The case of the reluctant brides

It was meant to be an errand of mercy - to rescue two Glasgow girls abducted to Pakistan. And it worked. But the episode split the Asian community at home and brought deep political trouble to the man who brought them home: Mohammad Sarwar, Britain's first Muslim MP
It was on a March morning back in 1996 that I went to see Mohammad Sarwar to ask him a favour. Back then he was a councillor and millionaire businessman, little-known outside the city of Glasgow. It was a good 14 months before he would become Britain's first Muslim MP. And it was 21 months before he would become the first Labour MP for more than two decades to face criminal charges. He goes to trial in nine days' time.

As I drove to the office of his cash-and-carry firm that day, I had little notion of how his decision to become involved with me would affect his political career. All I knew was that he was the most high-profile Asian in Glasgow, that he was well-liked in the city's central mosque and that he had contacts at the top of society in Pakistan.

That day, as he sat behind a vast desk in his office near the Clyde, Sarwar was going about his daily business, overseeing some figures from the shop floor and talking over strategies in his campaign to be selected as the Labour parliamentary candidate for the Govan constituency. He listened as I told my story of kidnap, violence, drugs and forced marriage - just days before, I had returned from a trip to Pakistan where, as a reporter for the Scotland on Sunday newspaper, I had been investigating the case of two Glaswegian Asian girls who had been abducted by their father, Abdul Haq.

The girls, along with their mother Fatima and nine-year-old sister Somera, had thought they were going to the Punjab for a summer holiday, but instead found themselves trapped, forced to make a new life in a country they did not know as their own.

Rifat Haq, who was 20, and her 13-year-old sister, Nazia, were apparently forced into marriage two weeks after their arrival in Pakistan in June 1995. Nazia, who was due to return to Hillhead secondary school in Glasgow at the end of the summer holidays, was drugged and forced to marry her father's nephew, Mohammad Iqbal, whom she believed to be about 40.

She was still only 13, which makes the match illegal under both Pakistani and Islamic law. The day before, Rifat, a university student, had been forced into marriage with her cousin, 27-year-old Khalid Mehmood, an illiterate factory worker. Their mother and sister were made virtual prisoners in the Haq family compound in the village of Jahania in the Punjab.

I had first heard the girls' story from someone who had no connection with politics. It became clear that the case was being investigated by Strathclyde police, working with Interpol on reports that the girls - who are British nationals: Rifat came here as a small child, and her sisters were born in Glasgow - had been beaten, drugged and married, that their passports had been confiscated and that they were stranded.

Letters had been smuggled out to Nadeem Haq, their 17-year-old brother who had been left behind in Scotland. In one, Rifat said of her sister: "The last time I saw her was on September 4, she had put on weight and looked beautiful but said, 'Rifat, please get me out.' Those words don't get out of my head. I'm going mental here, I need to help her, but how?"

Chak 132 is a village of flat-roofed houses fashioned either from mud or concrete. Unremarkable and nameless, it doesn't appear on the map and is a few hours' drive from Multan, a city famous mostly for its heat, dust and beggars. It was here that I found the now-married Rifat.

Along the cratered road, thronged with people, that bumps its way from the city to the outlying villages, animals strayed on to the highway, and brightly-painted buses bounced over the potholes, all the time tooting their horns. We saw few women out of doors, and those we did see all wore veils. A while after we arrived, I was led to Rifat. Behind the mud-baked walls and through the steel door of a small compound, women were gathered around a fly-plagued courtyard.

Here, in purdah, Rifat Haq had been allowed to discard her veil - she'd not worn one before coming to Pakistan. The girl who had been studying biosciences at university in Glasgow was now living in a house with 18 others, the extended family of her new husband; she was helping to bake flat roti bread on top of two circles of burning coals.

Rifat told me that when they arrived at Multan airport, she and her mother and sisters were beaten and forced into a van by their father, their half-brother, Zulfiqar Ali, and some hired help. The next few days they'd spent in a darkened room where they were injected with a sleeping drug known locally as nushi dia golia. In the intense heat, they were allowed only sips of water before the glass was teasingly thrown away.

