by BEENA SARWAR
Nation-wide mass letter signing campaign kicks off TODAY, Sat. March 12, 2011, 11am-7pm:
Silence means more blood. Say No to Violence & to a Denial of our Civil Rights
Join CFD’s mass letter-writing campaign (http://bit.ly/cfd-massign), for which people are gathering to add their signatures on letters addressed to the President of Pakistan, Prime Minister, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and the Chief Ministers of all four provinces. “We are demanding from those in positions of power to take appropriate actions to reverse the erosion of our civil and human rights and to uphold the rule of law without fear or favour. Please join us in a mass letter campaign – we are your peaceful fellow citizens, struggling to survive with dignity, and yet trying to preserve our inalienable democratic rights. The purpose of this campaign is to allow all citizens to speak out in support of inter-faith harmony and to resist a growing climate of religious intolerance in Pakistan,” says a press release.
Support Citizens for Democracy, 11 am to 7pm TODAY (Saturday, March 12, 2011) at Jahangir Kothari Parade (opposite Park Towers), Clifton, Karachi. Bring postage stamps and friends
Below – online version of the letter endorsed by hundreds of academics, columnists, writers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women, IT professionals, students, journalists and others from Pakistan and around the world, besides over 80 organisations from Pakistan and abroad. To add your name, please leave a comment at the blog (http://bit.ly/cfd-openletter), or email cfd.pak@gmail.com.
Open letter to The President, Prime Minister, Interior Ministry, Chief Justice, Chief Ministers, and heads of all political parties, Pakistan
Re: Murder of Shahbaz Bhatti and demand for action against calls for violence and vigilante action
The murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minority Affairs, again highlights the rampant lawlessness in Pakistan and the impunity with which the “forces of violence” act against “whoever stands against their radical philosophy,” to quote the late Mr Bhatti. These “forces” find fertile ground to operate in an atmosphere where calls to vigilante action are publically made and celebrated.
We urge the government and its functionaries to swiftly apprehend, charge, try and punish Mr Bhatti’s murderers, and also to take immediate measures to curb this trend.
We urge all political parties and parliamentarians to take a clear stand on this issue: No citizen has the right to cast aspersions at the faith and beliefs of any other citizen or to term someone else a `blasphemer’.
We urge the federal and provincial governments, the judiciary and the security and law enforcement agencies to ensure protection for those, like former information minister Sherry Rehman, who are publicly threatened by extremists
Some immediate steps that must immediately be taken include:
1. An urgent and meaningful shift in the long-standing policy of appeasing extremists, by the security establishment, the judiciary, the political class and much of the media, with a few honourable exceptions.
2. Hold accountable and charge under the law those who incite hatred and violence; zero tolerance for any public labeling of anyone as `blasphemer’, which in the current situation is an incitement to murder, even brazen declaration of criminal intent and commission of a crime. Some recent examples of such incitement are:
– Maulana Yousuf Qureshi, Imam of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque, Peshawar, announced a Rs 500,000 award for the murder of Asia Bibi if the Lahore High Court acquitted her of blasphemy (reported on December 3, 2010, a month prior to the murder of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer; some newspaperseven wrote editorials supporting this call for murder.)
– Banners placed at public places in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi-Islamabad by “Tehreek-e-Nifaz-Tableegh-e-Islam” terming Tehmina Durrani as Pakistan’s Taslima Nasreen and demanding that she be hanged. These must be removed forthwith and the organisation, and administrative officers who allowed these banners to be placed, proceeded against.
3. Prevent the rising number of `blasphemy’ cases being registered, by laying down and enforcing a law whereby no such cases may be registered without being inquired into by a judicial magistrate.
Beena Sarwar’s website is Journeys to Democracy
(Thanks to Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)