PESHAWAR: Shop owner Saeed Khan has already buried one child killed in fighting between the Taliban and government forces in northwest Pakistan. He cannot bear to lose another, AFP reports.
So the 50-year-old bundled his wife, son and daughter onto a bus in the Taliban-infested town of Mingora in the Swat valley and hurried to the city of Peshawar, hoping for a future free from further bloodshed.
‘I lost my son, who was a police officer in Swat, in a suicide attack in Mingora early this year. I buried him in front of my house,’ Khan told AFP, tears rolling down his cheeks.
‘I don’t want to dig graves for my daughter and son in Mingora. That is why I left the area... His death broke me. Tell me where should I go and from whom should I seek justice?’
Local officials say more than 40,000 men, women and children have packed up and fled Mingora since Tuesday, fearing that Pakistan’s military could unleash a fresh ground and air assault against Taliban fighters.
The bedraggled refugees, some leading goats and cattle through the streets, are seeking safety for their loved ones, as the Taliban claimed to control 90 per cent of the former ski resort and tourist getaway, once favoured by Westerners.
‘I am immediately leaving the city with my wife, mother and four kids,’ said taxi driver Ali Rehman, 46.
‘I don’t really know my destination and destiny. My family and I need protection.’
At the bus stop in Peshawar — the capital of the North West Frontier Province — exhausted and anxious people told stories of horror as they poured out of vehicles carrying old bags, blankets and bundles of clothes.
Zarina Begum, 40, pleaded for help as she staggered off a bus.
‘A mortar hit my house and as a result, I lost one of my eyes. Please take me to hospital, I want medical treatment,’ Zarina begged.
‘They (Taliban) killed my husband, they slit his throat after accusing him of spying... I escaped Swat because I don’t want my son to be killed under the same circumstances. I don’t want to receive his decapitated body.’
The government had hoped that a peace deal agree in February would placate hardliners trying to impose a repressive brand of Islam, but instead the deal appears to be in tatters.
Clashes have flared in recent days throughout Swat, where wealthy Pakistanis and foreigners used to enjoy the breathtaking mountain scenery from plush hilltop hideaways, or cruise down the ski slopes.
Now, gunfire rings out in Mingora, where armed Taliban patrol the streets.
‘I’m really scared of going to Swat. Whenever I see Taliban, they look like vampires,’ said 25-year-old shop keeper Salman Mujtaba, who lost family members in a suicide attack near Mingora.
‘I will never ever go back to Swat. It has lost its beauty.’
5/2/09
Pakistan Students against Taliban scourge
YOUTHINK: Youth stand up to the Taliban menace By Nosheen Abbas
Saturday, 02 May, 2009 | 05:20 PM PST Students shout anti-Taliban slogans during a protest. –AFP Photo The youth of Islamabad is not sitting idle in the face of growing religious extremism and Talibanisation in some areas of Pakistan. Even if individually, some are trying to combat ‘Talibanisation’ in a manner they deem fit; and some are even finding creative avenues.
Amna Mawaz, a bachelor’s student, is in the process of organizing street theatre. She has drawn up her first script and talks about her aim to spread more awareness through entertainment. ‘I figured after attending protests and seminars that no one will listen to you if you give a lecture but rather through something entertaining like theatre. I think if you keep it light and yet have a meaning one can spread awareness about extremism.’
But extremism, some say, is like a symptom that was carelessly ignored, until it turned into cancer.
Nazish Zahoor, a bachelor’s student, and a member of a left wing political party spoke about his efforts in spreading awareness long before the threat was at our doorsteps.’The Taliban of today are the outcome of the 80s Afghan war, and we have been condemning it since then. The state is involved in this whole issue in one way or the other; and it’s a structural fault and if the structure cannot be fixed than nothing will change in a real way,’ he says.
Many questions remain unanswered about these criminals: where have they got their sophisticated arms from? How do these illiterate men make a living? And probably the most dicey question: who or how many institutions are behind the Taliban?
Before taking action against extremism, however, the youth of today wants to understand the root causes of the problem. ‘First we plan to understand the problem from all aspects. It’s a complex issue. But for now we will give moral support to all those who are suffering, even if it means that we go to those areas and stand with them in protest,’ says Nazish.
Moral support of those suffering also includes women, who, somehow, are always the first targets of extremists. The Taliban’s aim to isolate women from the mainstream of life means making half the population of Pakistan dormant. Any progressive nation cannot move forth without the national contribution from women and this is an issue that has been completely ignored in the parliament.What is the point of having the ‘greatest number of female parliamentarians in Pakistan’s history’ if the topic of women’s rights, far from being tackled, is not even being mentioned?
Abbas Saleem Khan who organized a protest in the federal capital against the Taliban on the Constitution Avenue also speaks of the youth’s unity. He talks about the importance of collectively standing up against the Taliban. ‘By not joining in, you are literally giving the Taliban a free pass to allow them to walk into your streets and homes and tell you how to conduct your daily affairs. The heart of the matter is that we will stand up against the Taliban and steer this country towards the vision it was created for.’
He says it was a shame that the parliamentarians signed the Nizam-i-Adl and not a single woman MP stood up except the MQM and Ayaz Amir who was the lone voice of reason among the uncouth crowd who pathetically shrank from doing their duty. This just indicates that most of the current parliamentarians don’t deserve the position they have, he says. ‘We went on the streets and asked people to donate money for the girl schools that were shut down in Swat and collected Rs250,000,’ says Ali Zaidi, founder chairman of the Pakistan Youth Alliance. ‘Our agenda is to spread socio-political awareness and wake up the youth of Pakistan; 70 per cent of our population is the youth and most of them are not proactive,’ regrets Ali, who believes that the youth can make a difference against this plague of Talibanisation.
Samad Khurram, who is currently studying at Harvard is doing his bit to counter Talibanisation. His logo denouncing the Taliban has caught on Facebook with many youngsters making it their display picture. He also wrote a strong piece warning people about their apathy. ‘Any country that has fallen to the Taliban has never recovered. The Taliban are here to stay and unless we stand up against them in every possible way Pakistan will be lost for good!’
A bunch of his friends have come up with a four dimensional strategy to rid the country of this menace. They have pulled their sleeves up and have made a comprehensive strategy to combat the Taliban. A lot depends on how much cooperation they receive form their fellow youth. He criticises the West for its rhetoric against the extremists who were its own creation. He says it is time they stand up for the future of the country.
4/30/09
Brute
The sexual undertones of this brute are pretty obvious. Do we really want this brute roaming around in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad?
4/26/09
Abusive Sex in Madrassah
Acid attack on boy who ‘refused sex with Muslim cleric’
By Massoud Ansari in Karachi
On his hospital bed last week, 16-year-old Abid Tanoli sat listless and alone, half of his body covered by burns that all but destroyed both his eyes and left his face horribly disfigured.
The teenager talked, with difficulty, of how his life had been destroyed since the fateful day in June 2002 when he refused to have sex with his teacher at a religious school in Pakistan.
The boy was horrifically injured in an acid attack after he rebuffed the Muslim cleric’s sexual advances. Now, he has alarmed Pakistan’s powerful religious establishment by pressing charges against his alleged assailants.
A teacher at the school, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and two of his friends are in prison awaiting trial for attempted murder and rape. All three deny the charges. A fourth alleged attacker is still at large.
It is the first such case to be brought against a Muslim cleric and threatens to expose a scandal of sex abuse within Pakistan’s secretive Islamic schools.
Abid was blinded and maimed in the assault, which he says came shortly after he rejected sexual demands from the Islamic teacher at a madrassa in a crowded, lower middle-class district of Karachi. “He threatened to ruin me for life,” Abid recalled, “but I didn’t take him seriously. I just stopped going to the madrassa”.
Abid, who was 14 at the time, told neither parents nor friends what had happened because, he said, he was ashamed. A few days later, as he played with his brothers and sister at home, he said that his religious teacher - accompanied by three associates - broke into the house, bolted the door and threw acid over him, screaming: “This should be a lesson for your life.”
Abid was taken to a public hospital, where doctors told him that he would be scarred for life.
Lawyers and campaigners against sexual abuse of children say that it is not uncommon in Pakistan, especially in the segregated surroundings of the country’s estimated 20,000 religious schools, but cases involving members of the clergy are rarely - if ever - exposed.
“They are either hushed up and sorted out within the confines of school, or parents are pressurised not to report the incident to the media as it would give religion a bad name,” said Zia Ahmed Awan, the president of Madadgaar, a joint project of LHRLA (Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid) and Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund.
Haroon Tanoli, Abid’s father, met strong resistance when he tried to take up his son’s case with officials at the school. He says that they offered to help him secure a cash payment from the alleged attackers, provided that he did not involve the police. Since then, he has been threatened with harsh consequences for refusing to back down.
“I despise hypocrites who sport huge beards in the name of religion and hinder the passage of justice in the name of Islam,” said Mr Tanoli.
“I had a beard, and all my four sons were studying in a madrassa. However, following this incident, the first thing I did was to pull my children out of the madrassa - and shave off my beard.”
Even as Abid was receiving treatment, the religious authorities pressed the hospital to discharge him. Mr Tanoli managed to get him admitted to a different hospital, where he is being treated free, although the family cannot afford an operation to save his sight.
Mr Tanoli refuses to back down, despite being offered one million rupees (£12,000) by the teacher’s relations if he withdraws the charges. He has moved to a secret location for his own safety.
By Massoud Ansari in Karachi
On his hospital bed last week, 16-year-old Abid Tanoli sat listless and alone, half of his body covered by burns that all but destroyed both his eyes and left his face horribly disfigured.
The teenager talked, with difficulty, of how his life had been destroyed since the fateful day in June 2002 when he refused to have sex with his teacher at a religious school in Pakistan.
The boy was horrifically injured in an acid attack after he rebuffed the Muslim cleric’s sexual advances. Now, he has alarmed Pakistan’s powerful religious establishment by pressing charges against his alleged assailants.
A teacher at the school, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and two of his friends are in prison awaiting trial for attempted murder and rape. All three deny the charges. A fourth alleged attacker is still at large.
It is the first such case to be brought against a Muslim cleric and threatens to expose a scandal of sex abuse within Pakistan’s secretive Islamic schools.
Abid was blinded and maimed in the assault, which he says came shortly after he rejected sexual demands from the Islamic teacher at a madrassa in a crowded, lower middle-class district of Karachi. “He threatened to ruin me for life,” Abid recalled, “but I didn’t take him seriously. I just stopped going to the madrassa”.
Abid, who was 14 at the time, told neither parents nor friends what had happened because, he said, he was ashamed. A few days later, as he played with his brothers and sister at home, he said that his religious teacher - accompanied by three associates - broke into the house, bolted the door and threw acid over him, screaming: “This should be a lesson for your life.”
Abid was taken to a public hospital, where doctors told him that he would be scarred for life.
Lawyers and campaigners against sexual abuse of children say that it is not uncommon in Pakistan, especially in the segregated surroundings of the country’s estimated 20,000 religious schools, but cases involving members of the clergy are rarely - if ever - exposed.
“They are either hushed up and sorted out within the confines of school, or parents are pressurised not to report the incident to the media as it would give religion a bad name,” said Zia Ahmed Awan, the president of Madadgaar, a joint project of LHRLA (Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid) and Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund.
Haroon Tanoli, Abid’s father, met strong resistance when he tried to take up his son’s case with officials at the school. He says that they offered to help him secure a cash payment from the alleged attackers, provided that he did not involve the police. Since then, he has been threatened with harsh consequences for refusing to back down.
“I despise hypocrites who sport huge beards in the name of religion and hinder the passage of justice in the name of Islam,” said Mr Tanoli.
“I had a beard, and all my four sons were studying in a madrassa. However, following this incident, the first thing I did was to pull my children out of the madrassa - and shave off my beard.”
Even as Abid was receiving treatment, the religious authorities pressed the hospital to discharge him. Mr Tanoli managed to get him admitted to a different hospital, where he is being treated free, although the family cannot afford an operation to save his sight.
Mr Tanoli refuses to back down, despite being offered one million rupees (£12,000) by the teacher’s relations if he withdraws the charges. He has moved to a secret location for his own safety.
Mullah Hypocrisy... These people cannot run our governments.
Mullah's Naked Butt With Hooker Is YouTube Hit In Iran (Video)
So Hot-- Top Mullah is busted on camera with a hooker in Iran.
Totally Hot Iranian Cleric Porn.
The Daily Beast reported:
A hidden camera catches an Iranian cleric committing adultery, and the video rockets around the blogosphere, where a new generation can finally skirt state censorship.
A video scandal has hit the Iranian Internet scene. Like many online scandals in the West, it involves a model. Not Paris Hilton, but a supposed model of virtue: a cleric.
In the video—for weeks voted the top story on Balatarin.com (an Iranian version of Digg.com)—a robed cleric is caught on a hidden camera in a private room. He walks to the door to let a chador-clad woman enter.
“Nobody saw you come in, did they?” he asks her lightheartedly. As she removes her chador, he continues in the same tone: “Want to do some Nasnas?”
Iranians know Nasnas as a mythological monster. What the cleric means by “do some Nasnas” is clarified by what happens next in the clip. Americans have a similar expression: the beast with two backs.
The cleric was apparently a member of the government-run Friday Prayers Committee in Hamadan province. Semi-official news sites tried to downplay the impact of the video, which leaked out of an Intelligence Ministry investigation. But their reports did acknowledge that the man involved was a married cleric, and that the video depicts the consummation of an unlawful affair.
"One thing we had never seen before was a cleric’s naked butt,” commented one young Iranian below the online video clip. “Thanks to the Internet, that is no longer impossible!”
Hamadan Province is the same area where a young female doctor was arrested and later murdered for sitting with her fiancee alone in a public park in 2007.
Doctor Zahra Bani Yaghoob arrested by the head quarter of Basig’s Militia at a public park in Hamadan while she was walking with her fiancé. The couple was stopped by the militia and requested to show a legal marriage certificate. For the reason of not having that marriage certificate handy to show, she was arrested and 2 days latter she died suspiciously.
The regime called it a suicide.
Part of the solution - Younis Khan - on terrorism
"When we left for the airport to fly out to Dubai at 2am in the morning there was just so much security around us, it was unbelievable," Younis told Cricinfo.
"We were on the bus and it was on everyone's minds, so much security for us, in our own country. There was talk among the players that maybe we should have travelled separately," he said. "I asked Misbah [ul-Haq] what he would do if something like that [attack] happened to us and he didn't really know. If something like that did happen, in our own country, on us, I would retire from cricket the very next day. How can someone do it to anyone, let alone their own countrymen?"
"All of us were just shocked that something like this can happen. We have talked about it…you know you read about these unfortunate things in papers or see it on TV, but when it happens so close to you, to sportsmen it is difficult to fully comprehend.
"To take someone's life, or try and take it, is the lowest thing anyone can do and to try and do it to people who are considered heroes around the world, is just impossible to grasp,"
Is this our Islam? A taliban kills school children. Horrific.
Watch this cowardly, despicable act. Moderate Pakistanis unite.
4/25/09
Dear "Islamic" Terrorists... Read this and then burn in hell.
About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.
Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.
"We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to," he said. "Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.
India has the world's second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting was also expected to address issues like national integration.
"Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form. Cooperation should be done for the cause of good but not for committing sin or oppression," the fatwa written at the Darul Uloom Deoband, India's foremost Islamic seminary.
Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.
"We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to," he said. "Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.
India has the world's second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting was also expected to address issues like national integration.
"Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form. Cooperation should be done for the cause of good but not for committing sin or oppression," the fatwa written at the Darul Uloom Deoband, India's foremost Islamic seminary.
Reformistan Exclusive - More Zardari scumbaggery
This is from a direct source. Specific details are purposely being witheld to protect the identify of the source.
A businessman was facilitating the trasfer of some equipment to Pakistan that was required for a public project. The businessman rec'd a call from a man claiming to be a representative of Mr. Zardari. He said a substantial amount must be paid to his "organization" to allow the transfer of the equipment.
Is it any wonder that doing business in Pakistan is so difficult?
Is it any wonder that the treasury of Pakistan is empty?
Dear readers, if you have any stories of corruption in Pakistan that can be substantiated with evidence, please post here.
A businessman was facilitating the trasfer of some equipment to Pakistan that was required for a public project. The businessman rec'd a call from a man claiming to be a representative of Mr. Zardari. He said a substantial amount must be paid to his "organization" to allow the transfer of the equipment.
Is it any wonder that doing business in Pakistan is so difficult?
Is it any wonder that the treasury of Pakistan is empty?
Dear readers, if you have any stories of corruption in Pakistan that can be substantiated with evidence, please post here.
Reformistan Exclusive - Zardari up to old tricks.
I have been informed by a dependable source of the following events that happened recently in Islamabad.
Mr. Zardari & associates wanted to purchase a home in a posh "embassy" area of Islamabad. The seller agreed to sell his property for 5 crores PKR. Mr. Zardari & associates agreed to purchase said property immediately. Papers were signed and a check for 5 crore was presented to Mr. Zardari and associates.
The check bounced.
When the seller attempted to contact Mr. Zardari and associates... He was given the run-around and eventually provided a check for 2 crores PKR, less than half of the agreed amount. According to the source, the seller was told there were "fees" to doing business with Mr. Zardari and criminals... I mean associates.
Mr. Zardari & associates wanted to purchase a home in a posh "embassy" area of Islamabad. The seller agreed to sell his property for 5 crores PKR. Mr. Zardari & associates agreed to purchase said property immediately. Papers were signed and a check for 5 crore was presented to Mr. Zardari and associates.
The check bounced.
When the seller attempted to contact Mr. Zardari and associates... He was given the run-around and eventually provided a check for 2 crores PKR, less than half of the agreed amount. According to the source, the seller was told there were "fees" to doing business with Mr. Zardari and criminals... I mean associates.
Scumbag Zardari's Assets
Did this scumbag invent something, hold patents, write innovative software? Where did this wealth come from? Shame on us for voting him into power.
ZARDARI’S LOCAL ASSETS ARE:
Plot no. 121, Phase VIII, DHA Karachi.
Agricultural land situated in Deh Dali Wadi, Taluka, Tando Allah Yar.
Agricultural property located in Deh Tahooki Taluka, District Hyderabad measuring 65.15 acres.
