Pakistan, Drowning in Neglect

Victo Ngai

By ALI SETHI

Published: August 25, 2010

THE old man was sitting on his string bed. But it was upside down; its finely rounded legs were pointing to the sky, and the knotted ropes strung across its wooden frame were wet. Underneath it were several plastic drums — once used for storing diesel fuel — that had been emptied out and tied to it for buoyancy. The makeshift raft was bobbing up and down, and the man sitting on it had his legs in the yellow-brown water, which stretched around him for miles and miles like a strange sea, the tops of faraway trees sticking out of it like little islands.
“Hold it like that for five more minutes!” cried the cameraman.
I had accompanied a TV crew to this submerged village in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The floodwater had dissolved the villagers’ mud houses, turned the rice fields they tilled into a lake and the road above into an embankment.
The villagers acted quickly: they set up temporary homes along the embankment, with two upright string beds for walls and a third thrown atop them like a roof. But the slits between the strings exposed the makeshift roofs, so the villagers filled these with the twisting branches of the ak plant, a kind of milkweed the women had plucked from the banks of a nearby canal. The plant’s tendrils now hung from their ceilings like flimsy chandeliers, with bees and flies dancing around the rotting bulbs.
“As you can see,” said the young reporter with the microphone in his hand, frowning at the camera in the harsh afternoon light, “these people have been living like this for three whole weeks.” His testimony was sent via satellite to the channel’s headquarters some 500 miles to the northeast in Lahore, and was airing live in the big cities and towns of Pakistan.
“Our grain is wet,” said a stocky old man with a henna-dyed beard. “It stinks.”
Another man said: “We have no clean water to drink. Our children are vomiting.”
“We need tents,” said the man with the red beard. “We were promised tents. But none have arrived.”
A sweating, bespectacled farmer who was standing behind the camera said that all the snakes had come out of the water and climbed into the trees. “In some places there are 20 snakes to a tree,” he said.
“Are they poisonous?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” said the farmer, laughing at my question, which had prodded the deadly reality of his predicament. “Oh, yes.”
“Who did you vote for in the last election?” asked the reporter, and offered his microphone to a thin, bearded man who was standing next to his shack on the embankment.
The man named a landlord who was also the local politician.
“Will you vote for him again?”
“No, I will not.”
“Never again?”
“Never again.”
“You heard him,” said the reporter, reclaiming the microphone and looking defiantly into the camera. “He says he will not vote for the same politician, who has done nothing to help his constituents in this desperate time.”
A few hours later, when we had retired to a rest house in town, our TV crew got a call from a bureaucrat. He had been criticized in our transmission and was calling to say that he was sick — an explanation for his absence from the scene of the flood. The crew politely offered to interview him at his house. “But I am at the doctor’s right now,” he pleaded.
The next phone call came from the office of the landlord-politician whose tenants we had interviewed. The big man himself was in another city, but a staff member was calling to insist that his men had been helping the displaced people. There were just so many of them right now; would we meet him in a few hours at a relief camp in the town? He would like to offer his explanation there.
We weren’t satisfied. We had been sent here to break a big story and make a big difference — all the big TV channels of Pakistan had sent out their crews to interrogate the victims’ elected representatives — and here we had two late, paltry excuses, both relayed by telephone, both issuing from the still-invisible officials of a famously corrupt local government.
We agreed to meet the man at the relief camp. We were scheduled to do another transmission at night, and hoped that in it we would confront him with the complaints and demands of the villagers his boss had abandoned.
But we never got the chance.

