Creatures great and small

Scanning through the national press each day searching for good news is not an option. It is not to be found. Rather, headlines tell us that a four-year-old girl was raped, strangled and then thrown on a rubbish heap in a highly up-market area of Karachi, that a nurse was allegedly gang-raped in one of Karachi's main hospitals, and that some women in a village of Punjab were stripped naked and herded along the streets.  And these are not one-off occurrences, nothing new to them — so much for human rights.

Then we read that in Kasur earlier this month “Three siblings killed youth over ‘honour’” and that a jirga in Mansehra “decrees [that a] couple be stoned to death”. This latter story was picked up by The Guardian's who quoted a local as saying: “We’ll kill them, there’s no doubt about that . . . this is our custom.”  Schools are regularly blown up in the freshly-named Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Baloch leaders are shot dead every second day, and our highly gifted legal fraternity runs riot with the law, physically manhandling judges in Lahore and throwing them out of their courts.

Reportedly, the law minister ‘doctor,’ the Man from Monty Cello, “may get a role in the degree scrutiny process,” which will kill all hopes of justice being meted out to our legislating perjurers. And surely the quote of the week comes from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who when talking to the media suggested that Pakistan should realise the economic problems faced in her country which lead many Americans to ask "why we're sending money to a country that doesn't want it."

Now, no one can be blamed for thinking it is mad to latch on to, amidst the mayhem surrounding us, a report in this publication on July 16 about the Sindh police having imported from Germany 12 sniffer dogs – German Shepherds and Labradors – all under one year of age, at a cost of Rs5 million, to be trained to sniff out explosives and terrorists. The concern is that this is not a dog-friendly country, not even animal-friendly. The average good Muslim, the man in the street, cares nothing for the welfare of animals, they are objects to be used and grossly abused — not that human beings fare much better.

It arises from a story posted on the internet on March 24 on the fate of over two dozen specially trained dogs provided by the US to Pakistan under a counter-narcotics programme a couple of years ago. By November last year there were seven dogs who had survived and who, “unused and abused,” were due to be put down. The wife of an American marine got into the act, visited the dogs, took photographs “of the surviving dogs living in horrific conditions in Karachi” and emailed them to K9 soldiers, a US organisation which supports military dogs.

J T Gabriel of K9 sprang into action, three dogs were taken in by US diplomatic staff, and $20,000 was raised to cover the shipping costs back to the US of the other four who were in the country by February, taken into good homes by caring people — a huge turnaround in their little lives.

This shaggy dog tale is part of the security and military aid for Pakistan (some $10 billion since 9/11) and amazingly there was some reaction in Pakistan as Gabriel “got word from someone she describes as a ‘high-up in counter-narcotics’ who asked that she take down the pictures of the abused dogs she had posted on her website.” Her reaction: “If they don’t want to be embarrassed, don’t treat living things like that.”

Can the Sindh police do better?

Published in The Express Tribune, July 24^th, 2010.