Community-building measures between India and Pakistan lost as blame game heats up

SONYA FATAH
My heart sank when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his first national address after the Mumbai terror attacks, said that a foreign hand was involved.

Last year, Singh made the endearing admission that he wished in his lifetime to see a day when he could breakfast in New Delhi, lunch in Lahore and dine in Kabul. Since last month’s ghastly attack, that dream seems desperately distant.

I am Pakistani and Muslim. My husband is Indian and Hindu, and I have lived in New Delhi for two years as a journalist with the Canadian media.

As a Pakistani growing up in a hostile Indo-Pak environment, I never imagined that India and Pakistan could ever get along. Yet here I am, a testament to that change, not only living among Indians but also happily married to one.

Over the past six years, a series of community-building measures have matured the India-Pakistan relationship. Education exchanges and fashion shows have taken place.

Indian crowds boisterously cheered on Pakistani cricket players during a recent club tournament. There has been people-to-people diplomacy, and trade has significantly multiplied.

Moreover, despite the challenges of our notorious bureaucracies, new, lasting, long-term partnerships like my own have developed. At a personal level, our families have embraced one another. And in travelling India as a journalist, I have found that a cross-section of Indian society – rickshaw drivers, store owners, students, activists, police officers, government officials and many others – have been demonstrably hospitable. Many consider the South Asian faceoff a reflection of establishment, not people-to-people, hostility.

All that goodwill promises to change.

After the Mumbai attacks, I watched the coverage with deep anger at the young, urban-clad terrorists who massacred innocent people in the name of a religion they clearly don’t know. But as I watched the Indian media report the grisly event, I began to panic. Before the first night was out the nation was certain that Pakistan was responsible.

The media began whipping their viewers into an anti-Pakistan frenzy. Suddenly, regular citizens – housewives, students and young professionals, mostly from the country’s middle to upper classes – began chanting the mantra, “Let’s bomb Pakistan.” On a nationally televised show, television host Simi Garewal began calling for carpet bombing Pakistan.

This kind of sentiment is especially dangerous. Many Indians think a quick bombing sortie on Pakistani terrorist camps will solve the problem. They forget that Pakistan has one of the world’s better armed forces bristling with modern weaponry and, like India, nuclear warheads. The human toll of any such engagement would be catastrophic.

I’m no stranger to Pakistan’s problems. As a journalist I’ve covered Pakistan fairly extensively, from the Pak-Afghan border areas to Pakistani Kashmir. Militancy is indeed on the rise and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, remains an extra-constitutional actor. Elite and middle-class Pakistanis know this but are in denial.

People paid special attention only when Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel, a haunt of the elite, went up in flames in September. Similarly in India, bombs have gone off in middle-class markets and in trains packed with lower class passengers. Only now, when the elite has been attacked, is there any sense of urgency for retaliation.

The reality is that Pakistan cannot afford war. Today, counterinsurgencies are underway in Balochistan and in the North-West Frontier Province. The country’s economy is in shambles, and young, disillusioned Pakistanis are happily joining a growing cult of militancy.

A war would play into Al Qaeda’s hands by distracting the Pakistani military’s attention and allowing Al Qaeda to ramp up its operations.

So, where do we go from here? Today, India is a South Asian leader. It needs to bring in stronger, more mature leadership that can rise above the blame game that has typically characterized the relationship.

It has work to do at home and abroad, though. It has to show that secularism works. It must act with speed in situations like in Orissa where Hindu mobs recently killed scores of Christians and set fire to their villages. It has to overcome the grisly history of the 1992 razing of the Babri mosque, and the killing of more than 1,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Closure has been difficult because of the rise of Hindu extremism; an Indian army officer is being investigated for the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing – the friendship train between India and Pakistan, in which 68 people, mostly Pakistanis, died.

Equally worrisome is the large increase in bomb attacks by Indian Muslims.

South Asia, in particular Pakistan, is in a fragile state.

Yet there is reason for hope.

Recently, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told Indians via live satellite at a leadership summit interview – televised in India and Pakistan – that Pakistan has adopted a no-first-strike nuclear policy, the first such promise from a Pakistani leader. Zardari said he was for “change and reconciliation,” and endeared himself to Indians when he said, “I do not know whether it is the Indian or the Pakistani in me that is talking to you today.”

This week, Pakistani security forces arrested 15 people connected with the outlawed militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India holds accountable for the Mumbai attacks.

Perhaps now both countries have an opportunity to solve the regional crisis. They should finally put Kashmir – the longest dispute in modern history – on the table for resolution.

On a personal level, as a Pakistani living in India and married to an Indian, it worries me that partnerships like ours, which could be one key to regional peace, must survive in an oasis of hysteria and at the edge of communal tension. Every day we hope for a day when economic, political and human relationships are real and sustainable. And yet, it takes only a handful of terrorists to strike at the heart of a small piece of trust that has taken decades to cultivate.

Amina Janjua

After Amina Masood Janjua’s husband went missing, she took her case to the steps of the Supreme Court with nothing more than some handmade placards and a few folding chairs. Her protest over Pakistan’s “disappeared” has grown into a national movement and become an integral storyline in the country’s continuing constitutional crisis.

On the morning of July 30, 2005, Amina Janjua sat down for breakfast as usual with her husband, Masood Ahmed Janjua, and their three children. After their meal, the children waved goodbye as their father headed off with a friend for three days in the northwestern city of Peshawar, a little over a hundred miles from their home in Rawalpindi. Amina watched Masood walk away from the house and turn the corner.

