Police attack protesters in Pakistan

IHT
Posted: 2007-11-05 19:37:56

ISLAMABAD: Police officers armed with tear gas and clubs attacked thousands of protesting lawyers Monday in the city of Lahore and rounded up lawyers in other cities as the government of the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, faced the first signs of concerted resistance to the imposition Saturday of emergency rule.

The opposition to emergency rule, which many here are describing as military rule, was led by lawyers, students and journalists. The main opposition political parties, however, mounted no immediate large-scale rallies or protests. The next few days will show whether they can organize in the current atmosphere, which is highly restrictive.

Benazir Bhutto, leader of the country's biggest secular political party, remained at her home in Karachi, although she said she would fly to Islamabad on Wednesday to take part in a protest rally. Bhutto has sharply criticized the emergency rule but so far has stopped short of criticizing Musharraf himself.

Pakistani officials say an estimated 500 opposition figures have been arrested since emergency rule was imposed during the weekend, although lawyers and analysts said the figure could be far higher, probably about 2,000.

Musharraf, in a televised address Saturday night, cited the danger to the country posed by extremists and said only emergency rule could solve it. He suspended the Constitution, fired the judges of the Supreme Court, closed the transmission of privately owned television news channels and curbed the broadcasts of international broadcasters. Parliamentary elections scheduled for next January were delayed for up to a year, officials said.

On Monday, the Musharraf government deployed police forces and threatened political opponents with more arrests.

An estimated 150 lawyers were arrested in Lahore after a pitched battle between police officers and lawyers who stood on the roof of the High Court throwing stones at the police below. Some of the lawyers had bleeding heads as they were shoved into police vans, and some fainted in the clouds of tear gas. In Multan, another city in the province of Punjab, two new judges who had taken the oath of office under emergency rule Sunday were forced to leave the courtroom by hundreds of angry lawyers.

"We threatened them, saying: 'You've taken an unconstitutional oath; if you don't go we will throw eggs at you.' They left," said a lawyer from Multan, Riaz Gilani.

Lawyers in the capital, Islamabad, and the nearby garrison town of Rawalpindi said they had not gone to the courts because they had been warned that they would be arrested and possibly beaten.

Despite the warnings, more than 100 lawyers demonstrated outside Islamabad's main court complex Monday. The lawyers - clad in black suits and ties - shouted "Musharraf dog!" and "A baton and a bullet will not do!"

Haroon Rashid, president of the Islamabad Bar Association, instructed lawyers not to attack the police officers watching because he did not want to give them a pretext for arrests, he said.

This is the second time this year that the country's lawyers have emerged to fight the government, after they led weeks of protests in the spring when Musharraf fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Liaquat Baluch, deputy leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an opposition Islamic party, told Reuters that the police had detained about 700 of his party's supporters Sunday night.

In a showdown Monday afternoon between the government and the media, hundreds of journalists and printers at the Jang Group, the largest Pakistani media group, confronted the police and officials from the government's press information department at the offices of Awam, the afternoon newspaper in Karachi.

The government officials ordered the editor of the newspaper, Nazeer Leghari, not to print a supplement, and the police threatened to close down the plant, according to a statement issued by the Jang Group. When the newspaper's management refused to obey, the officials withdrew, the statement said.

Protests were held at two of the country's top universities. Several hundred students and faculty gathered at the Lahore University of Management Studies, shouted anti-government slogans and planned further protests, according to a faculty member. Several dozen students protested at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

In the first practical sign of international displeasure at the emergency rule, the United States said Monday that it had suspended annual defense talks with Pakistan.

Eric Edelman, an under secretary of defense, was meant to head an American delegation to the talks, beginning on Tuesday, but the meetings will be delayed until conditions are "more conducive to achieving the important objectives of all those who value democracy and a constitutional role," said Elizabeth Colton, an embassy spokeswoman.

To shore up the emergency rule, the government appeared to be bypassing the regular police channels and instead sending orders for arrests through regional, politically appointed mayors, said Syed Fakhir Imam, a former speaker of the National Assembly.

Imam said he was receiving telephone calls about arrests across the country. One man was arrested in the press club in Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan, he added.

In his own relatively small district of Jhang in the western Punjab, 47 lawyers who were politically active, including a senior lawyer, Fareed Naul, had been jailed, he said.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was dismissed earlier this year and then reinstated, was dismissed again by Musharraf on Saturday.

Chaudhry said in an interview in a newspaper, The News, Monday morning that "everything that is happening today is illegal, unconstitutional and against the orders of the Supreme Court."

In a telephone interview, one of the seven Supreme Court justices now under house arrest, Rana Bhagwandas, urged the United States to support the restoration of democracy in Pakistan.

"The United States is a democratic government, and democratic governments should work for democratic values across the globe," said Bhagwandas. "Pakistan is no exception."

Analysts said the resistance to emergency rule would only gain momentum when, or if, the main political parties show their hand.

"The resistance is unlikely to succeed unless the political parties come into the process," said Hasan Askari Rizvi, an analyst in Lahore who teaches at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In a telephone interview from her home in Karachi, Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan last month with the blessing of the United States, said she would fly Wednesday to Islamabad, where she hoped to meet with other opposition political parties.

She insisted a rally planned by her party would go ahead on Nov. 9 in Rawalpindi. It would be staged as a protest rather than a political gathering, she said.

"We decided this would be a protest meeting where we would protest the imposition of military rule," she said. "This protest movement will continue until the Constitution is restored."

Even so, there was doubt among some of her supporters about which way Bhutto would swing.

"I hope she resists," said Syeda Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. "If she cooperates, she will be politically annihilated."

Hussain said there were plans for Bhutto to meet a cross-section of political parties in Islamabad under the umbrella of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy.

In a two-hour meeting with foreign ambassadors Monday, Musharraf gave a lengthy explanation for the emergency rule, repeating much of what he said in his formal televised statement Saturday night, and dismissed criticism of the detention of his opponents.

Recounting the events of the last few days, Bhagwandas, the Supreme Court judge, said that he and seven other justices gathered in the Supreme Court building very late Saturday night after Musharraf suspended the Constitution.

They drafted a ruling declaring the emergency order unconstitutional, and faxed it to Musharraf's office, the country's four governors and senior judges across Pakistan.

The police allowed the seven justices to return to their houses, but since then they have been barred from leaving, he said. On Monday morning, Bhagwandas awoke, he said, to find the gates to his house locked.