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International-UN-NGOs

Palestinian Clan 'disowns' Son For Attending Bahrain Conference

2019-06-22

[Jpost] The clan of a Paleostinian man from Jenin who reportedly agreed to attend next week’s US-led economic workshop in Bahrain has issued a statement "disowning" him and accusing him of collaboration with Israel. The man, Mohammed Arif Masad, from the town of Burqin, 5 km west of Jenin, is reported to have moved to Israel two decades ago after being accused of collaboration with Israeli authorities. The clan said in its statement that it cut its ties with Masad 20 years ago because he "deviated from the national line and the morals, values and traditions of his family." The clan said that Masad represents only himself and pledged its full support for Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... and the PLO for their "courageous stance against all those who are conspiring [against the Paleostinians] by attending suspicious conferences." The Paleostinian ruling Fatah faction headed by Abbas published the family’s statement and photos of Masad on its official Facebook page. If true, Masad will be the second Paleostinian to defy the Paleostinian call for boycotting the Bahrain workshop, which is expected to be launched in Bahrain on June 25. Masad was suspected of collaboration with Israel during the first Intifada and was forced to flee his town, Paleostinian sources in Jenin told The Jerusalem Post. They claimed that the man has since been living in Israel. Earlier, Ashraf Jabari, a businessman from Hebron, said he has accepted an invitation from the US administration to participate in the conference. Jabari said he will go to Bahrain as the representative of the Judea and Samaria Chamber of Commerce. Also Friday, Paleostinian Chief Religious Justice Mahmoud Abbas, who also serves as adviser to Abbas, said that Paleostinians would rather die than accept being humiliated by Israel and the US. Referring to the Bahrain conference, Habbash said at a Friday prayer sermon in Ramallah: "It is our duty to confront this conspiracy. We may disagree on many things, but the Paleostinians are united in rejecting this disgrace by Israel and the US." Habbash claimed that the US was seeking to "bribe" the Paleostinians through the Bahrain conference. "They are talking about billions of dollars to improve the economic conditions of the Paleostinian people," he said. "This is a bribe. They are offering us billions of dollars in return for making Jerusalem Israel’s capital and giving up the right of return for the refugees. They want to turn the Paleostinian cause into an issue of a people who just want to live, and not a people seeking dignity or freedom or illusory sovereignty." Habbash scoffed at the US administration’s motto of "prosperity to peace" and accused the Americans of treating the Paleostinians with contempt. "Which prosperity are they talking about?" he asked. "This is contempt for peace. This is a mockery of the Paleostinian people and their rights. They are ridiculing the blood of the deaders who sacrificed their lives for our cause. We will never betray their blood and sacrifices." Nabil Abu Rudaineh, front man for the PA presidency, again lashed out at the Bahrain conference, dubbing it a "strategic mistake." He claimed that the conference was aimed at achieving normalization between Israel and the Arab states. The conference, he said, was in the context of US "provocative steps that will aggravate tensions in the region." Meanwhile, ...back at the railroad tracks, Little Nell tried to kick her bound feet and scream post the snotty handkerchief Scarface Al had stuff into her mouth... Fatah and several Paleostinian factions repeated their appeal to Paleostinians to stage demonstrations in the West Bank to express their rejection of the Bahrain conference. The protests will begin on June 24 and continue until the end of the conference two days later. The factions urged Paleostinians to "escalate confrontations" with the IDF during the mass protests.

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India-Pakistan

Suspect ‘trained by RAW’ held

2015-10-29

[Dawn] [Dawn] KARACHI: The counterterrorism department of police on Wednesday claimed to have enjugged Keep yer hands where we can see 'em, if yez please! a suspect allegedly trained by the Indian intelligence agency RAW after an 'encounter' on the outskirts of the metropolis. The suspect, Mohammed Arif, confessed to have received training at Indian army camps, said CTD SSP (investigations) Naveed Nisar Khowaja. "Aieeee! I confess to everything! Just stop doing that!!" He said that acting on a tip-off the police raided a place near Murshid Hospital on Hub River Road and detained him after the encounter. The police also seized two hand grenades and a pistol from him.

