February 27, 2024
By Kamran Ali and Jamaima Afridi
BARA:
Wadan Khela rests on her charpoy out in her courtyard, warming herself in the sunlight. She turns her head, pointing out the scabs and the discolouration on her left cheek – bruises suffered when she tried to intervene in her son’s enforced disappearances a few days ago.
She tells Voicepk.net that Rehmatullah’s abductors broke into their home in the dead of night, and detained her son under the charge of participating in “suspicious activities”.
“A group of men in stark white clothes and faces obscured came and grabbed my son. When I tried to stop them, they beat me up. My son drives a qingqi, if he has done anything then tell us so. I just want my son,” she pleads.
Rahmatullah is just one among 200 or so individuals reported missing in Bara, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the last three months.
Enforced disappearances has persisted for decades in Pakistan. According to a report by the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded 3,485 missing person cases, the highest out of all the provinces, with Balochistan following with 2,752 cases.
While the practice, regarded as a crime against humanity per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is illegal, its perpetrators are able to act with impunity due to the complicity of the state as well as a deficient justice system. The victims as well as affected families, friends and concerned activists are often cowed into silence.
Muqib Afridi, a local Pashtun activist, was slapped with treason and terrorism charges for protesting against Rahmatullah’s abduction. “What happened to Rahmatullah is not an isolated incident. [Thousands] of youth in the Pashtun belt have been treated like gangsters by the state and have disappeared,” he explains. “Some 230 to 240 incidents of have been reported these past three months. Their whereabouts remain a mystery.”
Enforced disappearances particularly affect tribal regions where the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Ordinance, enacted in 2019, and extended to the merged districts, empowers the armed forces to detain suspects for an indeterminable amount of time in unlisted internment camps. The ordinance also grants the armed forces the authority to occupy any property with the approval of the provincial government.
The ordinance is a near-reproduction of the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulations 2011, promulgated by then-President Asif Ali Zardari in 2011, through which legal cover was given to several detention centres set up during military operations in FATA and PATA.
The Peshawar High Court in October 2019 scrapped the ordinance on a petition by advocate Shabbir Hussain Gigyani, declaring it in violation of the constitution. However, the order was challenged by the government in the apex court and subsequently suspended by then-Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, who issued directives for a larger bench to hear the case. Four years on, the case remains unresolved.
The increasing number of missing persons cases in Bara has irked its chiefs, who say that rather than illegally abducting individuals, state institutions can work with local elders to legally apprehend suspects.
“Every two or three days there is a raid on someone’s home. They sneak in like thieves and take away people,” he says. “The elders of every tribe and region here are responsible individuals. The state should take us into their confidence, and we will hand over suspects to the police. This practice is deplorable.”
Gigyani, a Supreme Court lawyer who has established his career fighting cases for families of missing persons, explains that as per the law no arrests can be made without the commission of an offense or availability of evidence. However, the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Ordinance 2019 has granted security agencies unfettered powers in tribal regions.
“Under the law, an accused should be presented before a court of law within 24 hours of their arrest. But the ordinance has no such clause, it instead allows the army any amount of time to present a detainee in court,” he says.
He adds that so long as the injunction on the Peshawar High Court’s order remains, there can be little progress in addressing enforced disappearances.