Final meeting
Rohaifa Bibi suffered a massive cardiac arrest after seeing two of her sons at SC, missing since 2010, last week.
We can only imagine what Rohaifa Bibi’s final thoughts were before she passed away last week. She suffered a massive cardiac arrest after seeing two of her sons at the Supreme Court premises, where they had been produced after being taken away from Adiala Jail in 2010. They had been ‘missing’ since then, and were only recently discovered, known to be in the hands of agencies. The 11 other men whisked away from the jail were to be released after being acquitted by an anti-terrorist court of involvement in terrorism.
The sight, the almost-70-years-old Rohaifa Bibi had to witness, would have broken any mother’s heart. Her younger son, Abdul Majid, 24, carried a urine bag. Abdul Basit, 26, walked with a limp. A third son, Abdul Saboor, was among four of the 11 men to have died in custody. Like the other prisoners, Basit and Majid had no warm clothes when imprisoned in freezing weather conditions and as a result, they were in poor health. Rohaifa Bibi’s family and lawyer are in no doubt about that fact that the unwell sight of her young son’s claimed her life. The father of the captives had already died waiting for his sons to return when they were arrested in 2008. The plight of Rohaifa Bibi, the terrible suffering she must have borne in the hours before her death, haunted by that terrible last meeting, is shared by other mothers in the country. Many live in Balochistan, others live elsewhere. A significant number have seen the tortured bodies of young sons. And there is no indication, as yet, that the situation illustrated so vividly before us by the appearance of Majid, Basit and their five surviving companions, followed by the burial of their mother in her native Kohat, will change quickly.
We have a state that has broken all records of humanity. Even the chief justice expressed horror at the plight of the captives produced before him. Yet, there appears to be no authority that can effectively rein in the agencies and end the era of barbarism inflicted on us.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 22nd, 2012.
The sight, the almost-70-years-old Rohaifa Bibi had to witness, would have broken any mother’s heart. Her younger son, Abdul Majid, 24, carried a urine bag. Abdul Basit, 26, walked with a limp. A third son, Abdul Saboor, was among four of the 11 men to have died in custody. Like the other prisoners, Basit and Majid had no warm clothes when imprisoned in freezing weather conditions and as a result, they were in poor health. Rohaifa Bibi’s family and lawyer are in no doubt about that fact that the unwell sight of her young son’s claimed her life. The father of the captives had already died waiting for his sons to return when they were arrested in 2008. The plight of Rohaifa Bibi, the terrible suffering she must have borne in the hours before her death, haunted by that terrible last meeting, is shared by other mothers in the country. Many live in Balochistan, others live elsewhere. A significant number have seen the tortured bodies of young sons. And there is no indication, as yet, that the situation illustrated so vividly before us by the appearance of Majid, Basit and their five surviving companions, followed by the burial of their mother in her native Kohat, will change quickly.
We have a state that has broken all records of humanity. Even the chief justice expressed horror at the plight of the captives produced before him. Yet, there appears to be no authority that can effectively rein in the agencies and end the era of barbarism inflicted on us.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 22nd, 2012.