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India-Pakistan

AQIS city chief among five killed in 'encounter'

2015-04-14

[DAWN] KARACHI - Five holy warriors of the recently formed Al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), including its Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... chief and deputy chief, were killed in an alleged encounter in Orangi Town in the early hours of Monday, according to police. The officials claimed to have unearthed a bomb-making factory and seized a huge quantity of kaboom, three suicide jackets, laptop and some documents during the raid which was conducted on information about the alleged hideout of AQIS holy warriors in the Khairabad area. The police said the suspects were involved in the suicide kaboom on Rangers officials at Qalandria Chowk in North Nazimabad last month and were planning further attacks on security agencies. The documents, laptop and other material found at the hideout helped the police in identification of the jacket wallah, a 20-year-old Bengali, who had attacked the Rangers personnel, said DIG of the Counter-Terrorism Department Mohammed Arif Hanif. "The bomber, identified as Arif alias Wahaj, happened to be the student of one of the biggest seminaries in the metropolis," the DIG said. Sharing details of the raid with the media during a presser at the CTD Civil Lines office, the officer said that when a police team headed by CTD official Raja Umer Khattab conducted the targeted raid, the suspects tried to flee by resorting to firing and attacking the armoured personnel carrier of police with hand grenades. "The CTD team and Special Security Unit commandos encircled the Lion of Islams. In an ensuing exchange of intense fire, five holy warriors were killed," said DIG Hanif. He said the dear departed were identified as Karachi AQIS head Noor-ul-Hasan alias Hashim alias Bhai Jan alias Babu Bhai, his deputy Usman alias Irfan alias Abdullah, and Ibrahim alias Rafiq alias Awais. The CTD chief said the identity of the two other suspects could not be ascertained immediately, but the police had reason to believe that they were 'suicide bombers'. They had come from the Helmand ...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan... province of Afghanistan just two months ago, according to CTD official Khattab. "The laptop and other documents seized from the bomb-making factory revealed many things," he said. One of the findings was that the cycle of violence used in the March 2 attack on the Rangers had been prepared there, he added. Then "a video of the suicide bomber recorded before the attack was also seized," he said. The suicide bomber, Arif alias Wahaj, was a resident of Bilal Colony, Korangi, and a student of a prominent seminary, said the CTD chief without disclosing its name. Profile According to the officer, the Karachi chief of the AQIS was an expert in preparing bomb-laden two- and four-wheelers. He had been associated with different 'Jihadi organizations' since 1999. Due to these credentials, he had been made the head of the AQIS in Karachi. It was Noor-ul-Hasan alias Hashim alias Bhai Jan alias Babu Bhai, who had prepared the bomb-laden cycle of violence, which was used in the attack on the Rangers.The CTD chief said the AQIS had been established by Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri ... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is... who had appointed Asim Umer, a former Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain commander, its first chief. It took Al-Qaeda two years to set up AQIS in which members of all Jihadi organizations were recruited. At present, holy warriors of Harkat-ul-Mujahidin Al-Almi were leading AQIS in Karachi, according the CTD. They had assumed the AQIS leadership after being 'released' from prisons where they had remained incarcerated for 'years'. "The AQIS has focussed on recruiting Burmis and Bengalis for carrying out terror attacks," believed the CTD officer who has extensive experience in dealing with terror cases. The group had also been involved in terror attacks on police and paramilitary force including the Feb 4 kaboom on Rangers personnel near DC West office, attacks on police vans in Korangi and Ibrahim Hyderi, and an attack on a police post in Bilal Colony, killing of a political party worker Khurshid Pathan, murder of a policeman Abdul Razzaq, Siraj Bihari, Alam Muchhar and Syed Zakir Shah. DIG Hanif said the police also seized a 'target list' from the hideout, indicating that their next targets were personnel of security agencies, Rangers and police. The CTD chief said it was the AQIS that had grabbed credit of the botched terror attack on Dockyard in September 2014. Soon after the launch of Operation Zarb-e-Azab, AQIS relocated from Wazoo to Helmand province. "AQIS bandidos Lions of Islam are provided assistance in Helmand from where they travel to Chaman, Quetta, Shikarpur and Karachi," said DIG Hanif. CTD official Khattab told Dawn that the AQIS had done a recce from Malir Halt to airport to Toll Plaza to target Rangers, police and others. "Their network also existed in the University of Karachi," he said, while referring to some clues retrieved from the laptop. The suicide bomber in the Rangers attack case was a Bengali-speaking youngster, who had been handed over to the AQIS in Helmand, Mr Khattab said, adding that a card found from the hideout showed that he had remained a student of the Karachi seminary.

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India-Pakistan

Delhi Red Fort attacker loses death penalty appeal

2011-08-11

[Pak Daily Times] A Pak convicted of murder and waging war against India for an attack at New Delhi's historic Red Fort in December 2000 lost his appeal against execution in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The court refused to quash the death penalty handed down to Mohammed Arif, who used the alias Ashfaq, for his role in the gun attack that killed three people at the 17th century tourist attraction. "The death sentence has been confirmed," Justice VS Sirpurkar and Justice TS Thakur said. Ashfaq and five other gunnies sneaked into the Red Fort late on December 22, 2000, and opened fire, killing a soldier, an army barber and a civilian working for the military.

