He barely escaped Pakistan with his life after angering its powerful military with his journalism. Now his story has become a comic book.
Taha Siddiqui’s therapist told him not to dwell on the attempted kidnapping he experienced five years ago, or he would never escape his trauma.
“Clearly, I didn’t listen to her at all,” Siddiqui said with a smile.
Photo: AFP
He was speaking in his Paris bar, The Dissident Club, which he opened in 2020 as a refuge for exiles like himself. It shares its name with his new autobiographical comic book — coauthored with cartoonist Hubert Maury who was previously a French diplomat in Pakistan — which is to be released tomorrow in France and soon in other languages.
It opens with the moment in January 2018 when members of Pakistan’s military pulled him from a taxi in broad daylight and shoved him into another car. Detention, torture and death were real possibilities.
Two strokes of luck saved Siddiqui — convincing the man holding his neck to release him, saying he would go quietly, and noticing that the passenger door was unlocked. He leapt from the moving car, ran down the busy highway and managed to alert his media friends, swiftly organizing a news conference about the attack to buy time.
Only after escaping to Paris did he discover he was on the military’s “kill list” and could never return.
The graphic novel goes beyond that incident to explain the spread of extremism and war in the region through the story of his religiously conservative upbringing in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
“I chose to tell my story as a comic book because I couldn’t have any when I was young,” Siddiqui said. “It will definitely piss off my father. I hope he won’t see it.”
Not that they have a good relationship. His father’s response to the attempted kidnapping was to say he was being punished by God for not praying enough.
It was a classic Romeo-and-Juliet experience that challenged Siddiqui’s faith, after his family opposed his marriage to a Shiite girl he met at university. The divide between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam is a fraught and often violent fault line in Pakistan.
“That really triggered this thing in me that there’s something wrong with the way we live,” said Siddiqui, who is now an atheist.
The attempted kidnapping put an end to a successful career. He had worked with many international media and won the prestigious Albert Londres Prize for an article on the Taliban banning polio vaccines.
His fearless criticism of the powerful Pakistani military made him a target, particularly a front-page story for the New York Times exposing their secret prisons.
“It was pretty crazy,” Maury said. “But that’s what makes it such an interesting story.”
“I find it impressive and remarkable. He risked not just his life, but exile as well and cutting ties with his family,” he added.
Siddiqui said he has no regrets.
“I chose this life, but I didn’t choose [the military’s] reaction. That’s on them, not me,” he said.
“Sometimes I’m sad. I really believed in the country at one time in my life, but now less and less. Pakistan is a very dysfunctional country,” he said.
He is already planning a follow-up that looks at the lives of other exiles.
“I wanted to take control because when I was attacked. I lost control,” he said.
His therapist is convinced, having recently visited the bar for a talk on exile and mental health.
“She said I was doing well and getting purpose out of what happened to me,” he said. “I was really happy.”
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the