Amina Janjua

After Amina Masood Janjua’s husband went missing, she took her case to the steps of the Supreme Court with nothing more than some handmade placards and a few folding chairs. Her protest over Pakistan’s “disappeared” has grown into a national movement and become an integral storyline in the country’s continuing constitutional crisis.

On the morning of July 30, 2005, Amina Janjua sat down for breakfast as usual with her husband, Masood Ahmed Janjua, and their three children. After their meal, the children waved goodbye as their father headed off with a friend for three days in the northwestern city of Peshawar, a little over a hundred miles from their home in Rawalpindi. Amina watched Masood walk away from the house and turn the corner.

It was the last time she saw him. Although the details of what happened to her husband and his friend, Faisal Faraz, are sketchy, Amina has learned that they may not have boarded the bus that was to take them to Peshawar. They were picked up by intelligence agents and bundled off into illegal detention in unknown places.

For nights before his departure, Amina had had strange nightmares. “My dreams were wild,” she says. “I dreamt that I kept falling, and I dreamt of being buried alive. In retrospect I realized that these must have been premonitions or some sort of intuition. That day, as I saw him disappear around the corner, I desperately wanted to run after him, stop him and tell him not to go that weekend. But I knew he would think I was being silly, so I just let him go.”

After Masood went missing, family and friends worked tirelessly for months to obtain information about his whereabouts. When they learned he had “disappeared” into Pakistan’s large and secretive intelligence netherworld, they called upon their contacts within the country’s powerful military and its affiliated intelligence agencies. Masood’s father, a retired colonel who knew then- President Gen. Pervez Musharraf from his days in the army, asked the most powerful man in the country to secure his son’s release. “At first, all our contacts in the army—and we had many— said they would find out and help us. Even President Musharraf promised to help. I met everyone I could access,” says Amina, who initially fell into a deep depression before throwing herself into the search. But her entreaties went nowhere. “I felt I was facing a wall. There was no relief from anyone—the police, the courts—and we had tried all our military contacts. After promising to help, they began to avoid me.”

In September 2006, Amina joined with relatives of Faraz and another man who had “disappeared,” Atiq-ur-Rehman, to stage a protest outside the steps of the Supreme Court with handcrafted posters and placards. Her daughter, Ayesha, then 10 years old, made her own sign: uncle president, please find my loving abbo [father]. That tiny protest launched a national movement that, within a year, swelled with the families of 575 missing Pakistanis and was joined by lawyers, judges, students and concerned citizens. It has made Amina Janjua a household name and given voice to the frustrations of ordinary Pakistanis at their government’s heavy-handed tactics in the war on terror that spurred deadly attacks at home but did nothing to diminish domestic terrorism. Amina grew increasingly politicized as she realized, she says, that “they have kept men like my husband, who are innocent, in secret prisons for years, and the real criminals are roaming our streets with aplomb.”

To see Amina Masood Janjua in action today on the steps of the Supreme Court, or outside the gates of the Awane- Saddar (office of the president), or addressing a human rights delegation at the United Nations in Geneva, as she did earlier this year, is to witness the remarkable transformation of a devoted wife who once contented herself with fussing over her husband and children, painting and writing love poems in her spare time. Amina is now head of the Defense of Human Rights, the group launched by that first protest in 2006, and she has proven herself to be a dynamic activist who understands the utility of harnessing public opinion to support her mission: to win the release of hundreds of men who remain in illegal detention in and around Pakistan— or at least to obtain legal access and representation for them. “We do whatever we can to raise awareness at different levels,” she says. “We stage protests, press conferences, hold seminars and have awareness campaigns.” Recently, in an effort to reach out further, the Defense of Human Rights hosted a painting competition for children to express their views on wrongful arrests, illegal detentions and the poor condition of Pakistani jails.