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India-Pakistan

Five Indian Mujahideen men arrested from Mumbai

2008-09-24

MUMBAI: Mumbai Police claimed to have arrested five members of the terrorist group Indian Mujahideen in connection with the serial blasts in Ahmedabad and Delhi. The five are learnt to have provided logistics support to those who carried out the blasts, the police said. The cops have also hinted at the Indian Mujahideen being controlled from Pakistan. The men, identified as Mohammad Sadiq Sheikh, Afzal Usmani, Mohammed Sakib, Mohammed Arif and Shaikh Ansar were nabbed from a place near the Maharashtra-Karnataka border. All of them belong to Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, said the cops. They are believed to have provided the suspected terrorists with logistics support, including acquiring the vehicles that were laden with explosives. The police claim to have arrested the founder member of the terrorist outfit. A large quantity of arms has also been seized from the suspects. The next target of the terrorists was Mumbai, said the city police commissioner. The police also claimed that all arrested were involved in blasts since 2005 including Mumbai train blasts in 2006.

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India-Pakistan

New hope for Indian kins of PoWs in Pak

2008-03-04

CHANDIGARH: President Pervez Musharraf's belated gesture of pardoning 67-year-old Kashmir Singh, an Indian spy who endured 35 excruciating years on death row in Pakistani prisons, has rekindled anticipation amidst 54 Indian families, whose kin have been missing since being taken prisoner in the wars of 1971 and 1965. "Hope is the ultimate casualty in any war and we are not yet ready to give up," says Dr Simmi Waraich, whose father, Major S.P.S. Waraich of the 15 Punjab Regiment, went missing in December 1971 during battle at Hussainiwala in the Ferozepur sector. The young psychiatrist, like the dozens of other PoW relatives, has struggled to keep her brave father "alive" through years of India’s political and military establishment telling them it was "futile to expect miracles". Kashmir Singh, a former Indian Army soldier of Hoshiarpur’s Nangal Choran village, was arrested in Lahore and Charged with espionage in 1973. A Pakistani military court sentenced him to death and he has since been kept in continual solitary confinement with only a 30-minute break to stretch his aching limbs each day. It is the former spy’s endurance and his will to survive an ordeal beyond description that has renewed hopes. "If a man like Kashmir Singh could live through three decades of torment there would surely be others," says Mr S.S. Gill, whose older brother, Wing Commander Harsern Singh Gill was taken prisoner after his fighter went down in 1971. The families have until now based their crusade for the location of the missing PoWs around a huge volume of evidence (see box) painstakingly collected through the years. And now Kashmir Singh’s incredible story, they say, lends further legitimacy to the notion that many Indian servicemen could still be alive out of sight and memory in the maze of Pakistan’s prison system. Just 30 years old when arrested, Kashmir Singh is said to have voluntarily embraced Islam to lessen his torture in jail. The prisoner was introduced to Pakistan’s caretaker human rights minister, Mr Ansar Burney, who orchestrated his pardon, as "Ibrahim Iqbal" inside Lahore Jail. "This is exactly what we have been telling the authorities both in India and in Pakistan. Many of our people may be under changed names. Some of them could well have become insane or amnesiacs," Mr Gill said insisting that the search for the missing PoWs will need to begin with a thorough perusal of the war records alongside both district and state prison registers. "The Pakistani officers who took our people prisoner also need to be interviewed." Dr Simmi Waraich and Mr Gill accompanied 14 missing PoW relatives to Pakistan in what turned out to be a fruitless search for their loved ones last year. Even though the visit had come through on a personal invitation of President Musharraf and this was a first-of-its-kind exercise in the world, they were given very limited access to the records at the ten jails they visited over 13 days in June. The relatives were denied crucial access to the Attock Fort prison, known to have housed large numbers of Indian PoWs. In fact, one of the first firm evidences that PoWs were being held beyond the purview of international conventions came from Attock Fort. Mohan Lal Bhaskar, an Indian spy who was repatriated in December 1974, stated in a sworn testimony that two Pakistani Army officers, Major Ayaz Ahmed Sipra and Col. Asif Shafi, who were incarcerated at Attock Fort for their role in an abortive coup against Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1973, later met him inside Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat Jail and told him that there were more than 45 Indian officers inside the fort. They specifically named Wing Commander H.S. Gill and one Capt. Singh. "The problem with locating our people is that most of them were initially held inside makeshift PoW camps and possibly later interned to regular prisons," said Mr Gill. He believes that the more recent instances of Mohammed Arif and Jagsir Singh, two Indian soldiers who were repatriated in April 2004 after capture during the 1999 Kargil War, are illustrative. "There is no record of Jagsir and Arif from 1999 to 2004 when they suddenly showed as interns at the Rawalpindi Jail. So how and where were they held for four years? Very obviously in some military establishment," he said. Simmi Waraich is convinced that the passing of three decades since the 1971 war has led to a growing apathy amidst both the Indian and Pakistani establishments. "So many, including my father, are still missing, yet there has been no independent or mutual attempt to establish an official mechanism to find these men," she points out. India’s ministry of defence has been toying with the prospect of setting up a "missing in action cell" on the lines of then in western nations like the USA, but nothing has moved on the ground. And reflecting a clearly callous attitude to the problem, while parliamentary records continue to show 54 missing PoWs, both the Army and Air Force insist they are missing no one. "There appears to be a strange embarrassment about acknowledging even the possibility of old PoWs on both sides of the border," says Dr Simmi. This shows each time the missing men’s relatives approach the authorities. When a delegation of relatives met defence minister Pranab Mukherjee some years ago, he heard them out patiently only to respond with: "Do you really think they (the PoWs) are still alive?" Ms Damayanti Tambay, the wife of Flt. Lt. V.V. Tambay who failed to return despite the Pakistani press widely reporting his capture in 1971, quietly responded: "But minister, you are still alive, no?" Pakistan’s former high commissioner in Delhi, Mr Riaz Khokhar, too publicly admitted to the possibility of PoWs being held on both sides. He told an Indian TV channel that his country had given up on the 300-odd Pakistani PoWs believed to be in India. "Wo hamare liye shaheed ho chuke hain (they have become martyrs for us)," he said obliquely suggesting that India must do the same. But for the 54 families it is no longer a question of their own kin. "We should be able to get back a handful, even one," says Mr Gill. Simmi Waraich adds, "It is not about closure. If they are alive they must be brought home. And till that happens our lives will continue to be on hold."