It was the last time she saw him. Although the details of what happened to her husband and his friend, Faisal Faraz, are sketchy, Amina has learned that they may not have boarded the bus that was to take them to Peshawar. They were picked up by intelligence agents and bundled off into illegal detention in unknown places.

For nights before his departure, Amina had had strange nightmares. “My dreams were wild,” she says. “I dreamt that I kept falling, and I dreamt of being buried alive. In retrospect I realized that these must have been premonitions or some sort of intuition. That day, as I saw him disappear around the corner, I desperately wanted to run after him, stop him and tell him not to go that weekend. But I knew he would think I was being silly, so I just let him go.”

After Masood went missing, family and friends worked tirelessly for months to obtain information about his whereabouts. When they learned he had “disappeared” into Pakistan’s large and secretive intelligence netherworld, they called upon their contacts within the country’s powerful military and its affiliated intelligence agencies. Masood’s father, a retired colonel who knew then- President Gen. Pervez Musharraf from his days in the army, asked the most powerful man in the country to secure his son’s release. “At first, all our contacts in the army—and we had many— said they would find out and help us. Even President Musharraf promised to help. I met everyone I could access,” says Amina, who initially fell into a deep depression before throwing herself into the search. But her entreaties went nowhere. “I felt I was facing a wall. There was no relief from anyone—the police, the courts—and we had tried all our military contacts. After promising to help, they began to avoid me.”

In September 2006, Amina joined with relatives of Faraz and another man who had “disappeared,” Atiq-ur-Rehman, to stage a protest outside the steps of the Supreme Court with handcrafted posters and placards. Her daughter, Ayesha, then 10 years old, made her own sign: uncle president, please find my loving abbo [father]. That tiny protest launched a national movement that, within a year, swelled with the families of 575 missing Pakistanis and was joined by lawyers, judges, students and concerned citizens. It has made Amina Janjua a household name and given voice to the frustrations of ordinary Pakistanis at their government’s heavy-handed tactics in the war on terror that spurred deadly attacks at home but did nothing to diminish domestic terrorism. Amina grew increasingly politicized as she realized, she says, that “they have kept men like my husband, who are innocent, in secret prisons for years, and the real criminals are roaming our streets with aplomb.”

To see Amina Masood Janjua in action today on the steps of the Supreme Court, or outside the gates of the Awane- Saddar (office of the president), or addressing a human rights delegation at the United Nations in Geneva, as she did earlier this year, is to witness the remarkable transformation of a devoted wife who once contented herself with fussing over her husband and children, painting and writing love poems in her spare time. Amina is now head of the Defense of Human Rights, the group launched by that first protest in 2006, and she has proven herself to be a dynamic activist who understands the utility of harnessing public opinion to support her mission: to win the release of hundreds of men who remain in illegal detention in and around Pakistan— or at least to obtain legal access and representation for them. “We do whatever we can to raise awareness at different levels,” she says. “We stage protests, press conferences, hold seminars and have awareness campaigns.” Recently, in an effort to reach out further, the Defense of Human Rights hosted a painting competition for children to express their views on wrongful arrests, illegal detentions and the poor condition of Pakistani jails.

In Amina, the Defense of Human Rights has the perfect ambassador. Her voice is soft yet persuasive. Her round and slightly cherubic face, framed by her sometimes plain, sometimes patterned hijabs, can turn fierce with determination. By her own admission, the trauma of Masood’s “disappearance” has given her both perspective and purpose in life. “I had no idea about cruelty and injustice in the world. I was living in such happiness, even in childhood. I was a family favorite, and everyone treated me like a princess. Masood was so loving and caring as a husband,” she says. “After experiencing this pain, I’ve changed a lot. I spend most of my hours thinking about injustice in our modern age of technology and advancement, and yet”—Amina’s voice breaks—”at the time we were so desperate, we would just take a few chairs, some snacks for the children and park ourselves outside the parliament, hoping to get some attention. I had no idea that this would mushroom into a national movement when we started.”

Early on in Amina’s quest, her story attracted the attention of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. He took deep interest in the issue of the “disappeared” and directed intelligence agencies to produce the men they had abducted before court to afford them the legal protections they were due under the justice system. His efforts won the enmity of then-President Musharraf, who sacked him in November 2007. The general’s roughshod treatment of the country’s top judge, and the sub-sequent suspension of Chaudhry’s allies in the judiciary, set off a protracted constitutional struggle that resulted in violent street clashes between police and lawyers outraged by Chaudhry’s ouster. Pakistan’s new national government has reinstated some of the judges, but Chaudhry—who has become a potent symbol of democracy in a fractious political climate—remains suspended, along with several other judges.

Amina’s fight has been closely intertwined with the so-called “Lawyers’ Movement,” a fact that is reflected by the high regard many members of the judiciary have for her. Says Fakhruddin Ibrahim, a retired Supreme Court justice who has supported Amina’s cause from the start, “I think half the battle was fought because of her. The lawyers were there to fight the case on legal grounds, but she would assert herself on emotional grounds. Her role was very important in this process, which I believe has been the most important litigation to come before the Supreme Court of Pakistan.”

The issue of “disappearances” has been an extremely volatile one in Pakistan, for hundreds of the missing are from Balochistan, the province that has been at odds with the national government for decades over institutionalized ethnic discrimination, including the aggressive extraction of its natural resources—coal, minerals and natural gas—and poor representation in Islamabad. Several individuals have also gone missing in Sindh Province, where people have similar grievances. Before Amina and her family challenged the country’s seat of power, these families had kept silent, afraid that public demonstrations of their anxiety would result in persecution from various branches of Pakistani intelligence. After her public protest movement began, she says, “All sorts of families started coming to us. I realized we had something in common: We were all merely asking for our rights. So I said, sure, join us.”

