Monday, August 13, 2012
Pakistan: Nation celebrates 65th Independence Day
Pakistan Civilian awards: Presidency issues list of 192 recipients
US shares Jinnah's goal of vibrant, self-reliant Pak
Democracy is binding force, provides solution: Ashraf
President Zardari: People must guard against assault on Constitution
Zardari stresses political choices be made through ballot, not bullet
Kashmir women ordered to cover up or risk acid attack
http://www.telegraph.co.ukA pro-al-Qaeda group in Kashmir has warned women it will kill them or disfigure their faces with acid if they are seen unveiled or using their mobile phones in public.
Imran cannot bring any change
Tensions again rising between Afghanistan, Pakistan
http://www.mcclatchydc.comThe continuing rocket attacks from Pakistan on eastern provinces of the country have cost two high-ranking officials their jobs and threaten to further destabilize the country's fragile central government. Early last month, Abdul Rahim Wardak, the country's defense minister, was forced to step down after members of parliament called for his removal because of the ongoing shelling. Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, who controls the Afghan National Police, was also forced to step down. President Hamid Karzai said he would respect parliament's views and remove the two ministers, but he asked the two to stay on until replacements could be found. Wardak refused the president's request. Meanwhile, there is growing anger in Kabul as rockets continue to fall on the eastern Kunar province. Senior Afghan officials say that the Pakistani military, rather than Taliban militants, is responsible for the attacks, claiming that only Islamabad has access to the type of munitions being used. Pakistan has denied the allegation. U.S. defense officials and members of the international security force continue to suspect that insurgent forces may be behind the rocket attacks. Whoever is to blame, tempers are growing short among the country's leaders. Kabul previously threatened to go to the U.N. Security Council with its complaint against Pakistan if the bombardments, which began in May, do not stop. Kunar provincial governor Fazlullah Wahedi said nearly 2,000 rockets had landed in recent months. In addition to killing numerous civilians, the attacks have displaced hundreds of families. "The central government should address this issue seriously. The bombardment has made the public very anxious," he said. Army Chief of Staff Sher Mohammad Karimi recently told the upper house of parliament that he is convinced the Pakistani military is responsible for the attacks. He said he believes the assault was intended to pressure Kabul into accepting the Durand Line, a poorly defined border dividing the two countries that was imposed by the British in 1893. Kabul does not recognize the line; Islamabad would like to see it formalized. Lawmakers asked Karimi why the United States has not done more to address the situation. "I don't know why the Americans are ignoring this issue," he responded. "Maybe the Americans are afraid because Pakistan has nuclear weapons, or maybe they are old friends and (America) doesn't want to clash with them." In Washington, Pentagon spokesman George Little said America was working closely with Afghanistan and Pakistan to try and limit violence along the border. "We have obviously been in constant contact with the Afghan government to work on these issues and we have put pressure on the enemy that operates along the border," Little said at a recent conference. Kunar province is mountainous and heavily forested, and borders Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas, over which Islamabad has limited control. Officials in Islamabad have accused insurgents of staging attacks into Pakistan from Kunar. They say the Pakistani Taliban have found refuge in parts of eastern Afghanistan from which most Afghan and American forces have withdrawn in recent years. Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported on July 24 that "terrorists" had launched 15 attacks from Kunar and Nuristan provinces against Pakistani border posts and villages over the last year. The newspaper claimed that 105 soldiers and civilians had been killed in the attacks. In a country rife with conspiracy theories, many see a dark purpose behind Washington's reluctance to become directly involved in the dispute between the two countries. They note that the United States and Pakistan in July signed a new agreement allowing the shipment of war materials from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Such shipments had been blocked since November 2011 following a U.S. airstrike inside Pakistan that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. As part of the agreement, Washington agreed to release $1 billion in frozen military aid to Pakistan's military. Wahid Mozhda, an Afghan political analyst, said that even if Washington knew Islamabad was implicated in the shelling, American officials might be reluctant to address the situation given the importance of the transit route through Pakistan. "The ... least expensive transit route for American troops here in the region goes through Pakistan. The U.S. needs Pakistan to achieve its long-term goals in the region," Mozhda said. "I am confident that with the technology at their disposal, the Americans know where the rockets coming into Afghanistan are being fired from, but they don't want to upset Pakistan." ABOUT THE WRITERS Hafizullah Gardesh and Mina Habib are reporters in Afghanistan who write for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Readers may write to the authors at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 48 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, U.K.; Web site: www.iwpr.net. For information about IWPR's funding, please go to http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?top-supporters.html. This essay is available to McClatchy-Tribune News Service subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or its editors. Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/08/13/162068/tensions-again-rising-between.html#storylink=cpy
US to crack down on Fazlullah’s Taliban militia
Veena Malik: Entertainers have the right to discuss religion
Lahore Cops shoot two dead at a ceremony
Peshawar : Great rush of girls on bangles shops