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Bangladesh

Human rights group demands release of Banglacartoonist

2008-01-06

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has demanded the immediate release of a Bangladeshi cartoonist whom the military-backed interim government arrested for allegedly insulting Islam. Mohammed Arifur Rahman, a former cartoonist for the Bengali-language daily Prothom Alo, is "a prisoner of conscience" who was detained for exercising his legitimate right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International said in a statement Friday. Security officials arrested Rahman on Sept. 18 after hard-line Islamic groups protested against one of his cartoons that they said mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

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India-Pakistan

Red Fort attack: SC stays Ashfaq`s death

2007-12-04

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily suspended the death sentence awarded to Lashkar-e-Taiba militant and Pakistani national Mohammed Arif alias Ashfaq for his role in the December 2000 terror attack on the Red Fort here. While staying the sentence on an appeal by the convict, a bench of Justice G.P. Mathur and Justice P. Sathsivam issued notices to the Delhi government and the city police, seeking their response. On Sep 13, 2007 Delhi High Court had upheld Ashfaq`s death sentence, while acquitting six others convicted for the terror attack on Dec 22, 2000, which had resulted in the death of three army personnel deployed there. A division bench of the high court, comprising Justice R.S. Sodhi and Justice P.K. Bhasin, had acquitted the six others who were sentenced to different jail terms by a trial court in 2005. The trial court had awarded the death sentence to Ashfaq and life imprisonment to Nazir Ahmed Quasid and his son, Farooq Ahmed Quasid. The high court acquitted Nazir Ahmed, Farooq Ahmed, Ashfaq`s wife Rehmana Yusuf Farooqui, Matloob, Babar Mohsin and Sadaquat Ali in the case. Ashfaq was sentenced under Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for waging war against the government and Section 302 for committing the murder of three army personnel. Upholding Ashfaq`s sentence, the high court had said: "Ashfaq was responsible for the attack, and the attack was the result of a well-planned conspiracy by him and some other militants."

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India-Pakistan

Militants free 14 abducted troops

2007-09-05

Militants released 10 paramilitary soldiers on Tuesday, four days after abducting them in Mohmand Agency, and another four paramilitary soldiers, nearly two months after they were abducted from Bajaur Agency. The 10 Frontier Corps soldiers were handed over to a jirga that brokered their freedom in Mohmand Agency, said Arbab Mohammed Arif Khan, FATA security chief. “They were released unconditionally,” Khan said. The troops were headed to Ghalanai to meet with government authorities, Khan said. In Bajaur Agency, local Taliban agreed to free four militiamen after the authorities released their colleague, Bajaur administration chief Mohammad Jamil told reporters.

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India-Pakistan

Musharraf’s return to ‘jihadi option’?