“Her leadership in Pakistan, during a time of crisis when hundreds of Pakistanis were ‘disappearing,’ was essential,” says T. Kumar, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for Asia and the Pacific. “It’s very rare to come across someone who is willing to go so far, even when it affects her own family.”

Amina’s vigorous activism, however, has attracted the unwanted attention of the authorities. During a December 2006 rally in Rawalpindi, police officials beat her two sons and partially stripped one of them in public. “My daughter and I were screaming at them to leave them alone. Then my daughter fainted, and I didn’t know what to do—to help her or my sons.” Widespread news coverage resulted in the sacking of junior police officers involved. But Amina insists they were sacrificial lambs for the high-level officers who gave the orders. “I gave an affidavit spelling out their names and ranks. In the end they sacked the wrong guys.”

In September, en route to the United States, her visa was cancelled suddenly— a result, Amina believes, of her growing prominence on the international stage; the cancellation occurred just as she was departing Switzerland after addressing a series of high-level European meetings. “I was at the airport in Geneva, ready to board my plane,” Amina says, “whenI received a phone call from Islamabad. The caller identified himself as Chris Richard from [the] visa section of the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan. He told me, ‘We will deport you if you try to board this plane. We have simply been told to communicate this order to you, and we don’t know why.’”

In many ways the story of Amina’s life with Masood had the trappings of a Pakistani romance novel. She was born in Mardan, in Pakistan’s now-restive northwestern frontier province, in 1964 and spent the afternoons of her childhood scampering across conveyer belts carrying bags of colored sugar in the factory where her father was chief engineer. As a young woman she hoped to become an army medical officer; when she failed to make the cut, she went into the arts, earning her bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in fine arts from Punjab University’s Government College for Women.

Art introduced her to Masood. After university Amina participated in a number of exhibitions hosted by some of the country’s most renowned artists and kept a lookout for a gallery that would exhibit her work. Although Masood earned most of his income at the time from his travel agency, he also owned the Originals Art Gallery in Islamabad. Amina recalls, “When I showed him my art work, he told me he didn’t like it! It was too realistic. He encouraged me to try and use more abstract influences in my paintings, to be more creative with my work.” Later, he bought some of her paintings, and a romance developed. They were married in 1989, after their families met, settled into a three-story house in Westridge—a prominent neighborhood in Rawalpindi, a city of 3 million people— with Masood’s parents, and had three children: Mohammad, Ali and Ayesha. Amina still shares the house with Masood’s father and his mother, both of whom have been her A-team since their son disappeared. They live on the ground floor; Amina shares the middle floor with her daughter, Ayesha; and her sons, Mohammad, 18, and Ali, 17, live on the top floor.

Amina says she has no idea why the authorities would have been interested in Masood, though she says he became religious, began “sporting a beard” and devoted more time to social service after the couple performed the Muslim pilgrimage Hajj in 2000. “These days, just having a beard and wearing shalwar kameez makes us marked people in our own country,” she says.

She is, however, keenly aware that her family has been riven by political forces larger—and more ominous— than even she imagines. “Many of my well-wishers and family members made me realize that what I’m doing is not only unusual but also historic, and it could be very dangerous too—God forbid.” Yet she is driven by the hope that Masood will return.

Last year she wrote, in Urdu:

I’m amazed
That you’re not here
And yet
The sun rises,
The moon shines, and the stars
Twinkle…
…I am amazed
That you are not here
And that lamps of hope are still lit
From my beloved heart
The feeling is still strong
The love of my life,
That you are!
O love of my life,
That you are!

During the last couple of years, Amina has witnessed the return of perhaps 150 “disappeared” individuals. Some of them, after spending years in subterranean and subhuman conditions, were mentally and physically destroyed. She is prepared for a changed Masood once he comes home, though she hopes he is not as incapacitated as one man she knows who—two years after his release—stammers and cannot cross the road for fear.

NEW DELHI, INDIA – Authorities at Canada’s High Commission in Islamabad say no Canadians were killed by the massive suicide bomb set outside one of the gates of the four-star Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital city.

The Marriott caters to international travelers and the Pakistani elite and, as the bomb exploded, many people had gathered at the hotel to break their daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. A Pakistani diplomat suggested the attack was “Pakistan’s 9/11,” BBC News reported.

“All our staff at the mission are accounted for, and as far as we know there are no Canadian casualties,” said a source within the Canadian High Commission.

The source, who often liaises with security officers at Islamabad’s two main prestigious hotels, the Serena and the Marriott, said an entire team of security officers deployed at the Marriott by the government of Pakistan accounted for seven of those who have died in the bombing. The officers are generally employed to ensure the security of VIP visitors and foreign delegations, including Canadian ones. The security staff was likely in the lobby at the time of the bombing.

At the time of filing, there were at least 40 dead and many injured but with people still trapped inside the hotel, the numbers were expected to rise. Islamabad’s police chief told the Guardian that the number of dead would be much higher because “dozens more dead” were inside.

The Marriott is a popular destination for international journalists, travelers and businessmen. In addition, many restaurants, in particular Jason’s Steakhouse, the Japanese restaurant, Sakura, and its Thai restaurant, the Royal Elephant, are also frequented by the city’s wealthier residents.

SONYA FATAH
The Toronto Star, July 5, 2008

NEW DELHI–Lamenting a long and difficult year behind bars, a former Pakistani state minister said justice was finally served this week when he was acquitted of murder in the suspicious death of a Richmond Hill woman.

“It was a very long year,” Shahid Jamil Qureshi, former minister of state for communications, told the Toronto Star in a telephone interview yesterday from Pakistan, two days after he had been released from jail.

“But now I have been exonerated.”

Qureshi, who was acquitted Wednesday of murder and illegal confinement charges by Justice Nisar Baig, said he is now eyeing a political comeback.

Qureshi said he didn’t know why the same court had denied him bail after several court appearances during his year in jail.

Police learned Kafila Siddiqui, a 38-year-old Pakistani-Canadian businesswoman, died when her body was brought to an Islamabad hospital by the minister in the early hours of June 9, 2007.

His lawyer’s case rested on a simple argument: If the autopsy showed that Siddiqui died a natural death, how could his client be accused of committing a murder?

“There was no evidence at all,” Raja Rizwan Abbasi, Qureshi’s lawyer, said in a telephone interview. “I was expecting the verdict.”

Siddiqui’s family had raised doubts about the results of the first post mortem.

Siddiqui and Qureshi lived together in a house rented under her name in Islamabad. They were partners in a series of businesses registered to Siddiqui and her husband, Salman Qaiser’s Richmond Hill home.

Siddiqui left her husband and 5-year-old son to pursue contracts that would bring Canadian investment into Pakistan. Her family has insisted that she was being held against her will after she stopped sending emails to relatives and friends in February 2007.

Qureshi has said Siddiqui and Qaiser were having marital and financial problems and she intentionally cut herself off from a family that was trying to blackmail her.

Qureshi also has an axe to grind with the Canadian High Commission in Islamabad, which he said “produced two prosecution witnesses,” one of whom had close ties with Siddiqui.

“It really pained me and I wondered why the Canadian High Commission would involve itself in this case. I mean, what were they trying to show? The Canadian government should have taken notice of it.”

Canadian officials in Islamabad couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Kafila Siddiqui case has been riddled with accusations and counteraccusations levelled between Qureshi and Siddiqui’s family. There are also allegations about political and judicial interference in the case.

Qureshi blamed his party, the then-ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), for deserting him in a time of crisis. He said he had been the victim of a political plot but would not elaborate.

In a jailhouse interview last year, Qureshi claimed his party deserted him because many high-level officials had dealings with Siddiqui and wanted to hide them. He proved to be their scapegoat, he said.

“Everything I said before is true,” he repeated yesterday.

Now that he’s free, however, he doesn’t want to elaborate.

Although distanced from his party, he is ready to jump back into the political arena, and is currently in the process of making new allegiances, likely with the PML-N, headed by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

By Sonya Fatah

Pakistani lawyers and activists stood in the line of fire to defend the rule of law against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. In spite of mass arrests and persecution, they have called the world?s attention to the urgent human rights situation in Pakistan.

When President Gen. Pervez Musharraf asked Iftikhar Mohammad Choudhury to resign on March 9, 2007, he turned an erstwhile obscure man into a people’s hero overnight. Choudhury, the chief justice of Pakistan’s supreme court, had drawn Musharraf’s ire by mounting pointed judicial challenges to the military establishment, and the president erroneously calculated that sacking the justice would be politically expedient.

Instead, Musharraf’s incursion into Pakistan’s judiciary “and Choudhury’s refusal to resign” ignited an accumulation of discontent that had been building in the hushed courtrooms and august law firms of Pakistan for years. Since Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, he has retained nearly absolute control over the government’s executive and legislative bodies. The president’s actions in recent years, including a succession of constitutional amendments, the questionable sale of national assets and policies that led to the “disappearances” of hundreds of citizens, incensed lawyers and judges in Pakistan who have been striving to establish the rule of law in a famously unwieldy political landscape.

The consequences of Choudhury’s defiance played out dramatically before the entire nation: intelligence officers entered the judge’s home, and police barricaded his property and roughed him up on the streets while television cameras rolled. That very day, thousands of nattily dressed lawyers broke their agitated silence and poured into the streets of Pakistan in an unprecedented mass protest. Choudhury’s challenge to Musharraf’s policies fortified the conviction among lawyers and activists that the courts’ technically the only independent arm of Pakistan’s government– could stand up to poor governance and state corruption. Overnight, Choudhury become a symbol around which an entire country could rally.

While technically a parliamentary democracy, Pakistan has been ruled by the military for half of the sixty years since its founding. Supported by a nexus of bureaucratic, feudal and business elites, the military has grown into the most powerful institution in Pakistan. When Musharraf seized power, he presented himself as the father of “enlightened moderation” and economic opportunity. Like other military rulers before him, however, he has instead strong-armed national cohesion out of a fractured, mostly poor population of 160 million. U.S. support, including aid totaling nearly $10 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, has helped fund his increasingly authoritarian tactics.

Spurred by Choudhury’s defiance, lawyers and activists articulated the language of protest against Musharraf’s transgressions “both on the streets and in the media” throughout the latter half of 2007. In doing so, they braved arbitrary arrest, police beatings and the looming threat of imprisonment.

At the forefront of the movement was Munir Malik, then president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. Malik, part of the country’s educated and professional elite, did not have the feudal links or military background necessary to challenge the country’s power structures on his own. Standing alongside thousands of other lawyers, however, he could publicly champion Choudhury’s judicial activism and his commitment to ordinary Pakistanis. Malik appeared on talk shows and penned newspaper editorials –in both English and Urdu–to express his outrage at Musharraf’s blatant constitutional violations and the heavy-handed manner in which the military suppressed the voices of ordinary citizens.

