World Concerns Over Shariah in Swat

[kidwaibhai]

I think we need to realize that this shariah court appeal was a big propaganda tool for the taliban once this has been eliminated then they wont have a leg to stand on.

Govt-TNSM deal a high-risk affair

LAHORE: Islamabad’s decision to sign a peace deal with the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi by enforcing the ‘Sharai Nizam-e-Adl Regulation’ in the Malakand division of the NWFP, primarily to bring back peace to the Swat valley, is a highly risky affair for both Maulana Sufi Mohammad and the government since both sides have put their credibility at stake and will have to prove in the coming days that they are capable of honouring their part of the treaty unlike the past.

It is not for the first time that the TNSM and the NWFP government have inked a peace deal to end fighting in exchange for implementation of Shariah or Islamic law in a large region of the Northwest Frontier Province. It was on April 20, 2008 that the NWFP coalition government signed a six-point accord with the TNSM led by Maulana Sufi Mohammad whose son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah alias Maulana Radio calls the shots in Swat. The then imprisoned TNSM Amir had promised to renounce militancy and suicide attacks, refrain from targeting the Army and the government installations and not to oppose female education and immunisation programme for children. In return, the government withdrew all pending cases against Sufi, commuted his remaining prison term of four years and set him free unconditionally.

Sufi’s release meant that the coalition government in the NWFP, comprising the Awami National Party, which champions Pashtun nationalism and secularism, and the Pakistan People’s Party, a left-of-centre secular party, wanted to use him as a partner in tackling militancy and extremism and bringing peace to Swat. However, in a strange move, almost a week after his release, Sufi disowned his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, saying he would not talk to him again for the sake of peace in Swat as he has shown disobedience to him. While there are those who believe it was a shrewd move on the part of Sufi who had already been freed and who wanted to carry on his old agenda of enforcing Shariah in the Malakand division, the NWFP government circles believed it was hard for Sufi to take back the initiative from his son-in-law who had already established himself as an unchallenged commander of the TNSM in Swat and strengthened his position by joining forces with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, led by the South Waziristan-based fugitive Commander Baitullah Mehsud.

Therefore, Sufi Mohammad deemed it fit to simply disown Maulana Fazlullah, thus failing to fulfil his part of the peace deal under which he was released. The Sufi’s inability to pursue his son-in-law prompted the NWFP government to pursue Fazlullah independently, only to strike yet another peace deal in Swat with him almost a month later — on May 21, 2008. It took the NWFP coalition government hardly three rounds of talks spread over 13 days to reach their peace accord for Swat. The 16-point handwritten accord in Urdu was described by analysts as a comprehensive document of give-and-take by the two sides. The TNSM leadership had renounced militancy in return for acceptance of their longstanding demand that Shariah be enforced in Swat and the rest of Malakand region. Fazlullah had promised not to challenge the writ of the state, refrain from attacking security forces and government installations and stop opposing girls’ education and immunisation of children. He denounced suicide bombings and agreed to disband his private militia — Shaheen Commando Force. Though it was not yet announced, a general amnesty for the Swati militants was to cover Fazlullah and his top lieutenants.

The NWFP government also gave in to the militants’ demand to retain control of the TNSM’s sprawling Madrassa complex in Fazlullah’s village, Mamdheray, and establish an Islamic university there, besides allowing them continued use of their FM radio. An 11-member joint committee of the provincial government officials, NWFP assembly members and militants’ representatives was formed to monitor and implement the accord, because of the worries that problems could arise with regard to the still undecided timeframe for eventual withdrawal of over 20,000 Army troops from Swat. However, the peace deal was unilaterally revoked by Maulana Fazlullah hardly a few weeks later under instructions from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Ameer Baitullah Mehsud who was furious over the ongoing military operation in the Waziristan region. Mehsud further asked the ruling coalition to step down immediately or else face an armed movement from the militants, as it had failed to honour its promises made with the Swat chapter of the TTP in the peace agreement.

Almost nine months later, the NWFP government has inked yet another peace agreement with Sufi who has once again promised to extend his support to bring back peace to Swat by prevailing upon his son-in-law to lay down arms before the military operation in the valley could come to an end. As per the peace deal, Sufi will be at the forefront of establishing a new political administration in Swat. He will pave public opinion for a new local administration, to be established in Swat, by holding public gatherings throughout the district. Nevertheless, there are those in the political circles who are sceptical about Sufi’s ability to neutralize Fazlullah and his lethal militant network despite reports that Baitullah Mehsud has already severed all contacts with Maulana Fazlullah for not toeing his line recently. At the same time, it remains to be seen how much political support and clout Sufi and his TNSM still retain in Swat and in the rest of Malakand region following his 2001 misadventure when he had taken thousands of his young followers to fight out the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan which had invaded Kabul in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.