2006-06-10

Khaled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s General Pervez Musharraf brought Pakistan out of its Dark Age of death and destruction by rolling back Pakistan’s 20 year old jihad. He banned the jihadi organisations - once nurtured carefully by the ISI - to win back space for Pakistan in the international polity. But there was a measure of ambiguity in his approach that made many think that he could be merely hiding jihad under the bushel for the time being, to be brought out to threaten the world once again. The time probably has come to threaten the world a la? General Hameed Gul, Pakistan’s de facto ruling strategist, who is once again parading his trigger-happy vision on the TV channels. In its May 2006 issue monthly Herald published a report by Azmat Abbas that the government had allowed Sipah Sahaba to reinstate itself on the condition that it would no longer indulge in militancy (sic!), violence of the verbal or active sort. The Sipah, now renamed Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan (MIP), held its first post-ban meeting in Islamabad on 6 April 2006 under the surveillance of the agencies. This rally was the outcome of an understanding reached between Sipah and the government in March 2006. But when the party convened with a gathering of 5,000 people it became a show of strength of the old sectarian terrorist Sipah. The government allowed Brigadier (Retd) Zaheerul Islam Abbasi – the officer who failed narrowly to stage a military-religious coup in 1995 but is now running his own extremist organisation – to harangue the gathering. Sipah Sahaba rides again? The meeting chanted anti-Shia slogans and vowed to avenge the deaths of their leaders Haq Nawaz Jhangvi and Maulana Azam Tariq at the hands of the Shia. Literature of anti-Shia exhortation was distributed as well as videos depicting beheadings of American soldiers in Iraq. MIP leader Dr Khadim Hussain Dhillon said his party had held its gathering with the government’s permission after he had protested the government’s according of normal protocol to Allama Sajid Naqvi the leader of the banned Tehrik Jafaria while Naqvi was a member of the MMA. The intelligence officers looking after the Sipah told Herald that the gathering was the outcome of a long drawn out process of negotiation with the banned organisation. This also involved a reconciliation between the Sipah and the Shia organisation. Arrested leaders, like the fanatically anti-Shia Maulana Muhammad Ludhianvi, were to be released and in return the rabid Shia leader of Sipah Muhammad, Allama Ghulam Raza Naqvi would be released and sent to Gilgit where he would head a seminary. The Shia of Gilgit were making preparation to celebrate his entry there. The government went ahead and further made peace with the anti-Shia activists, members of the dreaded Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. (Rustam Khan Muawiya, Asghar Muawiya and Ghulam Farid were let off at the Sindh High court. Member of MMA, Shia leader Allama Hassan Turabi was attacked in Karachi the very next day in which he narrowly escaped death. He issued a statement connecting the attack with the release of the Lashkar members.) Lashkar-e-Tayba revived? Earlier on 2 May 2006, the State Department in Washington named Pakistan’s Jamaat al-Dawa and its affiliated Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq as “terrorist organisations that pose a threat to the United States”. Everybody knew that Jamaat al-Dawa was earlier the dreaded Lashkar-e-Tayba banned by a UN Committee as a terrorist organisation. The Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq had been active in the relief and reconstruction work in the Azad Kashmir areas affected by the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. It now developed that the Idara could not be used to rescue the bad image the Jamaat al-Dawa had garnered for itself over the recent years. Its leader Hafiz Said had constantly condemned the policies of the government in general and President Musharraf in particular, and had used all kinds of dire threats. For some puzzling reason, President Musharraf has been soft on Jamaat al-Dawa. Some say because the son of an important personality in Islamabad is a member of the outfit, but why allow its firebrand leader Hafiz Said to constantly badmouth him? All the other dreaded jihadi outfits banned either by the UN or put on the terrorist list the United States have duly changed their names and are operating quietly without shooting off their mouths. At one point this year President Musharraf actually called in all the police chiefs of the country and asked them to catch hold of the old jihadi outfits on the UN terrorist list now operating under changed names; but nothing happened. The attitude of the president has been most puzzling, especially after the fact that he had nearly gotten himself killed at the hands of the fanatic activists of these very jihadi militias. Lashkar/Dawa becomes popular? Then Islamabad literally issued an edict defying the Washington categorisation of Jamaat al-Dawa. The Foreign Office was made to say that Pakistan had no plans to act against the two Islamic charities listed by the United States last week as terrorist organisations. Its stance was however correct. ‘We are not required, and we do not put any entities on the terrorist lists, if action is taken under the domestic US law’, it said, ‘However, if the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee were to designate any organisation (as a terrorist group), then it becomes a legal obligation to take action’. The Foreign Office statement was followed on 6 May 2006 by demonstrations in which hundreds of residents demonstrated against the US in Garhi Habibullah and Balakot, NWFP, where the banned organisations are still running tent villages and hospitals for locals ‘where 90 percent of the non-government organisations (NGOs) are wrapping up their camps after finishing relief projects’. The press noted that Jamaat al Dawa had become popular in the earthquake-hit region and its activists had become ‘heroic icons’ for the local population. The Jamaat al-Dawa was even more popular in Azad Kashmir where its relief work