As the chief justice of Pakistan’s highest court, Choudhury “took on issues no one [else] would have touched,” said Malik. He passed an order for the liberation of bonded laborers, for example, and challenged the legality of the government’s sale of national assets. At the top of the judge’s list: the “disappearances” of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Pakistani citizens the government claims are terror suspects; among the missing are students, businessmen and civil servants. A large number have “disappeared”  from the province of Balochistan, where ethnic separatism has bubbled in response to the central government’s aggressive exploitation of the region’s natural resources. Others across the country have been swept up for their alleged support or knowledge of al-Qaeda and Taliban activities. Taken to intelligence sites and reportedly tortured, most of the missing have not been seen since they were abducted. Their families have filed petition after petition in the courts, maintaining the innocence of their relatives and pleading for news.

Shortly before he was dethroned, the chief justice, who had become increasingly assertive about his judicial independence, had begun to examine the role of intelligence agencies in these disappearances. Choudhury boosted the cause of anxious relatives by demanding that the government and intelligence agencies present some 500 missing persons in court to try them lawfully, and several high-profile lawyers took up the cases. Amina Masood Janjua, 35, had been awaiting just such an opportunity to find out what had happened to her husband, Masood Janjua, who was abducted from a station in Rawalpindi in 2005. She was elated when she finally got a date for a missing persons hearing.

But on Nov. 3, Musharraf declared a national state of emergency that was widely interpreted as a move to preempt both the missing persons hearings and a Supreme Court judgment on the legitimacy of his candidacy in the February presidential elections. He suspended the constitution and the Supreme Court, bringing the missing persons proceedings to a grinding halt.

The desolate families of the missing persons” were counting each day for the return of their loved ones,” Janjua lamented. “Once again, their high hopes are shattered.” For two years after her husband’s 2005 “disappearance,” Janjua stood vigil outside the Supreme Court holding a portrait of her husband, a tour operator. She soon learned she was not alone. Other families began to reach out to her, so Janjua started a support group. She recorded in her diary the details of some 500 men who had “disappeared,” many of them taken to illegal detention centers both inside and out of Pakistan, and organized demonstrations. Although Janjua has still not learned what happened to her husband, she has put a face on Choudhury’s judicial initiative and helped build a movement of truth seekers.

As public displays of opposition grew increasingly restive, drawing nationwide scrutiny to the deep contradictions in Musharraf’s policies, the authorities turned their attention to the protest movement. It was dangerous, unwelcome attention. In May 2007, after authorities detained Choudhury at the Karachi airport to prevent him from addressing the Sindh Bar Association, the ensuing demonstration by lawyers descended into mayhem. Police surrounded demonstrators as they tried to march down Karachi’s main street, and armed thugs from a provincial political party allied with Musharraf were caught on video inciting violence and assaulting protesters. Eyewitnesses said police officers stood by and watched the fighting escalate, and at least 41 people were killed as a result. After AAJ TV, one of Pakistan’s independent television channels, aired the footage, its offices were attacked.

The crackdown only hardened the resolve of the movement’s leaders to expose the government’s failings, which in turn ratcheted up the persecution. “Naturally, there was continued harassment,” said Noor Naz Agha, a leading human rights activist. She reported threatening phone calls and police visits to her office and home.

When Musharraf imposed the November state of emergency, he signaled the hard limits of his tolerance for dissent. He instituted a media blackout, expelled three foreign journalists and gave orders for the arbitrary arrest of anyone who might challenge the legitimacy of his action. Agha was picked up and carted off to jail, one of a tiny handful of women to be locked up. “It’s hard to believe,” she wrote in an op-ed published in the United Kingdom in The Guardian. “As a lawyer and a founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, I have visited many prisoners over the years. Now I am one of them.”

The police went after Janjua too, humiliating her teenage son during a protest by stripping him of his pants. But they came down hardest on Malik, whose voice carried weight with both the elite and the masses amid the political turmoil. Immediately after the state of emergency was declared, Malik was taken to Adiala Jail in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, a facility crammed with about 6,500 prisoners despite its holding capacity of 1,700. After a few nights, he was woken by guards and told he was being transferred to Attock Fort, the notorious military prison primarily used by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Pakistani police officers beat lawyers with batons during an anti-governmant rally in Lahore, Pakistan, in March 2007. Lawyers boycotted court proceedings, clashed with riot police and burned and image of President Pervez Musharraf in a countrywide protest against the ouster of the ocuntry’s top judge, Iftikhar Mohannad Choudhury.. © AP Photo/k.M Chaudary

“It was biting cold,” said Malik of the four-hour journey that followed. But he believes the separation was really a scare tactic meant to break his resolve. In the end, he was taken to a local jail where he was strip-searched, given a uniform and escorted to a cell reserved for those who violate prison rules. There, in a space that measured roughly six by five feet, he lay on a slab on the floor, trying to calculate his next steps. There were small comforts. In the absence of intelligence agents, jail staff accorded him respect. “They would whisper in my ear when others were out of earshot that they were with us,” Malik recalled, “not the government.”

The collective realization that vast amounts of U.S. aid has served only to line the coffers of Pakistan’s military apparatus, with no benefit to ordinary Pakistanis, has caused Musharraf’s domestic standing to plummet. So have the government’s military “solutions” in Balochistan. Bolstered by U.S. military support, including equipment meant to support anti-terror operations, the incursions there have killed hundreds of people and stoked the volatile problem of ethnic separatism.

