Saturday, July 28, 2007

Musharraf Benazir Meeting And Pakistan

Those who wield power in Pakistan can always depend on their counterparts in the desert kingdoms of Arab families, especially seven poodle sized city fiefdoms unitedly called United Arab Emirates and the family-owned-and-run desert kingdom with added benefit of religious aura called Saudi Arabia. An urgent state visit invitation can be requested and had at only a Day's notice.

From Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to Ziaul Haq, to Benazir Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif, to Musharraf every occupier of Islamabad has called these trusted allies in the times of distress.

Musharraf's visits to UAE and Saudi Arabia showed all the hallmarks of such an urgent distress call. Visits were announced by the Pakistani foreign ministry only on Thursday. Both the UAE president and its vice-president, who also serves as prime minister, were out of the country. But it did not matter. He needed help and the sooner the better.

Smarting from the Supreme Court verdict on the fired chief justice and hurt by exploding suicide bombers everywhere, including Islamabad, Musharraf limped to Abu Dhahbi on his way to Jeddah. Benazir was asked to abruptly interrupt her scheduled meetings to distribute parlamentary tickets to her party candidates in London. They both were brought "secretly" to meet yesterday in Abu Dahbi where the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahayan presided over and signed as witness along with some British and American stake holders.

The tryst was essentially to finalize the prenuptial negotiations for the marriage of convenience. Musharraf wanted his sinking ship brought to safe harbors so he could stay in power and Benazir wanted to come back in out of the long self exile in cold and share the loot all over again. The only way out of their and the west's predicament was thought to be the mutual help and cooperation of 'enlightened moderates'. They will remove constitutional hurdles from each other's ways. The constitution has been amended to prohibit anyone from becoming prime minister more than twice and Musharraf faces constitutional hurdle of his own if he wants to cling onto his position as army chief while staying on as president.

As expected both sides are denying the meeting and the respective spokespersons are scrambling to make official statements giving the impression of just a bunch of heads of states going through the normal state business of discussing bilateral relations, chiefly "cooperation in fighting terrorism and extremism," and other regional issues. Even though he last visited the UAE and Saudi Arabia in January this year to do exactly the same.

Musharraf spokesman, Major General Rashid Qureshi, is vehemently refuting the reports of the meeting as "completely baseless." Even those in the know are leaking to the TV networks that the meeting, if it ever took place, ended in deadlock over the issue of whether Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, should be allowed to retain his dual role as army chief and president. Pakistani embassy spokesman in the UAE said he did "not know anything" about the reported meeting, while an aide at Bhutto's home in the nearby emirate of Dubai said he did "not have any information" about it.

Shaikh Rashid, Minister for Railways, on the other hand is saying that Musharraf and Benazir "held a successful meeting". Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, another minister said the two were trying to strike a deal to secure another term for the general while paving the way for Bhutto to return as prime minister.

The question on Pakistani minds is whether all this political maneuvering and somersaults will be enough to hold Pakistan's drift to self-immolation?

Monday, July 23, 2007

Greedy Generals, Hungry Beazir

Benazir Bhutto is behaving as if tomorrow has been ripped off of her calender and the only day she is left with is today's. She is in race against time. She does not care if Pakistan and its people go to hell and stay there for as long as she can get and stay in the seat of the prime minister.

She just can't wait to make a deal with the generals regardless of how little a piece of the pie she is allowed to get. She could care less if they were the ones who hanged her father and murdered her baby brother; and she lost power twice at their hands. When, in 1990, she was prime minister and was pregnent with her second child the general forced through a legislation prohibiting a prime minister from taking maternity leave, she elected to have the baby early by Caesarean section so she could remain in power.

She still wants to make a deal.

But why is she dying for power? The way things are going she is not going to get a lot. She just wants to start from where she had left off: robbing the people blind. She just wants her share in the spoils with the generals.

The looser Musharraf's grip gets on power the more impatient she becomes. Andrian Levy and Cathy Scott of the Guardian report that since September 11 2001, due to the US obsession with the "war on terror" General Pervez Musharraf has been at the center of power in Pakistan. The "long war" as the Americans love to call it the "war on terror" not going to go away in near future. They want it to go, at least, as long as they could drag out the Cold War.

Musharraf is getting all the attention and getting filthy rich at the same time. His generals are already into millions (of Pounds). She also wants to get in this lucrative game. The only way to do so is make a deal with the generals.

If the west has been willing to overlook Musharraf's military record as a close ally of the Taliban it can also ignore her contribution as Prime Minister in Taliban's rise. The west has turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the fact that early in his career, Musharraf acted as military mentor to Pakistan's home-grown jihadi groups; rose to power in a coup d'état; deposed and exiled an elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and has refused to restore democracy and doff his 'second skin'. Rather Bush has increased his "best friend's" aid by 45,000% (yes, forty five thousand per cent), which now totals more than $4bn.

That is a lot of money to go around. Why not some of it Benazir and Zar-Dari?

According to the Guardian "all that has changed"... "While Washington and London continue publicly to characterise Musharraf as the west's best hope of stopping Pakistan's descent into Islamic extremism, in reality they have concluded that it is the general who is easing the path of the jihadis. And he must be stopped.

