improvement of Working Conditions and Environment found that “a family of two adults and three children can make 500-1200 bricks a day depending on their skill (level) and physical health.”

The tasks include fetching mud from two or three kilometres away, soaking it in water, molding it into bricks, transporting the finished product to the kiln and finally baking and grading each brick.

In case of inclement weather or illness the workers earn nothing and are forced deeper into debt, begging for loans from their employers who are happy to extend the line of credit, which acts as a noose around the necks of many workers. Once indebted, workers cannot leave until they pay off their outstanding loans.

The loans, known as an ‘advance’, or ‘peshgi’ in Urdu, are the root of all kiln workers’ woes, according to Ghulam Fatima, secretary general of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF), a rights group working to end bonded labour in Pakistan.

Children of kiln workers are born into bonded labour, working long hours alongside their parents. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

She says the kiln owners extend loans for occasions such as marriage, births and deaths, in an effort to tie the workers more tightly into servitude.

“This action is totally illegal, as ruled by the Supreme Court of Pakistan (in 1988). Under the law a kiln owner can only release an advance equal to or less than two weeks’ wages,” she told IPS.

For every 400-rupee payment that Ata is entitled to, the kiln owner deducts 150 rupees (about 1.6 dollars) to settle a loan he claims he granted Ata’s father, though Ata has no memory of this.

Fatima says this is totally unjust, as the minimum wage set by the government is 665.7 rupees (or seven dollars) per 1,000 bricks.

She added that numerous kilns pay a wage as low as 300 rupees (three dollars).

“If the government ensures payment of minimum wages to kiln workers and recovery of dues from owners, who have been paying less than the legal minimum, most of the workers will be able to clear their debts.”

As unregistered labourers, kiln workers are also denied social security cover. Since their employers do not set aside part of their wages for emergencies, they have no safety net upon which to fall in times of financial distress.

If a contribution were made to a social security fund on their behalf, it would signal an end to the system of ‘advances’, according to Mehmood Butt, general secretary of the All Pakistan Bhatta Mazdoor (kiln workers) Union.

“If you get a marriage grant at the time of your daughter’s marriage, free medical care for you and your family at social security hospitals and even a death grant, why would you opt for exploitative loans?” he asked.

Butt told IPS that families of kiln workers carry price tags equivalent to their outstanding loans. By paying this amount, owners can effectively ‘purchase’ workers from one another.

If a worker runs away from a kiln, he is traced with the help of police and local politicians and all the money spent during this exercise is then added to his or her outstanding debt, according to Butt.

A lack of identification documents adds another restriction to kiln workers’ mobility. Khalid Mehmood, president of the Labour Education Foundation (LEF), pointed out that the Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) – the right of every Pakistani – is the prerogative of but a few kiln workers.

“Once you have a CNIC, you can apply for social security registration, get enrolled on voting lists, benefit from welfare schemes, open bank accounts or apply for jobs. Kiln owners cannot afford all this,” he said.

Mehmood told IPS that the National Database Registration Authority (NADRA) set up mobile camps near some kilns close to Lahore earlier this year, with the intent of issuing CNICs to bonded labourers. But armed gangsters hired by kiln owners prevented all but a few from actually reaching the mobile centres.

Shaukat Nizai, media spokesperson for the Punjab labour department, believes bonded labour cannot be eradicated without empowering the workers through education.

This, he says, will enable them to live and find sustenance away from the remote kilns where they were born and where many expect to die.

Without alternative skills and knowledge, he told IPS, kiln workers and their families are doomed to a lifetime of toiling in the heat, never breaking the metaphorical chains of their bondage.

Shaukat told IPS that a project called the Elimination of Bonded Labour in Kilns (EBLIK), launched in 2009 in the district of Kasur in Lahore, has worked with the ministry of labour to establish 200 schools to educate 8,000 kiln workers’ children.

“It was not easy. It took us a long time to convince the kiln owners that this would help them as well.”

He added that the government has also started issuing soft loans to kiln workers to eliminate the advance payment system.

The government is also in talks with kiln owners regarding registration of workers with the social security department. Additionally, it has set up a helpline and a complaint cell, both of which assist workers in demanding minimum wage and other rights granted to them under the law.

