PAKISTANI VICE
Clerics call for unrest, bombings if Musharraf doesn’t clean up country
The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, May 30, 2007
SONYA FATAH
ISLAMABAD — They started by taking on Islamabad’s music and video shops, shutting them down and destroying CDs and DVDs they found objectionable. They went on to abduct a suspected brothel owner to put her out of business and force a Pakistani cabinet minister to offer her resignation for conduct deemed un-Islamic.
Now, the brothers behind a rogue mosque in Pakistan’s capital are challenging the country’s President, using the 10,000 students in their religious school to provoke General Pervez Musharraf.
“Our main point,” said Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who runs the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, with his brother, Mullah Abdul Aziz, “is that this system should be abolished, and an Islamic system should be in place.” He said inequality, systemic corruption and moral ambiguity in Pakistan have forced him and his brother into the roles of agents of change, threatening unrest and even suicide bombings if their demands are not met.
In its boldest challenge yet, the Lal Masjid’s male students held several policemen hostage this month, demanding the release of fellow students who had been arrested on allegations of terrorism. Gen. Musharraf called in 10,000 men from the security services to surround the large grounds of the mosque and its seminaries, and Maulana Ghazi responded by threatening to launch suicide attacks if the mosque was raided. Overnight, the troops were recalled and negotiators sent instead. In the end, all the police officers were released and no one arrested for their abduction.
Gen. Musharraf hasn’t hesitated in the past to use force against those who oppose him, so his tolerant actions toward the Lal Masjid is puzzling many, and analysts say it’s a sign of the mosque’s political power. It’s a tactic that could backfire, however, and serve to embolden, rather than defeat, hard-line Islamists in Pakistan.
With its freelance Taliban-style anti-vice campaign, the mosque is proving to be a major challenge for Gen. Musharraf, already weakened by significant public protests over his dismissal of the nation’s top judge and recent riots in Karachi. With a general election in October, Gen. Musharraf is facing increasing political pressure from opposition parties seeking a return to democratic rule.
The government has been reluctant to confront the mosque, because it is said to have clout in many circles. It has enjoyed the attention of presidents past and present, with visits from dignitaries and the country’s military chiefs over the years.
The brothers who run it have long had close relations with the Taliban.
Maulana Ghazi fought alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. He has met Osama bin Laden and considers him a heroic figure. Students at the madrassa have been known to chant the names of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and Mr. bin Laden, although Maulana Ghazi is quick to condemn the World Trade Center attacks.
Hostilities between the Lal Masjid and the government began in January when the city demolished illegal mosques built on Lal Masjid’s premises. Female students reacted by occupying a children’s library nearby, refusing to leave until the government rebuilt the demolished structures.
Then, male students, many of them armed with Kalishnikovs, attacked and closed down music stores destroying piles of CDs by setting them alight outside the stores’ premises. They said they were opposed to the illegal pornography trade from the video stores.
In March, dozens of women from the mosque, armed with long bamboo staves and dressed from head to toe in black burkas, barged into the home of a suspected brothel owner and took her hostage along with her daughter, daughter-in-law and a six-month-old baby until the government stepped in to secure her release.
The Lal Masjid went on to establish a sharia court, which said that Pakistan’s federal tourism minister should resign because she hugged her French instructor after a successful maiden parachute jump. The minister tendered her resignation, which the government refused to accept, but the sharia court remains.
A little over a week ago, the mosque took its challenge to the government further and abducted the policemen.
Some critics say the Lal Masjid confrontation is engineered to prove the need for a forceful, military government.
“This is a government concentrating on elections and regime control,” said Samina Ahmed, South Asia director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention think tank headquartered in Belgium. “The problem is that regime survival is the objective. If that priority means making yet another deal with the mullahs, that is what they will do.”
If anything, the negotiations have helped to embolden the hard-line clerics. A few government officials are said to be sympathetic to their cause, while some in the Prime Minister’s cabinet have been calling for severe action against the mosque’s clerics. In the absence of that, however, the brothers remain able and appear willing to challenge Gen. Musharraf again.
Popularity: 3% [?]
