I have other Tumblr blogs, too….
Just thought I’d mention these, though they have nothing to do with being a gori in Karachi…
My daily photoblog, recently revived…
and the blog that complements my Etsy vintage shop, Kissing Cousin…
Follow me!
That is, follow me in America here.
As y’all probably figured, I’m not posting as much here anymore because I’ve made it back to the US. But I will continue to post pics and thoughts from my time in Pakistan on my wordpress blog. Just a heads up, and a thank you to everybody that followed me here! Hope to see you over at wordpress!
For now, I’ll leave you with a couple of pics from Lahore. Had a great time there, especially the first day. Wandered the old walled city solo, posed for at least a hundred cell phone “snaps,” had tea in a handful of homes, squeezed into one of those jittery metal kiddie ferris wheels (those things are WAY more exciting than you’d think!) and temporarily joined a biker gang. True story.
Another treat…ADP’s final music video, with a minor cameo from gori-with-a-camera :)
Balochistan, Pakistan, 1981
(Credit: Steve McCurry)
Roaming
I’ll probably never get all my Pakistan pictures posted but after airing my grievances, I think it’s time to serenade you with pretty things.
These were taken on a lazy Sunday afternoon in mid-April, when I was strolling Gilgit’s downtown.
Copy and pasting now, Express?
Or did this story go on the wires? Even if it did, where is Issam Ahmed’s byline? I’m with all the perplexed commentors who are wondering how Express was able to copy and paste Christian Science Monitor’s story directly…the only explanation is if this story was made available via a subscription wire service, and when I used to troll wires for Express, I never came across a CS Monitor story. Or maybe Express requested permission from the CS Monitor, and it was granted? But I’m disinclined to give Express the benefit of the doubt these days
As an attempt to regain credibility via “outing” itself, this tactic would have been much more effective had it not been posted the day AFTER CS Monitor broke the story…
Read Express’s hack job here.
Express Tribune lies.
I’ve had firsthand dealings with the Karachi-based paper, Express Tribune, and its systemic unethical practices. Obviously the paper’s dishonesty goes way, way beyond illegally holding and lying about an American employee’s passport and visa.
Read what the Christian Science Monitor has to say about Express Tribune/Express News:
US funding for Pakistani journalists raises questions of transparency
EXPRESS TRIBUNE STOLE MY PASSPORT
Dear International Herald Tribune/ Global New York Times:
I know that your association with The Express Tribune is a business deal that essentially gets your papers printed and distributed on someone else’s tab, but do you really want to lend your name to this?
While on a journalistic fellowship sponsored by Express, I willingly handed over my passport to an Express editor who was to obtain a visa extension for me. But once the visa was settled, the company refused to return my passport. For at least five weeks after the extension was granted, Express withheld my documents and lied about their whereabouts, despite my requesting their return on the phone, in person and via email every single day. It wasn’t until I contacted the US Consulate and threatened a police report that my documents were returned.
And who got them back? Luckily, the web co-editor called security to have me removed for yelling in the newsroom, and security guy told the editor he wasn’t going to lie to me any longer, to hand over my passport.The company had also been lying about the validity of my visa to restrict my movement throughout Pakistan. Both an editor and the publisher told me in writing that my visa ended on July 31, so I needed to leave the country. When my passport was returned, I was able to see that my visa is valid till October 2011.
Turns out many, many people at Express knew about this. Faria Syed, web co-editor, was holding the passport in her desk drawer on publisher Bilal Lakani’s orders. Kamal Siddiqi, managing editor, knew about this and was complicit, as was Mahim Maher, the city editor, who told another newsroom employee that I am really “overreacting.”
Despite the fact that journalism is supposed to be a bastion of truth and free information, The Express Tribune lied to me and illegally withheld my travel documents. Their plan, according to Kamal Siddiqi, was to “return her passport ten minutes before she got on the plane”—to go back to the US.
