On Sunday, 25 January 2026 in Pretoria, Salaamedia hosted one of their “Bring Aafia Home” public programmes. Human rights lawyer Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE and former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg stood before a South African audience to speak about a case that has survived more than two decades of denial, distortion, and political convenience.
The event, part of Salaamedia’s Global Voices Campaign, centred on the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist whose disappearance and imprisonment has become one of the most troubling human rights stories of the post 9/11 era. But the afternoon made clear that this was not only about one woman. It was about systems that erase people, rewrite timelines, and expect families to survive indefinitely without answers.
Clive Stafford Smith, Aafia’s legal representative, spoke with the precision of someone who has spent a career navigating institutions designed to resist accountability. A British attorney specialising in civil rights and capital punishment in the United States, Stafford Smith has worked tirelessly to overturn death sentences. His experience is built on decades of standing between the state and those it would rather discard.
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From home to US custody in the blink of an eye
He traced the origins of Aafia’s case back to 2003, when she and her three children disappeared from Pakistan. No warrants. No explanations. No public record. Five years later, she resurfaced – not free, but in United States custody.
In the intervening years, her children’s lives were irrevocably altered. One child remains missing to this day. There is no confirmation of death. No confirmation of life. Only absence.
Stafford Smith spoke about how Aafia was later falsely convicted of attempting to kill American personnel in Afghanistan, in a trial that raised serious concerns about due process and evidence. Pakistan’s silence in defending its own citizens became part of the machinery that allowed the case to proceed unchallenged.
What was taken from a family
Stafford Smith asked a question that cut through legal frameworks and political language. Would you rather know with certainty that your child is dead, or live with the fragile hope that after more than twenty years, he might still be alive somewhere?
It is not a question courts are built to answer. It is one that shows us how Aafia, like many of you, is a mother, a human, a sister, a daughter and someone who did not deserve to have her life play out the way that it did.
There is also something deeply unsettling about what was taken from Aafia beyond her freedom. She was a knowledgeable Muslim woman. Educated, articulate, and independent. Being from a Pakistani background myself, it is impossible not to see her as a true daughter of the soil.
Someone who could have been a role model for thousands of Pakistani women who are taught to shrink their ambitions or apologise for their intellect. She was someone who could have contributed meaningfully to academia, to society, to a generation of women searching for permission to exist fully in public life.
Instead, her life was abruptly diverted, her potential frozen in time, not because of proven guilt, but because of dirty politics that required a body to carry blame. What was lost was not only her freedom, but everything she could have become if she had simply been allowed to live.
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A life reduced to a label
Moazzam Begg’s presence reinforced that Aafia’s story is not an anomaly, but part of a broader pattern. A British citizen, Begg was seized in January 2002 when Pakistani officers burst into the Islamabad apartment where he was living with his family. He was taken without charge, labelled a terrorist, and transported through a network of detention facilities that included Bagram and Guantanamo Bay.
He spoke about torture, about being removed from home, about years stolen and about how labels are applied first, and justifications constructed later. His testimony underscored a chilling truth. Once a person is framed as a threat, actually finding any proof becomes an unnecessary inconvenience.
Aafia’s case became a worldwide spectacle not because it was well understood, but because it was easily simplified. A complex human story reduced to headlines. A woman turned into a symbol. Her suffering was consumed as content while her rights remained unresolved.
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A sister’s appeal witnessed across continents
One of the moments that stood out during the event was when Stafford Smith spoke about how if you were ever in trouble, you would want Fowzia Siddiqui as your sister and as the Chairperson of the Aafia Movement, Dr Siddiqui sent a message that was read aloud to the audience.
“Dear people of South Africa,” she wrote, “as we stand together in the pursuit of justice, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to each of you for standing with us in the fight for Aafia’s freedom.”
She thanked Salaamedia for the initiative and acknowledged the protests, letters, and advocacy that have kept Aafia’s case alive across South African cities.
“Your unwavering support, your voices, and your solidarity have been a beacon of hope for our family and the Aafia Movement.”
Her message carried both gratitude and resolve. She spoke of the hope and prophecy that 2026 would be the year Aafia is set free. But she was clear that hope alone is not enough.
“To the government of Pakistan, we say: it’s time to do the right thing. Bring Aafia home.”
She called on the international community to maintain pressure, and thanked South Africans for becoming Aafia’s voice when too many others fell silent.
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What weight does silence carry?
Events like this do not promise closure. They aren’t supposed to. Their purpose is interruption. To disrupt the slow normalisation of injustice that sets in when cases last too long and outrage becomes inconvenient.
But as South Africans who have witnessed injustice in our own country, including our own former president Nelson Mandela being imprisoned for speaking the truth, we refuse to be silent.
And until Aafia is free, that refusal remains necessary.