The paper says: "Behind the back-slaps and bonhomie, a plot is afoot to remove the current military leaders and revive an old Pakistani dynasty". It will be a different kind of regime change. Without any shock and awe and without the loss of thousands of lives. The aim is "to restore democracy to Pakistan and reinstall Benazir Bhutto".

It all started back on June 20 2004, in a town called Blackburn in Lancashire, England. This little town was made famous by singer John Lennon of The Beatles when he featured Blackburn in his song "A Day in the Life". An article in the Daily Mail about a plan to fill potholes in the town caught his eye as he was writing the song, giving birth to the lyric: "I read the news today. Oh, boy. 4,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire".

Other than 4,000 pot holes Lancashire had a Councillor named Salas Kiani, a British Pakistani, who had until recently served as the town's mayor helped by a 7,000-strong Pakistani population. He had invited Benazir Bhutto and some political friends to a dinner. Benazir's hopes of returning to power looker slimmer than ever as Musharraf's Pakistan had recently been readmitted to the Commonwealth after being suspended when Musharraf seized control; and, just four days earlier, President Bush had named the country as a major non-NATO ally.

She could only watch from the sidelines. Shortly after deposing Nawaz Sharif Musharraf had vowed never to let Bhutto return. After 9/11, the west forgot about Bhutto.

But then at the Blackburn dinner, Bhutto's host, Councillor Salas Kiani, "had a surprise for her. He passed Bhutto a mobile phone. "It's Jack for you," he said mischievously". It was Jack Straw, then foreign secretary. He was the Member of Parliament for Blackburn and knew Kiani well. Jack Straw invited her to come to the Foreign Office. It was the first official communication the PPP had had with a British government minister in more than a decade. Relations with the British had cooled after she was overthrown and her husband jailed. She and Zar-Dari had been accused by the Pakistan government of amassing an ill-gotten fortune, including a £2million Surrey country estate complete with stud farm and helipad - in stark contrast to life in Pakistan, where 37 million people lived below the UN poverty line. Jack Straw, then home secretary, refused to meet her. Now, in 2004, Straw was on the phone.

A month later, "Bhutto was brought to a side entrance of the Foreign Office, her trademark white dupatta pulled over her face". The meeting lasted more than an hour. She told Straw that Musharraf's "primary allegiance had been with the jihadi groups that the Pakistan media described as Musharraf's 'ethnic storm-troopers'."

Musharraf had been director general of military operations during Bhutto's second term as prime minister, and had requested permission to "unleash the forces of fundamentalism" - Sunni irregulars sponsored by the army and intelligence community - to infiltrate the Indian-controlled sector of the divided state of Kashmir. In 1996, when the Taliban had grown as a force in Afghanistan, it was Musharraf who ensured the movement was armed and fed.

Straw squirmed as this was recounted and reassured her that his government favoured democracy in Pakistan, but stressed that Musharraf, too, was important. She never told him though that in 1996, when she was the prime minister, Murtaza, her eldest brother was shot dead in an encounter with police in Karachi, for which her husband was indicted. She never let the case come to court.

Within weeks, Mark Lyall Grant, the British high commissioner in Islamabad, flew to Dubai to convey a message to Bhutto from Musharraf. The general was willing to make a gesture: her husband was to be released from jail. Perhaps she should now consider working with him?

Bhutto remained suspicious.

Zar-Dari was released from prison in December 2004.

In early 2005, Bhutto was invited back to the Foreign Office to talk about " a post-Musharraf world" but, the Guardian quotes a Foreign Office spokeswoman saying, "What London feared was chaos. What everyone wanted was a smooth transition, from Musharraf to something sustainable, preferably democratic. Bhutto had a chance of winning an election if that day came."

But the US was not in her corner yet, although Straw advised her that it was beginning to think about change. Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, was at that very moment in Islamabad pressing Musharraf to allow free elections.

A series of bombings on London's transport network four months later, in July 2005, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more, brought a new urgency to the Straw-Bhutto talks. Three of the four British suicide bombers had links to a radical madrasa in Muridke, 20 miles outside Lahore. Straw noted that, in 2001, Musharraf had pledged to outlaw jihadi groups. The Muridke school was now one of 13,000 madrasas, none of which had been regulated as the president had undertaken to do.

Bhutto warned Straw that the PPP would have little chance, unless the Bush administration, too, was willing to look beyond Musharraf and back the call for elections. Straw insisted he had talked to Rice and Washington was reconsidering its position.

The aftermath of an earthquake that left 75,000 dead and more than three million homeless in the Pakistan-administered sector of Kashmir gave additional cause for concern in October 2005. Under the cover of providing aid to the victims, 17 Sunni extremist groups previously banned by Musharraf (under pressure from the US state department) re-emerged with new names. Distributing food, tents and blankets, they opened tent villages, one beneath a banner proclaiming: "Custodian of the blood of 10,000 mujahideen." The outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba was there, running a field hospital in Muzaffarabad. "Why should we not allow our own people, to go there and assist... whether they are jiihadis or anybody," Musharraf said at the time.

Yet only a few months later, in early 2006, he was sending a new message to Bhutto, asking that she list her demands. She wrote: free elections; political prisoners released; an independent election commission formed; Pakistan's constitution [of 1973] restored. The reply came back almost immediately: Musharraf was not ready for this kind of deal.