•

At dusk, just as we were heading to the relief camp, a police officer called from the nearby town of Dera Allahyar. “It’s an emergency,” he said. “Please come to my office right away.”
His office glowed at the end of a lightless road, a large whitewashed building with low outer walls and a long driveway — an eerie reminder in this desolate province of the British-colonial pretensions (and origins) of Pakistan’s omnipresent bureaucracy. Inside, through a slender corridor with high ceilings, we were led to the officer’s room: he was sitting at his desk in the soundless, air-conditioned cold, a plump, uniformed man with perfect black hair and mustache, an enormous, highly detailed map of the district hanging on the wall beside him. “The water is coming this way,” he said wretchedly, his elbow on the desk, his plump hand on his brow.
We sat in the chairs arranged around his desk.
There was a highway, he explained, on a berm above the fields and towns nearby, that ran on the border between Baluchistan and Sindh Province to the south. On the Sindhi side lived a land-owning politician who wanted to cut a hole in the highway that would divert the water to this very town. The politician was claiming that he needed to protect Jacobabad, an important small city on his side of the highway, though he was obviously trying to save his 400 acres of rice fields.
“When will he divert the water?” I asked.
“Now,” said the police officer. “He’s trying to breach the highway right now.”
But it was late at night, and the 200,000 people of the area’s towns and villages were sleeping.
“How will you alert your people?” I asked.
He said: “We will have to make announcements from the loudspeakers of mosques. We have no other way.”
A gray-haired man wearing a traditional shalwar kameez came into the room — the civil commissioner — and together the two men made a string of phone calls to their subordinates, announcing the emergency and ordering the evacuation of houses.
The police officer hung up the phone and said he was going to the highway to stop the breach.
“Can we come with you?” I asked.
“That is not advisable,” he said. There were soldiers on the highway, and they wouldn’t want to be on camera. What were soldiers doing on the highway?
The answer came in evasive, fragmented sentences: there was an airbase on the Sindhi side of the highway. This was where the military’s newest F-16 fighter jets were parked. But local residents believed that the base also housed the notorious American drones used to kill Islamist militants in the mountains. If true, this meant that the military was getting tens of millions of dollars a year in exchange, none of which trickled down to the local population.
The armed forces were going to save the base at all costs, he explained. But they didn’t want to draw attention to their own role — or to their interest — in the diversion of the water. Hence the presence of the land-owning politician; if there was any fallout, he would take the blame, and the soldiers would appear to have acted on his personal wishes.
The commissioner and then the police officer departed for the highway, leaving our TV crew behind in the room. Could we break the story we had just heard?
“I don’t think so,” said one reporter. “You don’t want the intelligence agencies to come after you.” The last time he had broken such a story, he said, a whole team of officers from the feared Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence had come to see him in his office.
Another said, with sudden formality, “It is considered unpatriotic to criticize the security forces.”
“We can release some information,” suggested the first reporter. “We can say the highway is being breached. At least we can alert people that way.”
The others agreed, and he rushed out to the driveway to set up his equipment in the van. After some minutes he returned; the news bulletin had gone through. Now we had nothing to do, and after waiting another hour we decided to go back to the rest house.
But the policeman called: he wanted us to come to the highway after all. “People have brought out their guns,” he said. “Please come quickly.”
We sped toward the highway, our headlights illuminating the stark figures moving in the other direction on the road: herds of swaying buffalo, barefoot men and women urging them on with sticks and switches. Behind them were donkeys and cows pulling rickety wooden carts laden with goats, chickens, children, tin trunks and sacks of grain. Some of them had been traveling for days — the jutting ribs of the unfed animals showed even in the night — while others had just heard the evacuation warning on the loudspeakers of their mosques and had decided to flee the water, though they had nowhere to go.
We reached the wedge-shaped breach in the highway. It was incomplete; the water was still on the Sindh side. The police officer was standing next to the breach, but there was no landlord, no soldiers.
What had happened?
The policeman said that when he arrived the landlord and an army major were standing on the highway and supervising the giant excavators making the breach. But the policeman and his commissioner had pleaded with them to stop. And another tribal chieftain-turned-politician from an endangered village on the dry side had appeared with his armed guards and joined the commotion.
“It was turning into a fight between the provinces,” said the policeman darkly. “But then, I asked the major, ‘Are you from the Pakistani army or the Sindh army?’ And that shook him. He understood what I was saying. He apologized and withdrew the excavators.”
That was oddly simple. Was that all it took to deter the powerful military — a reminder of its theoretical neutrality in political matters? Or had the major detected a threat in the policeman’s words?
There was no one left to ask.
“Would you like to start your transmission?” said the police officer.
And so the camera came out again, and the police officer spoke softly and humbly into the microphone, surrounded by the evidence of his unlikely victory. The direction and levels of the floodwater were mentioned; the conniving landlord and his rice fields were mentioned. But the soldiers and the airbase — still mysterious and forbidding — were not.

