Back to square one

Back to square one

By Kamran Shafi

I WRITE this on the second day of the emergency imposed by the Commando on the very country he has ruled unchallenged for eight whole years, citing all sorts of reasons mainly ranging from a loss of the state’s writ across the land (as if its our fault!) to blaming the judiciary for hampering the government’s anti-terrorism efforts.

Before we go any further let me here explode this particular myth. One of the gravest charges against the judiciary (read Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry) is that the Supreme Court subverted the government’s anti-terrorism efforts by ordering the handing over of the Lal Masjid back to the same group of clerics who took the law into their own hands and which resulted in the horrific July bloodbath.

It most expediently ignores the fact that it was the government’s own ineptness, some say abetment, that exacerbated the problem in the first place when it looked away and pretended all was well even when the mosque’s hard-line and extremist clerics took over the state’s assets. When they killed its own agents and kidnapped Pakistanis, acting only when China sent a strong message after its citizens were kidnapped.

More critically, it glosses over the fact that the two judges who ruled in the Red Mosque’s (read terrorists!) favour were the two judges who have taken oath under the new PCO. So there.

So then, we now live under yet another martial law, for that is what it is because the COAS has imposed it, not the government. The last martial law I should have said, for after the dust of this one has settled after the difficult days that lie ahead which will call for difficult decisions by ordinary people, no other general will enter politics. Ever again.

Let me tell you why. Look at the mess created over the last eight years. Look at Swat, its people, and just see what a horror has been made of that once idyllic place where I went for my honeymoon in March 1969. We stayed at what was then the Swat Hotel, now the Serena, an elegant art-deco building with well-kept lawns and a dining room that had just stepped out of a picture-book on the Raj.

Its beautiful furniture; its waiters in their starched pugrees (turbans); its wonderful bone-china crockery and silver. I remember the two of us going to play golf at the well-designed and manicured golf course situated some miles away in the beautiful valley. I so vividly recall the gentle and cool breeze soughing through the poplar trees that were just turning green, and the blossom-laden apricot and plum trees. I wander, my friends, forgive me, but how can you and I not recall the Pakistan we knew? And for which we pine, eyes brimming with tears.

And now see what has happened to it? See what incompetence and foolishness and placing self-interest above national interest — if I hear ‘Pakistan First’ one more time I’ll scream — has done to our country. I mean enough! The last six years, particularly the last two have been spent in working out ways and means for the Commando to be either elected or reelected! The people will not easily forgive the army brass its trespasses this time around. Consider:

A quick recap on the Swat/Malakand situation. Maulana Sufi Mohammad, father-in-law of Maulana Radio, the present rebel leader in Malakand Division, is the man who took hundreds of innocent young boys into Afghanistan as ‘Mujahideen’ to fight the infidel, just prior to and during the US assault on that country. Took them to their deaths surely.

His methodology was simple. He would take a truckload or two of young boys including his own sons into Afghanistan, drop the rest there and bring his own back. And do the same again, and again. As the Americans intensified the bombing and put an end to Taliban rule, Sufi Mohammad’s young ‘Mujahideen’ either got their heads blown off or disappeared into the torture chambers of Bagram or Guantanamo or Mangla or wherever.

Back home the relatives of those poor young men began to bay for Sufi Mohammad’s blood. Instead of letting him face justice at the hands of his peers what does the government do? It locks him up in Dera Ismail Khan jail, thus affording him protective custody.

Nothing to be too surprised about, for this is yet another example of the government’s ineptitude.

No article, no piece these days can be complete without most fulsome praise of My Lords, Mr Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and his brother judges who have refused to take oath under the new PCO. Which judge before him had the gumption to face down the chiefs of the most frightening of the state’s agencies? Who before him extracted some of the ‘disappeared’ from the clutches of the cruel men who run these agencies and care not for the pain they cause to fellow beings?

While his endeavours to, at the very least, locate the ‘disappeared’ were brought to an abrupt halt by his second dismissal, he is to be saluted for at least giving some hope to the relatives of some whose custody the ‘agencies’ had to admit.

Which Chief Justice was as hard working as him? His Lordship reducing the cases pending before the court for decades from 32,000 when he took over to 7,000 when he was dismissed the first time around? Who heard the cries of the poor and the defenceless more than Iftikhar Chaudhry, and then proceeded to provide them succour?

Very few judges in Pakistan’s history were as correct as Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Though it is an aberration to take his name in the same breath as Maulvi Mushtaq’s (for the younger of my readers, Justice Maulvi Mushtaq headed the LHC bench that sentenced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to death) who did not recuse himself despite ZAB’s strenuous appeals that he do so because Maulvi bore Bhutto a grudge, Justice Iftikhar recused himself when the Commando’s case came up for hearing before the SC.

I can only pray that other judges model themselves on this good man; and more than that, that he is restored as the Chief Justice of Pakistan.

Bushism of the week: “I fully understand those who say you can’t win this thing militarily. That’s exactly what the United States’ military says, that you can’t win this military.” — President George W. Bush on the need for political progress in Iraq, Washington, DC, Oct 17, 2007

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk