Pakistani lawyers protest against Musharraf regime
Click on the link below to view pictures (Courtesy Rise of Pakistan):
24 Jan 2008- Islamabad Protest of Lawyers and Police's baton charge
Pakistani riot police used tear gas and batons here on Thursday to disperse hundreds of protesters chanting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf, Agence France-Presse reporters witnessed.
Around 400 people, including lawyers, hardline Islamists and supporters of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan screamed ‘Death to Musharraf’ when police stopped them from visiting Pakistan’s former top judge.
Musharraf sacked chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry under emergency rule in November last year. Chaudhry remains under house arrest in Islamabad.
The protesters tried to break through a police barricade outside the upmarket Marriott Hotel, which is near Chaudhry’s house, but were forced back by baton-wielding police who then fired tear gas.
Waving black flags, the protesters regrouped and chanted: ‘We will lay down our lives for the chief justice.’
Former premier Nawaz Sharif was prevented from meeting Chaudhry on Wednesday.
The independent-minded Chaudhry became a pro-democracy icon when he fought back against Musharraf’s initial attempt to oust him in March 2007 on charges of misconduct.
Musharraf declared an emergency and finally sacked the judge on November 3 amid fears that the Supreme Court was set to overturn his victory in a presidential election the previous month.
Source: TV3 (NZ) & Hemscott
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Police tear-gas anti-Musharraf protest [Watch Video & Pictures]
Monday, January 21, 2008
What future for Pakistan's lawyers' movement?
By Faisal Naseem Chaudhry
[advocate, Lahore High Court, Lahore, Pakistan]
Monday, January 21, 2008
"All was not well on the morning of December 27, yet it was not so unwell either. Elections were to take place on 8th of January. Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and other politicians were on a move round-the-clock as part of their election campaign. The lawyers' boycott of judges who had taken oath's under General Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule was a working reality, especially in Lahore. The issue restoration the ousted superior court judges was sizzling and Bhutto was condemned for her fluctuating stance on the subject.
Everything changed at 6 PM that evening when one or more bullets killed her. Three of days official mourning witnessed excessive damage to public and private property resulting in huge losses to the national exchequer; just the other day Pakistan Railways demanded 6 billion rupees for a revamp. The Election Commission of Pakistan set February 18 as the new date for General Elections, and the deposed judges appeared to be part of history.
Only in the last couple of weeks has the lawyers' movement witnessed some progress. The Lahore District Bar Elections took place on 12 January. Hamid Khan's all-powerful "Professional Group" made a clean sweep. After a couple of days, the new Chief of Army Staff issued a strict official directive that he would not tolerate military's indulgence into politics and any officer inviting a politician to his office shall have to face serious consequences. News items also appeared that the Army Chief also decided to summon back officers working as deputies in in civilian organizations.
In the wake of all this, a strange decision of Pakistan Bar Council struck everyone. Through a resolution, it decided that the lawyers' fraternity would observe a complete strike of Superior and Subordinate Judiciary on every Thursday while on other working days only a token strike shall be observed from 10:30 am to 11:30 am. This is interesting because in the Superior Judiciary, the tea break for judges commences at 10:30 and ends at 11. The decision jolted not the community, but rather its discipline. In its wake, provincial and local lawyers bodies agitated and simply flouted the decision of the Pakistan Bar Council, asking it to go back to its former rule.
February 2008 is going to be a very important month. National Elections are to take place, but for me, the Lahore High Court Bar Association Elections (23 Feb) are of more importance. It was a shame when the Office Bearers of the Lahore District Bar Association came out against rallies amidst police baton charges and our leadership preferred to take shelter in the form of 'house arrest'. It was a shame when we were advised to 'protest' within the boundary of the High Court: "Do not go out; police will beat you. Let the thrashing of Civil Court Lawyers take place, you are superior. They appear before the subordinate judiciary, you appear before the Lordships." It was a shame in toto. If the District Bar Association was not there, the leadership of the Lahore High Court Bar Association in connivance and collaboration with the recently retired Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court would have almost destroyed the lawyers' movement in Lahore.
