Missing years

The court’s reassurance that over 100 or so persons missing in the country would be recovered in 2011 is encouraging.

If the complaint by one of the plaintiffs in the missing persons case — that another 100 people have been ‘picked up’ since April last year — is accurate, it is a disturbing reminder of all that is wrong with our system. It is significant that the additional attorney general, who appeared before a three-member Supreme Court bench hearing the case, did not deny that more people were being taken away, but emphasised only that 134 had been recovered.

The court’s reassurance that the over 100 or so persons missing in the country would be recovered in 2011 is encouraging. So is its commitment to penalise those responsible for their illegal detention. We all know this means the agencies which operate beyond the command of the civilian government. Bringing them to account for their actions could change a great deal about how the business of the state is conducted in Pakistan. The perception of the agencies themselves, as well as of other people, that they are immune from prosecution, appears to have encouraged the whisking away of people — the largest number from Balochistan. The SC action in the Adiala Jail case and the acceptance by agency bosses that they were bound to follow judicial orders has been a key step in changing the tide.

It is, in some ways at least, a pity that the report of the Judicial Commission set up by the SC in the matter will not be made public. The court has agreed to this. But what is most important is that there is no repetition of the actions seen since 2002 against citizens who fell under agency scrutiny. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, vanished in these years. Some have yet to be located. Clear-cut instructions must go out to the agencies in this respect. It is also important that we gain clarity about the command structure that regulates agencies. They must not be permitted to continue to play the role of a ‘state within a state’. This function has weakened democratic governments in the past and led to grotesque abuses of rights, as we see in the missing persons case. It is time for such actions to stop and measures to be taken to prevent more people from being taken away from their homes or from the streets.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2011.