They had no clean clothes, very little food and none of the tablets that Rifat needed for her arthritis and Somera for her bowel disorder. They were continually beaten, drugged, verbally abused and threatened with guns, Rifat said. In the months that followed, both girls tried to kill themselves and Rifat suffered two miscarriages.

Later that day, I met Rifat again, this time at the nearby 32-acre farm of her new father-in-law. She was with her husband, Khalid, who had also been pressed into the marriage. Among the goats and buffalo in the farmyard, Rifat told me that she and Khalid had fallen in love in the nine months they had been together, and that she wanted him to come back with her to Glasgow. Holding her hand, Khalid said in Punjabi that he had been supportive of his wife in spite of threats from her father and her new brother-in-law, Iqbal. "A man who treats his own daughters like this shouldn't be on the loose," he said.

When I returned to Jahania, I found Abdul Haq in his house at the end of a row of mud huts that ran parallel to a railway line. He was shirtless and his stomach was hanging over his sarong. His eyes were yellowed with jaundice, but they could barely disguise his anger at being questioned about Nazia. "You cannot ask me to see my daughter," he said. "I married her eight or nine months ago to Iqbal; you must ask him to see her. You must ask her husband. She is not mine."

When I spoke to Iqbal in his tiny motor-parts shop just across the road, he claimed that he was only 27 and that his wife was happy. He took me to the room where the two of them lived, but would not let me see her. It was dismal: nothing other than a perfume bottle sitting on top of a concrete shelf suggested that a young girl spent her days there. Nazia, he said, was a big girl, very mature for her age, she might even be pregnant. Such marriages took place all the time in Pakistan. He must have known that the Koran says that a woman and man must both consent to an arranged marriage.

I had managed to meet only Rifat, but it was clear from what she said that she, her mother and her younger sister were all desperate to get back to Glasgow. At this point, there was very little I could do. I returned to Glasgow to tell the girls' story. The Labour MP George Galloway was in Islamabad to receive an award from Benazir Bhutto's government and I thought he might intervene on the girls' behalf. He told me he could not get involved because the girls lived in another MP's constituency. He suggested that I ask Sarwar if he could help. Twenty months later, Galloway told me he would always regret that suggestion.

Mohammad Sarwar is a sober-suited man with a Colonel Blimpish physiognomy; a man wont to touch up what is left of his greying hair. Born in Pakistan in 1952, in the Punjabi village of Salleempur, he did not move to Glasgow until the age of 26. His father, Abdullah, had come to Scotland when Sarwar was just four, making a living as a hanky-tie man, selling his wares from door to door. In 1973, the father sent for his family, but Sarwar was by then an adult, not a dependent, and so had to stay behind in Pakistan. Sarwar, whose name means leader in Urdu, won a scholarship to Faisalabad University in the Punjab, where he graduated with a BA in political science and English. (He would later send his two sons to private school.)

It was while at university that he discovered the Pakistan People's Party - founded in 1967 - becoming student president and meeting Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the late father of Benazir, the woman who was later to become his friend.

In 1976, in Pakistan, Sarwar married his cousin Perveen, who had grown up in Lossiemouth, in the north-east of Scotland. The couple - who would eventually have four children - moved to Glasgow, living in his parents' three-bedroomed council flat in the run-down Maryhill area. First, they worked for ten years in the family's corner shop. Then, Sarwar and his brother, Ramzan, began selling eggs to other corner shops and realised the profit to be made.

People still remember them darting in and out of doorways with huge trays of eggs on their heads. Soon after, the brothers opened a cash-and-carry warehouse, selling cut-price goods on the business philosophy of pile it high, sell it cheap and pay the employees sparingly. United Wholesale and United Homestores now have an estimated annual turnover of £100 million.

Sarwar shies away from talking about his wealth. "People who come from Pakistan and from working-class families in other countries know what it means to be poor, and when they come here their priority is to earn some money and send back some to look after their families," he has said. "They often work seven days a week to start up. Then you make money, and the money you make starts to make money. It is difficult to make the first million, but then the first million makes more."

