Anjuman Mazarain Punjab (AMP) has welcomed the release of a special report of the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), detailing the abuses committed by the state authorities against landless tenants struggling for ownership rights of Okara military farms.
Addressing a press conference, AMP chairman Liaqat Ali and Asim Sajjad of Peoples Rights Movement (PRM) said after four years, an impartial organisation had confirmed what the AMP had been asserting consistently since the beginning of the conflict between the state authorities and the tenants in June 2000.
The government authorities had shamelessly terrorised the tenants whose only crime had been to demand that their basic rights were recognised and that the government's repeated promises to distribute state land to the landless, they said.
It was ironic that the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General rejected the findings of the report immediately, suggesting that the HRW had no right to make claims about human rights abuses by Pakistan Rangers and other security forces.
The military rulers of the country, they said, had welcomed the reports by the same organisation on human rights abuses in occupied Kashmir and Guantanamo Bay.
It was obvious that the ISPR chief found it inconvenient and embarrassing to admit what the HRW asserted in its report quite clearly, because those findings spoke volumes about the extent to which the authorities had become involved in institutionalised corruption, they said while reading out the report.
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