It was late at night in Islamabad and Ahmad Farhad was returning from a quick trip to the shops when someone walked up behind him. “Don’t be scared, don’t scream and come with us,” the figure, dressed in civilian clothes, whispered discreetly into his ear.
Still clutching bread, eggs and jam intended for the next morning’s breakfast, Farhad went to the car without a sound. With a sinking feeling the poet recognised the vehicle, with its blacked-out windows, as one known to be used by shadowy military agencies in Pakistan for abductions.
“We have to tie your hands behind your back and put a cloth on your face,” the man told Farhad, before everything went dark. Certain he would never see his wife and children again, Farhad pleaded with those in the car to take him out with a single bullet rather than torture and mutilate him. They replied: “Don’t worry. Things don’t turn out that way.”
Farhad, known for political resistance poetry that has criticised the military for treating the constitution “like a toy”, had long feared he was a target of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Just days before his abduction he had tweeted about threats to his life.
Pakistan’s military, the most powerful institution in the country, is notoriously intolerant of dissent and for decades has been accused of using various agencies to carry out abductions, killings and disappearances of critics, though they deny the practice. Many of those taken do not make it out alive, with families often receiving mutilated corpses, and few who do survive are willing or able to discuss their ordeal.
Speaking for the first time about his experience of abduction in May, Farhad told the Guardian he was thrown into a tiny, hot, foul smelling cell and began to become unwell soon afterwards, but was given no medical attention. Instead he was pulled in for interrogation.
His captors made it clear that his political poetry, his activism and a recent post on social media calling for Pakistan’s powerful army chief to resign, were the reasons he had been picked up.
“They asked me many times, what’s my issue with the army chief and the military?” he said. “The interrogator then pressed me harder, asking about my resistance poetry, particularly my two poems on the military and enforced disappearances. He would scream at me ‘why did you use the name of the army as a title of the poem, why do you hate the military?’”
Farhad responded that he did not hate the military or the chief but believed all should follow the constitution.
Shut off from the world Farhad did not know that his abduction had sent ripples across Pakistan, elevating him from a little-known poet to a national figure of resistance as his political verses began to be spread widely.
His wife, Syeda Urooj Zainab, filed a case in Islamabad’s high court, accusing the powerful security agencies, including Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, ISI, of being behind the abduction of her husband.
The judge summoned the security agency heads, as well as senior figures from the government ministries of interior and defence, demanding an explanation of where Farhad was. If they did not produce him, warned the judge, he would call for the prime minister to explain.
ISI and the department of defence denied knowledge of Farhad, but back in his interrogation cell the officer began to put even greater pressure on him. “He threatened me that they could easily kill me and dump my body and it would be no issue,” said Farhad. “He listed other journalists and activists who have been killed and said, ‘what happened to their cases? – nothing’.”
Two weeks after he was abducted, Farhad resurfaced in the custody of police in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir and was later released on bail. He now faces a criminal case of “obstructing” a public servant at a checkpoint. He claims he was handed over to police by intelligence agencies, and denies any incident occurred at a checkpoint.
The Inter-Services Public Relations, a media wing of the armed forces, refused to comment on Farhad’s case.
Just before his release, Farhad was told not to give any interviews, but to keep a low profile and not use social media again. However, he says he has refused to stay silent and still plans to publish a book of his resistance poems.
“I fear they will kill me for talking,” he said. “But I believe I should tell my story. I was abducted and I know who abducted me.”
The situation in Pakistan for artists, poets and critics who speak out was best summed up, Farhad said, by one of his own political poems, Fauj Nama, or Verse on the Army, which was among those that had riled his interrogators. One line runs: “We live here merely to draw our breath / The entire land of Pakistan belongs to the army.”