As his business became established, Sarwar turned to politics. When I approached him almost three years ago, he was embroiled in a battle for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate. The following year, on December 17, 1997, he was charged with electoral fraud, perverting the course of justice and breaking the law governing electoral expenses. Suspended by Labour for bringing the party into disrepute, he is due to stand trial with a co-accused, Mumtaz Hussain, on January 25.

As I sat in his office, telling my story, all that lay ahead. He said he was horrified; he had heard about the case from the girls' brother, Nadeem, but he did not know what was true and what was not. He said he would go to Pakistan himself if he had to, in order to ensure the girls' safe return.

I contacted the BBC in Scotland and suggested that they might want to make a film of the journey. A few days later, Sarwar, a television crew and I had secured the necessary visas. I had kept in touch with Rifat since my first trip to Pakistan, and she told me that her sisters and mother - knowing help was on its way - had all managed to escape and were now staying with an uncle on her mother's side of the family, and had protection from an armed guard provided by Sarwar's close friend, Irfan Mahmud Khan, the deputy inspector general of the Punjab's police force.

When we arrived in Lahore, Khan took us to his country club, where he introduced Sarwar as Britain's first Muslim MP (he wasn't; Sarwar had yet to be selected as a candidate). Khan had said that any Muslim would be outraged to hear of the girls' plight, but at lunch, when the subject was raised, the editor of one of the country's leading newspapers told us that it was a family matter and that we should not be interfering. Later, we discovered he was not the only person to feel this way.

We found the girls at the home of their uncle. They were relieved to see Sarwar, who took them to his family compound a few hours away in the village of Mukhdoman. Sarwar's mother, Rashida, was waiting there with an armed guard. Inside, Nazia spoke of her marriage, of how she would struggle when her husband tied her to the bed for sex. "Whenever I used to say, 'I want a divorce' or 'I don't like you', he just used to batter me. He used to slap me and pull my hair and punch me and then he would do it," she said. "He used to say, 'You are my wife and you will do what you are told.' "

Dressed now in traditional tunic and shalwar, Sarwar set off to confront Abdul Haq in Jahania. The old man insisted that he had done nothing wrong, that his daughters were lying. Later, we discovered that Haq had hired Pakistan's top advocate, Latif Khosa, and had lodged a writ in the High Court claiming that Sarwar was forcing the girls to leave the country. "In this country, a father is marrying anytime. I have done it the right way," he said, adding that 16 was the age of consent only under British law. He went on to deny that Nazia was 13, even when shown her birth certificate.

Sarwar had known Abdul Haq from Glasgow's Central Mosque, but they were not by any means friends. "We cannot tolerate such a man," Sarwar said as we were leaving Jahania.

We took the girls and their mother to the British Embassy in Karachi, where they were issued with new passports. Fatima, who originally had a Pakistani passport, was crying when she was told that she could return to Scotland. Rifat said an affection farewell to Khalid, promising him they would be reunited. Nazia had no regrets. Heading for the airport through the heat and congestion of Karachi, she took a last look around her: "I've only been here once before, as a small girl, and I don't like it," she said. "I can't wait to get back to Glasgow and hang about with my pals in Kelvingrove Park."

The reception was not quite so welcoming back home. Much of the Muslim community in Glasgow was not pleased with Sarwar. At a press conference at Glasgow airport, it was clear that the more traditional elements did not approve of his intervention. They felt it was a private, family matter and should have been left as such. Even now, three years later, the community is still divided over the issue.

At the time, the Pakistani Media Relations Council in Glasgow issued a statement claiming Sarwar made the trip to promote his own ends. Its secretary, Ali Syed, said: "It is felt he did this for his own publicity and used this unfortunate family to project himself as leader of the community." Later, the committee's president, Dr MS Kauser, disowned the statement in its entirety.