Meanwhile, Bhutto had competition in London. On January 30 2006, Nawaz Sharif and his family arrived. Ensconced in their mansion-block apartment in Mayfair, he held court on a leopard-print sofa. "We were mobilising," Sharif tells us. "There could be no deals with Musharraf. No deals. Full stop. It was central to our charter for democracy. We hope Bhutto was acting sincerely when she signed it."

By now the Americans were on track and Musharraf at last agreed to hold a poll. It was to be staged after November 2007, when the National Assembly's term ran out. But he insisted that Bhutto and Sharif should not to be allowed to return until after the election. Prospective PPP parliamentary candidates began finding envelopes containing bullets left in their cars or on their desks - similar intimidatory tactics had been used in the previous election.

As direct contact was established between the US and Bhutto, the newly appointed US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, Richard Boucher, urged her not to encourage PPP supporters to take to the streets in protest, as they had done on previous occasions. The PPP agreed. Over a series of meetings, Boucher made clear that the US would not be dealing with Sharif, whom they blamed for putting Pakistan at risk of nuclear war with India in a conflagration over Kashmir that flared up just a few months after both countries tested nuclear weapons.

"But by 2006, we didn't need the US," Sharif says. "It was time they realised that, in backing Musharraf in Pakistan, they were going to get their fingers burned, just like they did in Iran. Then, they had kept saying the Shah was safe until one day he was overthrown and the Ayatollahs took over the country. That could be Pakistan's future, too - Musharraf overthrown and the fundamentalists taking over. We are a better option, believe me. Regardless, I intend to go back. Like Bhutto, I have to go back and fight the election or be damned by our supporters." Sharif and his younger brother, Shahbaz, were working to rebuild their shattered party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), in Pakistan. But Nawaz Sharif was reluctant to talk dates and timings for his return - it sounded more like an aspiration than a plan.

On the other hand, Bhutto and Musharraf continued to sound each other out through emissaries. It seemed that a major sticking point was Musharraf's pride. He had never forgiven Bhutto for embarrassing him during a discussion they had about starting a war with India over Kashmir in 1993, when Musharraf had wanted the Pakistan army to launch a full-scale invasion on its own initiative. "This country is run by a civilian government," Bhutto recalls snapping. "I am still the prime minister."

In early 2007, President Bush made his first public criticism of Musharraf, warning that he had to be more aggressive in hunting down terrorists. Under pressure, Musharraf leaned toward a deal with Bhutto - if he could stay on as president. The talks stalled again, this time because Bhutto's supporters resented her being in cahoots with the general. Then Musharraf's emissaries came up with an even stranger proposal: if Bhutto stayed away from Pakistan during the election, Musharraf would "adjust the vote". A Bhutto aide said, "We could not believe it. He was offering to rig the election."

In Pakistan, unrest was building up, especially after Musharraf suspended Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. In the ensuing mass demonstrations, more than 40 people, many of them PPP supporters, were killed and 300 more were rounded up.

Bhutto stepped up her demands. "We wanted a free vote and I told them I was going back home to campaign for one." Then she made a remarkable concession: if she fought and won the election and became Pakistan's prime minister, Musharraf could stay on as a civilian president for the next five years. In another seismic shift, Bhutto proposed that the military retain responsibility for foreign affairs and national security over this five-year period, while her government would concentrate on the domestic agenda.

Publicly, all sides denied the talks. Nevertheless, a US state department spokesman, briefing the media on June 11, was positively bullish. "There are going to be some important elections coming up in the fall," he said, adding that Musharraf had pledged that, if he "continues in political life", he will "put aside the uniform".

Bhutto is committed to returning to Pakistan in September, and informal polls have shown that, despite the rampant extremism in the country, she is likely to dominate the elections. Her constituency in the Sindh had been battered but could be salvaged and built into a movement, she claims, while the tribal areas, in which the Taliban and jihadi groups had made the most inroads, are electorally insignificant.

For Bhutto, the recent siege at the Red Mosque was evidence of the calamity facing Pakistan. "The country is experiencing its darkest hour," she says - General Musharraf stood by while a religious institution was transformed into a 7,000-strong army of would-be jihadis in the heart of the capital. "Nothing is as General Musharraf portrays it," she says. "He talks of the army battling militants who are trying to get a toe-hold. In fact, in the border regions, there are thousands of new madrasas. And they are not just madrasas, they are mini-cantonments, ruling the tribal areas through terror. Free and fair elections are the last chance to halt the expansion of al-Qaida and the neo-Taliban."

Musharraf has reiterated that he is still committed to holding an election, but the pressing question now being asked is whether Bhutto, if elected, is capable of bringing Pakistan back from the brink.

When the military was last forced into free elections, it was in 1988, after a decade of Zia's increasingly unpopular military dictatorship. Then it stacked the odds in its favour by dumping leaflets from the air that bore humiliating, doctored photographs of Bhutto and her mother in bikinis, beneath the slogan "Gangsters in bangles". When Bhutto won, despite the slurs, military intelligence stepped up its covert campaign. Much was made of the fact that the publisher of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in the US was the same as for Bhutto's memoir, Daughter Of Destiny.

