Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [69]
The question is once again whether this was part of an attempt at systemic change, or whether Chaudhry was simply playing the role that you can see politicians and their assistants playing in every political office in Pakistan – responding to appeals for help against the police in return for promises of political support. Moreover, by 2009 the use of suo motos by Chaudhry and other senior judges was beginning to extend far beyond their judicial competence, with, for example, judgments being issued ordering the government to reduce prices of essential goods. If continued, this will inevitably bring the courts into conflict with any government – and it is not clear where public sympathy will lie in future.
At a lower level, individual lawyers and groups of lawyers express their views in more direct ways. During the Lawyers’ Movement, lawyers beat up opponents and fought with police. After the restoration of the Chief Justice, some took their victory as a licence to continue this violence in individual cases. During my stay in Lahore in August 2009, a group of lawyers beat up a police officer who had testified against their client in front of the court. When this was shown on television, the next day they beat up the camera team responsible. From various parts of the country came reports of judges using Contempt of Court judgments to muzzle the press and intimidate opponents, to help friends and relatives. As a Lahori friend remarked cynically,
Well, what do you expect? The army wears uniforms and beats up people, and so do the police, so of course the lawyers wear their black jackets and beat up people. It is what you do if you have power in this country.
THE SHARIAH
Faced with all this, it is hardly surprising that ordinary people dream of a completely different and better system of justice, or that for many these hopes should focus on the Shariah. All over Pakistan there was majority support among the ordinary people with whom I spoke for agreements with the Taleban to establish the Shariah in certain areas (like the Nizam-e-Adl agreement of February 2009 for Swat), and in the Pathan areas that support was overwhelming – though that only made many people’s disillusionment greater when they saw that the Taleban were not interested only in bringing Islamic justice, but also sought power for themselves.
People on both sides of the Afghan – Pakistan frontier remember how in the 1990s the Afghan Taleban, on the ideological basis of the Shariah, restored order out of the chaos created by the victory of the Afghan Mujahidin in 1992. The Islamic Courts’ Movement in Somalia has much of the same appeal.
In fact, the Afghan Taleban fulfilled the vision set out for me by a qazi (Islamic judge) in the Afghan province of Paktika in 1989. Looking at the complete absence of regular government in the areas ‘liberated’ by the Mujahidin, I asked him whether he was not afraid of anarchy when the Communist regime in Kabul fell and the Mujahidin took over completely. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘because we Pashtuns have our own code, the pashtunwali , which resolves conflicts and maintains order. It doesn’t stop all feuds, but it prevents them going too far. And if that fails, then we have the Shariah, Islamic law, which everyone respects and which it is my job to implement.’
But what is this ‘Shariah’ that ordinary people say they want, and that the Taleban claim to be implementing? Here, a great deal of careful unpicking is necessary. At one level, believing Muslims are simply required to declare their support for the Shariah, because its ultimate basis is to be found in the Koran, which is the word of God delivered through His Prophet. On the other hand, people also use ‘Shariah’ as a sort of code for a better, simpler, more equal, more honest and more accessible form of official justice, without really knowing in detail what they mean by this, or what the various forms of Shariah really contain. For example, when faced with the idea of amputation of the hand as a standard punishment