The Haq women put out their own statement defending Sarwar. "He put his own safety at risk to get us out of Pakistan. We were not given any safety until Mr Sarwar used his influence. Without him, our family would not have been reunited,"

it said. "We are extremely angry that people who are obviously political or personal enemies of Mr Sarwar are exploiting our family's ordeal to attempt to discredit him."

The Asian community has been in Glasgow for more than 40 years and many of its children are faced with an identity crisis as a result of their absorption of British culture. Many do not have the close relationship with the Indian sub-continent that their parents still maintain. Recently, a number of young British Asians have begun to rebel against forced marriage.

In July last year, the parents of a Bradford girl, Rehana Bashir, were jailed for attempting to drug her and force her on to a flight to Islamabad for an arranged marriage. And Abdul Hoque and his wife, Ayesha, were jailed in London after conspiring to kidnap and falsely imprison their daughter, who chose to live with her West Indian boyfriend rather than have an arranged marriage.

Sarwar entered a minefield when he took up the Haq case. He had joined the Labour Party in 1984, and in 1992 was elected as a councillor for the largely-affluent Pollokshields area. But Sarwar's ambition went further than the pink-marble interior of Glasgow's city chambers: he sought nomination for a seat in Westminster and chose Govan, a place that once clanked with the sound of Clyde shipbuilding but that is now more associated with the clink of Rab C Nesbitt's empty wine bottles.

Glasgow Govan has more than 5,000 Asian voters, and it is estimated that one-third of all of the city's ethnic minority community lives in the constituency. Traditionally, most would be likely to vote Labour. In 1992, the Commission For Racial Equality (CRE) estimated that 77 per cent of Asians supported Labour, in spite of the fact that Asians had failed to be selected in a number of English constituencies, including Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester. There are only 144 Asian and Pakistani councillors in the whole of the UK. According to the CRE, proportionate to the population, there should be about 40 black and ethnic minority MPs; there are only nine.

Amjed Salim, Scottish correspondent for the Daily Jang, the London-based Urdu and English language daily newspaper, is currently writing an article on the lack of Asian candidates selected for the Scottish parliament. "No ethnic minorities have been selected for any of the safe seats. It's a kind of ethnic cleansing," he says. "The parties have been very reluctant to bring forward Asian candidates because of what has happened with Sarwar."

For Sarwar, Govan meant the chance to represent not only his constituents but some of Britain's two million seemingly disenfranchised Muslims. Unfortunately, he wasn't the only one to have his eye on the Govan seat. Mike Watson, the Labour MP for Glasgow Central, was about to have his seat taken away as a result of a boundary rejig. Having served as an effective MP for six years, he pretty much saw Govan as his by right. He was mistaken: he did not inherit any sitting members' rights. The two rivals had to slug it out, and soon there were allegations of dirty tricks and intimidation.

It was at the City Halls in Candleriggs - the place where the great Scottish Marxist, John MacLean, spoke the day after they read the Riot Act in Glasgow, and also where John Smith, Labour's lost leader, made his last Scottish speech the afternoon before he died - that the ballot to select the new candidate for Govan was counted. Dramatically, Watson won by just one vote. But then it emerged that 51 ballot papers out of 540 had been ruled ineligible because the signatures on them differed from those on the party application forms.

Much of this was put down to cultural and literacy difficulties within the Asian community. Over in the city's central mosque, the men shook their heads as they drank their milky coffee. Tufail Shaheen, president of the Islamic Centre, warned, "If the hierarchy does not do something about this, they will lose the seat."

Labour did do something. The National Executive Committee agreed mistakes had been made and a second ballot was ordered. Each blaming the other for irregularities, Watson tried to stop the second ballot by going to the Court of Session in Edinburgh and Sarwar threatened to sue the party.

In the middle of all this, Sarwar flew to Pakistan to rescue the Haq girls. Three months later, he won the rematch by 82 votes after another candidate, Margaret Curran, pulled out and gave her backing to Sarwar. Again, there were allegations of dirty tricks and of racism. In July 1996, Sarwar was officially endorsed as Labour's candidate.

