Talibanisation is a contagious disease. Look around. Do you have a Talib friend, family member, neighbour or colleague? They need your help urgently.

Babar Sattar: Talibanisation of the mind

Last week a conservative schoolteacher in Rawalpindi hailed a cab to get to work in the morning. She wore a gown and had covered her head with a 'dupatta’. A few minutes into the journey the bearded taxi driver asked her if she was Muslim. She said she was. Then why she had not covered her head properly, he asked. She responded by explaining that she ordinarily wears a headscarf, but as she was running late that day she was unable to put it on. Such hurry could invite punishment and result in her being dispatched to the hereafter soon, he retorted. At this point she began to shake with fear and tried to reach for her cell phone to seek help. He turned back and grabbed the cell phone. As the taxi had almost reached the school campus, she insisted that she be let out. The driver obliged, but left her with a chilling message: if the female staff of the school failed to observe proper 'pardah’ they would all be sent to God sooner rather than later. Once out of the taxi, this horror-struck woman turned back to see if she could note the registration number of the taxi. The driver was still standing there watching her menacingly. She rushed into the school.

This is no isolated event. Be it warnings delivered to the medical community in NWFP to wear shalwar qameez, or edicts issued to music shops and barbers, or threats communicated to schools, or reports regarding women being harassed in bazaars and public spaces more generally, there has been a surge in vigilante action being carried out by our self-styled moral police. The worst justification for the Nizam-e-Adl regulation comes from liberals within the ANP and the PPP claiming that this legislation doesn’t set up a parallel system of justice, as it is merely procedural law adorned with Islamic nomenclature. Accepting the demand to 'enforce’ religion legitimizes the discourse of bigots and their obscurantist project of personally stepping into God’s shoes to judge fellow Muslims, taking a measure of their sins and delivering divine justice in this world on God’s behalf. The growing intolerance that our society is witnessing with mute horror is fuelled by our odious brand of hypocrisy that encourages double-speak in the name of protecting and preserving tradition, culture and religion.

The growing Talibanization of the mind that Kamila Hyat spoke about in her column this week is a real threat to our fundamental rights and liberties. Simply put it is bigotry, intolerance, obscurantism and coercion practiced in the name of religion that feeds on (a) the fear of change being ushered in by modernity, (b) confusion about the role of religion in the society, and (c) the failure of the state to provide for the basic needs of citizens, including means of subsistence the absence of which renders people desperate and a balanced education without which they lack the tools to question and resist extreme intolerant ideas. The message of the Taliban or other religious bigots can be simple and appealing to a majority of the population that is deprived of basic needs, disempowered and consequently disgruntled. The contract between the citizens and the state is not being honoured by the state and thus the system neither provides for the basic needs of a majority of the citizens nor offers them any real prospect for upward social mobility. This problem of governance is then presented by the maulvi as a consequence of lack of religion.

America, the big Satan, has mesmerized the elites of this country, explains the maulvi. These elites, as agents of the devil, have signed on to modern/western ideas that are taking our society and our country away from our religion. Our miseries are a consequence of our sins and God’s vengeance and the solution is a return to a backward lifestyle that shuns modernity. The appeal of this thesis lies in its simplicity. We are unhappy with the performance of the state and the manner in which it is leading to the creation of a predatory society and crave change. And such change is promised by the maulvi in the name of religion.

We have never candidly spoken about the desired role of religion in our country and no sensible distinction has been between the discourses on what religion is and how it should be practiced. Thus, whether or not Sharia prescribes 'pardah’ is one question, and whether the state has a right to enforce 'pardah’ or citizens have a private right to ensure that others observe 'pardah’ is a separate question. Because we don’t separate the individual right to freely practice religion from the debate on what constitutes the legitimate prescriptions of Islam, an interpretation of Sharia that favours 'pardah’ automatically ends up justifying illegal actions of private citizens coercing and harassing others to abide by an interpretation they prefer.

The Constitution of Pakistan holds out the promise of 'enabling’ citizens to order their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah. What the Constitution does is create a right and not an obligation. Except laws that regulate our collective lives as a society, that are informed by Islamic injunctions, the Constitution does not empower the state to 'enforce’ religion in the private lives of citizens. Should a Muslim choose to order his private life in accordance with his understanding of the edicts of the Quran and Sunnah, the state is under an obligation to 'facilitate’ him. And this individual right to freely practice one’s religion includes the right not to be goaded into practicing Islam in a manner that one finds disagreeable. This requires the state and the society to differentiate between propagation and intimidation. Where propagation of religion enters the realm of coercion, the right to freely practice religion becomes a casualty. Thus, the individual right to practice religion freely can only be meaningful if it protects against the type of bigotry being practiced by Sufi Mohammad in Swat or Abdul Aziz in Islamabad.

It is imperative that the distinction between virtue/vice and legality/illegality in the country be kept alive. The growth and spread of bigotry in our society is not only blurring the line between sin and crime, but is also arrogating to private citizens the ability to enforce an obscurantist moral code – a right that citizens don’t have even when it comes to enforcing the law. As aforesaid, the right to practice religion freely in one’s personal life naturally includes the right not to practice religion, just as the right to free speech includes the entitlement not to speak at all. Let people privately judge others for being good or bad Muslims if they so wish. But such judgment must not be allowed to abridge or fetter the constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties of those being judged. Irrespective of our disagreements over the content and interpretation of Sharia, all those who value the right to profess and practice religion freely can rationally agree that 'enforcing’ a certain brand of Sharia neither falls within the province of the state, nor is a private right of any citizen or a group of citizens.

Further, within the discourse on the content of Sharia, it is imperative to resist the propensity of authoritatively determining whether or not someone is Muslim. Here too, the issue of what Islam allows and disallows as understood by human agency must be distinguished from the authority to declare someone a non-Muslim or oust a Muslim from the circle of Islam. Who are we after all to appropriate to ourselves the divine right of judgment that God has reserved for the day of deliverance? The tendency to readily issue decrees denouncing the faith of fellow Muslims not only makes us more intolerant, exclusive and fractured as a community, but also confuses the rationale and the need to act against militant groups. For example, Sufi Mohammad declares that anyone who doesn’t abide by his view of Sharia will automatically be ousted from the circle of Islam. In turn, maulvis opposed to Sufi emphasize that anyone who supports the Taliban who plan suicide bombings and slaughter Muslims is an infidel. This discourse is unhelpful. The state and the society need to strengthen their resolve to act against the Taliban terrorizing citizens, not because they are infidels or bad Muslims, but because they are criminals and have usurped the lives and liberties of compatriots.

Talibanization of the mind is finding room in our society either because a majority of our population that is religiously inclined continues to confuse its responsibilities toward God with those toward fellow citizens or because we are too timid to defend a lifestyle that might be judged by the religiously inclined. Unless we shun hypocrisy and stand up to defend a legal and social structure that allows us to order our private lives freely, in a secular fashion or in accordance with our own understanding of religion, freedom of religion will continue to be chipped away and more and more vigilantes will develop the urge to play God within Pakistan. (The News, 9 May 2009)

The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu

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At last Tableeghi Jamaat denounce Talibani Shariat !

