ISLAMABAD, July 23: Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has expressed shock and indignation over what she called atrocities against tenants of the Okara military farms by paramilitary forces.

In a statement issued by the Pakistan People's Party Media Cell here on Friday, the former prime minister demanded a judicial probe into the torture incidents of tenants.

Ms Bhutto said she was shocked over the disclosures made by the Human Rights Watch that the paramilitary forces were killing and torturing farmers with impunity because they refused to sign contracts to cede their land rights to the army.

To coerce farmers into ceding their rights the paramilitary forces tortured children and forced couples to divorce, the HRW report said. "This is medieval barbarism at its worst.

History records such barbarities only by occupiers and conquerors in medieval times. That our own troops are re-enacting a shameful medieval drama over its own people should make the head of every Pakistani hang in shame.

Pakistan's military and paramilitary forces are brutalizing their own people in the Punjab instead of protecting them, said the report. It's a dangerous moment in Pakistan when the military turns on its own core constituency.

The PPP chairperson asked the army high command to stop the torture of poor peasants and punish those "responsible for inflicting torture on the tenants and heaping shame on the nation".

She also demanded ownership rights to the tenants on the state lands in Okara before the situation turned even worse. "The PPP calls upon the intellectuals, the youth and the political parties to raise their voice against these shameful actions which has stigmatized the whole nation. It also urges the Chief Justice of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of the continued harassment of the Okara tenants", she said.

AMP: Anjuman Mazarain Punjab (AMP) also condemned what it called the arbitrary arrests of 19 tenants from Chak 15-4/L of Okara military farms on Friday. In a statement issued here, the Anjuman's office-bearers alleged that 19 tenants had been captured from outside a local court in Okara as three of the captured went there to confirm their bail in cases filed against them by the military farms' authorities.

The AMP has threatened a peaceful roadblock of GT Road if these tenants were not released immediately. According to the AMP press release at present, about 6,000 men, women and children are sitting alongside GT Road seeking release of the detained tenants.

A heavy contingent of police numbering almost 2000 has been summoned to the spot and they have repeatedly baton-charged the peaceful demonstrators, injuring women and children and spreading terror throughout the farms.

The Anjuman chairman, Mr Liaqat Ali, and General Secretary Mehr Abdul Sattar asserted that this unwarranted harassment was certainly part of the military's on-going intimidation of the tenants into paying the cash rent illegally demanded of them, but might also be in reaction to the Human Rights Watch report documenting abuses committed against the tenants of the military farms by the police and paramilitary personnel.

It is clear from the ISPR comments reported in the media that the military authorities are enraged by the large-scale disclosure of the atrocities against the tenants. While the military cannot now launch a full-scale offensive against the tenants, they will certainly try to intimidate and harass using tactics similar to those used in low-intensity conflicts, it further added.

The AMP office-bearers also of the government to act on the HRW recommendations. While the AMP has been agitating for land ownership rights for over four years now, public attention is riveted on the military farms as a result of the release of the HRW report.