was much aided by the fact that it had been active there as a jihadi militia under the tutelage of the ISI. As reported in Dawn , on 10 May 2006, hundreds of people staged a rally in Muzaffarabad, Azad Kashmir, to condemn the United States’ ban on the Jamaat al-Dawa: ‘Down with America, down with Bush’, the demonstrators shouted. According to daily Jang (29 May 2006) a sessions judge in Peshawar, after hearing the famous Al Qaeda and Sipah Sahaba lawyer Javed Ibrahim Paracha, ordered that a group of Egyptian mujahideen languishing in jail, be released, be treated at Al Khidmat Hospital, and then handed over to Mr Paracha pending their deportation to Egypt. Christians and Hindus love Lashkar/Dawa? Then on 17 May 2006, more than one hundred Hindus and Christians from different parts of Sindh staged a demonstration in front of the press clubs of Hyderabad and Karachi ‘against the United States’ recent move to include the Jamaat al-Dawa on its list of “terrorist” organisations’. The next day however the Christians in Punjab rebelled against the orchestrated pro-Dawa protest. A leading Christian organisation in Punjab, National Commission of Justice and Peace (NCJP), condemned the pro-Jamaat al-Dawa rallies by Christians and Hindus in Sindh, particularly haris of Thar, saying that it was an ‘establishment-sponsored’ ploy to glorify the jihadi militia. The statement was bold because it was made in the city where Jamaat al-Dawa is headquartered. If there was an effort afoot to return to the ‘jihadi option’ through the reinstatement of Sipah Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, it was already greatly undermined by the Nishtar Park massacre of the Barelvis on 11 April 2006. It soon became apparent that it was not a Shia-Sunni sectarian incident but a Sunni-Sunni one. As put in Urdu, it was not an act of terrorism based on fiqh but on maslak , and this is how it began to be described on the TV channels. Monthly Urdu journal Naya Zamana in its issue of May 2006, wrote that during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia had funded a number of organisations to carry out its Wahhabi project in the region, and one of these organisations was Lashkar-e-Tayba, then headquartered in Muridke Lahore, as Markaz Dawat wal Irshad. The project was of spreading ‘pure Islam’ not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan too as a bulwark against the emergence of a Shia state in Iran. The intent of Imam Khomeini to export the Shia revolution to the rest of the Islamic world was in parallel to the Saudi ambition of spreading the Wahhabi model. After Shia-Sunni terror, it is Sunni-Sunni terror: According to Naya Zamana , the publications of Jamaat al-Dawa/Lashkar-e-Tayba and Sipah Sahaba (Khilafat-e-Rashida) criticised and condemned the Shias together with the Barelvis. The Barelvis were dubbed a moderate version of Shiism and both were together dubbed a version of Judaism. After General Zia, this Wahhabi Islam was used in Kashmir too and the state itself became more and permeated with this hardline faith. It was in the face of this Wahhabi dominance that Sunni Tehreek was defensively created to protect the interests of the Barelvis with force. As observed by Naya Zamana , when JUP chief Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani attended a rare gathering of the Barelvis in Lahore in those days he made a speech in which he declared that ‘there were one lakh kalashnikovs in the Muridke headquarters of Lashkar-e-Tayba which will not be used in Kashmir but against the Barelvis in Pakistan’. Wahhabism and Deobandism are characterised by an opposition to popular culture and it literary and festive forms and is finally also opposed to democracy in favour of khilafat. They are hostile to the mystical batinya traditions of Waris Shah, Shah Husain, Mian Mir, Data Sahib, Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, Hazrat Zakariya Multani, etc. Wahhabism easily apostatises those that don not follow its strict order; and after someone is declared outside the pale of Islam his property is thought to be rightfully owned by the Wahhabis through looting and confiscation. It is on this principle that Barelvi mosques were taken from them. In the case of Jamaat Dawa or Lashkar-e-Tayba, this extended to taking Barelvi girls into forcible marriage after abduction and the looting of banks in the tradition of an early Companion, Abu Jandal, who funded jihad in this fashion. (After Hafiz Said’s faction fell foul of the Ahle Hadith party of Prof Sajid Mir, one Qari Hanif issued a series of audio tapes in which he accused Hafiz Said chief of Jamaat al-Dawa of looting banks in Gujranwala and abducting Barelvi girls.) Viability of jihad option: President Musharraf’s attitude towards Jamaat al-Dawa has puzzled almost everyone who has watched Pakistan. Now some critics connect it to the on-going ‘peace process’ with India where he expects India to match Pakistan’s ‘flexibility’ on Kashmir”: If India fails to deliver, Pakistan will take out the Lashkar-e-Tayba card and start playing it again . This option becomes pointed because Hafiz Said is a wanted man in India. According to Frontline (5 Nov 2005) on December 22, 2000, ‘Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT) claimed responsibility for the Red Fort attack in which three Army personnel lost their lives. The main accused in the case, Mohammed Arif alias Ashfaq, a Pakistani national and a member of the LeT, used his mobile phone to convey to BBC correspondents in New Delhi and Srinagar his organisation’s responsibility immediately after the shootout. This, apart from the other pieces of evidence pointing to the LeT’s involvement in the attack, was the basis of the trial court’s conclusion that the LeT planned and carried out the assault’. The truth is that jihad is no longer an option. It is not an option even if only for brandishing under the nose of the world community. It gains nothing for Pakistan in regard to the Kashmir dispute; but it will certainly force the country’s civil society into making another painful shift to adjust to Hafiz Said’s parallel government. Even if the fiat has come from Saudi Arabia, it is not in the best interest of Pakistan.