 

[Solomon2]

Interpretation of 'divine law' - read my prior posts to understand my perspective on this.

Checks and balances are legal structures, interpretations are opinions. You are not answering the question, "With what does one "check and balance" divine law?" If you don't feel qualified to answer, please say so - but in that case, why are you supportive of Shariah?

 

[SurvivoR]

That's a rather general statement - in the context of Pakistan and the understanding of Shariah as "Divine" -- it is most certainly retrogressive.

After all, is Shariah understood as man made laws? Are they amenable to alteration? Who is qualified to alter them?? What use of lawyers, what use of the many years of training and learning, after all we now will have half literates transmitting the Laws of God on us, especially on women, the enemies of all Islamists.

If this is not retrogressive, what then is it ?? Just because some horrible Hindu Indian is concerned does that automatically mean we have to oppose it??

Highly misleading comments. Because there is no radical change in Sharia regulations this time. It is just extention of the same Nizam-e-Adal Regulations 1999. Only words have been changed nothing else.

Under this judicial system cases will be heard by Zila Qazis (District Judges) who btw are not "Illiterate or half-literate." These Qazis (judges) are highly educated and served for many years in different regular courts of Pakistan as well as in Federal Shariat Courts.

Do you know what is machanism to decide cases under this law? Under said law "Section 8 of Nizam-i-Adle Regulations 1999 empowered a Qazi to decide a case under the Islamic law if both parties wished so."

The section is still there not eleminated.

The only change which had been made in 1999 sharia law is just that "In the proposed Nizam-i-Adle Regulations 2009, the NWFP government has proposed repeal of superior courts jurisdiction with Federal Shariat Court (FSC)."

That too has been made just to save people from traveling to Peshawar because there are branches of FSC in Swat and Malakand.

Would it not be wise to have some knowledge of the law before presenting misleading judgment to outside world over this law?

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Checks and balances are legal structures, interpretations are opinions. You are not answering the question, "With what does one "check and balance" divine law?" If you don't feel qualified to answer, please say so - but in that case, why are you supportive of Shariah?

I thought I did -the fact that it is open to interpretation means that your assertion that whatever is decreed cannot be challenged by virtue of being 'divine' is incorrect.

Interpretation will vary from Scholar to scholar - 'institutionalization' of the Shariah system with checks and balances and accountability can allow for scholars/Qazi's with progressive interpretations to come into the system, as society evolves.

 

[Solomon2]

'institutionalization' of the Shariah system with checks and balances and accountability can allow for scholars/Qazi's with progressive interpretations to come into the system, as society evolves.

I find this very interesting, yet as you point out it needs development. Please make your proposal for a current system as detailed as possible, and explain how it can change "as society evolves".

 

[waraich66]

Checks and balances are legal structures, interpretations are opinions. You are not answering the question, "With what does one "check and balance" divine law?" If you don't feel qualified to answer, please say so - but in that case, why are you supportive of Shariah?

Solomon,

Quran is base of shariah law(adultery,marriage,seperation,murder,haj,zakat etc) and to resolve practical problem (pent above ankle,beard,prayer methods etc) of personal life and social life in Islam we have four fiqas , shafi,humbali,hanfi,maliki but they dont differ on basic laws mentioned in Quran , they only differ in different hadiths mentioned in authentic hadiths books muslim,bukhari,majah,muskat and other hadith books..

When evere there is difference in opinion ulema council consist of all fiqas will resolve it and on this basic Qazi will take decision.

I hoped question answered.

 

[Solomon2]

When evere there is difference in opinion ulema council consist of all fiqas will resolve it and on this basic Qazi will take decision.

I hoped question answered.

This kind of resolution is a form of balance only; there is no check on power. I don't think this is what A.M. has in mind.

 

[waraich66]

This kind of resolution is a form of balance only; there is no check on power. I don't think this is what A.M. has in mind.

In Islamic system of governance ruler or kahlifa is answerable to shaura(ulema council) and Qazi (shariah court) also so there is less chance of mis use of power.

 

[Solomon2]

"Less chance"? Why are you not more confident, waraich66?

