KARACHI, Nov 9 (IPS) - Faced with a continuing
news blackout and with street protests being met with police beatings
and imprisonment, members of Pakistan’s civil society who oppose the
‘emergency’, imposed by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf a week ago, are
finding alternative ways to express dissent.
"This is a battle that cannot be won on the streets,"
commented a development economist asking not to be named. "We are few
in numbers. We don’t have street power. Mass mobilisation is the job of
the political parties. What we can do is provide the brains, the
strategies and the manifestoes."
Pakistan’s intellectuals and civil society activists were the
first to react against the emergency imposed on Saturday. Activists in
Lahore who met at the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
(HRCP) to discuss the situation were arrested and detained before
finally being released on Tuesday evening. HRCP chairperson Asma
Jahangir is still under house arrest, served with a 90-day detention
order.
Families and friends expect the detainees to be released sooner. Many
belong to the intellectual and social cream of society -- professors,
lawyers, journalists, artists, economists, former ministers and retired
army officials. But their powerful connections were useless this time.
The relative of one detained activist who managed to get through to a
‘very high level official’ was told that the local and provincial
administration was helpless. "The orders came from the very top, to
teach these people a lesson," the official reportedly said.
The regime has been particularly brutal on the legal community
for refusing to accept new judges sworn in under emergency orders. The
judges of the superior courts who refused to take oath under these
orders were placed under house arrest and thousands of lawyers
imprisoned around the country. Many were brutally beaten before being
hauled off. Hundreds have been charged under the anti-terrorism laws.
In a statement on Nov. 8, Jahangir drew attention to two former
presidents of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA)-- Muneer A.
Malik and Tariq Mahmood. Malik – shifted, she alleged, to the notorious
Attack Fort "under the custody of the military intelligence and
tortured". No one has been allowed to see Mahmood or Aitzaz Ahsan,
recently elected SCBA president. Mahmood has been shifted "to an
unknown place". The whereabouts of Ali Ahmed Kurd, former vice chair of
the Pakistan Bar Council, are also unknown. He is believed to be in the
custody of military intelligence, said Jahangir.
Police have also targeted journalists in what the Pakistan Federal
Union of Journalists (PFUJ) terms as the worst repression of the media
since the days of the military dictator, Gen. Ziaul Haq who held power
from 1977-88. Police beat journalists who emerged from the Karachi
Press Club following a protest meeting on Monday, and arrested six. The
journalists, nominated in the police report as ‘hardened criminals’,
were produced before a magistrate in handcuffs. The PFUJ has released a
poster based on this image headlined ‘Press in Chains’ -- the title of
a famous book by the late chronicler of media freedoms, Zamir Niazi.
After an inconclusive 45-minute meeting with the government over the
withdrawal of anti-press ordinances, resumption of television channels
and FM radio on Thursday, the journalist union announced a countrywide
"Black Day" on Friday. The protest will include a boycott of official
functions, protest camps from Nov. 14 -17, a Global Action Day on Nov.
15 and countrywide protest rallies and demonstrations on Nov. 20, said
Mazhar Abbas, PFUJ’s secretary general. The detention of civil society
activists, lawyers and journalists have prompted criticism that
Musharraf is diverting attention from the ‘war on terror’ that has
reached worrying proportions, particularly on Pakistan’s north-west
frontier that borders Afghanistan. "While the terrorists remain on the
loose and continue to occupy more space in Pakistan, senior lawyers are
being tortured," said Jahangir.
Mainstream political parties have been relatively slow to
respond but since twice elected former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on
Tuesday announced an agitation starting with a protest on Friday, Nov.
9, and a ‘long march’ from Nov. 13, workers of her Pakistan People’s
Party (PPP) have been demonstrating in various cities. The government
has banned both events.
On Wednesday, police in Islamabad thrashed workers attempting to break
through a barricade near the National Assembly. Hundreds of PPP
activists have been detained around the country.
The blackout on television news has made it hard for people to
know what is happening. "There’s nothing going on," said Nausheen, an
economics teacher who gave only her first name, talking to IPS.
By Wednesday evening, two business channels (Business Plus and
CNBC-Pakistan) had been restored. On Thursday, BBC and CNN were also
back on air. However, these channels are in English, a language few
people in Pakistan understand. (A business channel holding discussions
in Urdu also resumed broadcast on Thursday)
The newspapers are publishing critical comments, reports and
photographs, but Nausheen does not read any. So like most Pakistanis,
she remains unaware of current happenings. The surface normalcy that is
visible intersects frequently with the pockets of protest catalysed by
the emergency, found Saskia Sassen, a professor of urban sociology at
Columbia University, recently in Pakistan to deliver a lecture in
Lahore. Writing in the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ (‘Pakistan’s
Two Worlds’, Nov 8), she observed, that "through it all, the streets
continued to bustle, the traffic remained heavy and the airlines
continued to fly according to schedule, as if nothing is happening".
