The Third Martial Law

During General Zia's 11 years regime international human rights groups repeatedly expressed concern over army's ruthless measures to suppress dissent. The Amnesty International, in a report released on 15.5.1978 said: "We are very concerned at the use of flogging in Pakistan and are disturbed that this unusual punishment is also being inflicted on political prisoners for committing acts which often appear to be no more than exercise of the right of freedom of speech and expression guaranteed in the constitution. The first public hanging took place in March, after death sentences were passed by a military court on three civilians convicted for murder. At least 16 prisoners have so far been sentenced to floggings for political activities."[18 ]

Commenting on General Zia regime's repression the Economist said the army has been ruthless in its crackdown. "Relatives, many of them teenagers, have in some cases been held temporarily as hostages until a wanted person was found. Bhutto's Attorney General, Yahya Bakhtiar was beaten up in his cell in Quetta jail this month: his family was given his bloodstained clothes for cleaning."[19 ]

Citing a report by the Lahore Bar Association, a survey by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists charged that "systematic torture" occurred in five Lahore prisons in 1984, particularly at a jail where many political detainees were held. Military courts are used increasingly to clear the backlog of cases in ordinary courts. The survey cited reports that the military courts decide cases in minutes and refuse defendants the rights to lawyers. Special military courts that try serious offenses allow defense counsel but the judges often obstruct the lawyers in their work," the survey said.[20 ]

The Amnesty International on 19.11.1985 also accused Pakistan of torturing and denying fair trials to political prisoners tried by special military courts. "As of September, more than 130 prisoners were serving sentences of between seven and 42 years after special military courts convicted them of political offenses or politically motivated criminal offenses. The military courts regularly use as evidence confessions extracted by torture while prisoners are hung upside down and beaten, given electric shocks, strapped to blocks of ice, deprived of food and sleep for two or three days and burned with cigarettes. Many prisoners are held in fetters and chains. People often are tried in courts held in closed session and denied the right of appeal to a higher court."[21]

The U.S. State Department in its 1985 annual report on the state of human rights in Pakistan said: "Human rights abuses have been common under both civilian and military rule during Pakistan's 37 years and, although the trend was generally toward improvement, abuses continued in 1985. The authorities in 1985 on several occasions used preventive detention....and more frequently used externment orders to curtail the activities of opposition leaders. During the year there were continuing allegations of torture and traditionally harsh and abusive treatment of prisoners.... allegations of torture have been heard in connection with all the major security-related trials completed during the year...abuse of prisoners in common criminal cases also appears widespread. Pakistan's Islamisation policy has reversed some of the social and legal gains made by women in past years. While minorities are protected, Hindus, Christian and Parsis do not enjoy the same legal rights as Moslems."[22]

A report released on 7.9.1987 by the International Commission of Jurists said: "Some human rights abuses continue in Pakistan, including alleged military attacks on villagers, despite the lifting of martial law 20 months ago." The ICJ report cited reports by villagers who said their villages were raided and looted by soldiers sometimes accompanied by local police. "Some male villagers were shot to death and women beaten, in at least two cases pregnant women, who subsequently miscarried."[23] "Certainly, no defender of democracy or human rights is going to shed tears over General Zia's death," wrote the reputed Paris daily Le Monde on August 18, 1988.

ZIA'S LEGACY

General Ziaul Haq was a typical third world dictator who seized power in the wake of anti-Bhutto demonstrations[24] in 1977 and showed little inclination to relinquish it till the last moment of his life. But he also wanted respect from his western supporters, especially, the United States. Therefore he attempted to clothe his regime in democratic grab through "shuracracy" and tried to legitimize his rule by holding a referendum in the name of Islam.

Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 proved a blessing in disguise for his military regime as Pakistan emerged as an important actor on the international scene. It became a bastion of western interests in south Asia because without it there would have been no reliable supply-line to the Afghan rebels. Pakistan was seen as the only cogent barrier against further Soviet expansion southwards to the Indian Ocean. It was the main regional counterweight to India, which has a friendship treaty with Moscow. The collapse of General Zia's regime might have damaged the western interests like the collapse of the Shah's regime in Iran next door. With Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Americans saw to it that there would be no serious challenge to Zia's regime. Therefore, the democratic world tolerated his autocratic rule and turned a blind eye to serious human rights violations committed by his regime.

Within a week of the Soviet intervention, the US National Security Adviser of President Jimmy Carter, Zebignev Brezinski, had publicly affirmed that Washington would support Pakistan with military force if necessary. Carter administration had cut off Pakistan's aid because of its nuclear program. However, the parameters of the US-Pakistan relationship changed after the Soviet moves in Afghanistan.

General Zia's Afghanistan policy brought badly needed American military as well as economic aid to the country.[25] Pakistan has built a military machine that cannot be kept in good repair by its own resources and always needed foreign aid. Defense forces are intended to provide a means of being independent to a nation; in our case Pakistan's dependence on outsiders has been enhanced by the growing size of its armed forces. Day-to-day needs of the armed forces have forced the rulers of Pakistan to stand in queue in Washington, hat-in-hand. [26 ]

Zia's adventurist policy in Afghanistan resulted in multi-facet negative impacts on the social fabric of our society. Massive supply of sophisticated weapons to the Afghan "mujahideen" led to the proliferation of arms in the country from Peshawar to Karachi and produced the Kalashinkov culture. Army and civil officers involved in the distribution of foreign aid to the Afghan rebels became rich overnight because the operation was covert and there was no paperwork involved. According to the annual statement of the Swiss National Bank the total value of the deposits held by Pakistanis reached to 1.141 billion Swiss Francs in 1985. Until 1980, the total value of Pakistanis deposits in numbered accounts in Switzerland was so small that Pakistan never used to find a separate mention in the annual statements of the Swiss National Bank.[27]

An American adviser to Afghan "mujahedeen" groups and an official of the Federation for American-Afghan Action, Andrew Eiva, told the US Senate in 1987: "Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, run by Major General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, which oversees the transfer of money and arms to the rebels, is responsible for the theft of millions of dollars in funds and military equipment." Eiva alleged that $700 million out of $1.09 billion in aid earmarked by the US Congress for the Afghan rebels between 1980 and 1984 had disappeared.[28]

Another result of the 10-year long Afghan war was the drugs{XE "drugs"} smuggling in the country as the principal conduit by which weapons reached the Afghan rebels in the north became one of the main organized routes by which heroin reached Karachi for transshipment to Europe and the United States. The monthly Herald, Karachi, wrote in January 1987: "If you control the poppy fields, Karachi and the road which links the two: you will be so rich that you will control Pakistan." According to the Herald, the National Logistic Cell - the army-run transport organization that has the monopoly of goods movement across the country - trucks have been used repeatedly in the shipment of heroin from the Frontier Province to Karachi port. In its September 1985 issue, the Herald reported: "The drug is carried in the NLC trucks, which come sealed from the NWFP and are never checked by the police. They come down from Peshawar where they deliver their cargo, sacks of grains to government godown. Some of these sacks contain packets of heroin. This has been going on for about three and a half years." The government in practice had exempted from customs all in-coming and out-going consignments for the Afghan war.

The former Governor of the North West Frontier Province, Lt. General Fazlul Haq - described by the western press as the Noriega of Pakistan - used to claim that during his tenure opium production dropped dramatically. According to official statistics opium output had fallen from 800 metric tons in 1979 to 165 tons in 1987. But during precisely the same period the output of opium increased from an estimated 270 tons to 800 tons across the border in Afghanistan that was easily smuggled into Pakistan.