Agricultural land falling in Deh 76-Nusrat, Taluka, District Nawabshah measuring 827.14 acres
Agricultural land situated in Deh 76-Nusrat, Taluka, District Nawabshah measuring 293.18 acres
Residential plot No 3 (Now House) Block No B-I, City Survey No 2268 Ward-A Nawabshah
Huma Heights (Asif Apartments) 133, Depot Lines, Commissariat Road, Karachi
Trade Tower Building 3/CL/V Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi
House No 8, St 9, F-8/2, Islamabad
Agricultural land in Deh 42 Dad Taluka/ District Nawabshah
Agricultural land in Deh 51 Dad Taluka Distt Nawabshah
Plot No 3 & 4 Sikni (residential) Near Housing Society Ltd. Nawabshah
CafT Sheraz (C.S No.. 2231/2 & 2231/3) Nawabshah
Agricultural land in Deh 23-Deh Taluka & District Nawabshah
Agricultural property in Deh 72-A, Nusrat Taluka, Nawabshah
Agricultural land in Deh 76-Nusrat Taluka, Nawabshah
Plot No. A/136 Survey No 2346 Ward A Government Employee’s Cooperative Housing Society Ltd, Nawabshah
Agricultural land in Deh Jaryoon Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Aroro Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Nondani Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Lotko Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Jhol Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Kandari Taluka Tando Allah Yar, Distt. Hyderabad
Agricultural land in Deh Deghi Taluka Tando Mohammad Khan
Agricultural land in Deh Rahooki Taluka, Hyderabad
Property in Deh Charo Taluka, Badin
Agricultural property in Deh Dali Wadi Taluka, Hyderabad
Five acres prime land allotted by DG KDA in 1995/96
4,000 kanals on Simli Dam
80 acres of land at Hawkes Bay
13 acres of land at Maj Gulradi (KPT Land)
One acre plot, GCI, Clifton
One acre of land, State Life (International Center, Sadar)
FEBCs worth Rs. 4 million
SHARES IN SUGAR MILLS INCLUDE:
Sakrand Sugar Mills Nawabshah
Ansari Sugar
Mills Hyderabad
Mirza Sugar Mills Badin
Pangrio Sugar Mills Thatta
Bachani Sugar Mills Sanghar
FRONT COMPANIES IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES:
Bomer Fiannce Inc, British Virgin Islands
Mariston Securities Inc, British Virgin Islands
Marleton Business S A, British Virgin Islands
Capricorn Trading S A, British Virgin Islands
Fagarita Consulting INc, British Virgin Islands
Marvil Associated Inc, British Virgin Islands
Pawnbury Finance Ltd, British Virgin Islands
Oxton Trading Limited, British Virgin Islands
Brinslen Invest S A, British Virgin Islands
Chimitex Holding S A, British Virgin Islands
Elkins Holding S A, British Virgin Islands
Minister Invest Ltd, British Virgin Islands
Silvernut Investment Inc, British Virgin Islands
Tacolen Investment Ltd, British Virgin Islands
Marlcrdon Invest S A, British Virgin Islands
Dustan Trading Inc, British Virgin Islands
Reconstruction and Development Finance Inc, British Virgin Islands
Nassam Alexander Inc.
Westminster Securities Inc.
Laptworth Investment Inc 202, Saint Martin Drive, West Jacksonville
Intra Foods Inc. 3376, Lomrel Grove, Jacksonville, Florida
Dynatel Trading Co, Florida
A..S Realty Inc. Palm Beach Gardens Florida
Bon Voyage Travel Consultancy Inc, Florida
ZARDARI’S PROPERTIES IN UK ARE:
355 acre Rockwood Estate, Surrey (Now stands admitted)
Flat 6, 11 Queensgate Terrace, London SW7
26 Palace Mansions, Hammersmith Road, London W14
27 Pont Street, London, SW1
20 Wilton Crescent, London SW1
23 Lord Chancellor Walk, Coombe Hill, Kingston, Surrey
The Mansion, Warren Lane, West Hampstead, London
A flat at Queensgate Terrace, London
Houses at Hammersmith Road, Wilton Crescent, Kingston and in Hampstead.
ZARDARI’S PROPERTIES IN BELGIUM ARE:
12-3 Boulevard De-Nieuport, 1000, Brussels, (Building containing 4 shops and 2 large apartments)
Chausee De-Mons, 1670, Brussels
ZARDARI’S PROPERTIES IN FRANCE ARE:
La Manoir De La Reine Blanche and property in Cannes
ZARDARI’S PROPERTIES IN USA — in the name of Asif Zardari and managed by Shimmy Qureshi are:
Stud farm in Texas
Wellington Club East, West Palm Beach
12165 West Forest Hills, Florida
Escue Farm 13,524 India Mound, West Palm Beach
3,220 Santa Barbara Drive, Wellington Florida
13,254 Polo Club Road, West Palm Beach Florida
3,000 North Ocean Drive, Singer Islands, Florida
525 South Flager Driver, West Palm Beach, Florida
Holiday Inn Houston Owned by Asif Ali Zardari, Iqbal Memon and Sadar-ud-Din Hashwani
ZARDARI’S BANK ACCOUNTS IN FOREGN COMPANIES ARE:
Union Bank of Switzerland (Account No. 552.343, 257.556.60Q, 433.142.60V, 216.393.60T)
Citibank Private Limited (SWZ) (Account No. 342034)
Citibank N A Dubai (Account No. 818097)
Barclays Bank (Suisse) (Account No. 62290209)
Barclays Bank (Suisse) (Account No. 62274400)
Banque Centrade Ormard Burrus S A
Banque Pache S A
Banque Pictet & Cie
Banque La Henin, Paris (Account No. 00101953552)
Bank Natinede Paris in Geneva (Account NO.. 563.726.9)
Swiss Bank Corporation
Chase Manhattan Bank Switzerland
American Express Bank Switzerland
Societe De Banque Swissee
Barclays Bank (Knightsbridge Branch) (Account No. 90991473)
Barclays Bank, Kingston and Chelsea Branch, (Sort Code 20-47-34135)
National Westminster Bank, Alwych Branch (Account No. 9683230)
Habib Bank (Pall Mall Branch).
National Westminster Bank, Barking Branch, (Account No. 28558999).
Habib Bank AG, Moorgate, London EC2
National Westminster Bank, Edgware Road, London
Banque Financiei E Dela Citee, Credit Suisse
Habib Bank AG Zurich, Switzerland
Pictet Et Cie, Geneva
Credit Agricole, Paris
Credit Agridolf, Branch 11, Place Brevier, 76440, Forges Les Faux
Credit Agricole, Branch Haute – Normandie, 76230, Boise Chillaum
Meanwhile the average Pakistani makes less than 2000$ a year.
Pakistan's former benvevolent dictator making a comeback? Sadly, the public would not elect him. No we would rather have some thief in power.
LAHORE: Former president General (retired) Pervez Musharraf has said he will be willing to take the president’s office once again if the country’s political and economic affairs continue their downward spiral.
Interviewed by the Al-Jazeera television channel, he said that he would mull over the chance of returning to his previous position if he thought he could play a meaningful role for the country.
Musharraf told Al-Jazeera that he had resigned because if he had continued he would have become ‘kind of an impotent president.’ He said he did not like sitting around uselessly and therefore chose to depart.
However, Musharraf said that since relinquishing his position, he was increasingly becoming ‘despondent’ about the country’s state of affairs, especially the situation in Swat, where the Taliban had been allowed by the government to introduce sharia law.
The former president said the Taliban were now a far greater threat to Pakistan than Al Qaeda. He slammed the US for the ‘trust deficit’ between the two countries. Musharraf said President Barack Obama was not very different from his predecessor and had not helped change the US mind-set towards Pakistan.
Interviewed by the Al-Jazeera television channel, he said that he would mull over the chance of returning to his previous position if he thought he could play a meaningful role for the country.
Musharraf told Al-Jazeera that he had resigned because if he had continued he would have become ‘kind of an impotent president.’ He said he did not like sitting around uselessly and therefore chose to depart.
However, Musharraf said that since relinquishing his position, he was increasingly becoming ‘despondent’ about the country’s state of affairs, especially the situation in Swat, where the Taliban had been allowed by the government to introduce sharia law.
The former president said the Taliban were now a far greater threat to Pakistan than Al Qaeda. He slammed the US for the ‘trust deficit’ between the two countries. Musharraf said President Barack Obama was not very different from his predecessor and had not helped change the US mind-set towards Pakistan.
4/24/09
Drones made for export by Pakistani Companies.
Looking at the facility from outside, no one would guess what goes on within the 90,000-square-foot research facility of Integrated Dynamics (ID), a privately owned company in Karachi’s Korangi area. There are no signboards indicating that ID is in the business of developing drone technology for military and civilian use. Surprisingly, there isn’t even an army of security guards manning the complex as one would expect upon entering the gate. A lonesome gate keeper lets us in without a fuss.
Even more startling is the ease with which Raja Sabri Khan, ID's chief executive, states that ‘drone technology has existed in Pakistan for the last 20 years.’
Khan, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics, is quick to clarify that his company has ‘never been asked to develop a drone which has an armed implication.’ Instead, ID develops advanced Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV) systems capable of reconnaissance missions as well as target decoys for anti-aircraft missiles. His customers, he says, include the armed forces of the country as well as foreign buyers from the US, Australia, Spain, Italy and France.
Although he may not have been asked to develop an armed drone, Khan, who previously worked as a consultant for Pakistan’s aerospace agency Suparco, points out: ‘If we consider the fact that drone development has been taking place in Pakistan for the last 20 years, I think the technology for flying long-range autonomous missions has existed for at least 10-12 years.’
Even more startling is the ease with which Raja Sabri Khan, ID's chief executive, states that ‘drone technology has existed in Pakistan for the last 20 years.’
Khan, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics, is quick to clarify that his company has ‘never been asked to develop a drone which has an armed implication.’ Instead, ID develops advanced Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV) systems capable of reconnaissance missions as well as target decoys for anti-aircraft missiles. His customers, he says, include the armed forces of the country as well as foreign buyers from the US, Australia, Spain, Italy and France.
Although he may not have been asked to develop an armed drone, Khan, who previously worked as a consultant for Pakistan’s aerospace agency Suparco, points out: ‘If we consider the fact that drone development has been taking place in Pakistan for the last 20 years, I think the technology for flying long-range autonomous missions has existed for at least 10-12 years.’