Tableeghi Jamaat leaders denounce gunpoint Sharia

ISLAMABAD: In an unprecedented move, top leaders of the Tableeghi Jamaat have denounced enforcement of Sharia at gunpoint, religious extremism, militancy and terrorism.
Leaders of the Jamaat, who scrupulously avoid speaking on controversial issues, also called for promoting inter-faith harmony, tolerance, human rights, social justice and peace.
They were speaking at the conclusion of a three-day congregation near here on Monday. ‘Shariah cannot be enforced at gunpoint,’ declared Haji Abdul Wahab, Amir of the Tableeghi Jamaat, Pakistan.
Had that been the case, Allah Almighty would have sent fierce angels to protect prophets and enforce their faiths, he said.
The 90-year-old scholar, who left his job as sessions judge in pre-partition India and joined the Jamaat, cited the example of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), said the Holy Prophet never used force. Instead he spread the word of God only by peaceful means.
Haji Abdul Wahab also condemned extremism and militancy in the name of Islam, apparently a reference to the growing trend of Talibanisation and enforcement of Shria in Swat and other areas in the NWFP.
The congregation of tens of thousands of people was also addressed by Maulana Jamshaid, Maulana Mohammad Ahmed and Mualana Fahim.
‘Muslims should preach peace, brotherhood and tolerance across the world, including Israel. They must avoid imposing their creed or faith by force because Islam is a religion of peace and promotes tranquillity,’ another scholar told the mammoth gathering.
Maulana Mohammad Ahmed, a former educationist, said that Muslims should inspire adherents of other religions by their good moral and social behaviour. People who thought that Shariah could be imposed by force were simpletons, he said. ‘We should reach out to all human beings and guide them out of darkness. Before the advent of Islam, people were so inflexible that they used to bury their daughters without remorse. (But they changed.) Remember …human beings are above other creations of God,’ said Maulana Ahmed, the custodian of the largest seminary of the Tableeghi school of thought in Raiwind near Lahore.
The main message of the gathering was that Islam could not be confined to Pakistan or any other geographical area and there was a need to spread the religion of peace in every corner of the world.
People from across the country who had converged there pledged that they would continue the mission of spreading Islam across the world.

Source: Dawn, Jang

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Harris Khalique: Bhutto no more, Zia lives on

Friday, April 03, 2009


Thirty years ago, on April 4, 1979, I was pale and weak after recovering from severe jaundice and the final exams for class seventh. We were home with my younger brother and a couple of cousins. My mother had just got back after doing her groceries. In those days, we cousins were addicted to a game called 'Monopoly' where the choicest property of London could be bought and sold for a few hundred pounds. I wish electric company, which was for 150 pounds then, could still be bought. It was a pleasant day and while buying and selling property by throwing a pair of dice and offering fake currency, we were also thinking of organising a cricket match with another group of boys in the afternoon. Yusuf, a very dear cousin of mine, had anointed his new bat with linseed oil, as was the ritual in those days, and was now eager to hit a few strokes.

I vividly remember that around 11am, someone knocked at the front door. He was a junior colleague of my father's who came regularly to bring files and other office material. He arrived with the instructions that children should stay indoors as riots may break out. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was hanged in Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi, in the early hours of the day. I remember my mother was shell-shocked. She hunkered down holding her head in both hands and then started shaking in disbelief. My father arrived a little early that afternoon and kept using his favourite expletive in Farsi for General Ziaul Haq, which virtually meant the product of an unidentified sperm. He was peevish and we kept a distance from him. But soon he went out with a grim-faced man for a meeting somewhere in Nazimabad. It seems now that it would have been a political meeting of some sort.

On the same day, a boy came running from the neighbour's telling my mother that my aunt was on the phone. We did not have a direct phone connection those days and used their number. Police had come to arrest my maternal grandfather, Sufi Saghir Hasan. He was an educationist by profession who ran a number of colleges and schools during his career and a thoroughly religious man with no less than a decade long solitary chilla on the outskirts of Sialkot behind him. He was about 85 years old in April 1979. His journalist son M B Khalid, my uncle who I never saw due to his early death in PIA's Cairo crash of 1965, was a friend of Bhutto's. Sufi sahib and Bhutto started writing letters to each other after that tragedy. This continued while Bhutto was in prison and then in his death cell. The reason cited by the police for the old man's arrest was his habit of writing letters to a dangerous and condemned man. His warrants were cancelled after some senior civil servant's intervention but Sufi sahib was all set to go to prison.

The reign of terror had begun. People were picked up, tortured, jailed for years, flogged and gagged. Many were executed. Newspapers had blank columns appearing on main pages after official censors would remove a news item or a feature at the eleventh hour. The same year, General Ziaul Haq was to introduce the draconian laws against women and religious minorities in the name of Islam. I am amazed at how unashamedly his son and followers can still come out in public and attempt at rationalising the deeds of Pakistan's General Franco. After Aurangzeb Alamgir, Ziaul Haq committed the greatest disservice to Islam as a ruler in the history of the Indian subcontinent. But in April 2009, what remains of Bhutto is mere rhetoric – a few slogans raised by his followers, in which the PPP leadership doesn't believe itself, or a few sponsored TV shows in his memory. What remains of Zia is the real thing – a conservative, hypocritical, rotten to the core polity and sociology of Pakistan. (The News)


The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and rights campaigner. Email: harris@spopk.org

ذوالفقار علی بھٹو کو چار اپریل سنہ 1979 کو جنرل ضیاء کے دورِ اقتدار میں تختۂ دار پر چڑھا دیا گیا تھا اور وہ لاڑکانہ سے بیس کلومیٹر دور بھٹوز کے آبائی قبرستان گڑھی خدا بخش بھٹو میں دفن ہیں جسے لوگوں نے اب شہیدوں کا قبرستان قرار دے دیا ہے اور جہاں پنجاب سے آئے ہوئے ایک بزرگ جیالے کے بقول’پاکستان کے رکھوالے‘ دفن ہیں۔

تیس سال پہلے جب راولپنڈی سے ایک فوجی ہیلی کاپٹر میں بھٹو کی میت گڑھی خدا بخش لائی گئی تھی تو ان کی نمازِ جنازہ میں درجن بھر مقامی لوگوں کو شرکت کی اجازت دی گئی تھی۔گڑھی خدا بخش کے ایک بزرگ محمد عالم نے بی بی سی سے بات کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ ’فوجیوں نے بھٹو کو خاموش کرنے کے لیے خاموشی سے اسے دفن کردیا مگر انہیں پتا نہیں تھا کہ بھٹو کی قبر بول پڑے گی۔ تیس سالوں سے بھٹو کی قبر چیخ چیخ کر قاتلوں سے حساب مانگ رہی ہے‘۔

http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/2009/04/090402_bhutto_anniversary_preps_zs.shtml

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Ayesha Siddiqa: Many readings of Sharia

Many readings of Sharia

By Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 03 Apr, 2009

THE students of Jamia Hafsa want nizam-i-adl implemented in the entire country as a way out of the current crisis. They also want Taqi Usmani, their mufti, as chief qazi.

Their demands must have attracted plenty of attention and support, especially from those who feel that the new legal system in Swat is the best possible solution to the conflict there.

Some people support the Sharia in Swat for at least three reasons. First, it is believed that the Sharia alone will give ordinary people in Swat the speedy system of justice that they want. Second, since the Sharia is the demand of the Swat Taliban, they believe that it is a good idea to implement the system there while ensuring it remains disconnected from the rest of the country. Third, imposing the Sharia is not an issue because that’s what is prescribed by the 1973 Constitution according to which all laws have to be in conformity with the Sharia.

But it is worth clarifying that the 1973 Constitution stipulates that all laws conform to the Quran and Sunnah, with no mention of the Sharia. This means that Sharia was not treated on a par with the Quran and Sunnah. This also indicates that the constitution gives the right of interpretation of laws of the state to legislators acting on behalf of the people rather than dogmatic ones of the past.

