The eerie quiet of Islamabad was not only broken by the powerful suicide explosion near Lal Masjid early this month but also the revelation made by a British journalist about a nameless Pakistani woman prisoner reportedly, languishing in Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan.
While there was no dearth of sound bytes related to the horror revisiting the federal capital, the predicament of “Prisoner 650” — as the Pakistani inmate has been referred to — will have considerably drowned in the din. Not that it requires sound amplifiers to make us forget how officialdom treats our fellow citizens around the world.
Given the past track record, it is not that hard to imagine — as the slogan of an international brand goes — what awaits ‘Prisoner 650’ in terms of support from Islamabad.
The Foreign Office will, at best, ‘look into it’, if some conscientious media person ventures to ask the question at the weekly briefing in Islamabad before events overtake the issue — that is, if something more noisy has not taken place already.
At the time of writing this, serial blasts in Karachi and the regular road show up north have ensured that people of Pakistan will be all ears to anything but the screams and cries of an allegedly imprisoned fellow citizen, who, if not for Yvonne Ridley would probably, not be even known to us.
Ridley, who herself made headlines when she was taken into custody by Taliban in 2001 for venturing into Afghan territory without legal papers, came to know about Prisoner 650 from a harrowing account given by a former Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg in his book entitled Enemy Combatant.
Ridley candidly admitted that the West secured her freedom in only eleven days without any harm coming to her after raising hue and cry, but, for a Muslim woman from Pakistan, not a word of sympathy is forthcoming from global champions of human rights.
Disclosing that the account of Prisoner 650 was corroborated by four prisoners, one of whom even saw her before they managed to escape Bagram detention facility in 2005, Ridley raised obvious questions about the prisoner’s identity, state of mind and the extent of abuse or torture inflicted on her.
An assumption is that Prisoner 650 may be one amongst hundreds of people arrested for their alleged link to terrorism and handed over to the US by the Musharraf regime without recourse to the law of the land.
But this is just an assumption. Why should that hold back the new government in Islamabad from determining the truth? After all, it is the bounden duty of the state to look after the wellbeing of its citizens anywhere on the globe.
However, the record does not inspire.
Six years ago, six Pakistani immigrants in Macedonia were murdered in cold blood — at the behest of its then-interior minister, an admission of which was made by the succeeding government in Skopje!
The murder was allegedly sanctioned to win brownie points with the international community about how committed the breakaway former Yugoslavia state was to the war on terror.
The immigrants were set up as “terrorists” in a fake encounter outside the US Embassy in the Macedonian capital.
The Foreign Office in Islamabad made the usual noises about getting to the denouement but, true to script, nothing meaningful was ever done.
It was left to rights activist Ansar Burney to take up the cudgels and bring home the bodies of the slain Pakistanis from Skopje — almost a year after they were killed.
Before these immigrants, noted Pakistani intellectual Dr Munawwar Ahmed Anees was caught in the crossfire of a deadly political game in Malaysia just because of his affiliation with former deputy prime minister Anwer Ibrahim.
Dr Anees was arrested in 1998 under the draconian Internal Securities Act, a relic of the British era, which allows for indefinite detention without trial. He was charged with sodomy with Ibrahim, who was himself arrested for the same offence and “interfering with the police”.
Both of them were kept in the infamous Bukit Aman prison where political prisoners are interrogated and tortured. Dr Anees was kept incommunicado and denied access to his lawyers and even wife, who could barely recognise him when he was eventually produced in a court.
London-based Amnesty International declared Anees and Anwar prisoners of conscience and launched an urgent campaign to press for their release.
However, when the Pakistani government was approached at the highest level — a federal minister in Nawaz Sharif’s government to be precise — it only served to bury the issue with the minister turning the other cheek, saying “we import palm oil from Malaysia!” — implying that trade was more important than securing the release of a man, who had been grievously wronged. Truth to tell, there could not have been a more glaring manifestation of indignity and disregard for human rights.
There seems to be a certain official pattern corresponding to our citizens’ plight abroad (except when the person is a kidnapped ambassador). Sound bytes from official quarters have hardly ever meant more than a nugget for domestic consumption.
The record shows we put little premium on the lives of our citizens in comparison to say, the developed world as if we are lesser mortals by way of definition.
Unlike its Western counterpart, the Pakistani media appears to lack a full grasp of human rights issues, which explains why news about Pakistanis going missing or being abused/tortured at home or abroad rarely gets a prime spot. 
It is standard practice in many of these Western countries for the media to launch a sustained campaign to win justice for a victim — something deserving of emulation this side of the Indus, where actually there is far greater incidence of rights violation.
Sadly, whatever else it may have achieved, the mushroom growth of independent TV channels and their print cousins have done little to change the fate of a ‘cornered’ citizen. For now, political agenda is hijacking space — at the citizen’s expense.