International Herald Tribune
November 12, 2007
Jailed lawyer has long history of fighting military rule in Pakistan
By Jane Perlez
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Twenty-five years ago, when President Ronald Reagan greeted Pakistan's dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, at a White House state dinner, a promising young lawyer, fresh out of Cambridge University, languished in jail. He had protested too loudly and too often about the lack of democracy in his country.
Now, grayer, and at the peak of his profession, the same lawyer, Aitzez Ahsan, 63, sits in a Pakistani jail once again, reduced to seeing family visitors for 20 minutes a day and accepting bags of fruit and bedding for some basic comfort.
His crime is the same: making too much noise about democracy under the nose of a military ruler who is backed by the United States.
Last Saturday, as President George W. Bush praised Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, as a friend of the United States in the fight against Al Qaeda, Ahsan was ending his first week in a solitary cell under the general's emergency edict that effectively put Pakistan under military rule.
An accomplished orator, a bit of a showman, and a member of the Pakistan Senate, Ahsan is the leader of the lawyers' movement here and has become the symbol of resistance against the Musharraf regime.
But for his family, the parallels between the days when the United States armed Zia with billions of dollars to fight a proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and today, when the Bush administration has rewarded Musharraf with an estimated $10 billion for the war on terror, are eerie and disturbing.
On both occasions, they argue, America's realpolitik interests trumped the interests of democratic rule for Pakistanis.
"Both my parents were in jail when Reagan welcomed Zia to the White House with a 21-gun salute," said Ali Ahsan, the son of Ahsan, and also a lawyer.
"Now Musharraf is the current White House's blue-eyed boy," he said.
Ahsan said he found it hard to believe that "essentially the same play is being re-enacted."
"I thought by this age we would be beyond it," he said.
Ahsan's wife, Bushra, who was under house arrest during the Zia regime for protesting in favor of women's rights, said she used to remind American diplomats in the 1980s that "your military aid to Pakistan is hostile to the people of Pakistan."
Similarly, she said, the $10 billion in largely military aid would be better spent on civilian projects.
When Pervez Musharraf introduced martial law nine days ago, Ahsan was the first to be picked up, frog-marched out of his office by the police as he finished a news conference condemning the new emergency decree that dismissed the Supreme Court, scrapped the Constitution, banned independent media and barred protests.
"This country is in a deep, deep crisis. This cannot stand," were among his last words before disappearing into a police car.
Since Ahsan's arrest, thousands of lawyers have been arrested, many of them senior members of the bar who represented the biggest challenge to the government, according to lawyers who are keeping tab.
In Punjab alone, 1,374 lawyers were arrested across the province Nov. 5, according to the provincial home secretary.
Many of these lawyers remain in jail, and other lawyers were still being arrested and not released, members of bar associations said.
Pakistani lawyers galvanized opposition to Musharraf after the general suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikar Mohammed Chaudhry, in the spring.
Ahsan quickly emerged as the judge's champion, driving around Pakistan's back country and discussing strategy with the judge in the passenger seat, as they moved from campaign stop to campaign stop, challenging Musharraf.
Ahsan has won many court cases, some for clients with less than spectacular reputations and some for more noble causes, like the successful reinstatement of Chaudhry in July.
That victory set him on the path of irreconcilable differences with the Musharraf regime, who saw the chief justice as its main enemy and Ahsan as his chief promoter.
His colleagues say they admire Ahsan's instinct for combat in and out of the court.
When the nominating papers for Musharraf's re-election as president were submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan in September, a melee broke out between policemen and angry lawyers.
A policeman hit Ahsan in the chest with a brick, and Ahsan responded, grabbing his assailant by the neck, said Feisal Naqvi, a lawyer in Lahore and a colleague.
"I wish the hell he were out here with us telling us what to do," Naqvi said. "He is irreplaceable. He can fight on every level."
Even without Ahsan's guiding hand, the lawyers have set down basic principles to try to cripple the judiciary as a way of undermining the emergency decree.
One effort is to dissuade judges dismissed from the bench under the emergency decree from taking a new oath under martial law.
Lawyers opposed to the decree are also urging other lawyers not to be flattered by offers from the regime to become judges.
For the moment, the Supreme Court and the four provincial High Courts are not operating because there are too many vacancies on the bench.
When Ahsan's sister-in-law, Nighat Asad, emerged Monday afternoon from the Central Jail in Rawilpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital, she described Ahsan as "fine."
"We don't ask too many questions," she said.
Then she and her two sisters, dressed in soft silks and scarves that contrasted with the hard iron prison fence and dusty jail yard, drove off to prepare for another visit in the coming days.
During his stints in jail in the 1980s, and 1990s, Ahsan wrote "The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan," a book that looked at Pakistan in a different way: not as a state created specifically for Muslims, but as a state with a long specific historical and ethnic tradition.
In the forward, he wrote: "No one who has not experienced life on the wrong side of prison walls can understand this commitment, indeed a yearning, for a better more liberal, more tolerant society in Pakistan. My only prayer is that never again in this land should prison seem to be the only honorable option for political activists or for anyone else for that matter."