In Amina, the Defense of Human Rights has the perfect ambassador. Her voice is soft yet persuasive. Her round and slightly cherubic face, framed by her sometimes plain, sometimes patterned hijabs, can turn fierce with determination. By her own admission, the trauma of Masood’s “disappearance” has given her both perspective and purpose in life. “I had no idea about cruelty and injustice in the world. I was living in such happiness, even in childhood. I was a family favorite, and everyone treated me like a princess. Masood was so loving and caring as a husband,” she says. “After experiencing this pain, I’ve changed a lot. I spend most of my hours thinking about injustice in our modern age of technology and advancement, and yet”—Amina’s voice breaks—”at the time we were so desperate, we would just take a few chairs, some snacks for the children and park ourselves outside the parliament, hoping to get some attention. I had no idea that this would mushroom into a national movement when we started.”

Early on in Amina’s quest, her story attracted the attention of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. He took deep interest in the issue of the “disappeared” and directed intelligence agencies to produce the men they had abducted before court to afford them the legal protections they were due under the justice system. His efforts won the enmity of then-President Musharraf, who sacked him in November 2007. The general’s roughshod treatment of the country’s top judge, and the sub-sequent suspension of Chaudhry’s allies in the judiciary, set off a protracted constitutional struggle that resulted in violent street clashes between police and lawyers outraged by Chaudhry’s ouster. Pakistan’s new national government has reinstated some of the judges, but Chaudhry—who has become a potent symbol of democracy in a fractious political climate—remains suspended, along with several other judges.

Amina’s fight has been closely intertwined with the so-called “Lawyers’ Movement,” a fact that is reflected by the high regard many members of the judiciary have for her. Says Fakhruddin Ibrahim, a retired Supreme Court justice who has supported Amina’s cause from the start, “I think half the battle was fought because of her. The lawyers were there to fight the case on legal grounds, but she would assert herself on emotional grounds. Her role was very important in this process, which I believe has been the most important litigation to come before the Supreme Court of Pakistan.”

The issue of “disappearances” has been an extremely volatile one in Pakistan, for hundreds of the missing are from Balochistan, the province that has been at odds with the national government for decades over institutionalized ethnic discrimination, including the aggressive extraction of its natural resources—coal, minerals and natural gas—and poor representation in Islamabad. Several individuals have also gone missing in Sindh Province, where people have similar grievances. Before Amina and her family challenged the country’s seat of power, these families had kept silent, afraid that public demonstrations of their anxiety would result in persecution from various branches of Pakistani intelligence. After her public protest movement began, she says, “All sorts of families started coming to us. I realized we had something in common: We were all merely asking for our rights. So I said, sure, join us.”

“Her leadership in Pakistan, during a time of crisis when hundreds of Pakistanis were ‘disappearing,’ was essential,” says T. Kumar, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for Asia and the Pacific. “It’s very rare to come across someone who is willing to go so far, even when it affects her own family.”

Amina’s vigorous activism, however, has attracted the unwanted attention of the authorities. During a December 2006 rally in Rawalpindi, police officials beat her two sons and partially stripped one of them in public. “My daughter and I were screaming at them to leave them alone. Then my daughter fainted, and I didn’t know what to do—to help her or my sons.” Widespread news coverage resulted in the sacking of junior police officers involved. But Amina insists they were sacrificial lambs for the high-level officers who gave the orders. “I gave an affidavit spelling out their names and ranks. In the end they sacked the wrong guys.”

In September, en route to the United States, her visa was cancelled suddenly— a result, Amina believes, of her growing prominence on the international stage; the cancellation occurred just as she was departing Switzerland after addressing a series of high-level European meetings. “I was at the airport in Geneva, ready to board my plane,” Amina says, “whenI received a phone call from Islamabad. The caller identified himself as Chris Richard from [the] visa section of the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan. He told me, ‘We will deport you if you try to board this plane. We have simply been told to communicate this order to you, and we don’t know why.’”

In many ways the story of Amina’s life with Masood had the trappings of a Pakistani romance novel. She was born in Mardan, in Pakistan’s now-restive northwestern frontier province, in 1964 and spent the afternoons of her childhood scampering across conveyer belts carrying bags of colored sugar in the factory where her father was chief engineer. As a young woman she hoped to become an army medical officer; when she failed to make the cut, she went into the arts, earning her bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in fine arts from Punjab University’s Government College for Women.

