U.S. Gently Rebukes Pakistan Over Case of Lawmaker

The Bush administration delivered a rare but mild rebuke to its ally Pakistan on Tuesday, expressing concern over the sentencing of a member of parliament to 23 years in prison for reading a letter criticizing the country’s military.

The statement came as Pakistani police arrested at least 15 supporters of the imprisoned opposition leader, some taken during raids on their homes and others detained at a protest.

A senior State Department official said the decision to raise the case in public came after the failure of private discussions about it with the government of President Pervez Musharraf.

“We’ve been talking to them for a long time but haven’t gotten anywhere,” said the official, who declined to be identified in keeping with State Department protocol.

Javed Hashmi, leader of the opposition Alliance for Restoration of Democracy, was arrested in October, charged with trying to incite an army rebellion and tried in closed proceedings inside a prison in Rawalpindi. He was sentenced Monday after being convicted on seven counts, including sedition, mutiny and forgery. Associated Press reported that he is likely to serve four years.

Hashmi’s family and lawyer said they had not had adequate access to him to prepare his defense. Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission denounced the conviction as “a farce.”

A statement by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Tuesday said U.S. officials had expressed “concerns ... that Mr. Hashmi’s case be handled in a fair and transparent manner and with due regard for his rights. We regret the closed nature of the proceedings against him so far and hope that the appeal process will be more open.”

A Human Rights Watch official called the case “an unbelievable outrage” and said the administration’s statement was welcome but should have been much more blunt.

“You have the leader of an opposition party being tried in a summary trial in prison,” said Brad Adams, director of the group’s Asia division. “It’s more than a problem of transparency, it’s a fundamental miscarriage of justice. He didn’t have good access to his lawyer, and clearly the decision [to convict] was made in advance. It wasn’t really a trial.”

Moreover, because the trial was so political, there is no judicial remedy, said Adams, who called on the U.S. to appeal directly to Musharraf for Hashmi’s release.

The Bush administration insists that it has consistently raised human rights issues in private with Pakistani officials, along with its concerns about democratic processes and Pakistan’s record in combating Islamic extremism. But Washington wants to avoid doing anything to damage what is seen as Musharraf’s fragile grip on power, fearing that a radical regime would be the likely successor.

Tuesday’s mild statement “was calibrated to get the result we want as opposed to a feel-good statement,” the senior State Department official said. “It was designed to encourage responsiveness.”

Commenting on the administration’s statement, Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings Institution, said: “Their view is, friends don’t criticize friends publicly.”

Adams, who recently returned from a trip to Pakistan, said there are “constant, serious human rights problems in Pakistan which no [Bush] administration official would deny. But they do make it very clear that they believe that only Musharraf can hold the country together. Almost every Pakistani I spoke to there did not agree with that.”

Cohen said the decision to convict Hashmi for treason for reading aloud an anonymous letter criticizing the military was a sign that the Pakistani army intended to stay fully in control. The conviction “makes it even less likely that Musharraf is going to step down as army chief when the year is up.”

Pakistan’s information minister denied that Musharraf, a general who seized power in a 1999 coup, might violate his pledge to relinquish his concurrent post as army chief at the end of 2004.