By mid-2007, mainstream public opinion had turned to deep suspicion that Musharraf was using U.S. financial– and political–support to eliminate opposition of any stripe. The botched outcome of Operation Sunrise, a military strike in July against the increasingly militant mullahs of the Islamabad-based Red Mosque, outraged Pakistanis of every social strata. Hundreds of young girls, who lived at the madrassa inside the sprawling campus in the middle of a posh Islamabad neighborhood, were killed during the siege. The government defended the shedding of blood and the loss of life in the capital, claiming that it had tried all other avenues of negotiation with the increasingly aggressive mullahs who ran the madrassa. But most believed that the final death count was a reflection of Musharraf’s confused handling of the Islamist problem in Pakistan? and an indication that the country’s military had turned against its own people to wage an American war.

Although Musharraf announced the nominal end to the 2007 state of emergency on Dec. 15, the movement kept up the fight to prevent the “Old Raj” –as the president is known–from tightening his grip on power. Lawyers began a strike during the national emergency and refused to bring cases. Demonstrations continued. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan secured the release of about 50 detainees. And all the while, the lawyers and activists stood steadfastly behind the chief justice, who managed to communicate with his supporters via smuggled messages while under house arrest.

At press time, opposition parties had won a large majority in the Feb. 18 Parliamentary elections; they will form the new government. The movement was urging Pakistan?s new parliament to take urgent steps to reinstate Choudhury and the judges of the superior judiciary, who were punitively and unconstitutionally dismissed in 2007, and restore the Constitution to its preemergency state.

The lawyers and activists remain committed to do whatever it takes to defend the rule of law. “This is a fight we will take to the end. I am willing to make that choice. I don’t care what it takes,” said Malik. “They will either silence us, or it is them–the repressive forces–that will have to go.”

SONYA FATAH
THE TORONTO STAR, January 22, 2008

KARACHI, Pakistan–A class full of children – all of them boys – sit bent over their books, rocking back and forth as they collectively repeat after their instructor.

Mufti Naeem smiles as he watches the scene on one of four security monitors on his office desk at the Jamia Binoria, a madrassa, or religious seminary, in Karachi’s northern district.

This is one of Karachi’s allegedly reformed madrassas, where Islamic and secular subjects are taught to the 4,000 students at its sprawling campus.

In 2002 the Pakistani government launched a five-year program called the Madrassa Reforms Project, a post-9/11 directive aimed at modernizing religious seminaries by broadening their curricula, establishing educational standards and reining in the militant ones. With suicide attacks on the rise in Pakistan, many fear that more madrassas will become breeding grounds for extremist ideologies.

Yet, five years later, the program has been discontinued.

Officials estimate there are about 13,000 madrassas across the country with fewer than 2 million students enrolled. But many observers say there are likely more than 20,000 madrassas.

“None of these madrassas are registered or will bother to register,” said Muhammad Ejaz Ahsan, who heads the Karachi office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “They are politically and financially independent and have no desire to be reined in by government authorities.”

Historically, madrassas were institutions of learning in the Islamic world. Today, a large percentage of the country’s madrassas are community responses to sub-par government education.

Why madrassa reform has failed isn’t difficult to answer.

Instead of being curtailed, madrassas sprouted up, providing free education, boarding and lodging for poor children, combating poor government schooling, unemployment, inflation and a host of other problems.

At an education conference one of Binoria’s students, Adnan Kaka Khel, lectured Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf against his madrassa drive.

“Mr. President … (this) is class games, an unjust system, disrespect of talent … limitless corruption, and the misuse of power – it is these dangerous trends which have driven the youth in this direction. You need to fix these problems, and then you will see if these youth are terrorists or lovers of peace.”

Pakistan’s constitution obliges the state to provide free and compulsory secondary education. However, education (and health), key social-sector departments, have consistently been sacrificed in the name of “national interest” issues such as defence expenditure.

“In this lane itself, there are at least six madrassas,” said Abdul Waheed Khan, founder and director of the Bright Educational Society, a non-profit educational institution in Qasba Colony, a Pashtun-dominated settlement in Karachi.

In 1990, Khan enrolled in a madrassa for one year to get a taste of life on the inside.

“I came out of it, and I thought, `What kind of life is this for little children?’ They could not play or enjoy their lives. I saw sexual abuse and rape, and the children were learning by rote from teachers who were themselves uneducated.”

So, Khan convinced clerics in his area to let him teach secular subjects to their students. The heads of three small madrassas agreed. Today, Khan’s literacy program is run in 350 madrassas in Karachi.

Of the roughly $80 million earmarked for madrassa reform, about $18 million was distributed to the Sindh provincial government, but most of it, insiders say, was spend on office expenses.

Ultimately, it’s the lack of political will that is preventing both the education of largely poor school children, and the closing of more extremist madrassas, many of which continue to have friends in high places across government.

“Our government doesn’t want to enlighten or educate its people,” said Khan, referring to Musharraf’s promise of enlightened moderation. “As long as people are suppressed and can be used to follow their agenda, they are unlikely to change the status quo.”

KARACHI, Pakistan–The advertisement ran prominently in Urdu-language newspapers across the country.

“In just three days, we have suffered a loss of 100 billion rupees ($1.6 billion),” it read. “This is not politics. This is not grieving. This is lawlessness.”

Underneath the headline, the advertisement invited all those who have suffered personal, financial and other losses during riots following the Dec. 27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto to call a hotline for assistance.

The invitation, however, wasn’t extended to everyone.

“All party candidates for national and provincial assembly seats and Punjabi, Pathan, Mohajir and Baloch settlers of Sindh (province) who have been affected by the recent violence can contact (us) at these telephone numbers,” it read.

But the ad omitted Sindhis, people from Bhutto’s home province, and the region that bore the brunt of the devastating loss during the post-assassination riots.