Art introduced her to Masood. After university Amina participated in a number of exhibitions hosted by some of the country’s most renowned artists and kept a lookout for a gallery that would exhibit her work. Although Masood earned most of his income at the time from his travel agency, he also owned the Originals Art Gallery in Islamabad. Amina recalls, “When I showed him my art work, he told me he didn’t like it! It was too realistic. He encouraged me to try and use more abstract influences in my paintings, to be more creative with my work.” Later, he bought some of her paintings, and a romance developed. They were married in 1989, after their families met, settled into a three-story house in Westridge—a prominent neighborhood in Rawalpindi, a city of 3 million people— with Masood’s parents, and had three children: Mohammad, Ali and Ayesha. Amina still shares the house with Masood’s father and his mother, both of whom have been her A-team since their son disappeared. They live on the ground floor; Amina shares the middle floor with her daughter, Ayesha; and her sons, Mohammad, 18, and Ali, 17, live on the top floor.

Amina says she has no idea why the authorities would have been interested in Masood, though she says he became religious, began “sporting a beard” and devoted more time to social service after the couple performed the Muslim pilgrimage Hajj in 2000. “These days, just having a beard and wearing shalwar kameez makes us marked people in our own country,” she says.

She is, however, keenly aware that her family has been riven by political forces larger—and more ominous— than even she imagines. “Many of my well-wishers and family members made me realize that what I’m doing is not only unusual but also historic, and it could be very dangerous too—God forbid.” Yet she is driven by the hope that Masood will return.

Last year she wrote, in Urdu:

I’m amazed
That you’re not here
And yet
The sun rises,
The moon shines, and the stars
Twinkle…
…I am amazed
That you are not here
And that lamps of hope are still lit
From my beloved heart
The feeling is still strong
The love of my life,
That you are!
O love of my life,
That you are!

During the last couple of years, Amina has witnessed the return of perhaps 150 “disappeared” individuals. Some of them, after spending years in subterranean and subhuman conditions, were mentally and physically destroyed. She is prepared for a changed Masood once he comes home, though she hopes he is not as incapacitated as one man she knows who—two years after his release—stammers and cannot cross the road for fear.

By Sonya Fatah

Pakistani lawyers and activists stood in the line of fire to defend the rule of law against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. In spite of mass arrests and persecution, they have called the world?s attention to the urgent human rights situation in Pakistan.

When President Gen. Pervez Musharraf asked Iftikhar Mohammad Choudhury to resign on March 9, 2007, he turned an erstwhile obscure man into a people’s hero overnight. Choudhury, the chief justice of Pakistan’s supreme court, had drawn Musharraf’s ire by mounting pointed judicial challenges to the military establishment, and the president erroneously calculated that sacking the justice would be politically expedient.

Instead, Musharraf’s incursion into Pakistan’s judiciary “and Choudhury’s refusal to resign” ignited an accumulation of discontent that had been building in the hushed courtrooms and august law firms of Pakistan for years. Since Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, he has retained nearly absolute control over the government’s executive and legislative bodies. The president’s actions in recent years, including a succession of constitutional amendments, the questionable sale of national assets and policies that led to the “disappearances” of hundreds of citizens, incensed lawyers and judges in Pakistan who have been striving to establish the rule of law in a famously unwieldy political landscape.

The consequences of Choudhury’s defiance played out dramatically before the entire nation: intelligence officers entered the judge’s home, and police barricaded his property and roughed him up on the streets while television cameras rolled. That very day, thousands of nattily dressed lawyers broke their agitated silence and poured into the streets of Pakistan in an unprecedented mass protest. Choudhury’s challenge to Musharraf’s policies fortified the conviction among lawyers and activists that the courts’ technically the only independent arm of Pakistan’s government– could stand up to poor governance and state corruption. Overnight, Choudhury become a symbol around which an entire country could rally.

While technically a parliamentary democracy, Pakistan has been ruled by the military for half of the sixty years since its founding. Supported by a nexus of bureaucratic, feudal and business elites, the military has grown into the most powerful institution in Pakistan. When Musharraf seized power, he presented himself as the father of “enlightened moderation” and economic opportunity. Like other military rulers before him, however, he has instead strong-armed national cohesion out of a fractured, mostly poor population of 160 million. U.S. support, including aid totaling nearly $10 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, has helped fund his increasingly authoritarian tactics.