This is why I consider the forthcoming LHCBA elections of supreme importance. If the "Professional Group" does not succeed this time having Mr. Anwar Kamal as candidate for the position of President, we shall again be constrained to merely read in the newspapers as to what is going on at Peshawar High Court or Sindh High Court at Karachi. The office bearers of Lahore High Court Bar Association caused great damage to the lawyers' movement in fear of the former Chief Justice of Lahore High Court. Kudos go to the individual lawyers who were arrested, beaten, and later jailed under Anti-Terrorism charges. It was these individual members of the High Court Bar who said 'no' to the office bearers, refused to listen to their deodorized speeches, and decided to join their Civil Court colleagues in the streets. What a day it was when the former President of the Lahore District Bar (as the new President has been elected on Jan 12) virtually bullied the District Police Officer in the last week of December, "On November 5, we were not prepared. If you have guts, try to baton charge us today and then see how we are going to hammer you and your foot-constables". Police Officers did not baton charge afterwards since the then Chief Justice had not issued any clandestine orders in this regard. I am not aware of other provinces and Bar Associations other than the two based in Lahore, but so far as Lahore is concerned, the lawyers were beaten on March 13 and November 5 under the specific orders of the then Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court working through the President of the Lahore High Court Bar Association. I do not have a video to support my arguments but these arguments are the talk of the town. Take a poll; you will get the same opinion.
Since November 3, 2007, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association (Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan), Mr. Ali Ahmad Kurd, and many others have been detained in their houses. They have not been allowed to come out of their houses lest 'public order' deteriorate. Where is the democratic United States in all this? Its leaders would prefer to have debates over the fate of Guantanamo detainees while one of ours - imprisoned by a government they support - is the Chief Justice of this country. The EU meanwhile is sending a Mission to 'observe' the upcoming National Elections, yet the EU does not seem to care about the fate of those who sacrificed their high offices for the security of our constitutional rights.
On top of all this, we also do not allow them to start their Chambers either. The deposed judges have been asked by the lawyers not to commence legal practice, as it would be taken as consent to the unlawful removal from office. Almost three months have passed with no other source of income and they are sitting home while restrained by us not to work as legal counsels.
I am apprehensive of the days after the National Elections. The infamous 'horse-trading' will begin in the newly elected Constituent Assemblies; the newspapers will have other spicy stories to publish; the new Prime Minister of Pakistan will address his 'brethren' promising the alleviation of their sufferings; I shall have new clients and new litigation in my pocket, and amidst the mesmerizing lights of Lahore we shall forget how a deposed Judge will pay the electricity bills to have lights in his house."
Source: Jurist
Singing songs of Piccadilly, Strand and Leicester Square ...
By Lorne Gunter
Monday, January 21, 2008
I'm with you and you're with me, so we are all together;
And we are marching to Islamabad, Islamabad, Islamabad;
Oh, we are marching to Islamabad, Islamabad, Hurrah!
Come on, Canada. Let's get our creative juices flowing. Now that Liberal party leader Stephane Dion has declared war on Pakistan, we're gonna need some great tunes our boys and girls in uniform can sing as they slog their way from the rolling sand dunes of the Thar Desert, through the mangrove swamps of the southern coast to the frigid peaks of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush.
There'll be pheasants over, the wide Hunza Valley; Tomorrow, just you wait and see ...
The goatsman will tend his kids. The opium will bloom again. And Rashid will go to sleep, in his own little room again.
Oh, I know the Liberals are in full backpedal over remarks Mr. Dion made in Quebec City last week that sounded an awful lot like a plan for an invasion of Pakistan. You can tell how desperate they are because they stooped to sending the unbelievable Denis Coderre out to cover his boss's tracks.
