Prisoner no. 650

We are the generation of Muslims that grew up fearing our own kind. We pigeonholed all the practicing ones as extremists. We dreamed of fleeing abroad and making our future in the center of learning and knowledge. However, we soon realized our flawed construction of reality. The promising slogans of Peace and Democracy proved to be hollow. Shard by shard, our emotions were hurt by those claiming to be humanists; from Abu Ghuraib prison, Iraq WMDs farce to this never ending phony war of terrorism. Now, the case of Dr. Afiya Siddiqui has once again set us ablaze.

Dr. Afia Siddiqui, a Pakistani citizen, went to Manchester to graduate in neurobiology. She had been an accomplished student since her early years and got into MIT and Brandeis University through scholarships. Later, she got married with Amjad Khan but the marriage came to a breaking point in 2002, the year she got divorced. In December 2002, she made another trip to US to find a job for her. The US suspects the real purpose was to open a PO Box Office for an alleged al Qaeda operative. In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, a chief al Qaeda person was arrested by FBI from Rawalpindi. Around the same time, Afia Siddiqui was catching a flight for Islamabad from Karachi airport from where she was hustled off by the ISI agents along with her three children. Her family was threatened to remain hushed about the matter. However, later ISI denied all the reports about a woman being handed over to FBI by Pakistan.Moazzam Beyg,an ex detainee of Bagram Air Base, wrote a book Enemy Combatant and mentioned the horrifying screams he heard of a lady. This was corroborated by other detainees and Lord Nazeer. The book was read by Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who travelled to Bagram and confirmed about an imprisoned woman known as The Ghost of Bagram jail and Prisoner no. 650. After the hue and cry, she was removed to Guantanamo Bay where she was repeatedly raped and brutally tortured. She was kept in a male facility and there was no privacy for her shower and bathroom. She had lost her sanity. She was charged with the crime of being a courier of diamonds and for shooting an FBI officer in Ghazni.

Throughout this time, her family was kept in dark about her whereabouts. Her mother cried vehemently waiting for the shreds of news about her extraordinary bright daughter. It was Yvonne Ridley who broke the ice and presented the case to the public. Her case was reopened in Feb 2010 and the court passed the verdict against Dr. Afia and gave her life imprisonment.

Rehashing the facts is not my purpose, neither am I trying to plead her innocent. I simply want to share with you what bewilders me. The question arises in me is that even if she is guilty of aiding al Qaeda, should she be yanked away from airport to the gloomy dungeons of Bagram, without any news to her parents? Why should her children be detained and made to suffer? Why aren’t the courts issuing verdict against those officers who subjected her to sexual harassment and physical assaults?

The role of agencies in this quagmire is equally dirty. Pervez Mushurraf, in his book mentioned about earning million dollar bounties for capturing and handing over suspected al-Qaeda persons to the US. I feel indignant at us first. Islam considers women sacred, yet she was treated so atrociously and shamelessly by the Muslims. There had been news about her manhandling and gruesome torture, but nobody flinched.

I see this as blatantly against fundamental human rights. The law says that everyone is Innocent until proven guilty. She might be more heinous than Osama bin Laden in the eyes of US, but does that give them the right and authority to molest her, to abduct her along with her children and torture her? I demand that we should put our foot down and force the government to pass a verdict against this injustice and extremism.

If the case is scanned chronologically then one finds sheer inconsistencies. First, the ISI had been telling the family that she is wanted for mere interrogation, and later she is called as one of the dangerous al Qaeda operatives. Secondly, the FBI report contradicted the blame on her since the finger prints on the bullet does not match her DNA. Moreover, the site where she allegedly shot the police shows no signs of bullets. Amjad Khan, who had been in the forerun in alleging Afia of being an aide of al Qaeda, said all the news reports about her are false. He says her son had been killed and her lawyer says that Afia’s identity had been stolen.

I am not taking any side, but a comparison needs to be drawn. Ridley, a UK journalist was held by Taliban for ten days but she wasn’t hurt a tad. So much so, that after her release she embraced Islam. What about the civilized and humanitarian claims of the US? Is Mukhtara Mai the only Pakistani woman worthy of their humanly consideration? I don’t know what torture is like, but we can see a glimpse of it in the picture of Dr. Afia from Guantanamo Bay. Her face has withered. Her radiant smile of her graduation day seems of a totally different person. It shows not only the physical pain, but also the mental scars.

I am not here trying to awaken anyone because all of this should have scrambled us to action a lot before. It’s too big a loss for us to just sit and whine about it. Allah SWT says in Surah Nisa “And what is wrong with you that you do not fight in the Way of Allah and for those ill-treated and oppressed among men, women and children?”We are a nation which boasted about woman’s honor. We are a nation of Muhammad bin Qasim, who flocked to Sindh on the plea of a woman and liberated her.