Karachi police rescue chained madrassa captives

By Zia Ur Rehman

December 13, 2011

http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/pakistan/main/2011/12/13/feature-01

KARACHI – Police late December 12 raided a suburban madrassa and rescued 56 chained boys and men from its basement, officials said.

“Police had received a tip that one Mufti Dawood, the custodian of the Madrassa al Arabia al Uloom, had been keeping a number of students chained in the basement of the madrassa and also was subjecting them to torture and sexual abuse,” Mukhtar Khaskheli, a senior police officer in Gadap, told Central Asia Online.

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Families wait outside a Karachi police station for news of relatives freed from the Madrassa al Arabia al Uloom in suburban Karachi December 13. A police raid found 56 children and young men held prisoner in the madrassa who said they were tortured. [Photo courtesy Zia Ur Rehman

Police raided the madrassa in Afghan Basti and rescued the captives, who are temporarily at a police station, he said. Police arrested Qari Muhammad Usman, but Dawood escaped, he said.

The seminary had claimed to provide rehabilitation services for drug addicts, he said.

The captives were between the ages of 12 and 50, and they were mainly Pashtuns from Afghanistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab, Malik Altaf Awan, another senior police officer, said.

A few of them were drug addicts or were mentally ill, he said.

Police have registered cases against five suspects, including Dawood and Usman. The madrassa and the adjacent mosque, Jamia Masjid Zakariya, have been sealed, Khaskhel said, adding that a high-level investigation will include inquiries about the madrassa’s possible links to militant organisations.

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Some of the children freed from the Madrassa al Arabia al Uloom walk down a corridor inside the police station. [Photo courtesy Zia Ur Rehman

Muhammad Asghar, 12, an Afghan student rescued from the seminary, said he was enrolled in it against his will and that teachers tortured him.

Parents were unaware of the conditions their children were kept in, as madrassa management did not allow parents of some students to meet their children, Amjad, a relative of a student, said.

Talking to reporters, Usman denied torturing the students or having any knowledge of torture.

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Qari Muhammad Usman, a custodian at the madrassa, is in police custody. Usman denied any knowledge of torture at the school. [Photo courtesy Zia Ur Rehman

Only Dawood knew why the boys and men were detained, said Usman, a native of Battagram District, KP, who moved to Karachi two months ago. He said families voluntarily enrolled their children and relatives at the madrassa to rid them of evil spirits.

Sindh Governor Dr. Ishratul Ebad took strict notice of the alleged torture and abuse of children in the seminary and ordered an immediate inquiry into the matter.

Ebad has ordered the Sindh inspector general of police to act promptly against elements involved in the incident, an official statement said, and he appealed to religious scholars to co-operate in the matter.

Pakistan has thousands of unregistered madrassas educating, feeding and lodging poor children for free, civil society activists say. However, reports of abuse occasionally surface in the media.

Rights violations and torture are common in madrassas, contended Abdul Waheed, an Ashoka Fellow who runs an educational charity in Karachi.

“The students were enrolled in the madrassas by their parents to be religiously trained but against their own will,” he told Central Asia Online, adding that seminary teachers were brainwashing the students through severe torture for unknown aims.

“Free will and choice of education are a fundamental right of every student, but in religious seminaries, the students always are deprived of their basic rights,” he said, suggesting the government should launch a comprehensive operation against such madrassas.

Some madrassas linked with banned militant organisations are not imparting religious education but rather are transforming the ideologies of students and preaching hatred and violence, security analysts said.

Serious concerns have arisen over militant-run seminaries in Sindh, especially in Karachi, because they stir up fear of Talibanisation, said Raees Ahmed, a political analyst.

The banned sectarian groups organise public gatherings in which many of the participants are young madrassa students, he said, citing media reports, adding that the banned groups also circulate militant literature among the students in an effort to steer their thought processes.

Any long-term solution to extremism must include regulation of madrassas, especially those that preach religious and cultural intolerance, Ahmed suggested.

Some defended the institution in question.

“The seminary (Madrassa al Arabia al Uloom) was not registered with Wafaq-ul-Madaris Al-Arabia (WMA), and it was, in fact, a rehabilitation centre offering services to drug addicts,” said Mufti Muhammad Naeem, an official at WMA, the largest federation of Islamic seminaries in Pakistan.

“The seminaries associated with WMA are not involved in any negative activities, and the conditions for obtaining registrations from the federation are very strict,” Naeem said.

