Editor’s Note: Enforced disappearances have been occurring in Pakistan since as far back as at least the mid-1980s but their frequency has picked up particularly in the last 20 years. Families of the disappeared are plunged into a state of anguish as they try to keep the flame of hope alive while fearing the worst for their loved ones that go missing. Many have been in this limbo for years. Amnesty International, which fights abuses of human rights worldwide, has been in touch with one such family.
Sajid Mehmood, an IT engineer from Islamabad was abducted six years ago. His daughter Aymun Sajid witnessed his kidnapping when armed men broke into their home and took him away. Now 18, Aymun details her family’s struggle in the form of a journal, the entirety of which will be published on www.amnesty.org. Eos presents an excerpt of the searing first-person account of the day that changed her life.
AYMUN’S JOURNAL
The UN OHCHR [Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights] characterises enforced disappearance thus: (1) The deprivation of liberty against the will of a person; (2) Involvement of government officials, at least by acquiescence; (3) Refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.
Enforced disappearances in Pakistan started [in earnest] under the reign of military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf and have continued ever since. Most often, male members of the family are abducted by state agencies on mere suspicion, due to their speaking out against official policies, or even for no apparent reason. No charges. No whereabouts. Nothing.
I had heard about these disappearances. I felt sorry for the families held in the strangest limbo, with the children not knowing if they are orphaned or not, the wives not knowing if they are widowed or not, and the men themselves having no idea why they were picked up in the first place. I sympathised from a distance.
Then it happened to us.
Excerpts from the journal entries of an 18-year-old whose father was forcibly ‘disappeared’ six years ago
THE MORNING OF A SPRING DAY IN 2016
We were sorting books that day.
There were books all over the place — we’re avid readers — and even dusty old books that I had never seen were pulled out of the cupboards. I came across an old magazine — some sort of astronomy journal — and found a cool photograph of a night sky, the Milky Way clearly visible.
I went over to my dad. He was sitting at his desk, the tabletop holding two big monitors, a stack of folders, his calendar and various work-related stuff. In a corner of the table sat a jar of my sister’s home-baked ginger cookies: CEOs aren’t invulnerable to a sweet tooth, my dad definitely isn’t. As his fingers raced over the keyboard, he still hadn’t the heart to refuse our beloved ginger cat, Cado, a place in his lap.
“Hey, Baba, look what I found for you,” I said, holding the picture up. He could have been in the middle of a crucial project pitch or key client chat but, as always, he dropped everything and turned his full attention to me.
“Oh, wow, that’s wonderful, jani!” he said, with a big grin that always sent the opposite message of ‘tired’. “Could you cut it out for my wall?”
Baba’s ‘wall’ was the wooden partition behind his computer, where he would tape the drawings we ‘gifted’ him as well as pictures of constellations. Baba likes the stars.
“Alright, great!” I walked off to fetch the scissors.
After all the sorting was done, we put everything back in place, swept the floor and closed the cupboards.
They wouldn’t stay closed for long.
THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY IN 2016
I remember that day like it was yesterday. That’s not meant as a metaphor. I mean literally I can recount every single moment of the most horrific day of my life like it just happened. I was eleven then. I even remember the clothes I was wearing, pink and grey.
They knocked on the door of my room. I was writing a story. A fantasy story where I was the main character, with dragons and ninjas and evil robots.
“Who is it?” I asked, confused. I had not heard anyone come into the house. “We need to search,” someone said. My brain went numb, just disconnecting from the rest of my body. I couldn’t process what was happening.
I was still clutching my pencil when I somehow moved my legs and walked out. Our house was ransacked. The cupboards were flung open, things lay strewn around and men in plainclothes with masks and guns were everywhere. As I went past the couch and looked over my shoulder, I saw two men, one with a gun, searching through our toys. Our toys.
What they were looking for, I still do not know. What could they possibly find in our house other than books and computers? I joined my siblings and mom in the living room, where they’d already searched, and just stood there, dazed. After a few minutes, the rooms emptied, the doors sounded, and they were gone.
“Where’s Baba?” my then seven-year-old sister asked my mom, as we stood in the middle of our ransacked home. I remember saying over and over in my head, “Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.” Mama looked around the house, expressionless. “They took him.”
I walked back to the living room, my brain refusing to process anything, my heart refusing to believe anything. I found the picture of the stars. The one I had cut out for Baba. It lay among the rest of the papers on the ground, as if it [were] not any more important. As if it did not mean anything else.
I picked it up and held it in my hand. For a moment, I didn’t do anything. Then my fingers came together, my palm clenched into a fist, and the paper crumpled. I walked over to the trash can and threw it away.
A DAY LATER
Relatives and neighbours came and went. None of them stayed for very long. I guess they were afraid to linger, in case our house cursed them.
I was sitting with my mom, the guests in the other room, and she was talking to me about being brave and patient. I finally said it. “Alright, Mama, I can be patient. But please just tell me how long we have to wait.” She hesitated. “Beta…”
“Just tell me! An estimate. Just a guess. So that I can be prepared. How long? One week? One...month?” And then I finally burst out my worst fear, “One YEAR?” My mom took a deep breath. “We..we don’t know.”
“We don’t know?”
That was when the tears came.
I scoff at my childish estimates now. One year was the worst I could think of then.
It’s been a lot, lot longer.
THE FIRST EID
As I stood in the masjid on the first Eid without Baba, I looked around as the prayer finished, the Aunties giving everyone big hugs and the girls laughing amongst each other. I wondered how many of them had a missing father or husband. I wondered if these few people in the crowd had perhaps learnt to just act well so that I couldn’t identify any faces as long as ours. Or maybe there weren’t any others at all.
I felt incredibly alone.
We used to go to Baba’s rural village, two hours away from the city, every Eid as well as every two weeks, to visit my grandparents. Since my mom had never driven the unpaved roads there, we didn’t visit for the whole year. I guess it was a good excuse for getting a little time to gather some courage. On this Eid-ul-fitr, our relatives came [to visit us] instead of us going.
My grandmother was not told that her son had gone missing for as long as possible. My Baba is her favourite son — the star of the family, always obedient to his parents and caring towards his siblings. But the secret couldn’t be hidden forever. She walked into our house with a damp face and hugged us without a word.
I thought I couldn’t survive [Ramazan] without Baba, let alone an Eid. But here I was.
Perhaps I had died the day he was taken.
Aymun’s father remains missing since 2016, and has not been heard from since.
Published in collaboration with Amnesty
International and Defence of Human Rights
Published in Dawn, EOS, March 6th, 2022