gori in karachi

Sipte had just rented a gorgeous art deco apartment overlooking Frere Hall (that steepled building to the left). This was about a week before I left Karachi, and the monsoon was rolling in. It was one of the few days, in all my time there, that I ever saw the white sky break into clouds. Black kites encircle the city constantly, and people feed them raw meat off bridges. It’s a prayer and offering to this beautiful, ominous city.

The kites are the mascots of Karachi. They’re birds of prey. Parsis rely on them to eat the corpses atop the Tower of Silence.

Sipte’s apartment is on a busy street, but late at night, the traffic thins. American chain hotels, the Marriot and the Sheraton, rise above the park, and Karachi seems completely anonymous. It’s like a prototype or idea of a city, rather than any specific city.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 daily. 

My documents were eventually returned when a sub-editor called security to have me removed for yelling in the newsroom The security guard told the editor he wasn’t going to lie to me any longer and to hand over my passport. The company had also been lying about the validity of my visa in order to restrict my movement. 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 sub-editor, was holding the passport in her locked desk drawer on publisher Bilal Lakani’s orders. Kamal Siddiqi, managing editor 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  documents. Their plan, as relayed to a subeditor by Kamal Siddiqi, was to “return her passport ten minutes before she got on the plane”—to go back to the US.

Now, why would 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. If not, I told him I was ready to explore other opportunities in the country. He assured me that they wanted me to stay. But from that moment on, accomplishing anything at Express grew incredibly difficult. I was denied translators, transportation, bylines and ultimately my stipend. I kept going through the proper channels, scheduling meetings with the editor and the publisher to 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, 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, the Ministry of Interior had it, the Islamabad bureau had it, etc. They offered a variety of excuses.

I realized something was up quickly and became increasingly insistent about my passport, contacting U.S. and Pakistani officials. After days of phone calls, I knew for sure that my passport was being held by someone at Express.

Somehow, the higher-ups at Express thought, because they didn’t want me to work for them or work for anyone else, that justified the unethical and criminal act of withholding my documents. And I am convinced that many, many people — and particularly all the senior editors and high level reporters — at the Karachi bureau knew about it. 

IHT, are you comfortable lending your masthead to a newspaper this corrupt, run by executives driven by ego and propaganda rather than facts? Because my naivete is my own, but your affiliation is part of what fueled my unwarranted trust in The Express Tribune and those who staff it.

Yep, I am. Copying and pasting articles from word docs on my laptop… I posted the unedited version of my story about the Thari boy. Here’s the Express version: http://tribune.com.pk/story/216076/charged-under-the-arms-act-thari-teen-disappears-into-indian-prison-system/

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.

The fan stirs the breeze in a small room at the Human Rights Commission Pakistan. It’s the final day of World Comic’s grassroots workshop on tolerance, and 28 participants, aged 12 to 40, are busy with their display.

It’s a grand affair involving tape, scissors, posters and twine. The participants — students, teachers, graphic designers and office clerks — have spent three days illustrating personal stories and learning the basics of comic communication. Their comic-speak has grown increasingly sophisticated. English words like visual script, ‘foreground’ and ‘long-shot’ pepper Urdu conversations.

The room resounds with laughter and chatter, blending into the din of Khadda market. Students snap pictures with their phones and discuss the nuances of specific comics. Despite the fact that a variety of religions, geographies, ethnicities and economic classes are represented here, there is palpable camaraderie.

“We encourage them to write their own stories in their own language,” said Nida Shams, a full-time volunteer for World Comics Network Shams. “We taught the process of writing, drawing and inking, so now they have what we call comic wall posters.”

Participants are encouraged to post on bus stops, electric poles and university campuses as a means of owning their public sphere. The posters explore issues such as religious and ethnic discrimination, religious hypocrisy, street violence, political and media criticism and Pakistan/India relations.

Keep reading.

THARPARKER: Jumun, a white-haired, leather-skinned farmer belonging to the Thar Desert’s Bhil tribe, described his youngest son, Pehjal Jumun, as mentally unstable.  “His mind would start spinning, and he would be angry for awhile. He would refuse to eat, cry for no reason. Then he would become alright again,” said Jumun.  

 On May 17, 2006, Pehlaj was a loving but moody 13-year-old, attending school and nursing Bollywood ambitions in his tiny hometown of Diplo. That evening, he quarreled with his parents and stormed out of the house. At the time, neither Jumun nor Mulah realized that it might be the last time they ever saw their son.

Jumun has seven children, ranging in age from18 to 35. His daily life is an agglomeration of the hardships familiar to almost all who dwell in Tharparker District: resources are scarce, water is precious and healthcare is primitive. Pehlaj should most likely be medicated for the seizures he experiences, but a conventional doctor was beyond Jumun’s finances and his education.

“We took Pehlaj to a Sufi pir. He said to give him lots of love,” Jumun said. For the most part, Jumun and Mulah claimed their home life was peaceful and happy.

“Our son was fond of studying, and we all used to take care of each other,” said Mulah.

Initially she and Jumun didn’t worry. Pehlaj took no food or water—they were sure he’d be back soon. But when the night passed and he didn’t return, his family and neighbors began to search. Two days later, a khoji, or foot-tracker, discovered evidence suggesting that Pehlaj had crossed the Indian border, some 30 kilometers from his home.

Now Jumun worries about constantly. For five years and two months, his son has been languishing in an Indian prison. Authorities on both sides of the Indian/Pakistan border seem unable to predict when or if Pehlaj will return home.

“I have cried for so long that I have no tears left,” said Mulah, hiding her face behind her pink dupatta. One of her eyes is visibly murky, a congenital condition that she thinks has been aggravated by her incessant weeping.

The Pakistani Rangers contacted the Indian border police immediately, but they denied any knowledge of the missing teenager. They repeated this claim four times over the next 15 days, at subsequent white flag meetings.

There are thousands of illegal border crossings each year. Some of these are purposeful, but many are inadvertent. Hundreds of these crossings are committed by children under 18, who may end up imprisoned under hostile conditions. Both India and Pakistan intermittently release these detainees. Even last week, India returned 11 Pakistani teens, most of who were fisherman. The teens had been jailed for periods ranging from four months to two years.

When human rights activists get involved, it speeds up the bureaucratic process. Ateeq, a 12-year-old from Lahore, was released in March 2010, after hopping a train that he didn’t realize would take him across the border. He was trying to evade his father, whom he feared would punish him for a day spent kite-flying. An Indian advocate discovered the boy in a juvenile prison in Hoshiarpur and, with the help of various aid groups, Ateeq was released within two months.

In October 2010, 16-year-old Nauman Arshad, also from Lahore, was released after eight months in another juvenile facility. He was subjected to prolonged interrogations where he ultimately confessed, falsely, to entering India as a suicide bomber. The truth was, Arshad had fought with his mother one morning, then taken a bus to the border instead of going to school. He crossed on foot, still dressed in his school uniform, with a pocketful of almonds and a chemistry book in hand. His release came after Human Rights International took up his case.

Pehlaj has been less fortunate. Four years after his disappearance, in 2010, Indian officials finally admitted to holding the boy. An International Red Cross worker visited Pehlaj in Jammu prison, confirming his identity and sending a letter to his family: “Dear Father, I hope everything is alright there. I wrote some letters but unfortunately, I did not get a response,” Pehlaj wrote.

According to a 2005 Red Cross report which became public via wikileaks, detainees at Jammu have undergone electric shock, extreme stretching, suspension from the ceiling, crushing, water torture and sexual assault. Detainees suspected of being militants are routinely killed. The report was taken from 177 prison visits and 1,491 detainee interviews, the majority of which were obtained privately. Eight-hundred-and-fifty two inmates from Jammu and other Kashmiri prisons reported mistreatment. The report has been disputed by India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

While first-hand inmate accounts place conditions as somewhat better in Pakistani prisons, there is still cause for alarm. In1999, Human Rights Watch reported that Pakistani prisoners, including children, are routinely hung upside down, beaten with straps and subjected to other forms of torture.

“Jails are bad enough as is,” said Fawad Sherwani, a representative of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi. “If there is animosity between countries, harsh treatment is inevitable unless the jails are well monitored.”

