Third degree

When it comes to interrogations in Pakistan, torture is not the last resort but the first.

“I wish I had died instead, because what I suffered was worse than death. They would hang me upside down and thrash me for hours. I wasn’t given food for days. I thought it would never end.” This is what Nauman, a young Christian man from Gojra had to say of the 14 days he spent in police custody.

Nauman was picked up in a sweep by security agencies after the 2009 Gojra riots. Even though he was not in the city when the riots took place, he was detained and tortured for two weeks as law enforcers tried to get him to confess to retaliating against attackers and causing the inadvertent death of a Christian man.

He was eventually released after a Christian organisation stepped in to help him in his defence. When he was finally freed, his closest friends couldn’t recognise him: Nauman was skin and bones, a shadow of his former self.

Scarred and scared by his experience, Nauman and his family members should nevertheless count themselves lucky, because unlike many who suffer such a fate, his period of torture lasted ‘only’ 14 days.

In February, seven men who were once ‘missing’ — a casual term that explains away how hundreds have become victims of enforced disappearances in Pakistan — were finally presented before the Supreme Court. They were a pale shadow of the men they had been when they were whisked away by the country’s intelligence agencies on suspicions that they were involved in terrorist activities. Four other men, who were also in custody, are now dead. The military has claimed that they died of natural causes, their families beg to differ.

But the men in court appeared to be knocking on death’s door in any case. Journalists described them as ‘ghastly’ and ‘bewildered’. One clutched a colostomy bag, another wept constantly and all seven have been diagnosed with various diseases. Detailing what the men had suffered, lawyers told the court that “during the confinement, which lasted for more than a year, the prisoners were not exposed to sunlight which worsened their health.”

The treatment of the men at the hands of the country’s security agencies was evident from their condition, invoking ire from the chief justice and horror from the families of those who are still missing.

The story of these seven men is just one of thousands of cases of maltreatment and torture that are covered daily in newspapers, broadcast live on television, and circulated on YouTube. A maniacally laughing man in army fatigues twists a man’s genitals. A man is tied to a tree outside a police station. A crowd lynches two young boys. Militants flog their victims. The list goes on and on.

The use of physical violence is prevalent throughout Pakistan, and the word torture is used so often that it has almost lost all meaning. ‘Lawyers once again torture journalists,’ screams a headline in a daily newspaper. ‘CJ takes notice of PPP MNA Waheeda Shah’s torture of polling staff,’ reads the copy on a news channel’s website. It is a disservice not only to the horrific reality of torture, but also to those people who suffered actual torture, the physical and psychological scars of which they bear to this day

People like former political prisoner Jabbar Khattak, who firsthand experienced what it is like to be at the receiving end of a torturer’s ministrations.

When General Ziaul Haq imposed martial law in 1977 Khattak, a student activist, believed that people would rise against the military regime. His student association regrouped and named itself the Democratic Students Federation. In 1980, Khattak went into hiding and was eventually arrested in Peshawar and taken to ‘Chowki Number Do’, an infamous detention spot in the Saddar cantonment area and then to Balahisar Fort.

This was the beginning of a four-year imprisonment, during which Khattak was interrogated and tortured. “They would beat me with fists everywhere, hang me upside down, and tie up parts of my body to cut off the blood supply. All the while they would hurl abuse at me and threaten me,” says Khattak when asked to recall those dark days.

“When I was at Warsak Dam, they hung me upside down and lowered me into the water with a pulley, making me feel as if they were going to drown me,” he continues. One beating in Peshawar almost killed him. “It [the beating] was so brutal that I began bleeding from both arms and legs. I was taken to the Lady Reading Hospital where doctors told my captors that I was on the verge of dying. They wanted to admit me into the hospital but the authorities would not allow it — they told the doctors to administer emergency treatment and then release me back into their custody.”

He was transferred to Peshawar central jail and then to Haripur, where fellow prisoners Imtiaz Alam (now secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association) and Khalil Qureshi had to help him with basic tasks — bathing, changing clothes, eating.

Khattak was eventually transferred to Karachi and released by a court. But despite then-prime minister Mohammad Khan Junejo’s announcement that all political prisoners would be released, Khattak was thrown back into jail in connection with the Pan Am hijacking, which had taken place while he was in jail. “BBC did a story on me — calling me Junejo’s ‘first political prisoner’. Because of the coverage and calls for my release I was cleared of that case.”

Khattak, who is now the editor of the Sindhi-language daily Awami Awaz, adds, “Sometimes I
feel like I should have done a more thorough investigation on this,” when asked how he feels knowing that the camps he was tortured in are used for the same purpose today.

During his detention, he also underwent psychological torture. Solitary confinement, he says, was not as feared as the actual physical torture, or simply the threat of being tortured. “The jail authorities would use many tricks — officers would sit outside the cell and brag loudly about the punishments they had meted out to other detainees. Often, detainees were taken to interrogation cells and made to witness the beatings of others.”

