Anxious relatives are trying to contact Australian authorities

BY:DEBBIE GUEST
From:The Australian
June 27, 2012 12:00AM



A 28-year-old Iranian woman being held on Christmas Island says she and other detainees are 'so sad' over the mass drowning. Picture: Daniel Wilkins Source: The Australian


TEENAGE boys desperate to escape persecution in Afghanistan and Pakistan probably made up most of the 90-plus asylum-seekers who drowned off Christmas Island last week, it emerged yesterday, as police moved to identify at least three of the 17 bodies recovered.

Anxious relatives overseas are trying to contact Australian authorities for information on whether their loved ones are alive. Afghan man Raiz Hussain told The Australian from his home in the United Arab Emirates he feared his brother Asad, 25, was on the boat and might be dead.

Mr Hussain said his brother had been in Indonesia for 18 months and wanted to get on a boat to Australia; he had been unable to contact him since the disaster.

"Sometimes he was calling me from Indonesia and told us he wanted to go to Australia, and now his phone is switched off. I'm worried he was on this ship," he said. "When the boat was destroyed, his phone was switched off."


He said he and his brother were from Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, and the threat from the Taliban made life dangerous and had forced them to leave.

On Monday, Pakistani Muhammad Essa contacted The Australian concerned about his 36-year-old brother Jabir Hussain.

Australian Hazara Federation spokesman Hassan Ghulam said four other families worried about Hazaras from Afghanistan and Pakistan had contacted him through friends in Australia.

He said one youth believed to be missing was 15 or 16 and he had heard through Brisbane's Hazara community that many more teenage boys were on board the boat and unaccounted for.

The boat was carrying about 200 people; only 110 survived.

West Australian police inspector Neville Dockery, who is leading the coronial investigation into the tragedy, said three of the bodies recovered were likely to be able to be visually identified. About 20 officers were continuing with the victim identification process and interviewing survivors yesterday.

News of the tragedy has swept through the island's detention centres. One Iranian woman in the island's family camp told The Australian she and fellow detainees were very upset. "We're so sad, we don't know who they are," said the 28-year-old woman, who did not want to be named.

"We're very worried it might be our friends, we're very worried about them and about everyone who comes this way."

The woman said she had made the journey to Australia from Indonesia with her brother and they had spent three frightening days at sea. "This is very dangerous. We were very scared," she said through the detention fence.

Two of four injured survivors were released from Royal Perth Hospital yesterday after being flown off Christmas Island on Friday and Saturday.

The Australian

Living in fear

By Letter
Published: June 26, 2012



QUETTA: Syed Ali Mujtaba was killed on his way to donate blood and Aqeel Raza met the same fate while travelling to his university. Their only fault was that they belonged to the Shia Hazara community. As heart-rending as this state of affairs is for the community in Quetta, the criminal silence that has accompanied it is equally agonising. Perhaps, Shia Hazaras are lesser human beings because I really cannot figure out why we are being offloaded from buses and killed in cold blood, with not even women and children being spared. Yet, the media and the people of Pakistan seem to have more important issues to address, including the numerous ‘gates’ that are constantly hogging the limelight.

On June 18, a bus carrying Shia Hazaras was hit by a suicide blast, which killed five students and critically wounded many others. Not a single person involved in this or other attacks has been caught and punished and even if they are caught, they miraculously ‘escape’. Businessmen have abandoned their businesses, students cannot go to universities, colleges and schools, people cannot travel and are trapped in their homes. They have become despondent and are forced to leave the place they love most. Hundreds have drowned while on their way to Australia. They prefer death by drowning than to live every day in constant fear.

I am sure my dear, departed friend, Syed Ali Mujtaba, is in a better place now as he does not have to experience the pain caused by the death of friends and family members anymore. The city he loved has changed a lot. The mountains are not as friendly as they used to be and the valley has become bleak. Blood flows through the streets and the air is filled with sobs and screams. Roaming the city with him on a scooter and the trips to Askari Park and Hana Urak are just memories now. People don’t go on picnics anymore and spend their time remembering their loved ones. Everybody is waiting … waiting for their turn.

Saqlain Ali Changezi

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27th, 2012.

Quetta blast victim dies at CMH

Tuesday, June 26, 2012


QUETTA: Professor Muhammad Hussain of the Balochistan University of Information Technology Management and Sciences (BUITMS) succumbed to his injures at Combined Military Hospital (CMH) on Monday, taking the death toll of Samungali Road blast to six.

It may be mentioned that five students of the BUITMS were killed and 70 others, including policemen, women and children, were injured in the blast near FIA office last Monday.