 

[asaad-ul-islam]

for the last time, nizam-e-adl has nothing to do with fazlullah and the militants. it was proposed by sufi mohammad, who denounces his son-in-law fazlullah. these are two separate people with different views and goals for the region.

this agreement to enforce nizam-e-adl has been with sufi mohammad, not fazlullah and TTP. fazlullah and TTP just happened to declare a ceasefire for ten days around this time. with that said, this nizam-e-adl agreement should have been enforced a while ago, back when Swat became a part of Pakistan. for some unfortunate reasons, these laws were not enforced by the federal govt.

nizam-e-adl is hardly what people see it to be, it does not sanction anything extreme like on the imaginations of westerners. it's just a system of immediate justice, something that is not available, not just in Swat, but all of Pakistan. our corrupt judiciary can drag cases-like mine-on for years, make an income off of bribes, and engage in nepotism.

I wish something like nizam-e-adl can be enforced in Karachi, my own city, so that my family and I can get a peace of mind! with this agreement in place, we will see support for fazlullah die out very quickly, it's only a matter of time before people figure out what he's up to.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

I find this very interesting, yet as you point out it needs development. Please make your proposal for a current system as detailed as possible, and explain how it can change "as society evolves".

If you look at the FSC and CII, they have grown progressive over the years. I attribute this to appointments to the CII and FSC benches of educated Islamic scholars, possibly chosen specifically becasue they were not firebrand radicals.

Another reason behind this 'moderation' is that the CII has scholars from different sects, which forces them to consult and arrive at compromises.

A similar system of appointments by the government, and careful vetting of the performance of these Qazi's, would mean that you would not get the sort of obscurantist thinking that we have come to associate with the taliban and Saudi Shariah, or atleast be able to weed out those who seem to subscribe to more extreme views.

Survivors post provides some details about the constitution of these Qazi courts, and at this point it seems that the Government will have some role in who is appointed, and that they will be educated and qualified judges.

Unlike Survivor, I am not enthused by the abolition of the right to appeal to the FSC, and I am not certain the FSC will have branches in Swat where the right to appeal against the Qazi courts could be exercised. Ostensibly this decision to eliminate 'right to appeal' was to 'speed up justice'. It is a move that can be reversed later, if local FSC branches do not exist to hear appeals.

Just to clarify, given a choice, I would rather have a non-Shariah system, and continue with the existing one, since so much time and effort has been put into it already. But I am also a pragmatist, and I think that opposing this Shariah bill will only destabilize the situation.

 

[Solomon2]

I am not enthused by the abolition of the right to appeal to the FSC, and I am not certain the FSC will have branches in Swat where the right to appeal against the Qazi courts could be exercised.

Where litigants have no means of appeal to ensure that the court and its enforcing officers are acting in accordance with the law, does that not open the door to arbitrary decisions, corruption, and tyranny?

 

[rubyjackass]

Accidentally ran over this. Very nice piece...
http://www.dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/news/pakistan/our-whirling-dervishes-should-be-ashamed--qs

Our whirling dervishes should be ashamed
Kamran Shafi
Tuesday, 17 Feb, 2009 | 11:53 AM PST |
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What has gone wrong with us, I ask? Is this tortured land that same land I called mine? — Reuters
What has gone wrong with us, I ask? Is this tortured land that same land I called mine? — Reuters

I HAVE changed the title of this piece from 'We whirling dervishes ought to be ashamed' to the present one because I have many times exhorted this state of Pakistan, this Land of the Pure, this Citadel of Islam, etcetera, that whenever it indulges in shenanigans that are deplorable and monstrous and odious, I, as a citizen want no part of them. Not in my name, gentlemen.

I must also beg the dervishes’ pardon for using their good and kind name to describe our mendacious establishment, but its U-turns are so fast and so mind-numbing that they can only be compared with the whirling of the dervishes!

But first, let all of us Pakistanis hang our collective head in sorrow and in shame at the dreadful and downright evil and cold-blooded murder of Piotr Stanczek, the Polish geologist who was prospecting for oil in Attock district and who was kidnapped by the so-called Taliban four months ago and cruelly beheaded last week. More especially the establishment should be ashamed of itself, for it is now being said out loud that poor Stanczek was killed because Pakistani state institutions are not on the same page.

Indeed, in this particular case, Poland has officially said that 'internal divisions within Pakistan’s government apparatus hampered efforts to save the life of' the hostage. Be that as it may, do the beasts that actually carried out the execution not have hearts? Do they not have children? Or wives? Or mothers and sisters and brothers? How possibly could they break bread with another human being one day and then slaughter him the next? What sort of bestial behaviour is this? And all in the name of Islam?

