The REAL THREAT!
"Pakistan Attempts to Crush Protests by Lawyers" by JANE PERLEZ and DAVID ROHDE
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 5 — Angry protests by thousands of lawyers in Lahore and other cities on Monday demonstrated the first organized resistance to the emergency rule imposed by the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. But the abrupt arrests of many of them threatened to weaken their challenge.
The real test of whether the opposition to General Musharraf will prevail appears to be several days off: The leader of the biggest opposition political party, Benazir Bhutto, has pledged to lead a major protest rally on Friday in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad, the capital.
And I'll bet it gets hit by "suicide" bombers!!!
CUI BONO, readers?
The Musharraf government’s resolve to silence its fiercest opponents was evident in the strength of the crackdown by baton-wielding police officers who pummeled lawyers and then hauled them by the legs and arms into police wagons in Lahore.
At one point, lawyers and police officers clashed in a pitched battle, with lawyers standing on the roof of the High Court throwing stones at the police below, and the police hurling them back. Some of the lawyers were bleeding from the head, and some passed out in clouds of tear gas.
Lawyers THROWING STONES at the cops? Terrorists!
How long the lawyers can keep up their revolt now without the support of opposition political parties, which so far have been lying low, remains in question.
And since Bhutto cut a deal, I wouldn't be waiting around.
There were conflicting estimates of the number of lawyers in jail in Lahore on Monday night. Some lawyers said that as many as 500 to 700 of their colleagues were in custody, scattered in various police cells and jails. In all, about 2,000 people have been rounded up since the imposition of emergency rule on Saturday night.
The demonstrations were not confined to Lahore. In Multan, a city in the same province, Punjab, as Lahore, two new judges who had taken the oath of office under the emergency rule were forced to leave the courtroom by hundreds of angry lawyers.
“We threatened them, saying: ‘You’ve taken an unconstitutional oath; if you don’t go we will throw eggs at you.’ They left,” said a lawyer from Multan, Riaz Gilani.
Some lawyers in Islamabad and Rawalpindi said they stayed away from the courts because of warnings that they would be arrested and possibly beaten.
Despite the warnings, more than 100 lawyers demonstrated outside Islamabad’s main court complex on Monday. The lawyers in black suits and ties shouted “Musharraf dog” and “A baton and a bullet will not do.”
Haroon Rashid, the president of the Islamabad Bar Association, instructed lawyers not to attack police officers who were watching them because the association did not want to give the police cause to arrest them, he said."
That's right. STAY PEACEFUL!!!
That exposes agent provocateurs, and confers moral legitimacy to your cause!
Go get 'em, lawyers!
