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November 7, 2007

Pakistani Lawyers Angered as Hope for Change Faded

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 6 — Behind the public rage of Pakistan’s lawyers, who protested for a second day on Tuesday, lies a long-smoldering resentment toward the country’s military president, who at first held out promise for educated, politically moderate Pakistanis, but steadily squandered their support.

That disappointment turned to fury after the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, abolished the Supreme Court and scrapped the Constitution, touching a raw nerve among Pakistan’s lawyers, some with degrees from the best universities abroad and with experience in how other societies had preserved legal rights.

On Tuesday in a telephone address to lawyers here in Pakistan’s capital, the ousted chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, urged them to continue to defy the state of emergency.

Hundreds of lawyers took to the streets again in the eastern city of Lahore and in Multan, about 200 miles to the southwest of Lahore. The police arrested scores of protesters, and more than 100 lawyers were injured in street battles.

In interviews on Tuesday, a day after hundreds were tear-gassed, beaten and rounded up by the police, the lawyers said they had taken to the streets because they felt that Pakistan’s first taste of judicial independence was being snatched away.

“How do you function as a lawyer when the law is what the general says it is?” said a prominent Islamabad lawyer, Babar Sattar, who has a Harvard law degree.

Athar Minallah, who holds a master’s degree in law from Cambridge and was in General Musharraf’s cabinet during the first two years of his rule, said lawyers were outraged that the general was moving backward.

“When the Supreme Court started acting like an independent institution for the first time in 60 years, they came down very hard,” he said. “In the past, the Supreme Court had always connived with the establishment and the military.”

That once cozy relationship frayed as the court, led by Mr. Chaudhry, gradually began challenging General Musharraf on cases ranging from human rights to his election’s validity. General Musharraf suspended the chief justice in March, accusing him of corruption, but lawyers around the country protested.

Their demonstrations became a rallying point for a broader weariness among Pakistanis after seven and a half years of military rule. The general eventually had to back down, and Mr. Chaudhry was reinstated in July.

But as the court continued to thwart General Musharraf, he cracked down and on Saturday declared a state of emergency, accusing the court of meddling in the affairs of state and “demoralizing” public servants.

In fact, lawyers said in interviews, the court was doing its job, and it was General Musharraf who had retreated into the old ways of Pakistan.

Mr. Minallah, the former cabinet member, said their expectations of change had been dashed. “All these people are professionals, who have never been out on the streets before,” he said of the roughly 50 people arrested at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in Lahore, when the police raided it on Sunday.

In fact, when General Musharraf first seized power in a military coup in 1999, unseating Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, he was welcomed by Pakistanis fed up with years of corrupt and dysfunctional civilian rule.

Mr. Minallah was among those early supporters. “Initially, Pervez Musharraf gave the impression, through speaking of reforms, that he meant business,” Mr. Minallah said. “He was going to do something that had never happened before 1999: people from the ruling class would be held accountable for whatever they did.”

But he recounted his gradual disenchantment on a range of issues — not only strictly legal issues — after joining the Musharraf government.

Things began to turn sour quickly, particularly after General Musharraf organized a referendum in the spring of 2002 in an attempt to legitimize his rule, Mr. Minallah said.

By then, it was clear, he said, that the general was keeping the opposition political parties headed by two former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Sharif, out of the political arena.

“That vacuum was filled by the religious forces,” Mr. Minallah said. “Now Musharraf is targeting the liberal forces of this country. Yet they are the ones who want to fight extremism.”

The lawyers have been the only force in the country to mount protests since Saturday night. The political parties have remained notably subdued.

Ms. Bhutto, leader of the country’s largest opposition party, returned to Pakistan in October after living abroad for eight years to avoid corruption charges. She was hoping to find a way to share power with General Musharraf, her old nemesis.

Though that deal looks increasingly unlikely, she has yet to authorize the organization of rallies against the emergency decree. She returned to the capital on Tuesday night, but has so far confined herself to statements condemning the general’s move.

Instead, it is the lawyers who have taken the lead in staging protests. The day after General Musharraf imposed emergency rule, people who supported the general eight years ago were so furious that they demonstrated outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Mr. Minallah said.

An estimated 700 lawyers, maybe more, are now in jail, lawyers say.

Some top corporate lawyers have been arrested, like Shahid Kardar, who among those jailed Sunday in the raid on the human rights commission.

Other top lawyers have stayed out of trouble, choosing to monitor events from their offices, or in some cases, like Mr. Minallah, hiding from the authorities at friends’ houses as they plan strategy for protests and long-term boycotts of the courts.

The country’s most visible lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the campaign to support Chief Justice Chaudhry in the spring, was hastily put into prison in Rawalpindi, a major city adjacent to Islamabad, on Saturday night.

Mr. Ahsan is regarded by many of his colleagues as a virtuoso orator, talented lawyer and a clever politician who is probably best able to maintain the momentum of the lawyers’ movement, a fact the Musharraf government well knows.

A lawyer for Mr. Ahsan, Tariq Hasan, said he went Tuesday to the jail where Mr. Ahsan was being held, but was denied access to see Mr. Ahsan even though he carried written permission from the authorities.

While the lawyers say their immediate cause is the preservation of Pakistan’s legal system, and their own profession, they said they have also been spurred on by more wide-ranging frustrations.

Mr. Sattar, the Islamabad lawyer, said he was disappointed that Washington was not trying to forge “a liberal alliance” in Pakistan. Ms. Bhutto, who has returned to Pakistan with encouragement from the Bush administration, was calling for elections, but had ignored the vital issue of a viable and independent judiciary, he said.

“Three years down the line when the Bhutto-Musharraf government is discredited, there will be an extreme right-wing government with the kind of political agenda that is openly hostile to the United States,” Mr. Sattar warned.

Several other prominent lawyers said they were discouraged by what they saw as the mild reaction of the Bush administration to the dismissal of the Supreme Court.

“Expressions from the United States are taken seriously here, and I feel the United States ought to put its foot down regardless of the consequences to Musharraf,” said Hassan Aurangzeb, a corporate lawyer, whose firm had represented General Musharraf on some cases.

Mr. Aurangzeb, whose family comes from the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province, where religious extremists have seized power, said it was unrealistic to expect Washington to cut military assistance.

But, he said, “there ought to be a greater vigilance and the strings should be stronger, so we know how the money is spent and who the beneficiaries are.”

From inside the Musharraf government, Mr. Minallah said, he had watched a steady erosion of the general’s reform agenda.

General Musharraf abetted the religious parties, weakened legislation on the rights of women, and withdrew a proposal on blasphemy that had offended Islamic fundamentalists.

At the same time, he allowed extremism to spread in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, even though he was telling the United States that quelling extremism was his top priority, Mr. Minallah said.

After General Musharraf suspended the chief justice in March, Mr. Minallah said he warned one of the president’s most trusted aides, Tariq Aziz, the head of the National Security Council, that the general had lost his base of popular support.

Mr. Minallah said: “I told him: ‘Don’t believe any of the reports from the intelligence agencies. Go and disguise yourself and see if you can find a single person who is not angry at Pervez Musharraf.’”

He added: “His reply was that he should leave if he’s so unpopular. I said: ‘That’s for you to tell him.’”