Death Sentences on Twitter: Civilian Victims of Secret Military Courts in Pakistan
This chapter examines secret military courts established for trying civilians charged with terrorism-related offenses. The first section examines how the Pakistani authorities failed to provide institutional independence to military courts (e.g., by keepi
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ntroduction The Pakistani security forces arrested Maulana Qari Zahir Gul, a religious leader from the tribal area of Bajaur, on 27 April 2011.1 When he was deprived of liberty, Qari Zahir lived in Jalozai, a camp for internally displaced people located east of Peshawar. He and his family found shelter in Jalozai after fleeing from Bajaur during a military operation against local insurgent groups. After taking Qari Zahir into custody, the security forces refused to inform him about the reason for detention and did not allow him to challenge the lawfulness of detention in an independent and impartial tribunal. He was also not allowed to see his family nor a defense lawyer. The security forces refused to provide his family— his parents, his wife and four children, three sons and a daughter— information about his fate and whereabouts. While being held in custody at an unknown detention facility, Qari Zahir “disappeared.”
1This
account about the detention of Maulana Qari Zahir Gul is based on an interview, carried out in 2015, with Mohammed Ajmal Khan, a lawyer from Peshawar who represented Anwar Bibi, Qari Zahir Gul’s mother.
© The Author(s) 2019 V. Badalič, The War Against Civilians, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12406-9_9
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In 2012, Qari Zahir’s family filed a petition at the Peshawar High Court to request the security forces to disclose the place of detention of their “disappeared” family member. After a long wait, the detaining authority finally allowed them, in July 2014, to visit Qari Zahir. They were allowed to visit him only once. The next time they received information about Qari Zahir was in early April 2015, when they learned that he was sentenced to death by a then newly established secret military court. Qari Zahir’s parents, who were illiterate, learned from their friends that their son had been given the death penalty. Their friends discovered what happened to Qari Zahir after seeing a report on military courts in the news media. Before and during the trial, the Pakistani military did not deem it necessary to provide any information about Qari Zahir’s case to his family members. It was only after the trial—on 2 April 2015—that the military informed the public at large about the first sentences, including Qari Zahir’s death sentence, awarded by the military court. Major General Asim Salim Bajwa, director-general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of Pakistan’s military, used his Twitter account to relay the news to the public (Kine 2015). The tweet read: “#Mil Courts: Army Chief confirms death sentence of 6 hard-core terrorists tried by the recently established mil courts… Were involved in heinous act of terror, men slaughter, suicide bombing, loss of life and property” (ibid.). The military also disclosed in a short statement that Qari Zahir and five individuals—Noor Saeed, Murad Khan, Inayatullah, Israruddin, and Haider Ali—were given death penalties, while one of the convicts, a man called Abbas, wa
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