The story of the six Pakistanis gunned down brutally in the Macedonian capital of Skopje by the local police last year, is soon going to gather enough dust to be lost forever to memory. And, along with that will be forgotten all the suspicious circumstances leading to their death.
No longer will people spare a thought on the needlessness of the entire incident and wonder why those six Pakistanis preferred to risk their lives and die as illegal immigrants than lead an uneventful life in their hometown. Government officials are not going to vie with each other to bust the human trafficking racket, netting millions of rupees each month from families desperate to leave Pakistan. We would rather distribute Rs3 million, as compensation money, among the families of the six young men than set up an independent inquiry to check illegal immigration and prevent the recurrence of similar tragedy.
The danger of being an illegal immigrant unfolded last year in Macedonia, which was made all the more worse when six out of the seven arrested were found to be Muslims. On the worn-out pretext of fighting Muslim terrorists, the Macedonian police shot dead all seven of them in the suburbs of its capital, Skopje. In a hurriedly trumped up story, the Macedonian interior ministry officials said that, “the terrorist group had opened fire on a police patrol with machine guns and had been planning attacks on vital installations and embassies of Germany, Britain and the US”.
The police officials told the press that they had found AK-47 rifles, grenade launchers and grenades in the van used by the terrorists. They tried to link the dead with the disbanded Albanian rebel group, the National Liberation Army (NLA), suggesting that the group was recruiting Muslim terrorists from other countries to fight against the government troops.
The falseness of the Macedonian side of the story was revealed when the US embassy in Skopje rejected the local government’s claim through a press release stating that, “it had no information and was not aware of any indication that there was a specific threat to the embassy”. But the Macedonian government had made a pretty good case of it. Not only were the dead men linked to the al-Qaeda, they openly declared to have proof of that link. That too turned out to be an unauthentic declaration. One of the men was carrying a sacred verse written in Arabic in his pocket, which was interpreted as proof of their guilt by the Macedonian government. Officials insisted that the decoded Arabic verse included names of other terrorists and uncovered plans of their secret meetings.
In a chat with Dawn, Ansar Burney, who heads his own trust which had brought back the bodies from Skopje to Lahore last September, confirmed that the documents, publicised as terrorist material, were in fact a copy of Nad-i-Ali and an invitation to a majlis-e-aza (a religious congregation). But it really did not matter what the truth was. What mattered was that the men were Muslims coming from a country known for never taking a stand on any national or international issue; a country which bent backwards into playing ‘your humble servant’ to its primary donor, the US, no matter how politically unviable that was. How can such a country compel any government of the world to treat its citizens with dignity?
No country, be it Macedonia or any other, is going to be thrown into a blue funk over the prospect of killing some illegal Pakistani Muslims. They were lying buried under a heap of mud, almost forgotten, till six months later the Trust decided to bring the bodies home.
The next best thing to following the international immigration laws would have been to offer a formal apology. But none was made by the Macedonian government because none was demanded by the Pakistan government. It issued a few press releases to complete the usual formality of lamenting the dead, and closed the file on the Macedonian massacre.
There is no independent commission set up to deal with such cases, there are no immigration ordinances, there are no official steps taken by Islamabad to salvage what little respect, if any, is left of our country. Instead, what we see is the rise of the Zahoor Elahi Trust offering Rs500,000 each to the families of the deceased. In the middle of being upstaged comes the PML-Q president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s valiant pronouncement that his and Ansar Burney’s trust will take the case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). All costs shall be borne by the magnanimous president of the PML-Q whose party has not even brought the issue of illegal immigration to be discussed in the National Assembly. “We were going to discuss it but then the war in Iraq began,” says Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain.
Two of the killed young men belonged to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s hometown, Gujraat. Going by the unofficial statistics, Gujraat is one of the places in Pakistan with the highest record in human trafficking. Looking composed and almost unaffected, the president of the PML-Q admits the gravity of the problem only to concede in the next breath how difficult it is to catch the mafia operating in the racket.
“You can’t stop people from going abroad. They want to make a better living for themselves. I’m not justifying illegal immigration, but you should come and see how developed Gujraat is,” claims Ch Shujaat.
It is not certain when the process of taking the Macedonian massacre to the ICJ will begin because making a promise does not necessarily mean that it has to be honoured.
“It is not so simple. A team of lawyers is going to start working on it,” defends Chaudhry Shujaat.
That will probably be a fair compensation to the families of the dead. But it seems they will have to wait for quite some time to see that happen. The two Trusts are already planning to raise a team of volunteers to go to the war-zone and bring back Pakistanis stranded in Iraq. One can see the dust already settling on the Macedonian massacre.
The story of the six Pakistanis gunned down brutally in the Macedonian capital of Skopje by the local police last year, is soon going to gather enough dust to be lost forever to memory. And, along with that will be forgotten all the suspicious circumstances leading to their death.