Spurred by Choudhury’s defiance, lawyers and activists articulated the language of protest against Musharraf’s transgressions “both on the streets and in the media” throughout the latter half of 2007. In doing so, they braved arbitrary arrest, police beatings and the looming threat of imprisonment.

At the forefront of the movement was Munir Malik, then president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. Malik, part of the country’s educated and professional elite, did not have the feudal links or military background necessary to challenge the country’s power structures on his own. Standing alongside thousands of other lawyers, however, he could publicly champion Choudhury’s judicial activism and his commitment to ordinary Pakistanis. Malik appeared on talk shows and penned newspaper editorials –in both English and Urdu–to express his outrage at Musharraf’s blatant constitutional violations and the heavy-handed manner in which the military suppressed the voices of ordinary citizens.

As the chief justice of Pakistan’s highest court, Choudhury “took on issues no one [else] would have touched,” said Malik. He passed an order for the liberation of bonded laborers, for example, and challenged the legality of the government’s sale of national assets. At the top of the judge’s list: the “disappearances” of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Pakistani citizens the government claims are terror suspects; among the missing are students, businessmen and civil servants. A large number have “disappeared”  from the province of Balochistan, where ethnic separatism has bubbled in response to the central government’s aggressive exploitation of the region’s natural resources. Others across the country have been swept up for their alleged support or knowledge of al-Qaeda and Taliban activities. Taken to intelligence sites and reportedly tortured, most of the missing have not been seen since they were abducted. Their families have filed petition after petition in the courts, maintaining the innocence of their relatives and pleading for news.

Shortly before he was dethroned, the chief justice, who had become increasingly assertive about his judicial independence, had begun to examine the role of intelligence agencies in these disappearances. Choudhury boosted the cause of anxious relatives by demanding that the government and intelligence agencies present some 500 missing persons in court to try them lawfully, and several high-profile lawyers took up the cases. Amina Masood Janjua, 35, had been awaiting just such an opportunity to find out what had happened to her husband, Masood Janjua, who was abducted from a station in Rawalpindi in 2005. She was elated when she finally got a date for a missing persons hearing.

But on Nov. 3, Musharraf declared a national state of emergency that was widely interpreted as a move to preempt both the missing persons hearings and a Supreme Court judgment on the legitimacy of his candidacy in the February presidential elections. He suspended the constitution and the Supreme Court, bringing the missing persons proceedings to a grinding halt.

The desolate families of the missing persons” were counting each day for the return of their loved ones,” Janjua lamented. “Once again, their high hopes are shattered.” For two years after her husband’s 2005 “disappearance,” Janjua stood vigil outside the Supreme Court holding a portrait of her husband, a tour operator. She soon learned she was not alone. Other families began to reach out to her, so Janjua started a support group. She recorded in her diary the details of some 500 men who had “disappeared,” many of them taken to illegal detention centers both inside and out of Pakistan, and organized demonstrations. Although Janjua has still not learned what happened to her husband, she has put a face on Choudhury’s judicial initiative and helped build a movement of truth seekers.

As public displays of opposition grew increasingly restive, drawing nationwide scrutiny to the deep contradictions in Musharraf’s policies, the authorities turned their attention to the protest movement. It was dangerous, unwelcome attention. In May 2007, after authorities detained Choudhury at the Karachi airport to prevent him from addressing the Sindh Bar Association, the ensuing demonstration by lawyers descended into mayhem. Police surrounded demonstrators as they tried to march down Karachi’s main street, and armed thugs from a provincial political party allied with Musharraf were caught on video inciting violence and assaulting protesters. Eyewitnesses said police officers stood by and watched the fighting escalate, and at least 41 people were killed as a result. After AAJ TV, one of Pakistan’s independent television channels, aired the footage, its offices were attacked.

The crackdown only hardened the resolve of the movement’s leaders to expose the government’s failings, which in turn ratcheted up the persecution. “Naturally, there was continued harassment,” said Noor Naz Agha, a leading human rights activist. She reported threatening phone calls and police visits to her office and home.