Hussain’s body was handed over to his relatives for burial after legal formalities. “Three of the injured students lost their eyesight in the blast,” hospital sources said. staff report

Daily Times

Doctors: 116 More Afghan Students, Mostly Girls, Poisoned

Posted Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 3:35 pm

Doctors in central Afghanistan say they are treating at least 116 Afghan students, mostly girls, after they became sick at school.

Health officials in Bamiyan province made the announcement Tuesday. For the past several weeks, hundreds of female students across Afghanistan have complained about noticing strange smells in their schools before becoming dizzy and nauseous and even fainting and vomiting in some cases.

Hospital officials in the province are investigating to see if any of the students show signs of having been poisoned.

No one has died in the incidents, and authorities have not found any traces of poison in the blood samples. Some experts suggest that a phenomenon called “mass hysteria” against the backdrop of Afghanistan's ongoing conflict could be behind the episodes.

But Afghan intelligence officials have accused the Pakistani military spy agency of being involved in the incidents. Pakistan has called the allegations “absurd and senseless.”

Other Afghan authorities have blamed the Taliban, saying they detained a group of people with insurgent ties after an incident in northern Afghanistan. However, Taliban officials have denied any involvement.

The Taliban in the past has been accused of targeting girls' schools with poison and acid attacks in an effort to close them down. Under the Taliban's rule, women were banned from working or going to school outside the home.

Voice of America

Taliban district chief arrested in Bamiyan province

By SAJAD - Sun Jun 24, 12:09 pm

According to local authorities in Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, Afghan security forces detained Taliban district chief in Saighan.

The officials further added Mullah Abdul Kabir was arrested by Afghan security forces along with some weapons and ammunition including 1 RPG, 2 missiles, 120 rounds of AK-47 and PK ammos, some explosive materials and 3 remote controls.

Provincial security media office chief Ahmad Aliyar said Taliban district chief Mullah Abdul Kabir was arrested after carrying out a failed suicide bomb blast to target Saighan district chief.

Mr. Aliyar further added Afghan security forces seized some documents from Mullah Abdul Kabir which shows he had conducted his classes in a religious school “Jame Ashhad-ul-Tawhid” in Peshawar city of Pakistan and was later send to Bamiyan province of Afghanistan.

In the meantime Mullah Abdul Kabir said a number of religious clerics of Afghanistan is also being trained in religious Madrasas in Pakistan.

He said he was elected as district chief for Saighan while he was being trained in Peshawar city of Pakistan.

Mullah Abdul Kabir also said Taliban group was being supported and organized by United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) and 25 other Islamic and Western nations.

According to local security officials, this is the second time Afghan security forces arrest nominated Taliban leader in Bamiyan province of Afghanistan.

Afghan security forces arrested nominated Taliban provincial governor Mullah Burhanuddin for Bamiyan province last yet.

Taliban militants group yet to comment regarding the report.

Khaama Press

Daily Times, the latest pen-killer of Shia Hazaras of Quetta – by Ali Muntaziri

Pakistan media usually promotes the agenda and discourse of military establishment.

Update/Editor’s note: Op-ed editor of Daily Times has now apologized and assured to be extra careful in the future. We appreciate this gesture and hope the mainstream media will publish factual and sympathetic articles on Shia Hazaras, one of the most persecuted and target killed community of Pakistan. The exchange on Twitter is reproduced in the comments section below.

********

Daily Jang’s long held stature as the military establishment’s top media ally has been thrown into jeopardy all of a sudden. There is a new candidate for the throne in town, albeit, new only in butchering facts and replacing them with outright fallacies. The victims are not new, however, it’s the Shia Hazaras of Quetta who find themselves on the receiving end of misrepresentation again.

But this is no minute propaganda, mind you, the article published in Daily Times today (written by Surat Khan Marri)is so replete with factual lies that it would have made Joseph Goebbels a very proud man.

A community besieged and terrorized at the hands of religious fanatics should normally expect some sort of solace from the educated elite of the mainstream press. I, for one though, have long let go such hollow expectations because the more one believes in the transparency of Pakistan’s electronic and press media (both Urdu and English press), the more likely are the chances for the person to end up in sheer bewilderment as to how such an insulting written piece finds its way into one of the leading newspapers in the country.


Surat Khan Marri, an ISI mole or an LeJ-Taliban operative?

What adds to my utter inconvenience is the fact that the writer of this outrageously unrealistic article claims to be a Baloch, whose community has always found an able supportive friend in Hazaras during the entire course of their struggle against the injustices that they have been targeted with. Read Mr. Surat Khan Marri’s written piece, then reread and then reread again, still, the search for a single instance of truth would prove futile. Quite contrary to the claims that Hazaras are the beneficiaries of the Balochs’ miseries is the reality that both communities continue to be the subjects of genocide at the hands of a ‘common enemy’.