According to a report published by a New York daily in February 1993, a study commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency concluded the heroin trade has penetrated "the highest political circles" of Pakistan and "is becoming the lifeblood" of the economy and government in Pakistan. The intelligence document asserted that heroin traffickers have financed Pakistan's ruling political party, bought enough votes to win seats in the national assembly, and gained access to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The currently ruling political party, the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance, has routinely tapped narcotics traffickers to bankroll campaigns, the study said, and so did the ruling parties of previous administrations. Two of General Zia's pilots used presidential aircraft to smuggle heroin - one to the United States during a state visit.[29]

The war in Afghanistan not only prompted drugs smuggling on a large scale but also led to an unprecedented addiction of drugs in Pakistan. Senate Chairman Waseem Sajjad told the first International Conference on Drug Addiction held in Bhourbon, Murree in April 1993 that till 1979 number of drug addicts was very low, but at present the number of addicts has risen to millions. According to a press release of the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan was producing 70 metric tons annually of heroin from its 100 laboratories in the frontier areas, out of which two-thirds was consumed by Pakistanis and the rest was smuggled abroad.[30]

The most malignant legacy of Zia is the religious extremism which has taken firm roots in our society. The virulent militancy, in the name of religion which we see all around us today, is a direct off-shoot of his religious rhetoric.[31] General Zia had turned to Islam not for the purposes of deriving from it a social or political program of a progressive nature but for evolving a penal code that makes the regime and Pakistan look like a retrograde society.[32] Pakistan was transformed from a semi-liberal, struggling third world democracy into an obscurantist society, ruled by the rigid edits of an intolerant regime on the strength of what was perceived as the dictates of Islam rather than as the truly dynamic, forward-looking spirit of religion.[33]

After the 1971 debacle in East Pakistan, religion appeared to decline as a political issue in Pakistan. Bhutto's government created the impression of being determined to secularize Islamic Pakistan. However, by late 1970s this trend had been reversed and Islam and Islamic reform became central issues in Pakistani political discourse. However, the object of the so-called Islamisation was not Islam but rather that of invoking a claim to state power as an alternative to restoration of representative government. From this perspective, Islamic reforms were a clever device to mobilize popular support, especially among the mullahs and the bigots and to divert attention from issues of representative versus authoritarian rule. Islamisation was used to increase the gap between rich and poor.

Like many near-bankrupt military regimes in Muslim countries, General Zia used the so-called "Islamisation process" to legitimize and perpetuate his narrowly-based military rule marked by public and political executions, flogging of people in the name of Islam and confusing the country's judicial system by simultaneously operating the Shariah courts, the military tribunals and the common law civil courts. Justice Shafi Mohammad, Judge of the High Court of Sindh, while allowing quashment of criminal proceedings against two accused booked under the Hudood Ordinance remarked:

"It is the considered opinion of many religious scholars that Islamisation in 1980s as adopted by the government of General Ziaul Haq was devoid of the real spirit of Islam and the same created complication not only for the prevailing judicial system, but also ambiguity about Islam instead of solving the problems of this country."[34]

Pakistani legal experts fully agree that Islamic criminal law thoroughly suited tribal Arab society. This is especially so if we look at the Islamic law of murder. Murder is considered a private vengeance and in tribal Arabian society the avenging of a murder fell on the victim's next-of-kin; so it was the right of the family to demand satisfaction. Punishment was effected on the principle of retaliation, commuted to a payment of blood money or compensation for the injury. Cutting of limbs, stoning to death and flogging were also prevalent as punishments (in the tribal Arab society.[35] The position of women in tribal society was also secondary to that of men. In the light of modern developments in criminology where the insistence is on reform and rehabilitation of criminals, the claim of the Muslim traditionalist, however, is that Islamic concepts are not contrary to the modern spirit of criminology.[36]

