DPC warns of protest if NATO supplies resumed

 

At a news conference, DPC leaders said they would stage a sit-in in front of the Parliament on Feb 20 in condemnation of restoration of NATO supply.

 

The restoration of NATO supplies would be tantamount to mocking national honour and sovereignty.

 

They also said All Party Conference (APC) would be held on Feb 23 on Balochistan issue.

 

They were speaking to the media after DPC session at a Karachi hotel on Saturday.

 

Those who attended the news briefing included Jamiat Ulema Islam (S) Chief Maulana Sami Ul Haque, Jamaat-e Islami (JI) Pakistan Chief Syed Munawwar Hassan, Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP) Chief Sahibzada Abu Al Khair Muhammad Zubair, Jamaat Ud Dawa Chief hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Ahl-e Sunnat Wal Jamaat Chief Maulana Muhammad Ahmed Ludhyanvi.

 

While addressing, Maulana Sami Ul Haque said that the DPC leaders had discussed country’s situation in detail and decided to keep the decision of staging a sit-in at the Parliament on Feb 20.

 

The political and religious parties in DPC would join the sit-in. He said that DPC leaders’ conference would be held in Islamabad on Feb 19. DPC was extremely concerned on Balochistan issue and taking up Balochistan issue in the Congress of the United States was a direct interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs as she had done in Arab countries.

 

The statement issued by the US Defence Committee was provoking and serious. The DPC stands beside the people of Balochistan and would play their role to get the situation resolved. In this regard, APC on Balochistan issue would be held in Quetta on Feb 23 and Baloch nationalist leaders would be taken on board.

 

Speaking on the occasion, JI Chief Syed Munawwar Hassan said that people have welcomed the DPC across the country, which manifested their trust. The biggest challenge in the country was US interference.

 

He said that the war on terror was not Pakistan’s war and due to that war, issue of missing persons had terrorized the nation and led to military operation in the country.

 

The DPC’s agenda was clear that NATO supply should remain discontinued. NATO supply via Pakistan’s air routes was a matter of grave concern and the DPC protested vehemently on the statement of US ambassador.

 

He said that the incidents of targeted killings in Karachi had wreaked havoc on citizens and since the Karachiites had welcomed the DPC, the DPC would not leave them at the mercy of the target killers.

 

Sahibzada Abu Al Khair said that DPC would struggle for freedom from America.

 

Hafiz Saeed said that DPC had honoured those resolutions that the Parliament had discarded.

 

Shaikh Rasheed Ahmed refuted claims that a new political alliance on the pattern of IJI was in the making.

 

Shahbaz urges Ulema to save country

TrendPK.com

LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif on Saturday urged the Ulema (religious leaders) to save the country, TrendPK reported on Saturday.

While addressing a Seerat-un-Nabi conference here to commemorate the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the Punjab CM said that hatred has destroyed the country and now religion can play part to save it.

He said that begging from outsiders is against the Islamic teachings.

The minister said that there was no leader in the entire history who helped the spread of Islam and the concept of equity around the world other than the Prophet (PBUH).

Religious scholars and people of all classes participated in the conference. TrendPK

Police open fire at Bangladesh protesters, 3 dead

 

The clashes killed at least three people and injuring more than 100, a news report and doctors at two hospitals said.

 

The opposition party said 1,200 of its activists were arrested, but the figure could not immediately be confirmed.

 

The main Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its key Islamist ally Jamaat-e-Islami are demanding an independent caretaker government oversee elections. The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina scrapped the 15-year-old system last year, saying it contradicted the constitution.

 

The opposition, led by Hasina s archrival former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, says elections will be rigged if held under the current government and without a caretaker system in place.

 

Clashes during Sunday s nationwide protests were reported in about a dozen towns, Desh television station said.

 

Two men died from bullet wounds at a government hospital in the eastern town of Chandpur, physician Mahmudunnabi told The Associated Press by phone.

 

They were shot by police who fired at a procession of protesters trying to march forward by breaking a police barricade, the United News of Bangladesh agency said.

 

Separately, a youth died and four people with bullet wounds were being treated at a government hospital in Laxmipur, another eastern town, said doctor Mohammad Nizam Uddin.