Interestingly, there are several public sector companies involved in developing UAVs in Pakistan, including the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC), Air Weapons Complex (AWC) and National Development Complex (NDC).
The PAC's Uqaab drone is in use by the Pakistan Army, and, according to unconfirmed reports, is being upgraded with Chinese help to carry a weapons payload. Other PAC UAVs include the Bazz and Ababeel. AWC's Bravo+ UAV is in use of the Pakistan Airforce (PAF). The PAF recently acquired an unarmed Italian drone called the Falco UAV, which is reportedly being used for surveillance and battleground assessments in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In 2008, the Pakistan Navy also reportedly completed trials of UAVs - the Austrian Schiebel Camcopter S-100 and Swedish Cybaero - from a Pakistani frigate in the Arabian Sea.
Private sector companies are also involved in the design and development of UAVs. Apart from ID in Karachi, East-West Infinity (EWI), Satuma and Global Industrial Defense Solutions (GIDS) are in the drone-making business.
The EWI's Heliquad UAV is considered a stealth design because of its small size and Whisper Watch signals intelligence package, which is capable of picking up radio and other communication signals. ID's Nishan Mk1 and TJ1000, Vision MK1 & MK2, Tornado, Border Eagle, Hornet, Hawk and Vector are also popular models employed by the armed forces for reconnaissance missions and target practice (each model varies in range and endurance). Satuma's UAVs, with similar functionalities, are called Flamingo, Jasoos and Mukhbar. For its part, the GIDS develops the Huma-1 UAV and its own version of the Uqaab.
Even though almost all UAVs in the country have been built for military applications - reconnaissance, simulations, decoy systems, remote sensing - none of them are reported to be capable of firing arms. Moreover, none of the above-mentioned facilities are involved in large-scale, mass production of UAVs.
While Pakisan is concerned about India - The Taliban are threatening it from within - God bless our country
The Taleban say they are withdrawing from a Pakistani district where their consolidation of power this week has caused deep concern in the US.
A Taleban spokesman said commander Maulana Fazlullah had issued the order for fighters to pull back from Buner, just 100km (62 miles) from Islamabad.
The US has accused officials in Pakistan of abdicating to the Taleban.
The Taleban have agreed a peace deal bringing Sharia law to some districts in return for ending their insurgency.
The peace agreement covers six districts of Malakand division, including the troubled Swat region, in North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
The Taleban have almost full control of Swat and this week had strengthened operations in Buner.
Delegation
Taleban spokesman Muslim Khan said: "Our leader has ordered that Taleban should immediately be called back from Buner."
The move came after Maulana Fazlullah had met the commissioner of Malakand.
The Taleban should be gone by Saturday, their spokesman said
Administration officials in NWFP have confirmed that Taleban fighters have started to leave.
A delegation from the Taleban and the cleric who negotiated the peace deal, Sufi Muhammad, is on its way to Buner to oversee the withdrawal.
Muslim Khan said the militants had just crossed from Swat into Buner as "a gesture of solidarity" with local comrades.
He said the Taleban would be gone by Saturday but denied that the militants were leaving due to pressure from the government or under any deal.
Those who went to Buner, they must get out from Buner
Iftikhar Hussain, NWFP spokesman
Disarray on Taleban
But the BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad says circumstances suggest the militants are now under pressure and that a national consensus is building among the public and political parties that they must be challenged with force.
Pakistan's government has clearly stated that unless the Taleban lay down their arms, other options will be considered.
Pakistan's chief of army staff Gen Ashfaq Kayani rejected criticism of army inaction in Malakand.
"The operational pause, meant to give the reconciliatory forces a chance, must not be taken for a concession to the militants," he said.
Sympathy for the militant movement has been on the decline, our correspondent says, since the airing of footage showing a young girl being flogged as a punishment in Swat.
Although the Taleban denied ordering the punishment, their public standing has plummeted.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warns of the Taleban threat to Pakistan
At least 10 more paramilitary platoons totalling about 200 men have now arrived in Buner to take control of government buildings.
The latest moves followed a meeting of government officials in North West Frontier Province to discuss the faltering peace deal.
Ahead of the meeting provincial spokesman Iftikhar Hussain had said: "Those who took arms must lay them down. Those who went to Buner, they must get out from Buner.
"This is the only way, and we are asking them for the last time."
The Taleban had been expected to lay down their arms under the peace deal and allow police and other officials to resume their duties.
However, the Taleban had further consolidated their hold on Buner.
On Wednesday they ambushed a paramilitary convoy at the border village of Totalai and prevented it from reaching Buner's central town of Dagar.
The US had expressed deep concern over the developments.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Pakistan posed a "mortal threat" to the world by abdicating to the Taleban.
On Thursday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned Pakistan that relations with the US would be threatened unless Islamabad combated the rise of the Taleban.
4/20/09
A religious Pakistani muslim the whole world can admire: Abdul Sattar Edhi
Written by Richard Covington
In the cool interior of a mental ward in Karachi, a short, powerfully built man with a flowing snow-white beard and penetrating dark-brown eyes is standing at the bedside of a distraught young woman. She has covered her head with a sheet and is pleading for news of the two children her husband took from her.
“I know you are suffering terribly, but this is no way to bring back your children,” says the man with stern compassion. “You have a college degree. You can do many things to help the other patients.”
Outside the room’s windows of latticed stone, several hundred other women stroll and lounge under pipal trees scattered around a courtyard as big as several football fields. All are here because their families cannot—or will not—cope with their mental illnesses.
“Self-help,” says the man as he walks away from the young mother’s bedside. “That’s the best way to get back on your feet.”
For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.
Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.
Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.
Usually dressed in a simple tunic over gray pajamas, scuffed sandals on his feet and his trademark astrakhan hat on his head, Edhi outlines his philosophy in the Mithadar dispensary where he launched his charity more than five decades ago. “I tell people that, because I am working for you, the money must come from you,” he says. For years, this meant that Edhi would take to the streets to beg on behalf of his growing social programs. Even in his 70’s, he still occasionally begs on the streets, generally for the sake of severely ill individuals in urgent need of expensive medical care that his clinics cannot provide.
Generally, however, donors come in person to one of the 300 centers and clinics across Pakistan. One, who declined to give his name, explained that he gives money regularly to the Edhi Foundation because an Edhi ambulance once rescued his sister from an automobile accident. (The cost of an ambulance call—one of the few services for which the foundation charges—is less than 50 rupees, or around 85 us cents.) “When I give this 1400 rupees to Edhi, I know it goes to people who need it,” says the donor.
Some donors have been very generous. One family donated two villas in the wealthy Karachi suburb of Clifton for use as a residence and school for around 250 girls. A Pakistani expatriate in the uk donated office buildings worth £1.4 million ($2.5 million) that became the British headquarters of the foundation, which organizes local charity services both for expatriates and in support of the foundation’s work in Pakistan. In addition to money and property, contributors donate clothes, appliances, furniture—even goat and chicken meat, sometimes by the ton. The organization uses a portion of these gifts to feed and clothe residents of the homes; the rest is given away to other hospitals, prisons and disaster victims.
For this, Edhi may well be the most widely admired man in Pakistan. In 1986 he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Public Service, sometimes referred to as “the Asian Nobel Prize.” In 2000, he was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood. In 2002, he joined former us President Bill Clinton, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and others as an honorary board member of the newly founded Daniel Pearl Foundation, created in honor of the murdered Wall Street Journal correspondent. Typically, Edhi pays his own way to receive awards and participate in conferences.
“What Edhi is doing is nothing short of a miracle,” explains Z. A. Nizami, former director-general of the Karachi Development Authority.
emmed in by a labyrinth of fabric shops, food markets and dusty, cart-filled lanes, Edhi’s three-story Mithadar center is a hive of activity. In the crowded front offices, men and women sit behind donated desks taking ambulance calls, ordering medicines and checking the accounts of clinics and centers across the country. In one room, three women are filling out adoption papers. Bilquis Edhi, who oversees adoptions, has placed more than 16,000 children in adopted homes. Outside every Edhi center there is a cradle—shaded from the sun—where unwanted babies can be left anonymously.
Upstairs, a dozen infants and well-fed toddlers, some rattling across the floor in walking strollers, play and doze as Bilquis chats with a woman who has come to adopt a child for her son and daughter-in-law in the United States.
“The baby she’s adopting was starving when it arrived,” Bilquis remarks. “When you nurse a child back to life, it really hurts to see her go, even after you’ve gone through the process thousands of times. Finding her a loving home makes it worth the feeling of loss.”
Bilquis tells of the 32-year-old woman who showed up recently at the Mithadar clinic looking for her. The woman explained that her parents had just revealed that they had adopted her as an infant from the Edhi center. “I’m a doctor now, with four children of my own,” she told Bilquis. “And I wanted to show my gratitude to the woman who nursed me.”
“We both broke down in tears,” Bilquis recalls.
With her head loosely covered by a brightly patterned yellow scarf and eyes that twinkle behind black-framed glasses, Bilquis’s sunny, lighthearted disposition contrasts with her husband’s severe, sometimes impatient manner. The pair met at the clinic when she arrived as an 18-year-old nurse in 1965. A year or so later, they were married.
Their wedding night set the tone for the relationship. Dropping by the dispensary after the ceremony, Edhi found a 12-year-old girl with severe head injuries. The newlyweds rushed her to the hospital and spent the night supervising blood transfusions and calming down distraught relatives.
“I didn’t mind at all,” Bilquis told Reader’s Digest for an article published in 1989. “Today that girl is married with children; that’s what is really important.”