“What they’re saying by publishing this advertisement is that no Sindhis suffered during the riots,” said Fayyaz Naich, who hosts a news discussion show on a local television channel. “And they are creating a dangerous precedent.”

The advertisement, from the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam party, comes at a particularly bad time as Pakistanis gear up for next month’s general election and struggle to move on after the assassination of one of the leading political candidates.

It also threatened to bring in a fresh wave of ethnic tension and violence that could jeopardize the already postponed elections.

Although many insiders said the mistake was a misprint, the party’s president, Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain, said PML-Q had decided to run the advertisement because Punjabis had been targeted in the violence following Bhutto’s death.

Pakistan’s largest and richest province, Punjab, which holds 148 general seats in the National Assembly, has always overshadowed its southern neighbour, Sindh, which occupies 61 seats in the same assembly.

The smaller province has regarded Punjab with hostility since partition, with many believing that Punjabis occupy a hugely influential role in the country’s economy, society and its politics. Punjab’s domination of the country’s most powerful institution, its army, also has ruffled feathers in Sindh.

“She was killed in Punjab, you know,” said Ghulam Nabi, 60, from Sukkur in interior Sindh, echoing a much-repeated statement. “Just like all our leaders.”

Indeed, Bhutto is the third Sindhi leader to be assassinated or killed in Punjab. The first was prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by a gunman in 1951 not far from where Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi. And Bhutto’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 under the supervision of Gen. Zia ul Haq.

Pakistan’s politicians know just how quickly ethnic tension can flare up. To avoid that situation, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party reminded its supporters of the party’s national message and its promise not to discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.

Three days after Bhutto’s death, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, appealed to PPP supporters to put away their swords and not to blame Punjabis for his wife’s death. Bhutto supporters were also in Punjab, he reminded them, and some had served as her bodyguards.

Friday’s advertisement set off panic that an ethnic flare-up could destabilize the country further. But by yesterday, the party had published a new, improved version, which included the omitted province.

But many, including those who are Sindh-based politicians, were unimpressed. In the larger battle for power, national resources and control of the land, between Sindh and Punjab, the ad may boomerang on the PML-Q party by alienating its Sindhi membership.

“It seems as if the party has decided to sacrifice its Sindh candidates to win more seats in the Punjab,” said Ghaus Khan Bux Mahar, a national assembly candidate from Shikarpur, interior Sindh.

Beyond concerns of impacting the upcoming general elections, many Pakistanis said that these were all signs of a greater conspiracy to destabilize and then destroy Pakistan. That theory has been a popular one across Pakistan for years.

“The Americans and certain people within our establishment are trying to break us up,” said Baboo Narayan Lal, 46, in Karachi, expressing a popular view across Pakistan.

“That’s why they are creating tension between the provinces. I’ve even seen the map – Pakistan will break up into little pieces and join other territories,” he said.

GARHI KHUDA BAKHSH, Pakistan–The dust has settled around the Bhutto mausoleum a week after hundreds of thousands flocked here to witness the burial of slain Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Inside the elaborate structure reminiscent of Mughal splendour, some 200 people gather around Bhutto’s grave, sprinkling the damp mud with rose petals that spill over onto the speckled marble floor.

The numbers have dwindled since the early days after Bhutto’s assassination, but with one more Bhutto buried here the family’s legendary draw is likely to continue attracting a steady stream of loyalists.

Of those gathered inside yesterday, several were from Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, where the mausoleum stands in Sindh province. Others had walked or hitched rides to get here to pay their final respects.

“I’ve come here every day since Mohtarma Benazir was buried,” said Satora Bibi, 60, who works in the fields and lives in a packed mud house beside the marble edifice that houses the graves of Bhutto family members.

“I’ve been coming here regularly since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was martyred,” she said, weeping at the memory of the former prime minister and founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party. “I come for (Benazir Bhutto’s brothers) Shah Nawaz and Murtaza as well.”

The village is abuzz every year on April 4, the day in 1979 when Gen. Zia ul Haq hanged Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.Benazir Bhutto’s Dec. 27 death is likely to become another observed date.

The original mausoleum built to house the senior Bhutto’s family, not far from his home district of Larkana, was constructed quite simply. Later, Benazir Bhutto enlarged the structure significantly, and a miniature Taj Mahal was born.

“I used to come to listen to her speak here,” said Nabi Bakhsh, 60, who is from Sukkur. “She had the ground in front of the mausoleum cleared and she would address the thousands of people gathered here against this magnificent backdrop. It was worth watching.”

In a country with a rich culture of shrines and Sufi saints who are worshipped by communities large and small, Bhutto’s mausoleum has also become something of a shrine. There is always a steady stream of local and other travellers stopping to rest on the cool marble floors under the arched doorways and high ceilings.

“I remember when our martyred leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was buried, the military blocked the roads,” said Satora Bibi. “We couldn’t even get near. At least this time we haven’t been stopped.”

Many children followed their weeping parents and grandparents, to stand by Bhutto’s grave yesterday. For this generation, the collective Bhutto legacy will likely be transferred by word of mouth, a kind of oral history.

“I feel sad,” said Saima Ali Gul, 10, talking about Bhutto. “She was so beautiful.”

Beside her, an elderly woman began to wail. “Oh Allah! Oh Allah,” she grieved. “What will we do? What will us poor people do? Benazir is no more.”

Among those gathered, no one questioned their poverty or why their leaders lived mere kilometres away in luxury at the Bhutto mansion in Naudero.

Neither the past nor the future mattered to some who felt Bhutto’s loss has thrown the country into the depths of despair.

“It doesn’t look good,” said Yasir Bhutto, 23, a student at Shah Latif Government College in Shikarpur, about 50 kilometres away.