•

In the morning, we were told to get out of the town.
The soldiers had made the breach after all: but in another location, and quietly, without arousing suspicion.
The water was on its way.
In one place our car ran into the flood. It was swallowing the road. There was another way out — a six-hour drive west to the city of Quetta. Unfortunately, Baluch separatists had struck: they were stopping vehicles, pulling out Punjabi passengers and shooting them. Most of the men in our crew weren’t Punjabis, and they took that route. But I am a Punjabi, as are two of the reporters, and we had to find another way.
The highway again, the vehicles on it now stranded for a full mile. There were people on tractors and trucks and the wooden carts we had seen the night before; many more were going by foot. A bloated dead buffalo was lying on its side in the dust, and a skinny dog was frantically tearing out its stomach.
Bent children with grain sacks on their backs rushed past it. A blind woman, holding the hand of a little girl, was trying to find her family, scraping her one free hand along the forms and shapes she passed. A blinkered donkey could no longer pull the load it was carrying — the salvaged possessions of just one family — and its thin legs were shaking uncontrollably. Behind it was a tractor carrying several families; and behind that was a truck carrying many more.
The water rose smoothly and steadily beneath the highway, spilling from one field into the next, claiming house after house. At some point in the night, when the water around us was no longer visible, a group of shouting men appeared with sticks and rifles and forcibly cleared up the traffic jam. The trucks and tractors ahead of us began to move. And then our car got out.
I don’t know if the animals or the people on carts behind us made it in time.
FOR days now I have been trying to call some of the people I met in Dera Allahyar. But their phones aren’t working. The area around the highway is under 16 feet of water. Dozens of people have drowned, and at least 21 people have died from gastroenteritis in the last three days alone, with hundreds of thousands stranded on the dry land that remains. In some places the military has set up functioning relief camps. But the people’s needs far exceed the aid at hand.
The airbase came up last week when the country’s health minister told a parliamentary committee that it was “controlled by the Americans.” But the military rejected the story right away: the base is used for Pakistani aircraft only, said one senior official, and Americans come there only to impart technical training for the F-16s.
The story has died, and the image of Pakistan’s military as the sole protector of its people is whole again, with all those videos of soldiers rescuing people from the water playing endlessly on TV screens. At least two high-profile politicians have asked for a military “intervention” to relieve the country of its inefficient civilian rulers.
The Western media’s coverage of the flood, meanwhile, is dominated by fears of Islamic charities with militant wings. Here, too, the implication is the same — Pakistanis are unable to govern themselves — and dovetails with the emerging demand for a strongman.
But there is at least one other way of looking at the country revealed by this natural disaster. This is a place where peasants drown in rice fields they don’t own, where mud-and-brick villages are submerged to save slightly less expendable towns, and where dying villages stand next to airbases housing the most sophisticated fighter jets in the world. Such a country is owed more than just aid, it is owed nothing less than reparations from all those who preside over its soil.
This includes politicians and bureaucrats, who are already being brought to account by a rambunctious electronic media, but also an unaccountably powerful military and its constant American financiers, who together stand to lose the most when the next wave comes.

Ali Sethi is the author of the novel “The Wish Maker.”

Denialistan: DAWN’s romance with jihadis exposed

Nasima Zehra Awan laments the media romances with sectarian Islamists while the country drowns

The August 21st editorial by DAWN is a good example of what is wrong with the media in Pakistan. “Hardliners and Flood Relief” is precisely the kind of vacillating apologia for extremists that is the bane of the local media.A media that has anointed itself as “Independent” for hounding out elected politicians at the behest of a powerful establishment, has failed in informing the public about the various Islamist militant groups and their agendas. In this regard, it is baffling that DAWN’s editorial prefers to maintain an Ostrich-like approach to the exponentially growing existential threat from these sectarian bigots.
President Zardari is absolutely correct in pointing out this threat. The exclusive bashing of elected PPP leaders is the national sport in our elite drawing rooms and reflects our impotent rage that can never be directed at the actual source of our problems but at those who cannot strike back. It is therefore sad that DAWN follows suit and completely disregards the warning of Pakistan’s elected president and chooses to maintain the establishment-led status quo in protecting its Jihadi assets.
In covering the hundreds of targeted killings of minority sects and religious groups like the Ahmadis, Shias and Christians, DAWN studiously maintains a policy of obfuscating the issue via the use of euphemisms. In doing so, it dishonestly creates a false symmetry between the victims (Ahmadis, Shias and Christians) and their killers, the vast nexus of sectarian Salafist Jihadi groups like Sipah Sahaba, its militant wing, Lashkar Jhangvi, Lashkar Tayabba, Jaish Mohammad and Harkat ul Mujahideen amongst a host of other related subsidiaries. For a newspaper that allies itself with Jinnah, the irony that the country’s Shiite Muslim founder would have been a fair game for these sectarian groups is completely lost on DAWN!
Since the beginning of the flood crisis, Pakistan’s media has preferred to lynch the elected government as opposed to galvanizing the public and the International community towards relief efforts. In trying to divert attention away from banned groups who are using the tragedy of these floods to increase their hold on Pakistan, DAWN has allied itself with the same reactionary and bigoted class that prefers an authoritarian future for Pakistan under an increasingly monolithic and supremacist identity that abhors a pluralist ethos. In both the 2005 Earthquake tragedy and in the current devastation caused by the floods, these sectarian-Jihadi groups have been facilitated and financed at the expense of the State to carry out relief efforts. While the Government has been consistently blocked, distanced, misrepresented and denied, the armed forces, which are constitutionally under the direction of the Government and who are funded by the public are lauded for doing what is their duty and what is customary in any part of the world. Similarly, the sight of banned sectarian groups who are being funded by the Punjab Government, openly discriminating in their relief efforts on the basis of sect (refer to the case of hundreds of Ahmadis being denied relief by Jamaat Dawa/LeT) is being glossed over and mostly ignored by DAWN and other similar corporate media outlets.
The reason that the International community is skeptical about giving aid to Pakistan is not because of Transparency International’s statistics that have remained largely the same since the last 4 years. Its because of the clear divide between a helpless and hounded elected Government that prefers to engage with the world and a  jingoist establishment that wants to berate the Government for accepting foreign aid on a warped basis of honour(ghairat). The International community is skeptical because this aid is then siphoned off for buying more weaponary and toys for the Jihadi monsters who attack NATO troops in neighbouring Afghanistan when they are not too busy killing thousands of Pakistanis back home. The International community is skeptical about aid and relief efforts to Pakistan because it does not want its money to go to Jihadis and its own volunteers to be the targets of these Jihadis while they are in Pakistan.
The public credibility with the Government can be addressed in the next elections. However, how does one deal with the obvious lack of credibility of the media? In a drowning country, how does one deal with a media whose bias for Islamist militias has graduated from a blossoming romance to a full scale marriage. How does one make sense of how DAWN concludes its editorial:

“Also, the concept of charity is a major motivational factor with all religious organisations, not just Islamic ones. So the hardliners’ response to the floods is more likely to be guided by a sense of religious obligation than an opportunity to win more recruits.”