The opposition leader's office now insists: "Mr. Dion obviously did not propose any sort of military intervention. Mr. Dion believes that Canada must focus our diplomatic efforts on Pakistan in order to secure the border with Afghanistan."
OK. But what he said sure sounded a lot like a call to arms. If the Pakistanis cannot stop the Taliban from training within their boundaries and pouring into Afghanistan to attack our troops, Mr. Dion warned, "We could consider that option with the NATO forces in order to help Pakistan help us pacify Afghanistan."
Sure, sure. He didn't mean we should send the Patricia's and the Van Doos into Baluchistan. No, Mr. Dion clearly meant non-military action. Our diplomats always refer to themselves as "NATO forces" and their negotiations as "pacification."
I know Mr. Dion now insists he has "no solution" regarding Pakistan and our mission in Afghanistan. (I can already see the Tory ads featuring that gift of a quotation.) But I think Mr. Dion was really letting his inner hawk shine through in Quebec. Deep inside this mealy-mouthed, Liberal equivocator lies the heart of another Winston Churchill. "We shall fight them in the madrasas. We shall fight them on the cricket pitches. We shall fight them in the Punjab and in the tribal territories. We shall never surrender!"
It's clear to those who care to look that if the Liberals are elected at the next election, D-Day in Pakistan won't be far off.
So who among us will step up and be the Canadian Spike Jones?
When al-Qaeda says, "We ist der master race," we HEIL! HEIL! Right in bin Laden's face. Not to love Der Prophet is a great disgrace; so we HEIL! HEIL! Right in bin Laden's face.
Or Marlene Dietrich?
Underneath the prayer light at the mosque gate, darling I remember the way you used to hate. 'Twas there that you whispered tenderly, Mullah Omar, wanted me.
So maybe the wartime songs aren't going to work. But how 'bout those gung-ho Liberal campaign ads the party's clever strategists are no doubt devising as we speak to capitalize on Mr. Dion's newfound jingoism? I'm betting they reprise, with a twist, those "men with guns" ads that were so successful for them in the 2006 election.
"Stephane Dion has a plan. He wants soldiers. With guns. In Pakistan. On Pakistan's streets ... we're not making this up. Vote Liberal. And we'll be in Rawalpindi by Christmas."
Of course, Mr. Dion didn't mean we should invade a country of 170 million Muslims. But, if Stephen Harper had said the same thing while in opposition, the Liberals would have pounced on it as proof he lacked the mental sophistication to be PM.
There's no reason not to accuse Mr. Dion of the same now.
Source: National Post
Friday, January 18, 2008
Judicial spark stifled in Pakistan
Life under house arrest described
By Kim Barker | Tribune correspondent
January 18, 2008
The judge's family has been locked in its house for more than 10 weeks. The 8-year-old son is disabled and has difficulty walking. His two teenage sisters are not allowed to go to school. Strangers often padlock the gates, and armed men roam the neighborhood.
"How mad they are," the 16-year-old daughter, Palwasha Iftikhar Chaudhry, wrote in an e-mail to a lawyer, referring to government officials who have kept the family detained.
The father, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, is the former chief justice of Pakistan, a man detained since a state of emergency was declared by President Pervez Musharraf on Nov. 3, still the object of the president's ire and watched constantly by police and the intelligence agencies.
"We are being treated as if we are militants, terrorists, extremists," said Palwasha Iftikhar Chaudhry in a rare telephone conversation from her house.
Forgotten in chaos
With the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto dominating the country's politics and headlines, the fate of the many judges fired or suspended in the emergency has faded. But many critics of Musharraf's move say a case like Bhutto's -- allegedly mishandled since her assassination Dec. 27 -- shows exactly why Pakistan so badly needs an independent judiciary.
The handpicked judges who now sit on the country's Supreme Court and provincial High Courts all signed a new oath to Musharraf after he declared emergency rule. Many legal observers believe this oath destroys the judges' independence and credibility -- especially in the investigation of Bhutto's killing, in which many Pakistanis accuse the government of complicity or even responsibility.