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India-Pakistan

Muslim India struggles to escape the past

2006-04-05

Prominent individuals belie the poverty of a minority left behind by the 1947 partition Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai Wednesday April 5, 2006 The Guardian On the sprung floor of a Mumbai dance studio standing amid a huddle of male and female dancers is a young woman, dressed in tight sequinned clothes, sucking on a cigarette. She is shouting at her troupe. It is difficult not to notice 19-year-old Mumait Khan. Tattoos ride on her shoulders and her lower back and her sinuous dance routines have made her one of the most sought-after "item girls" to roll out of Bollywood. "Item" is Mumbai film-speak for a raunchy musical number slipped into mainstream Hindi films. In the lottery of life Mumait Khan has hit a jackpot. An Indian Muslim, she embodies an apparent contradiction that is rapidly becoming part of a national debate. While government statistics reveal India's Muslims achieving lower educational levels and higher unemployment rates than the Hindu majority, paradoxically there are an increasing number of high-profile sports and film stars, politicians and industrialists among India's 150 million adherents to Islam. India's tennis star, Sania Mirza, the country's president, Abdul Kalam, and Azim Premji, its richest man, are all Muslims. Like many success stories of this modern Indian Muslim resurgence, Mumait attributes her rise to self-reliance and self-help. Although she says she still prays and comes from a pious family, it was poverty that persuaded her parents to overcome their conservative instincts and let her pursue a film career. Only after her father lost his job and could not get steady work again was Mumait allowed to begin dancing. Her appearance fee today runs into hundreds of thousands of rupees and she has just bought a duplex for 5.5m rupees (£70,000). Walking past the rubbish-strewn streets and open sewers of the chawl or housing colony she grew up in, the teenager says: "Look, this is where I came from. I had to get out." There is however growing concern that such high-profile success stories mask the relative decline of the Indian Muslim community. The issue has political repercussions - Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the ruling Congress party, has made it clear that the nation's Muslims are key to winning elections, calling them the party's natural allies. Mrs Gandhi's party has embarked on a campaign to "empower" Muslims with quotas in jobs and universities. Hindu nationalist politicians claim an obscurantist minority is being appeased and pampered. India has more Muslims than any country except Indonesia, a large religious minority in a professedly secular nation of a billion people. Indian Muslims often feel under pressure not to antagonise the Hindu majority and this sets them apart from many of their brethren in the rest of the Islamic world. The result is that protests on global issues concerning Muslims, whether the Danish cartoons controversy or George Bush's "war on terror", are relatively muted in India. But there are some notable exceptions - a Muslim politician in Uttar Pradesh recently called for the beheading of the cartoonist and offered a 510m-rupee reward. What is also striking about India's version of Islam is that it remains largely unreformed and looks outdated by comparison with other Islamic countries. Fatwas are frequently issued - priests pronounce on the correct length of tennis players' skirts. In India Muslim men can divorce their wives by saying talaq ("I divorce thee") three times - a practice largely abandoned in Islam. Last week village elders in eastern India even ordered a man to leave his wife after he said talaq three times in his sleep. The most striking example of this attempt to be "authentic" are the beards and filigreed topi caps of students among the verandas and courtyards of Darul Uloom (House of Knowledge), a madrasa located in Deoband, 90 miles north-east of Delhi. The seminary is a global centre of Muslim learning with 15,000 schools worldwide adopting its sparse and dogmatic version of Islam. Although Darul Uloom spreads a message of peace, the Taliban sprung from its teaching. Rising unemployment among Muslims in India has seen a steady increase in students. "My father is a farmer, but there is no work. He thought the best job was to become an imam (priest). People always need spiritual learning," said Mohammed Arif, 20, who has studied in Deoband for seven years. A committee set up by the country's prime minister tasked with looking at minority employment found that despite making up 14.7% of the population, Muslims only comprise a fraction of the workforce in many areas. In February there was an angry debate in parliament over the Indian army's refusal to tell the committee how many Muslim soldiers the country had. In the end the army relented: out of 1.1m Indian soldiers only 29,000 are Muslims. There are many who wonder why Muslims, who before the subcontinent was divided made up a third of the armed forces, have stayed away from India's regiments. There is a widely held suspicion that Muslims prefer Pakistan. But in the three wars India has fought with Pakistan there were no signs of Muslim disloyalty and the dispute over Kashmir has not stirred wider passions. More worrying, Muslims are falling behind Hindu Dalits, or untouchables, seen as the lowest social class. "In terms of educational achievement, Indian Muslim men in cities are less literate than their Dalit peers," says Abusaleh Shariff, a member of the prime ministerial committee conducting a socio- economic survey of Indian Muslims. Why Muslims fare so badly is a mix of history and politics. When the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, most of the Muslim upper and middle class emigrated to Pakistan. Those left behind were leaderless and mostly poor and many felt guilty they had been responsible for the carving-up of the country. Experts also point out a linguistic divide. For many north Indian Muslims their language, Urdu, written in a modified Arabic script, is conspicuous by its absence in India. Like their Hindu counterparts, descent often determines employment for Indian Muslims. The result is that poor artisans expect their sons to take over often low-paying jobs. "It is why 50% of car mechanics are Muslims. The fathers just hand over the business to the son," says Mr Shariff. Academics say that rather like African Americans, Indian Muslims have become victims of history and discrimination. Some suggest that mimicking US policy on African Americans might help. But, says Zoya Hassan, professor of political science at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: "Unlike African Americans Indian Muslims are not organised. They have not campaigned for their rights effectively. Of course racism is easier to identify than an anti-Muslim bias, but African Americans were lifted by a policy of positive discrimination which could help here." In numbers Muslims form 14.7% of India's 1.1 billion population but only 3% or less of the Indian army 7% of public administrators 5% of the railways staff 3.5% of the country's banking employees