Pakistan is one of those Muslim countries (the first being Saudi Arabia) where Islamic criminal law has partly been put into practice. Generally speaking, there has been a significant increase of crime in Pakistan since the implementation of Islamic punishments in 1979. This is notably in crimes against property, which include highway robbery, theft from petrol pumps, housebreaking and bank robbery, cattle rustling, motor vehicle thefts etc. An increase of crime has also been noted in Zina, Qazf and prohibition of alcohol cases.[37]

Modernists question whether the criminal policy adopted in Pakistan is compatible with the requirements of a modern society. The modernist demand in this respect is that the codification of Islamic criminal law should be done in the light of modern circumstances. There can be no return to the past. Islamic law has to face the challenges of the modern world. Otherwise, Islamic law is just a mockery, as we now know from the experience of Pakistan.[38]

Islamic criminal law is certainly not compatible with the status that women already have in Pakistani society. It was a shock to the women of Pakistan to have to accept that they are not accepted as full human beings, that in Hudood cases they are not considered capable of appearing as witnesses and that in financial matters two women are considered equal to one man.[39]

The women became the special victims of Islamisation and its inconsistencies. The Zina Ordinance carried grave injustices and untold miseries on women in the country and prompted bitter international criticism. Women's rights groups helped in the production of a film titled "Who will cast the first stone?" to highlight the oppression and sufferings of women under the Hudood Ordinances. In September 1981, the first conviction and sentence under the Zina Ordinance, of stoning to death for Fehmida and Allah Bakhsh were set aside under national and international pressure.

In many cases, under the Zina Ordinance, a woman who made an allegation of rape was convicted for adultery whilst the rapist was acquitted. This led to a growing demand by jurists and women activists for repealing the Ordinance. In 1983, Safia Bibi, a 13-year-old blind girl, who alleged rape by her employer and his son was convicted for adultery under the Zina Ordinance whilst, the rapists were acquitted. The decision attracted so much publicity and condemnation from the public and the press that the Federal Shariah Court [40] of its own motion, called for the records of the case and ordered that she should be released from prison on her own bond. Subsequently, on appeal, the finding of the trial court was reversed and the conviction was set aside.

In early 1988, another conviction for stoning to death of Shahida Parveen and Mohammed Sarwar [41] sparked bitter public criticism that led to their retrial and acquittal by the Federal Shariah Court. In this case the trial court took the view that notice of divorce by Shahida's former husband, Khushi Mohammed should have been given to the Chairman of the local council, as stipulated under Section 7(3) of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, 1961. This section states that any man who divorces his wife must register it with the Union Council. Otherwise, the court concluded that the divorce stood invalidated and the couple became liable to conviction under the Zina ordinance.

The International Commission of Jurists mission to Pakistan in December 1986 called for repealing of certain sections of the Hudood Ordinances relating to crimes and "Islamic" punishments which discriminate against women and non-Muslims. The commission cited an example that a Muslim woman can be convicted on the evidence of man, and a non-Muslim can be convicted on the evidence of a Muslim, but not vice versa.

General Zia's most enduring legacy is the political system he left behind. After the partyless elections of February 1985, the 1973 constitution was pulled out of cold storage, and on its back, a series of amendments giving absolute powers to the president were grafted to dismantle any future democratic set up at will. Since then the presidential powers have been used three times to disband elected assemblies. In May 1988 he himself sacked Prime Minister Mohammed Khan Junejo and dissolved the elected assemblies while President Ghulam Ishaq Khan sacked Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and disbanded the national and provincial assemblies twice in 1993.

General Zia also militarized the bureaucracy systematically. By his government's orders, 5 percent of all new posts in the higher civil service were to be filled by army officers who, consequently, occupied important civilian positions. No political government has yet the courage to rescind this order.

Economic planning in the Zia era left the country more indebted than ever, with a parallel black economy being managed with impunity by smugglers and black marketers. Nationalized banks and financial institutions were milked dry to please and retain his supporters. Despite the resumption of American aid on an unprecedented scale, there were serious shortages of facilities for education, health services and social development. University campuses remained closed for most of Zia era.