 

The identities of the dead were not immediately clear. Zia s party claimed one was a party activist while media reports said two others were rickshawpullers.

 

Hasan Mahmud Khandaker, the country s police chief, said authorities would investigate the violence to determine what actually happened.

 

Police arrested about 1,200 activists, opposition spokesman Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir said. The figure could not be confirmed immediately.

 

The South Asian nation s politics became tense recently as the opposition has geared up its anti-government protests targeting the next general election due in 2014.

 

Hasina s government is also at loggerheads with Zia and the largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami over its effort to try suspected war criminals involving the 1971 independence war against Pakistan.

 

Five top officials and a former chief of Jamaat-e-Islami facing charges of war crimes are currently behind bars for their alleged role in the nine-month war in which the government said at least 3 million people were killed by the Pakistani army in collaboration with the suspects. Two others of Zia s party also face similar charges of crimes against humanity that include killing, rape and arson.

 

Zia and Jamaat-e-Islami party have rejected the trial and said it is politically motivated to eliminate the opposition.

 

The opposition parties also held several general strikes in recent months.

 

Violent protests are common opposition tactics to embarrass the government in Bangladesh, a fragile parliamentary democracy that has a history of two successful and 19 failed military coups since 1971 when the country broke from Pakistan.

 

On Jan. 19, the Bangladesh military said it foiled a plot by a group of hardline officers, their retired colleagues and Bangladeshi conspirators living abroad to overthrow Hasina.–AP
 

Karachi: Preparations for JUI-F rally in final phase

TrendPK.com

KARACHI: Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) is all set to hold Islam Zindabad rally here in Karachi, for which all the necessary preparations have been finalized, reports TrendPK on early Friday.

Leader of the opposition in Senate, Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haidri and Senator Haji Ghulam Ali visited the venue short while ago to witness the arrangements.

During his visit to the rally venue, Maulana Haidri said the aim to hold rally in Karachi is to remind every Pakistani that JUI will implement the true essence of Islamic version of the government after coming into power.

Senator Haji Ghulam Ali said more than 5000 activists will provide people security. TrendPK

Saudi Arabia, UAE funded jihadi networks in Pakistan: WikiLeaks

KARACHI: Islamic charities from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates financed a network in U.S. ally Pakistan that recruited children as young as eight to wage holy war, a local newspaper reported on Sunday, citing Wikileaks.

Pakistani rocker: bin Laden death great for Muslims

WASHINGTON: Top Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad has hailed Osama bin Laden’s death as a victory for the Islamic world and demanded accountability over how the Al-Qaeda chief lived in his country for years.

The rock star, whose band Junoon is one of the most popular acts in South Asia with more than 30 million albums sold, said Pakistanis felt “humiliated” that the world’s most-wanted man resided in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

“In the last 1,400 years of Islamic history, there has rarely been a man or woman — Muslim or non-Muslim — who has caused more damage to Muslims around the world than Osama bin Laden,” Ahmad, who recently performed in Washington, told AFP.

“On 9/11, those terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings overnight hijacked Islam so that anything that has to do with Islam, anything that has to do with Muslim culture, would be equated now with the face of Osama bin Laden.

“So he being taken out in a military operation I think is a great thing for the Muslim world as well as the planet,” he said.

A team of elite US Navy SEALs swooped secretly into Abbottabad on May 2, shooting dead bin Laden nearly 10 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Ahmad said he had “massive questions” — including how bin Laden lived a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s top military academy and why he apparently felt safe enough to maintain minimum protection.

He also asked how the military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) did not detect a US operation deep into Pakistani territory.

“Are you saying that everybody is so incompetent, everybody was asleep?” he said. “This was Osama bin Laden, man.”

“If there was any other country where this happened — the intelligence failure on Osama and the intelligence failure on the US operation — the first thing the president would do is ask for the resignation of the intelligence chief and ask many questions of the army chief,” he said.

“Pakistan, for its own in-house accountability, needs to ask these questions of its leaders,” he said. “You have a military chief, an ISI chief — all of these people are at the end of the day supposed to be answerable to the people.”

Ahmad is not a newcomer to the issue. In the 1990s, Pakistani television banned Junoon’s song “Ehtesaab” (“Accountability”), whose accompanying video mercilessly mocked corruption by the country’s leaders.