Even so, Bilquis acknowledges in a playful way, life with Edhi can be trying. “Sometimes I wonder how I stayed my whole life with this man who is a mental case,” she says with a smile. “He won’t even attend the weddings of his own children, but if there’s an emergency somewhere he’ll dash out to help in an instant.”
In a room nearby, a teacher is conducting a class in Urdu, Arabic and counting for around a dozen children three to six years old, some of whom have Down’s syndrome. Next door, a female doctor is showing 10 aspiring nurses how to take blood tests; it’s part of a six-month course that will lead to their certification as nurse’s aides.
“I tell destitute women who come to the centers that they can learn nursing here and later earn their own money as nurses and midwives,” Edhi explains back downstairs in his office. So far, around 1500 women have received this training.
Edhi’s own passion for healing dates back to his childhood. At age 11, he was obliged to care for his mother, who was paralyzed with a severe diabetic condition. “I bathed her, changed her and fed her,” he recalls in his 1996 autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind. “Taking care of my mother made me ponder the misery of others who suffered; from that time on, I began to think of how I could help them, and to dream of building hospitals and a village for the handicapped.”
Born in 1928 in Bantva, a small Indian town of 25,000 inhabitants in Gujarat state, he was “not what I would call an obedient child,” he admits with a grin. A natural leader, when he was not prodding other kids to join him in stealing corn and fruit from wealthy farmers, he was organizing impromptu circuses and performing gymnastic feats for the neighbors. Although his father brokered textiles and other goods and provided the family with a middle-class income, both of Edhi’s parents instilled in him the importance of simplicity and frugal living.
“Every day before school, my mother would give me two paisa and say, ‘Spend one paisa on yourself and give the other away,’” Edhi remembers. “When I came home, she would ask me where I had given away my one paisa. It was her way of creating an awareness in me of the need for social welfare.”
At the same time he began caring for his mother, he also developed a habit of saving, putting aside one rupee for every five he earned working at a fabric shop after school. This thriftiness served him well, prompting him to gradually acquire government securities. Even now, Edhi takes no salary, choosing instead to live parsimoniously on the interest from these securities.
In 1951, four years after the family moved to Karachi following the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, the 23-year-old Edhi used some of his savings to buy a tiny shop, less than three meters (10') on a side, inside what is now the clinic building. Together with a doctor who taught him the basics of health care, he set up a free dispensary, and he persuaded several friends to help him add free literacy classes. To be available at all times, he slept on a cement bench outside the dispensary.
In 1957, a virulent flu epidemic swept through Karachi. Edhi reacted with unselfish daring, using his own money to erect tented camps on the city’s outskirts where people received free immunizations. After the epidemic was brought under control, grateful residents chipped in to buy the rest of the Mithadar dispensary building, enabling Edhi to create a free maternity center and nursing school.
Over the years that followed, Edhi realized that Karachi desperately needed an ambulance service. Impressed by his handling of the flu crisis, a local businessman made a large donation, part of which Edhi used to buy a beat-up van that he converted into a free ambulance and drove himself. “I prided myself on being the first to arrive at an accident,” he recalls. Today, Edhi’s ambulance service has grown to a fleet of more than 600 nationwide, all paid for with donations. Dispatched from call centers scattered around the country’s cities and highways, Edhi ambulances are still usually the first to arrive at the scene, and they have helped cut the fatality toll from road accidents by half, he says.
In 1986, during a hijacking attempt at Karachi airport, Edhi marshaled 54 ambulances at the ready. When negotiations between the hijackers and the government broke down and Pakistani commandos stormed the plane, Edhi and other paramedics entered under fire to try to save wounded passengers and crew.
In 1993, during devastating floods in the Punjab, Edhi ambulances rescued 50,000 people. Using donated planes, volunteers also dropped food, water and supplies to isolated families. Edhi’s air ambulance service now numbers three planes and a helicopter, all donated by the US Agency for International Development—“without conditions,” Edhi is quick to point out.
“The 1993 flood was the biggest operation we’d ever done; it satisfied Mr. Edhi that we could handle major disasters,” explains Anwer Kazmi, a longtime friend and aide, who translates Edhi’s Urdu into English.
A stickler for organizational efficiency, Edhi stands up from his desk and goes over to a wall arrayed with stacked drawers of cardboard boxes, each carefully labeled with a year, a location and a subject. “How do you like my computer?” he asks, smiling, as he pulls out a box containing the expense records of the 1993 flood operation. Like his training in health care, Edhi’s expertise in administration is self-taught, his business savvy acquired over decades of running a foundation that now occupies some 7330 staff and volunteers. Back at his desk, he leafs through one of the oversize accounting ledgers that he fills with ruminations, anecdotes, recollections and plans.
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down ideas in these ledgers,” he explains. “And in the morning, everyone groans about all the orders I hand down as I try to follow through on my inspirations.”
Recently one of those nighttime brainstorms involved setting up emergency clinics on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to treat victims of the 2001 war. Edhi’s son Faisal, 26, who works for the foundation, vividly recalls an incident at one of these clinics that encapsulated his father’s demanding nature.
At the new center in Jamun, Faisal explains, local staff members had purchased a dozen chairs for guests and journalists. When Edhi arrived for his own first visit, he blew up. “Why did you waste money on chairs?” he stormed. “Next, you’ll be buying beds and other things for yourselves instead of spending the money on the people we intend to help.” That night, Edhi himself slept with the ambulance drivers on the floor of the center.
As Faisal finishes his anecdote, Edhi rubs a hand across his balding head and nods in agreement. “People respect me because they see how simply we live and that all the donations go to the people who need help,” he volunteers. Only 10 percent of the foundation’s overall budget goes toward administrative overhead, including salaries, he adds.
Edhi and Bilquis still occupy a cramped, two-room apartment next to his office in the midst of the hubbub of the Mithadar clinic. He remains on call for emergencies 24 hours a day—just as he has for the past 52 years. “I am always available to all, rich or poor,” he says. “Anyone can come into this office and talk to me.”
Despite this open-door policy, growing up the children of such a father was not easy. Although Edhi’s children were raised largely by Bilquis’s mother in a house near the dispensary, they were exposed to pain and misery from an early age. At seven, Faisal recalls accompanying his father to recover the corpse of a murder victim. Edhi brought the body back to Mithadar, washed it and gave it a respectful burial. “I got very sick and couldn’t sleep for a week,” Faisal recalls.
By the time he was 10, however, Faisal had grown accustomed to riding with his father on ambulance calls to bring the dead and injured to morgues and hospitals. Now, Faisal is in charge of the ambulance service, whose costs he is trying to cut to make it self- sustaining. He’s also creating a new dispensary and ambulance center for some 50,000 people uprooted from their Karachi homes by a highway project and forcibly moved to a treeless settlement west of the city where there is no running water, sewage or electricity.
Running the Edhi Foundation is very much a family concern. Edhi, Bilquis and their children meet every Sunday at the girls’ home in Clifton to confer over problems at the centers and plan new projects.
“We discuss each girl individually,” says Edhi’s 36-year-old daughter, Kubra, who is as restrained as Faisal is extroverted. “Before the establishment of Edhi homes, young girls who ran away from their families fell into prostitution and other criminal activities. Now they have a place to take shelter.”
Some girls flee to the center to obtain the education their families deny them, while others are sent by parents eager to have their daughters educated, but too poor to pay school fees.
“When girls first come, they generally pass the first few days with great difficulty, often getting depressed and tense,” Kubra continues. “We involve them in work—taking care of children, mixing with other girls and women. Their lives become more normal after three or four days. If a girl continues to be depressed or has difficulty adjusting, we call a doctor to treat her.”
“This is very difficult work, because of fundamentalism,” Edhi interjects. “Our society does not want to give any facilities to females. When political opponents criticize us, we never fight them—we ignore them.
“Still, it’s very hard to survive if you are working for all the people, not just your particular religious or ethnic group,” he acknowledges. “With so much discrimination and growing religious divisions, my children will have a very, very tough time.”
In 1992, tragedy drew the family closer than ever. A mentally unbalanced woman staying at the Clifton home scalded Kubra’s four-year-old son, Bilal, with bathwater so hot that he died two months later. “Revenge will not bring Bilal back,” Edhi advised Kubra at the time. “You must try to forgive the woman.” Kubra decided to transfer her to another Edhi center, but not to punish her. That Kubra and the rest of the family continued their work with the mentally disturbed and destitute is powerful testimony to their commitment.
arly the next morning, Edhi sets out with Faisal and Kazmi to conduct a surprise inspection of Edhi Village, a home for runaway and abandoned boys with a separate asylum for mentally ill and physically handicapped men. Halfway into the 45-minute drive south of Karachi, Edhi stops the ambulance at a one-room cinderblock building with a red roof, one of 35 emergency first-aid outposts he’s created along the 1100- kilometer (700-mi) highway from Karachi to Peshawar.
As he chats with the paramedic on call, a pair of policemen pull up to the center. Seeing Edhi, they greet him warmly and join in the conversation.
“Before we set up these emergency centers, the police were stretched too thin and many people died in accidents,” says Faisal. “Now, they rely on us to respond to 75 percent of road accidents.” Nationwide, the Edhi ambulance service receives more than 6000 calls a day.
At the entrance to Edhi Village, the driveway is lined with tamarisk trees covered with yellow blossoms, eucalyptus and palm trees, and beds of purple and white flowers. The courtyard is sprawling and grassy, surrounded by classrooms and dormitories. It contains a playground, a soccer field and volleyball and basketball courts, all of which are used for competitive games with visiting school teams. “Faisal organized the boys to do the landscaping,” Edhi says proudly. “It’s part of our self-help initiative.”
