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The terrifying world of Pakistan's 'disappeared'
If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi–a room that somehow accentuates her loneliness–scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country's cruel oppression. Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan's "disappeared".
It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not where Masood Janjua has gone–Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the President–for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of Pakistan's missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 "torture houses" just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from the basements could be heard by residents–who complained only that the buildings might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than compassion.