Bhutto was made to look like a woman of poor judgment. Weakened, she was forced out of office in 1990, and when she attempted to stand again in the election later that year, the ISI and military, according to documents lodged in the Pakistan supreme court, deployed a £1.5m slush fund with which they bribed religious candidates to slander Bhutto. The election was lost.

Seventeen years on, the Pakistan military, on the verge of conceding another election, may be even more vicious, having evolved into the most powerful economic entity in the country. The military have gone into business by stealth, accruing a fortune estimated at £6bn. Ayesha Siddiqa, a former research director for the Pakistan navy and author of Military Inc, which exposes the new-found wealth of Pakistan's armed forces, characterises Pakistan as "a racketeer state run by soldiers".

The military's empire has been built up by the auctioning of Pakistan's state assets to its own welfare organisations. Foundations established to look after servicemen and their families now run Pakistan's cement and fertiliser industries, as well as pharmaceuticals and telecommunications, banking, aggregates, aviation, transport and insurance. Everything - from the Tarmac people drive on to the petrol they put in their tanks, to the motorway tollbooths they can barely afford, to the road hauliers they hire - is owned by the military.

Since Musharraf came to power, originally choosing the title of Pakistan's chief executive, he has transformed Pakistan's market economy into a military one. The Army Welfare Trust, created in the 70s with a grant of only £6,000, now has assets of more than £200m. According to the IMF, such foundations control more than one quarter of Pakistan's economy. The personal wealth of Musharraf's key generals is estimated at £3.5m a head. And Musharraf himself, who has a combined salary of £700 a month for his jobs as president and army chief, has acquired a real-estate portfolio worth £5m.

Musharraf declined an interview with the Guardian. However, he has publicly commented on the military's business world, recently claiming, "We've got fertilisers, we're involved in banking, we are involved even in pharmaceuticals. So what is the problem? Why is anyone jealous? We do things well."

The Pakistan military, with their enormous economic clout, have become a new political class and ultimately might not care who wins the elections. Regardless of whether or not Benazir Bhutto returns to triumph at the polls, it is the military who will remain in power.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Americans And Muslims

Poll: Americans Are Mixed on U.S. Muslims

The latest NEWSWEEK Poll paints a complicated portrait of attitudes toward America's Muslims. By Brian Braiker. July 20, 2007

Americans are largely accepting of their fellow citizens who are Muslims, but remain worried about radicals inside the United States, according to a new NEWSWEEK Poll—the first the magazine has conducted on attitudes toward Islamic Americans. Forty percent of those surveyed believe Muslims in the United States are as loyal to the U.S. as they are to Islam. (Thirty-two percent believe American Muslims are less loyal to the U.S.) But close to half (46 percent) of Americans say this country allows too many immigrants to come here from Muslim countries.

A solid majority of Americans (63 percent) believe most Muslims in this country do not condone violence, and 40 percent tend to believe the Qur'an itself does not condone violence (28 percent feel it does). But 41 percent of Americans feel Muslim culture glorifies suicide.

Most Americans surveyed (52 percent) view Muslims who live here as more peaceable than those living outside the United States. (Only 7 percent think Muslims here are less peaceable.) Still, there is a high level of concern among Americans about Islamic radicals inside the United States. A majority of Americans report being either "somewhat" (38 percent) or "very worried" (16 percent) about radicals within the American Muslim community.


The concern over radicalism seems to translate into some support for FBI wiretapping of mosques. Roughly half (52 percent) of the poll’s respondents favor this kind of surveillance. The same number rejects the notion that Muslim Americans are unfairly singled out or profiled by law enforcement, while more than a third (38 percent) do think Muslims are unfairly targeted. Yet if a 9/11-style terrorist attack were to occur again, only 25 percent of Americans would support mass detentions of U.S. Muslims; a solid majority (60 percent) would oppose such detentions.

There are between 3 million and 6 million Muslims living in the United States. More than a third of adult Americans (36 percent) say they personally know a Muslim living in the United States. Fifty-two percent of those surveyed are aware that most Muslims in this country are immigrants; 19 percent believe most are converts born on U.S. soil. Nearly two thirds (64 percent) say they would have no objection to a son or daughter dating a Muslim, and slightly more (69 percent) think Muslim students should be allowed to wear headscarves in class (23 percent think they should not).

Americans are split on whether they would vote for a qualified Muslim for political office (45 percent would, and the same amount would not). Younger Americans tend to be more likely to vote for a Muslim candidate. More than half (57 percent) of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 say they would cast their ballot for a qualified Muslim—a number that dips to 44 percent for the 40-59 crowd and drops to 32 percent among Americans 60 and older.

The NEWSWEEK Poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International on July 11-12. Telephone interviews were conducted with 1,003 adults, age 18 and older; the overall margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. The margin of error for questions asked only of Democrats and Democratic leaners is plus or minus 6 percentage points; for Republicans and GOP leaners, 7 percentage points.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Amina's Judge Is Back In Chair

Amina sounded very upset and down over the phone on that fateful day, March 9. I had asked her how did it go in the court for her husband, Masood Janjua, and all those other missing Pakistanis whose cause she had taken on her slender shoulders and was fighting an uphill fight in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. She told me that she no more had a judge to listen to her case because Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had been sacked by General Musharraf.

