[Reader-list] The mysterious case of the grey lady of Bagram

[Pawan Durani]

Source : dawn.com
By Robert Fisk
Saturday, 20 Mar, 2010

Why didn’t Aafia Siddiqui's family report her missing in 2003, asks
Robert Fisk. –
PAKISTAN
Witnesses’ accounts differ at Dr. Aafia’s trial

ISLAMABAD: Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological
records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. “I strongly doubt
if the children are alive,” he says. “Probably, they have expired.” He
says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he
seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008
re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui – the “most wanted woman in the
world”, according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft – I
guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight.
But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?

Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui’s uncle and he produces a photograph of
his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above
Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning
against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which Al-Qaeda
operatives are made. Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country
which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which
now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her
children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten.

Aafia Siddiqui’s story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious
in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an
American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 – she was
convicted this month and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just
one of the charges against her – is regarded as a symbol of American
injustice. “Shame on America,” posters scream in all of Pakistan’s
major cities. She is known as the “grey lady of Bagram”, supposedly
tortured for five years in America’s cruel Afghan prison. President
Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to
repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme,
while the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dubbed her a “daughter
of the nation”. Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her
release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and
Maryam are their names.

Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi
tells me he doesn’t believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui’s
son. “He came here to stay with me, but he said he didn’t know Aafia
until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: ‘I was in the big
earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in
their home while I was out fetching water – that’s what saved my
life.’ He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an
orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and
said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before.
Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman – my
niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest.”

All such mysteries require a “story-so-far”. It goes like this. Aafia
Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis
university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister’s home for
Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her.
The Americans say she was a leading Al-Qaeda operative. So does her
ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in
Guantanamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the
1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy
curriculum vitae in the West’s obsessive “war on terror”. In 2004, the
UN identified her as an Al-Qaeda operative.

But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near
Kabul– where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have
been murdered – have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman
whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was
dubbed the “grey lady of Bagram”. At her New York trial, Siddiqui
demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her
own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture;
Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons
before her arrest. “If you were in a secret prison ... where children
were murdered...” she said.

And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan
police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly
contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes
on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American
soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in
Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting
behind a curtain. According to their evidence, she managed to take one
of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire. She missed but was cut
down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers.
Hence the charges. Hence the conviction.

She wasn’t helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed –
the man who supposedly planned 9/11 and who is the uncle of her second
husband, Ammar al-Baluchi – who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a
senior Al-Qaeda agent. But then, he’d just been waterboarded 183 times
in a month – which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase,
water-tight.

The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with
a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American
targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn’t they
report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the
children? Ahmed – son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your
point of view – is now staying with Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia, in
Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans
have shown no interest in him – even less in the other two, younger
children. Why not?

It’s odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008
– before the Ghazni incident – Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in
the suburbs of Islamabad. “She was wearing a burqa and got out of the
car, just outside here,” he says, pointing to the tree-lined street
outside his office window. “I only caught sight of her once, and I
said ‘You have changed your nose’. But it was her. We talked about the
past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the
Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get
away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would
protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her
children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia.”

More questions. If Siddiqui was a “ghost prisoner” in Afghanistan, how
come she turned up at Dr Faruqi’s home in Islamabad? Why would she
wear an Afghan “burqa” in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country?
Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show
her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad?

Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister’s
“unfair” trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the
Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention
to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a
martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing
suspension of disbelief. But America’s constant protestations of
ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about
them.

And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a
sense, were “disappeared” from the story – until the Afghan President,
Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and,
according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that
“the children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon”. Was Karzai
referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the
“real” Ahmed? And if Aafia’s two/three children are in Afghanistan,
where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept
them? The Afghans? The Americans?—Dawn/The Independent News Service