ON the main Margalla Road, opposite the scenic Saidpur village in the lap of the green Margalla hills, where traditional and continental restaurants remain packed with foreign and local customers, the office of the Save the Children has now reopened.

Gates open and close and cars and staff come and go. After authorities allowed them to work, at least for the present, the employees have started coming to office but have yet to regain their full confidence.

Next to the main gate, a middle-aged, bearded man in a clean off-white shirt opens a window and smiles. Upon my introduction, he politely refuses me entry and asks me to contact their focal person for media.

“It will take some time to emerge from the shock of it all. The staff had no idea what happened on the day the authorities raided our office and sealed it,” Saeed Ahmed tells me minutes later at a nearby up-market cafe. “So our managers are concerned; they have prohibited the employees from talking to the media and have restricted entry.”

Nevertheless, he says, things are moving on. “It is good that the government is bringing in some regulations and we welcome it. This organisation is a guest in this country and the guest will work in coordination with the host, and in full compliance with the [rules set by] the federal and provincial governments,” says Ahmed.

But a senior manager of the Save the Children, who agrees to talk to me on condition of anonymity, says the employees are still experiencing trauma as they have been branded ‘anti-state activists’.

“On that day, I left office at 6pm. As I reached the parking area and was about to leave in my car I saw a few policemen running towards our office. I came back and saw a police truck and a couple of other government vehicles parked outside the office. A group of armed cops and some men in plain clothes were moving in.”

“They instructed us to ‘freeze’,” says another employee without giving his name. “Ninety per cent of the staff had left at 5pm but a few of us were sitting late because there was a proposal under discussion with our London office on the phone. When the police and the plain-clothes officials entered the office, they were accompanied by a videographer who was shooting everything.”

“It was like a raid on a hideout. Everything was being filmed which scared our female colleagues. They tried to avoid the camera but could not. Then the officials asked us to move out and leave everything there and then. They did not even let us take personal letters and family pictures with us. But they did deal with us politely. At the end they did not take anything with them and locked everything there. Then they closed the main gate and sealed it,” he says.

“We are not concerned about the closing and opening of the office,” says a female employee. “We are concerned about how the issue has played out in the media. We have been declared anti-state agents without any reason,” she says.

Another senior official says the officials who ordered the Save the Children to be shut down were not aware of the facts. “The government order said that all expats should be expelled within 15 days. But the fact is that no expat has been working in this organisation since a year and a half. And this organisation is now being run by Pakistanis. Most of them are children of military officials and bureaucrats. And their children and siblings are now asking them whether they were working for an anti-state organisation.”

She goes on, “Actually, the officials concerned never read the reports which our organisation submitted about our staff and activities every year. We had already decided to wind up our operations in Balochistan and KP because our projects were not cost-effective there. Had these officials read these reports, they would have had no need to raid our office because there was no activist who gave cause for suspicion.”

Security analyst Muhammad Amir Rana says the government has started an ill-planned crackdown against International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) to distract people from the original issue of action against hard-line seminaries.

“They are not taking action against the seminaries because they are constituencies of the prime minister and interior minister. They are doing what they should not do and are not doing what they should do,” says Rana.

“It’s true that the state has a right to regulate INGOs and formulate a code of conduct. It’s also true that the security agencies have their own concerns about the INGOs and there have been discussions in meetings about action against them. But what has the government done to implement the National Action Plan?” Rana concludes with a pertinent question.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play