Pakistan:ELECTIONS AMID ANARCHY
Pakistan: AG wants court to avert clash between state institutions
Fathers of contempt law mull scrapping it
Britain is set to scrap the medieval offence of scandalising judges or the courts, as the government's official law reform organisation has termed it out-of-date, Daily Times has learnt. Judges no longer need the old law to protect themselves from scurrilous abuse, and any attempt to use it would risk bringing the judiciary into disrespect. The last successful prosecution was more than 80 years ago and there was controversy this year over an attempt to bring a case against former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain over criticism of a judge in his memoirs. Speaking at the launch of a consultation paper on the issue, David Ormerod of the British Law Commission said, “We are making a proposal to abolish this anachronistic form of contempt of court.” Dating back to 1344, scandalising the court is a form of contempt of court triggered by publishing anything that ridicules the judiciary so that it is likely to bring the administration of justice into disrepute. It was revived in the middle of the 18th century to deal with critics of the establishment but has since fallen into disuse. In 1900, the editor of the Birmingham Argus was found to have committed contempt by scandalising the court after describing Justice Darling as “an impudent little man in horsehair, a microcosm of conceit and empty-headedness”. The last successful prosecution in England and Wales was in 1931. The Law Commission’s consultation paper recommends abolition in England and Wales. But it also outlines a modified offence under which the case would only be proved if there was substantial risk of seriously harming the administration of justice or where the statements published were untrue. Ormerod said, “We are not leaving judges unprotected here. If the publication involves threats or harassment it could be prosecuted and in other circumstances judges could rely on the civil law by bringing proceedings for libel.” A separate offence of scandalising the face of the court would continue to exist.DAILY TIMES
The Balochistan joke
Editorial:THE FRONTIER POSTNowadays, holding amid great fanfare a road show is a cabinet committee on Balochistan. But what kind of a joke is this? Who really needs a committee, a commission or a task force to know of the problem afflicting Balochistan? Has such an enterprise not been undertaken in the past many a time that this government has again embarked on a new one? How long indeed is this joke to go on? When will the perfidy going around the select coterie of political elites, commentariat galaxy and civil society groups be put paid to and the Balochistan problem be truthfully told and addressed? When will honesty prevail and it will be conceded candidly that the crying need of the hour is to demolish the elitist status quo in the Baloch belt for the Baloch commoner to emancipate to become a fuller human being, master of his own life, will and vote? When will it be recognised that the Baloch community’s real stakeholders are no more those traditional power centres, namely, the compulsive exploitative and suppressive sardars and chieftains, and the self-styled deceitful nationalists? The stakeholders are now the commoner Baloch youths. An innately-talented lot being swayed by a forceful awakening, they are not ready to live as serfs and slaves. They are restive, struggling to emancipate. And it is their struggle that needs to be buttressed by every conceivable means. They require educational facilities that they should get at any rate, even at the cost of incurring the anger of entrenched powers centres that deem they have descended from heavens with some divine right to rule and reign over the Baloch commoners. They require jobs and opportunities to grow, flourish and prosper, which they should get in any event. The precious billions pouring into the provincial treasury should cease landing in privileged pockets under one cloak or the other. That prized dough must go into establishing schools, universities, professional colleges and technical institutes for the commoner Baloch children to be educated and groomed in various professions and skills to be respectable earning citizens. The valuable moolah must be used by way of easy loans and grants to help the Baloch youths to fork out into diverse businesses and trades. And as the military has opened its doors wide to the Baloch youths for recruitment, why the civilian apparatus is so loath of following suit? Why nobody is ever pushed in Islamabad about moving proactively to obviate the persistent niggardly representation of the Balochs in the central services? Why never ever has some innovative method been employed to redress this criminal injustice to the Baloch youths? Why never ever some attractive incentives have been introduced to draw them into these services? Why indeed the elites across the spectrum are always out to pamper their cohorts, the Baloch elites, not the commoners? Why even now they are fretting so hard to preserve and reinforce the status quo in the Baloch belt and strengthen its oppressive traditional power centres? Why the cabinet committee is not bothering to reach out to the Baloch commoners, especially their youth, and find out what they want and how to meet their hopes and expectations? Is it because the elites of the centre are intrinsically sympathetic to their Baloch peers — the Baloch sardars, chieftains and self-styled nationalists? But they have in their much-touted Balochistan package already given them on a platter a state-funded private militia in the form of the Levies to suppress and oppress their enslaved tribal folks. Ostensibly, the force comprises the nominees of the tribe. But who doesn’t know that they are actually the nominees of tribal sardars and chieftains? Is that not enough of it that the centre’s elites are so keen to further cajole, flatter and adulate them? What else they want to give them to make them happy? Will they tell? Nevertheless, if they have any sense left to them they would realise that the time has come critically to show if the state is with the commoner Baloch youth or with the Baloch elites. The first option bodes well for the Pakistani state. The second option spells very ill for it. They must know this.
