International

One year after Lal Masjid, looking back in anger

ISLAMABAD: In bunches of four or five, scores of men sat digging the soil in the empty plot of land where the Jamia Hafsa women’s madrassa stood until last year. They were using small sticks and their bare hands, looking for remnants of those killed in a military operation on the madrassa and the Lal Masjid next door last year.

Husn-e-Alam, one of the men, showed what he had found: bits of broken glass bangles. Reverentially, he put away in his wallet the mud-encrusted bits of glass that he said were from the bangles worn by the girl students “martyred” in the commando raid. Others showed what they insisted were bits of human bones, and one man said the small piece of cloth that he had found was the remnant of a dupatta.

“I did not personally know anyone who died here. But I’m searching here as a brother would for his sisters’ belongings. All Muslims are brothers and sisters,” said Husn-e-Alam, who travelled to the capital all the way from his home in the North West Frontier Province on Sunday to participate in the one year anniversary of the Lal Masjid siege. As thousands of people gathered at the mosque to remember the “martyrs”, the continuing anger at the operation on July 10 last year was evident. The government said 102 people were killed in the operation, which followed a week-long standoff during which the Army tried to get militants holed up inside to surrender.

But radical preachers and clerics who addressed Sunday’s “Martyrs of Lal Masjid Conference” denounced President Pervez Musharraf for ordering the Army to kill “thousands of innocent students” in order to “please the international community”. The conference rubbished the claim that Al-Qaeda militants were hiding in the mosque. Speakers also condemned Pakistan People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari and President Musharraf as “kaffirs” or infidels, and accused both of being hand-in-glove with America to “destroy Pakistan”.

The conference demanded that Maulana Abdul Aziz, the cleric who headed Lal Masjid, and who was caught during the operation trying to flee disguised in a burqa, be absolved of all charges and released. It also demanded that the Jamia Hafsa, which was bulldozed by the government after the commando operation, be rebuilt at the same site next to the mosque.

The clerics resolved to form a committee to look after the families of the “martyrs”. It is to be named after Abdul Aziz’s brother, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who ran the Jamia Hafsa seminary and was killed in the commando operation. One man wept openly at the shrine, clenching and unclenching his fists in apparent anger.

“Musharraf is not a Muslim. No Muslim could have burnt the Koran. No Muslim could have killed fellow Muslims,” said Nazar Hussain. “Musharraf is a Jew, and he is working with America to turn Pakistan into a Jewish state, all to make some American dollars for himself.”

Mr. Hussain’s 16-year-old son Mohammed Tariq Farooq has been missing since the operation. He said the boy had gone to bring home his sister who was studying at the Jamia Hafsa, but while she returned, he did not come back.

“An intelligence agent told me that my son had been shot in the legs and taken into custody, but I’ve looked in all the prisons and I can’t find him. He has disappeared,” he said.

The PPP-led government’s policies also came in for condemnation. “There’s no difference between the new government and the old. They are taking this country towards destruction. Look what they are doing in the North West Frontier Province,” said an Islamic Studies teacher at Rawalpindi Medical College, in a reference to the operations in the Khyber area.

The entire area around the Lal Masjid had been sealed off by the police as the gathering, comprising almost entirely men wearing white salwar kameez and prayer caps, grew through the day. No vehicles were allowed into the area, and those walking in had to go through a metal detector, and a physical check. Despite the heavy police presence, roadside stalls selling CDs of the Lal Masjid operation and other jihadist material did brisk business.

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