Ahmad, 47, left a medical career to lead “Junoon,” which means “passion” in Urdu. He now teaches music at the City University of New York’s Queens College but returns regularly to Pakistan to perform and lead humanitarian efforts.

He teamed up with Peter Gabriel for the song “Open Your Eyes,” with each download contributing funds for survivors of the floods that devastated Pakistan last year.

In a recent autobiography entitled “Rock ‘n’ Roll Jihad,” Ahmad counted Led Zeppelin among his influences but saw himself in the tradition of Sufism — the mystical movement in Islam. The book’s title, he said, was part of his effort to take back the word “jihad,” or struggle, from extremists.

Sufi shrines have faced a wave of attacks in recent years in Pakistan, part of the violence that has left thousands dead.

Ahmad dismissed the significance of the violence and recalled Baba Bulleh Shah, the Punjabi Sufi poet who was branded a heretic and denied an Islamic burial when he died in 1757.

“But hundred of years later there are hundreds of thousands of people who go to Baba Bulleh Shah’s shrine” in the Pakistani city of Kasur, he said.

“They can blow up a shrine and get on the media radar,” he said. “But despite their disruption, society has a resilience that is shown throughout the centuries.”

Ahmad traveled to Washington for a recent concert by Sufis from the Indian city of Ajmer who performed qawwali, the voice-bending devotional music popularized overseas by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Ahmad joined in with his guitar, jamming with the Ajmer Sufis for his rendition of Baba Bulleh Shah’s celebrated poem, “I Know Not Who I Am,” which criticized doctrinairism.

“Sufism is not some sort of trend. It’s been there for centuries and it’s the glue of this region,” he said.

“You have these snapshots of political turmoil and extremism, but at the end of the day what keeps society together is this sort of deep cultural unity.” AGENCIES

Pakistan Islamists to protest against U.S. bin Laden raid

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s most influential Islamist party urged its followers to hold mass rallies on Friday to demand their government withdraw its support of the U.S. war on militancy after U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), one of the country’s biggest religious political parties, said the United States had violated the sovereignty of key ally Pakistan by sending its own forces into the garrison town of Abbottabad to kill the al Qaeda leader.

Pakistan’s support is key to U.S. efforts to combat Islamist militants, and also to fighting against the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

“Even if there was any sympathy for the Americans, that would dissipate after the way they crushed and violated our sovereignty and our independence,” JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan told Reuters on Thursday.

“We have appealed to everyone to hold peaceful demonstrations on Friday on a very large scale,” he said. “Our first demand is Pakistan…. should withdraw from the war on terror.”

Anti-American sentiment runs high in Pakistan, despite billions of dollars in aid for the nuclear-armed country with a troubled economy. Pakistan’s religious parties have not traditionally done well at the ballot box, but they wield considerable influence in a country where Islam is becoming more radicalized.

There have so far been few public protests in Pakistan against bin Laden’s killing early on Monday at Abbottabad, 50 kms (31 miles) north of Islamabad. One of Pakistan’s most violent militant groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba, held special prayers for the al Qaeda leader and called his death “martyrdom.”

The United States war on militancy is unpopular in Pakistan, because of the often high civilian cost of drone attacks against suspected militants along the Afghan border. But many people are also critical of al Qaeda’s radical interpretation of Islam and the suicide bombings its followers carry out.

The fact that bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, after having appeared to have lived there for several years, has also embarrassed many people in the government and the country’s powerful spy agency.

Muslim population growth to outstrip non-Muslims: report

The worlds Muslim population will grow twice as fast as the non-Muslim population in the next 20 years, when Muslims are expected to make up more than a quarter of the global population, a study published Thursday predicts.