Singer Nazia Hassan remembered
http://www.brecorder.comOne of pioneers in the country's pop music and iconic singer
Sunday, August 12, 2012
A tale of Iftikhar Chaudhry, Imran Khan and Nawaz
Let Us Build Pakistan
The Judiciary-Right-Wing-Taliban Apologists alliance
by Kumail AhmedIftikhar Chaudhry has brought democracy into a cul-de-sac, through his unconstitutional persistence forcing the Prime Minister to write a letter to the Swiss authorities. Why is he silent on the Shaukat Khanum issue? I believe this silence isn’t unintentional; rather, it’s a simple manifestation of the balance of power in Pakistan. Mr. Khawaja’s Asif allegations against Mr. Imran Khan are making a headline. The pro-PTI youth, especially in Punjab, has taken these allegations with unconcealed disgust. Caricatures have been made in order to belittle Mr. Nawaz Shareef’s personality. The PTI youth is also preoccupied with senseless sloganeering against Mr. Asif. It seems as if Imran Khan will try to use these corruption allegations as a weapon against PML(N). Khawaja Asif has oft-repeatedly said that his allegations were not against Shukat Khanoom Hospital; he wanted to underscore Imran Khan’s illegal use of donation funds abroad. On the other hand, Imran Khan with the support of Pakistani electronic media has totally distorted Khawaja’s argument to gain political benefits. With this entire story aside, there is another important aspect to this issue that isn’t being questioned. This unquestioned aspect might help in understanding the power nexus between military, judiciary, and Punjab’s ruling party. The prime question which an “unbiased” media should ask is, “Why isn’t Mr. Iftikhar Chaudhry taking a Suo Motto action on such serious allegations?” We all know that he took a Suo Motto notice on two alcohol bottles. He took another one against PEMRA, as according to his view, fashion shows are unethical. He has brought democracy into a cul-de-sac, through his unconstitutional persistence forcing the Prime Minister to write a letter to the Swiss authorities. Why is he silent on this issue? This issue is on the media screen for the last eight days. I believe this silence isn’t unintentional; rather, it’s a simple manifestation of the balance of power in Pakistan. If Mr. Chaudhry jumps into this ‘Shaukat Khanum issue’, he’ll have to play a very delicate balancing. On the one hand is Imran Khan, he has a complete support of Pakistan Army and the Islamic right that is extremely active nowadays. Moreover, speaking against Imran Khan means to upset the Punjabi speaking PTI youth. The Chief Justice will never put his publicity on the line in order to carry on his “Justice Job”. On the other hand is Nawaz Shareef. How can Mr. Chaudhry upset him?! He has never done this before. He bailed him in the hijacking issue, he never talks about Hudabiyya paper mills, he never questions Mr. Shareef alleged corruption of six billion rupees, the Mehran bank scandal has moved into oblivion. Iftikhar Chaudhry has never brought Mr. Shareef into his court. Furthermore, what history proves is that he decided a case that was put forward by Mr. Shareef against President Zardari just in a few hours. CJP never wants to upset the rulers of Punjab, as Punjab holds the power to control Pakistan. In brief, Chaudhry Shaib is now in an imbroglio. He can neither go against Imran Khan nor against Nawaz Shareef. Following are the possibles option in his bag: 1) Take No Suo Motto — just remain quiet This is the very strategy Iftikhar Chaudhry is following. The media isn’t questioning him as he is the strongest man in the town. Yet, at the same time, his power rests on the very pillars against whom he should take a Suo Motto notice. Iftikhar Chaudhry will remain quiet unless someone files in a case. Whoever files this case will be putting Iftikhar Chaudhry into a very difficult situation. 2) A case is filed — kill the weakest bird! Let’s assume someone else files a case. Now what? Iftikhar Chaudhry will try to solve the power equation in a way that no major power centre feels the pain. Hence, my prediction is neither Imran nor Nawaz will be called into the court. In the worst case scenario, it will be Khawaja Asif who’ll have to face the court’s anger. 3) Iftikhar Chaudhry does the unexpected If Mr. Chaudhry decides against Mr. Khan or Nawaz Shareef — he’ll never do this — it will be a beginning of an end for him. He will not be able to handle the public outcry. Large parts of Sindh aren’t happy with him, as he goes on his anti-PPP marathon.
