Airport ordeals

The frightening experience of travelling through Pakistani airports has gotten to the point where even the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which owns and operates almost all airports in the country, admits that passengers are constantly subject to harassment. CAA chief Khaqan Murtaza slammed the conduct of Customs, Airport Security Force and Anti-Narcotics Force officials, saying they harass and delay passengers to extort bribes, and even go as far as accusing them of serious criminal activity such as threatening passengers with wrongful imprisonment for failure to pay out bribes. He was also highly critical of the optics of visibly armed and uniformed law enforcement officials inside airports, noting that there are few, if any, airports in the world where this happens. Indeed, even in ‘high security’ facilities such as military airports in other countries, armed officials usually carry well-concealed small arms to make passengers feel more comfortable, rather than assault rifles with their fingers near the trigger.

The Senate standing committee meeting during which Murtaza made his claims was an all-out assault on the Pakistani airport experience, but law enforcement officials came in for the strongest criticism. Committee chair Senator Hidayatullah noted that tourists and expats are not greeted by the beauty of Pakistan, but by a police state, with angry, armed, uniformed men at every corner. Many of these security officials are clearly redundant since international reviews regularly give Pakistan passing grades on airport security. Another area of improvement is unifying the security counters and checkpoints to make movement and the general passenger experience a bit smoother — last year, the split counters allowed corrupt ASF officials to steal some money from an overseas Pakistani and have Customs confiscate the rest under false pretenses, which would be near impossible with a unified counter. We cannot encourage tourism by presenting to tourists as a police state where the cops will also rob them.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2023.

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