Terror In Okara

On 11 May 2003, Amer Ali, a 60-year old peasant of Chak 4-L of Okara district, made his last good-neighbourlyvisit to the adjoining village, Chak 5-L. As the old man hobbled out of his hosts' house to see what was goingon, he was cut down by a hail of bullets. Amir Ali was the seventh to have died in recent months in the bitterstruggle between the peasants of Okara and the Pakistan Army Rangers, now into its third year. Coincidentally,just hours earlier, a group of journalists from the Urdu press and concerned citizens, including myself, hadset out from Islamabad on a fact-finding mission.

As I stood by the blood-spattered earth next to a wall pock-marked with bullets, grim-faced villagersindicated to me the field from where they said the Rangers had ceaselessly machine-gunned the village for overan hour.

A tour around Chak 5-L followed. It is a fairly typical village with visible signs of poverty - mud coveredhuts, open drains, bare-footed children, and scrawny chickens. Branches of trees felled in the shooting layall around. Many houses, as well as the village mosque, had bricks broken or chipped by the impact of heavybullets. They are there for the next visitors to village 5-L to see - but only if they can successfullynavigate through the siege imposed upon the seventy odd villages in the area.

Roadblocks are everywhere, manned by soldiers with automatic weapons as well the lighter-armed police.Four-wheelers with mounted machine-guns prowl menacingly upon the dirt roads next to the irrigation canals,raising huge clouds of dust as they move between villages. For all practical purposes, the nearly one millionpeople of Okara are under military occupation but Pakistan's political parties, which vociferously scream atbeing denied their share of the pie, are yet to take note of this.

Why are they doing this, I asked one villager from the crowd that was now swarming around me. "Theywant to put us on contract, pay rent to them, take away our rights to the land, and then throw us out",he replied, "but this land is ours because our forefathers have tilled it and we have nowhere else togo".

And then, as if the floodgates had broken, villagers came to show us wounds upon their bodies, some nowturning septic. One, who led me aside, broke down sobbing and told a tale that cannot be related here forreasons of propriety. A visit to the neighbouring village, Chak 4-L, showed the situation there to bevirtually identical. Broken limbs, hollow faces, sunken eyes, and marks of beatings were in abundant evidencethere too.

Appalled by what we had seen, we felt it absolutely necessary to see the point of view of those inauthority and therefore drove to the Okara Rangers Headquarters, at whose entrance we were stopped by heavilyarmed guards. After some hesitation they conveyed by telephone our request to meet with Colonel Saleem, thehead of the Rangers in Okara. Permission was eventually granted and we drove into the huge complex, spreadover many acres, containing residences and offices. The beautifully manicured lawns and flower-beds, gravelledpaths, and ornate structures from colonial times stood in stark contrast with the brick and mud hovels we hadjust left behind.

We were received by all who matter in the Okara administration. Apart from Colonel Saleem, we met MajorTahir Malik who looks after the military aspects and is greatly feared by the villagers, the seniorsuperintendent of police, and the district commissioner. Each had a closely similar point of view to theother. They spoke good English, the meeting was civil and polite, and we were offered tea and sandwiches. Butthere was to be no meeting of minds.

In response to my question of who killed Amir Ali, the administration officials said that he had beencaught in the crossfire between Sindhis and Machis, two groups at loggerheads over some local dispute.However, my offer to transport Amir Ali's decaying corpse, which at the moment was lying in his relativeshouse in Chak 5-L, to Islamabad for a post-mortem was summarily dismissed. And where did the torture marks onthe bodies of so many villagers come from, of which we now have photographic proof? The answer given was thatthese had been self-inflicted with the intent of defaming the authorities, or else they were wounds inflictedby one group upon the other.

Finding the answers to be less than satisfactory, we sought permission to return to Chak 5-L. After somehesitation this was granted. Negotiating through the roadblocks required further delays, as each confirmed byradio whether we were indeed permitted to visit the village. In my conversations with the soldiers manning thepositions, I learned that they too were disturbed about what they were being asked to do to the Okaravillagers but had no real choice. Upon eventually reaching the village, we conveyed to the villagers what theauthorities claimed as the cause of Amir Ali's death. They laughed bitterly and said that there are no Sindhisor Machis in Chak 5-L, much less a fight between them.

The siege of Okara is a blot on Pakistan's collective conscience and must be lifted immediately andunconditionally. Further, the incidents of torture and beatings that have occurred there over the last threeyears should be immediately investigated at the highest level and the guilty punished.

We cannot plausibly demand that India end the military occupation of Kashmir while employing similar brutalmeans and tactics at home. Peasants have no political agenda - land is about livelihood and physical survival.Pakistan cannot bear the shock of nearly a million of its own people being dispossessed of the lands they havetilled for over a century.

Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of high-energy physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad,Pakistan. This article first appeared in Dawn