After the enormous reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister and a popular politician, the Musharraf government has registered more than 3,000 cases against more than 500,000 people in one province of Sindh alone. The government has started arresting and threatening them with arrests in cases of fire, murder, looting and provoking people to resort for violence. Up to now the government has arrested around 2000 persons from the province and about 400 people from Karachi. On the other hand the ruling coalition party of Musharraf¡¦s government, the MQM, is instigating ethnic clashes between two major linguistic groups, the Sindhis and Urdu speaking people, prior to the coming elections. The major ruling party of Musharraf, the PML-Q, has formed some camps in the Punjab province to show that Sindhi speaking people are threatening the Punjabi speaking people. This situation is leading to bloody clashes which will ultimately help Musharraf¡¦s government to further postpone the already extended elections.
When some civil society groups and political parties belonging to the opposition started to demonstrate the provincial government arrested several activists and resorted to tear gas and baton charging the protesters in different cities of the province. The arrested people are being charged with murder, arson and looting on the charges of already constituted cases during the period of mass protests after the Benazir Bhutto assassination in late December 2007. In the latest development the leadership of the Pakistan Fisher Folk (PFF), a trade union of fishermen was booked in the murder of seven workers of a garment factory who died in a fire. The fire on December 29 was the sheer negligence of the owners of the factory and the provincial authorities. The son of Mr. Mohammad Ali Shah, chairperson of the Pakistan Fisher Folk and Mr. Akhter Shiekh, secretary of coordination of the PFF along with several other activists were falsely charged in the murder of the factory workers. Their houses were fired upon by unknown persons.
The Asian Human Rights Commission deplores the actions of Musharraf against civil society activists for his arbitrary arrests and the making of fabricated cases. During the entire the previous months Musharraf¡¦s government has attacked the judiciary, physically abused lawyers and imposed censorship and curbs on the media and journalists to deny them basic rights for the benefit and protection of his government. As the year 2008 started the Musharraf government has taken an unyielding position against the activists of civil society.
The AHRC urges the government to release all the people who were arrested during the mass reaction against Benazir Bhutto¡¦s assassination, and stop fabricated charges against people by filing blind FIRs (First Information Report). A blind FIR is the report of a crime in which no person or persons have been named. It is therefore possible for the authorities to use them against anyone they want to get off the street.
It is clear that such provocations will spread chaos and create a climate in which the regime can once again postpone the elections. Whatever the regime may do by way of arrests, beatings and torture, civil society activists will continue their protests because they are faced with enormous and unbearable problems. The responsibility for maintaining law and order rests solely on the shoulders of the government. If the government fails to act within the law and protect the people the consequences that may follow may be extremely serious.