(END)

Hudiara drain winds through thick foliage of shrubs and trees, in the border village of Burki. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
LAHORE, Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

At a time when spiraling input costs and perennial shortages of irrigation water are breaking countless farmers’ backs, a small village community on the outskirts of Lahore appears to have been spared.

The village of Hudiara, situated close to the Wagah border, falls in the way of a natural storm water channel called the Hudiara Drain, which originates in Batala in India’s Gurdaspur District and flows for nearly 55 kilometres before entering Pakistan.

The farmers here say the drain ensures them of year-round irrigation. What they won’t tell you – either because they don’t know it, or refuse to believe it – is that the water is poisoned.

Hundreds of factories located along the length of the canal dispose of their untreated industrial waste into it. This includes discharge from textile processing and dyeing units, carpet industries, tanneries, dairy plants, food, beverage and oil processing plants and ghee production units.

Municipal wastes are added along the way and the water that finally flows out of farmers’ pumps and into their fields is a toxic cocktail of pollutants.

Farmers and the local municipality are now locked in a fierce battle – with farmers ignoring countless warnings and taboos on the use of the water to irrigate farmland.

“The water is free, its supply regular and its ingredients strong enough to replace fertilisers. Only a fool will reject this deal,” Amanat Ali, a vegetable farmer who distributes his produce to the large population in Lahore, told IPS.

He is not worried about the toxic impact of heavy metals in this water.

“Flowing water can never be harmful; it’s the stagnant water that’s bad,” he said confidently when asked about the effects of the water on his agricultural produce and its consumers.

Impact of poisoned water

It is unsurprising that farmers are reluctant to heed official warnings. Less rainfall and the never-ending construction of roads and housing projects are exhausting ground water supplies, according to Dr. Muhammad Yaseen, associate professor of soil fertility and plant nutrition at the University of Agriculture in Faisalabad.

Yaseen, co-author of a report on heavy metals and their uptake by vegetables in adjoining areas of Hudiara, told IPS very little has been done at the government level to improve the situation in the village.

His team declared the drain water suitable for irrigation only during the monsoon, when rainwater dilutes the effluents to safe levels.

Though the report was released in 2009, farmers continue to use the water for irrigation all year round.

Citing the report, Yaseen told IPS that crops irrigated using poisonous water contained metals in higher than desired concentrations. For example, zinc concentration in ghia tori (a type of gourd) was 10 times higher than safe levels.

Brinjals and spinach samples from the village contained iron in higher concentration than the stated guidelines. Nickel content in all the crops except for brinjals were higher than prescribed levels. Cadmium concentration in almost all the plants exceeded the safe limit.

According to the report, food crops quickly absorb cadmium, which is one of the reasons why vegetables grown in Hudiara are oversized.

Naseem-ur-Rehman Shah, director of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of the Punjab Environment Protection Department (EPD) told IPS the irrigation department is about to start a process of lining Hudiara Drain to stop seepage of toxic water into the ground.

He said this process was of the utmost importance since locals are in the habit of drilling for subsurface drinking water, leading to the spread of waterborne diseases such as hepatitis and diarhhoea.

Environmentalist Ahmed Rafay Alam told IPS that according to the findings of another study, the drain contains extremely low levels of oxygen and cannot support any form of aquatic life.

Citing an investigative study conducted by the World Wildlife Fund in Pakistan nearly a decade ago, MUAWIN, a community organisation in Lahore, reported that, “the rate of abdominal pains, paralysis of limbs, joint pains and prevalence of arsenic toxicity and eye infection was greater in the respondents of a village along Hudiara Drain.”

Cattle take a dip in Hudiara Drain. At times, they drink the polluted water. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS

“Domestic animals like cows and buffaloes are also seen wallowing and watering in the wastewater drains thus increasing the risk of water pollutants, mainly heavy metals, (entering) our food chain through the consumption of milk and meat of these animals.”

More than ten years later, experts are agreed that the situation today is much worse.

Furthermore, environmentalists fear that the drain, which eventually empties into the River Ravi after travelling 63 kilometres through Pakistani territory, will also poison the river with toxic elements.

Rafay, who is currently vice president of the Pakistan Environmental Law Association (PELA), says industries situated along the canal should take concrete steps towards reducing pollution rather than push the burden onto the farmers.