While Khattak says he was tortured by army and agency officials, 1971 War veteran and retired brigadier Tariq Khalil, who served in the Inter-Services Intelligence and led the anti-dacoit operation in Sindh in the early 1990s, says one needs to differentiate between the police and the intelligence when it comes to interrogation practices.

The police, he says, “start with torture”, while the intelligence apparatus works differently. According to Khalil, there are three categories of detainees: terrorists involved in acts of sabotage, anti-state elements — agents of the enemy or spies — and thirdly, those involved in combat, usually enemy soldiers. The kind of interrogation methods used depends on which category you fall into.

Khalil gives an example from his own experiences as a prisoner of war in Indian custody after the 1971 war. “They applied physical torture to high-ranking officials, such as those with operational knowledge. The rest were given passive punishments — they wouldn’t give us food for 24 to 36 hours, would keep us in the heat, would take away our clothes.”

Retired military officers say interrogation only turns into torture in the hands of inexperienced interrogators. Interrogation is a delicate job, and according to them, a six-month to one-year course is required to enter the field. “You need to confront the detainee from all angles. You need to have a complete history, comprising details about his family, friends, foes and activities, as well as his job,” says Brigadier (retd) Javed Hussain, a former Special Services Group officer who was trained to not only interrogate but also to resist interrogation.

Hussain and Khalil both agree that most captives eventually break under a combination of both psychological pressure and enhanced interrogation techniques — a euphemism for physical torture.

“What starts off as a ‘civilised’ interrogation eventually switches to other techniques,” says Hussain. “But before resorting to enhanced interrogation, interrogators must first plant a man masquerading as a prisoner. He then befriends the detainee and tries to extract as much information from him.” This then is the way that an interrogation is supposed to proceed, at least as far as the agencies are concerned. When it comes to the police, controls on torture are even more lax.

The use of torture is endemic at every level of the police system in Pakistan: from a moment a man is detained, kicked and dragged and shoved into a police van to a detention cell where he is beaten and undergoes physical abuse. Every so often, a grainy video of police brutality makes its way to the TV channels. Then there is outrage, impassioned analysis and finally silence as the breaking news cycle moves on.

Echoing Hussain and Khalil’s point about lack of training, a report on Pakistani prisons by the International Crisis Group states that the “lack of specialised training centres for prison personnel…is largely responsible for the failure to enforce the Jail Manual’s rules, particularly with regard to the rampant abuse in prisons.”

The report goes on to say that due to the lack of specialised training centres for prison personnel, jail personnel are instead sent to police training schools which are known to produce police who are brutal and “anti-suspect,” which is why prisoners are treated in an inhumane manner. However, “police officers insist that prison personnel ‘need no lessons in brutality’ from them and are ‘eminently capable of managing on their own’.”

That last part is borne out by the report, in which a particularly harrowing case is also highlighted in which prison staff in Toba Tek Singh “stripped three prisoners, taped their genitals to prevent them from urinating and forced each to drink three or four litres of water. The tape was removed four hours later, by which time all three had developed renal ailments.”

It is not just the state that has become adept at using torture tactics. Just as the writ of the state has degenerated over the years, militant wings linked to political parties have increasingly used these tactics to intimidate their opponents. In 2011, one of the worst years in Karachi’s recent history for targeted killings, footage emerged of kidnapped victims being physically and sexually abused, allegedly at a torture cell in Lyari. The violence in Karachi in the past few years has also seen an increase in bodies being found beheaded or with marks of torture, a pattern familiar to those who have witnessed armed groups battling it out in the streets in the 1990s. Given the state’s apathy towards ‘official’ torture, this cannot come as a surprise.

According to Mustafa Qadri, the Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International, “Although torture is a crime in Pakistan, it is widespread at every level of law enforcement, from ordinary police to paramilitary forces and the intelligence agencies. In contrast, the Pakistan government’s response to allegations to torture is either to deny them or claim that it does not reflect official policy. Yet torture represents one of the key failings of the justice system in Pakistan. Rather than investing in their personnel or relying on consistent interrogation techniques that are tried and tested, there is an assumption that torture is a necessary part of extracting information.”

Qadri goes on to say that “torture serves another purpose: namely to punish, humiliate or intimidate, to take revenge or to extract money from detainees or their families. Courts rarely question confessions obtained under torture and lawyers often lack even a basic understanding of what constitutes torture. This is a shameful situation that has serious repercussions for law and order in Pakistan.”

As a result, Qadri says that torture and other human rights violations have become synonymous with the police and other security forces. “Often victims of abuse who approach Amnesty assume the ISI or some other security force is responsible for their ordeal, even where there is no evidence to suggest that is the case. When citizens fear the very people who are meant to protect them what hope is there for justice?”

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine. April 29^th, 2012.