Really, charity!! Where is this charitable spirit and this religious obligation when the same sectarian militias are killing thousands of Pakistanis all over the land. How can one call this charity when the resources used by these Jihadi groups are the very same resources that have been diverted to them from the State and their local and foreign patrons. Where is this charitable spirit when relief is provided and denied on the basis of sect! In Sindh, Hindu families have publicly taken the responsibility to feed their Muslim countrymen. Non-Muslim countries are finally donating hundreds of millions to the PPP lead Government due to the efforts of the much maligned President and Prime Minister, even as two bit TV anchors like Talat Hussain can get away with their brazen lies to the BBC that the couple of hundred thousand dollars collected by him and Kashif Abbasi exceeds the entire collection of the Government! Yet, editorials like this one in DAWN and those shouting matches on GEO have only one agenda; malign the Government and glorify the Jihadis. If the latter is not possible, at least diminish their malevolence even if its means that facts on the ground have to be distorted. If these are the standards of the country’s premier English daily, one shudders to think what scurrilous rags that are openly beholden to the Jamaat Islami are publishing.
History will not forgive the negative role played by the Pakistani media at this crucial juncture. While the country is being ravaged by floods, the media spent more time cheering the shoe thrown at the President by a Hizb ul Tahrir activist; a shoe thrown in protest against the nascent democratic set up in Pakistan and in the hope of establishing a totalitarian caliphate. While floods ravage a third of the total area of Pakistan and have rendered 20 million people homeless, our media, including DAWN, has thrown its lot in with the establishment and its political game of lynching the elected political class, especially those from the PPP and ANP. Nero fiddled while Rome burnt and our media romances sectarian Islamist brutes while the country drowns.
Wait for the next editorials – “Al-Qaeda is a global charity movement” and “Taliban are a group of rescuers”!!

Forceful Observance of Ramadan and its Commercial Exploitation: Is it Serving Any Purpose?

Ramadan has arrived and all of us are witnessing bombardment of corporate advertisements which try to capitalize on the reverence of the month. In fact the most paradoxical nature of religion in our society is often witnessed through the way advertisements transform into “holy” form from their urban yuppie pre Ramadan look. Female models suddenly discover “chaddar” and their male counterparts are seen wearing religious caps while holding tasbeehs.
This month, particularly the way it is “celebrated” in our part of the land becomes more of a forceful imposition of religion by the state and petty commercial exploitation by the corporate sector rather than a month of self sacrifice. The spirit of Ramadan is to feel the pain of those who are less privileged and acting to help them rather than this strange forceful imposition of religion by the state and its commercial exploitation by the corporate.
I personally believe that Ramadan should not be imposed the way it is in Pakistan. Religion is a matter between God and individual and observation of Ramadan by same logic should be at the individual level not the way it is literally enforced. This forceful observation which bans public consumption of food coupled with exaltation of the religion through all the medium of communication merely ends up reinforcing rather hypocritical reverence of religion.
This reverence which is actually not built upon deep faith but on unquestionable acceptance of everything associated with religion has made it extremely difficult for the society to reform and reinterpret religion. I have previously also pointed out that misdirected glorification of religion merely makes the society completely impotent to challenge anything in the name of religion. Pakistan is not a radical society and yet due to this cultivation of reverence of religion, which is at its peak during Ramadan, it finds itself in a quagmire. This reverence has made clergy more powerful than they actually are. Pakistani society is thus unable to challenge or protest anything, if it is successfully imposed in the name of religion.
Black laws like Anti Blasphemy  and Hadood Ordinances despite not having implemented through the legislative process are firmly entrenched because no Party wants to  invoke wrath of the hardliners and be branded as anti Islamic. The general populace is also afraid to raise any voice despite knowing that these laws are in fact against the real spirit of the religion itself. Reverence and unquestionable attributes of the religion makes it impossible to even start a debate.
Of course glorification of religion is also thwarting the emergence of a pluralistic and tolerant society. For the past 63 years the state has used religion as an ideological tool to subdue the ethnic diversity in the country. It has assumed that forceful imposition and insistent glorification of religion would ensure that ethnic and linguistic identities won’t be able to gain momentum and seek more autonomy. Unfortunately this also has proven to be counterproductive and denial of autonomy has actually manifested in armed separatist movement in provinces like Baluchistan.
Glorification of religion by state and media has also cultivated this strong state of denial in the Muslim population where they find it impossible to believe that a Muslim can be behind any terrorist activity. A mindset has developed which assumes that due to belief  in Islam, Muslims are superior in virtue and therefore incapable of anything as hideous as suicide bombing. This state of denial has nurtured this conspiracy theory culture and has strengthened the terrorists as their hideous crimes, instead of being hated, are conveniently blamed on the foreign powers.
Every year this reverence and fear of religion is reinforced in Ramadan. Moreover, the corporate interests have made whipping up of religious reverence and fervor a routine practice in Ramadan which in turn has further strengthened clergy and the state’s ideological emphasis on religion.  Additionally since observation of Ramadan is forced by state and is backed its coercive power, the instruments of coercion such as police are further encouraged to abuse power at the grass root level.
As the time passes, we are getting even more stuck in this quagmire. Private sector has in fact joined state and is glorifying the role of religion. This glorification by the corporate which emanates out of petty commercial interests is merely compounding the problem and ensuring the status quo. Frankly due to these reasons the forceful observance and glorification of Ramadan is proving to be regressive.

