Pakistani and Indian fishermen are pawns in governments' disputes
Pakistani and Indian fishermen are pawns in governments' disputes
From impoverished villages, the men fish in the Indus River delta or at sea but face arrest if they stumble into foreign waters. Terrorism fears have intensified the two-way cat-and-mouse game.
March 09, 2010|By Alex Rodriguez
Reporting from Jati, Pakistan His hands wrapped tightly around the frayed rope he uses to steer his skiff, Lutf Ali is visibly on edge as he scans the horizon. He keeps looking to the left, from where the speedboats always pounce.
"The Indian boats are big and noisy, so when we hear them, we try to get away," the 50-year-old Pakistani fisherman says of the neighboring country's coast guard. "If we're lucky, we're not caught."
In the cat-and-mouse game played out every day in the Arabian Sea and in the channels carved into the mud flats of the Indus River delta, Ali is the mouse.
Hundreds of Pakistani and Indian fishermen have been arrested and imprisoned in recent years, high-seas apprehensions that human rights activists say have nothing to do with border enforcement and everything to do with the 6-decade-old hatred between Pakistan and India.
When fishermen from either country are hauled in for questioning, they're interrogated by intelligence agents convinced that the men are spies. The fishermen are often held for years without a trial.
Officials with the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, a human rights nongovernmental organization, or NGO, that focuses on the plight of Indus River delta fishermen, say Indian prisons now hold
175 Pakistani fishermen. The organization's counterpart in India, the National Fishworkers Forum, says
550 Indian fishermen are jailed in Pakistani lockups.
Fishermen and activists with the Indian and Pakistani NGOs say India's border enforcement in the Arabian Sea and nearby channels has stepped up sharply since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, which killed 166 people.
Indian coast guard patrols focus keenly on the Indus River delta, fishermen and activists say, because the Mumbai attackers began their journey to India from the delta's waterways in a small boat, armed with AK-47s, grenades and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
The arrests add another layer of misery for families just scraping by in thatched-hut villages, where schools, electricity and paved roads don't exist.
Since Mohammed Saleh, a 37-year-old Jati fisherman, was arrested more than a year ago and jailed in India, his wife, Zeenat, and two of his older daughters have had to work picking tomatoes and peppers for less than a dollar a day. A 12-year-old son, Sajjad, scours mounds of trash for paper and plastic recyclables.
Pakistani and Indian fishermen are pawns in governments' disputes - Los Angeles Times
