Pakistani FATA lawmakers refuse to submit to US body scanning, fly home
March 8, 2010, 14:40 EST
There may yet be hope for Pakistan. A six-member delegation of Pakistani parliamentarians--both senators and members of the National Assembly from the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA)--on an official visit to the US, refused to submit to body scanning at Washington Dulles Airport and instead decided to fly home. They had arrived in the US on February 28 and said that at the US embassy in Islamabad, they were assured that they would not subjected to full-body scanning.
On Saturday March 6 morning, while flying from Washington to New Orleans as part of their tour, two members of the six-member delegation were pulled out for full body scan. The FATA senators and MNAs flatly refused.
They said they would rather go home than be subjected to such humiliating treatment. Other members of the delegation backed them up. They all returned to their hotel, packed their bags and boarded a Kuwait Airways flight from Washington Dulles airport to return home.
Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, a senior member of the delegation, told journalists that other lawmakers backed their colleagues and told US officials that they too would go home if their colleagues were not exempted.
At the hotel, US State Department officials, who were travelling with the delegation, as well as Pakistan’s deputy chief of mission and other senior US officials, tried to persuade the lawmakers to change their minds, telling them that all passengers in the US had to go through random checking. Even US generals, members of Congress and senior officials are not exempted. But the FATA lawmakers refused to accept such argument.
Senator Afridi said that lawmakers considered the scanning order an insult to the parliamentarians of a sovereign country and decided to call off their visit. He further revealed that officials at the US Embassy in Islamabad had assured them that they would not be subjected to a full-body scan.
While other Pakistani officials, including President Asif Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gailani as well as generals (General Rashid Qureshi, for instance, who was a spokesman for General Pervez Musharraf while the latter was president) have been subjected to such degrading treatment at US airports and sheepishly complied, it appears that senators and MNAs from FATA have a trifle more dignity and are not prepared to barter it away for a shoulder of mutton.
Perhaps, FATA members should occupy the posts of president and prime minister of Pakistan. They would bring some dignity to these and other positions that have been cheapened by the craven attitude of the likes of Musharraf, Zardari, Gailani, Rahman Malik and Hussain Haqqani. Self respect is an unknown quantity in the lives of most Pakistani politicians and officials except the members of FATA.
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