Now, why did they do this? Kamal explained that as well: my official fellowship ended a few months ago, but I wanted to stay in Pakistan. My obligation to Express was up. I went to Kamal and asked him if they wanted to keep me. Otherwise, I told him I was willing to explore other opportunities. He assured me that they wanted me to stay. But from that moment on, accomplishing anything at Express grew incredibly tough. I was denied translators, transportation, assignments and ultimately my stipend. I kept going through the proper channels, scheduling meetings with the editor and even the publisher to try and figure out what was happening. Kamal later admitted that Express didn’t want the liability of keeping me in Pakistan, but they also didn’t want me to work for a competing Pakistani publication. They were trying to sabotage my experience so that I would choose to go home. When I showed no signs of letting up, when I begin to use friends as translators and find my own transportation (since they led me to believe it was a resource issue), I was falsely notified by Express that my visa had expired and I needed to leave the country. They would handle the travel arrangements (at my expense, of course), but I couldn’t have my passport just yet because the travel agent needed it, etc.—they offered a variety of flimsy excuses.
I realized something was up, so I arranged my own travel and became increasingly insistent about my passport. That’s when my dealings with all power players at Express grew heated and nasty, and that’s when everything came out. Express didn’t want me to work for them. They just didn’t want me to work for anyone else, and to them this somehow this justified the unethical and criminal act of holding my documents without my consent. Rather than tell me that they would prefer me to leave the country and not take any other jobs in Karachi (and there were several offers), they lied and broke the law.
I was trying to work with Express out of some sense of loyalty, because they sponsored my original visa. I was naive enough to think that the difficulties I faced were merely the general woes of working at as an expat in a developing country at a very young newspaper and not reflective of a particularly unethical business m.o.
So I ask again, IHT, are you comfortable lending your masthead to a paper this immature and inexperienced, run by executives who are so blatantly petty and ego-driven? Because my naivete is my own, but your affiliation is part of what fueled my unwarranted trust in The Express Tribune and those that run it.
To the person who’s just accused me of copying and pasting
Yep, I am. Copying and pasting articles from word docs on my laptop, copying and pasting the unedited versions of articles I wrote. Here’s the Express version of the Thari boy story: http://tribune.com.pk/story/216076/charged-under-the-arms-act-thari-teen-disappears-into-indian-prison-system/
Note the byline, please.
What the bullets know: the forensics of Khi violence
photos and text by Cheree Franco
KARACHI: On July 17, Taj Muhammad stood in the doorway of a burnt house. Melted bits of a desktop computer and a sewing machine were visible in the rubble. A few days earlier, the house had looked like hundreds of others in Orangi town’s Aligarh Colony, where tiny alleys lead to a jumble of concrete walled, partially open-air squatter dwellings. A street vendor by profession, Muhammad held a pan of spent bullets at arms length, displaying remnants from the previous week’s riots. Over the course of four days, 100 Karachites were killed and countless more injured in street violence. Muhammad’s three brothers are among the dead. One of them had six children.
“ANP shoots from there,” Muhammad’s neighbor said, indicating flat rooftops and high windows. “MQM fights on the ground.”Nearby walls are pock-mocked from bullets, and although the situation seemed stable on a bright Sunday morning, echoes of occasional gunfire ruffled the truce.
The Sindh Police Department blames its inability to halt Karachi’s ethnic clashes on a lack of resources. But according to Munir Ahmed Sheikh, assistant inspector general of forensics, police are getting better at determining perpetrators through scientific means.
“We’ve identified six weapons used in target killings from their spent bullets,” said Sheikh. “This is important because you come to know which groups are operating in the city, or which groups have actually committed crimes. Particular groups use particular weapons because they get financing from the same source.”
Sheikh is not at liberty to reveal which weapons have been identified, nor who those groups may be. He is unable to say if confiscated weapons have been matched to shells plucked off the streets in the past six weeks of heightened Karachi violence.
“All I can tell you is the procedure,” Sheikh said. “Bullets are recovered from the field by investigation officers, who send them to us. The bullets are then photographed and grouped according to weapon, so that we know how many weapons we’re dealing with. Then we use a comparison microscope to obtain unique data on the bullets.”