According to Sherwani, there are currently 646 Pakistanis in Indian jails. India released 300 Pakistani inmates in 2010, and so far 110 have been released in 2011. In the last two years, six Pakistanis have had premature heart attacks in Indian jail cells. The deaths were filed as “due to natural causes.” 

A representative at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad said that statistics for Indian prisoners held in Pakistani jails are not available.

For Jumun and Mulha, the nightmare is ongoing. At some point, the allegation against Pehlaj was changed from illegal border-crossing to the more serious charge of violating the1959 Arms Act. This change probably coincided with his on-record move from the border town of Gujarat to the Jammu jail.

Sherwani doesn’t know the basis of these new allegations, but Pehlaj’s trial has been perpetually delayed.  “He could be tried next week or in ten years,” Sherwani said. “The charges are serious, but Pehlaj himself is not very important in the scheme of the Indian justice system.”

Currently Pehlaj has no lawyer of his own, although at trial he will have access to one of the High Commission’s staff lawyers. Sherwani said that the High Commission is attempting to monitor Pehlaj’s treatment, but access to the prison has been repeatedly denied. “Years pass and we are given no information. Prisoners can be detained after their sentences. False accusations are made and they have no defense. In some cases, a prisoner freed by a court order is not even released,” he added.

A representative from the Pakistani consulate has interviewed Pehlaj once, for 10 minutes, in half a decade. The interview took place in March 2010, and at the time Pehjal appeared “mentally sharp without any signs of trauma or deficiency,” Sherwani noted.

That visit, a little over a year ago, is the last word that Jamun and Mulah have on their son.  Jamun keeps careful records about Pehlaj’s case, collecting scraps of paper in a battered blue folder. He wonders about his son’s health and mental condition and prays that one day he will see him again. “My son is in jail and miserable, begging for help. Not one day goes by that I don’t think of him,” said Jamun.  

Clean, quiet morning?

Apologies issued and for the past few hours, most of the violence seems to have been directed at toys and tires. But I wonder, is this how it’s going to be, off and on, till Ramadan? Surely it’ll stop then?

Or will it just morph, sect vs sect instead of party vs party?

that unleashed more slaughter in Sindh:

“If [MQM-Haqiqi leader] Afaq Ahmed is a criminal, then [MQM leader] Altaf Hussain is 100-times a bigger criminal,” bellowed Mirza. “Afaq is the second-biggest political prisoner in Pakistan after President Asif Ali Zardari…This province was here for centuries before you [Urdu-speaking migrants] came to this city hungry and naked [after Partition in 1947],” said Mirza. “You will divide Sindh over my dead body.”

*Signs of intelligent life (at least in this instant): “Mirza made the remarks at a dinner hosted by Awami National Party (ANP) leader Shahi Syed. Interestingly, when Mirza first came forward to speak to the media, Syed attempted to stop him – and, once unable, requested the media ‘to not ask sensitive questions’

from Express Tribune

SchimiHusseyn Shumaila Hussain   “AltafHussain is 100times criminal than AfaqAhmed” is this statement justifies to burn #Karachi  & kill it’s people? #MQM

Saad_Haroon Saad Haroon   We are not Sindhi or Mohajir or Pathan, the amount of people we sacrifice in #Karachi  everyday, we must be Aztec. Time to build a pyramid.

WajihaShamim Wajiha Shamim Slept and woke up with gunshot lullaby… 

Saba_Imtiaz Saba Imtiaz   Exams cancelled at KU, public transport union to not operate buses, channels estimating 7 to 9 people killed so far.

FurhanHussain Furhan Hussain   So I hear #MQM’s burning their home again? Why don’t they set themselves on fire one of these days? 

akchishti akchishti   #Karachi  for not opening today would loose Rs.12-14 billion ($140-160 million USD) business.     (my note…where did numbers come from?)

sabahat24 Sabahat Zakariya   I have 2 kind of students. 1:Nalaaeq & ready to maro maaro at every insult. 2. Who laugh at slurs, work hard & get into Ivy Leagues

One party, three dinners with friends (and one of those, sidewalk seating!), three reporting trips (safe stories, of course. sigh, always safe stories), one trip to the bazaar and the grocery and the pirated DVD supercenter later…

(btw, think the “new” body count is actually up to 10)