Pakistani Protesters Respond to Restrictions With Defiance

Groups opposed to the United States’ war in neighboring Afghanistan vowed Thursday to go ahead with street protests across Pakistan despite strict new government measures to curtail public dissent.

The statements set up the first real test of the restrictions, which include bans on loudspeakers, incitement against the military and processions that disrupt commerce or routine life. Traditionally, the largest public demonstrations in Pakistan come on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath.

Collectively, the steps announced by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s military government late Wednesday represent the first concerted effort to curb the country’s Islamic fundamentalist political parties on the Afghanistan issue since the demonstrations began in mid-September.

“Processions should be discouraged,” Interior Minister Tasneem Noorani said. “Peaceful public meetings can be held, but there can be nothing that disrupts civic life.”

Although Pakistan is under military rule, people here have enjoyed considerable freedom, including being able to demonstrate and to criticize the government in public. The media have latitude in reporting the news.

The government also arrested a prominent mainstream politician on corruption charges early Thursday, only hours after his party voted to join a one-day general strike being organized by the Islamic parties for next Friday. Javed Hashmi of the Pakistan Muslim League was reportedly seized by police in Islamabad, the capital, shortly before 2 a.m. He was taken to the eastern city of Lahore, where he remained in custody later Thursday.

The head of the party’s standing committee, Ahsan Iqbal, called the arrest “an attempt to crush the Pakistan Muslim League.”

Others saw it as a preemptive strike by Musharraf in the form of a thinly veiled warning to leaders of other broad-based political parties that they too risk jail if they decide to join in the anti-American protests.

After several weeks of generally smaller-than-expected street demonstrations organized by Pakistan’s religion-based parties, violence erupted last weekend in two cities. A massacre near the central Pakistani city of Multan on Sunday left 15 Christians and a Muslim security guard dead, and a bus bombing in the western city of Quetta claimed three lives.

There have also been disruptive sit-ins, with one group blocking the famous Karakoram Highway for several days. The road connects Pakistan with China through high mountain passes. The government’s restrictive measures appeared to be a direct response to this unrest.

Leaders of the largest religion-based party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, declared Thursday that they had no plans to cancel either a large protest expected today in the city of Mardan, about 60 miles northwest of Islamabad, or a sit-in in Lahore.

“These events will take place,” said Syed Munnawar Hasan, the party’s deputy leader. “If the government comes to try to stop them, then it will be their violence, not our violence.”

Interior Minister Noorani said provincial authorities will be given the final authority on how to enforce the restrictions but seemed to indicate that there would be little leeway.

In Quetta, the scene of some of the most violent riots in Pakistan against the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, government officials say they plan to permit the weekly Friday rally as long as it is peaceful. The rally is held in a stadium a couple of miles from the center of town. Officials say they are still considering whether to grant a request from religious political parties to hold a rally at a football stadium that is more centrally located.

As a result of strict enforcement of anti-riot laws, Quetta has been quieter in recent weeks than in early October, when angry Pakistanis looted theaters that showed U.S. movies and trashed buses and other sites to show their displeasure at the government’s support of the war in Afghanistan.

But the protests have shrunk, and now that they are contained at a stadium, they are much less violent. The police are regularly deporting Afghans who participate in the protests: 15 were deported earlier this week, and 25 more are expected to be deported in the next couple of days.

In a related development, the Qatari-based Arab news network Al Jazeera read out a letter Thursday purportedly written by Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden that urged Pakistani Muslims to stand in the face of what he called “a Christian crusade against Islam.”

“Muslims in Afghanistan are being subjected to killing, and the Pakistan government is standing beneath the Christian banner,” the station’s newsreader quoted Bin Laden as writing.

In mountainous northern areas of Pakistan, an estimated 1,200 Pakistani ethnic Pushtuns crossed the border into Afghanistan in small groups, the BBC reported Thursday. Earlier this week, several thousand volunteers massed along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan wanting to cross into the neighboring country to fight the Americans.

Taliban authorities inside Afghanistan asked the men not to cross, apparently out of fear that such a large group could easily become a target for U.S. raids.

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Marshall reported from Islamabad and Rubin from Quetta.