“I am deeply, deeply sad,” he added as tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t know what our future is. I feel like my heart is flying out of Pakistan.”

His friend, Mukesh Kumar, a shopkeeper in the same town, laid a blanket of roses strung together with tinsel over Bhutto’s grave. He, too, agreed. “We had complete and total hope in her.”

There were optimists, too.

“I have come here to remember Bhutto,” said Zulfiqar Ali Rahujo from Larkana, who runs the group Liberal Forum Pakistan. “I will keep coming here to remember our leaders so I can have hope and faith in our struggle for democracy, rule of law and tolerance.”

NAUDERO, Pakistan–A constant stream of visitors filled the large conference room of the Bhutto mansion, as delegations of religious, political, legal and other groups offered their condolences to the husband of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto.

Dressed entirely in black, Asif Ali Zardari fielded phone calls, meetings with members of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party and television interviews, bounding back and forth between condolence callers and official business.

Zardari, the party’s new co-chairman, sat with each delegation, put his hands together and prayed with them beneath a portrait of his late father-in-law, former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

The visual is a reminder that Zardari, until recently not even a player on the political scene, is now on Bhutto territory. As the successor to the woman who drew vast numbers to her election rallies and to her political message, he has been left with some big shoes to fill.

Zardari doesn’t think that’s a problem. Indeed, he has no qualms about projecting himself as a politician in the aftermath of his wife’s death. Even as a Zardari, we are all Bhuttos here, he told the Star.

“I am not letting the nation go into the hands of the people who want to break the country,” he said, underlining his determination to go on carrying the Bhutto torch. “We have to take it to a democracy, that’s the vision she gave her life for.”

How exactly Zardari will do that remains to be seen.

The PPP had hoped to win a handsome victory in the Jan. 8 elections, partially riding on a national wave of sympathy since Bhutto’s Dec. 27 assassination at a public rally in Rawalpindi.

But now that the election has been delayed until Feb. 18, in the wake of Bhutto’s death, things may change.

“In our neighbourhood when Indiraji (Indira Gandhi) died, 20,000 people were killed but the elections were not postponed,” said Zardari, bringing up similar periods from Indian history.

“When Rajiv (Gandhi) died, scores of places were burnt but elections were not postponed. But unfortunately we have uneducated, non-political brains running the country. They do not know the difference, the far effects it can have on the country. They do not know how nation-building is done, how nations fractured are put together again.”

Zardari’s immediate challenge will be to mount an election campaign that can continue Bhutto’s momentum, and ensure that a free and fair vote takes place.

The chances of the latter, he admitted, are slim.

“They have tried to rig the elections, they haven’t given that up,” he said.

“Even now, the Killer league, as my workers call it, are (trying to rig the elections),” said Zardari, referring to the country’s ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam). That party is made up of defectors from the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), which is seen as a pro-establishment party.

After the Oct. 18 suicide bombing at Bhutto’s homecoming parade in which 150 people were killed, Zardari accused key figures in the country’s establishment of being behind the attack. Nothing has yet come of the government’s probe into the incident but the PPP has insisted there is a vendetta to either fracture or destroy the party.

Although the government enlisted the assistance of Scotland Yard in the investigation on Bhutto’s assassination, Zardari has said an international probe will only be accepted if it is under the auspices of the United Nations.

With much of the preliminary and on-site forensic evidence lost because the government hosed down the site, Zardari said he wanted an international team to highlight the long-term conspiracy against the PPP.

“Because it’s a larger conspiracy than just that one incident so I want the whole conspiracy unearthed,” he said. “We’re not interested in just that incident or just that day. That is captured on tape.”

Conspiracies aside, Zardari will have to deal with issues relating to his legitimacy. As party-co chair, his son, 19-year-old Bilawal, will remain inactive in politics until he completes his studies at Britain’s Oxford university.

Zardari said people in the ruling party have already started badmouthing him and the PPP.

“Instead of being sombre, instead of shutting up, keeping quiet, letting the nation mourn, they’ve been trying to badmouth us.”

Indeed, Zardari should be used to unkind words. He has been known for years in Pakistan as “Mr. 10 Per Cent” because of a number of corruption allegations.

The son of a Sindhi landowner, Zardari grew up in Karachi and married Bhutto in 1987.

He spent eight years in jail on corruption charges and was released in 2004 after negotiations between the PPP and the government of Pervez Musharraf.

Since then, he has kept a low profile maintaining homes in Dubai and New York.

Bhutto had always insisted the corruption charges against her and her husband were politically motivated.

Writing about the ups and downs of a political marriage, Bhutto once penned her appreciation of Zardari in a piece for Outlook India.

“I’m lucky that my husband Asif is a man of exceptional courage,” she wrote.

“He stood by me despite the threats and the torture – and the inducement that were he to leave me he would be free of state harassment. Few men have been called upon to pay the price that he has paid both for his political commitment and marriage.”

For Zardari, maintaining his wife’s legacy is a big task.

Many don’t consider him to be the legitimate heir of the Bhutto political dynasty but rather a troublemaker who gave more grief than happiness to Bhutto.

Part of Zardari’s problem is that he lacks the Bhutto name. Shortly after the central committee of the PPP met to announce its new co-chairmen, it also announced that Bhutto’s son Bilawal Zardari would be renamed Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, a change signalling the importance of the Bhutto name.

Zardari, too, understands what is in the Bhutto name.

“I don’t think anybody is a Zardari or a Magsi or Khokar or anybody in the Peoples party,” he said when asked if he felt uncomfortable as a Zardari in Bhutto clothing. “They’re all Bhuttos.”