Kamran Shafi

The writer is a retired army officer and a freelance columnist

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk

Poor Rafiq Butt was found lying face up, dead, "around 10:30 on the morning of October 23" in his first-floor cell in the Hudson County Correctional Centre (the name given by Americans to some of their County Jails), New Jersey, just across the water from Manhattan, New York City, according to a story in the New York Times of November 5, 2001. "A preliminary autopsy revealed that Mr Butt, whose one-year stay in the United States seems to have been hapless from the very start, had coronary heart disease and died of a heart attack" the story goes on. Poor, illiterate Rafiq Butt, possibly a cousin or a friend of someone who works for the United States Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, which is probably why he was granted a visitor visa, came to New York on September 24th, 2000, and, again according to the newspaper, "had little success scratching around for work". His nephew, a taxi-driver in NYC would give him some little money now and again.

This poor man had been a migrant worker in Qatar and Dubai for 10 years, and when his luck ran out in the Middle East, he made the great leap and came to The New World. But, what work can an (uneducated) man in his mid-fifties find in the market place of the strong and the young? Poor Rafiq Butt had the atypical symptoms of a heart attack - a pain in the jaw - which the jail doctor put down as gingivitis, a gum disorder. No further investigation - just some antibiotics for his 'toothache'. So then, poor Rafiq Butt died in a prison of the richest, most advanced, most powerful country in the whole wide world. Sheer fright, and acute stress probably brought on his heart attack.

But why in God's name wasn't Rafiq's "pain in the jaw" investigated further? The man wasn't aggressive; he wasn't fighting his deportation - he just wanted to get back to his family, having failed to earn the money that he desperately needed to marry his daughters off "in style." This is what he himself told his deportation hearing after his arrest, which only happened because neighbours of his, chary after September 11, told on him to the police. He had committed no violent crime, he had just overstayed his visa, like countless others from countless other countries. How can the greatest society on earth have failed poor Rafiq Butt so very completely, so very finally? The saddest part of it all was the following comment on his arrest papers: "Subject has $0.00 in his/her possession".

Enough of matters over which we have scant or no control. I must now keep a promise I made to Minister Omar Asghar Khan in early August. About a week before we were to leave for the United States I was having a farewell lunch with some friends at the Islamabad Club when I noticed the honourable minister walk in. I went over to his table to say hello, and to ask if he had done anything at all about the environment; to remind him about the pressure horns, the sewers that our rivers had become. "Hello, Minister", I greeted him, "how are you". He got up, shook hands with me, and said, "Yaar, janay bhi do", referring to my criticism of his ministry for doing nothing at all to improve the country's environment, except issuing high-sounding policies.

I told him I would "janay do" were his ministry to do something, anything at all. "What about the pressure horns, what about my river", I asked him. Suddenly he says, out of the blue: "Are you still smoking?" "Why do you ask", I said. "Because your teeth are yellow", he says back to me!! I should have fallen off a chair were I sitting on one, I was so taken aback. "Thank you for pointing out my yellow teeth, Minister - I promise I will write about this soon - but forget about them for a moment and talk to me about the pressure horns, about the Dhamra River, that you yourself fought for when you were in the NGO business", I said. Hold on to your chairs, readers, for this is what he says next, ignoring the bit about the pressure horns: "I have received a report that you are the main polluter of the river." It was all I could do, just trying to fathom what he was saying - I could hardly believe my ears. I collected my wits enough to say: "Well then, Minister, you must proceed against me through a police case; but are you serious when you say what you do - that all the horrific acids and petroleum products and other such beasts found in repeated chemical analyses of the Dhamra come from my house?"

He suddenly changed tack then, and instead went off on another tangent: "Well, it was your government that made the Hattar Industrial Estate", meaning that it was Benazir's first government that put up the Estate, which lies on one of the streams that feed the Dhamra. Very strange logic, what? "I am glad you think Benazir did something right", I said, "but do you mean the industrial estate shouldn't have come about at all, just because your government cannot apply the law against the dumping of effluents", I asked him. No answer to that, just a beatific smile. I threw my hands up in desperation, said my good-byes, and walked away. Now do you see what I mean when I say President Musharraf really chooses them!

Which reminds me: was the General briefed on the following two matters, so that he would have had the option of bringing them up when he met Prime Minister Tony Blair twice in the past three weeks: By the FO on the fact that the Labour Party had passed a resolution in 1995, accepting Pakistan's stand on Kashmir in its entirety; and by the Defence Ministry on the fact that the British government had early this year gone back on a promise made to those Pakistani WW-2 POWs who had suffered in Japanese POW camps, or in case they had passed on to their widows, that a one-off compensation payment of 10,000 Pounds Sterling would be made to them? He might well have brought these matters up, in the first instance to try and put a belligerent India on notice that it was flouting UN resolutions on a plebiscite in Kashmir; and in the second because a payment to the POWs, or their widows (there are so few of them anyway), would have had an excellent effect in the areas which are most represented in the Pakistan Army. I hope he was briefed, but fear he wasn't. He does choose them, doesn't he, our General?

In the end, a reader has pointed out to me that it was not an El-al airliner that the Israelis stormed in Entebbe, but one belonging to Air-France. I stand corrected, and thank him for the feedback.