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Police detain protesters amid turmoil in Pakistan
Agence France Presse - March 12, 2009
Hasan Mansoor, Karachi – Pakistan police baton-charged activists and manhandled dozens into vans in Karachi Thursday, as thousands defied the government in a mass protest that has thrown the country into crisis.
Lawyers in black suits and opposition party activists carrying flags and punching their fists in the air marched in Pakistan's biggest cities of Karachi and Lahore, demanding that President Asif Ali Zardari reinstate sacked judges.
Organisers hope that hundreds of thousands of lawyers, opposition supporters and civil activists will join a four-day convoy on the 1,500 kilometres (940 miles) route from Karachi to Islamabad, where it is intended to arrive Monday.
In the third such annual march in Pakistan, protesters want Zardari to act on a promise to reinstate judges after former military ruler Pervez Musharraf sacked around 60 of them, including the Supreme Court chief justice, in 2007.
Main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, locked in a showdown with Zardari, has urged the masses to rise up against the weak civilian government, which is struggling with a political crisis, the economic meltdown and Islamist violence.
A nervous government banned all protests in Punjab, the country's most important political heartland, and Sindh, the province including Karachi, where security forces guarded key installations amid fears of violence.
Protesters in Karachi chanted "Go, Zardari, Go" and "New Menace, Zardari" as riot police wearing helmets and carrying batons bundled more than 35 people into waiting prison vans outside the Sindh high court, witnesses said.
Overall about 90 people were detained in Karachi, including Ghafoor Ahmed, vice president of Pakistan's biggest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and 18 local lawyers, police said.
Around 2,000 lawyers, political workers and civil activists rallied in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, shouting "Zardari is a dog" and "Long March, Long March" – clashing briefly with police, an AFP reporter there said.
The lawyers' leader, Aitzaz Ahsan, said people were determined to flout the government's invoking of a 19th century British law banning rallies. "Today we have defied Section 144. It shows public morale is very high and they will reach Islamabad on March 16," Ahsan said.
Police held back from charging at the protesters and commentators say it is impossible for the government to enforce the ban. "Today lawyers broke the law, but we let them vent their sentiments," police official Ijaz Ahmed told AFP.
Around 150 lawyers and 250 activists drove out of the southwestern city of Quetta, where an American UN official was kidnapped last month, cheered off by wellwishers and scheduled to meet up with the contingent from Karachi in Sindh.
Hundreds of activists have been detained across Punjab and Islamabad since Wednesday. US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) condemned the clampdown as endangering the country's transition to democracy.
"It's a disgrace for elected officials to mimic the discredited military government by using old and repressive laws to stifle political expression," said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at HRW.
The government this week threatened to charge Sharif with sedition for inciting public rebellion after the Supreme Court on February 25 disqualified him and his brother from contesting elections.
Zardari and Sharif have long fought over the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militancy.
Protests in 2007 ultimately led to Musharraf's resignation and patience is running out with the new civilian government, more than a year after parliamentary elections and six months after Zardari took office.
Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) pulled its members out of the cabinet last year to protest against the government's failure to honour a deadline for reinstating the sacked judges.
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