Ahmad Farhad’s abduction sent ripples across Pakistan. After being released on bail, he insists on telling his story
Shah Meer Baloch in Islamabad and Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi
It was late at night in Islamabad and Ahmad Farhad was returning from a quick trip to the shops when someone walked up behind him. “Don’t be scared, don’t scream and come with us,” the figure, dressed in civilian clothes, whispered discreetly into his ear.
Still clutching bread, eggs and jam intended for the next morning’s breakfast, Farhad went to the car without a sound. With a sinking feeling the poet recognised the vehicle, with its blacked-out windows, as one known to be used by shadowy military agencies in Pakistan for abductions.
“We have to tie your hands behind your back and put a cloth on your face,” the man told Farhad, before everything went dark. Certain he would never see his wife and children again, Farhad pleaded with those in the car to take him out with a single bullet rather than torture and mutilate him. They replied: “Don’t worry. Things don’t turn out that way.”
Farhad, known for political resistance poetry that has criticised the military for treating the constitution “like a toy”, had long feared he was a target of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Just days before his abduction he had tweeted about threats to his life.
Pakistan’s military, the most powerful institution in the country, is notoriously intolerant of dissent and for decades has been accused of using various agencies to carry out abductions, killings and disappearances of critics, though they deny the practice. Many of those taken do not make it out alive, with families often receiving mutilated corpses, and few who do survive are willing or able to discuss their ordeal.
Speaking for the first time about his experience of abduction in May, Farhad told the Guardian he was thrown into a tiny, hot, foul smelling cell and began to become unwell soon afterwards, but was given no medical attention. Instead he was pulled in for interrogation.
His captors made it clear that his political poetry, his activism and a recent post on social media calling for Pakistan’s powerful army chief to resign, were the reasons he had been picked up.
“They asked me many times, what’s my issue with the army chief and the military?” he said. “The interrogator then pressed me harder, asking about my resistance poetry, particularly my two poems on the military and enforced disappearances. He would scream at me ‘why did you use the name of the army as a title of the poem, why do you hate the military?’”
Farhad responded that he did not hate the military or the chief but believed all should follow the constitution…..
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