Those responsible for law- and constitution-making did not depend on the Sharia for both deliberate and inadvertent reasons. There was a conscious decision to keep the state from becoming a theocracy. A theocracy was certainly not the intention of the father of the nation Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Another critical factor pertained to the larger question of which interpretation to apply.

After all, the Sharia is an interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah. A quick reading of Islamic history amply demonstrates that the rulers and the socio-cultural environment of their time equally influenced interpretations by various individuals. For instance, it is said that the Abbasids directly influenced the process of the development of religious laws, during the latter’s codification, to suit their own interests. According to Islamic scholar Tahir Wasti, some of the comparatively minor crimes then were punishable by the state. However, the bigger crime of murder was left out of this categorisation.

In Pakistan, the Sharia debate started under Ziaul Haq whose primary objective was strengthening his power rather than making society Islamic. Unfortunately, there were certain judges who helped the military dictator cheat the entire country by boosting his efforts to have in place Sharia laws that suited his interests. This in itself is indicative of the fact that the Sharia was open to interpretation.

The main purpose of any law is to bring peace and justice to society. A law becomes meaningless if it cannot do so. In Pakistan’s case, as demonstrated by Wasti through his meticulously gathered data on the implementation of the law of Qisas and Diyat in the country, there appears to be a correlation between the imposition of religious laws and increasing crime in the country, especially homicide.Since the law of evidence makes the implementation of Qisas difficult, the state had primarily depended on using the law of Diyat. This essentially meant that a crime like murder, that can have far-reaching repercussions for society at large, was deemed a private matter that could be settled through compromise.

For those, who argue that the purpose of blood money and compromise denote the spirit of forgiveness encouraged by Islam, the implementation of this law in Pakistan proved to be better suited to the interests of the powerful and did not, in fact, reflect a sense of evenhanded justice and forgiveness for all tiers of society. In many cases, the poor and weak were forced to accept a compromise. Interestingly, the system was never strongly challenged by the legal community as a whole, perhaps because a compromise could mean less work while being paid the same fee in the case of some lawyers.

Referring to the peculiar situation in Swat, could one expect any better from Sufi Mohammad and his son-in-law Fazlullah than to implement the Sharia law in a way that suited their interests? The law of Qisas is also problematic because the conditions for a witness cannot be met by most including Sufi Mohammad, Fazlullah and the rest of their crew. It seems quite likely that those people whose loved ones have been murdered by the militants will be forced to accept a compromise in the name of the Sharia.

In fact, the Swati people have little choice in the matter because the state has abdicated the right to administer justice. This is certainly not in line with the instructions of the Quran and Sunnah, which, were these to be implemented in their true spirit, would require a fundamental re-negotiation of the legal regime in Pakistan and all over the Muslim world. Other Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia are not any safer even with the implementation of religious laws by the most powerful. Ultimately, any law has to have the inherent capability to protect the individual and society at large. It is a question of debate whether religious laws in the Muslim world have been able to achieve this. (Dawn)

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

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What is the difference between Sharia politicians and Hindutva politicians?

Religion has absolutely no place in politics in a democratic state - Reuters/File photo.


Pakistani activists of Islami Jamiat Talaba, the student wing of the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami, burn a US flag during a demonstration in Karachi, 03 August 2007, against the controversial statement of a US presidential hopeful. (Reuters)

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Taliban style justice: Young girl lashed publicly in Swat !

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Dr Tariq Rahman: Talibanisation of Pakistan

The terrorists have won if peace is forsaken - Reuters/File photo.

Thursday, 02 Apr, 2009 (Dawn)

WHEN I wrote these lines a police training school in Lahore was under attack by armed men. Mayhem had broken out, people were killed, while many had to be taken to hospital to be treated for injuries.

On the same day, there were press reports of a militant ban on women going shopping in parts of Swat and of warnings to close down CD shops. A few days earlier, a huge explosion in a Jamrud mosque killed and injured more than 200 people. There is panic in the air, even though we have become inured to gory sights.

After the peace arrangement, Swat does not really appear as part of the Pakistani state. It has passed into the hands of the Taliban. It is, to all intents and purposes, a Taliban state and this hard reality should sink into the minds of our ruling elite.

First, the Nizam-i-Adl Ordinance (not yet promulgated) is meant to operate in Swat and not the rest of the country. The way Sharia will be interpreted will depend entirely on the power of the interpreter. The interpreters will be the Taliban and their supporters. This means that a part of Pakistan has been virtually detached from the rest of the country and handed over to those responsible for terrorising this area in the past.

Secondly, as pointed out by former caretaker interior minister Lt Gen Hamid Nawaz, the creation of a legal system different from that in the rest of the country will encourage hard-line elements in Hazara Division and the Seraiki region to demand such a parallel system. If this turns out to be the case, then we are headed for balkanisation or the Talibanisation of Pakistan.

Thirdly, the qazi courts, as they are seen to be functioning at present, will not introduce the Islamic system of justice as it existed before colonialism. There were several local systems of jurisprudence in different Islamic countries much before. The system which is presently envisaged threatens to render hundreds of lawyers jobless and it is not clear how the laws will be interpreted. The fear is that the rough-and-ready justice administered by these courts will not be justice at all. The reality in Swat is that everyone is afraid of the Taliban. There is peace but at the cost of accepting the militants’ domination. This is more of a defeat than a truce — and it is the state of Pakistan which has been defeated.

The cost of this defeat is heavy. According to a letter sent by several peace groups, including the Pashtun Peace Forum, to UN chief Ban Ki-moon about 700,000 people have been internally displaced and are leading miserable lives. Moreover, if one talks to these people they express their resentment against both the Taliban and the army. They complain that the army did not save them from the militants even when it was possible to do so. The army denies this charge but the public perception is that the army either played it safe or was not capable of combating the militants.

Some people, and not just American officials, point to the army’s romance with the jihadis since the time Pakistan fought America’s proxy war against the Soviet Union. Although Gen Musharraf withdrew support for the Taliban in Afghanistan soon after 9/11, journalists like Ahmed Rashid kept pointing out that there were Taliban camps in Quetta. The argument is that old policies are either carried out by individuals in their private capacity, or, at least at some level, are not reversed.

I have no inside information about this but it is clear that there is much confusion when groups that claim to operate in the name of the sacred are attacked by our soldiers. Surely years of state radio, television, school textbooks and public speeches using the name of Islam have caused people to see the Islamic idiom as something quite normal — and, of course, the Taliban use this idiom. It is altogether a separate matter that the Taliban’s usage of it is different from how ordinary people perceive it.

Ordinary people are not at all clear about what the implementation of the Sharia would entail. They think it would bring them the justice they have always sought but never obtained. They think they will finally find the food they have always craved but never eaten. They think there will be electricity in their homes, water in their taps, schools for their children, and no bribery or humiliation in their daily lives. In short, ordinary folk desire justice, good governance and peace. They want to live without having to face the danger of being blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber.

What the militants will give them is a dictatorship of the most barbaric kind. Excesses are always committed by ideological rulers such as the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran. But they will be more than matched by the cruel and mindless barbarity of the Taliban. We saw this in Afghanistan when it was under their rule. We are gullible and the militants take advantage of our gullibility. Slowly, they are nibbling at parts of our country. This is a situation of our own making. And we have our own unwise, narrow policies to blame. This being the case, we are the ones who should be finding a solution. A durable solution can only be found when we acknowledge our past mistakes, clean up the Augean stables inherited by the state, take our citizens on board and call the war on militancy ‘our war’ and then fight it single-mindedly, all the while helping the internally displaced.

The events which we are witnessing are reminiscent of the break-up of the Mughal empire. A number of states emerged then until the British created a centralised Indian empire. A number of states are emerging now. But the British gave us education, science, a legal system, canals, roads, railways and the postal service. What the Taliban will give us is anyone’s guess!

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The flawed Swat deal

By Gul Bukhari
Thursday, 02 Apr, 2009

THE Swat situation has yet again reached animpasse with Sufi Mohammad, the leader of the Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat Mohammadi(TNSM), instituting qazi courts outside the existing legal framework andappointing qazis at his own discretion. But the government insists that thelegal framework consisting of the present infrastructure and judges should beused for issuing Sharia-compliant decisions.

Some weeks ago, the Awami NationalParty-led government in the NWFP had negotiated a peace deal with SufiMohammad, offering to implement Sharia in the Swat and Malakand Divisions. Inreturn, the government wanted the TNSM head to persuade the head ofTehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan,Maulana Fazlullah, the Swat-based compatriot of Baitullah Mehsud, to ceasemilitancy.

This turn of events is not surprising — itwas likely from day one. When the government negotiated the said deal with theTaliban of Swat through the TNSM, it was evident that it was doing so from aposition of weakness and under duress.

There is enough evidence to indicate thatthe negotiators from the government’s side had only intended cosmetic changessuch as renaming the existing courts as qazi courts. Whether they thought theywould succeed in duping the Taliban, or whether they meant to fool the publicinto thinking that they were great strategists and would achieve peace withoutgiving anything away is anyone’s guess.

Much more likely is that they knew theywouldn’t bamboozle anyone in the end, but were just brushing the problem underthe carpet and buying time.

That would be a fine tactic, were there acomprehensive plan to be put into action after the expiry of time thus bought.Unfortunately, that was not the case; there was no plan and the Zardari-ledgovernment continues to muddle through, believing that different speechescontaining contradictory claims meant for different audiences would continue topush the explosion of the time bomb indefinitely into the future. If only lifewas that simple.

The very basis of any negotiations with anarmed movement is flawed. The state ceding the rights of a section of thepopulation and leaving them defenceless against the terror and oppression offreelance fascists, used to be seen as cowardice, and not the attainment ofpeace. If anyone doubts that tomorrow the rest of the country will not be heldhostage to the same terror that the Swatis live under, he/she is living in afool’s paradise. Either that or such people already have plans in place toleave the sinking ship when the time comes.

To begin with, how are the TTP or TNSM thelegitimate representatives of the Swatis or the people of any other area? If itis a question of gun-power then the government must immediately admit that itis bowing to their might, not the extent of their representativeness. If, on theother hand, it is claimed that the majority of the Swati people want what theTTP demands, then let’s have proof of it.

Invite the TTP (or for that matter anyother champion of faith) to form a political party with a published manifestoand contest elections. That should put to rest for the next few years at leastthe question as to whether or not it represents popular sentiment, albeit of aregion or province. If it does, a political way forward should not beunachievable.

But if it does not, then at least we wouldbe able to come clean about whether we are disenfranchising an entire sectionof the population by imposing an undefined penal code on them or simplysurrendering to armed criminals and leaving the people of Swat to fend forthemselves against oppression of the worst kind.

It’s very important to be cognisant of thefact that Sharia, for all practical purposes, is not a defined penal code. Notwo opinions within Pakistanon the practical ramifications of implementing Sharia are the same. Even proponentsof the ‘peace deal’ denounce the models in place in Saudi Arabia, Iranand previously in Afghanistan.

In the absence of any existing model, suchproponents advocate ‘real’ Sharia interpretations of which there are as many asthe individuals propounding them. It remains a nebulous idea of utopia onearth. How can the imposition of an amorphous ideal, with no commondenominators for the countless opinions on it, be a solution?

Let the proponents define Sharia, build aconsensus of what it might entail into a detailed penal code and then take avote on it.

It’s time for intellectual honesty — wemust call for the TTP, or any other movement that claims to speak on behalf ofthe people, to enter the political franchise and contest elections. This mustbe considered as a serious option.

Either they will demonstrate a constituency andemerge as a legitimate political entity to be negotiated with, or they willnot. In the latter case, if ‘peace deals’ with them continue to be pursued, atleast it would be morally more courageous to admit to caving in to terroriststhan to keep pretending that they are representatives of the popular will. (Dawn)
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Nawaz Sharif denies links with religious hardliners

* PML-N chief gives Obama plan cautious welcome

* Rejects charges against ISI
* Calls for an end to US drone attacks

LAHORE: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif denied in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday that he has had links with religious hardliners.

He said the accusations were propaganda unleashed by General Pervez Musharraf, who deposed him in a coup in 1999.

Although members of the PML-N sometimes characterise the war on terror as America’s war and not Pakistan’s, Nawaz distanced himself from this view. “The concerns of the West are genuine and they need to be addressed in all seriousness. The problems Pakistan faces are very tough and very serious, and in fact are endangering our state in a very serious way.

“I personally think that no party singlehandedly, whether in the government, or outside the government, would be able to deal with these problems. We all will have to fight these problems together.”

He said the new US administration was much better than the previous one, but needed to understand his country’s concerns.

He said reaction to President Barack Obama’s new plan for Pakistan and Afghanistan, announced last week, had been ‘mixed’ in the country.

“As we are very willing to address the concerns of all our allies and friends, I think they should also understand our problems and handicaps,” he said. “It has to be reciprocal.”

Nawaz Sharif rejected the charges that the ISI has links with Taliban, saying there was not “any room for any suspicion of the ISI”.

He also called for an end to American drone attacks on Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. “Some of the policies followed by President Bush have given rise to a lot of anti-American feeling in Pakistan,” he said.

“For example the drone attacks are affecting our relationship. The people of Pakistan have criticised them very severely. It damages the sovereignty of our country. On this issue the United States of America must move carefully.” reuters

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Taliban blow up Ex-Minister's house in Swat

Ex-Minister Ameer Muqam’s house blown up

April 01, 2009

PESHAWAR: Armed Taliban blown up house of Ex-Federal Minister Ameer Muqam.

Earlier, gunmen seized the house of Ameer Muqam in Bahrain, which was later blown up with explosives.

According to sources, Ameer Muqam and his family members were not present in the house when gunmen stormed the house, however, two servants of Ameer Muqam were forced to flee from the scene by armed men.

Ameer Muqam said it was a group of 60 to 70 local Taliban. He said restoration of peace in Swat seems difficult as gunmen are now started grabbing houses. Ex minister said he will discuss the issue with local administration.


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Shariat, Swat and Unemployed Lawyers: Tanvir Qaiser Shahid,

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Is ISI funding Taliban in Swat through emerald mines?

Taliban take over Swat’s emerald mines

The Taliban take one-third of the yield from all miners and the costs are shared equally by the Taliban and the miners. - Reuters/File photo.

TALIBAN in Swat have taken over emerald mines in the area and are operating the business. The mines produce emeralds of international quality and had been under the control of the Pakistani government in the past.

Taking advantage of the recent ceasefire between militants and the government in the region, the Taliban have taken over these mines.

The mines in the Pak-Afghan border region are said to hold the largest known deposits of emeralds in sub-continent of South Asia.

A senior Taliban commander told the BBC that ‘it is for the benefit of the public that we have reopened the mines.’ The commander added that the mines were open for anyone to work in provided they follow the rules laid down by the Taliban.

The emerald mines of Swat are located in the mountains that surround the main town of Mingora and cover an area of nearly 8 kilometers.

Despite the high prices of these stones in the international market, workers at the site told the BBC their average daily wage was only about 400 rupees ($5) per person because the Taliban also took a cut for themselves out of the workers’ wages.

Some workers said that it was still a very good deal because all these resources were going to waste earlier.

Taliban commanders also see this as a positive move in light of the benefits it offers to the local workforce. A Taliban commander said that it was a wonderful opportunity for the unemployed and poverty stricken people of the area.

According to the terms of the deal, the Taliban take one-third of the yield from all of the miners and the costs are shared equally by the Taliban and the miners.

However, the Taliban say that they are not directly involved in the mining operations themselves.

So far the government has not contested the Taliban control of the mines despite the fears that the funds from emerald mining are likely to give a massive financial boost to the Taliban.

Wednesday, 25 Mar, 2009 (Dawn)

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Taliban tap into Swat’s emeralds

LAHORE: As the NWFP government struggles to get approval for a peace deal from the centre – the Taliban in Swat have taken over operations in the valley’s emerald mines, which produce jewels of international quality and were previously controlled by the government. Located in the mountains that ring Mingora, the mines – along with the Panjshir mines in Afghanistan – hold the largest known deposits of emeralds in South Asia. BBC News has reported that the Taliban overtook operations four months ago. “It is for the benefit of the public that we have reopened the mines,” a senior Taliban commander told the BBC. “They are open to anybody who wishes to mine them as long as they follow our rules.” When fully operational, the mines yielded a quarter of a million carats of emeralds between 1978 and 1988. The last official estimate put the projected yield at about 13.2 million carats. Gemstone dealers say that most emeralds range from just under one carat to just over five. Prices range from $1,000 to more than $100,000 for a cut stone. However, workers at the site told the BBC their average daily wage was only about Rs 400 per person. “It’s still a good deal as previously all this was going to waste,” said one worker. Taliban commanders too are positive about its benefits. According to the terms of the deal, the Taliban take one-third of the yield of each set of miners. The costs are shared equally by the Taliban and the miners. The group says it is not directly involved in the operations themselves. But the rules, which include amputation for theft and strict adherence to sharia, mean only those with strong Taliban sympathies are allowed to operate. So far the government has made no move to contest the Taliban’s control of the mines. daily times monitor (25 March 2009)

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Taliban in Swat: Crippled and blind

Crippled and blind

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The media should have been reporting – and celebrating – the eradication of polio from Pakistan years ago. We were almost polio-free as recently as three years ago, whereas today this dreadful and entirely preventable disease is spreading fast. It has just got a major boost in its bid to blight the lives of our children courtesy of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which on Sunday ordered all non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to immediately leave the Swat valley, including those agencies working on polio eradication. The TTP spokesman Muslim Khan said, “They come and tell us how to make lavatories in mosques and houses. I’m sure we can do it ourselves. There is no need for foreigners to tell us this.” When asked why the TTP was against polio vaccination, Khan said, “The TTP is against polio vaccination because it causes infertility” – thereby reiterating the old and entirely-without-foundation myth in the Muslim world that polio vaccination is some sort of vast western conspiracy to emasculate and impoverish Muslim nations. He concluded by saying that he was against any operation run by NGOs and that the polio vaccine was imported and therefore could not be trusted. Membership of the comity of nations brings with it certain responsibilities. If we consider a nation as an individual, and that individual has a nasty communicable disease, we would not associate with them and would not appreciate attempts by our neighbour to infect us. This is precisely what happened in Nigeria in 2004. The Muslim northern states of Nigeria refused to participate in polio eradication programmes for the same reason that Muslim Khan is refusing to allow EPI teams into Swat. A rapid and catastrophic consequence was that polio quickly broke out, herd immunity in Nigeria was lost and neighbouring states were quickly infected. Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, all polio free, were placed at risk and then quickly infected. They ‘caught’ polio from Nigeria because parts of that country refused to get themselves vaccinated. It took years and millions of dollars to bring the outbreak under control again. We now run the risk of doing precisely the same as Nigeria did to its neighbours. A viral reservoir will be quickly built up in Swat; herd immunity is probably already lost, and given the mobility of populations in that area the almost inevitable result is that the virus will find a ready means of travelling across borders, both national and provincial. The blindness of the likes of Muslim Khan is going to needlessly cripple the lives of many.

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What about lawyers’ cause in Swat?

A new lawyers’ movement may be needed to address the crisis created for the legal profession in Swat after the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi (TNSM) banned the lawyers from the qazi courts set up under the tutelage of its leader, Sufi Muhammad. He warned the lawyers and judges on March 17 to stay away from the courts, saying they had no role under the new system of Islamic law in the region, branding the present Pakistani jurisprudence as an “infidel judicial system”. He said only the people filing cases and the accused would be eligible to appear in the new “Islamic courts”.

The Peshawar Bar Council has expressed its concern over these developments and intends to protest with the NWFP government. It is important to note that the country’s lawyers’ community did not properly register the plight of the lawyers in Swat after some of them were killed and those who did not migrate out of the valley were kidnapped and remain unaccounted for till today. But even as the lawyers protest in Peshawar, the Taliban have kicked the NGOs out of Swat and are still resolutely opposed to polio drops for children. Five hundred lawyers plan to pack up their bags and leave Swat. Meanwhile, fourteen more Taliban terrorists were freed from jail on Sunday, taking the total number released so far to 48, so that they can enforce the writ of the Taliban in Swat!

Isn’t there anything anyone can do about this? What about the lawyers who abandoned their profession for two years to get the deposed chief justice of Pakistan reinstated? Getting thrashed by the police in Lahore is one thing, being beheaded by the terrorists in Swat, as the state watches from the sidelines, is another. But the contrast is stark. And the contrast is in the mindset of those who suffer the atrocities of the terrorists in the name of Islam and the thinking of those who fight for the “independence” of the judiciary in the rest of the country. In Swat, the judiciary is going to be the handmaiden of the illegal occupants of the valley. Soon this rule will be extended through qazi courts to the entire Malakand Division and Kohistan in the Hazara Division.

One doesn’t have to strain to predict that the judicial system of the Taliban will soon threaten the rest of the country. Let us examine why this will happen. Unfortunately, no clerical organisation, apart from some individual Barelvi scholars and independent thinkers like Mr Javed Ghamidi, accepts that shariat is in force in Pakistan through the 14th Amendment that establishes the Federal Shariat Court. Even non-clerical debaters complain of “many systems” in the country, ignoring the fact that the principle established by the Federal Shariat Court — that nothing against the Islamic precepts will be allowed to stand — Islamises even the Pakistan Penal Code.

The Swati sympathisers of the overthrow of the legal system under the Federal Shariat Court have been wrong in their claim that the population of Swat wants the reintroduction of the shariat operative under the Wali of Swat because the “infidel” system of Pakistani injustice is dilatory and corrupt. A lot of hype has been created by generally acknowledging, without proof, that the Wali had a shariat system so pure it is worth taking back through the Taliban.

The truth is that the system under the Wali was not shariat at all. It was a system of qazi courts unseparated from the courts run by the Wali and his elite supporters, and there were no hudood laws as under the 14th Amendment. No punishments, like the cutting of hands and stoning to death, were given; offenders were usually punished with terms in jail. It is true that the extension of normal laws into the valley in 1970 brought in the systemic flaws of the rest of the country, but since then Swat also saw a measure of prosperity and happiness that it has lost under the shariat of Taliban. (Daily Times, 24 March 2009)
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Talat Masood: Revisiting the Swat deal with the Taliban

Revisiting the Swat deal

Monday, March 23, 2009 Talat Masood The Swat peace agreement, signed between the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) and the ANP-led government of the NWFP, seems to be running in serious difficulties. Broadly, the agreement aims at imposing Sharia law in Swat and Malakand division. Regrettably, the agreement was signed from a position of weakness. The army was hesitant to undertake another major counter-insurgency operation in Swat, when two earlier ones had failed to dislodge the militants from their hideouts. Moreover, the ANP having given a commitment that it would seek a negotiated settlement, and the army not in favour of a military operation, preferred a negotiated settlement. The government and militant leader Sufi Mohammed offer different interpretations to the agreement, and differences have surfaced on the question of the formation of the courts. Sufi Mohammed, who refuses to accept the present panel of judges for presiding over Qazi courts, has announced the formation of Qazi courts, appointed his nominees as Qazis and is establishing appellate courts. In reality, the Taliban are aiming to transform the entire legal and administrative system and are not prepared to integrate the Sharia in the existing judicial and bureaucratic structure. The TNSM in all probability will apply a harsher code of conduct. During the Wali’s times the ruler was in full control of the state and it was his appointed courts that were functioning. And the state’s administration was the implementing authority. Mullah Fazalullah is now calling the shots and the state has buckled in. The Taliban of Swat have tasted power and will not be content with the adoption of Sharia. Mullah Fazalullah and his father-in-law of Sufi Mohammed practically rule Swat. The civil administration cannot go against their wishes and even the army at places has to move with their concurrence. No NGO’s are allowed to function without their approval. The close linkage between Mullah Fazalullah and Baithullah Mehsud is another source of serious concern. Lack of clarity in policy formulation, poor coordination and weak resolve on the part of the provincial and federal governments and ambivalent attitude of the army in fighting counter-insurgency operations has emboldened the Taliban. It is evident that the army that has proven itself in conventional wars has been less than effective while fighting insurgents in FATA and Swat. This phenomenon is not peculiar to Pakistan. Great Britain had won World War 1 with its allies but was forced to negotiate a treaty with IRA leaders. The clamour for Sharia and the support of Sufi Mohammad and Mullah Fazalullah is essentially a demand for justice and good governance that the people have been denied. The fairness and quick implementation of justice was the key to its acceptability. Whether the same standard of fairness and quick disposal of justice prevalent in the 1960’s will be maintained by the newly appointed Sharia courts is questionable. People are also deeply worried about their personal security. Many people in Swat have been compelled to provide at least one member of the family to the TNSM. In the current circumstances, when the government’s writ is virtually absent, ordinary people consider associating with Taliban a means of providing security to themselves and their families. In this way they associate with the system where maximum power resides. If the Sharia demand increases in the entire NWFP and is ultimately adopted then there would be two legal systems in Pakistan. Sharia operating in the west and the Pakistan penal code in the east! It is possible that in future militant groups in Punjab may make similar demands in their area of influence. On the other hand, if the government is able to use the peace deal to get a foothold in Swat and establish its writ by placing a strong administrative structure that can provide a reasonable level of governance then it could be justified. But the converse seems to be happening. Mullah Fazalullah by putting Sufi Mohammed in front has very cleverly outsmarted both the ANP government and the military and consolidated the Taliban position. The growing demands of Sufi Mohammed on the government are a clear indication of their motives. (The News) The writer is a retired lieutenant-general. Email: talat@comsats.net.pk

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Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, Madam Tahira and Shariat in Swat

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Sufi Muhammad's judicial system in Swat: Is it really Islamic?

Daily Express, 22 March 2009

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Ill-judged

Saturday, March 21, 2009

We have never seen the detail of the agreement made between the government of NWFP and the TNSM, if indeed any such detail exists. For all the world knows it is nothing more than a sequence of sketched-out generalities and 'understandings' that can be interpreted flexibly by any of the parties to the agreement. The last week has begun to reveal the position of the TNSM in a number of areas, most especially relating to the Qazi courts. All the indications are that the TNSM now has sufficient leverage to dictate terms to the government at least in matters of the law. They are now, both literally and metaphorically 'the law of the land'. Lawyers and judges have been told that they are surplus to requirements and that they should leave Swat immediately. They have been told that their safety cannot be guaranteed either in the courts where they are no longer welcome or in their own homes. We would draw your attention to a report of 4th February 2009 of an announcement made by an illegal FM radio station in Swat that said that all lawyers and judges, being part of an 'infidel judicial system', would be killed if they did not quit their profession. Unsurprisingly, the Swat Bar Association president quickly confirmed that the lives of 300 of his co-professionals were under threat and he was trying to contact the extremists in an attempt to assure them that the lawyers were ready to work under an Islamic judicial regime. You can be killed for making a career-choice of lawyering? Killed because you are a judge properly qualified and appointed? Is this the only possible solution to the problem of how Swat transitions from one judicial system to another…the killing of all those who represent the ancien régime? The death of any who may disagree with the new dispensation in Swat seems to be their preferred option, which if nothing else should ensure full employment for gravediggers in the foreseeable future. Any attempt to attend their offices by judges and lawyers would be seen as a violation of the peace agreement, said Sufi Mohammed speaking on March 16 ; and he went on to say that Qazi courts would now be established in Lower and Upper Dir districts, Buner, Malakand Agency, Shangla, Kohistan and Chitral districts of North West Frontier Province. His statement seems to imply that the writ of the Taliban now runs much further than the confines of the Swat valley, extending even to the so-far peaceful Chitral, which has managed to avoid the extremes that have plagued other parts of NWFP. Is there some agreement between the TNSM and the government, provincial or federal, to the effect that Qazi courts are to be extended as indicated by Sufi Mohammed? If there is it has not been publicized and one wonders whether the administrations of Lower and Upper Dir districts, Buner, Malakand Agency, Shangla, Kohistan and Chitral districts have been notified of the changes that are apparently imminent. There is a miserable irony that in the same week the people of Pakistan came out on the streets in their tens of thousands to support a secular movement, the lawyers' movement that was made up of men and women of differing faiths and denominational adherence; that nobody has come out on the streets to protest at the gutting and filleting of Swat. Such is the power of those who now rule Swat that they can project that power strategically into other areas and there is little, seemingly, that can stop them. Whatever agreement has been made with the TNSM we need to see its detail, chapter and verse, and we need to see it now. Justice has been ill-served by an ill-judged arrangement expediently made.

(The News)

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Nazir Naji, Jang, 22 March 2009

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Hard Talk: An interview with Sufi Muhammad, Leader of the TNSM in Swat, Pakistan

HARDtalk: “If Fazlullah does not appear in court when summoned, he will be acting against shariat” —Sufi Muhammad, Leader of the TNSM * Keeping weapons is allowed in Islam
* The military violated the ceasefire
* No objection to a cantonment in Swat
* Democracy is not allowed in Islam

The influential pro-Taliban cleric of Swat, Sufi Muhammad has said that the sharia law does not allow debate on the past, and therefore he will not term what his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah did against the state of Pakistan during the last year and a half as haram or halal. In an exclusive interview with Daily Times’ Peshawar Bureau Chief Iqbal Khattak in Mingora city, the 74-year-old cleric said keeping weapons is Islamic, and that he did not demand that the Taliban surrender their weapons after a peace deal with the NWFP government. Excerpts follow:

Daily Times: You said in a 2005 interview with us that what Al Qaeda and the Taliban are doing in Pakistan is haram. Are Maulana Fazlullah’s activities over the last sixteen months also haram?

Sufi Muhammad: Yes, I said that about Al Qaeda, but not about the Taliban. Let me say...that debate on past happenings is disallowed in Islam. A hadith sharif says, what has happened in the past should not be discussed.

But how can we proceed without debating the past?

The hadith sharif says a Muslim should not discuss past happenings because he may not remember all the [details] and, therefore, he may...sin by not speaking the truth.

A majority of Swat residents do not think the peace deal recently signed between the TNSM and the NWFP government will last long.

God Almighty does everything; he builds and destroys countries.

Residents also doubt whether peace is possible in the presence of armed Taliban.

Everyone keeps weapons. People in Peshawar have weapons with them.

You support keeping weapons?

Yes, you can keep weapons with you.

Did you ask Fazlullah to surrender weapons after the sharia law deal?

Keeping weapons is halal in Islam.

President Zardari said recently that force would be used if the Taliban do not surrender weapons in Swat.

His statement is childish...immature.

With sharia law in Swat, there will be a complete ban on music and girls’ education, and people will be forced to grow beards?

There are five subjects — judiciary, politics, economics, education and the executive. The judicial subject will be with us, the rest is beyond our control.

The Taliban are kidnapping government officials and killing soldiers, yet you still hold the army responsible for ceasefire violations.

Kidnapping cases are taking place all over the world. The military violated the ceasefire.

The military says some of its soldiers were shot dead while bringing water.

No. This is not the case. The soldiers were not killed near any stream.

Are soldiers moving freely in Swat after the peace deal?

No. The military cannot move freely unless peace is restored.

After peace is restored, will the army leave Swat?

This is Pakistan’s army and Swat is within Pakistan’s borders. I will have no objection if a military cantonment is established here.

Locals say innocent people have been killed. Will the aggrieved families be able to get justice?

I have told you already: we will not discuss what has happened in the past. Sharia law does not allow this.

If a court summons a key Taliban commander, will he appear before the court?

If Caliph Umar (RA) can appear before a court, then why can’t others?

So Fazlullah will also appear in court if summoned?

If he does not...he will be acting against the sharia law.

What you did in Malakand in the 1990s and then in Afghanistan in 2001 you called ‘jihad’. Are Fazlullah’s activities over the last 16 months in Swat also jihad?

I do not want to speak on this.

What are Fazlullah’s plans after the peace deal?

He will support imposition of sharia law.

You have termed democracy ‘infidelity’. But Maulana Sami-ul Haq, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmad are taking part in the democratic process.

Democracy is not permissible in sharia law. I will not name [these leaders] but they are taking part in infidelity. I will not offer prayers if one of [these leaders] is leading those prayers.

Do you intend to export sharia law to other parts of Pakistan?

If people help me, I will. Otherwise, no.

Daily Times, 19 March 2009.
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Ejaz Haider: CJP restored; CJP sans Swat?

In Pakistan it is difficult to determine where to begin and how far to go back to set things right. Such situations call for pragmatism rather than sheer idealism, which is why Justice Chaudhry, the PCO 1 judge, was acceptable while PCO 2 judges were not

While the rest of Pakistan was celebrating the restoration of the deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan as indicative of the rule of law, in another part of Pakistan (if it can be called that), a more regressive step was being taken.

In Swat, where state authority has been ceded to the Taliban by the provincial government, a step the Centre has tacitly agreed to, Sufi Muhammad, leader of the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Mohammadi, has asked the lower judiciary and the lawyers to leave the area since the system they represent is not functional in his domain any more.

Need it be said that Sufi Muhammad’s interpretation of the deal with Peshawar — a deal quite mysterious — is very different from its marketing by the NWFP chief minister Ameer Haider Hoti?

Hoti had earlier claimed that nothing had changed except that people would be provided speedy justice and there would be an appellate court in Malakand. On the question of what kind of sharia (and whose) would be enforced, he had said that the constitution of Pakistan was already clear that no law repugnant to Islam could be on the statute books. In other words, the operation of normal laws, and by extension the writ of the state, was to remain intact.

Hoti was too slick in his marketing, which should have made all of us suspicious. But we have reached a point where all of us are constantly looking for any straws to clutch at. This one, Hoti’s assurance, was most bogus even as straws go.

So yes, while the opposition, notably the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, has called off the Long March and there is jubilation all round, the question is: what next?

In that question resides the devil. Time is serial and the moment is already history. The issue must go beyond the person of the CJP to the institution of the judiciary and further on to the judiciary’s interaction with other institutions of state and society. And, to the gravest threat facing Pakistan: terrorism. The difficult part is yet to come.

What is the CJP going to do about Swat? Can he? Even should he? Important questions because Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry liked to delve in policy and this is what someone rightly called a problem from hell.

At the minimum what has happened in Swat means that if it is not revised, the title CJP would need a suffix in parenthesis, ‘sans Swat’, because the system Justice Chaudhry heads is not acceptable to Sufi Muhammad running his satrapy. The loss of territory is a problem that requires something more than threatening Long Marches.

But lest anyone misconstrue this as an attempt to undermine the moment. In which case, here’s some evidence of the specifics without reference to the problem of terrorism.

Exhibit A: The problem of the movement from principles to policy. Let’s hark back to where and how the crisis began. The Supreme Court under CJP Iftikhar Chaudhry had begun to cross the fine line between its powers to adjudicate and the executive’s need to take political and policy decisions. Courts do travel the distance from principles to policy but such movement must remain the exception. Under Justice Chaudhry, it became the norm.

It is instructive that around the same time in 2007, a division bench of the Supreme Court of India in a judgement warned against interfering too much in the workings of the executive. That decision has been controversial. But at the minimum it shows the conceptual-juridical complexities involved in determining the turf.

In a country like Pakistan where politics has generally trumped law, a debate on the issue becomes even more important because it offers a paradox: the judiciary trying for that very reason to uphold law and strike back to restore the balance and ending up instead with creating more anomalies.

This is what caused the then-government of General Pervez Musharraf (retd) to try and get rid of Justice Chaudhry. The action was widely unpopular and Musharraf tucked tail and let the SC restore Justice Chaudhry. The SC, pointing to the Presidential Reference as based on mala fide, determined that it did not warrant judicial scrutiny by the Supreme Judicial Council.

The restoration, a victory, should have cautioned the SC against too much adventurism. Instead, it instilled a heady feeling that everything was possible now that Musharraf had been licked. Pushed to the wall, he, however, struck on November 3.

The current crisis, which nearly cost Pakistan its new government, can be traced back to that period.

While Musharraf is gone, some of those issues, including determining the probity of the National Reconciliation Ordinance, remain. What would the restored CJP do now? Amir of the Jama’at-e Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Imran Khan are already expecting the CJP to deliver a judicial revolution. Would he; should he? If he does, Pakistan will be thrown back into the vortex of another political crisis.

If he doesn’t, that would show both the limitation of what can be done and also his pragmatism. It would also show that if he had heeded this lesson between his restoration and second sacking on November 3, the situation would not have come to this pass and the country could have been saved much sweat.

Exhibit B: Linked with this is the issue of the politicisation of the restored CJP. Lawyers reject this argument by pointing to outgoing CJP Abdul Hameed Dogar as more tainted politically. True that, but it misses the point about Justice Chaudhry. The struggle that was waged was essentially political; neither can law be divorced from politics in any Dworkinian sense. Yet, the issue of being on the bench becomes a legitimate concern when a judge, having been in the middle of a political campaign, has to adjudicate cases where people expect, almost demand, a certain kind of verdict — rather than what can or cannot be determined by the court through accepted procedures of law.

The SC under Justice Dogar faced the same problem in cases against the Brothers Sharif. Even if, in theory, the Court had sound legal grounds to disqualify them, the issue had become political rather than remaining anchored in law. Any verdict other than one exonerating them was liable to kick off a political campaign of protest, as it did.

