| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Usual suspects refuse to heed government on madrassas |
| 2006-01-02 |
| Radical Muslim clerics have ignored an edict to expel all foreign students from Pakistan's madrassas, heightening fears that the Islamic schools will continue to be recruiting grounds for young Western-born suicide bombers. After the July 7 London bombings, in which three of four suicide bombers were of Pakistani origin, President Pervez Musharraf pledged to the West that foreigners would be excluded from the schools. Two of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan, are thought to have visited madrassas. Within three weeks of the attacks, Gen. Musharraf ordered that all non-Pakistanis be expelled by the end of 2005. But he backed down in the subsequent battle of wills with Islamists and the deadline passed on Saturday without the edict being enacted. Western intelligence agencies suspect that madrassas served as rendezvous points between senior al Qaeda operatives and Tanweer, Khan and other British recruits. Gen. Musharraf relented on Thursday after clerics said they would rather be incarcerated than comply with orders to expel foreigners or give their names to the authorities. Hanif Jalandhri, the head of the Federation of Madrassas, said that about 1,000 foreign students had left since July. Of the 700 who remained, those facing forced repatriation saw themselves as victims of the president's efforts to curry favor with the United States and Britain. Fazlur Rahman, a cleric who heads Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), known for its close ties to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime, said: "We'll do our best to keep the students with us and prefer arrest to giving the foreigners to police." Pakistan's Interior Ministry abruptly dropped threats to begin arresting violators, and then denied that there had been any ultimatum in the first place. "There is no deadline for it," said Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao. The JUI leader accused Gen. Musharraf of violating both the Pakistani Constitution and the U.N. Convention on Human Rights by forcing out students in the absence of evidence that they had committed crimes. Some critics vowed that the measure would be contested in the Pakistani courts if it led to students being deported against their will. Islamabad has not said it will set a new deadline for expulsion or whether it will enforce the existing one. Dec. 31 also was supposed to have been the deadline for every madrassa in the country to register with the government. Yesterday, however, about 6,000 of the 20,000 or so had done so -- despite a watering down of the rules on the information they had to submit. In September, ministers dropped the requirement for each school to declare its sources of funding -- meaning cash from terrorist affiliates can still flow in. At the time of the bombings, officials estimated that as many as 1,700 foreign nationals, including citizens of Britain, the United States and France, were attending madrassas. British intelligence agencies feared that a small number could be manipulated in those schools linked to al Qaeda and recruited as bombers. The Pakistani government's jitters underline the delicacy of its position in trying to keep a lid on terrorist recruitment. Gen. Musharraf has swung behind the West in the war on terror, he also wants to avoid alienating influential Islamic parties within his own country, some of which have links with extremists. Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, has known links with jihadist groups, and elements within it have provided backing for al Qaeda-type groups. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 Why not just poison the water ? This madrass problem is THE problem, isn't it. Splodydope factories run by religious extremeist lunatics with the sole aim of reproducing religious extremeist lunatics. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-01-02 21:24 |
| #2 sounds a lot like what they are doing to us. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-01-02 13:30 |
| #1 A good rule of thumb when your enemies are strongly united, is to undermine their strength by chipping away at them. In this case, he should first start a public propaganda campaign against something utterly repulsive to everybody, that nobody would oppose. Like child porn is in the US. But in Pakland would probably be investing in Israeli bonds or masturbating with bacon grease or something. Then when everybody is calling for the offenders to be burned at the stake, send in the special police who are loyal to M, to bust the heck out of a few of the weaker madrassas, with contrived but convincing evidence that they had been doing whatever it was that was so offensive. Nobody will stand up for them, so they will get burned bad. Then, when they face the stake, offer them a slim chance to save their asses by implicating a few madrassas that are stronger and better connected. Don't immediately pursue the stronger madrassas. Make it look like they are pulling political strings to avoid prosecution. Then approach the MMA, and demand that they use internal discipline to drive out any of their members who are doing the thing. Thing after thing, you turn them against themselves, you undermine them, you get the public pissed off at them. Machiavellian, but effective. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-01-02 13:19 |