What has gone wrong with us, I ask? Is this the country I was born in? Is this cruel and ugly place the Pakistan I knew whilst growing up, and going to college in Lahore where boys and girls would cycle to their schools and colleges as a matter of course? Is this tortured land that same land I called mine?

Now to our whirling dervishes: from the stoutest of denials to loud criticism of the Indians for providing only 'information' and not 'evidence' to our spokesmen of the FO sticking their tongues out at the Indians and faulting them on pedantic semantics; the whole shoot has fallen flat on its egg-smeared face. It has once more made the Mother of All U-turns, this time on the Mumbai attacks, admit that they were, indeed, planned in Pakistan. Why they even have the 'mastermind' (Senator-elect — God save us — Rehman Malik’s words, not mine) under actual arrest!

It would do us well to go over the sequence of events to establish once and for all that whilst there is a great divide within the establishment, it takes but a short visit by pro-consuls such as Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Holbrooke to grease the wheels AND the tongues of the powers that be.

Consider: on Nov 27, 2007, this newspaper reported that Shah Mehmood Qureshi 'was adamant at a news conference hosted by Delhi’s women journalists that there were no longer training camps for terrorists in Pakistan…'.

On Nov 28, 'the country’s top political and military leaders met on Saturday to discuss the tricky situation resulting from the Indian government’s move to blame ‘elements within Pakistan’ for the Mumbai carnage, but some of the actions and statements in response to Delhi’s tirade were indicative of a growing gulf between the government and the security establishment on ways and means to handle the affair…official and unofficial statements emanating from different quarters of the establishment suggested clear differences in perception, if not on the response to India’s blame game.'

Enter Ms Rice on Dec 4. She said she had asked the Pakistan civilian government for a ‘robust’ response against the terrorists who attacked Mumbai. In statements in Islamabad, she said that enough information was available for acting against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks and forestalling such incidents. 'There is a lot of information and it needs to be used to get to the perpetrators and prevent them from doing it again,' she said at a news conference during her brief visit to Islamabad.

'There is urgency in getting to the bottom of it; there is urgency in bringing the perpetrators to justice; and there is urgency for using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks,' she said, adding that the message was 'well received' in Islamabad.

Enter Ambassador Holbrooke, Feb 9, 2008, when according to another report in this paper, Pakistan was still describing the 'information provided by India on the Mumbai attacks as ‘insufficient’ to reach a logical conclusion and bring the alleged perpetrators to justice...'. India 'had rejected Pakistan’s claim that the information contained in its dossier was ‘insufficient’ and announced that it would not provide any further information to Pakistan.'

On Feb 12, 2008, immediately after Holbrooke’s two-day visit, and without getting any further 'information' from India, Pakistan admitted everything as described above. Why, several private channels have even gone to the fishing village where the terrorists hid for a few days and from whence they embarked on their murderous journey to Mumbai. The government, for its part, has already identified the shop that sold them the rubber dinghy, the outboard motor and other such equipment.

Would that Ambassador Holbrooke had come visiting earlier!

And now, my friends, to Swat. Who saw the heartrending film on that unfortunate place on television in which yours truly also featured? There was this young and extremely courageous young journalist, Ehsan Haqqani, who was moved to tears describing what is happening to his beloved motherland. Many thousands of us wept with you, my friend, may God keep you.

One has often said that if you give the government(s) of Pakistan two distinctly different ways of doing something, one appropriate and correct and beneficial; the other most inappropriate, wholly wrong and to the country’s total detriment, they will invariably choose the latter. There is going to be Sharia in Malakand/Swat! Whose Sharia? Which sects’ Sharia, please? You are giving another inch to the mullah, sirs, especially one who has tasted blood. He will want ten hundred miles the next time, mark my words.

Stop Press: News has just come in that the extremists in Swat have offered a ceasefire because they are running out of food and other supplies due to heavy snowfall. Which offer has been accepted by the government with the most shameless alacrity. There you go, sirs, on your self-seeking progress.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Where litigants have no means of appeal to ensure that the court and its enforcing officers are acting in accordance with the law, does that not open the door to arbitrary decisions, corruption, and tyranny?

It does, hence my concern over this change. Survivor seems to think that right to appeal will still be available in local FSC courts. I cannot confirm that.

If there is no right to appeal, it may be brought in at a later date. That woudl be part of the 'development' of the system. I think at this point the GoP is primarily interested in bringing about peace, and is willing to compromise somewhat.

 

[Flintlock]

^Ruby, I think its better to post just the relevant para. Saves time and space.