After hearing the news this morning that Justice Chaudhry has been reinstated by a 13-member bench of the Supreme Court which threw out the government's accusations against him, I called her and found her ecstatic and besides herself.

Her judge is back and she thinks he can bring her husband back. She has been waiting for him since July 30, 2005 when he went missing. She believes and has heard from those who have seen him in detention that he is Pakistani intelligence agencies' illegal custody.

In Justice Chaudhry's absence the case of missing Pakistanis was being heard by two judges of the Supreme Court but it was moving with the pace of a tired lethagic snail.

“He was very fatherly,” she Told the New York Times, recalling a hearing on March 8 before Mr. Chaudhry. “I was insisting hard. I was in tears. He said: ‘Be comforted. We are using every channel, and every person is going to be released, and we are going to continue the hearings until the last person is released.’ ” She added: “On March 8, he was speaking like this. The very next day, he was not in his chair.”

Now he is back in chair. She believes he will push harder for her husband and other 'disappeared' Pakistanis' release. I hope her wish is fulfilled by him.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Amina Janjua Embodies Cause of Disappeared


Pakistani Wife Embodies Cause of ‘Disappeared’: The New York Times Coverage of Amina Masood Janjua

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Sitting in the sparsely furnished office of her missing husband, Amina Masood Janjua counted the calls on a recent day from Pakistanis who have suffered a fate similar to hers. More and more are coming forward, she says, to report that their husbands, brothers or sons have disappeared under the rule of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

“It used to be two cases every week,” she said. “Today, there were three. The numbers are incredible. I get cases when I’m driving. I have three diaries full of names.”

She and Pakistani human rights groups say that those who are missing have disappeared into the hands of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services since 2001. The total could be more than 400, they say.

While American intelligence officials say that General Musharraf has not done enough to crack down on militants in the country, human rights groups here assert that Pakistan’s security services have been sweeping up civilians and holding them incommunicado without charges since 9/11, when the government forged an alliance with the United States to fight terrorists.

They say the Bush administration has pushed the government to arrest people who are overtly religious or show an interest in radical Islamic thought. Most of the men who are reported missing wore full beards, a sign of religiosity.

The movement to free the missing men gathered momentum in October when Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, decided to take up the cases. His boldness may have contributed to the decision by General Musharraf to suspend him on March 9.

But Mr. Chaudhry’s determination to challenge that decision by appealing to the Supreme Court and holding a series of rallies over the last few months has weakened the president and left other Pakistanis less fearful of standing up to the government. He has become the focus of a growing popular movement to restore civilian rule even as General Musharraf also comes under increasing pressure from radical Islamists.

That popular outpouring has given momentum to Defense of Human Rights, a group founded by Mrs. Janjua, and the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who are trying to locate and free the missing men.

Every two weeks in crowded sessions of the Supreme Court here, judges listen to the pleadings of women demanding to know the whereabouts of their husbands and sons and brothers, who they believe are locked up in government jails and safe houses.

Security officers, dressed in pressed khakis and black berets, are regularly dragged before the bench and asked to explain where the men — known here as the “disappeared” — are being held.

“At least tell me whether my husband is alive,” Mrs. Janjua pleaded at a recent Supreme Court hearing here in Islamabad.

The officers professed to have no inkling of the whereabouts of Masood Ahmed Janjua, 45, whose slightly smiling portrait Mrs. Janjua has held aloft outside government buildings for nearly two years.

One mother, Syeda Nargis, a diminutive woman swathed in black, travels four hours by bus from Lahore to the capital to attend the court hearings. It is a year since she waited at the Islamabad airport to greet her son upon his arrival from Dubai.

“He landed at 7 p.m.; I stayed until 1 a.m.,” she recalled, a color poster of her son Syed Imran Naqvi, 31, dressed in a tartan shirt, blazer and trim beard, clutched in her hands. “They said, ‘Maybe he will come after two or three hours.’ Now it is 12 months, and nothing has happened.”

Her son, a software engineer, was her main source of income, she said. “We spent so much money for him to be an engineer, not to go to jail,” she said. “Musharraf should tell us the reason, what is the problem?”

Asked specifically about the cases of the 400, a senior Pakistani government official said many of the people on the list had “religious links” with Afghanistan and had joined “militant organizations” there.

The official, Javed Iqbal Cheema, the director general of the National Crisis Management cell at the Ministry of Interior, said, specifically, that Mr. Janjua was close to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and was not in the Pakistani government’s custody.

Mrs. Janjua denies that assertion, saying that her husband was close to Tablighi Jamaat, a large Muslim organization involved in proselytizing whose membership includes former government officials. That group is also active in Britain, where some authorities contend that it serves as a conveyor belt for extremists.

Some of those who have been released by the government have been tortured, and their experiences have been sparingly reported. But for the most part they remain too afraid to describe publicly what was done to them, the leaders of the groups say.

About 60 of the detained have been released but as they have been freed others have been jailed, keeping the number of the missing at a fairly constant 400 since the beginning of the year, said Mrs. Janjua and the secretary general of the Human Rights Commission, Iqbal Haider.

The list of 400 does not include many more people, “perhaps thousands,” who have been arrested in Baluchistan and kept secretly for supporting the separatist movement in that province, said Mr. Haider, a former minister of justice in the government of Benazir Bhutto.

The most recent United States State Department human rights report on Pakistan said its human rights record “remained poor,” though that has not diminished the Bush administration’s support for the Musharraf government.

Among the methods of abuse used against people in custody, the report said, were “beating, burning with cigarettes, whipping the soles of the feet, prolonged isolation, electric shock, denial of food or sleep, hanging upside down, use of electric shocks and forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters.”

A former officer in the Pakistani Air Force, Khalid Khawaja, 56, who is well known for his good relations with a number of Islamic radical groups, was released from the Rawilipindi jail in late June after six months in custody.

Mr. Khawaja, a force behind Defense of Human Rights, said he was arrested and blindfolded in January, then shuffled around several prisons, including a new maximum-security one in Faisalbad. He was held in solitary confinement for long periods and denied medicine, he said.

His wife, Shamama Malik, turned up at every demonstration, and his son worked the phones to win his father’s freedom. “The Americans are getting all the people with religious motivation and taking them away,” Mr. Khawaja said angrily in an interview at his home the morning after his release.

Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, the lawyer who has led the effort in the Supreme Court for the Defense of Human Rights, said the government had three laws, including the Security of Pakistan Act, under which it could detain people for specific periods. But none of them had been applied in the cases he was handling, he said.

“Even if some of the missing persons have some link with Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Siddiqui said, “they have to be treated in accordance with the law.”

So far, the Supreme Court seems to agree. Even with the chief justice’s suspension, the other justices have not shied away from hearing the cases, though Mrs. Janjua says she is convinced that Mr. Chaudhry’s determination to do so led to General Musharraf’s attempt to oust him.

“He was very fatherly,” she said, recalling a hearing on March 8 before Mr. Chaudhry. “I was insisting hard. I was in tears. He said: ‘Be comforted. We are using every channel, and every person is going to be released, and we are going to continue the hearings until the last person is released.’ ”

She added: “On March 8, he was speaking like this. The very next day, he was not in his chair.”

When 118 Is Equal To 248

See if you have read these words before? Many times. Right?Musharraf Government says it has found 118 missing persons and the Supreme Court seeks separate reports on each case.

How many time do the judges have to repeat this tiring, stale rhetoric to realize that we know what is going on?

I ask the to stop playing this game of giving hope to the families of the disappeared Pakistanis and throw your hands like sons of men and admit that the odds are to high for you to pull it off.

Look at this news piece: "The government on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that five more missing people had been traced and four of them sent home. It said 118 out of a total of 285 missing persons had been traced so far".

Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Tariq Khokhar told the court that Zafar Yasin, Naeem Noor Khan, Luqman and Abid Raza had been recently found and sent home, adding that Alim Nasir was in custody of a political agent [?] in DI Khan.

Luqman’s brother-in-law contradicted the DAG’s claim, saying Luqman had not reached his home yet. The SC bench, consisting of Justices Javed Iqbal and Falak Sher, directed the DAG to recheck the record.

Can you imagine: check the record!

The wife of Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI official claimed police arrested her husband without any warrant, adding that he was not linked with Lal Masjid.

Deputy Commissioner (DC) Muhammad Ali said Khawaja was booked in a police case. The court directed the DC to submit details of the case with it in a week.

How many weeks are in a judicial week?

The bench also took notice of the arrest of Hafiz Abdul Basit on allegation of his involvement in the ‘Muaharraf attack case’ and directed the authorities to release him because he was not named in the list of convicted people and no FIR was registered against him.

Would they? No way.

Father of recently traced Qari Obaidullah told the bench that he had met his son in CMH Rawalpindi, adding that the man’s weight had reduced from 72-kilogrammes to 42-kilogrammes. The bench summoned a complete record of medical treatment of Obaidullah from the CMH. The DAG, meanwhile, said missing Attiqur Rehman was not held by any intelligence agencies.

SP Faislabad told the court that an FIR for the disappearance of Atif Javed was lodged on August 4, 2005. The court called for a complete record of Javed’s case.

Human rights activist Asma Jahangir appeared before the court to plead the constitutional petition of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). She said only 78 out of 173 missing people listed by the HRCP had been traced thus far. The bench expressed anger [ha!]over the slow process of recovery of the missing people.

Advocate Habibur Rehman pleaded a constitutional petition for 28 missing Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal men. Justice Falak Sher said four governments had expired since the case began, asking the lawyer why it was not brought into court earlier. “You did not bother to lodge FIR of these missing people. Today, if a person tries to move Supreme Court regarding the killings in riots during 1947, then how we would help him,” asked Justice Falak Sher.

The counsel submitted that the persons mentioned in his petition disappeared between 1992 and 1996. Justice Javed Iqbal asked him to provide complete details of the missing people within a month.

Amna Masud Janjua, coordinator of the families of missing people, submitted that the court must pass an order to expedite the process of recovery. The bench directed the authorities to give a separate progress report on each missing person within 10 days otherwise action would be taken against them. The hearing was adjourned till August 6.

August 6 is not far. Let us see what the judges come up on that date.

Now look at the following news piece: "Deputy Attorney General Tariq Mahmood Khokar on Wednesday told a two-member bench of the Supreme Court that five of . the remaining 248 missing persons had been traced and released. Is it 118 or 248?

Sunday, July 15, 2007

End or Beginning?

By first encouraging, for months, his old buddies and veterans of Afghanistan Jihad in Lal Masjid, and then invading them only when China came down hard on him for the kidnapping of its citizens by the militants, Musharraf might have been able to convince the White House that he was the man US still needed to control extremism in Pakistan. He might also have gotten some more time in power. But I don't believe he himself is convinced that, without pushing his army in the midst of a low-intensity civil war, he can eliminate the scourge his army had created, supported, and trained at the behest of USA, for two decades starting at the end of seventies.

The militants have grown too strong for him, or for the USA for that matter. Look what is going on:

Militants in pamphlets distributed in Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan region, say they have ended their ten months long truce with the government and blamed the government for breaking the agreement. Pakistan deployed thousands of troops in Swat area, fearing "holy war" after the storming of the militant Red Mosque last week.

More than 60 Pakistanis, including soldiers and police recruits, have been killed in three attacks in the past two days. At least 11 Pakistani soldiers were killed in Swat when two suicide bombers rammed explosive laden cars into a convoy. At the same time a roadside bomb also went off. Another 40 were injured in the attack near the town of Matta.

In the city of Dera Ismail Khan at least 26 people died and more than 30 were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up among young men waiting to take a police recruitment test at a police recruitment centre.

On Saturday, a suicide attack on an army convoy near the village of Daznary, near Miranshah, killed 24 and wounded at least 30.

Previously 102 people died in the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) siege including 11 soldiers.

If Musharraf thinks that by killing a hundred or so people in the mess called Lal Masjid Incident he is moving in the right direction then he is in for a shock. I hope I am wrong but I don't believe it is the end. I am afraid it is the beginning. The militants of Lal Masjid have clearly struck a chord with the conservative segments of the society because they tapped into a strong and seething sense of injustice and inequality. They have shown by their example that when the state fails to take action then people themselves can take action but they have to be very strong to do so. People can see the government system does not work. It is corrupt and people are sick and tired of it.

The worst example was set by Musharraf himself when he seized power by force. He has marginalized moderate political parties and has created a political vacuum that needs to filled. And that is being filled by religious extremists. He does not seem to understand or his masters who push him in that direction are too powerful for him to let him understand that there cannot be no a military solution to Pakistan's problems.

More and more Pakistanis will be drawn to the mindset of power as long as long as a general, whose only training is in using force, is sitting in the president's chair.

Bush's Lawless Detainee Policies

US Senate is finally going to consider a bill that would restore to the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay the right to challenge their detention in court. But Bush administration is looking for a legislation that would permit the long-term detention of foreigners on American soil without charges or appeal, basically just changing the address of Guantanamo Bay. But "the biggest challenge", as Defense Secretary Gates said, "is finding a statutory basis for holding prisoners who should never be released and who may or may not be able to be put on trial.”

Read the New York Times editorial on this issue published: July 15, 2007

Terrorism and the Law: In Washington, a Need to Right Wrongs


Congress and President Bush are engaged in a profound debate over what the founding fathers intended when they divided the powers to declare and conduct war between two co-equal branches of government. But on one thing, the Constitution is clear: Congress makes the rules on prisoners.

At least that is what it says in Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to “make rules concerning captures on land and water.” And it is good that Congress seems finally ready to get back on the job. This week, the Senate will consider a bill that would restore to the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay the right to challenge their detention in court.

The Senate and then the House must pass the bill with veto-proof majorities. But that is only a start. The White House and its Republican allies have managed to delay consideration of bills that would finally shut the prison at Guantánamo Bay and begin undoing the damage wrought by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. That national disgrace gave legal cover to secret prisons, kangaroo courts and the indefinite detention of prisoners without charges in a camp outside the United States.

Shutting Guantánamo Bay will not be easy — and it will not be enough. Of about 375 inmates, the administration says only about 80 can be charged under the Military Commissions Act. Along with Guantánamo the entire law needs to be scrapped. Prisoners against whom there is actual evidence of crimes should be tried either in military or federal courts. Mounting an effective prosecution may be hard, since these prisoners were held for years without charges and some were tortured. But it is up to the administration’s lawyers — who helped Mr. Bush create the problem by allowing indefinite detention and torture to begin with — to deal with it.

Human rights groups say there are about 30 inmates who should be released but have legitimate fear of persecution or torture if sent home. The administration reportedly has already sent back some vulnerable prisoners, after obtaining what it must know are worthless assurances of their safety. Congress should require notice of such transfers, real guarantees of protection for released prisoners, and a review of the deal by outside judicial authority.

That leaves around 265 prisoners who have been held for years in violation of American and international law because Mr. Bush decided they were illegal enemy combatants — even though most were captured while fighting the invasion of Afghanistan. Under pressure from the courts, the administration created Combatant Status Review Tribunals to rubber-stamp that designation. These tribunals must be disbanded and their rulings reviewed by courts. Inmates who are not security risks should be released, and the others held under normal articles of war.

President Bush, of course, wants Congress to simply endorse his arrogation of power. The Times reported recently that the White House is seeking support for legislation that would permit the long-term detention of foreigners on American soil without charges or appeal, just on Mr. Bush’s say-so. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “the biggest challenge is finding a statutory basis for holding prisoners who should never be released and who may or may not be able to be put on trial.”

Challenge? The very idea is anathema to American democracy. Congress did harm enough by tolerating Mr. Bush’s lawless detainee policies, and then by passing the Military Commissions Act. Giving the president a dictator’s power to select people for detention without charges on American soil would be an utter betrayal of their oath to support and defend the Constitution, and of the founders’ vision of America.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Red (Mosque) Herring

Musharraf always seems eager to present his credentials as an "enlightened moderate" and as the only choice the west has in Pakistan to stem the growing tide of extremism. The west has bought this line of argument in its totality, without any questions asked.

At the same time he does whatever he can to keep his cronies in various places stoking the fires of extremism according to his needs, a la carte. To pay back he keeps them on payroll and in the news.

He has been doing it successfully in Islamabad for the last six months with the help of two brothers of the Red Mosque. If you ask him why he is not eliminating this threat to the writ of the state he says there are little girls and boys there and he is not cruel, notwithstanding he has incinerated scores of little boys in other madrassas in the North Western Frontier Province and in the tribal areas.

The other excuse he gives is that there are also present in the Red Mosque militants linked with Al-Qaida. It should make the elimination more urgent and not less.

The real reason he keeps these pseudo mujahideen in the news is that these stage-managed provocations help him scare the west into keeping him in power and billions of dollars coming.

If he is so enlighted a moderate as he claims to be then why was he not bothered by the kidnappings of women and the harassing of businesses at the hands of Red Mosque students for months until they bit more than they could chew by kidnapping seven Chinese?

Chinese came down hard on him and he in turn came down hard on his red herring. The timing also suited him fine as the Chief Justice movement as well as All Parties Conference in London got buried in his botched and prolonged operation in Islamabad.

The way the operation is being conducted shows poor planning and execution. 24 people have been killed so far in 5 days. The inhabitants of two neigborhood of Islamabad have virtually become hostages in their houses without water, electricity, gas and other provisions. They cannot come out of their houses because curfew is imposed. They cannot go onto their roofs and cannot open their windows because they could get killed with stray bullets. They have to stay in their rooms in this hot weather. They don't know when their ordeal is going to end.

The operation is also an embarrassment for a professional army. I hope our enemies are not watching otherwise the professionalism, discipline and efficiency of our armed forces will be amply exposed and will threaten our national security.

The question is who is Musharraf helping by blocking the way of the mainstream political parties' way into free, fair and transparent election by stacking his cards while giving free hand to his extremist cronies, including MQM?

Not Pakistan!

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Justice Delayed

The Supreme Court justices who are hering missing persons' case are going through all the required motions to make us, all Pakistanis, believe that they are trying very hard to despense justice. But if look at the pace at which the wheels of justice are grinding there is no doubt left in any mind that they are helpless in the face of a dictatorship that is paying their salaries and other perks. There is only so much they can, or want to, do.

They try to give solace to disgruntled families of the kidnapped persons. They try to give warnings to the secretaries of defence and interior departments without putting any teeth in their warnings. They threaten them with dire consequences without daring to do so.

After a session of huffing and puffing they adjourn teir proceeding for another month or half while families cry their eyes and pull their hairs out for their loved ones who have gone missing for months and years on end. Nobody tells them where the missing people are. They are dead or alive. They are being tortured or have been sold into captivity in other countries where they sit in dark dungeons.

Once again the The Supreme Court on Monday has "directed" defence and interior secretaries to file concise statements explaining as to why they had not complied with the court directives in the case of another detainee, Imran Munir.

Justice Javed Iqbal, who was prompt in taking oath of Chief Justice when Musharraf had sached Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 9, is moving with a snail's pace to dispense justice. In its June 6 proceeding he had directed the government to arrange a meeting of legal counsel of Mr Abdul Mujeeb Pirzada with Imran Munir, a civilian, who was sentenced to eight-year imprisonment over charges of espionage by army's field general court martial (FGCM).

Obviously the government did not want to comply with Sureme Court's orders so no such meeting was arranged. On June 20, the court summoned Interior Secretary Kamal Shah and Defence Secretary Kamran Rasool in the court. The justices were told about the non-implementation of its order. The justices served notices on the two federal secretaries.

During the hearing on Monday, another missing person, Imran Ali Naqvi's distraught mother submitted that she had not been given a single chance so far to meet her son Imran Ali Naqvi, who is in state custody for the last one year. On her complaint, Justice Javed Iqbal took another "serious notice" and asked the Deputy Attorney General to explain under which law meetings with the detene by their relatives were being denied, saying that it was the "legal right" of the relatives and defense attorney "to meet detenues".

The bench adjourned the case till July 19 when the state attorney has been asked to submit medical report of Imran Munir.

After the hearing, father of Imran Munir, Dr Munir Ahmed, a dentist in Canada, told reporters that if he did not get justice in Pakistani courts then he would take his son's case to international forum.

Justice Javed Iqbal, who had previously threatened the secretaries with contempt of court in case of non-compliance of his orders, said that the court has no intention to initiate contempt proceedings against them even though they had failed to comply with court's direct orders. Justices could only ask the DAG as to “why the order of the court has been flouted by both the secretaries".

Justice has been delayed at least until July 19. The justices must be familiar with the adage: Justice delayed is justice denied.