Sectarian Clashes Surge in a City in Pakistan’s Heartland

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Pakistanis gathered recently in Faisalabad outside a Presbyterian church damaged in riots after two Christian brothers were killed.

By SALMAN MASOOD

Pblished: August 7, 2010

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — This industrial city, famous for its textile exports, has lately become renowned as the center of a new wave of sectarian violence that has gripped Pakistan as militancy and extremism have taken firm root here in central Punjab Province.
Last month, violent clashes broke out between Muslims and Christians after two Christian brothers — Rashid and Sajid Emanuel — were shot dead outside the district courthouse after showing up to face charges of blasphemy.
Immediately, there were fears of rioters’ setting fire to the Christian neighborhood where the brothers had lived, Warispura, a poor suburb with about 100,000 people — as they had done in a similar episode last year in a district nearby.
Blasphemy is a capital crime in Pakistan, and rights activists say the allegations are usually spurious and used to settle personal vendettas or to score political points.
In this case, for instance, the troubles started on July 1 when a handwritten letter defaming the Prophet Muhammad was distributed in a marketplace; it contained the address and telephone numbers of both brothers.
“A thief does not leave behind an ID card,” said Aslam Pervez, 60, a Christian teacher and a neighbor of the brothers. “A grave injustice has been done. The charges were not even proven, and they were killed. Is it justice? Where is the law?”
Analysts say the communal and sectarian clashes often have a local spark — an economic grievance, for instance — that is easily ignited in an atmosphere in which militant groups have been allowed to thrive for years by politicians who use them as a base of support, or have little to gain by standing up to them.
Looking to expand their influence, the groups, too, read the political winds as astutely as they do the local political terrain.
Such groups have thrived for decades in Pakistan, though sectarian violence has ebbed and flowed. Some groups, like Sipah-e-Sahaba, a Sunni militant organization, have largely domestic agendas, while others, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, focus on jihad in India and Afghanistan.
But it can be hard to draw a firm line, and sometimes the domestic groups channel militants to the others.
Under the nearly 10 years of military government that ended in 2008, sectarian violence was relatively subdued, in part because the military did not need to manipulate domestic schisms to maintain control. But civilian politics and sectarian tensions work hand in hand in Pakistan, and recently the violence has flared again. The last bad spasm was also under civilian rule in the 1990s.
Christians are not the only targets of the violence. In February, one person was killed during armed clashes between two Muslim sects. One of the sects then burned down the homes of several leaders of the other sect. Then in April, four members of the minority Ahmadi sect, declared non-Muslim by the country’s Constitution, were gunned down in Faisalabad by masked gunmen thought to be from Sipah-e-Sahaba.
Amir Rana, a terrorism expert, said the level of radicalization had grown and spread across Punjab Province, the country’s heartland. Residents say banned Islamic militant groups have managed to increase their presence and clout in Faisalabad, a city of nearly three million, and its surroundings.
Both Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that India and the United States have blamed for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, maintain offices in neighboring districts, which also serve as recruiting grounds.
As riots broke out on July 19, groups of agitated men, many of whom were said to be armed, tried to make their way to Warispura, the Christian neighborhood, from a neighboring village, Malkhan Wala, which is a known stronghold of Lashkar-e-Taiba, residents of the Christian neighborhood said.
Mr. Rana speculated that local economic competition might have been a motivator. Christians in Faisalabad are settled on land close to roads and railway tracks. “This is precious land,” he said. “Industrialists and builders have their eyes on such properties.”
Mr. Rana said Sipah-e-Sahaba had a strong base among the working class of the city; most Christians are in the working class, too.
Khalid Rashid, vicar general of the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in Faisalabad, said the acts of violence against minorities, especially Christians, were on the rise, as the militant groups wanted “their presence to be felt.”
Religious minorities are feeling vulnerable and insecure. Christians make up only 5 percent of the population.
Neighbors and family members said the two Christian brothers who were killed had enmity with nobody. Rashid, 31, was a pastor who ran a local prayer group. Sajid, 28, was pursuing an M.B.A. degree.
They were taken into custody after a case was registered against them at the urging of local traders. On July 19, after a court appearance, an unidentified gunman entered the court premises and opened fire in the hallway. Both brothers were shot in the back and died at a hospital. A police officer was wounded. The attacker escaped easily.
The government has ordered a judicial inquiry into the killings. The Punjab police suspended two police officers for security lapses. But the family of the brothers is in hiding. The father, a retired government employee, and his three other sons and a daughter fear being singled out and are afraid to pursue the case.
Joseph Coutts, the bishop of the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, attributed such attacks to the growing intolerance and militancy in Pakistani society.
“These groups have become so strong that they have become a law unto themselves,” he said. He added: “There is a lot of anger amongst Muslims, and there is a revival of militant Islam. Local Christians are seen as linked to the West, the United States, and therefore the fallout.”
Indeed, a city resident, Khurram Shahzad, who lodged the initial complaint with the police against the brothers, claims not to know them personally. Muslims in the Warispura neighborhood said that Christians had been provided financing from abroad to spread Christianity and convert Muslims.
“They had been given money to spread their religion,” said Muhammad Nadeem, 25, an electrician. A crowd of onlookers nodded in agreement.

