Daily Times has a good editorial on this saga.
From Pakistani nationalists’ perspective it doesn’t matter what Indians say.
What matters most is to see what Hafiz Saeed is saying about and doing to Pakistani citizens. And he is AGAINST Pak army ops in swat and by extension any operations in FATA.
This clearly shows Hafiz mian is a terror sympathizer and supporter. If any link of his charity is proven to be supporting terror activities then he should be hanged.
And Pak government has plenty of evidence that his so called charities are involved in terrorizing civilians.
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Editorial: L’affaire Hafiz Saeed
A full bench of the Lahore High Court on Tuesday accepted a habeas corpus petition and ordered the government to release Jama’at-ud Dawa (JD) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and one of his deputies because the government “did not have proof to detain the petitioner for preventive measures”. The government’s plea that Mr Saeed was kept in confinement in pursuance of a United Nations resolution was rejected because the text of the resolution did not specifically require the incarceration of the petitioners. The LHC had been giving clear signals during the habeas corpus hearings that there was paucity of proof for keeping Mr Saeed confined even “in the public interest”.
Mr Saeed was put under house arrest in early December last year after a UN Security Council committee added him and the JD to a list of people and organisations linked to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The relevant UN Security Council resolution quoted by the government was No 1267, but it required freezing the guilty party’s assets, and banning its members from travelling abroad rather than detaining them. An in-camera disclosure of secret information about Jama’at-ud Dawa also apparently proved ineffective.
This news has spread around the world like wildfire. The reason for this is the person of Hafiz Saeed who founded Lashkar-e Tayba (LT) in 1985 and took it into Indian-administered Kashmir to help the freedom fighters there. He was blamed for attacks in Mumbai and Delhi in 2003, 2005 and 2008. The LT was banned by General Pervez Musharraf in 2002, whereafter Mr Saeed renamed it Jama’at-ud Dawa (JD). In August 2006, Mr Saeed was detained as head of JD, but was later released.
India has expressed its views after this development and its reaction is negative. It has taken the position of linking Mr Saeed’s “punishment” conditionally to the resumption of the bilateral dialogue with Pakistan.
After his incarceration under the UN resolution last year, Pakistan discovered the size of the charity Mr Saeed was running under JD. Since the UN had asked for the closure of all JD facilities, the government had to reveal their locations. No one can claim that all the charities were uncovered, but the nation was taken aback at the outreach of the organisation into the districts where it was engaging civil society in the service of its “charitable cause”. The Musharraf government had praised it for doing great work in the rescue and rehabilitation of the affected population after the Kashmir-NWFP earthquake of 2005 despite the fact that it reportedly expelled NGOs and women workers in the area on the basis of religion.
Mr Saeed has said some right things after his release, such as that he is opposed to suicide-bombing. But his statement that the army has gone into Swat under international pressure places him outside the national consensus against the Taliban. America and the West in general have simply recorded the event of his release but comment too will surely come by and by, which will be disadvantageous to Pakistan. It will certainly be more critical than the comment made on the release of Maulana Abdul Aziz of Lal Masjid. But at the present moment the West is too busy admiring Pakistan for finally taking on the Taliban to note the consequences of what has happened. The western press has already noted the charity JD is deploying among the internally displaced persons of Swat under another name.
At one level it is a clash between politics and requirements of justice. At another it is also a kind of clash between international law and municipal law. A resolution of the Security Council can be given the status of law to avert follow-up action under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. Yet, if a nation wants to abide by the resolution, it has to fulfil the requirements of justice under its own law too. It is moot whether the state even intended to go through with the process without endangering the government, but the bare fact is that international political repercussions will be negative, getting worse as Pakistan proves incompetent to fulfil the other requirements of Resolution 1267 that the court has not rejected. *
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