Gargi Gupta talks to Ansar Burney and finds out how a Pakistani human rights activist has become popular on this side of the border as well.
Ansar Burney may yet do for the beleaguered sailors of the hijacked MV Iceberg — six Indians among them — what he managed to do for those of MV Suez: get them back home to freedom and safety. As we go to print, the Karachi-based human rights lawyer is in Dubai, trying to meet the owners of the cargo ship that was captured by Somalian pirates in March last year. Get involved in the negotiations for the release of the ship and crew, and pay the sailors’ families salary for the 16 months of captivity will be his two demands. The owners have rejected such appeals earlier, and chances are they will continue to do so.
But if there’s something that the MV Suez saga has taught Burney, it is that such negotiations are inevitably long-winded, difficult and unpredictable. When he first began talking to the MV Suez pirates in February, they demanded $30 million. “Over four months, I brought that down to $4 million and then to $2.1 million,” he says over phone from London where he lives alternately. Burney Legal Solicitors, the legal firm which helps to “run the house”, as Burney says laughingly, has had an office in the city for the past five years. (It has another in Washington.)
Bringing down the ransom was not his biggest trouble, however. As Burney recounts in minute detail (over what turned into a nearly two-hour conversation) all the trials and tribulations of his struggle, it was followed by getting the Egyptian owner to agree to pay half the amount, then arranging for the rest of the sum in Pakistan — which included money used to save the lives of the six Indians.
“I didn’t sleep for about 15 days,” says Burney of that frenzied time. “I used to be on the phone all day. At night the pirates would call; during the day I would be liaising with donors and families of the 21 sailors....it was ajooba (wonder) work.” Speaking now, Burney says, saving just his countrymen was never an option, as was not raising the money to save the Indian sailors. “We said we can’t do it [leave the Indian sailors to die]; they will die as their hopes will die.”
This time Burney’s humanitarian gesture has earned him unqualified support in both India and Pakistan, but he hasn’t always been as lucky.
Take Sarabjeet Singh, the Indian who has been in a jail in Pakistan for the past 21 years on charges of being involved in terrorist attacks. Burney was Sarabjeet’s lawyer until 2008, when he managed to get him off the death row. But the case hasn’t moved forward since, and another lawyer, Awais Sheikh, has the brief now. “He had different ideas about how we should proceed in the case,” says Sarabjeet’s sister, Dalbir Kaur who is, otherwise, all praise for her “rakhi brother”. Burney, on his part, feels that Kaur and her lawyer are ham-handed, publicity hungry and need to proceed carefully, given the mood in Pakistan.
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He should know. Burney has more than 30 years’ experience working with Pakistan’s prison system. Ansar Burney Trust, the human rights organisation which does his pro bono advocacy work, began as Prisoner’ Aid Society in 1980, started by the then 24-year-old Burney to improve conditions in Pakistani prisons. Burney, an active left-wing student leader, had been in prison, arrested by the new regime of Zia ul Haq. The conditions there horrified him, as did the fact that there were many incarcerated for years without trial.
In all these years, the Trust has, so claims its website, secured the release of “700,000 innocent prisoners from countries all around the world”. The most notable of these was Burney’s campaign against child camel jockeys, for which the US State Department declared him one of its “Heroes Acting to End Modern Day Slavery” in 2005. That was followed by his nomination as an expert to the United Nations’s advisory committee on human rights (Burney’s three-year term expired in April this year).
But within his country it has been a bumpy ride. On the one hand, he seems to have the ear of officialdom. Burney was nominated minister for human rights in the Pervez Musharraf government in 2007. Early this month too, Asif Ali Zardari had wanted Burney to become governor of Sindh (he declined; “I wanted to work for the government, not serve it,” he says).
On the other, there is considerable anger because Burney is seen to be soft on India. He’s also run into trouble with his outspokenness — last year he appealed to the British government to ban Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s entry into the UK alleging he spread hatred against the West. There have been fatwas against Burney, and his offices have been raided and threatened. “I sent off my children to study in the UK because I felt that the danger to them would weaken me,” says the father of three. Son Fahad now works with Burney (he’s vice-chairman of the trust), as does his wife Shaheen and brother Sarim.
Even in Karachi, he has to take precautions such as change the route he takes to go home in the well-to-do North Nazimabad locality. “Burney,” says film director Mahesh Bhatt who is a close associate, “is one of those rare people these days in whom the emotion of empathy is alive and kicking”, and mentions how Burney flew to Mumbai three days after the 26/11 attacks and donated blood.
Sampa Arya, wife of Ravinder Gulia, the third officer of MV Suez who was in touch with Burney over many months, says: “He is amazing; I would call him sometimes 20 times through the day in Karachi, or in London, or in Cairo. He was always patient.” Burney himself speaks of “do(ing) something to bring the two countries together”. He comes to Delhi and Mumbai next week to meet the families of the MV Iceberg crew, and hopefully to do something in that direction.