In December 1996, Abdul Haq returned to Scotland and accused Sarwar of breaking up his family. He hooked up with Peter Paton, a strange soul who was standing against Sarwar as an independent Labour candidate. Paton had been a Labour party member, then an independent Conservative, then a fervent Mike Watson supporter. Through all these guises, he remained steadfast in his dislike of Sarwar. With Paton's help, Haq lodged a

£2 million defamation action against Sarwar. Paton told the press that Nazia was 15 when she was married. He seemed to think that made it permissible.

In January 1997, I visited Haq at the flat for the homeless where he was then living courtesy of Glasgow City Council. His family had a court order preventing him from visiting their home, and his wife was divorcing him. I found him drinking tea with his son by a previous marriage, Zulfiqar Ali, Paton, Paton's wife and Jamil Abassi, an independent Conservative candidate also standing against Sarwar. Haq found it difficult to get a word in edgeways. Each butting in on the other, they all advanced the absurd theory that it was Sarwar who had kidnapped the girls.

The next day, the Haq girls told a sheriff that they did not want their father to have access to them. Outside the court, Paton claimed, once again, that it was Abdul Haq who was the real victim. A few months later, they took the same line when their action against Sarwar was thrown out of court.

This craziness was not Sarwar's only concern. He was opposed in the general election of May 1997 by an intelligent, young and experienced SNP candidate, a solicitor called Nicola Sturgeon. On the stump around Govan, this young woman found it easier to shine than the somewhat wooden Sarwar ever could. More worrying was the discovery that Paton's computer and fax had been used not only for his own election leaflets and press releases, but also for Abassi's and those of another independent Labour candidate.

The election count took place in a sterile hall at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. Among the candidates, councillors and campaigners I saw the girls' half-brother, Zulfiqar Ali, who told me he was Paton's election agent.

Sarwar's victory was not as large as he had expected - he beat the SNP by just 2,914 votes - but, on election night, the Govan candidates were for the first time united: each of them refused to take the stand with the British National Party candidate. Across the country, Muslims watched as Sarwar stood celebrating victory under the red rose.

"It was a moment of joy," says Ali Usman, deputy editor of the Daily Jang. "Sarwar was very much seen as a symbol of British Muslims coming of political age. He was seen as part of a process."

The celebrations did not last long. Sarwar was suspended by the Labour Party less than two months after the election. In Westminster, he was sworn in with the Koran but without the party whip. He is now the first Labour MP to face serious criminal charges since former housing minister John Stonehouse faked his own disappearance and in 1976 was jailed for seven years for fraud, forgery, theft and deception. "The news that he was to be indicted was met with disappointment," says Usman. "A lot of people are quite upset about it."

In their flat in Glasgow's west end, the Haq sisters are living a normal life. Nazia and Somera are back at school. And Rifat has been reunited with the husband she was forced to marry. On her return to Glasgow, she worked tirelessly to persuade immigration officials to allow Khalid to join her and was eventually successful. A few days after Christmas, Rifat gave birth to a baby girl named Madiha. Khalid is working as a butcher in an Asian food store. Rifat hopes that one day she can go back to her studies at university. Whatever happens, she says she will always feel guilty about Sarwar, about him getting involved in the case.

At the ostentatious Victorian villa that is the Sarwar family home, Perveen says she is proud of what her husband did for the girls. Sarwar, who faces the prospect of a possible jail sentence if found guilty, would do it again if he had to. "When he took this case on, he discussed it with his friends and his family, and they were all against it. But when he got home, he discussed it with me and I said that, as a man with daughters, he should help them. I know that a lot of the community were against it, but it sent out a message to a lot of women that was reassuring," she says.

"A lot of women were telling me that they felt there was somebody out there if it happened to them. Even older women. They feel they don't have to suffer in silence any more. Sarwar has no regrets. I know that it's brought us a lot of heartache and a lot of pain but, at the end of the day, I feel that what he's done is for the best. The girls are happy."

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