Waqar Gilani contributed reporting.

In Indonesia, Many Eyes Follow Money for Hajj

Kemal Jufri for The New York Times

Employees at a travel agency in Jakarta that specializes in Hajj pilgrimage packages. About 1.2 million Indonesians are on a waiting list to travel to Mecca.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Published: August 5, 2010

JAKARTA, Indonesia — As the nation with the world’s largest number of Muslims, Indonesia every year sends the most pilgrims to Mecca by far. About one out of 10 believers who performed the hajj last year were Indonesian.
Some 1.2 million of the faithful are now on a government waiting list to go to Mecca, filling this country’s annual quota through the next six years. But if the rapidly lengthening list is a testament to Indonesia’s growing devotion, it has also become a source of one of its perennial problems: corruption.
Government officials and politicians misuse the money deposited by those on the waiting list — now totaling nearly $2.4 billion — according to government investigators and anti-corruption groups. With friendly travel agents and business allies, officials exploit the myriad requirements of the state-run hajj to fatten their own pockets, watchdog groups say. Corruption, they say, has contributed to consistent complaints about cramped accommodations for pilgrims in Saudi Arabia and catering services that stop delivering food midway through the trip.
The national Parliament and officials at the Ministry of Religious Affairs recently settled on the price of this year’s hajj after unusually protracted negotiations and accusations, widely reported in the news media here, that some lawmakers and bureaucrats had agreed to share $2.8 million in bribes from the ministry. The annual negotiations are used by veteran bureaucrats and lawmakers to hammer out personal deals, according to anti-corruption groups and the news media, which have labeled them the “hajj mafia.”
“We can’t prove the existence of the hajj mafia yet,” said Muhammad Baghowi, a lawmaker who was elected last year and sits on a parliamentary commission that oversees religious affairs. “But given all the indications, you can really sense it.”
Parliamentary leaders and ministry officials have denied the bribery accusations. Abdul Ghafur Djawahir, a high-ranking official at the ministry’s hajj division, said anti-corruption groups had misinterpreted the ministry’s procedures and handling of the deposit money. He said they had also wrongly evaluated the costs of flights to Saudi Arabia and unfairly compared Indonesia’s hajj management with that of Malaysia, where pilgrims are reported to pay less and get better service.
“That’s what, in the end, forms the public’s opinion that there is huge corruption here,” Mr. Djawahir said, adding that there was “no hajj mafia” and that the ministry was “completely clean.”
Ministry officials and lawmakers pointed out that the price for this year’s hajj, which is scheduled for mid-November, had been lowered by $80 to $3,342, compared with last year. But anti-corruption groups argue that without graft and mismanagement the cost would be several hundred dollars lower.
Despite the convictions in 2006 of ministry officials, including a former minister, for misusing hajj funds and bribing state auditors to validate the ministry’s accounts, anti-corruption advocates say that little has changed.
According to Indonesian Corruption Watch, in the deal-making between the ministry and Parliament, lawmakers win hefty allowances on hajj trips for themselves and their relatives, and travel agencies and other businesses with political ties are handed contracts for catering or transportation. In return, lawmakers do not question the ministry’s handling of the $2.4 billion in deposits, especially the accrued interest.