PPP to resist if PM is ousted, warns Gilani
Yousaf Raza Gilani has said if present PM is ousted,the PPP would resist and protest demonstration. While talking to the media in Lahore, ex-prime minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani warned that the present prime minister has not been elected as bounty; if the elected representative is terminated from his office, it would be equal to disintegrate the country. Furthering his statement he said that if the prime minister is bound to be sent to home, there is no need of general elections, adding that the system of the government and democracy should be packed diametrically. He said that the establishment expelled one Gilani and the PPP have sent two Gilanis to the parliament to continue democratic system according to general will of the masses. After this, it has become crystal clear that the parliament is supreme, he concluded.
Arab League postpones meeting on Syria
http://www.rt.comArab League foreign ministers have postponed to a later date a meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss Syrian conflict, AFP sites top Arab League official as saying. Ministers were scheduled to meet on Sunday in the city of Jeddah. Arab bloc's Deputy Secretary General Ahmed Ben Helli said that they were going to discuss the latest developments in Syria and which policy actions to take after the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, resigned earlier this month.
Obama pledges major response to drought
Michelle Obama visits Aurora theater shooting victims in hospital
Bahrainis continue anti-regime protest in Boori village
Afghan Girl Finds Rare Justice
By GRAHAM BOWLEYWhen she refused to prostitute herself or have sex with the man she was forced to marry when she was about 13, officials said, Sahar Gul’s in-laws tortured her and threw her into a dirty, windowless cellar for months until the police discovered her lying in hay and animal dung. In July, an appeals court upheld prison sentences of 10 years each for three of her in-laws, a decision heralded as a legal triumph underscoring the advances for women’s rights in the past decade. She is recovering from her wounds, physical and emotional, in a women’s shelter in Kabul. But to many rights advocates, Sahar Gul’s case, which drew attention from President Hamid Karzai and the international news media, is the exception that proves the rule: a small victory that masks a still-depressing picture of widespread instances of abuse of women that never come to light. Further, advocacy groups fear that even the tentative progress that has been achieved in protecting some women could be undone if the West’s focus on Afghanistan now begins to shift away as NATO troops withdraw and the international money pumped into the economy diminishes. “If you take away that funding and pressure, it is not sustainable,” said Heather Barr, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. As more details of Sahar Gul’s case have come to light — including the fact that the abuse continued even as, time and again, neighbors, police officers and her family members voiced suspicions that something was wrong — it has only reinforced how vulnerable women and girls still are in Afghanistan, particularly in rural areas where under-age marriages are common and forced ones are typical. Sahar Gul, who is now about 14, grew up in Badakhshan, a poor, mountainous province in the north. As a young child she was shuffled around after her father died, ending up with her stepbrother, Mohammad, when she was about 9. She helped with the hard work — tending cows, sheep and an orchard of walnut and apricot trees, and making dung bricks for the fire — but her stepbrother’s wife resented her presence. The woman pressured Mohammad to give Sahar Gul up for marriage after he was contacted by a man, about 30, named Ghulam Sakhi — even though she had not yet reached the legal marriage age of 16, or 15 with a father’s consent. In effect, Ghulam Sakhi bought her: he paid at least $5,000, according to government officials and prosecutors, an illegal exchange. He drove off with Sahar Gul to his parents’ home in Baghlan, another northern province hundreds of miles away. Ghulam Sakhi’s first wife had fled after he and his mother beat her for not bearing children, according to Rahima Zarifi, the chairwoman of Baghlan’s women’s affairs department, and the mullah in the mosque in the town in Baghlan. In his search for a new wife, there may have been a reason Ghulam Sakhi’s family looked so far afield: they intended to force her into prostitution, according to Ms. Zarifi, who followed the case closely, and officials at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul. In Baghlan, the girl was immediately put to work cooking and cleaning, but she was able to resist consummating the marriage for weeks. She ran away to the house of a neighbor, who alerted both the police and her husband’s family. Ghulam Sakhi’s neighbors and the