This can now be applied in reverse to the restored CJP. If he absents himself from all such cases, people expecting him to clean up the Augean Stables would be disappointed. Even more troublesome, the political opponents of the PPP, having drawn blood, would like Justice Chaudhry to help them finish the job.

Politics would once again spoil to influence law.

Exhibit C: Expectations that the restoration would lead to strengthening of the judiciary and, even more ambitiously, Constitutionalism, a much broader concept, may be misplaced. While this is a necessary step in that direction, it is not sufficient. The integrity of one institution is a hollow concept. State institutions work in relation to each other. To expect one to show integrity in the absence of an overall institutional culture of integrity is putting too high a premium on optimism.

Exhibit D: Analysts, including former generals, have appeared on tv and praised the army for playing a positive role. One of the tribe, without any touch of irony, said that by streamlining democracy the army had reclaimed its prestige and shown that it would not intervene in politics.

But it did! That’s what its mediation was all about. True, it took the high tide of popular sentiment, but the fact that it had had to break the logjam between the two major political forces by weighing in means that, all said, it retains its arbitration role in the power structure of Pakistan. Even at the best of times for other institutions, and the army is just emerging from a long period of direct rule, trying hard to distance itself from its former chief’s legacy, it remains primus inter pares.

Until such time that the civilians can regain complete supremacy, it is too early to raise the glass to victory.

Finally, in Pakistan it is difficult to determine where to begin and how far to go back to set things right. Such situations call for pragmatism rather than sheer idealism, which is why Justice Chaudhry, the PCO 1 judge, was acceptable while PCO 2 judges were not. Some residual matter from the past has to be accepted to move forward.

Justice Chaudhry will therefore have to tread very carefully, balancing between the passionate idealism of the street and the practical demands of the Court’s functioning in relation to other institutions of state. Not an easy job given that his restoration has not changed much as far as the power structures of the state and their expression is concerned. (Daily Times)

Ejaz Haider is Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times and Consulting Editor of The Friday Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk. Parts of this article appeared in the Indian Express

Hamid Akhtar, Daily Express, 19 March 2009

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سوات: ریگولر عدالتوں میں کام بند

رفعت اللہ اورکزئی

بی بی سی اردو ڈاٹ کام، پشاور

نئے مسودے میں تمام مقدمات شرعی عدالتوں میں لڑے جائیں گے

صوبہ سرحد کے ضلع سوات میں ’شرعی عدالتوں‘ کے فعال ہونے کے بعد ضلع بھر میں قائم تقریباً بیس عمومی عدالتوں نے کام کرنا چھوڑ دیا ہے جبکہ حکومت کی طرف سے واضح احکامات نہ ملنے کے باعث عام عدالتوں کے کئی ججوں نے بھی مبینہ طور پر ڈیوٹیوں پر جانا چھوڑ دیا ہے ۔

سوات سے ملنے والی اطلاعات کے مطابق بدھ کو دوسرے روز بھی ضلع بھر میں قائم تمام ریگولر عدالتوں میں کام نہ ہونے کے برابر تھا اور زیادہ تر مقدموں میں وکلاء اور ججوں کی عدم موجودگی کے باعث تاریخ تبدیل کیے گئے۔

سوات میں سول اور سیشن عدالتوں کا دورہ کرنے والے مقامی صحافی غلام فاروق نے بی بی سی کو بتایا کہ شرعی عدالتوں میں باقاعدہ کام شروع ہونے کے بعد ریگولر عدالتوں کے وکلا اور ججوں میں شکوک شبہات پائے جاتے ہیں اس لیے دو دنوں سے ان عدالتوں میں کوئی کام نہیں ہورہا ۔

انہوں نے کہا کہ تین دن پہلے تحریک نفاذ شریعتی محمدی کے سربراہ مولانا صوفی محمد کی طرف سے کیے گئے اعلان میں کہا گیا تھا کہ شرعی عدالتوں کے قیام کے بعد ریگولر ججوں کو سوات سے چلے جانا چاہیے کیونکہ بقول ان کے اس سے امن معاہدے کی خلاف ورزی ہو رہی۔ اس اعلان کے بعد سول اور سیشن کورٹس کے جج مخمصے کا شکار ہوگئے ہیں

http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/2009/03/090318_swat_courts_uk.shtml

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Sufi Muhammad urges people to cooperate with Qazi courts

SWAT, Mar 16 (APP): The Chief of Tehrik Nifaz‑e‑Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM), Maulana Sufi Muhammad here Monday appealed people to cooperate with the Qazi courts for quick, speedy and inexpensive justice to litigants in light of the Nizam‑e‑Adl regulations 2009. He told a press conference here at peace camp in Saidu Sharif that Qazi courts in the district will hear cases from Tuesday in accordance with the Nizam‑e‑Adl regulations. The TNSM Chief said after the announcement of provincial government, the Qazi courts will take up cases from February 16 and will start proceedings in Swat from Tuesday. He also instructed the civil judges must not come to courts any more.


“I will himself supervise the process of courts after which Qazi courts would also be gradually extended to Dir, Buner, Malakand Agency, Shangla, Kohistan and Chitral districts,” he added. He said that Darul Qazi (appellate) tribunal will be setup at divisional level in which three Qazis would be appointed.

Sufi asks Swat judges to cease hearings

* TNSM chief says continued hearings violate peace agreement
* PHC asks NWFP govt to ensure safety of judges
* Registrar says judges to continue jobs until told otherwise

By Akhtar Amin and Ghulam Farooq

PESHAWAR/MINGORA: Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammad (TNSM) chief Sufi Muhammad warned judges of the Swat lower judiciary on Monday to cease their hearings, as sharia courts would start operations in the district from today (Tuesday).

He warned at a press conference that if the judicial officers continued to attend their offices, it would be considered a violation of the peace accord between him and the NWFP government.

Under the agreement, Sufi said all decisions rendered by lower courts in Swat after February 16 are void, and only the qazi courts are qualified to decide the cases in the district under sharia law. He claimed there was no need for President Asif Ali Zardari’s approval on the Nizam-e-Adl (Shari) Regulations, 2009 as such regulations had already been implemented in the region without presidential consent. He said qazi courts would now be established in Lower and Upper Dir districts, Buner, Malakand Agency, Shangla, Kohistan and Chitral districts.

Sufi said if the appointed qazis did not deliver their verdicts in light of sharia laws, they would be replaced by other qazis. He said the qazi courts’ decisions would be challenged in Darul Qaza, for which two qazis had already been appointed and a third one would be appointed soon. He appealed to the public to examine the qazi courts’ verdicts and efficiency, and inform him of any weaknesses and delays.

Concern: Following the press conference, the Peshawar High Court (PHC) expressed concern at TNSM chief Sufi Muhammad’s threats to judges in Swat, and directed the NWFP government to ensure the safety of Swat judges and courts. PHC Registrar Qalandar Ali Khan told Daily Times the PHC and provincial government supported the appointment of sharia courts in Swat, but Sufi’s warning to Swat judges against attending to their duties from today was a matter of concern.

Denouncing the warning, the PHC registrar said he had contacted Swat District and Sessions Judge Hayat Khan after learning of the threat, and they had decided that the lower court judges would resume their hearings into the cases pending before them. “I have informed the provincial government of the security concern. But it has not responded yet,” he said, adding it was the provincial government’s duty to ensure protection of the judiciary. He said the lower courts could only be shut down if the provincial government ordered the PHC to do so.

http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\03\17\story_17-3-2009_pg1_12

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