Pakistan’s blasphemy laws make it a crime to defile the Quran or to defame Prophet Mohammad, punishable by life imprisonment and death respectively. But the laws have been roundly criticised by civil rights groups as appropriate safeguards against misuse as they have become notorious for being used to settle petty private disputes.

Religious minorities have been especially vulnerable to the blasphemy laws with around half of all charges being brought against them — even though a mere 3 per cent of Pakistan’s population of Pakistan is non-Muslim.

Hundreds of blasphemy cases have been brought against minorities in Pakistan in the last 26 years. One of those was against Asia Bibi, a poor farm worker from rural Punjab sentenced to death for apparently defaming the Prophet after some Muslim co-workers refused to drink water with her because she is Christian. Asia’s case came to prominence globally when it was highlighted by the international media.

In Pakistan Salmaan Taseer was the most senior political figure to publicly appeal for Asia Bibi to be released and for the blasphemy law to be reformed. Taseer received almost daily death threats from religious zealots for his stand, but few could have predicted that one of his security guards would gun him down at close range. Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s murderer, freely admits to killing the late governor because of his criticism of the blasphemy law.

Most disturbing of all, it appears Qadri told other members of Taseer’s security detail about his plan, and they allowed him to shoot Taseer 27 times before dropping his weapon and surrendering.

Normally fractured Islamist groups have found common cause in supporting the murder of Taseer, the liberal governor of Punjab who was critical of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws — and their support is echoed by the Taliban. This unusual coalition has helped silence the already restricted debate on the blasphemy laws in Pakistan.

The murder of a high profile politician by a member of his own security detail has shaken the country in several significant ways.

Nothing has been more ominous than the way it has united Pakistan’s generally fractious Islamic groups. Although religious groups have consistently supported the blasphemy laws in their current form, in recent years rival Muslim sects have been in increasingly violent conflict with each other, conflict what has been punctuated by the murder of leading Wahabi and Sufi clerics whose deaths are blamed by both camps on each other’s followers. It is therefore notable that these otherwise warring groups united to endorse the murder of Taseer.

Their support for the blasphemy laws is shared by the Taliban. This confirms and indeed demonstrates an alarming nexus between the Taliban insurgency Pakistan is fighting along the border with Afghanistan and mainstream religious opinion in urban centres like Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

As Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, co-Chair of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and son of Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, railed against the murderer of in London after the murder, members of the Pakistan Taliban insurgency sent out an ominous warning.

“We appreciate Mumtaz Qadri’s efforts in killing the blasphemer Taseer. The Taliban are also after other secular politicians and no one will be left, they will be killed the way Taseer was killed,” said Mullah Noor Alam, a middle-ranking Taliban commander currently in North Waziristan when he spoke exclusively to New Matilda. Alam said those were his personal views as well as those of the insurgency.

Such views are not isolated to the Taliban. A week after Taseer’s murder on 4 January, tens of thousands gathered in Karachi to support Mumtaz Qadri and similar rallies occurred in most major cities including one in Lahore this week that garnered 40,000 people. Alam’s comments were echoed by many who attended the Karachi rally. “Whoever blasphemes will face the same fate as Salmaan Taseer,” poor labourer Abdul Rehman told New Matilda.

Facebook fanpages and other websites proliferated in the wake of Taseer’s murder, extolling the virtue of Qadri as a “ghazi” or warrior of Islam and defender of the Prophet. Although most of the Facebook sites have been taken down, a frenzy of apparent celebration has continued to sweep through Pakistan, including in Qadri’s hometown and Army headquarters Rawalpindi. The celebration is fed by conservative TVcommentators and a well organised religious lobby that can arrange public gatherings on short notice.

These sudden developments suggest that the battle against religious extremism in Pakistan is beyond the scope of military planners — whether in Rawalpindi or in international capitals.  Qadri openly admitted to killing Taseer but although he has already been brought before the federal Anti-Terrorism Court his trial has yet to commence. Pakistan’s judiciary has an opportunity to challenge self-proclaimed defenders of the faith from continuing down the spiral toward lawlessness by taking the law into their own hands.

But if anything Pakistan’s senior courts have shown a sympathy towards the Islamists, as several high profile recent developments demonstrate.

In November the Lahore High Court took the unprecedented and apparently unconstitutional step of barring Pakistan President Zardari from pardoning Asia Bibi until it hears an appeal against a sentence.That does not appear likely for some time given passions surrounding her case and the genuine fear that someone might try to kill her if she appears before the court.

During hearings into a recent constitutional amendment last year, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry of Pakistan’s Supreme Court said Islam and not the elected parliament was the highest authority in the land. Another judge on that bench wondered whether Pakistan could afford “afford to follow western parliaments which have decided in favour of gay marriages.” Both statements played to the strong Islamist sentiment here that liberal forces and greater secularity are a threat to Pakistan’s Islamic identity, a key argument of those who supported the murder of Taseer.

Along with the PPP’s Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, individual members of the Urdu-speaking community’s Muttahida Quami Movement and the ethnic Pashtun Awami National Party, the other major secular political parties in the country, have quietly condemned Taseer’s murder. But none of these parties have officially affirmed their support for reforming the blasphemy laws at the centre of the crisis.
The PPP-led federal government has gone even further to say it will defend the current laws from any reforms.

Civil society groups inside Pakistan have championed the cause with a slew of anti-blasphemy law rallies, websites and court petitions allowing the voices of moderate Pakistanis to be heard. These rallies were dwarfed by those organised in support of Mumtaz Qadri. Given the danger of openly opposing Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws these days — and how few political supporters there are for blasphemy law reform aside from former Information Minister Sherry Rehman and Bilawal Zardari Bhutto — such displays are a brave show of force. Some civil society groups even lodged complaints with police and the Supreme Court against local preachers for inciting the murder of Asia Bibi and Sherry Rehman. Still, the courts have an unreliable record in prosecuting those who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam.

And alone among mainstream Pakistani religious leaders, Javed Ahmed Ghamadi has called for the blasphemy laws to be repealed, arguing that they have no basis in Islamic law. But Ghamadi has lived in Malaysia since last year, when police discovered a plot to assassinate him. Such is the stifling environment in Pakistan now that even reasoned debate can have deadly consequences — and the implications of this local blasphemy debate in the wider region remain to be seen.

The Taliban Has No Plan B

By Mustafa Qadri

The Taliban is stepping up its violent attacks but ordinary Pakistanis have had enough and the organisation is losing popular support, reports Mustafa Qadri from near the Swat valley

This week, the Taliban finally responded to the massive army operation in the Swat valley with a string of bombings in Peshawar, Lahore and the tribal district of Dera Ismail Khan. As shocking as they were, however, the attacks were as predictably violent as all the others that have rocked Pakistan almost weekly for the past several years. With a key Taliban base about to be lost in Pakistan’s north-west, the recent attacks may well represent the beginning of a new wave of violence.

Four bombings rocked the troubled North West Frontier Province yesterday, three of those were in the markets of Peshawar where book, music and clothes shop owners have, since at least last year, been routinely threatened with bomb attacks by the Taliban for trading in “un-Islamic” goods.

Only a day earlier a gun and bomb attack in central Lahore killed at least 30 and injured close to 300 more. Among the dead were seven personnel of the powerful Inter Services Intelligence, including an officer. Rescue workers are continuing to unearth bodies from the rubble.

Although the ISI was the ostensible target in Lahore, the broader aim appears to have been to show that the Taliban is still a force to be reckoned with.

Pakistan’s many news channels were flooded with images of misery late Thursday evening. Along with the now familiar sight of entire mountain communities living in camps for displaced people, there were the pictures of the bloodied, injured survivors of Lahore and Peshawar.

Taliban spokesperson Hakimullah Mehsud said the Lahore attack was in response to “the innocent people killed [by the army] in Swat”. It was an obvious appeal to the estimated 2.5 million made homeless by the war with the Pakistan army in the tribal areas. If ethnic Pakhtuns in the tribal areas have to suffer, so the reasoning goes, so too should Punjabis who make up the bulk of the army.

These latest attacks are a sign of the Taliban’s weakness, not its strength. That it can only respond with violence — mostly against poor Muslims — says much about the Taliban’s long term vision and the veracity of its claims to be a vanguard for true Islam.

This week I have been travelling through displaced person camps just below the war zone in the Swat valley, which stretch all the way to Peshawar. Almost all the people I met spoke of their deep hatred for the Taliban. They were everyday people — mothers, bureaucrats, tradesmen and school kids — yet all spoke with a common purpose.

“If the war stopped tomorrow, I would go back home the very next day,” said Mohammad Yayha from the village of Kokari, near the main Swat city of Mingora where the army is currently engaged in bloody street battles with the Taliban.

Many said that the Taliban has been deliberately hiding among civilians, particularly in their villages, effectively turning them into human shields. They also noted the Taliban’s continuation of hostilities in outlying regions of Swat and the neighbouring areas of Dir and Buner after a peace deal was tenuously reached in February, well before the current operation commenced.

Although there is also anger at the army, it has — along with the Pakistan Government and numerous NGOs — been providing tents and supplies for the approximately 20 per cent of the displaced people who are believed to be living in the camps. The remaining 80 per cent have sought refuge among family, friends and community organisations in other parts of the country. Throughout the country, Pakistanis have opened their hearts and wallets to these people, despite attempts by some in Karachi to block the displaced from entering the city.

In a refuge on the outskirts of Peshawar, just seven kilometres from Taliban-controlled Dera Adam Khel, they sang ancient Pakhtun poems about wine and beautiful dancing girls. It was a far cry from the vision of Pakistan the Taliban promises to create.

Yet, as with the immediate future of stability in this country, many remain uncertain about whom they should be blaming for all this violence. One source of this uncertainty is continual denial about home grown militancy. Major religious parties like Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islami refuse to even use the word Taliban. And army spokesperson General Athar Abbas, Pakistan’s own version of a glib Pentagon spokesperson who issues daily press statements promising the enemy will soon be vanquished, has generally preferred to talk of “miscreants” rather than use the T word.

Even rank-and-file soldiers are uncertain about the enemy they are facing. One junior officer said he did not believe the Taliban were behind atrocities like the gruesome murder of captured army personnel.

The people of Swat I spoke to didn’t seem to have such misgivings. Under the banner of “Aman Tehreek” or Peace Movement, ordinary villagers, clerics and local NGOs from Swat have joined forces to demand a cohesive, long term strategy for defeating the Taliban and bringing justice, education and employment to Swat.

“We are inspired by our great leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan,” says Swat school teacher and activist Ziauddin Yusufzai in reference to the respected 20th century Pakhtun leader who is often described as the region’s Mahatma Gandhi.

“The movement was formed to denounce the three [forms of terrorism] — Taliban, sectarianism, and kidnappings [for ransom],” says NGO worker Fazal Maula.

“The army must eliminate the miscreants,” he adds, but only through carefully targeted operations that cause a minimum of harm to civilians. The group has called on authorities to be more responsible in its military campaign and develop a detailed program for reconstruction. With its emerald mines, lumber industry and scenic beauty, Aman Tehreek believes Swat could quickly be reinvigorated.

Appeals for donations are being made on television and in markets across Pakistan. The clear signal is that, for the first time, Pakistanis are rallying with the Government and against the Taliban’s violent crusade.

http://newmatilda.com/2009/05/29/taliban-has-no-plan-b

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-taliban-has-no-plan-b/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/isolating-the-taliban/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/isolating-the-taliban/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 09:42:46 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=517

Isolating the Taliban

Violence in Pakistan can only be tackled if the state listens to devastated communities and recognises the Taliban threat

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 18.30 BST

It was really only a matter of time before we would see this. A day after a bomb ripped through central Lahore, three explosions rocked Peshawar – two at the famous storytellers’ market, and another near the city’s railway station, destroying significant amounts of property, lives and livelihoods. It is too early to know what motivated these latest attacks in Peshawar. Like so much of the North-West Frontier Province, however, Peshawar businesses, particularly book music shops and women’s clothing stores, have been heavily hit, often after being told to shut for being unIslamic.

The motivation in Lahore appears to be clearer. Yesterday’s suicide gun and bomb attack killed around 30 people and injured more than 200 in Lahore. Among the dead were seven personnel of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, including one of its officers. The ISI may have been the ostensible target, but more than that, the aim was to prove that the Taliban are still relevant.

The images on Pakistan’s copious news networks of those fleeing the fighting in the Swat valley were joined by those of the pained faces of mourners in Lahore and Peshawar raising their hands to the heavens. The heavens are often invoked in this Pakistan’s latest internal conflict, but the machinations are tragically all too worldly.

When Taliban spokesman Hakimullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the Lahore attack, he said it was in response to “the innocent people killed [by the army] in Swat”. It was an obvious appeal to the now 2.5 million made homeless by the war with the Pakistan army in the tribal areas. If ethnic Pashtuns in the tribal areas have to suffer, so the reasoning goes, so too should Punjabis who make up the bulk of the army.

That it can only respond through violence, and even that against fellow, mostly poor, Muslims, says much about the Taliban’s long-term vision and the veracity of their claims to be a vanguard for true Islam.

In short, as Basim Usmani astutely notes, these latest attacks are a sign of the Taliban’s weakness, not their strength. That can only mean more, not less, bombings and violence.

Like a gambler once enriched on the craps tables, the Taliban’s political capital is as spent as its actions have been morally bankrupt.

As I travelled through displaced person camps to the south and east of Swat, in Mardan, Jalallah and Peshawar, people spoke of their deep hatred for the Taliban. I spoke to around a hundred people from diverse backgrounds in four camps – to school kids, teachers, mothers, farmers, and small business owners. Many said that the Taliban have been deliberately hiding among civilians, particularly in their villages, effectively turning them into human shields. They also noted the Taliban’s continuation of hostilities in outlying regions of Swat and the neighbouring areas of Dir and Buner after a peace deal was tenuously reached in February, well before the current army operation commenced.

There is anger at the army too, but it has, along with the Pakistan government and NGOs too numerous to count, at least provided tents and supplies for some of the displaced – only 20% in all according to some estimates, but a significant number nevertheless. And while the hot, miserable conditions of the IDP camps cannot be overemphasised, there is an ever-growing national effort at rehabilitation.

The spectre of sectarianism is still in the air, particularly in Karachi where unions and political parties dominated by the Urdu-speaking community blocked displaced Pashtuns from entering the city. But that move looks to have turned into a political disaster for those trying to paint Pakistan’s Pashtun community as synonymous with extremism and the Taliban. The impression among the displaced could not have been more different.

In a camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, just 7km from Taliban-controlled Dera Adam Khel, they sang ancient Pashtun poems about wine and beautiful dancing girls. It was a far cry from the vision of Pakistan the Taliban promise to create.

Yet, as with the immediate future of stability in this country, many remain uncertain about whom they should be blaming for all this violence. One source of this uncertainty is continual denial about home-grown militancy. Major religious parties like Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islami refuse to even use the word Taliban. And army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas, our own version of a glib Pentagon spokesman, who issues daily press statements promising the enemy will soon be vanquished, has generally preferred to talk of “miscreants” rather than use the “T” word.

Even rank and file soldiers, whom I met quietly this week, earnestly proclaim that the culprits could not be the Taliban.

There aren’t as many concerns about the nomenclature among the displaced. Under the banner of “Aman Tehreek” or Peace Movement, ordinary villagers, clerics and local NGOs have come together demanding a cohesive, long-term strategy for defeating the Taliban.

“We are inspired by our great leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan,” says Swat school teacher and activist Ziauddin Yusufzai in reference to the respected 20th-century Pashtun leader who is often described as the region’s Mahatma Gandhi.

“The movement was formed to denounce the three [forms of terrorism] – Taliban, sectarianism, and kidnappings [for ransom],” says NGO worker Fazal Maula.

“The army must eliminate the miscreants,” he adds, but only through carefully targeted operations that do a minimum of harm to civilians. Aman Tehreek has prepared a detailed list of political and humanitarian demands that they hope will enable communities devastated by war to resist future Taliban encroachment.

Pakistani society is starting to recognise the existential threat from within. Whether the government and army can capitalise on the present mood by showing leadership and a long-term social strategy for the country remains unclear.

(This article was published online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/28/facing-up-to-the-taliban)

I haven’t had many opportunities to write recently due to the lack of internet access. It has shown just how dependent I am on the technology. In my defence, without internet, small scale writers such as I would not be able to contribute very much. The cost of constant phone calls and transport, which I do a lot of anyway, would alone be too much.

I’ve been here in Lahore since Monday now. The mood here is in marked contrast to Karachi – it is still a big city but far less populated. There is poverty, but far less overt. And there are plenty of lovely gardens and walkways. It is much hotter over here, though, and it’s been taking its toll on me a little. The friendly staff at the hotel where I’m staying must think I’m daft for walking around in the heat instead of roaming around in an air-conditioned car like other civilised people. But somehow I find you miss out on a lot if you don’t see a place face to face.

Having said that, the main mode of public travel here, apart from buses, is the rickshaw. I’ve hardly spotted any taxis. The rickshaw gives you the ability to see a lot of things close to the ground, smog and all. The Lahore rickshaws are slightly different to their Karachi brethren in that many have enclosed passenger areas. The first rickshaw I used on Tuesday even had metal doors with glass windows. The novelty of sitting in the rickshaw didn’t last long, however, because I soon discovered that the metal chassis was a veritable oven in the midday heat. I think I sweated more than I would’ve in a sauna! I arrived at an interview with a respected lawyer and President of the Pakistan Workers’ Party with trousers drenched in sweat. Thankfully, I don’t think he noticed that they were meant to be light, not dark brown.