Let me be blunt, the military establishment kills and abducts the Balochs and the military establishment kills Shia Hazaras, of course with the use of its strategic assets-LeJ- in this case. The Balochs and Shias (both Hazara and non-Hazara Shias) should counter this collective genocide together, any such notion that tries to create animosity between the two should be quashed left, right and center, be it one from a Hazara or a Baloch.

Let us start from today and from this piece of trash published by Daily Times. Whatever economical, educational and social progress the Hazaras have made while being in Pakistan is a testament to their hard work, dedication, patriotism, determination and willingness to move forward as a developing community unlike some others who have a sense of pride in sticking to their cave houses and guns and illiteracy. Anyone who puts pen to paper in order to repaint history with lies should be ashamed of oneself. While such attempts fail audaciously in tainting the glorious reputations of Shia Hazaras, they serve only to unveil the hatred and bias that exists within some people.

I don’t normally dwell into conspiracy theories, but the notion that the Military-Mullah-Media alliance is fully bent on pitting the local communities of Balochistan against one another is as legit as they come. On the one hand is the exceedingly naive assertion that majority of the terrorists of LeJ/SSP, killers of Shia Muslims (including Shia Hazaras), are local Balochs. While on the other hand are the nonsense claims linking innocent Shia Hazara youth with the assassination attempts on Sunni scholars. Most people might not discern the grave consequences of reactions once people of Balochistan start believing in these lies but allow me to state that disaster will ensue. As yet, though, sanity has prevailed and any such propaganda has been met with strong negative response on all fronts. May the truth seekers continue to emerge victorious from every battlefield.

CriticalPPP.Com

Ending religious discrimination: ‘The tolerant majority needs to take charge’

By Our Correspondent
Published: June 23, 2012


" We will not respond to violence with violence. This is the lesson everyone needs to learn," Hazara community member Aftab Hussain. DESIGN: FAIZAN DAWOOD
LAHORE:

“Those who believe in peace and tolerance are a majority and must take charge of the country,” Justice (retired) Nasira Iqbal said on Friday.

Justice Iqbal was addressing a convention organised by the Peace and Tolerance Alliance (PTA) in collaboration with the Strengthening Participatory Organisation Pakistan (SPO-Pak) at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) offices.

She said that Jinnah had dreamt of a Pakistan where all citizens would have equal rights irrespective of their religious affiliations.

However, she lamented that religious minorities had been deprived of rights in the country.

“We have to do more than putting the rights of minorities in the constitution,” she said. “We have to ensure that these rights are also upheld.”

She said the blasphemy laws were being used to persecute minorities and deprive them of their property.

“Most blasphemy cases are used to unjustly occupy land,” she said.

She said that a number of people that had served the country had belonged to religious minorities.

She praised the late Justice Alvin Cornelius as the most competent judge in the country’s history.

Mehboob Ahmed Khan, a human rights activist, said that a country which persecuted religious minorities through both unfair laws and social discrimination could not progress.

He said that the Jinnah’s dream was being mocked.

He recalled that Cecil Chaudhry and said he had put his Pakistani identity above his religious.

“He fought in wars to safeguard the entire country, not just Christians,” he said.

Amarnath Randhawa, a representative of the Hindu community, said that Hindus are one of Pakistan’s largest religious minorities. “We were promised a lot, from equal rights to respect,” he said.

He said that there were more than 500,000 Hindus in the Punjab. Most of their worship places had been unjustly occupied, he said. “We suffer at the hands of the majority in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan where the state religion promises security to religious places,” he said.

He said that educated Hindu girls were being forced to stay home for fear of forced conversions.

Aftab Hussain, a member of the Hazara community, said, “The silent majority needs to wake up and fight for the rights of the oppressed.”

He said that despite persecution, Hazaras had decided to fight their war peacefully.

“We will not respond to violence with violence,” he said. “This is the lesson everyone needs to learn.”

“Minorities must be brought into the mainstream to end social disparity,” Hussain said.

SPO regional director Salman Abid said that religious extremism had increased due to a weak democratic system. He said that the failure of political forces meant that the state had become party to religious discrimination.

The convention ended with PTA convener Samson Salamat putting forward demands that were unanimously adopted by the participants of the convention. These included ensuring that state policies and laws are free of religious discrimination, the blasphemy laws be ended and the curricula be revised to end discriminatory content.

Published In The Express Tribune, June 23rd, 2012.