When Musharraf imposed the November state of emergency, he signaled the hard limits of his tolerance for dissent. He instituted a media blackout, expelled three foreign journalists and gave orders for the arbitrary arrest of anyone who might challenge the legitimacy of his action. Agha was picked up and carted off to jail, one of a tiny handful of women to be locked up. “It’s hard to believe,” she wrote in an op-ed published in the United Kingdom in The Guardian. “As a lawyer and a founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, I have visited many prisoners over the years. Now I am one of them.”

The police went after Janjua too, humiliating her teenage son during a protest by stripping him of his pants. But they came down hardest on Malik, whose voice carried weight with both the elite and the masses amid the political turmoil. Immediately after the state of emergency was declared, Malik was taken to Adiala Jail in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, a facility crammed with about 6,500 prisoners despite its holding capacity of 1,700. After a few nights, he was woken by guards and told he was being transferred to Attock Fort, the notorious military prison primarily used by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Pakistani police officers beat lawyers with batons during an anti-governmant rally in Lahore, Pakistan, in March 2007. Lawyers boycotted court proceedings, clashed with riot police and burned and image of President Pervez Musharraf in a countrywide protest against the ouster of the ocuntry’s top judge, Iftikhar Mohannad Choudhury.. © AP Photo/k.M Chaudary

“It was biting cold,” said Malik of the four-hour journey that followed. But he believes the separation was really a scare tactic meant to break his resolve. In the end, he was taken to a local jail where he was strip-searched, given a uniform and escorted to a cell reserved for those who violate prison rules. There, in a space that measured roughly six by five feet, he lay on a slab on the floor, trying to calculate his next steps. There were small comforts. In the absence of intelligence agents, jail staff accorded him respect. “They would whisper in my ear when others were out of earshot that they were with us,” Malik recalled, “not the government.”

The collective realization that vast amounts of U.S. aid has served only to line the coffers of Pakistan’s military apparatus, with no benefit to ordinary Pakistanis, has caused Musharraf’s domestic standing to plummet. So have the government’s military “solutions” in Balochistan. Bolstered by U.S. military support, including equipment meant to support anti-terror operations, the incursions there have killed hundreds of people and stoked the volatile problem of ethnic separatism.

By mid-2007, mainstream public opinion had turned to deep suspicion that Musharraf was using U.S. financial– and political–support to eliminate opposition of any stripe. The botched outcome of Operation Sunrise, a military strike in July against the increasingly militant mullahs of the Islamabad-based Red Mosque, outraged Pakistanis of every social strata. Hundreds of young girls, who lived at the madrassa inside the sprawling campus in the middle of a posh Islamabad neighborhood, were killed during the siege. The government defended the shedding of blood and the loss of life in the capital, claiming that it had tried all other avenues of negotiation with the increasingly aggressive mullahs who ran the madrassa. But most believed that the final death count was a reflection of Musharraf’s confused handling of the Islamist problem in Pakistan? and an indication that the country’s military had turned against its own people to wage an American war.

Although Musharraf announced the nominal end to the 2007 state of emergency on Dec. 15, the movement kept up the fight to prevent the “Old Raj” –as the president is known–from tightening his grip on power. Lawyers began a strike during the national emergency and refused to bring cases. Demonstrations continued. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan secured the release of about 50 detainees. And all the while, the lawyers and activists stood steadfastly behind the chief justice, who managed to communicate with his supporters via smuggled messages while under house arrest.

At press time, opposition parties had won a large majority in the Feb. 18 Parliamentary elections; they will form the new government. The movement was urging Pakistan?s new parliament to take urgent steps to reinstate Choudhury and the judges of the superior judiciary, who were punitively and unconstitutionally dismissed in 2007, and restore the Constitution to its preemergency state.

The lawyers and activists remain committed to do whatever it takes to defend the rule of law. “This is a fight we will take to the end. I am willing to make that choice. I don’t care what it takes,” said Malik. “They will either silence us, or it is them–the repressive forces–that will have to go.”