“What the money is used for, we never know,” said Ade Irawan, a researcher at Indonesian Corruption Watch, the country’s leading private anti-corruption organization. “That’s the people’s money, public money, the pilgrims’ money.”
The Indonesian Pilgrims Rabithah, a private organization that has long pressed for reform of the hajj management, said the ministry and lawmakers negotiated away from public forums to keep their deals hidden.
“There is never any public accountability,” said Ade Marfuddin, the organization’s chairman, adding, “No one knows who gets what except them.”
In a recent report, the Corruption Eradication Commission, the government’s main anti-corruption agency, identified 48 practices in hajj management that could lead to corruption. Mochammad Jasin, a deputy chairman of the commission, said the commission would wait to see whether the ministry carried out suggested reforms before considering a full-fledged investigation into possible wrongdoing.
According to quotas established by Saudi authorities, 211,000 Indonesians will be allowed to go to Mecca this year. About 17,000 of them will go on private tours costing several times the state-run package of $3,342 — a sum that often entails a lifetime of savings and the sale of property or livestock.
Unable to afford the state-run hajj, Arif Supardi, 53, entered Saudi Arabia on a business visa shortly before the hajj a couple of years ago. (The Saudi government estimated that 30 percent of the 2.5 million pilgrims last year went to Mecca without valid permits.) He said he managed to complete his pilgrimage for $2,000 by becoming what he and others called “hajj backpackers.”
“There were many from Indonesia, mostly because of the cost,” he said.
Prospective pilgrims must now deposit $2,500 to register for the hajj, effectively lending the ministry that amount until their turn to go on the hajj comes up six years later. According to the religion ministry, between 15,000 and 20,000 people register every month. Interest in performing the hajj, a pilgrimage that is an obligation for any physically and financially able Muslim adult, has risen in the past decade as Indonesians have grown wealthier and increasingly given Islam an important place in their lives.
But Ian Imron, 38, who owned a travel agency offering private hajj tours from 1988 to 2006, said the growing interest also led to an overemphasis on the business side of the hajj. Travel agencies with political ties and large capital have mushroomed. When he ran into financial difficulties in 2006, Mr. Imron took it as a sign to quit the business.
“Maybe at the beginning, it was really about religion,” Mr. Imron said. “But then it became more about business.”
In a wealthy neighborhood in southern Jakarta, Al Amin Universal travel agency boasts that it has taken prominent politicians on the hajj on private tours. Employees at the agency said its owners — the family of Melani Suharli, the deputy speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly, a legislative branch — were unavailable to talk.
Despite the widely reported poor service on the state-run trips, most pilgrims do not complain as ministry officials warn them that airing grievances will mar their religious experience, anti-corruption groups said.
Achmad Fachin, 50, who sold his family car to go to Mecca with his wife, said he did not complain during their hajj but has grown angry about the corruption.
“But, in the end, let them be,” he said. “They’ll have to take responsibility for whatever they do. We were performing our religious duty and paid the fees with sincerity.”

Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting.