ISN SECURITY WATCH (21/07/05) - Pakistani police have arrested over 200 religious clerics and students of religious schools during two days of raids following the 7 July bombings in London.

Pakistani military president General Pervez Musharraf is personally monitoring the operations after directing the authorities to get tough with extremists in a campaign that critics say is being hastily conducted under international pressure.

Some of the key religious figures and leaders of banned hard-line outfits have also been arrested.

Last week, Musharraf called British Prime Minister Tony Blair to ensure his government’s full cooperation into investigations of the suspects linked to the 7 July bombings of London’s transport network that killed 55 people and wound hundreds of others.

The suspects had reportedly visited or attended religious schools (madrassas) during trips to Pakistan.

The raids took a turn for the worse on Wednesday when police wounded 23 female students at a Muslim school for women, prompting Musharraf to issue an order to Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao, saying: “The crackdown must be restricted to seminaries promoting militancy and religious intolerance because all seminaries are not drawn into terror activities.”

The government also removed the top brass of the Islamabad police on Wednesday for “mishandling” the raids.

The Interior Ministry has also banned foreign journalists from entering madrassas.

The influential religio-political alliance Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) condemned the police operation, calling it “an attack on religious freedom”.

The group announced that it would hold demonstrations against the raids on Friday.

MMA President Qazi Hussain Ahmad told ISN Security Watch on Thursday that “General Musharraf has once again proven his naïve understanding of the delicate issues”.

He said the religious parties would have come forward to share information on students and their activities with the government had there been any contact or any serious attempt to peacefully resolve the issue.

“Musharraf is trying to earn the international media’s attention by taking such counter-productive actions,” he said.

Internal problem or international pressure?

Interior Minister Sherpao told ISN Security Watch that the government would not be deterred by the protests, and that “the law-enforcement agencies have been asked to intensity the operation to make it result-oriented”.

He denied that the operation was connected to the 7 July London bombings, saying it was “an internal matter of Pakistan”.

“It is high time to deal an effective blow to […] those fanning hatred,” said Sherpao, whose party sits in opposition to the MMA-led government in the Frontier province.

The law-enforcement agencies have specifically been confiscating text books and other published materials from the madrassas.

In a recent speech to security agencies, Musharraf voiced zero tolerance for any literature promoting hatred and religious sectarianism.

Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman, another top MMA leader, said the Musharraf regime, which has referred to itself as a champion of women’s rights, was fighting a war against its own citizens.

“Musharraf’s war against Muslims has now reached a limit where its hands have disgraced the female students of religious seminaries by snatching their head coverings,” he told ISN Security Watch.

The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily, wrote in an editorial: “It was on the cards for a long time. After 9/11, there has been much rhetoric about a crackdown on religious militancy and extremism, and it has been coming from no less a person than General Pervez Musharraf.”

Syed Rashad Bukhari, an expert on reforms in religious schools for the Institute of Policy Studies, said: “This crackdown is linked with the 7/7 [London bombing] incidents and stems from international pressure.”

Like many other analysts, Rashad said the apparently fast-paced action had little to do with the internal situation.

He noted that the very nature of the hasty raids would risk the process of reforms in the religious schools, which have only recently started to take shape.

“It will have negative implications for domestic politics as well as reforming society,” he said.

The Pakistani government has been trying to implement reforms in religious institutions with financial assistance from foreign donors, such as USAID.

Senior government officials also believe that the crackdown should have been more specially targeted, rather than being a broad sweep of all religious institutions.

A senior police official observed that though the government has taken certain steps to curb extremism, the strategy to deal with religious schools should be spelled out through interaction and dialog rather than a police crackdown.

There are thousands of religious schools in Pakistan that offer free education in some of the most remote and backward regions of the country. According to the Education and Religious Affairs Ministry, there are between 8,000 and 10,000 degree-offering religious schools in Pakistan.

(By Naveed Ahmad in Islamabad)

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