Several injured, arrested at Sunni Ittehad Council rally

Pakistan

Several injured, arrested at Sunni Ittehad Council rally

Agencies
November 27, 2010

The workers of Sunni Tehreek (ST) arriving on board Khyber Mail were arrested at Rawalpindi Railways station. — File Photo

ISLAMABAD: Over a hundred local leaders and activists of Sunni Ittehad Council were arrested on Saturday. Police stopped the rally near ‘Soha Rawalpindi, where the activists had held a sit-in protest and were determined to move forward.

Police in twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi jump-started into action since Saturday morning in a bid to stem Council’s Long March from Islamabad to Lahore. Hazrart Bari Imam Shrine was sealed.

The workers of Sunni Tehreek (ST) arriving on board Khyber Mail were arrested at Rawalpindi Railways station.

According to Cantt Police Station, at least 50 people were taken into custody. Meanwhile, Sunni Council spokesman claimed over 200 of their workers were nabbed.

In view of security apprehensions, the government was in top gear since yesterday to stanch Islamabad-Lahore Long March announced by Sunni Ittehad as the march to ‘Save Pakistan’.

Islamabad’s exits and entry points especially those roads leading to Bari Imam Darbar were heavily guarded with baton-wielding police contingents armed with tear-gas shells and armored personnel carrier (APC).

Police were given duties outside madaris in support of Sunni Tehreek. Also, some local leaders were browbeaten into staying back.

Police took 19 Tehreek workers including a local leader during an operation in Jhelum.

According to Rawalpindi officials, over 100 people have been taken into custody. – Agencies

Chief of the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) Sahibzada Fazal Karim on Saturday said the SIC will not allow the repeal of the blasphemy laws. He said terrorism had distorted Pakistan’s image across the globe, adding that those persuading people for suicide bombings were not loyal to Pakistan.

Hundreds of SIC activists started a nearly 200-mile long march on Saturday in a protest against Taliban attacks on the country’s religious sites.

Authorities warned that militants could attack the procession which was being led by Sahibzada Fazal Karim.

Police escorted the convoy out of Islamabad, where the journey had started.

The participants, travelling on foot and in cars, plan to rally in Lahore, where 47 people died in a suicide bombing at a Sufi shrine in July.

While addressing the participants of the long march at Islamabad’s Bari Imam shrine, Karim said the government had not accepted the SIC’s demand for legislation to curb terrorism and called for an All Parties Conference on the issue.

He further demanded the release of the arrested SIC activists.

The local administration had imposed Section 144 in Rawalpindi and several activists from various religious seminaries had been arrested.

Following intelligence reports of possible terror attacks, the Punjab government had banned the long march to avert any untoward incident.

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL: www.dawn.com/2010/11/27/we-will-not-allow-repeal-of-blasphemy-laws-sic.html

Sectarianism has poisoned Pakistan

Sectarianism has poisoned Pakistan

The violence seen in Lahore last week was aided by a bigoted constitution. How has stock in our nationhood plummeted so?

Basim Usmani guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 July 2010 09.01 BST

The recent attacks on a prominent shrine in Lahore demonstrate how the unrest in Pakistan is caused by a minority of few who cannot tolerate the plurality of beliefs in Pakistan. The Tehrik-e-Taliban are lying through their teeth when they claim that they do not attack public places. It’s becoming more and more apparent that these militants aren’t resisting American hegemony; this a war to determine Pakistan’s future and, by proxy, the future of Islam.

Whether the Tehrik-e-Taliban actually arranged the bombers’ suicide belts is irrelevant; they have created a domino effect that’s likely to spread from commercial capitals such as Lahore to cities with historic shrines and Pakistani historical sites, such as Multan, or Taxila.

Unlike Baghdad, where violence between Islamic sects is a product of the war America is waging, the onus of last Thursday’s blasts falls squarely on us, the citizens of Pakistan. We have been complacent about sectarianism for too long.

A good friend who works for a transportation company told me in 2007 that in villages along the highways to Waziristan where the Taliban had seized control were the bodies of butchered Shia Muslims. That year, Lahore’s public was too busy mobilising about the judiciary and President Musharraf to pay the violence any mind.

Sectarianism has a brutal history in Pakistan that existed long before militants in Afghanistan began calling themselves the Taliban. I remember as a child in Lahore the broadcasts of gun violence outside Shia houses of worship during the early 1990s.

Many Pakistanis feel that the attacks on two Ahmadiyya mosques last May, where gunmen unloaded bullets and grenades on Friday prayer-goers, were unprecedented. Certainly the Ahmadiyya community doesn’t think they are.

To have a Pakistani passport requires citizens to assert that they are not part of the Ahmadiyya community. In a sense, holding that passport also makes you complicit in the blasts that killed dozens in Lahore’s most famous Sufi shrine last week. Our inability to understand that this war is about national identity is rooted in the same complacency.

We are OK with the state deciding for us who is or isn’t Muslim. In this regard, the Pakistani government has the weakest moral fibre in taking on this growing strand of extremism. It is hypocritical to fight the Taliban in Waziristan if we are okay about denying citizenship to millions of Muslims born in Pakistan.

It may sound extreme of me, but we should be jailing clerics in Pakistan that give edicts declaring believers to be non-Muslim or anti-Pakistani. It may seem extreme to an American that writers who deny the Holocaust are imprisoned in Europe, but extreme contexts call for extreme measures.

Pakistanis must stress how being born or raised in their country is enough to be Pakistani; laws preventing Ahmadis from referring to themselves as Muslims were amended to the constitution by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s.

I remember being uneasy at my desk in middle school when I was studying at Aitchison College in Lahore, and some of my classmates were getting bullied for having marks on them after returning from Shia processions during Muharram. Pakistanis themselves are the only ones capable of stamping out this discriminatory culture.

Some proactiveness is necessary on our part to make it clear that mystics, Shias, Ahmadis and Christians are all fellow Pakistanis. When you are pulled over by street police in any major Pakistani city, the first bit of information the police ask for is your family name. From one name your caste, religious beliefs and affluence is determined.

This came as a shock to all of my family who have emigrated away: that collectively our stock in our own nationhood has plummeted so. In a sense, these problems are all accrued debt we’ve accumulated for being so complacent. In the light of our bigoted constitution and deterministic culture we have to – for ourselves – decide that being Pakistani is enough to make us all countrymen. Otherwise, we might as well just refer to ourselves as Taliban, Muslim extremists, Islamic militants, and so forth.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

URL: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/05/pakistan-terrorism