When Edhi purchased the Village’s 26-hectare (65-acre) parcel in 1985, it was barren land. Now there are kitchens, workshops, recreation rooms and housing for 250 children in one complex and 1500 mental patients in another.
In one of the classrooms, Edhi singles out an alert-looking 10-year-old pupil with a congenitally deformed hand. “When he was a newborn, this boy was abandoned in one of our cradles outside a center in Karachi,” Edhi explains. “Bilquis named him Shazab and took care of him in Mithadar until he was old enough to come here. Now he’s one of our smartest students.” When Edhi asks him what he’d like to do when he graduates, Shazab breaks into a shy smile. “I want to be in charge of Edhi Village,” he says.
Further down the open-air hallway are workshops with sewing machines and stacks of electrical equipment. In one of the rooms, a teacher is demonstrating how to repair a refrigerator motor. Edhi pauses to talk with a 13-year-old boy who explains that he’s an Afghan refugee whose parents were killed in the 2001 war. Police picked him up begging on a Karachi street and brought him to an Edhi center. He was later transferred to Edhi Village.
“The boys install all the electrical wiring in the Village and receive enough training to become electricians,” Edhi explains. “We also teach them how to sew so that they can get jobs as tailors or clothes makers when they leave.”
“Sometimes, parents take their children back home and the kids run away again to come back,” adds Kazmi. “The education they receive here is better than the education even middle-class students receive. Also, we provide them with clothes and plenty of food.”
In the walled sanatorium for the mentally handicapped, physically disabled and mentally ill next door, the scene is more sobering. Several hundred residents lie on scattered mattresses or sit on the cement floor in one bare, cavernous ward. Elsewhere, groups of men mill about outside under straggly bougainvillea trees. Despite the spartan facilities, “the patients live under far better conditions than in other mental hospitals in Pakistan,” maintains Ghulam Mustafa, the senior doctor of a staff of five doctors and eight nurses on rotation.
“We organize games and art activities, and the retarded patients do most of the work themselves, keeping the place neat and clean,” he says. “The better-off patients take care of the ones who are more dependent.”
Back in Karachi, Edhi stops by a men’s psychiatric center to meet with Mohammad Ayaz, a soft- spoken, 40-year-old psychiatrist whom Edhi hired after witnessing his success in rehabilitating mentally ill inmates of the city’s central jail. In the front reception room, former patients are busy answering telephone calls and dispatching ambulances.
“Many of our patients can be cured,” Ayaz explains, “but their relatives reject them, leaving them here to languish unnecessarily in long-term care.
“Our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough trained staff,” he continues. “Twelve doctors in rotation have to look after a total of 3500 patients in Edhi Village and six residential centers in Karachi.”
One of the men manning the phones stands up to introduce himself in American-accented English. A self-possessed character with a shock of swept-back black hair flecked with gray, 53-year-old Tariq Ayubi says he perfected his English in Miami, where he went to business school. Moving back to Karachi, he married, went into business and thrived. Gradually, however, he began drinking heavily, and he soon lost his job and his wife. Severely depressed and penniless, he sought refuge at the Edhi center. Volunteering for work here saved him, Ayubi says.
“The Edhi Foundation is the only social welfare organization in the country that works,” he declares.
Afterwards, Edhi expertly maneuvers the ambulance through teeming streets to the women’s sanatorium in north Karachi. As he ambles down the immaculate marble hallways, residents cluster around him, calling out “Abu-ji!” (“Daddy!”). “This adulation makes me nervous,” he says. “I’m not some kind of saint.”
Seeing one woman sitting on concrete steps distractedly waving flies away from an open sore on her foot, Edhi bends close, asking her gently how long it has been infected. “Two days,” she replies, “but it’s much worse this afternoon.” He calls out for a nurse to attend to the sore. When no one comes, he stalks away impatiently. “Don’t worry,” he calls over his shoulder to the suffering woman. “I’ll be back with a bandage before you know it.”
Later on, after Edhi has disinfected and dressed the woman’s wound, he sits on a stone bench and listens to other residents tell him heartrending stories of cruel husbands and family betrayal. Driving back to the Mithadar center, he vents his long-running frustration with the plight of women in Pakistan.
“Society goes against the teachings of the Qur’an in mistreating women and not giving them equality,” he says with indignation. “Only 10 percent of Pakistani women know how to read and write. That’s why we try so hard to give the girls who come to us a good education. Once they get an education, they can start to take control of their lives.”
Back at Mithadar, a businessman in a crisp linen shirt and polished shoes is waiting for Edhi in his office. “Here’s one who has come around,” he says, gripping the man’s shoulders in a friendly embrace. Edhi explains that the waiting businessman has launched a partnership with the foundation to assist the poor in starting fabric shops, food stalls and other small businesses. “He’s helping them stand on their own rather than giving them handouts that only make them more dependent,” says Edhi.
“That’s the humanitarian revolution we need,” he continues with a weary smile. “But still so few understand. Let’s spread the word.”
In the cool interior of a mental ward in Karachi, a short, powerfully built man with a flowing snow-white beard and penetrating dark-brown eyes is standing at the bedside of a distraught young woman. She has covered her head with a sheet and is pleading for news of the two children her husband took from her.
“I know you are suffering terribly, but this is no way to bring back your children,” says the man with stern compassion. “You have a college degree. You can do many things to help the other patients.”
Outside the room’s windows of latticed stone, several hundred other women stroll and lounge under pipal trees scattered around a courtyard as big as several football fields. All are here because their families cannot—or will not—cope with their mental illnesses.
“Self-help,” says the man as he walks away from the young mother’s bedside. “That’s the best way to get back on your feet.”
For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.
Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.
Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.
Usually dressed in a simple tunic over gray pajamas, scuffed sandals on his feet and his trademark astrakhan hat on his head, Edhi outlines his philosophy in the Mithadar dispensary where he launched his charity more than five decades ago. “I tell people that, because I am working for you, the money must come from you,” he says. For years, this meant that Edhi would take to the streets to beg on behalf of his growing social programs. Even in his 70’s, he still occasionally begs on the streets, generally for the sake of severely ill individuals in urgent need of expensive medical care that his clinics cannot provide.
Generally, however, donors come in person to one of the 300 centers and clinics across Pakistan. One, who declined to give his name, explained that he gives money regularly to the Edhi Foundation because an Edhi ambulance once rescued his sister from an automobile accident. (The cost of an ambulance call—one of the few services for which the foundation charges—is less than 50 rupees, or around 85 us cents.) “When I give this 1400 rupees to Edhi, I know it goes to people who need it,” says the donor.
Some donors have been very generous. One family donated two villas in the wealthy Karachi suburb of Clifton for use as a residence and school for around 250 girls. A Pakistani expatriate in the uk donated office buildings worth £1.4 million ($2.5 million) that became the British headquarters of the foundation, which organizes local charity services both for expatriates and in support of the foundation’s work in Pakistan. In addition to money and property, contributors donate clothes, appliances, furniture—even goat and chicken meat, sometimes by the ton. The organization uses a portion of these gifts to feed and clothe residents of the homes; the rest is given away to other hospitals, prisons and disaster victims.
For this, Edhi may well be the most widely admired man in Pakistan. In 1986 he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Public Service, sometimes referred to as “the Asian Nobel Prize.” In 2000, he was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood. In 2002, he joined former us President Bill Clinton, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and others as an honorary board member of the newly founded Daniel Pearl Foundation, created in honor of the murdered Wall Street Journal correspondent. Typically, Edhi pays his own way to receive awards and participate in conferences.
“What Edhi is doing is nothing short of a miracle,” explains Z. A. Nizami, former director-general of the Karachi Development Authority.
emmed in by a labyrinth of fabric shops, food markets and dusty, cart-filled lanes, Edhi’s three-story Mithadar center is a hive of activity. In the crowded front offices, men and women sit behind donated desks taking ambulance calls, ordering medicines and checking the accounts of clinics and centers across the country. In one room, three women are filling out adoption papers. Bilquis Edhi, who oversees adoptions, has placed more than 16,000 children in adopted homes. Outside every Edhi center there is a cradle—shaded from the sun—where unwanted babies can be left anonymously.
Upstairs, a dozen infants and well-fed toddlers, some rattling across the floor in walking strollers, play and doze as Bilquis chats with a woman who has come to adopt a child for her son and daughter-in-law in the United States.
“The baby she’s adopting was starving when it arrived,” Bilquis remarks. “When you nurse a child back to life, it really hurts to see her go, even after you’ve gone through the process thousands of times. Finding her a loving home makes it worth the feeling of loss.”
Bilquis tells of the 32-year-old woman who showed up recently at the Mithadar clinic looking for her. The woman explained that her parents had just revealed that they had adopted her as an infant from the Edhi center. “I’m a doctor now, with four children of my own,” she told Bilquis. “And I wanted to show my gratitude to the woman who nursed me.”
“We both broke down in tears,” Bilquis recalls.
With her head loosely covered by a brightly patterned yellow scarf and eyes that twinkle behind black-framed glasses, Bilquis’s sunny, lighthearted disposition contrasts with her husband’s severe, sometimes impatient manner. The pair met at the clinic when she arrived as an 18-year-old nurse in 1965. A year or so later, they were married.
Their wedding night set the tone for the relationship. Dropping by the dispensary after the ceremony, Edhi found a 12-year-old girl with severe head injuries. The newlyweds rushed her to the hospital and spent the night supervising blood transfusions and calming down distraught relatives.
“I didn’t mind at all,” Bilquis told Reader’s Digest for an article published in 1989. “Today that girl is married with children; that’s what is really important.”
