On 11th May 2003, Amer Ali, a 60-year-old peasant of "Chak 4-L" of Okara district, a distant rural part of Pakistan about six hours' drive from Islamabad, made his last good-neighbourly visit to the adjoining village, "Chak 5-L." As the old man hobbled out of his hosts' house, he was cut down by a hail of bullets. Amer Ali was the seventh to have died in recent months in the bitter struggle between the peasants of Okara and the Pakistan army rangers, now into its third year. It is an extraordinary story which concerns a piece of unfinished business from colonial days combined with the staggering greed and arrogance of the Pakistani army.
Coincidentally, just hours before Amer Ali was shot down, a group of journalists from the Urdu press and concerned citizens, including myself, had set out from Islamabad on a fact-finding mission.
As I stood by the blood-spattered earth next to a wall pockmarked with bullets, grim-faced villagers pointed out the field from where they said the rangers had machine-gunned the village for over an hour. A tour around Chak 5-L followed. It is a fairly typical village with mud-covered huts, open drains, barefooted children, and scrawny chickens. Branches of trees felled in the shooting lay all around. Many houses, as well as the village mosque, had bricks broken or chipped by heavy bullets.
They are there for anyone to see-but only if they can successfully navigate through the siege imposed upon the 70-odd villages in the area. Roadblocks are everywhere, manned by soldiers with automatic weapons as well as the lighter-armed police. Four-wheelers with mounted machine guns prowl menacingly upon the dirt roads next to the canals, raising huge clouds of dust.
Why are they doing this? I asked one villager from the crowd that was now swarming around me. "They want to put us on contract, pay rent to them, take away our rights to the land, and then throw us out," he replied. "But this land is ours because our forefathers have tilled it and we have nowhere else to go." And then, as if the floodgates had broken, villagers came to show us wounds upon their bodies, some now turning septic. A visit to the neighbouring village, Chak 4-L, showed the broken limbs, hollow faces, sunken eyes and marks of beatings were there too.
The peasants' forefathers were brought here from other parts of present-day Pakistan by the British about 100 years ago, to clear the brush and level the fertile land. The present crisis started when the peasants realised that the British had given the land on a 100-year lease to the government of Punjab, and that period expired three years ago. So the peasants started demanding ownership rights and stopped paying tithe (half of their produce) to the army.
The army, in turn, has decided that it wants the land for retired officers, families of martyrs, and so on. The army bosses think that such land is far too valuable for the peasants, so they are trying to force them to sign a contract that gives the army the right to dispossess them at will. It is clearly organised from Islamabad and represents the worst kind of institutionalised corruption.
Nevertheless, appalled by what we had seen, we felt it necessary to try to see those in authority in the region. Driving to the rangers' headquarters, we were stopped at the entrance by armed guards. After some hesitation, they conveyed by telephone our request to meet with Colonel Saleem, the head of the rangers in Okara. Permission was eventually granted and we drove into the complex, spread over many acres, containing residences and offices. The beautifully manicured lawns and flower beds, gravelled paths and ornate structures from British colonial times stood in stark contrast to the brick and mud hovels we had just left behind.
We were received by all who matter in the Okara administration. Apart from Colonel Saleem, we met Major Tahir Malik-who looks after the military aspects and is greatly feared by the villagers-the senior superintendent of police, and the district commissioner. Each had a closely similar point of view to the other. They spoke good English, the meeting was civil and polite, and we were offered tea and sandwiches. But there was to be no meeting of minds.
In response to my question of who killed Amer Ali, the administration officials said that he had been caught in the crossfire between Sindhis and Machis, two groups at loggerheads over some local dispute. However, my offer to transport Amer Ali's decaying corpse, which at the moment was lying in his relatives' house in Chak 5-L, to Islamabad for a postmortem was dismissed. And where did the torture marks, of which I now have photographic proof, on the bodies of so many villagers come from? The answer given was that they had been self-inflicted with the intent of defaming the authorities.
The siege of Okara is a blot on Pakistan's collective conscience. For all practical purposes, the nearly 1m people of Okara are under military occupation. Peasants have no political agenda-land is about livelihood and physical survival. To evict them from lands they have tilled for over a century is sheer cruelty.
