Amnesty International : Blasts Pakistan's Human Rights Record

By Gopinath Kumar (PHP from USA)
Thursday, June 10,2010

(In this file picture taken on June 10, 2010 a militant guards two criminals before their public execution in Bara, the main town in the Khyber tribal region. — AFP)

ISLAMABAD : Millions of Pakistanis in the country's northwest tribal areas live in a 'human rights-free zone' where they have no legal protection from the government and are subjected to abuses by the Taliban, the Amnesty International has said.

In a report titled 'As if Hell Fell on Me: The Human Rights Crisis in Northwest Pakistan', the London-based rights organisation urged the Pakistan government and Taliban to comply with international humanitarian law.

"Nearly four million people are currently living under the Taliban in Pakistan in northwest Pakistan without rule of law and effectively abandoned by the Pakistani government," Amnesty International's interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone said.

"There are still more than one million people who were displaced from their homes in Pakistan's northwest tribal belt by the conflict with the Taliban (and) whose plight is largely ignored and who are in desperate need of aid."

According to Amnesty, at least 1,300 civilians were killed in the fighting in northwest Pakistan in 2009.

A teacher who fled Swat with family in March 2009 was quoted as saying: "The government just gave away our lives to the Taliban. What's the point of having this huge army if it can't even protect us against a group of brutal fanatics? They took over my school and started to teach children about how to fight in Afghanistan.

"They kicked out the girls from school, told the men to grow their beards, threatened anybody they didn't like. Our government and our military never tried to protect us from this."

Cordone said that for years, the tribal areas have been treated as a stage for geopolitical rivalries and are currently in focus because of the conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan and the search for al-Qaeda militants, rather than the rights of the people living there.

"The Pakistani government should not just respond using military force; it needs to provide and protect the basic rights of its citizens living there.""The Pakistani government has to follow through on itspromises to bring the region out of this human rights black hole and place the people of FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) under the protection of the law and constitution of Pakistan," Cordone said.

There is no quick-fix solution for decades of "misrule" and the conflict of the past few years, but the road to recovery starts with recognising the rights of the people of FATA, he said.

Amnesty said the US' use of drones to target insurgents in northwest Pakistan has generated considerable resentment inside the country.

It called on the US to clarify its chain of command and rules of engagement for the use of drones and ensure proper accountability for civilian casualties.

Terror-Stricken Minority Sikh community and The Noble ‘Servant’ Of Peshawar in Pakistan

By Mohammad S.Solanki (PHP Managing Editor)
Wednesday, June 09,2010

 (PHOTO : Sikh community in Peshawar City , Pakistan)

Peshawar : Khurshid Khan, an eminent 60-year-old lawyer and deputy attorney general of Pakistan, wants to “heal the wounds” of the terror-stricken minority Sikh community in that country. So he does an extraordinary thing at a temple in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Every day when he handles his work as a legal expert, Khan visits a Sikh temple in center of the city, wraps a piece of cloth around his head to show his respect, and sits in the doorway to shine the shoes of Sikhs, whose community has come under frequent attack by Taliban militants over the last few years.

Two months back, militants in Khyber Agency abducted three Sikhs and demanded for a huge ransom for their release. Two were eventually freed, but one, Jispal Singh, was killed in brutal fashion and his corpse left on the roadside in the tribal area.

“I went to offer my condolences to the family of Jispal Singh and that was a turning point in my life,” Khan tells RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal. “I realized that as a Pashtun I should work to ‘heal their wounds’ by becoming their sewadar (servant). I want to give them a message of love and brotherhood, and that’s why every day I am here to shine their shoes.”

Khan says he is himself a landlord and doesn’t even shine his own shoes at his home. But his cause inspires him to sit on the ground on a daily basis and shine 70-80 pairs of shoes.

“I can see the light of love in their eyes for me and my people,” he maintains.

He adds that Sikhs have lived in the area with the dominant Pashtun communities for centuries, pay taxes, and play an important role in the economic progress of the region. But still, he laments, we fail to protect their lives and properties.

They are being killed and kidnapped by the Taliban in Orakzai, Kurrum, and Khyber tribal regions, Khan says, adding that other Pakistanis must stand by them in these critical hours and give them a sense of oneness and brotherhood.

An estimated 28,000 Sikhs live in Pakistan, including about 10,000 who live in the tribal region and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of the conflict-ridden country. In May 2009, Taliban militants destroyed 11 Sikh homes in the Orakzai tribal district after accusing them of failing to pay “taxes.” The ongoing conflict in the Buner and Swat districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has displaced more than 200 families.

Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) balkanize Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan

By Dr.Nanda Kumar Solanki
Thusday,June 03,2010

Islamabad : Noted Pakistani humorist Ibn-e-Insha once wrote about his encounter with a Pakistani troubled by his countrymen’s overwhelming ethnic and sub-nationalist sensitivities.“Aajkal Pakistan mein koyi apney aap ko Sindhi kehta hai to koyi Baluchi, Punjabi ya Pathan. Agar yahi sab karna tha tou Pakistan bananey ki kya zaroorat thi?” he asked.

“Maaf kijiyega, galti ho gayi, agey sey nahin banayenge,” responded Insha in a telling acceptance of contradictions that bedevil Pakistan as a nation State. That happened some years ago as the Leftist thinker died way back in 1978.

In the years thereafter, sharpened ethnic, regional, linguistic and sub-nationalist identities have put under greater strain the State’s cohesiveness. The Punjabi imperialism, Pakhtoon and Baloch alienation, Shia-Sunni divide and the Mohajir versus Sindhi sentiments have only lent greater meaning to Insha’s apology.

The recent wanton killings of members of the minority Ahmadiyya community were a chilling reminder of their persecution even before the Taliban, suspected of the massacre in two places of worship in Lahore, arrived on the scene. It would be pertinent to recall here the religio-political Jamaat-e-Islami’s Maulana Maududi-led revivalist campaign of the 1950s. It’s objective was to unify Pakistani Muslims against the Ahmadiyyas – who were variously painted as non-Muslims, pro-India and a threat to Islam through the sixties and seventies.

It might sound ironic. But it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who gave in finally to fundamentalist forces seeking the Ahmadiyyas excommunication from Islam in 1974. Zia-ul-Haq picked up actually the threads from where Bhutto left to create a separate electoral system for non-Muslims including the Ahmadiyyas. It was the much-maligned Pervez Musharraf who undid the pernicious regime towards creation of a joint electorate system.

However, that hasn’t ended the rampant discrimination of the excommunicated Ahamdiyyas in all walks of life. Their properties and businesses are perennially under threat. They cannot read the kalma or call their places of worship as mosques. And its common for the mullah lobby to prevent their elevation to key governmental positions or run campaigns for their removal.

The Pakistan of today bears no resemblance to what Jinnah willed in his 1947 speech as president of its Constituent Assembly: “To my mind, this problem of religious differences has been the greatest hindrance in the progress of India. Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

Jinnah quite obviously understood that while it was possible to create a country on a divisive agenda, it wasn’t possible to run it on that basis. His legacy was destroyed early in the life of Pakistan. The Talibani offensive is about the balkanization of his idea of a Muslim homeland.

Today in History , Lets Tribute to Hindus of Afghanistan

By Gopinath (USA) and Daleep Bhai Kochhar (Kabul City)
Thusday,May 20,2010

2001 - In Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban militia announce a law requiring Hindus to wear identity labels to distinguish them from Muslims. The measure also requires Hindu women to be veiled for the first time.

Here is More Info - Afghan Hindus and Blog on Afghan Hindus

(Aug.1992: A Hindu family who fled to Pakistan after they were brutalized by the Jehadi criminals in Kabul. Fighters from different criminal factions looted property, raped women, murdered, kidnapped people for ransom and committed many other horrible crimes against Non-Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. These conditions have forced millions of people to flee from Afghanistan in order to save their lives and belongings)

(2002© IRIN – Daulat Ram and his family at their home in the backstreets of Kandahar,Afghanistan)

Kidnapping reflects fears of Pakistan minorities

Source http://www.dawn.com
Monday, 22 Mar, 2010

In a country beset by a powerful Islamist insurgency, where suicide bombings are commonplace and government offensives widely dismissed as ineffective, anyone can become a victim. – Reuters Photo 

PESHAWAR: Five Sikh men who fled their hometown on the Afghan border were making a quick trip back home when masked men blocked their way with a pickup on a mountain road not far from the Khyber Pass.

There were no houses, no buildings, no other cars in sight. The kidnappers covered their faces with black scarves and carried machine-guns.

Surjeet Singh had just wanted to check on the small grocery store he had left behind in Dabori, the Pakistani town he fled a year ago when it was overrun with Taliban fighters and the government launched a bombing campaign against them. In an area torn by Islamist violence, it had quickly become a dangerous place for a non-Muslim.

Singh and the four friends traveling with him that day all wore the carefully wrapped turbans that made their Sikh religion clear.

They were going back to pick up money they were owed, or to check on their businesses. They had called friends ahead of time to check on the situation. They thought a quick trip would be safe.

“We were born there. We grew up there,” said Singh, who today is recovering from a bullet wound in a small apartment in a crowded maze-like neighborhood of Peshawar, the largest city in Pakistan’s northwest. “Our forefathers had been there for hundreds of years. We have houses, shops, land.”

In today’s Pakistan, though, that is not enough.

In a country beset by a powerful Islamist insurgency, where suicide bombings are commonplace and government offensives widely dismissed as ineffective, anyone can become a victim. But for the nation’s minorities – its small communities of Hindus, Christians and Sikhs – life is particularly precarious. Thousands have fled their villages, crowding into urban slums. Thousands more have fled the country.

“With the rise in militancy in our society in general, and in the northwest in particular, minorities are feeling more threatened,” said I.A. Rehman, a senior official with Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission. He noted that many Sikhs have been driven from their homes, and those that remain are now often forced to pay the militants a “jizya” – a traditional tax for non-Muslim.

Singh’s journey, which began on a cold morning in January and ended 42 days later with a March 1 bloody gunbattle, underscores the threats to those minorities, as well as the lawlessness of Pakistan's frontier regions.

Two months later, it’s still not clear exactly why the Sikhs were targeted: Were the bandits waiting for them? Would they have kidnapped anyone who came by?

Certainly their religion made them easier targets, since it is more difficult for them to make use of the region’s informal power networks, the tribal and religious leaders who can protect people in the semiautonomous areas.

On that day, though, as armed men swarmed toward their car, shouting for the five Sikh men to move quickly, all Singh and his friends were thinking about was survival.

Two if them managed to slip away amid the chaos, but three – all sharing the same common Sikh surname, Singh – were quickly captured.

“They held us at gunpoint, immediately dragged us out of our car,” said Surjeet Singh, a quiet composed man. He and his friends were blindfolded and driven for about an hour. Then they began walking.

They could see nothing through their blindfolds. They could only feel cold pressing in as they climbed higher into the Hindu Kush mountains.

After hours of walking, they were brought to a set of rooms carved into the mountainside. It would be their home for the next 42 days. There they would be kept chained and often blindfolded. Occasionally, they were beaten. The prisoners never saw their captors’ faces – which were always covered with scarves – and even now they do not know who they were.

They clearly were militant Muslims, forcibly cutting their prisoners hair. Keeping hair uncut is a deeply important religious precept for Sikh men.

But the real reason for the kidnapping was quickly clear: money.

Surjeet Singh did not want to talk about ransom demands but the other survivor, 18-year-old Gurvinder Singh, told the Times of India newspaper that their captors brought them mobile phones on their first morning in the cave. They were ordered to call their families and say their freedom would cost 50 million rupees, or about $600,000. When it was clear that money could not be raised, the number dropped to 20 million rupees, or $240,000.

After that: nothing. The men made no further phone calls, their captors barely spoke to them. Their days passed in silence.

“Every day was like a month, and a month was like a year,” Singh said.

After a few weeks, Jaspal Singh was suddenly taken away.

The other Sikhs were told he’d been freed. “You will also be released if you give us money,” their captors taunted them.

In the end, though, their captors got nothing.

Twelve days after Jaspal disappeared, the thunder of helicopters filled the air as teams of Pakistani commandos swarmed the camp.

The government has declined all comment on the incident. – AP

Kidnapped Sikhs by Taliban recovered in Pakistan

Source http://www.googlenews.com/
Sourec The Sikh Times
Thusday,March 04,2010

Kidnapped Sikhs were forced to cut hair and convert to Islam

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Two Sikhs kidnapped for ransom in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border were recovered alive Monday and are under the protection of Pakistani soldiers, the military said.

In a statement it said that security forces had recovered the two between the Orakzai and Khyber districts in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt, after they were abducted by "terrorists" in Khyber.

The tribal belt has been branded an Al-Qaeda headquarters by Washington.

The army said "some miscreants" were killed in Monday's encounter, but released no further details of the circumstances in which the Sikhs were freed.

The two Sikhs were part of a trio snatched by gunmen in hopes of receiving a ransom in the town of Bara in late January, officials said.

The third Sikh, Jaspal Singh, was beheaded after relatives failed to pay a ransom. His body was found dumped in Orakzai last month.

Pakistan's Sikh and Hindu communities are tiny. In the last year, hundreds have fled their homes after receiving death threats from the Taliban and other militant groups in the increasingly unstable northwest.

Most Sikhs and Hindus living in Khyber pay annual protection to the local militant group Lashkar-e-Islam, a Sikh community member has said, blaming the umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) for the beheading.

TTP has become the most dangerous militant group operating in Pakistan, where a wave of suicide and other bomb attacks carried out by Islamist militants have killed more than 3,000 people since July 2007.