New Year’s Eve 2010 was the worst day of Kareem Khan’s life. And now the whole world knows about it.
He has made international headlines of the disaster that will continue to plague him for the rest of his life, a disaster many other Pakistanis have experienced in the last few years: the drone attacks that have killed thousands of civilians people like Khan’s eighteen-year-old son and Khans brother who he says were innocently sitting in their homes when a remote-controlled drone attacked their house and ended their lives.
What makes Khan different is that he has pulled together what resources he has to make a public statement about the alleged crimes against his family. He has filed a $500 million lawsuit against several branches of the United States government. He has stated that his intentions for the lawsuit are to stop the drone attacks and to receive compensation for all of the Pakistani civilian victims of these attacks. The lawsuit is like many before it worldwide that have attempted to bring governments to justice for their misdeeds.
In the United States alone, there are numerous cases of suits against the government by Americans themselves. Filipino veterans of American wars recently filed a lawsuit in California to get benefits they are owed which have remained unpaid. In 2009, a Native American tribe called the Winnemem Wintu filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government for damage to and destruction of some of their culturally-significant sites. And the American Civil Liberties Union has made its name from filing and at times winning lawsuits against the American government for such things as warrantless laptop searches at borders and even the use of drones in war zones.
Khan is also not the first individual to file a lawsuit against the U.S. government. Around the world, individuals have also been known to take the U.S. government to task. Decades after they were illegally held in the famous Japanese internment camps of California during World War II, several individual Peruvians of Japanese descent who were held along with Japanese Americans in these camps in the United States filed suit in the late 1990s to receive compensation for their ordeal. American artist Richard Serra, whose most recent works include protest pieces against the events at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, once filed a lawsuit in the 1960s against the US government when an artwork of his was removed and destroyed from a public place in New York. And more recently the German citizen of Lebanese descent, Khaled El-Masri, who was allegedly flown to Afghanistan from Europe and tortured by the CIA filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government in 2005.
What is different about Khan’s attempt is that he knows these types of lawsuits can be seen as frivolous and instead wants something that is not so impossible: a simple recognition by the American and the Pakistani governments that these bizarrely unclaimed drone attacks which have been going on for several years are their responsibility. Khan wants both governments to admit what they have done to his family, his people, and his country.
He has once again highlighted that in the 21st century, people can be bombed in their homes by remote control and absolutely no one has to answer for it, or even admit that they did it. The drone attacks are still referred to in the media worldwide as suspected CIA drone attacks the terminology would be ludicrous if it werent so tragic. Everyone in the world knows who is doing this and who is letting them do it is transparency in human relations so insipid in our day and age that even the most obvious facts cannot be stated unless they are admitted by the perpetrators themselves?
Some people in Pakistan have discarded Khan’s lawsuit as a media stunt. But that is an ignorant assessment of what exactly the media is it is, in many ways, a home to stunts, a place where information gets the kind of attention that transforms it into news. Khan, a journalist, knows very well that his “media stunt” is an important step toward demonstrating that public opinion and not just in Pakistan, but worldwide is against these drone attacks, is, in fact, against the entire military escapade that is the Afghanistan-Pakistan war.
The writer is US-based political analyst and a fomer Producer for BBC and Al-Jazeera. Follow her on Twitter @ShirinSadeghi