Author, Raja Anwar, in his controversial book, The Terrorist Prince (1997), informs how dozens of young Pakistanis who ended up in exile in countries like Syria and Libya in the 1980s, simply vanished.

Anwar was a radical student activist in the 1960s who was made an advisor on youth affairs when the PPP came to power in December 1971.

After former Prime Minister and PPP Chairman, Z.A. Bhutto was hanged in 1979 by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, Anwar escaped to Kabul that had a Soviet-backed government at the time. There he joined the urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfikar (AZO).

Hair-raising tales of illegal immigrants …

Raja’s book is mostly about his experiences as an AZO operative. But he also sprints through stories of young lower-middle and working class Pakistanis who, due to their admiration for Bhutto, had joined the AZO (in Kabul).

Many such young men were also rotting in Zia’s cramped jails when some 50 of them were flown into Syria in exchange for passengers of a PIA plane that was hijacked by AZO in 1981.

According to Anwar, many early AZO men died or were arrested when they returned to Pakistan to orchestrate attacks against the Zia regime, while others (including the men who were swapped for the passengers) settled across countries such as Syria and Libya. Some even made it to certain European countries as well.

However, only a handful of those who had gotten political asylum in Europe managed to survive, and some even returned to Pakistan. But most of those who, to escape the Zia regime, had entered ‘anti-Zia’ countries like Libya and Syria, were never seen again.

According to Anwar, many of them ended up in jails. This happened after their utility as militants exhausted itself in the eyes of the radical Libyan and Syrian regimes or they chose not to get involved. They never made it back to Pakistan.

At the end of the Cold War in 1990, another group of young Pakistanis almost faced a similar fate. But the difference was that unlike their compatriots discussed above, these young men were not political.

In 2008, I met a group of Pakistanis selling flowers in a congested market in Rome. One such man, Qadir, who was in his late 30s, related to me an extraordinary story.

He told me that most of his Pakistani contemporaries who were selling flowers in that area were illegal immigrants who had been in Europe ever since the early 1990s. He said that he had first landed in Europe in 1992.

He was part of a group of about a dozen young men (from various small towns in the Punjab), who were contacted by a clandestine ‘travel agent’ (situated in Lahore).

Qadir, at the time, was 22 and working with his father who owned a small plot of farm land, even though he had managed to get an intermediate degree from a local collage.

The travel agent told them that since the Soviet Union had broken up (in 1991), reaching Europe had become a lot easier. They were asked to dish out Rs100,000 each.

‘He told us that we could make double this amount within months once we got jobs in Europe,’ Qadir had added.

Qadir and eight other such young men persuaded their parents to procure loans and pay the agent. They then bid farewell to their families in March 1992 and headed (by bus) to Afghanistan. The agent got them into Afghanistan by bribing some Afghan custom officials.

‘The Afghan war was (briefly) over, the Soviet troops had left, and there were no Taliban there in those days,’ Qadir had told me.

From Afghanistan they entered Russia (by foot). Qadir said: ‘More bribes were paid, and by the time we reached the Russia-Ukraine border, most of us had no money left and had lost lots of weight … but there was no turning back.’

The group was suddenly abandoned by the agent on the border, but the men were able to enter Ukraine due to the chaos that accompanied that country’s sudden independence from the former Soviet Union.

They tried to get jobs in the Ukrainian capital, but apart from securing some menial work (as daily wage janitors), they struggled. They bumped into a Pakistani businessman who agreed to pay for their return to Pakistan. ‘… But he just handed us $50 and we never saw him again,’ Qadir remembered.

In October 1992 the group took a bus to a town near the Ukraine-Romania border. In 1989 a West-backed revolution had toppled Romania’s communist regime.

‘There was still lots of turmoil in Romania,’ Qadir explained. ‘Poverty and corruption was rampant and, believe it or not, each one of us paid $7 each to a Ukrainian man who then paid half of this money to three Romanian border guards, and we managed to cross into Romania!’

But they found that country too was in the throes of economic and political turmoil.

‘There was no work,’ Qadir lamented. ‘We cleaned the streets and bathrooms for little money and slept in crumbling buildings with roving gypsies. Some of us began to break down and cry a lot.’

After hearing their story, a Romanian shopkeeper told them that they should travel to Bosnia: ‘He said, you are Muslims. Go to Bosnia. There are many Muslims there,’ Qadir remembered.

Bosnia had emerged in March 1992 after Yugoslavia broke up.

So they travelled from Romania on the edges of the Romania-Hungary border by foot and sometimes on the backs of donkeys owned by gypsy tribes. They entered Bosnia in February 1993.

But what the shopkeeper didn’t tell them was that a vicious civil war had erupted between Bosnians, Croats and Serbs.

They reached a Muslim Bosnian village. They were fed by a family of farmers and given some work. ‘They (the Bosnians) are very different kind of Muslims,’ Qadir laughed. ‘Very different culture and rituals.’

But after about a month, a group of Bosnian men arrived and took most of the men from the village away, included them. They were immediately recruited to fight against the Serbs.

At this point of the story, Qadir became sad: ‘For next five years we bounced from one Bosnian group to another, fighting their war,’ he shook his head. ‘It was terrible. The Serbs were like monsters. Killing women and children, and then the Bosnians would retaliate. Our (Pakistani) group lost three men and one was taken away by the Serbs. Don’t know what happened to him. We tried to escape, but couldn’t. There was war everywhere. We had to keep fighting (for the Bosnian groups) …’

Just four of them remained when the war came to an end after American planes bombed Serbia in 1999. Two decided to return to Pakistan while Qadir and three others ended up in Rome, Italy.

‘It was only in 2005 that my family got to know about my fate (through a relative who tracked him down). I talked to them on the phone, and my mother burst out crying. She was sure I was dead.’

Qadir was hopeful that one day he would be able to get Italian citizenship. Sometimes he gets arrested, but said that the cops of the area knew what he had gone through, and so they usually let him go.

I asked Qadir why he didn’t go back to Pakistan. ‘I would have loved to,’ he told me. ‘But I kept hearing about the terrible things happening there, the violence and all. So I think, wouldn’t going back be like being in Bosnia again …?’

Before I could answer, he had spotted an approaching cop. He handed me a flower, then after saying, Rab Rakha (May God be with you), he quickly slid away.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 6th, 2015

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