After a while, the name of the Pakistani-born neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, her legal position, and her situation are being discussed in the United States.
When news broke that her distraught sister Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui was permitted to see her sister nearly 20 years after her kidnapping and captivity in the infamous military prison in Texas, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s long-forgotten memory began to reawaken in Pakistan, where it had been clouded by so many of our other real and imagined problems.
Finally, Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui, Jamaat-e-Islami senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, and British human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith left for America this week and met with Dr. Aafia for a number of hours. The information regarding Aafia Siddiqui’s circumstance has increased the sense of sadness, helplessness, and disappointment among those back home.
Aafia Siddiqu’s profound sadness, sense of helplessness, and sense of the oppression at hands of high and mighty seem destined to haunt us for the rest of our time. Dr. Aafia’s story, which serves as an example of our cowardly and corrupt leadership, is also a stain on the US, the country that bills itself as a defender of human rights. Dr. Aafia will continue to be a symbol of our collective humiliation and the embodiment of the savagery of a nation that dubbed itself a super power up until her release.
We must keep in mind that if she passes away while still incarcerated in the US, it will be of little consequence to the country, whose hands are stained with the blood of millions of innocent people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Vietnam and from Iraq to Afghanistan. But we would write another bleak chapter of shame in our history.
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui went missing in March 2003. Nobody knew where she went until 2005. In addition, US puppet Pervez Musharraf was in power in Pakistan at the height of American aggression in Afghanistan. The family of Dr. Aafia made a pitiful attempt to help her, but the strong people silenced their voices with all their might.
British national Moazzam Baig was freed from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in 2005. He said in his book shortly after being released that there was a female prisoner in Bagram Jail, Afghanistan, who would scream in the middle of the night. Although Moazzam Baig didn’t know who this prisoner was, he did note that she was known as prisoner number 650 in his writing. Following Muazzam Baig’s admission, Aafia Siddiqui, who has been missing since 2003, was suggested as prisoner number 650 by British convert Yvonne Ridley.
When the noises got out of hand around 2008, the information made it to the world press, and it was then established that Pakistani national Aafia Siddiqui was prisoner number 650. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani female scientist, is being tortured in an American prison, according to Yvonne Ridley, who made the revelation public at a press conference she conducted in Islamabad with Imran Khan.
Why was she apprehended in 2003 yet the fabricated account of her pointing a gun at an American soldier is from 2008? In 2002, the US filed an international warrant for her after accusing her of being an Al-Qaeda handler. The US made up a fresh narrative after realizing that the one about her being an Al-Qaeda handler wouldn’t hold up in court. Based on this false narrative, the so-called global superpower cruelly treated a helpless and innocent woman by dragging Dr. Aafia, a mother of three children at the time, including a baby who was six months old, from prison to prison.
I believe it was unjustly judged to sentence Aafia Siddiqui to 86 years in prison in 2010. She is totally innocent. Her punishment demonstrates that America’s decision to punish Aafia Siddiqui was made solely to demonstrate its power. The flimsy evidence against Dr. Aafia also demonstrates the disregard of successive Pakistani governments who, if they had tried, could have arranged for her release.
There has been a credit war amongst various parties in Pakistan ever since the team travelled to America to visit Aafia Siddiqui. Because of Senator Mushtaq Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami, some of the ruling parties are beginning to highlight their prior accomplishments and claim that JI wasn’t the only ones involved in the effort to free Dr. Aafia.
Senator Mushtaq Ahmed stated that the solution to this issue lies in Islamabad rather than Washington after analyzing Dr. Aafia’s case. Therefore, the ruling parties should mobilize their governments and free the country’s daughter from the United States’ illegal detention instead of claiming credit for some unidentified earlier actions. Being the government, criticizing or downplaying an unofficial initiative to secure Dr. Aafia’s release is pathetic.
