On October 10, 2013, Habibullah was picked up by namalum afraad, or ‘unknown persons’, from his shop in Rawalpindi. He returned home five years later. Denied access to his family, the courts, and any legal counsel, he had spent these five years imprisoned in a basement cell because he was suspected of having connections with Islamic militants. Throughout this time his wife had protested for his release and regularly appeared at the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIOED).
Ali Asghar Bangalzai, a Baloch political activist, was first picked up in 1999 and released 14 days later. According to his nephew, Nasarullah Baloch, who heads Voice for the Baloch Missing Persons, Bangalzai was abducted again on October 12, 2002. It was only in 2010, eight years after Bangalzai had ‘disappeared’, that an FIR regarding his disappearance was finally lodged on the order of the Supreme Court. Bangalzai remains missing to date, along with many other Baloch students and activists.
Dr Idris Khattak went ‘missing’ on November 13, 2019. Two days later, ‘unknown men’ picked up his laptop and hard drives from his home. Seven months post-disappearance, it was revealed that he was in the custody of MI (Military Intelligence) and was charged, under the Official Secret Act of 1923, for sharing information about the 2009 military operation in Swat with an Irish national.
Khattak was a researcher who had worked on ‘missing persons’ cases and had done consultancy and research work in non-governmental, human rights organisations. Associated with nationalist politics, he was active on social media prior to his ‘disappearance’. The last post he had shared on Facebook was, in fact, a biting poem on missing persons; he openly supported Pashtun Tahfuz Movement (PTM) and was critical of the then ruling party, PTI, and its backing by the military establishment. Khattak was tried in a military court, despite being a civilian, and was convicted of ‘espionage’ and sentenced to ‘14 years of rigorous imprisonment’.
While the hunt for ‘foreign spies’ and conspirators, separatists-nationalists and suspected militants and their alleged collaborators continues, several of Khan’s party’s workers and parliamentarians have gone missing since the fall of PTI and Imran Khan from grace; some have mysteriously reappeared professing new loyalties. These soft disappearances and reappearances colour PTI’s narrative of persecution, but in their ahistorical narrative, what is conveniently forgotten by its sympathisers, is that not only did disappearances consistently take place when PTI was in power, often those persons went missing who criticised Imran Khan’s rule (like journalist Matiullah Jan who was abducted by namalum afraad, outside the school where his wife taught in Islamabad).
Disappearances have evolved along a spectrum that has continued to expand for the last two decades. From a tacitly tolerated practice and a tool of necessity, they have become the norm for disciplining dissent in Pakistan. The growing spectrum of ‘missing persons’ – nationalists, lawyers, political workers, students, social media and NGO activists, academics, bureaucrats, and journalists – illustrates how disappearances have emerged from a sphere of exception, legitimised to fight militants (and their accessories) and aid counter-terrorism operations, to silence urban middle-class critics and protestors on social media. Sanctioned by General Musharraf in the early 2000s to capture and transfer foreign and local militants to US custody for bounties and appeasement, the practice took an alarmingly new turn under subsequent democratic governments, with the addition of new categories of adversaries to ‘missing persons’.
Effective as the term is to raise alarm and mobilise protest, its blanket use flattens ethnic, regional, political, and class differences – that is, those with an outright existential ‘enemy’ position vis a vis the state versus those who have had a historically complicated relationship with it – as to how, in its violence, the state deals with its citizens differently. While some are returned a few days, weeks, months or even years later, others are tortured killed with impunity, and their bodies found on roadsides.
It would be naïve to deny the potential of external and internal threats – even though suspects are often hyperbolically created, fear is spun, and the violence and repression are justified through them – there is sufficient evidence that implicates state security agencies in the missing persons cases, and it is publicly available. This evidence includes CCTV footage, court documents, eyewitness accounts, and family testimonies. Several missing persons have been traced back to the custody of intelligence services and/or to the internment centers run by military and paramilitary forces. Those who have returned/were freed, allege that they were psychologically and physically tortured in custody.
These internment centers were established in the former FATA and PATA under the Action in Aid of Civil Power Regulation 2011. In its appeal against the Peshawar High Court ruling of 2019 that declared these centers unconstitutional, the state, invoking Article 245 of the Constitution, argued that a High Court cannot exercise jurisdiction in areas where military forces are called upon to aid civilian power. The families of the missing persons allege that these centers are holding many ‘missing persons’, while the government says they are educating and helping them reintegrate into society.
Historians of late colonial rule in India tell us that camps or internment centers were first established in the subcontinent by the British. This was a period marked, on the one hand, by the increasing participation of Indian middle-classes in constitutional processes of reform and representation and, on the other, the state’s repression of nationalist, and particularly of militant-nationalist politics by means of emergency laws.
As militant attacks against the colonial state increased and militant politics spread across India, ‘conspiracy against the state’ became a key concern of police and intelligence services. This resulted in the emergence of a new category of incarceration: the security detainee, a category of confinement that the British had borrowed from the French colonials.
From 1919-1947, through a series of repressive laws, (such as the Defense of India Act 1919 and 1939), the colonial government produced categories of legal subjects, ranging from political to security prisoners. Detention centers were set up to hold ‘security prisoners’ and special tribunals were created to try them. They were called ‘detenues’ – the same parlance deployed by the judges in missing persons cases 70 years later in Pakistan.
The Peshawar High Court’s rulings on the internment centers and in missing persons’ cases are exceptional to the usual deference that the higher courts tend to offer military and intelligence services. Although the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry took a keen interest in these cases when they first emerged in the early 2000s, overall, the higher courts have proved mostly helpless, most often opting for the deferral route.
The last notable ruling in these cases was delivered by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in 2016, when it ordered the government to pay an allowance to the families of missing persons. This order, however, is yet to be implemented. In another instance, the IHC had fined senior civilian bureaucrats for their failure to trace missing persons; a larger bench later suspended these fines.
On the eve of the country’s 76 birthday, the spectre of disappearances traverses across Pakistan, from Baluchistan to Karachi to KPK, while new dissenters and critics are steadily added to the ‘missing persons’ category. It is ironic that dissenters, like the Pashtun youth mobilised by the PTM – who non-violently protest the political-economic conditions under which disappearances have taken place and who peacefully resist the extraction of natural resources from their areas, the violence of militancy, counterinsurgency, and extrajudicial killings – are the ones labelled ‘conspirators’ and ‘enemies of the state’.
The continuing practice of disappearing citizens and the amendment of laws in order to provide a legal cover to them, is a stark reminder of how far we have regressed, and of how we have failed to free the Pakistani state from the logic of colonial rule that naturalised and normalised violence against its subjects as an essential part of statecraft, and as a necessity in times of ‘crises’.
The writer is a political and legal anthropologist.
