It’s a pity that Abdul Aziz and Hafiz Saeed were released by the courts. We should not take it as a failure of judiciary but the fact that agencies are not serious in taking the legal course and do not present but rather conceal the evidence gathered by them to convict these criminals. Agencies have to get serious about this problem and stop safeguarding these criminals by not presenting evidence against them in a court of law. Still today these ghundas are preaching hatred and are intellectual mentors of nut case jihadis.
These agencies must confess their past sins of nurturing these criminals as a state policy instead of covering up their own flawed defence and strategic thinking..covering up the evidence and blaming the judiciary is not going to help!!!
Transitional justice
Legal eye
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Babar Sattar
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
In 2007 we witnessed the Lal Masjid imbroglio: gun-trotting vigilantes occupying a children library, abducting foreigners and shutting down music shops in Islamabad. When confronted by the state – in an ill-conceived and delayed operation – the military action claimed many lives, including those of commandos carrying out the operation. Yet, there has not been a single conviction for the crimes carried out by the Lal Masjid brigade and Abdul Aziz was recently released by the apex court to receive a hero’s welcome back at Lal Masjid. Earlier this week Lahore High Court ordered the release of Hafiz Saeed – the head of Jamaatud Dawa widely suspected of having inspired or abetted the Bombay terror attacks last year that brought Pakistan and India to the brink of war. When a justice system fails to put miscreants and offenders in correction facilities, it encourages crime and criminals by diluting the deterring effect of law on the one hand, and on the other encourages law-enforcement agencies to indulge in extra-judicial killings as the only effective way of putting criminals away. Are Pakistan’s legislation, court system and criminal law jurisprudence fundamentally incapable of holding accountable perpetrators of terror and their intellectual mentors preaching an ideology of hate, violence and intolerance?
That Abdul Aziz and Hafiz Saeed are innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental tenant of our law and justice system. But why is it that despite a tremendous rise in terrorist activity and increase in the number of arrests made in relation thereto, no one ever gets convicted?** Are intelligence and law-enforcement agencies not able to gather information and evidence in a manner that can be used in a court of law? Are they unwilling to share information with prosecutors and the courts that they deem sensitive from a national security perspective? Are they incapable of confronting all facets of the terror infrastructure still alive and well in Pakistan? Or are they deliberately equivocal about the utility of non-state actors in line with our three-decade old flawed defence and strategic thinking?** And this is where the issue of truth-telling by the state becomes an essential plank in transitional justice. Hillary Clinton admitted before a senate committee that the US had helped nurture, finance and arm the Taliban and other mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had later forgotten about the stingers floating across Pakistan. It was thus part responsible for the mess in the region. Such admission is a crucial first step in amending mistakes of the past.
If Pakistan wishes to dismantle the jihadi infrastructure that continues to fuel insurgency in the tribal areas and terror across the country, the state must admit its original sin. We cannot confront or isolate militancy in Swat, while the militant ideology prospers in Waziristan, Southern Punjab and Muridke.** A comprehensive approach to fighting terror and extremism in Pakistan can only be built on the admission that a flawed approach to national security and defence strategy led to the inception of a jihadi project, where the state patronized militant groups, trained them in guerrilla warfare, fed them on an obscurantist brand of religion and armed them with modern weapons funded by foreign money. Such acknowledgement will enable the state to confront the crimes of today, without simultaneously trying to cover up those of yesterday that can be traced back to its own doorstep. It will allow agencies to divulge information before our courts that will lead to convictions of terrorists and their patrons.** And it will help today’s military and political leaders to explain how we wound up in a situation where a population of almost three million people had to be evacuated to confront a few thousand militants and the steps that we will take now to never let this happen again.
preaching an ideology of hate, violence and intolerance?