Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
from India Insight:
India’s ‘amnesty’ to Pakistan-based Kashmiri rebels
The Indian government has for the first time offered amnesty to hundreds of Kashmiris who had crossed over to the Pakistani part of Kashmir and are now willing to surrender and return home.
Thousands of Kashmiris have slipped into Pakistan-administered Kashmir for arms training since an anti-India insurgency broke out twenty years ago.
Hundreds have returned and joined Muslim rebel groups, many died on a rugged military control line while sneaking into the Indian side and many more are still living in different parts of Pakistan or Pakistani Kashmir.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has said anyone willing to give up militancy and return is welcome home.
The case of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui
Five years after she vanished from her parents’ home in Karachi along with her three children, Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui appeared in a New York court last week accused of trying to kill U.S. officers in Afghanistan
Accounts of her arrest and the shooting incident differ.
Siddiqui, 36, was arrested outside the governor’s office in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province on July 17 after police searched her handbag and found documents on making explosives, excerpts from the book “Anarchist’s Arsenal” and descriptions of New York City landmarks, federal prosecutors said in a statement.
Pakistan’s missing citizens
In a country facing the triple challenges of economic crisis, political instability and Islamist militancy, the impact on individuals can be easy to overlook. Amnesty International has tried to redress part of this by publishing a report about the hundreds of people it says have disappeared in Pakistan as a result of counter-terrorism measures.
It urges the coalition government elected in February to act immediately to resolve all cases of enforced disappearance. “We don’t know if those subjected to enforced disappearances are guilty or innocent, but it is their fundamental right to be charged and tried properly in a court of law,” says Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific director.