police forced him to sign a letter promising not to mistreat Sahar Gul, though they let him take her back. The warning had little effect. One day, when she complained of a headache, her mother-in-law, Siyamoi, tricked her into taking a sedative that she thought was medicine, said Mushtari Daqiq, a lawyer for the aid group Women for Afghan Women and also Sahar Gul’s lawyer. “When she woke up in the morning, she realized she had been used by her husband,” Ms. Daqiq said. A neighbor named Ehsanullah said that one evening last summer, as his family ate dinner, they heard screaming coming from the house. The following morning his mother called at the house. He recounted what she saw: “Sahar Gul had lost a lot of weight, her hands were covered with bruises and wounds, one of her hands was broken, but her mother-in-law was forcing her to do the laundry.” He added, “She kept her head down the whole time my mother was there.” After a group of elders confronted Ghulam Sakhi, the screaming stopped. Frustrated that the girl could not perform the housework they expected, the family put her in the cellar, where she slept on the floor without a mattress, her hands and feet tied with rope. She was given only bread and water to eat. She was also beaten regularly. According to Sahar Gul and Ms. Daqiq, most of the beatings were at the hand of Amanullah, Ghulam Sakhi’s elderly father. They described grotesque crimes, accusing Amanullah of hitting Sahar Gul with sticks, biting her chest, inserting hot irons in her ears and vagina, and pulling out two fingernails. “She was helpless,” Ms. Daqiq said. “She had no hope for her life.” Sahar Gul’s uncle Khwaja, who lived nearby in the same province, and her stepbrother, Mohammad, tried to visit her a few times, but the family told them the girl was not home. The family then threatened Mohammad, warning that he had illegally given his sister to be married. “He had to accept and run back to Badakhshan without meeting his sister,” Khwaja said. Then, last December, about six months after the marriage, they finally got to see her when they called at the house with two police officers and heard a voice coming from the cellar. “In the light of our flashlight, we found Sahar Gul lying on a pile of hay,” said Shirullah, one of the police officers. Her dress was in rags, she was barely conscious and she could not stand after weeks in the dark. “She was constantly moaning,” Shirullah said. “She was in a horrible situation. She couldn’t move her body parts, and we carried her to the hospital in our arms.” Ms. Zarifi and three nurses washed her and gave her soup and dates. “When she saw the food, she became very excited,” Ms. Zarifi said. The police arrested the mother-in-law, Siyamoi, her daughter Mahkhurd and finally Amanullah, the father-in-law — who was discovered hiding in a burqa and a blanket. The family told the police that Ghulam Sakhi was in the Afghan Army in Helmand. That was later found to be untrue, according to local residents and Afghan officials, but the claim bought enough time for him to slip away from the authorities along with his brother, Darmak. They remain at large. With her mistreatment a big story in the Afghan news media, Mr. Karzai called for swift justice. In a district court in Kabul on May 1, the judge, speaking in front of a bank of microphones on national television, declared Sahar Gul’s three in-laws guilty. According to neighbors and to officials who heard the in-laws’ arguments in court, they acted the way they did mostly because they felt they had paid good money for a girl who they said was not pretty, who misbehaved and who would neither work as they demanded nor bear them children. Lawyers for the family members say that they deny beating or drugging Sahar Gul, and that her wounds were self-inflicted. They deny confining her in the cellar, and say they had no plans to send her into prostitution. The prostitution accusation was not addressed in court. The lawyers, who were provided by the legal group Da Qanoon Ghushtonky, or Demanders of Law, which is financed by international aid, argue that the political outcry caused the trial to be rushed through without due process. Rather than showing the lack of legal protections for women, they argued, Sahar Gul’s case underscores the weakness of Afghanistan’s still-developing legal system, one that can easily be swayed by politicians like Mr. Karzai. Siyamoi and Mahkhurd are now 2 of 171 prisoners in a women’s prison in Kabul. On a recent morning there, the two women insisted they were innocent and railed ferociously at their accusers. “We are being cheated by the court,” Siyamoi said. “If you think I am a criminal, why don’t you pull out my fingernails?” A few miles away across Kabul, Sahar Gul lives in a shelter provided by Women for Afghan Women, one of seven shelters the organization has established nationally for abuse victims. Sahar Gul played in the sun in the garden in a golden dress and purple shawl