Even so, Bilquis acknowledges in a playful way, life with Edhi can be trying. “Sometimes I wonder how I stayed my whole life with this man who is a mental case,” she says with a smile. “He won’t even attend the weddings of his own children, but if there’s an emergency somewhere he’ll dash out to help in an instant.”
In a room nearby, a teacher is conducting a class in Urdu, Arabic and counting for around a dozen children three to six years old, some of whom have Down’s syndrome. Next door, a female doctor is showing 10 aspiring nurses how to take blood tests; it’s part of a six-month course that will lead to their certification as nurse’s aides.
“I tell destitute women who come to the centers that they can learn nursing here and later earn their own money as nurses and midwives,” Edhi explains back downstairs in his office. So far, around 1500 women have received this training.
Edhi’s own passion for healing dates back to his childhood. At age 11, he was obliged to care for his mother, who was paralyzed with a severe diabetic condition. “I bathed her, changed her and fed her,” he recalls in his 1996 autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind. “Taking care of my mother made me ponder the misery of others who suffered; from that time on, I began to think of how I could help them, and to dream of building hospitals and a village for the handicapped.”
Born in 1928 in Bantva, a small Indian town of 25,000 inhabitants in Gujarat state, he was “not what I would call an obedient child,” he admits with a grin. A natural leader, when he was not prodding other kids to join him in stealing corn and fruit from wealthy farmers, he was organizing impromptu circuses and performing gymnastic feats for the neighbors. Although his father brokered textiles and other goods and provided the family with a middle-class income, both of Edhi’s parents instilled in him the importance of simplicity and frugal living.
“Every day before school, my mother would give me two paisa and say, ‘Spend one paisa on yourself and give the other away,’” Edhi remembers. “When I came home, she would ask me where I had given away my one paisa. It was her way of creating an awareness in me of the need for social welfare.”
At the same time he began caring for his mother, he also developed a habit of saving, putting aside one rupee for every five he earned working at a fabric shop after school. This thriftiness served him well, prompting him to gradually acquire government securities. Even now, Edhi takes no salary, choosing instead to live parsimoniously on the interest from these securities.
In 1951, four years after the family moved to Karachi following the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, the 23-year-old Edhi used some of his savings to buy a tiny shop, less than three meters (10') on a side, inside what is now the clinic building. Together with a doctor who taught him the basics of health care, he set up a free dispensary, and he persuaded several friends to help him add free literacy classes. To be available at all times, he slept on a cement bench outside the dispensary.
In 1957, a virulent flu epidemic swept through Karachi. Edhi reacted with unselfish daring, using his own money to erect tented camps on the city’s outskirts where people received free immunizations. After the epidemic was brought under control, grateful residents chipped in to buy the rest of the Mithadar dispensary building, enabling Edhi to create a free maternity center and nursing school.
Over the years that followed, Edhi realized that Karachi desperately needed an ambulance service. Impressed by his handling of the flu crisis, a local businessman made a large donation, part of which Edhi used to buy a beat-up van that he converted into a free ambulance and drove himself. “I prided myself on being the first to arrive at an accident,” he recalls. Today, Edhi’s ambulance service has grown to a fleet of more than 600 nationwide, all paid for with donations. Dispatched from call centers scattered around the country’s cities and highways, Edhi ambulances are still usually the first to arrive at the scene, and they have helped cut the fatality toll from road accidents by half, he says.
In 1986, during a hijacking attempt at Karachi airport, Edhi marshaled 54 ambulances at the ready. When negotiations between the hijackers and the government broke down and Pakistani commandos stormed the plane, Edhi and other paramedics entered under fire to try to save wounded passengers and crew.
In 1993, during devastating floods in the Punjab, Edhi ambulances rescued 50,000 people. Using donated planes, volunteers also dropped food, water and supplies to isolated families. Edhi’s air ambulance service now numbers three planes and a helicopter, all donated by the US Agency for International Development—“without conditions,” Edhi is quick to point out.
“The 1993 flood was the biggest operation we’d ever done; it satisfied Mr. Edhi that we could handle major disasters,” explains Anwer Kazmi, a longtime friend and aide, who translates Edhi’s Urdu into English.
A stickler for organizational efficiency, Edhi stands up from his desk and goes over to a wall arrayed with stacked drawers of cardboard boxes, each carefully labeled with a year, a location and a subject. “How do you like my computer?” he asks, smiling, as he pulls out a box containing the expense records of the 1993 flood operation. Like his training in health care, Edhi’s expertise in administration is self-taught, his business savvy acquired over decades of running a foundation that now occupies some 7330 staff and volunteers. Back at his desk, he leafs through one of the oversize accounting ledgers that he fills with ruminations, anecdotes, recollections and plans.
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down ideas in these ledgers,” he explains. “And in the morning, everyone groans about all the orders I hand down as I try to follow through on my inspirations.”
Recently one of those nighttime brainstorms involved setting up emergency clinics on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to treat victims of the 2001 war. Edhi’s son Faisal, 26, who works for the foundation, vividly recalls an incident at one of these clinics that encapsulated his father’s demanding nature.
At the new center in Jamun, Faisal explains, local staff members had purchased a dozen chairs for guests and journalists. When Edhi arrived for his own first visit, he blew up. “Why did you waste money on chairs?” he stormed. “Next, you’ll be buying beds and other things for yourselves instead of spending the money on the people we intend to help.” That night, Edhi himself slept with the ambulance drivers on the floor of the center.
As Faisal finishes his anecdote, Edhi rubs a hand across his balding head and nods in agreement. “People respect me because they see how simply we live and that all the donations go to the people who need help,” he volunteers. Only 10 percent of the foundation’s overall budget goes toward administrative overhead, including salaries, he adds.
Edhi and Bilquis still occupy a cramped, two-room apartment next to his office in the midst of the hubbub of the Mithadar clinic. He remains on call for emergencies 24 hours a day—just as he has for the past 52 years. “I am always available to all, rich or poor,” he says. “Anyone can come into this office and talk to me.”
Despite this open-door policy, growing up the children of such a father was not easy. Although Edhi’s children were raised largely by Bilquis’s mother in a house near the dispensary, they were exposed to pain and misery from an early age. At seven, Faisal recalls accompanying his father to recover the corpse of a murder victim. Edhi brought the body back to Mithadar, washed it and gave it a respectful burial. “I got very sick and couldn’t sleep for a week,” Faisal recalls.
By the time he was 10, however, Faisal had grown accustomed to riding with his father on ambulance calls to bring the dead and injured to morgues and hospitals. Now, Faisal is in charge of the ambulance service, whose costs he is trying to cut to make it self- sustaining. He’s also creating a new dispensary and ambulance center for some 50,000 people uprooted from their Karachi homes by a highway project and forcibly moved to a treeless settlement west of the city where there is no running water, sewage or electricity.
Running the Edhi Foundation is very much a family concern. Edhi, Bilquis and their children meet every Sunday at the girls’ home in Clifton to confer over problems at the centers and plan new projects.
“We discuss each girl individually,” says Edhi’s 36-year-old daughter, Kubra, who is as restrained as Faisal is extroverted. “Before the establishment of Edhi homes, young girls who ran away from their families fell into prostitution and other criminal activities. Now they have a place to take shelter.”
Some girls flee to the center to obtain the education their families deny them, while others are sent by parents eager to have their daughters educated, but too poor to pay school fees.
“When girls first come, they generally pass the first few days with great difficulty, often getting depressed and tense,” Kubra continues. “We involve them in work—taking care of children, mixing with other girls and women. Their lives become more normal after three or four days. If a girl continues to be depressed or has difficulty adjusting, we call a doctor to treat her.”
“This is very difficult work, because of fundamentalism,” Edhi interjects. “Our society does not want to give any facilities to females. When political opponents criticize us, we never fight them—we ignore them.
“Still, it’s very hard to survive if you are working for all the people, not just your particular religious or ethnic group,” he acknowledges. “With so much discrimination and growing religious divisions, my children will have a very, very tough time.”
In 1992, tragedy drew the family closer than ever. A mentally unbalanced woman staying at the Clifton home scalded Kubra’s four-year-old son, Bilal, with bathwater so hot that he died two months later. “Revenge will not bring Bilal back,” Edhi advised Kubra at the time. “You must try to forgive the woman.” Kubra decided to transfer her to another Edhi center, but not to punish her. That Kubra and the rest of the family continued their work with the mentally disturbed and destitute is powerful testimony to their commitment.
arly the next morning, Edhi sets out with Faisal and Kazmi to conduct a surprise inspection of Edhi Village, a home for runaway and abandoned boys with a separate asylum for mentally ill and physically handicapped men. Halfway into the 45-minute drive south of Karachi, Edhi stops the ambulance at a one-room cinderblock building with a red roof, one of 35 emergency first-aid outposts he’s created along the 1100- kilometer (700-mi) highway from Karachi to Peshawar.
As he chats with the paramedic on call, a pair of policemen pull up to the center. Seeing Edhi, they greet him warmly and join in the conversation.
“Before we set up these emergency centers, the police were stretched too thin and many people died in accidents,” says Faisal. “Now, they rely on us to respond to 75 percent of road accidents.” Nationwide, the Edhi ambulance service receives more than 6000 calls a day.
At the entrance to Edhi Village, the driveway is lined with tamarisk trees covered with yellow blossoms, eucalyptus and palm trees, and beds of purple and white flowers. The courtyard is sprawling and grassy, surrounded by classrooms and dormitories. It contains a playground, a soccer field and volleyball and basketball courts, all of which are used for competitive games with visiting school teams. “Faisal organized the boys to do the landscaping,” Edhi says proudly. “It’s part of our self-help initiative.”