The Pakistan Bar Council has demanded a judicial inquiry into the assassination, led by Chaudhry. An editorial on the Bhutto probe in the respected Dawn newspaper concluded: "If the independence of the judiciary had not been compromised as a result of the extra-constitutional measures taken by President Musharraf on Nov. 3, perhaps that institution could have stepped in to bridge the credibility gap that the government so desperately needs filled today."
Although the government had wanted to name an independent judicial panel to investigate Bhutto's killing, critics say they doubt such a panel can be formed.
Critics say the country's legal system has been in tatters, the higher courts paralyzed. Of the top 96 judges in Pakistan before the emergency declaration, 44 lost their jobs because they refused to sign the oath or were not asked. Thirteen of the 18 Supreme Court judges were dismissed.
Corrupting influence
Former Supreme Court Justice Ghulam Rabbani, one of several justices allowed to leave the judges' Islamabad enclave after emergency rule ended Dec. 15, said he did not think it was possible for judges who took the new oath to Musharraf to form a neutral investigatory commission into Bhutto's death.
Many of Bhutto's supporters have accused elements of the government of being somehow responsible for the slaying after a rally for the Feb. 18 parliamentary elections.
"They are not going to appoint or nominate any judge who is going to be independent [or] anyone they have the least fear would be independent," said Anwar Zaheer Jamali, a former judge on Sindh province's High Court. "Why was normal procedure not followed [in the Bhutto case]? What was the motive? There can be no other motive but to destroy valuable evidence."
Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, tried to fire Chaudhry first on March 12, accusing the judge of corruption. Pro-Chaudhry rallies drew hundreds of thousands of supporters, and the remaining justices threw out the government complaint and reinstated Chaudhry as chief justice in July.
Since declaring the emergency, Musharraf has made his personal animosity with Chaudhry very clear. To Western diplomats, he rails against Chaudhry, who had pursued probes into missing detainees and an earlier attack on Bhutto. At his first news conference after declaring emergency rule, the Pakistani president spent at least five minutes discussing Chaudhry and the minutiae of his expense reports.
"He demoralized law enforcement," said Musharraf at another news conference. . "He demoralized the whole nation."
The new judiciary named by Musharraf already is raising questions about its handling of cases. On Oct. 1, Chaudhry had suspended three police and administrative officials accused of beating up lawyers, journalists and other protesters at a demonstration the week before. On Jan. 3, the new Supreme Court retracted that order.
Imprisoned at home
The judges' leafy enclave of 19 homes on a hill in Islamabad, with a jogging track, a children's park and a mosque, remains locked off from the world -- security officers guarding the roads in and out. Four former Supreme Court judges are still being held under a kind of neighborhood arrest: they can leave their homes but not their neighborhood.
Chaudhry and his family are being held under house arrest in their five-room home. His daughter Palwasha, nicknamed "the commander" by lawyers helping the family on the outside, helps smuggle in mobile phones.
A phone number can usually only be used once or twice before the intelligence agencies somehow manage to scramble it, she said. She said she has read one Harry Potter book more than 20 times since the crisis started, as she has had no other books.
As she spoke, her father's voice could be heard in the background, but he refused to come to the phone. Palwasha said the call would be cut off immediately if he spoke. Even so, the line went dead three times. She said her father worried that the upcoming elections would be fraudulent without a neutral judiciary to help evaluate the fairness of the results.
"I just want to say to the international community, why aren't they being supportive of the chief justice and the other Supreme Court judges?" she asked. "They didn't do anything wrong."
Source: Chicago Tribune
Monday, January 7, 2008
Pakistan Tourism: Still Trying
By SIMON ROBINSON
Friday, Jan. 04, 2008 
The Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, one of the country's most beautiful destinations.
