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Travelling while Pakistani

What does a 78-year-old social worker, one of Pakistan’s most respected citizens, have in common with the brother of a powerful political leader of the country? Nothing at all, except that both were recently caught TWP — travelling while Pakistani.

It is a phenomenon that has been around since 9/11, and many of us in South Asia can relate an experience or two of being asked weird questions by an immigration official in a European or American airport, of being picked out, seemingly at random, and asked to take off your shoes, or the humiliation at watching your suitcase opened up and its insides ripped apart. But in the last few days, it was brought home to Pakistanis in particularly stark terms when first one of its most powerful citizens was detained overnight at London’s Gatwick airport, London, and then, when a respected and famous citizen was detained for several hours at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport.

Of the two, it was Abdul Sattar Edhi’s detention that sent ripples of outrage across a country acutely conscious of its patron-client relationship with the United States. Mr. Edhi is Pakistan’s most well-known and well-loved social worker. Think male Mother Teresa. When the Pakistan Army was trying to get the militants holed up inside the capital’s Lal Masjid to give themselves up, Mr. Edhi showed up at the temporary military camp nearby, wanting to be allowed into the mosque to plead with the militants to at least send out all the underage children they were said to be holding hostage. He promised to adopt them all and give them an education. His network of private ambulances is the largest in the world and is Pakistan’s primary emergency service. Edhi shelters take in the homeless and the orphaned. The Edhi Welfare Trust collects unclaimed bodies and gives them a decent burial. Mr. Edhi was among the first to reach the earthquake victims in 2005 when the Pakistan government was still struggling to respond to the calamity. Edhi ambulances were the first to reach the spot of the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming parade in Karachi on October 18, 2007 as they did at the site of her assassination in Rawalpindi on December 27, ferrying the injured to hospitals and collecting the bodies of the dead from the site.

Yet at New York airport, Mr. Edhi was just one big suspect in the eyes of immigration officials. “Now this is the third time the U.S. immigration has interrogated and detained me for eight to nine hours. My clothes — a shalwar suit, a cap and a beard — made me a victim of discrimination. I told the authorities about my purpose for visiting the U.S., which was for nothing but welfare work,” Mr. Edhi said on his return to Karachi.

He was allowed to leave the airport but only after the officials seized his passport and his green card, which had lapsed as he had not spent enough time in the U.S. He got back his passport after 20 days, following diplomatic intervention.

“During the interrogation, they wanted to know why I travelled to the U.S. so frequently,” Mr. Edhi told the BBC from New York. “I told them about the nature of my work, but they did not understand.” The Edhi trust has a network of charity organisations across North America.

Just a few days before, London’s Gatwick airport saw a more dramatic version of the same script. Wajahat Hussain is no Edhi. He is the brother of Chaudhary Shujat Hussain, former Prime Minister and head of the Pakistan Muslim League that gave President Pervez Musharraf a political cushion from 2002 to 2007. In the Chaudhary stronghold of Gujrat in the Punjab province, he heads a private army called the “Wajahat Force,” and is hailed as “commander.” These days, he is busy trying to ensure his brother will win the February 18 election. Mr. Hussain headed to London late last month, apparently to line up meetings for General (retd.) Musharraf with Pakistani businessmen during his stop in the British capital at the end of his Europe tour.

But as the 48-year-old Mr. Hussain flew in from Barcelona with five other family members, including a son of Chaudhary Shujat, a squad of the British anti-terror police reportedly took them into custody from the plane, and whisked them away for interrogation — first to one police station and then a second. Three of the group were strip-searched and asked questions about Benazir’s assassination, and their links to the 12 suspected Al-Qaeda agents — 10 of them Pakistanis — who had been arrested a day before in Spain.

The whole lot was deported back to Pakistan after 21 hours. Intense diplomatic efforts by Pakistan, including a summons to the British High Commissioner in Islamabad, yielded a three-line statement from the British Foreign Office expressing regret for “any inconvenience and distress” caused to Mr. Hussain and members of his entourage.

Without giving reasons for the arrest and deportation, it assured all of them their visas were unaffected and they could return to the U.K. On landing in Pakistan, Mr. Hussain described the entire episode as extremely humiliating. “If it could happen to me,” he said, “most other Pakistanis are more vulnerable.”

Of course, in the case of Mr. Hussain, a rather large section of Pakistani opinion was pleased that he “got what was coming to him.” The Chaudharies are not the most popular politicians in the country, and the Pakistan People’s Party asked why the Foreign Ministry had thought it fit to intervene when Mr. Hussain held no official position. The party asked the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to “expose the real story” behind the deportation, insinuating that he was actually up to no good. There were all sorts of whispers about Mr. Hussain’s actual mission in London.

But there was no such ambivalence about the Edhi episode, and newspapers thundered that the treatment meted out to him at JFK was “outrageous,” demanding that the U.S. apologise to him.

Not surprisingly, the Edhi-Wajahat incidents are being seen as more evidence that the West tends to treat all Pakistanis, and indeed all Muslims, as terrorists or potential terrorists. The twin episodes have added to the sense that the world has laid siege to Pakistan, that the country is surrounded on all sides by enemies who are out to destroy it. With the foreign media going on about Pakistan’s “loose nukes” falling into extremist hands, the U.S. dropping hints about launching unilateral military strikes in Pakistani territory to take out Al-Qaeda targets, Pakistanis feel that despite the role their country is playing in the war on terror, it is being treated unfairly by the world. Much of the reason for President Musharraf’s unpopularity in Pakistan today is that he is seen as having brought this on the country, with his eagerness to cooperate with the U.S. Many political leaders have fed this feeling of persecution at the hands of the West, and in the run-up to the elections, have been promising that they have what it takes to show the U.S. its place. For instance, it has been Nawaz Sharif’s constant refrain that in 1998, despite all the threats from the U.S., he tested the nuclear bomb and restored Pakistani pride and sense of security in the wake of the Indian tests.

So it should be interesting to see how Pakistan responds to the plea that Benazir has made in a book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, to be released on February 12, that Muslim societies must stop blaming outsiders for their current plight. In excerpts published in Britain’ Sunday Times, Benazir has argued that while there is “a rush to condemn foreigners and colonizers…there is an equally weighty unwillingness within the Muslim world to look inwards and to identify where we may be going wrong ourselves.”

She writes that pride in the Muslim world now is rarely derived from economic productivity or technical or intellectual creativity. “Now we see Muslim pride always characterized in the negative, derived from notions of ‘destroying the enemy’ and ‘making the nation invulnerable to Western assault.’” In all likelihood, it was this political position that cost Benazir her life. Much ahead of the book, she had taken positions — such as her support to the military action against militants holed up in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid — that many Pakistanis perceived as pro-Western and pandering to the U.S. And in her “political will” that the PPP released recently, she directed it to continue working against extremism, whose existence in Pakistan many — political leaders as well as ordinary folk — continue to deny, blaming it instead as a West-constructed myth, just as Thabo Mbeki once denied the existence of HIV and in South Africa, blaming America instead for making it all up.

But nothing justifies the kind of ethnic, racial or religious stereotyping that Muslims, and all South Asians are subjected to in the West, especially since 2001. Mr. Edhi is the kind of positive role model that Pakistan desperately needs more of. But by treating him in an uncouth manner and bracketing him almost as if he was a Rashid Rauf, the terror suspect in the alleged 2006 plot to bomb transatlantic planes who recently escaped from custody in Pakistan, the U.S. has succeeded only in turning him into another rallying point for anti-Americanism, providing one more rallying cry for what Benazir has described as the “toxic” theory of the “clash of civilisations.”

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