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Pakistan: HRCP Press Release - Govt. crackdown during Long March

The government is using Section 144 of the1860 Penal Code, a law left over by the British that forbids public gatherings of four or more people to crackdown on the marchers.

Govt adopting dictatorial ways: HRCP
March 12, 2009 by HRCP
Press Release, March 11, 2009

Lahore: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed dismay at curbs on freedom of assembly, arbitrary arrests and harassment of lawyers, political figures and civil society activists ahead of the lawyers’ long march.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, HRCP said: “A wave of indiscriminate arrests has been reported from across the country ahead of the long march. Such arrests, snatching and placing of containers on roads, and imposing curbs on the right to peaceful assembly are measures disturbingly similar to the path military ruler Pervez Musharraf had taken against dissent and peaceful protest. The government is abusing legal process to prevent the people from exercising their democratic rights.

There is no justification for the government’s undemocratic decision to impose Section 144 curbs on the right to assembly and unleash a spate of arrests and harassment against lawyers, political workers and civil society activists. In Punjab, the enforcement of Section 144 restrictions has compounded the already tense situation created by the imposition of governor’s rule.

All the marches, rallies and protests of lawyers in the past two years have been peaceful without exception. The government, therefore, has no justification in preventing gathering of lawyers.

Indiscriminate actions – such as arrest and confinement in police stations of people like Tahira Abdullah, an HRCP board member – are hardly a distinction for a government that prides itself at being democratically elected.

The government’s resort to ways of authoritarian regimes has cancelled out whatever goodwill it had achieved by not interfering with the lawyers’ long march last year.

The government’s action is undemocratic, counterproductive and will only fuel confrontation. Whatever the outcome of the present protest, the government’s reckless policy is posing a grave threat not only to the democratic experiment but also to the state’s integrity.

There is still time for the government to give up the policy of conflict and defuse tensions by accommodating the demands of lawyers, ending governor Raj in Punjab, and allowing the Punjab Assembly to exercise its right to elect its leader.

The government must release all the detainees and desist from impeding in any way the people’s constitutional right to peaceful assembly and protest.”


Iqbal Haider
Co-chairperson

Ahwak.
I love you.
We atmana law ansak,
And I wish if I ever forget you,
Ansa rohy wayak.
I forget my soul with you.
Wen daiet teba fadak
And if it becomes lost, it's OK,
Law tensany.
If you've forgotten me.

We ansak,
So I forget you,
watareeny bansa gafak.
And I forget all you pain.
Wa ashtak le azaby maak.
And I start longing for it again.
We alaky demooi fakrak,
And I find my tears remember you.
Warga tany.
So I return to you.

Fe loak,
At times,
El donia tegeny maak.
The whole world comes with you.
We redaha teba redak.
And its wish is your wish.
We sa-et-ha ye hoon fe hawak.
And then, maybe you will end,
Tool hermany.
Depriving my love of you.

Flying Inside Your Own Body

Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the think pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Margaret Atwood

Death Experienced

We know nothing of this going-hence that
does not share with us. We have no grounds
for showing admiration or love or hate
to death, whom a costume mask

of tragic lament crazily disfigures.
Still the world is full of roles we act.
So long as we try anxiously to please,
death acts also, though never to acclaim.

But when you went, a streak of reality
broke in upon this stage through that fissure
where you left: green of real green,
real sunshine, real forest.

We go on acting. Fearful and reciting
things difficult to learn and now and then
raising gestures; but your existence,
withdrawn from us and taken from our play,

can sometimes come over us, like a knowledge
of that reality settling in,
so that for a while we act life
transported, not thinking of applause.

Ranier Maria Rilke

The Too Late Poem

Nothing in the room can go back.
The ashes couldn't be paper again,
the paper couldn't return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn't reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility
waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever's recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can't go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine ... it can't regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.

__________________

She's left the room. He stays in the bed,
below the covers, and when she exits the house
—the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness
that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now
she's past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious,
if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel
the whole life-corridor back to its insular source.
I'm sorry, but we can't: nor can the photons of the cosmos
do a U-turn and reconstitute the Original Field of Energy
the size of a barnyard egg. They're going to scatter outward
over the edge of zero. Barnyard egg ... he remembers
his grandparents' small, hand-labor farm ... the horror when he first saw
a decapitated chicken running crazy in the grit, to flee
the fate that had already happened.

Albert Goldbarth
The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems
Graywolf Press