(Charles Bowman / Alamy)
The young man at the airport approached me with a nervous smile and a hint of hesitation. He was from the Ministry of Tourism, he explained. Would I be so kind as to fill out a survey on my stay in Pakistan? The previous week had been eventful, to say the least. I had landed in Lahore on Thursday, Dec 27. As I left the airport for my hotel my cell phone pinged with an SMS from my wife: "Bhutto dead in Rawalpindi blast." The following few days are a bit of a blur, and then on New Year's Eve I fell sick with some intestinal bug that took two days to beat. "I'm not sure I'm the best person to help you," I told the man. But he insisted, and so I was soon filling out the three-page form, which mixed statistics gathering (nationality, places I visited, number of nights I spent in hotels) with questions like "During your stay which features did you like most?"
The hardest two questions came at the end. "Would you please like to identify the problems you faced during the trip?" the first of them asked. "You want me to be truthful?" I asked the survey man, who hovered over me to make sure I didn't skip any questions. "Of course," he said, smiling. "Information will help us improve. We need to hear the truth."
The truth is Pakistan could be — should be — an incredible tourist destination. It offers wonderful Mughal ruins, evocative British colonial architecture, world-class hiking and climbing in the Karakoram Mountains, gorgeous rolling green meadows, captivating culture, great food (especially the fruits and kebabs), and some of the best carpet shops in South Asia. Unfortunately, it is also regularly described as the world's most dangerous country — which, while more intriguing than slogans like "Malaysia, Truly Asia" or "I Feel Slovenia," is not exactly an inducement for people to visit.
It's not like Pakistan's tourism ministry hasn't been trying. The survey I was filling out is part of a two-year-long project that will wrap up this year. Pakistan has a great tourism website. And the country even decided to make last year "Destination Pakistan 2007." But there's the rub. Last year was one of the most troubled in Pakistan's history. Terrorist attacks became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. President Pervez Musharraf threw out the Supreme Court Chief Justice triggering massive street protests. The Swat Valley, a picturesque tourist spot renowned for its skiing and trout fishing, is now, as my colleague Aryn Baker so vividly described just two months ago, Taliban Central. And to end the year, the leading opposition figure was assassinated.
Even the most beautiful country in the world is going to struggle to air its charms with all that going on. The problems I faced during my trip? "Rioting, looting, burning of shops and tires along roads, shooting, general chaos, mayhem and insecurity — and a very bad stomach ailment," I wrote. I looked up and saw that the survey man, who was waiting patiently for me to finish the forms, was no longer smiling.
The next question read: "Would you please like to give suggestions for improving tourist facilities in Pakistan?" "How do you think I should answer this?" I asked the man, "Pakistan has so many troubles it's not fair to complain about particular tourist facilities." He shook his head and agreed that there had been a lot of unrest. "It's only 10% or 20% of the people," he said. "The rest of us are very welcoming." I nodded in agreement — Pakistanis are indeed warm, hospitable and generous — and lamented that he had a tough job. He nodded: "It's a struggle."
We both looked at the last question again and talked a bit more about what might help. Then, with a smile from my new friend, I wrote in: "Democracy and Stability." Easy to write, of course. Harder to make real.
Source: TIME
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Save Judiciary Save Pakistan
I received the original poster about the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry from the Emergency Mailing List. I read and liked it and as it was originally in Urdu decided to translate it into English so that people who do not know Urdu, can also understand what it is about.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
More Suicide Bombers Head to Twin Cities
Security has been red alerted in Islamabad and Rawalpindi in view of information of 7 suicide bombers entering the twin cities, said the Interior Ministry sources.
The police authorities have been informed in writing about the intelligence agencies information that 7 suicide attackers had entered the twin city, sources said.
They have been directed to step up security at all the important places and people.
The police have started to chalk out a fresh security plan while monitoring is being carried out at sensitive places besides strict watch is being maintained for suspected individuals.
Source: Geo News
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