So far away from home

Pakistanis live almost everywhere in the world, in most cases having moved away in search of a better quality of life. This process of movement has continued for decades, beginning virtually with the inception of the country, and mimics the patterns seen from other countries, including India, many African states, China and other countries.

There is nothing especially unusual about this shift away from home – and to their credit many Pakistanis have built for themselves lives of success in the UK, the US, Australia and other nations around the world. Benefits from this have often filtered back to extended families at home.

But in more recent years there has been an increasingly desperate edge to the desire to get away. Economic reasons are of course a key factor for the tens of thousands who each year try to get away illegally. Many are exploited by agents who promise them much but in some cases, instead, deliver death as people – most of them young men – are killed aboard ships used by human trafficking mafias or gunned down as they try to cross frontiers.

And flights coming in from the Far East or Middle East more and more often carry a cargo of deportees, handed over at airports to law enforcers, after being sent back from Kuala Lumpur, from Bangkok, from Oman and from other cities. Many say openly, with desperation in their eyes, they will try and get away again.

Their stories are sad. What can one even say about a country whose people are so anxious to get away? But there are others for whom another land is the only way to preserve life and escape death. Such people live across the globe; and more and more join them. We should consider what this says about our country.

Salamat Masih, who left the country for the west as a young teen in 1995, will now be a grown man. We know little about how his life has panned out, how he has adjusted or what traumas he still carries with him. But Salamat is alive. He would almost certainly not have been in his own country.

In 1993, Salamat, then 11 years old, was accused along with two adult Christian men, Rehmat and Manzoor Masih, of scrawling blasphemous words on a wall in Gujranwala. The charges were brought by a mosque prayer leader. The fact that the impoverished Christians were illiterate according to family members and friends was ignored. Manzoor Masih was shot dead before the case could be concluded; amidst protests from extremist groups, Salamat, a minor, and Rehmat were sentenced to death by a sessions court.

The verdict was over-turned in 1995 by the Lahore High Court, and both Salamat and Rehmat granted asylum. Justice Arif Iqbal Bhatti, who had acquitted them, was shot dead in Lahore two years later. He made a fatal mistake by attempting to continue work in a country where life holds less and less meaning.

In Norway, Saima Waheed and her husband, Arshad Ahmed, continue to raise their children. The couple had fled there after Saima, the daughter of hard-line cleric Abdul Waheed Ropri, had in 1997 won a landmark case permitting an adult Muslim woman to make her own choice in marriage. Saima’s decision to marry Arshad without her father’s consent had put the couple’s lives in danger, with Saima living for almost a year at a women’s shelter in Lahore.

Acquaintances say the young woman misses home and friends she has not seen for years. Since then, other couples facing the threat of ‘honour’ killing for choosing to marry by will have too been compelled to escape far away, to places where there will be safer.

In Birmingham Malala Yousafzai and her family settle into a new life, with Malala, now a globally known figure, speaking nostalgically every now and then of the Swat she may never see again and Skyping with friends in Mingora. Two other girls injured in the same October 2012 shooting now also live in the UK.

In Canada, another young girl, Rimsha Masih, accused of blasphemy by a cleric in 2012, lives what we can only hope is a better life. The teenager, who reportedly suffers Down’s Syndrome, was released after detention and faced the possibility of a death sentence. Hundreds of members of the impoverished Christian community of which she was a member had to flee their homes in Islamabad following harassment and persecution in the wake of the case. Witnesses said the accusations against Rimsha were completely unfounded, but this did not prevent the release of the cleric who had made the charges against her.

There are others who can also never return home. They include 65 members of a banned sect, who in a bizarre case had in 2007 sought asylum in India after entering as tourists and been held in Tihar Jail in New Delhi. The detainees told a panel of Pakistani judges who visited prisoners held in Indian jails in 2008 to try and secure their release as part of bilateral process for returning prisoners that they would prefer to remain in prison in India rather than risk going back. The 65 persons were denied asylum in India, but in 2011 handed over to UN agencies and assistance provided in settling them in the US and Canada.

Of course, Ahmadis each year seek asylum. Given their situation, many have received it. And we are told that more and more Shias are doing just the same, holding that they are no longer safe in their own country. Members of the Hazara community have of course consistently tried to get away, and their leaders state they have no option but to do so if they are to remain alive. The same holds true for other groups – and the numbers are increasing.

We must ask ourselves some questions. While it is not unusual for people, particularly from the third world, to try and seek homes elsewhere, the fact that more and more have had to leave our country simply to ward off death is alarming. New categories of people are joining them, including journalists and others who may have angered one group or the other.

The levels of intolerance combined with violence reflect the situation of a state simply not able to ensure the security of its own citizens. Such a state cannot claim to exist as an entity in any real sense of the word. A country from which people are forced to go away because they fear they will be killed if they live within it needs to look very closely at itself.

We should be taking this look now. We simply cannot afford to have people depart because there is no place for them amongst us. Their exit leaves behind a weaker, more frail country where the walls of extremism stand higher and threaten to close in, crushing all that is good within that society. We have allowed this process to go on for far too long. It is time we bring it to a halt – even though this task today seems harder than it ever was before.

Strategies will need to be worked out and we must also look at quite what we wish for our future and if we believe we have a future at all given the degree of hatred we have generated within our territory.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com