When Edhi purchased the Village’s 26-hectare (65-acre) parcel in 1985, it was barren land. Now there are kitchens, workshops, recreation rooms and housing for 250 children in one complex and 1500 mental patients in another.
In one of the classrooms, Edhi singles out an alert-looking 10-year-old pupil with a congenitally deformed hand. “When he was a newborn, this boy was abandoned in one of our cradles outside a center in Karachi,” Edhi explains. “Bilquis named him Shazab and took care of him in Mithadar until he was old enough to come here. Now he’s one of our smartest students.” When Edhi asks him what he’d like to do when he graduates, Shazab breaks into a shy smile. “I want to be in charge of Edhi Village,” he says.
Further down the open-air hallway are workshops with sewing machines and stacks of electrical equipment. In one of the rooms, a teacher is demonstrating how to repair a refrigerator motor. Edhi pauses to talk with a 13-year-old boy who explains that he’s an Afghan refugee whose parents were killed in the 2001 war. Police picked him up begging on a Karachi street and brought him to an Edhi center. He was later transferred to Edhi Village.
“The boys install all the electrical wiring in the Village and receive enough training to become electricians,” Edhi explains. “We also teach them how to sew so that they can get jobs as tailors or clothes makers when they leave.”
“Sometimes, parents take their children back home and the kids run away again to come back,” adds Kazmi. “The education they receive here is better than the education even middle-class students receive. Also, we provide them with clothes and plenty of food.”
In the walled sanatorium for the mentally handicapped, physically disabled and mentally ill next door, the scene is more sobering. Several hundred residents lie on scattered mattresses or sit on the cement floor in one bare, cavernous ward. Elsewhere, groups of men mill about outside under straggly bougainvillea trees. Despite the spartan facilities, “the patients live under far better conditions than in other mental hospitals in Pakistan,” maintains Ghulam Mustafa, the senior doctor of a staff of five doctors and eight nurses on rotation.
“We organize games and art activities, and the retarded patients do most of the work themselves, keeping the place neat and clean,” he says. “The better-off patients take care of the ones who are more dependent.”
Back in Karachi, Edhi stops by a men’s psychiatric center to meet with Mohammad Ayaz, a soft- spoken, 40-year-old psychiatrist whom Edhi hired after witnessing his success in rehabilitating mentally ill inmates of the city’s central jail. In the front reception room, former patients are busy answering telephone calls and dispatching ambulances.
“Many of our patients can be cured,” Ayaz explains, “but their relatives reject them, leaving them here to languish unnecessarily in long-term care.
“Our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough trained staff,” he continues. “Twelve doctors in rotation have to look after a total of 3500 patients in Edhi Village and six residential centers in Karachi.”
One of the men manning the phones stands up to introduce himself in American-accented English. A self-possessed character with a shock of swept-back black hair flecked with gray, 53-year-old Tariq Ayubi says he perfected his English in Miami, where he went to business school. Moving back to Karachi, he married, went into business and thrived. Gradually, however, he began drinking heavily, and he soon lost his job and his wife. Severely depressed and penniless, he sought refuge at the Edhi center. Volunteering for work here saved him, Ayubi says.
“The Edhi Foundation is the only social welfare organization in the country that works,” he declares.
Afterwards, Edhi expertly maneuvers the ambulance through teeming streets to the women’s sanatorium in north Karachi. As he ambles down the immaculate marble hallways, residents cluster around him, calling out “Abu-ji!” (“Daddy!”). “This adulation makes me nervous,” he says. “I’m not some kind of saint.”
Seeing one woman sitting on concrete steps distractedly waving flies away from an open sore on her foot, Edhi bends close, asking her gently how long it has been infected. “Two days,” she replies, “but it’s much worse this afternoon.” He calls out for a nurse to attend to the sore. When no one comes, he stalks away impatiently. “Don’t worry,” he calls over his shoulder to the suffering woman. “I’ll be back with a bandage before you know it.”
Later on, after Edhi has disinfected and dressed the woman’s wound, he sits on a stone bench and listens to other residents tell him heartrending stories of cruel husbands and family betrayal. Driving back to the Mithadar center, he vents his long-running frustration with the plight of women in Pakistan.
“Society goes against the teachings of the Qur’an in mistreating women and not giving them equality,” he says with indignation. “Only 10 percent of Pakistani women know how to read and write. That’s why we try so hard to give the girls who come to us a good education. Once they get an education, they can start to take control of their lives.”
Back at Mithadar, a businessman in a crisp linen shirt and polished shoes is waiting for Edhi in his office. “Here’s one who has come around,” he says, gripping the man’s shoulders in a friendly embrace. Edhi explains that the waiting businessman has launched a partnership with the foundation to assist the poor in starting fabric shops, food stalls and other small businesses. “He’s helping them stand on their own rather than giving them handouts that only make them more dependent,” says Edhi.
“That’s the humanitarian revolution we need,” he continues with a weary smile. “But still so few understand. Let’s spread the word.”
Part of the Solution: Shehzad Roy
Written by Abida Bokhari
Shehzad Roy, a famous Pakistani pop singer, went to Thar (a desert in Sindh, Pakistan), for recording one of his music videos. He didn’t know it then that this experience would change his life. At the time of shooting the video, Roy became aware of hardships people, especially children, have to face on a daily basis in rural areas. They have, he saw, a very low quality of life, are deprived of basic provisions of life and have few human rights. Roy was touched most when he saw “innocent and beautiful children” drinking contaminated water” near carcasses of decayed birds and animals. This morbid experience changed Roy’s perception of life. And, he decided to take some responsibility of helping under-privileged children of Pakistan through education. For this, he started by opening up a philanthropic school. Shehzad Roy shared this noble idea with his well- wishers and friends. They all showed their willingness to contribute to the cause. Especially, the great vanguard of philanthropy in Pakistan, Mr. Edhi supported him, and also appeared in his video, which Roy had made purely for the Trust campaign, named, “Zindagi (life) Trust: I am paid to learn.”
The Trust is not like any other charity school. The whole concept is very innovative. Here “they pay you to learn.” For sure it is very fascinating in nature for the indigent section of our society. Instead of charging fees, they give student Rs. 20 daily to attend classes. Not only will it help in educating the children, but will also, play a vital role in eradicating child labor from our country.
The response has been great. Roy’s well- wishers, friends, fans and others donate and volunteer to work for the Trust. What began with 1 school in Mansoor Colony, Karachi, is now spread in 3 major cities of Pakistan. The trust has 14 schools in Karachi, 11 in Lahore and 9 in Rawalpindi! There are 148 teachers working in these school and over 2,000 students are studying in the schools.
Shehzad Roy, a famous Pakistani pop singer, went to Thar (a desert in Sindh, Pakistan), for recording one of his music videos. He didn’t know it then that this experience would change his life. At the time of shooting the video, Roy became aware of hardships people, especially children, have to face on a daily basis in rural areas. They have, he saw, a very low quality of life, are deprived of basic provisions of life and have few human rights. Roy was touched most when he saw “innocent and beautiful children” drinking contaminated water” near carcasses of decayed birds and animals. This morbid experience changed Roy’s perception of life. And, he decided to take some responsibility of helping under-privileged children of Pakistan through education. For this, he started by opening up a philanthropic school. Shehzad Roy shared this noble idea with his well- wishers and friends. They all showed their willingness to contribute to the cause. Especially, the great vanguard of philanthropy in Pakistan, Mr. Edhi supported him, and also appeared in his video, which Roy had made purely for the Trust campaign, named, “Zindagi (life) Trust: I am paid to learn.”The Trust is not like any other charity school. The whole concept is very innovative. Here “they pay you to learn.” For sure it is very fascinating in nature for the indigent section of our society. Instead of charging fees, they give student Rs. 20 daily to attend classes. Not only will it help in educating the children, but will also, play a vital role in eradicating child labor from our country.
The response has been great. Roy’s well- wishers, friends, fans and others donate and volunteer to work for the Trust. What began with 1 school in Mansoor Colony, Karachi, is now spread in 3 major cities of Pakistan. The trust has 14 schools in Karachi, 11 in Lahore and 9 in Rawalpindi! There are 148 teachers working in these school and over 2,000 students are studying in the schools.
Shahzad Roy has founded a Girls’ Secondary School in Shahadpur as well. He understands very well that, “educating a female means educating a whole generation” and that we need educated females in our society. By setting up the Girls’ school, he has surely set an example for others.
Roy’s selflessness and devotion to make a difference is leading him to do more. He could not overlook the health problem in our country. For that, a Healthcare project was started by him in Sultanabad, near a town Shahadpur, where pediatric, prenatal, and postnatal treatments are provided. Roy plans to launch more projects, relating to healthcare in various parts of Pakistan.
In recognition of all of Roy’s efforts and altruism, He has been awarded Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, one of the highest civilian awards in Pakistan. It should be noted that he was the youngest and only pop singer, in Pakistan who had received this award, at the time of writing this article.
In recognition of all of Roy’s efforts and altruism, He has been awarded Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, one of the highest civilian awards in Pakistan. It should be noted that he was the youngest and only pop singer, in Pakistan who had received this award, at the time of writing this article.
Why does Pakistan need secularism? Because of this guy...
If a woman does not comply in having sexual relations with her husband, then the husband can refuse to feed her. "Yes, I said that," Mohseni said looking me in the eye.
How obssessed with sex do you have to be to come up a 'religious' edict such as this one? These are the people leading the illiterate and educated alike.
Why can't our bearded 'elder statesmen' worry about poverty, the economy, education, health?
What is Mr. Mohseni's next great revelation? The benefits of Viagra?
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