generalspeaking

This is Pakistan

What could be more heartbreaking than to see photographs of children weeping in fear and terror? These are children of Pakistan, whose parents have surrendered them to the care of a Karachi madrassa, one of many, in fact thousands of seminaries in Pakistan, most funded by Saudi Arabia oil money. This one, the Jamia Masjid Zikriya Kandhelwi Madrassa, was raided by Pakistani police.

The police freed 88 students, children ranging in age from 6 years old, upward. Some of these children were held in chains in the stone dungeon of the madrassa. Pakistan is a poor country, and a fundamentally religious country. The parents of these children paid a monthly stipend to have them educated in the Koran. It is doubtful whether they were fully aware of their children's plight.

Some of them were regularly beaten. One of them who was beaten, so hard, he said that his back would bleed, said also that he would prefer to be returned to the basement of the madrassa rather than go back home to live with his widowed mother who had sent him to the seminary. Where he and other children were chained to the walls, beaten, and held there beside drug addicts in cells.

"I was a thief, so my mother decided to admit me", explained the 14-year-old boy. His father is now dead, a homeless drug addict. And his mother, after her son's release, declared that she would prefer the police had left her son where she had placed him. "He was creating problems for me, people were always complaining he had stolen from them."

In all fairness, the state of these children, the manner in which they were kept, has shocked Pakistanis themselves. Most parents sent their children to the madrassa believing it would be useful to them, in attaining a religious eduction. "I didn't know the madrassa management would beat him so mercilessly", said one father of his 8-year-old son.

Another young boy explained that his parents sent him to the madrassa because they were at a loss about how to control him, because he suffered from fits that could turn him violent. "My father took me to several spiritual healers who said I was a victim of black magic. My father pays 3,000 rupees a month to the madrassa as a fee to make me a normal person, but I still suffer from fits and despite that they kept me chained and beat me with sticks ruthlessly."

One police official explained, "Most of the recovered are ordinary students while a few drug addicts and mentally challenged persons were also recovered from the basement. It seems that the administration was running a sort of religious school-cum-rehabilitation-centre." Two school authorities have been placed under arrest.

Pakistan has over 15,000 registered madrassas educating two million students, representing 5% of the 34 million children in the education system. This is a country that is third-world in its social conditions. Yet a deliberate choice was made to become a nuclear-owning nation. This in a country where millions of people are afflicted with endemic poverty.

Where people living a subsistence agricultural life can be made homeless with the onset of disastrous floods leading to mass evacuations requiring the intervention of international humanitarian groups and the United Nations to feed and temporarily house the refugees. Yet this is also a country that is paranoid about its nearest neighbour, India, and which invests billions obtained from the United States in conventional armaments.

This is a country whose military and national police plot with terrorist groups to bring violence to Indian-held Kashmir, to mount terror attacks on Mumbai, and to support, arm and plot with the Afghan Taliban, to destabilize another neighbour, Afghanistan.

Labels: Pakistan, Particularities/Peculiarities, Poverty

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, December 14, 2011