ISLAMABAD, Feb 27: The People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) has requested the United Nations to take up with the government the issue of alleged political victimisation of its workers.

In one way or the other, PPP workers and office-bearers remained target of state persecution, MNA Fauzia Wahab, the coordinator of the party’s human rights desk, wrote in a letter to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour.

According to a party announcement, Ms Wahab highlighted the case of alleged victimisation of former Balochistan MPA Sadiq Umrani, stating that the regime was using the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to harass him in an effort to force him to change his political loyalty. Since 2002, she said, Mr Umrani had been receiving notices and summons from the NAB and when he appeared before the bureau’s officials, he was asked to leave the PPP and join the Pakistan Muslim League (PML). “Each time a brigadier would interrogate him and the focus of interrogation would always be confined to his leaving the party and joining the official PML,” she wrote.

“Similarly, two of our office-bearers in the People’s Youth Wing, Junaid Buland and Jahangir Mughal, are facing imprisonment of 10 years each in the Central Jail, Hyderabad, on flimsy charges,” she said.

Their crime, she wrote, was that they participated in a strike called by the party in 2005 against the growing "highhandedness of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-controlled police in Mirpurkhas”.

Another political worker, Abu Bakar Panwer, was “arrested on fictitious charges of theft” and kept in police custody in the Satellite Town police station of Mirpurkhas. “Within four days, Abu Bakar died mysteriously in the lock-up. The local police had no answer to satisfy the family. In protest against the custodial death, the PPP Youth Wing gave a strike call. The markets went on strike and the boys took out a procession. It was a peaceful procession and no untoward incident took place. But both Junaid Buland and Jahangir Mughal were arrested and tried under charges of attempt to murder,” she wrote. “They were given maximum punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment. Besides this, tens of other fictitious cases were registered against them. On Junaid Buland alone, there are eight other cases impending in the lower courts.

“The human rights cell of the PPP requests your kind authority to take cognisance of the situation and do the needful against the highhandedness of the regime,” she stated.