General Musharraf Attempts to Crush Protests by Lawyers

The New York Times, November 6, 2007

Arif Ali/Agence France-Presse–Getty Images

Pakistani uniformed and plainclothes police beat a lawyer during a protest in Lahore on Monday.

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.

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Mohsin Raza/Reuters

Police officers beat a lawyer outside provincial High Courts in Lahore on Monday.

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.

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.

It was the second time this year that Pakistan’s lawyers emerged as the vanguard of resistance to the government. In the spring, the lawyers mounted big rallies in major cities when General Musharraf tried to dismiss the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who has now been fired.

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.

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.

Continued . . .