Shops, businesses and banks are open -- but it is shutters-down for
Quetta, capital of the western province of Balochistan where a small
nationalist party gave a strike call on Monday.
Urban markets continue to do booming business. One item that was
selling fast, after the news channels were blocked over cable, was
satellite dishes. But on Wednesday, shopkeepers were told they could
not sell satellite dishes. "I wish I had kept my satellite dish," said
a visual artist, meeting friends at a lively coffee shop in uptown
Karachi. "Now it’s just the internet."
This is in fact a tool that the younger generation in
particular is using effectively. Information exchanged over the
internet and via cell phone text messages has enabled young people to
organise quickly and effectively. This includes the normally
de-politicised students of private institutions who have been mobilised
for the first since the ban on student unions two decades ago, say
observers.
Students of a premier business school, the Lahore University of
Management Sciences (LUMS), have loudly opposed the emergency and
suspension of the constitution. Several LUMS professors were among
those arrested from the HRCP meeting on Sunday. The ranks of the 400
(four hundred) students who participated in the first protest on
Tuesday swelled to 1,500 the next day. Islamabad’s prestigious
Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) has seen similar activism, with students
holding ‘flash’ protests called at short notice, chanting slogans, then
dispersing before police arrive.
For their part, civil society activists are engaging in
creative ways of protest focusing on symbolism, like taking flowers to
the dissenting judges and spray-painting graffiti symbols like ‘eject’
and ‘repeat’ signs. On Wednesday, a small group of activists took
several bouquets to Sabihuddin Ahmed, Chief Justice of the Sindh High
Court (SHC), who is also under house arrest. Police vehicles blocked
both ends of Ahmed’s residential street.
Salahuddin, the judge’s son, was among the lawyers arrested from the
SHC on Monday. He was also among the few lawyers to be released early
Tuesday morning. He was unharmed, but Haider Waheed, another young
lawyer released around then, had bruises on his neck and upper back
caused by blows from police fists when he tried to resist arrest.
"These youngsters should not be aggressive," said Waheed’s grandmother
Sadiqa Waheeduddin, 88, who cut her teeth on the resistance against
British rule before Pakistan and India’s simultaneous independence and
partition in 1947. "This is all about politics. If the police is
arresting them, they should go quietly and not resist. After all, what
did they go there for? If they hit back, what is the difference between
intellectuals and the illiterate? When the police beat (Mahatma) Gandhi
or Maulana Hasrat Mohani, did they retaliate? It is because of their
patience that their ideas caught on around the world."
The Internet and cell phones have helped sustain the protests
and connect activists in Pakistan with sympathisers abroad. Judging by
the e-mails, blogs and messages of support whizzing about, the
expatriate community is in an uproar. They include ‘techies’ like
Sabahat Ashraf (iFaqeer), a blogger, technical writer and activist in
Silicon Valley, who created a ‘wiki page’ on the emergency.
"While the business world obsesses about what this means for enterprise
and the all-important bottom line, activists are using the tools of the
Web 2.0 world -- blogs, wikis, user-created multimedia sites like
YouTube and its clones -- to vault the barricades and get around
censorship and the other tools of police states," he commented in an
e-mail to IPS from San Francisco.
Ashraf says that it was initially natural disasters like the
tsunami in South-east Asia and the earthquake in Pakistan that inspired
activists like him to use Wikis to great effect -- rapid, collaborative
information-collecting and organising, fundraising, and so on.
"All these factors are coming together with the emergency in Pakistan.
A list of detainees and their status is evolving; protests are being
planned; information on where to see live feeds of Pakistani news
channels is being exchanged,’’ he said. ‘’A new factor is Facebook,
fast emerging as a social networking platform on which vigils and
protests are being coordinated, photos and websites exchanged..."
Such information exchanges have had a ripple effect within
Pakistan too. A chartered accountant recently e-mailed activists,
saying "a large number of chartered accountants intend to join the
struggle for the retoration of democracy, supremacy of judiciary and
rule of law. Please tell us what we can do."
CA's to join protest against emergency in PAKISTAN!!!
Aisha (Finance Professional) (8099 Points)
09 November 2007
CAclubindia