Using fertility, mortality and migration rates, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life project a 1.5-per cent annual population growth rate for the worlds Muslims over the next two decades, and just 0.7 per cent growth each year for non-Muslims. The study, called The Future of the Global Muslim Population, projects that in 2030 Muslims will make up 26.4 per cent of the worlds population, which is expected to total around 8.3 billion people by then. That marks a three-percentage-point rise from the 23.4-per cent share held by Muslims of the globes estimated 6.9 billion people today, the study says. More than six in 10 followers of Islam will live in the Asia-Pacific region in 2030, and Pakistan, which has seen a rise in radical Islam in recent months, will overtake Indonesia as the worlds most populous Muslim nation. In Africa, the Muslim population of the sub-Saharan country of Nigeria will be greater than that of Egypt in 20 years, the study projects. Israel will become nearly a quarter Muslim. The Palestinian territories have one of the highest growth rates in the world.And in Europe, Pew predicts the Muslim population will grow by nearly a third in 20 years, from 44.1 million people, or six per cent of the regions inhabitants in 2010, to 58.2 million or eight per cent of the projected total population by 2030.Some European Union (EU) countries will see double-digit percentages of Muslims in their population by 2030: Belgiums Muslim population is projected to rise from six per cent to 10.2 per cent over the next 20 years, while Frances is expected to hit 10.3 per cent in 2030, up from 7.5 per cent today.In Sweden, Pew predicts Muslims will comprise nearly 10 per cent of the population compared to less than five per cent today.Britains Muslim population is predicted to rise from 4.6 per cent to 8.2 per cent by 2030, and 9.3 per cent of the population of Austria is forecast to be Muslim by then, compared to less than six per cent of residents of the alpine country now.Russia, which is not a member of the EU, will continue to have the largest Muslim population in absolute terms in Europe in 2030, with 18.6 million Muslims or 14.4 per cent of the total population of the vast country.The United States, meanwhile, is projected to have a larger absolute number of Muslims by 2030 than any European countries other than Russia and France, but proportionally, Muslims will make up a much smaller percentage of the population of the United States than they do in Europe. The Muslim share of the US population is projected to grow from its current level of less than one percent to 1.7 per cent by 2030, making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States, the study says.

Bilawal hits out over Governor Taseer’s killing

LONDON: The son of slain Pakistani ex-leader Benazir Bhutto has condemned those who have praised the assassination of a provincial governor opposed to the country’s blasphemy laws.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari told mourners Monday at the Pakistan High Commission in London that people who have voiced support for the killer of Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer were “the real blasphemers.”

“Because of you, the message of Islam is distorted in the eyes of the world,” said Bhutto Zardari, whose father is Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari.

“Those who attack my religion, especially those who corrupt its peaceful message, you are what I call covert blasphemers and you will be defeated,” he continued. “This will be our jihad.” Bhutto Zardari further pledged to defend Christians and other minorities in the country.

“We will defend you. For those who wish to harm you for a crime you did not commit, they will have to go through me first,” he said.

Taseer was a member of the main ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of which Bhutto Zardari is co-chairman with his father.

The governor was shot dead by his bodyguard outside an Islamabad coffee shop on Tuesday last week, in the most high-profile assassination in Pakistan since ex-PPP prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in December 2007.

The gunman, police commando Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, has said he killed in the name of religion because of the governor’s stance on blasphemy laws.

More than 50,000 people from religious groups rallied in Karachi Sunday in support of Qadri, calling him a hero and demanding that any effort to reform the blasphemy law — recently used to sentence a Christian woman to death — be dropped.

Speaking at the memorial meeting late Monday, Bhutto Zardari compared the killing of Taseer with that of his mother three years ago, saying they both died defending the real message of Islam.

“My mother embraced martyrdom while defending our faith. She was martyred doing her jihad against those who had hijacked our religion,” said Bhutto.

“On January 4, Shaheed Salman Taseer was assassinated because he too refused to be silenced.

He too was assassinated in defence of our religion. “He died defending the message of Islam.”

Altaf urges religious leaders to end blasphemy protests

KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain today urged the country’s religious leaders to end their ongoing protests following Prime Minister’s assurance to not amend blasphemy law.

In a telephonic address from London, he said that no Muslim can even imagine showing disrespect toward Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

“I appeal to religious leaders to end their protests on blasphemy law after Premier Gilani’s assurance,” he said.

“Islam preaches modesty, not extremism and coercion while religious radicalism is also against the teachings of Islam.

“Not only Islam teaches peace to Muslims, it guarantees peace and safety to non-Muslims also.”

“Bombing mosques, sacred shrines, worship places and imambargahs and killing innocent Muslims are not anti-Islamic actions?” he questioned.

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