U.S. Sees a Terror Threat; Pakistanis See a Heroine
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Relations between the United States and Pakistan often have a through-the-looking-glass quality, where almost nothing appears quite the same from the other side. The latest example is the case of Aafia Siddiqui.
In the United States, authorities say Ms. Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who once studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. She was convicted by a New York court in February of trying to kill American military officers while in custody in 2008 in Afghanistan. She faces life in prison when she is sentenced in May.
In Pakistan, she has become a national symbol of honor and victimization so potent that politicians of all stripes, Islamists, the news media and an increasingly anti-American public have all lined up to champion her claim of innocence.
In a rare display of unity, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who has described Ms. Siddiqui as a “daughter of the nation,” and the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, have promised to push for her release. Last week, senators passed a resolution to demand her return to Pakistan.
Her sister, Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui, a neurologist who studied and taught at Johns Hopkins University, has led a countrywide campaign on Aafia Siddiqui’s behalf. In recent weeks, hundreds of people, including professionals and civil rights campaigners, have taken to the streets in support.
The broad outpouring has forced the government, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party, to publicly assure Ms. Siddiqui’s supporters that it will continue its legal assistance, which has amounted to $2 million already.
Pakistan’s government has also raised her case with American officials, most recently in February during a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy to the region.
“The prime minister has suggested to visiting American delegations that releasing Aafia Siddiqui unconditionally would greatly improve the image of the Americans in the public’s eyes,” a close aide to Mr. Gilani said.
All of this has taken place with little national soul-searching about the contradictory and frequently damning circumstances surrounding Ms. Siddiqui, who is suspected of having had links to Al Qaeda and the banned jihadi group Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Instead, the Pakistani news media have broadly portrayed her trial as a “farce” and an example of the injustices meted out to Muslims by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. She was convicted on Feb. 3 on seven counts, including attempted murder of American officials.
“People here have very little knowledge of who she is and what she did other than she is a Pakistani woman, so the reaction is much more knee-jerk Pakistani nationalism,” said Samina Ahmed, a director in Pakistan with the International Crisis Group, a policy advocacy organization.
Ms. Siddiqui’s trial, which focused only on charges surrounding her capture in Afghanistan, left many questions unanswered about allegations of her involvement with Al Qaeda and of terrorist activity.
She had a long involvement in jihadi causes, even while a student at M.I.T. and, later, at Brandeis University. The F.B.I. has accused her of opening a post office box in 2002 in the name of Majid Khan, who is suspected of being a Qaeda member and is being held in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Divorced from her first husband, Dr. Muhammad Amjad Khan, the father of her three children, she married Ammar al-Baluchi, the nephew of the professed orchestrator of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in early 2003, according to court documents filed in the United States.
When the F.B.I. issued a global alert for her and her first husband in March 2003, she disappeared from her family home in Karachi, Pakistan.
Her second husband, Mr. Baluchi, was arrested and is jailed at Guantánamo. Accused of a role in financing the Sept. 11 plot, he is among five detainees scheduled to be tried in the United States in the coming months in the attacks.
From 2003 to 2008, Ms. Siddiqui dropped out of sight. Her whereabouts and those of her three children have been a mystery.
Her sister has accused the Pakistani intelligence agencies of handing her over to American officials. She says Ms. Siddiqui was transferred to the United States air base at Bagram, in Afghanistan, and tortured there. Her accusation is widely accepted in Pakistan, and strenuously denied by American officials.
Ms. Siddiqui’s first husband, Dr. Khan, who was questioned by Pakistani and F.B.I. officials and released, said that during Ms. Siddiqui’s disappearance, she was hiding in Pakistan. He says he saw her on two occasions.
Her uncle, S. H. Faruqi, has signed an affidavit swearing that she visited him in January 2008 in Islamabad and that she had asked for his help to reach the Taliban in Afghanistan.
She was arrested in July 2008 in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her eldest child, Ahmed, then 12, who told Afghan investigators they had arrived by road from Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan, two days before. While in custody, prosecutors said, she grabbed a rifle from a police station floor and fired on Army officers and F.B.I. agents, hitting no one. She was shot in the abdomen.
Ahmed was later sent to be with his aunt, Dr. Siddiqui. The other two children, Sulejman, 7, and Maryam, 12, remain missing, but their father says they have been seen at their aunt’s house.
In an interview, Dr. Khan urged the United States, Pakistani and Afghan governments to publish joint findings on the whereabouts of his children.
Last month, the Pakistani minister of state for foreign affairs, Nawabzada Malik Amad Khan, said the evidence against Ms. Siddiqui was insubstantial, local news reports said. But senior Pakistani officials acknowledged that it was almost impossible to defend her in a court of law.
One Western diplomat compared her case to that of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist accused of running a proliferation network, who now has the status of a national hero.
There is no doubt that the case of an ultraconservative, educated middle-class Pakistani woman who shunned the ways of the West and defied America has resonated with the Pakistani public.
“The iconization of Aafia Siddiqui as an emblem of Pakistani womanhood represents the kind of female rebel acceptable in a rapidly Islamizing Pakistani society,” said Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, the leading English daily newspaper.
“Leaving a husband for a second marriage, traveling alone, even putting your children in harm’s way, all acts that would be otherwise reviled, became acceptable when they are done with the ultimate aim of defying the United States,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/world/asia/06pstan.html
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