Lal Masjid endgame
Thursday, July 05,2007
The 30th anniversary today of Gen Ziaul Haq's coup d'etat finds a central part of the capital of Pakistan a virtual battlefield. Tuesday, the first day of what is being described as the government's "countdown" to its long-promised operation to end the armed rebellion of the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa clerics, saw ten people dying during exchanges of fire. Residents around the mosque-seminary complex are fleeing their homes and there is a curfew in the area. It is a frightening thought what kind of situation the operation itself would produce. While the death toll so far is most unfortunate, the fact of the matter is that the government seems to have little choice but to act in the manner that it did since Tuesday. It is a sign that the government of President Pervez Musharraf has at last decided to grasp the nettle and started a process it was needlessly putting off. One can only hope that the matter is now resolved without any further loss of life or injury.
Despite the wide welcome the government's reaction has received among ordinary Pakistanis, questions are being raised as to why the basic measures that are being adopted at this late stage were not taken before. If it had been imposed before, the curfew would have prevented the entry of terrorists and their supporters into the complex, with their gadgets and their fearsome weaponry whose very procurement by civilians is a mystery; Maulana Abdul Aziz is a remarkably modern man for someone who is such a strong believer in omens and divinations he bases his jihadi decisions on them. The government has moved only now to disconnect water and electricity to the mosque and seminary. An earlier discontinuation of these would have forced most of those inside to leave sooner or later. It's surprising that the government didn't know that, as is apparent now from the interviews of the bewildered pupils leaving Lal Masjid, a large number of the occupants were virtual prisoners, or at least didn't know exactly why they were there or were being held, more or less, against their will. Their victimisation lends another unfortunate aspect to the authorities' dragging their feet.
Among the critics, there are those who see the delay as part of a government plan to use the operation as a kind of a diversionary tactic -- away from other pressing problems, some of which had been hogging the media spotlight of late. Their argument is that it is not exactly a coincidence that the operation came a day after the government took a severe battering before the Supreme Court's 13-member full court (which also resulted in a blanket ban on intelligence personnel from the superior courts). However, there is no proof really to lend any validity to their standpoint. Other criticisms though, especially those that question how and why the government permitted the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa students to occupy state-owned property for months on end and how the complex managed to build up a sophisticated weapons arsenal (given that it is situated in the heart of the federal capital and at a stone's throw from the headquarters of the ISI) are valid.
As for Lal Masjid itself, a little bit of a history lesson would help contextualise what has happened. The father of the two brothers who run Lal Masjid, Maulana Abdullah, was close to Gen Zia and many a senior politician and military man. During the time of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Lal Masjid became a favoured conduit for sending 'mujahideen' to Afghanistan, and also Kashmir. It is also widely believed that he was patron to several sectarian groups such as the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Harkatul Mujahideen. Even now, and as publicly stated by President Musharraf, several members of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad, for whose leader's (Maulana Masood Azhar) freedom Maulana Abdullah had publicly spoken many a time, were said to be hiding in the compound and helping the two brothers. The question that should be foremost on everyone's minds and which governments past and present need to answer is why the situation was allowed to come to this. Why wasn't the jihadi manufacturing machine fuelled by extremist seminaries and mosques such as Lal Masjid not reined in and kept a tight leash on? Also, the issue of Lal Masjid and what has been happening, especially the revelations that many of the students were not exactly willing residents, should hopefully attract public and media scrutiny on the role played by madressahs towards fostering extremist views in the country. Of course, a solution to this problem is not easy since it involves the decrepit and crumbling mainstream education system, but these are all questions and issues that need answers and introspection.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=63137