| July 1, 2003 | Tuesday | Rabi-us-Sani 30, 1424 |
Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
Frisking without sense
A damning indictment
PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf has done well to the Punjab governor to complete the creation of public safety commissions (PSCs) at the district and provincial levels as required under the Police Act (1861) Amendment Order (2002). So far only 50 per cent of such commissions have been formed in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan but none in the NWFP. None of the big cities have them yet, nor the apex-level Safety Commissions have been put in place in any of the provinces. Where the PSCs have been formed, they are virtually inactive and powerless in the face of strong resistance from the police department, which wants to retain all its powers under the old and new laws without being held accountable for its acts and omissions. The president’s directive has been necessitated by the refusal of international donor agencies to fund the proposed police reforms unless a public accountability mechanism, in the form of the PSCs, is put in place. The federal government, for its part, has also failed to constitute a national public safety commission so far.
One other important component of the amended Police Act (1861), which relates to the separation of crime investigation from other police functions such as crime control and prevention, has also not been implemented. Since the promulgation of the amendment last August, there has been a marked increase in police excesses across the country. Reports of serious violations of citizens’ rights on the part of the police — from harassment to extortion, midnight raids on houses on ground (real or fake) of arrests of suspects, arrest and detention of citizens without warrants, staging of fake police encounters and custodial killings — continue to mount. There have even been instances in recent months of criminal elements within the law enforcement agencies forcing their way into people’s homes at unearthly hours with the intent to rape, abduct or rob innocent citizens. The unbridled powers vested in the police force under the new amendment, thus, make a mockery of law and justice in the absence a monitoring and accountability mechanism like the public safety commission.
These bodies at the district, provincial and federal levels having representation from a cross section of civil society, elected representatives, responsible government officials and the judiciary, is the right mechanism to ensure responsible conduct by the police force. A similar system, introduced in Japan as part of the greater political, administrative and social reforms carried out in the post-Second World War years, has proved remarkably effective in improving the tone and quality of law enforcement and crime control. In our case, in spite of endless talk of reforms, transformation and restructuring of the police set-up, law enforcement continues riddled with rough-and-ready methods, excesses, corruption and plain apathy in critical areas of crime control and prevention. It is time all the four provincial governments and the federal government implemented the provisions of the Police Act Amendment so that things begin to look up and international donor agencies can release the funds promised for carrying out the long-overdue police reforms. The need is patent for bringing some semblance of sanity to the chaotic, inefficient and corrupt operational pattern of the police — made largely so by the apathy, indifference and ineptitude on the part of the authorities at various levels.
ANYONE with a sense of propriety will be shocked to learn that Iraqi women are being frisked by men belonging to the US-led coalition forces. The revelation was contained in a press statement by some Shia clerics belonging to Hawza, a leading Islamic school, protesting against this objectionable practice. If true, the report is bound to cause revulsion not only in Iraq and other Muslim countries but all across the civilized world. Even the emancipated among Western women will feel horrified at the thought of being subjected to body search by men; to expect women in chador to submit to such a horrid process speaks of the occupying forces’ utter ignorance of the moral and cultural values of the country they are occupying. If their paranoid concern about their own safety requires even women to be searched for arms, that task could be entrusted to women soldiers belonging to the coalition forces. Asking men to do this job is downright foolish and thoughtless and goes against the grains of common sense and the values societies throughout the world observe and uphold. Hawza is located in Najaf in southern Iraq, and it was in the country’s southern part that six British soldiers were recently killed in an attack. The obvious conclusion is that there is a change in the British commanders’ policy in the wake of the killing of the soldiers.
Britain has a long experience of dealing with Muslim peoples, and it is inconceivable that its field commanders should approve of such a policy by its troops in Iraq. It is quite possible that some British soldiers, angered by the killing of their colleagues, resorted to this form of frisking as a show of their might and power and to humiliate the Iraqi people for their defiant spirit. If so, it is churlish reaction, which is bound to alienate the Iraqi people even more and invite a backlash from them and provoke even angrier reaction from all over the Muslim world over the occupation forces’ weird actions and proclivities in Iraq. Unless stopped at once, search of Iraqi women by male soldiers could lead to greater trouble and harassment for occupation forces, including organized attacks on them.
A new report by a Washington-based think tank has confirmed what many independent observers have been saying all along about America’s policy of detaining hundreds of US citizens and immigrants (many from Pakistan) in the aftermath of 9/11. It says that arresting so many people, most of them American citizens and with strong ties with the local communities, often on minor visa violations, is proving counterproductive and ill-advised. If anything, it will make the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism even more difficult because America’s sizable Muslim and Arab communities are being alienated by such actions. Growing mistrust between these minorities and American law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, will make it difficult for actual terrorists or criminals to be tracked down. Authored by two former heads of America’s immigration service and a lawyer who worked for the government in several important terrorism cases, the report points out that the domestic crackdown after 9/11 has not led to any major success in the detection of terrorism cases or arrests of actual terrorists.
Confirming the fears of several opponents of this unjust policy of detaining people for months without informing them of their crime or giving them access to a lawyer, the report says that this is all reminiscent of the McCarthy era of the 1950s. US Attorney-General John Ashcroft, a moral crusader and the darling of America’s religious right, is held to be the man mainly responsible for this policy and for presenting a grotesque image of America. Many in America and outside believe that the country has embarked on a dangerous course by indefinitely detaining young Arabs or Muslims, on mere suspicion and without their culpability. Though most of what this new report says is already known, the fact that it has been written by insiders who served the US government in very senior positions makes it a stinging indictment. Human rights groups and much of the media all over the world have been asking Washington to release those detained after September 11, 2001, against whom no charges have been brought. That is the only way to end this continuing injustice.