The residents of Aligarhsay that no police have come to collect their shells. If police were in the area the night of July 8, they kept out of sight as bullets flew, fires raged in 30 homes, and the contents of eight Pashtun-owned fabric shops hardened into black fossil.
When shells do make it into police custody, experts can usually determine if the involved weapons were obtained legally or illegally. “We only issue licenses for bolt-rifles and handguns,” saidMuhammad Riazuddin Qureshi, additional secretary of the Sindh Home Department. “Licenses for automatic weapons are stringently controlled and come from the federal government.” So if a street bullet was fired from an automatic weapon, that weapon is almost certainly illegal.
An examiner can identify the weapon type from any bullet. But specific data from a single weapon must be matched to a specific bullet in order to confirm weapon identification. This identification is possible only if that weapon has entered police custody long enough to have its data collected. Each bullet has unique qualities—striker pin, breech and chamber marks—which are essentially a gun’s fingerprint. Like people, no two guns have the same fingerprints.
According to Sheikh, the bullet’s data is entered in a database and a report is filed. Then the bullet is returned to the police branch where it was originally recovered, and sometimes it’s introduced as court evidence. When weapons are recovered, they are fired in a chamber, and the resulting shells undergo the same procedure.
“All we do is examine material and send it back. Only the court and the investigating officer know the details of the report, because it could prejudice the case investigator,” said Sheikh.
The largest ballistics database has over 200,000 entries and contains stats on bullets used in street crime. High profile murders go into a three-month-old target-killings database. There is also a third database, configured to match bullets to weapons. Forensics receives 20 to 25 bullets a day, including those retrieved from the autopsies of gunshot fatalities. If a bullet matches a weapon, Forensics contacts the Home Department to find out if the weapon is registered.
“This is important for the report, because punishment of the same crime is different if committed by legal versus an illegal weapon,” said Sheikh.
Home Department records show that 13,802 guns have been legally registered in Karachi from January 1 to July 31 of this year, up from 9,794 guns registered in all of 2010. “But criminals don’t want to be tracked, so of course they don’t use registered weapons,” said Qureshi.
Karachi has a thriving underground arms trade. Presently the Home Department is taking steps to make forgeries more difficult and national background checks standard for every license applicant, but Qureshi admits that it will be years before these improvements are fully implemented. “And by that time, officers tend to get transferred or promoted elsewhere,” he added.
To register a weapon, a Sindh resident must have a NIC and either tax returns or utility bills—“because in Pakistan, 97% of people don’t pay taxes,” Qureshi noted—as well as an application vetted by his or her local supervisory police district. At this time, background checks happen only at the local level.
“We issue one license per weapon,” explained Qureshi. “It costs Rps4,500 to renew each license, each year. Legally you cannot even own a weapon after its license expires. You have to turn it in to your arms dealer or the Home Department. But since people tend to lock up their weapons and stay away or out of country, the Home Department takes a benign view and avoids prosecuting these license holders.” New weapons licenses have a built-in carry permit for loaded handguns, but older licenses require an additional permit.
Under Benazir Bhutto’s cabinet, possession of firearms was banned in1992. Musharraf overturned the ban in 1999. According to a 2010 paper published by the Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi, the city’s violent ethnic crime peaked between ‘93 and ‘96, directly following Bhutto’s gun ban, “with the rate of violent deaths to be 13 per 100,000 (deaths).” This Collective used stats from Human Rights Commission Pakistan’s annual reports.
But in Sheikh’s opinion, “street violence in Karachi is worse now than it’s even been. Maybe that’s because in the 1990s, there were more knives and now there are more guns, and or maybe the media hype contributes. Maybe we just didn’t know how bad it was then. In the 90s we had only PTV.”
There were between two and three hundred murders in Karachi in July, and thus far, August figures seem to be following suit. “Police can’t respond swiftly in an emergency. What do you want the people to do? If the state is failing to protect its people, then you can’t blame them for wanting a weapon for personal protection,” said Qureshi.