and pink bracelets, a round-cheeked, gangly girl. She had made a new friend at the shelter, a 14-year-old girl whose face was scarred by acid by a sister’s thwarted suitor. Sahar Gul still bears the scars and bruises of her ordeal, but her caregivers said she was recovering and becoming gradually more independent. She said she had ambitions. “I want to become a politician and stop other women suffering the same,” she said. Now, however, rights groups fear that schools and clinics for girls may close as international money dries up and the political climate in Afghanistan becomes more religiously conservative, undermining the fragile lattice of pro-women support groups, government ministries and nongovernmental organizations as well as laws specifically created in the past few years to protect women. A new 2009 law to eliminate violence against women was cited in the sentencing of Sahar Gul’s abusers, but the law is still barely applied, according to a United Nations report published in November, and it has not been formally adopted. Women’s shelters are under threat, with a conservative justice minister describing them as “brothels,” while a new family law that could make it easier for abused women to divorce is being held up. In such a climate, the fear is that Sahar Gul’s successful rescue may turn out to be an aberration rather than a new norm, and that it will not help those women whose suffering is not discovered. “We have many cases perhaps graver than this where women are murdered,” Ms. Zarifi said. “No one hears anything about them.” Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of The New York Times from Baghlan Province, Afghanistan.
Series of attacks on Kabul foiled
Afghan officials met key Taliban figure in Pakistan
US lawmakers call on Bahrain king to free activist
http://www.boston.comNineteen members of the U.S. Congress have written to Bahrain’s king to call for the release of prominent human rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who is currently serving a three-month jail sentence for making anti-government statements on Twitter. Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center For Human Rights, is due in court Sunday in a separate case that relates to him allegedly calling for and participating in an illegal gathering. The letter sent Friday to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa acknowledges the country has introduced reforms since last year’s anti-government protests. But it also said Rajab’s prosecution runs ‘‘counter to the government’s assurances that individuals will not be prosecuted for peaceful political speech.’’ Several other prominent rights groups including U.S.-based Human Rights First have also called for his release.
BJP, Bollywood Accept Veena Malik
http://www.orissadiary.comNo more outrages for
Pakistan: HRCP outraged at minorities’ flight
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed alarm and a strong sense of outrage at the continued exodus of religious minority communities from Sindh and Balochistan and said that the state has consistently failed to allay the concerns of these communities despite repeated reminders by the civil society.
In a statement issued on Friday, the Commission said: "The state of anger and panic caused by the reports that several hundred Hindu citizens from Sindh and Balochistan were migrating to India has subsided somewhat by the disclosure that they were on a pilgrimage. Most of them said they would return to Pakistan while some said they might not.
"In any case, reports of Hindu citizens' migration to India have been coming from Sindh and Balochistan fairly regularly. Some spokespersons of minorities have argued that vested interests are threatening and frightening the non-Muslim citizens with a view to forcing them to migrate.
Some of these elements are said to be religious extremists while others have plans to grab the minorities' property. In any case there is little doubt that the minorities have been driven to despair.
"Religious minorities' continued migration from Sindh and Balochistan is a reflection of the state's failure to save these citizens from violence, discrimination and disgusting excesses such as forced conversion of young women.
"HRCP desperately hopes that the government shares its distress in this respect and reiterates its call for the state to address, in consultation with the communities in question, the reasons forcing religious minorities to flee the country.
HRCP also urges civil society organisations and the media to keep the spotlight firmly trained on the raw deal these communities are getting.
Ahead of the forthcoming elections, the political parties also have an opportunity, through their manifestos, and more than that through their actions now, to articulate their vision for religious minorities in Pakistan."
Experts extol Pakistan’s Syria policy
HINA: Kabul more important than Washington
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