Extremism gains ground in Sindh

October 21-27, 2011

BY Zia Ur Rehman

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta2/tft/article.php?issue=20111021&page=4

Banned militant groups and new madrassas linked to them are changing the traditionally tolerant and progressive landscape of Sindh

On October 13, unidentified men fired at an Afghanistan-bound convoy of NATO fuel supply trucks in the Shikarpur district of Southern Sindh and burned six of them. Before that, on October 1, a group of 30 armed men attacked NATO trucks at the National Highway near Khairpur district, wounding four people and destroying 10 vehicles. NATO supply trucks had been attacked in Peshawar, Khyber Agency, Islamabad and Balochistan for years, but recently such attacks are also being carried out in Sindh.

Burned oil trucks smoulder in Shikarpur

Some believe that the motive of such attacks might be insurance claims and not terrorism, but a leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed that the men who attacked the NATO supply vehicles in Sindh were in fact militants and belonged to the TTP-linked mobile ‘Siyara Group’.

Sindh’s civil society and nationalist parties fear that militancy and religious intolerance are gaining grounds in the province. New madrassas (seminaries) and increased activities of banned jihadi organisations are affecting the traditional Sufi and progressive landscape of the province.

“The mushroom growth of madrassas, most of them funded and backed by banned militant outfits, is posing a threat to Sindh’s non-violent traditions,” says Salam Dharejo, a political analyst who writes in monthly Newsline. “Due to deep-rooted influence of Sufism and progressive nationalism, militancy has never flourished in Sindh,” he said, “but the proliferation of militants is posing a threat to what has been a liberal society for many years.”

Banned militant organisations are strengthening their bases in Sindh especially in districts like Umerkot and Mithi, where non-Muslims are in majority. And that is changing the secular socio-cultural landscape of the province, said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS), an Islamabad-based think tank.

While violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA continues to get media coverage, underdeveloped regions of Sindh are quietly becoming the recruiting grounds for militancy, analysts believe. Although there is no concrete evidence of involvement of any Sindhi in a suicide bombing, many people belonging to Interior Sindh, especially Shikarpur, had taken part in the jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir and many of them were killed during the war, Dharejo said.

A boy waits for breakfast in a Sindh madrassa

“Yes, the threat of religious militancy is evident and the Sindhi society has resisted it because of its political culture,” said Bakhshal Talahoo, a political activist associated with Labour Party Pakistan, “but at the same time, the Afghan war and the Islamisation of the society by dictator Ziaul Haq has also affected the secular colour of Sindh and its politics.” He believes that if Sindhi politics will lose their democratic structure, the society will be more receptive to religious extremism.

Charity organisations linked to banned jihadi outfits have been active in relief work after the recent floods in Sindh, exploiting the natural disaster to strengthen their organisation, Rana said. Some of these banned charity organisations had simply changed their names.

The civil society and nationalist parties also have serious concerns over the increasing construction of new seminaries. Only in district Khairpur, hometown of Sindh Chief Minister Qasim Ali Shah, 93 seminaries out of the total 117 are not registered with the government, said a local journalist. In Umerkot district, there are more than 400 madrassas.

The growing activities of banned organisations have and the madrassas linked to them have played a key role in hurting the religious harmony prevalent in the region, Sindh’s civil society activists say. The forced conversion of Hindus to Islam had never been a widely acceptable practice in Sindh, but in the recent years, hundreds of Hindu girls have been forcibly converted or encouraged to marry Muslims, Dharejo said, adding that such practices, which have threatened the secular fabric of the society, have never been publicly condemned by a local or civil society organisation. Religious groups and institutions have actively extended moral and financial support to such practices.

A Hindu member of Sindh Assembly, Ram Singh Sodho, resigned from his seat and took refuge in India after he received threats from militant groups. Media reports suggest that incidents of kidnapping of Hindus for ransom have risen alarmingly during the last few years, forcing many families to abandon their homes and shift to India and other countries.

Sufism had made a great impact on Sindhi society and Sufi shrines dot its landscape. Most recently, the shrine of Hazrat Noor Shah Bukhari situated in Mirpurkhas was attacked and set ablaze by unidentified attackers on late 14 July night, damaging some parts of the building .

“Taliban militants consider Sufism as a big threat to their radical brand of Islam. A majority of Sindhi people are adherents of Sufism, and have always condemned the Taliban’s un-Islamic acts,” said Dilshad Bhutto, head of Pakistan Secular Forum. “Islam spread in the Sindh region through the preaching of great Sufis, not through Arab fighters.”

But some analysts disagree. “There is no presence of Taliban elements in Sindh. It is the forces that want to malign the Sindhi people who are involved in the attacks on NATO supply vehicles,” said a leader of the Jeay Sindh Mahaz. “We have nothing to do with NATO, but we support their actions to eliminate militancy and terrorism.”

The writer is a journalist and a researcher who works on militancy and human rights. He can be contacted at zia_red@hotmail.com