Thailand: Castaways | Ordeal of Ahmadi families seeking shelter in Bangkok

96 refugees refused to go back to their country as, for them, it amounted to suicide. These persons were finally released in June this year with the help of Thai Committee for Refugees (TCR), an NGO working for refugees in Thailand.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The News | Pakistan
By Aoun Sahi | July 10, 2011

Standing on the second floor of a confinement centre on the outskirts of Bangkok city, Rana Haroon Siddiq, 40, clad in a grey kameez and traditional Punjabi tehband, starts crying while talking about his village thousands of miles away in Sahiwal district, Pakistan. He belongs to the Ahmadi community and was forced to leave his village when he was in class five. “I have been on the run since then. I had to change my residence or city after every couple of years,” he recalls.

Siddiq has been living in a small room of this building with his three children wife since March this year. He fled to Bangkok in August 2008 to get the refugee status from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) regional office and settle in some other country as the situation in Pakistan was not conducive for him to live.


“I was physically attacked four times since 2000 and cases were also registered against me only because of my belief. My family and friends forced me to leave the country.”

Siddiq does not want his children to live like him. “I do not want them to keep running only because they belong to the Ahmadi community. It is very painful to leave our country.”

In November last year, he was arrested along with his family by the Thai immigration authorities who took them to Bangkok’s notorious Immigration Detention Cell (IDC). The family was detained there for the next seven months in inhuman conditions. “It was the worst time of my life. The detention centre was like hell for me,” he recalls.

Siddiq is one of the 96 UNHCR-recognised refugees from Pakistan who are being transferred from one detention centre to another. By December 2010, the Thai Immigration Bureau had detained 91 Pakistani Ahmadis seeking asylum on grounds of religious persecution in their home country. Another 38 were detained in the early months of 2011.

Out of the total 131 Ahmadis at IDC, 35 were sent back in the last week of December. The remaining 96 refugees refused to go back to their country as, for them, it amounted to suicide. These persons were finally released in June this year with the help of Thai Committee for Refugees (TCR), an NGO working for refugees in Thailand. The organisation has paid 5 million baht (about Rs15 million) bail bond to get them released. All of them have got refugee status and the United States has agreed to accept them.

Veerawit Tianchainan, Executive Director of TCR, told media after the release of these Ahmadis that 34 children under 12 years of age were among those detained in cramped rooms.

Everybody at the confinement centre has a story to tell. Syed Altaf Hussain Bukhari, who belongs to a famous spiritual family of Sheikhupura, moved to Thailand in November 2010 along with his second wife Sadia and two daughters. He became Ahmadi in 1999 and had been facing life threats since then. “My brothers and cousins, who are caretakers of a shrine, even tried to kill me. I was denied all kinds of rights and even my first wife had left me. I have a son from her who was only a few months old by then. Pamphlets bearing my photograph were distributed in Sheikhupura, calling me liable to be murdered. I confined myself to a building in Gujranwala for three years before moving to Lahore and marrying an Ahmadi girl in early 2000s.”

On May 28, 2010, Bukhari was among the survivors of a deadly attack on an Ahmadi worship place in Lahore. “I was the only person from the community who talked to media after the attack. I started getting threatening calls the next day and after a week some gunmen attacked my home. My daughters started getting discriminatory remarks in their school. I never wanted to leave my country, but there was no other option,” he recalls sitting in a small room along with his family in the confinement centre.

Even though they were aware of Thailand not being a signatory to the UNHCR’s convention on refugees, they decided to come here. “The process of seeking asylum and refugee status from UNHCR was lengthy and painful. Interviews do not take place for months. The resettlement is another lengthy process in which refugees are informed about their final destination.”

He was arrested along with his family in January 2011. His wife Sadia does not even want to recall that period, showing wounds on the feet of her six-year-old twin daughters. “They got these wounds in the detention centre. They still cannot walk properly and fear that we would be put in that ‘big cage’ again,” she says.

Though Sadia and her family have got refugee status and will settle in America in a few months, she still misses Lahore. “My kids also miss their school and friends in Pakistan. We used to live in a big house in Lahore, but now we are living in a small room,” she says.

Saleem-ud-Din, spokesperson for Jamaat Ahmadiyya Pakistan, says their people feel insecure after the May 28 attacks on their worship places in Lahore. “Many people of our community have left Pakistan after these attacks though our organisation discourages this trend. Our children are being denied admissions to educational institutes and people are being forced not to do business with us while the state has evolved laws against us. So, it is not easy for us to live in our country,” he laments.

aounsahi@gmail.com

Altaf Hussain Bukhari, his wife Sadia and children still miss Lahore.




Read original post here: Ordeal of the Pakistani Ahmadi families who have fled Pakistan to seek shelter in Bangkok’s confinement centre