M.L. is a chemist from Pakistan. He is in his late twenties and comes from a large and prosperous family who have always been close. He has a brother and two sisters. None has ever left Pakistan, nor have they ever wanted to. Since April, M.L. has been in London, applying for asylum, something that he never imagined he would need to do. He is here for no other reason than the fact that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Were he to be sent back to Pakistan, he is certain that he would be killed.
Wrong place, wrong time
His family, whose ancestors are Kashmiri, own land in the Punjab and, whenever able to get away from his own work, M.L. went to help his father run the family farm. He is also a member of a religious human rights organisation called Lashkal-Tahiba. As part of his voluntary work he became involved in a project to collect clothes, shoes and medicines for the poor in Kashmir. His particular job was to transport whatever had been collected to Kashmir and to deliver it to refugee camps.
At the beginning of March 2001, there was a meeting in a town in the border zone of Lahore on the question of Kashmir, says M.L. which I attended. When it had been going on for about half an hour army vehicles appeared and ordered the proceedings to stop. The organisers refused. Then the army attacked the crowd with batons and long sticks. Shots were fired from the platform. In the confusion two army officers were shot and died.
M.L. had been standing on the platform when this happened. After the shooting, the organiser who had fired the shots fled into the crowd and escaped, but M.L. was among the people picked up by the army and taken to the barracks. After preliminary questioning, he was taken to a local police station and handed over to the police. They wanted the name of the man who had fired the shots.
They told me that they knew perfectly well who it was but that they needed an independent witness. I refused to tell them. They began to beat me with their batons, and they kicked me. I went on saying that I didnt know. Then they took me into another room and put a sort of helmet on to my head, with wires attached to it, and began to give me electric shocks. At the same time they attached electrodes to the soles of my feet and the palms of my hand. They kept telling me they would kill me if I didnt give them a name.
The breaking-point
M.L. held out for several days. He was tortured again. The first torturers had been junior police, but on the sixth day an officer with two stars on his shirt came and began to beat him. I was suspended upside down and tied by my ankles to a beam in the ceiling and I was then given more electric shocks. They left me for about two hours at a time hanging in this way, my head about three feet above the ground.
That evening, M.L. could stand it no longer. He told the police the mans name. They drew up a report, which he signed, and he was then freed. Before he left the police station, he was told that if he should fail to appear in court and repeat his sworn statement, then they would arrest him again and this time they would kill him. The next day, shaken and having great difficulty walking, he was able to make his way home. He heard that the man whose name he had given had been arrested.
The following day, a group of men arrived at his home. These were the relations of the man now in custody, who was well known in the area. They told M.L. that if he gave evidence against the man in court, he would be killed. M.L. was now in an impossible position. Whether he spoke out or not, he was sure that he would be killed. His parents persuaded him to leave Pakistan. With extreme reluctance, he accompanied his uncle to Karachi, who contacted an agent and paid to have him taken abroad.
Crooked path of migration
All this time, my injuries were not healing. My ankles didnt seem to work properly after the torture, and the electric shocks had left me with terrible headaches and very confused. I had pains that started in my forehead, travelled over my head and down into my spine. I fell down a lot.
The agent began by taking M.L. by plane to somewhere in China. He never discovered where. Since his condition continued to worsen, he was kept in a house. He never went out. Eventually, his health was judged sufficiently better for him to move on. He made several journeys all the while in the hands of the agent, finally reaching Britain via Paris. During all this time, he was kept with other people bound for Europe with the help of the same agent. He knows that he was held for a while in Paris, before being put onto a train for the UK.
Back home
In Pakistan civil and political rights have continued to be under severe pressure in the years following the bloodless military coup of October 1999, and still further in the months since 11 September. The military government of General Pervez Musharraf has moved to strip the judiciary of much of its power, while political activity of all kinds has been suppressed through the banning of rallies, raids on party offices and the detention of dissidents and opposition party members. The results of these infringements on individuals like M.L. are devastating.