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Afghanistan/South Asia

Eight die in Pakistan sect attack

2005-10-07

Police in Pakistan say at least eight people were killed and 20 injured when gunmen opened fire as worshippers gathered for Friday prayers. The attack on members of the minority Ahmadiyya sect took place near the town of Mandi Bahauddin in Punjab. The Ahmadiyya profess allegiance to Islam, but were declared heretical by a constitutional amendment 30 years ago. Police official Mohammed Arif said the gunmen rode up on motorbikes before entering the mosque and opening fire. "So far we only know that three men riding on a motorcycle suddenly came into the village [of Mong] on Friday morning. Two of them went inside the mosque and started firing," he told the Associated Press. The head of the mosque, Sadiq Hussain Sherazi, was leading prayers when he heard gunfire and "immediately threw myself on the floor". Which is why he's made it this far in his career "The attackers thought I was dead and that is what saved me. After a while I got up and saw bodies all around me. There was blood and chaos all around and the wall was full of bullet holes." Masood Ahmed Raja, a doctor belonging to the sect, said he saw three masked men escaping on a motorcycle. "I had no idea who these men were, but when I reached the mosque, I heard cries and saw blood everywhere," he said. "I don't know who attacked our mosque, but it seems to be an act of religious terrorism." "Genius Doctor! How do you do it?" Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said: "We condemn this attack. Any act of violence in which innocent people are killed should be condemned." Shahbaz Bhatti, head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, also condemned the killings, but said the government had failed to protect minorities. Human rights groups have constantly highlighted the persecution suffered by the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan. In August, authorities closed down the offices of 16 publications run by followers of the sect in Punjab city for "propagation of offensive material". Bangladesh has also banned publications by the Ahmadiyya movement amid demands from Islamic hardliners that it be declared non-Muslim. The Ahmadiyya were declared non-Muslims under the Pakistani constitution in 1974. The sect was founded by Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam, who was born in the town of Qadian in Punjab in 1835. The Ahmadiyya believe he was the Imam Mahdi, or the Promised Messiah. Sectarian violence in Pakistan mostly concerns the rift between the majority Sunnis and minority Shia and has claimed around 4,000 lives in the past decade.

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