“All these sectors need different technologies to treat their effluents and must install plants immediately,” he stressed.

Water at any cost

Though the practice has been going on for years, the government has only made a few half-hearted attempts to change farmers’ behaviour before eventually surrendering to powerful industrialists.

Former Punjab chief minister Pervez Elahi ordered the closure of over 100 water pumps installed along Hudiara Drain in an effort to save crops and livestock but the initiative did not succeed.

“There was immense pressure from locals who feared loss of livelihood if this happened,” Raza Butt, an elected member of the local government of Lahore, told IPS.

Despite numerous studies showing that vegetables produced here contain metals in concentrations higher than prescribed levels, farmers have not heeded the warnings, he said.

Shah told IPS that the EPD has instructed all 130 industrial units along the drain to install water treatment plants without delay, which would make the water suitable for irrigation.

So far only 22 of these operations have complied, and even these were largely due to pressure from importers of their goods.

“The problem is that most (owners of industrial units) cannot afford to install these plants individually,” said Shah.

Still, he says, the burden of cleaning the environment lies with the polluter. Now, with the landmark introduction of Green Benches in Pakistan’s high courts, polluters will be forced to take environmental concerns more seriously.

Shah suggests that more industries follow the example of the 307 tanneries in Sialkot, who got together to buy a large chunk of land on which they set up a combined treatment plant.

The government provided the collective with a soft loan worth 300 million rupees (roughly 3.2 million dollars).

(END)

As International Labour Day approaches, rights groups in Pakistan are redoubling their efforts to win freedom for six incarcerated union leaders in Faisalabad, the country’s textile hub, who are currently serving a combined jail term of 590 years for supposedly violating the country’s ‘anti-terror’ laws.

Union leaders now in jail. Credit: Irfan Ahmed/IPS.

The representatives of power loom workers – namely Akbar Ali Kamboh, Babar Shafiq Randhawa, Fazal Elahi, Rana Riaz, Muhammad Aslam Malik and Asghar Ansari – were charged with attacking a factory, injuring its owners and burning it down on Jul. 20, 2010, charges that all six individuals have denied.

Still, police were forced to add clauses from anti-terror laws to the report and the court ruled based on evidence and witnesses made available by the complainants, and now the labour activists are languishing behind bars.

The Lahore High Court (LHC) accepted an appeal against their conviction but so far no hearing date has been announced.

To keep the issue in the public eye, the Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP) organised a lecture at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on Apr. 16 to present the details of the case to a larger audience.

Meanwhile, the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM), the party to which the jailed leaders belong, is gearing up for a massive rally in Faisalabad on May 1 to demand that the case be repealed.

In actual fact, the six unionists were not terrorists but leaders of the LQM-sponsored strike involving roughly 100,000 power loom workers who were demanding a 17 percent wage hike, says Farooq Tariq, spokesman for the LPP.

He claims only a godown of the said factory was purposely burnt (some allege by the factory owners themselves) to teach the striking workers a lesson.

Still, it was the workers who were arrested, supposedly for indiscriminate firing to create fear, destroying public property and kidnapping people for ransom, all acts punishable under anti-terrorism laws in Pakistan.

“The message was clear: if this can happen with LQM leaders, anyone daring to assume this role in future must be ready for similar treatment,” Tariq said.

He laments the fact that dictators, the ruling elite, feudal lords and a host of other actors are manipulating the country’s anti-terror laws with impunity to silence voices of dissent, target groups demanding their rights and punish rivals in politics.

Thousands of lawyers were arrested for terrorism charges during former president Pervez Musharraf’s regime for participating in the movement for restoration of the judiciary, Tariq said, adding, “I myself was booked under terrorism charges four times just for organising protests. Today, I stand cleared in all of them.”

Families of the jailed leaders are in distress and LPP is raising 5,000 rupees (about 55 dollars) per month for each family’s sustenance.

No labour rights

The power looms sector in Faisalabad city, also known as the Manchester of Pakistan, is the backbone of the country’s economy, which is overwhelmingly dependent on the textiles sector.

Of the estimated 300,000 power looms, 200,000 are based here and set up mostly in the form of small units in houses.

Workers operating these units are paid per ‘pick’, a unit of measurement for the cloth produced, rather than a fixed wage, explained Anis-ul-Haq, spokesman for the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA).

He said the situation worsens when there is no electricity to power the looms for 14-16 hours each day, meaning zero income for the workers.

This sector cannot afford to make alternative arrangements, like captive power plants and generators, for the simple reason that a typical power loom owner has as many as four to eight power looms at his disposal.

The prolonged electricity load-shedding and inflation has a lot to do with protests organised by workers, claims Rana Tahir, Faisalabad president of LQM. He condemned the labour leaders’ harsh sentence, saying power loom owners and political leaders prepared this ploy to weaken LQM, which had supported an LPP candidate in by-elections for a provincial assembly seat in April 2010.

Tahir challenged the contents of the First Information Report (FIR) registered against the six leaders and clarified that, in fact, guards at the factory shot at protesters first.

The demonstrators’ subsequent reaction caused a bullet to hit a nearby motorbike, sparking “a fire that spread and burnt the cloth lying in the godown.”

Tahir also told IPS that it took police three days to add anti-terror clauses to the complaint, while the factory allegedly burnt by the accused took almost the same time to start fully functioning again. “Doesn’t this show things are doubtful?” he asked.

Akram Ghauri, chairman of the All Pakistan Cotton Power Looms Association, is not convinced by this version of events and has no sympathy for the jailed labour leaders.

“What they did to the factory and its owners is worth condemnation,” he said, calling the leaders blackmailers who effectively held power loom owners and workers hostage by refusing to agree to any proposals.

Ghauri says LQM even threatened workers willing to work on weekends for wages 50 percent higher than those offered during weekdays.

“Now we are in peace, and hold talks with the genuine labour body – the Workers Union of Faisalabad – whenever required.”

Despite his reaction, the registration of a case against the unionists under anti-terrorism law is a phenomenon backed by little public support.

Zulfiqar Shah, joint director of the Pakistan Institute for Labour Education and Research (PILER) believes commercial and industrial disputes should be decided in appropriate fora.

He believes there were certain circumstances that led to the clash between Faisalabad workers and the factory owners and the strike was not a premeditated move.

Now, the same anti-terror laws are being invoked in the case of protesting power loom workers in the port city of Karachi. Shah told IPS the only difference is that these workers have been booked under extortion charges.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) Director I A Rehman has also condemned the misuse of anti-terror laws against labourers and the administration of such a severe punishment.

Even hardened criminals involved in heinous crimes have never been awarded such severe punishments, he said, and urges the state to give people their constitutional right under Article 17 of the Constitution of Pakistan, which promises, “Every citizen shall have the right to form associations or unions subject to any reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of Pakistan, public order or morality.”

A knock on her front door throws Beenish, a 28-year-old housewife from Lahore, into a fix: should she allow the female volunteer vaccinators to administer the oral polio vaccine (OPV) to her two-year-old son, or not?

The decision has not always been this hard. Last year, Beenish had no qualms about hosting the service providers in her home to perform the simple procedure.

But now she is gripped with anxiety about the potentially harmful nature of the vaccine.

Her fears are not unfounded.

Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s populous Punjab province, is still reeling from the deaths of over 125 people who suffered an adverse reaction to Isotab, distributed by the government-run Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC) to a large number of cardiac patients.

Subsequent laboratory tests revealed that each tablet contained the antimalarial substance Pyrimethamine in quantities over 14 times the recommended weekly dose for malaria patients.

“I can’t afford to trust these people (with) my child’s life. The government’s inefficiency and the harms associated with free medicine are (dangerous) to us all,” Beenish told IPS.

The tragedy over the cardiac patients ignited severe criticism of the government from various corners of society.

The absence of a sufficient drug regulatory mechanism at the provincial level has also been dragged into the spotlight as a major health concern.

Obstacles to the eradication campaign

Outright distrust in the public health system has taken a crippling toll on the anti-polio initiative, especially in Punjab.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that roughly 700,000 children in the province already miss immunisation drives for various reasons. With fears of contamination now proliferating, and scores of households resisting the vaccination, medical experts fear this number will now rise.

Pakistan is one of just four countries in the world where the wild poliovirus is still circulating freely; the other three are India, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

Of the 326 polio cases reported in these countries in 2011, only one was detected in India, 52 in Nigeria, 76 in Afghanistan, and an alarming 197 in Pakistan.

According to UNICEF, “The annual incidence of polio in Pakistan, which was estimated to be more than 20,000 cases annually in the early 1990s, had decreased to around thirty cases in 2005. Just a few years ago Pakistan was on the verge of polio eradication. It seemed that we had made it.”

But a resurgence of infection rates has turned the country into a site of global concern, as it is now responsible for well over 60 percent of polio cases worldwide.

Global polio watchdogs recently found that the particular strain of poliovirus endemic to Pakistan has traveled to other countries and caused outbreaks in China and Afghanistan.

While UNICEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and federal and provincial governments have been urging mass media to minimise negative coverage of anti-polio drives, a recent political scandal involving the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) appears to have undone several years’ worth of efforts in that regard.

Towards the end of Jan. 2011, U.S. defence secretary Leon Panetta urged Pakistan to release a doctor named Shakil Afridi who was under arrest on charges of treason.

At the behest of CIA officials, Afridi reportedly launched a fake polio vaccination campaign in Abbottabad last year, using it as a front to gather DNA samples from people thought to be relatives of the elusive Osama Bin Laden. This elaborate scheme would later contribute to the frenetic manhunt for and subsequent assassination of the Al Qaeda leader.

“(Before this) happened, one could brush aside negative perceptions about the polio vaccine, terming them baseless and ‘agenda-driven’, but not this time,” Fazal Shah, a development sector professional based in the northern district of Mardan, told IPS.

“How can anybody deny something confirmed by the U.S. itself, including in its own media?” he asked.

Religious leaders and tribal elders who had hitherto been highly successful in generating public support for the polio vaccine – by breaking myths about the vaccine being life-threatening, made of haram (forbidden) ingredients or causing infertility among both male and female recipients – found their efforts seriously hampered by Afridi’s hoax vaccination drive.

In fact, as news of the CIA’s scheme filtered into thousands of households across Pakistan via sensational newspaper and TV reports, Pakistan’s entire polio eradication campaign began to suffer a major setback.

In an effort to form a joint front against the barrage of negative media coverage, individuals and groups working to exterminate the poliovirus have identified key partners in the fight and are approaching the media together, hoping for strength in numbers.

The timing of such a united front is crucial as the polio vaccine is currently being distributed in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and, for the first time in the past three years, in the lower part of Orakzai Agency – areas that had, for years, been inaccessible due to rampant militancy and military confrontations between rebels and state armed forces.

In a statement drafted exclusively for IPS, UNICEF claimed, “Pakistani journalists, being the major pillar of (this) nation, have both a moral and professional responsibility to ensure that polio eradication is set on top of the public agenda.”

“Balanced coverage, accurate reporting, due verification of facts, critical analysis of rumors, segregation of individual opinion from expert knowledge (and) avoiding unnecessary sensationalism are of the utmost importance in reporting about polio,” it added. “Recently, the media has contributed to numerous unwarranted speculations about the alleged side effects of the polio vaccine. The oral polio vaccine used in Pakistan is potent, safe, and efficacious; it is exactly the same vaccine that brought the number of polio cases down to just over 30 in 2007,” the statement concluded.

Mueen Ahmed, a Lahore-based investigative reporter with Pakistan’s premier Geo TV, agrees headlines like “Polio Vaccine Claims Child’s Life” should be carried only if autopsy reports confirm the claim.

However, he says the media cannot be stopped from calling a spade a spade.

“If the government engages untrained vaccinators for less than five dollars a day and stores vaccines out in the open, how can the media remain silent?” he asked.

Mueen believes the disease cannot be treated without simultaneously bringing about a complete paradigm shift.

“The day people all over the country start chasing vaccinators, rather than (vice versa), we will achieve our goal,” he said, adding the media could be instrumental in bringing about such a fundamental change in public thinking. Azhar Mahmood Bhatti, director of the Punjab’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), went a step further to suggest that legislation be implemented along with responsible media coverage.

“Laws should be (on the books) to make immunisation mandatory, and birth certificates should be issued to children only on verification of their polio vaccination cards,” he told IPS.