LUBP: Lord Avebury: ASWJ-LeJ terrorists condemned in House of Lords
Pakistan: Religious Violence
Question for Short Debate
2 pm
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the Government of Pakistan on curbing religious violence in that country.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, there are good reasons why the international community needs to pay attention to the upsurge of religious violence and hatred in
Pakistan over recent years, and indeed to the related political violence during the recent elections in which more than 100 people were killed. Pakistan is due to be the largest recipient of UK aid in the world when it gets £446 million in 2014-15. It also receives billions of dollars from the United States in both economic and military aid in the effort to shore up the country’s stability. However, since 2001, an estimated 30,000 civilians have been killed in religious and political assassinations and massacres—all that aid money has not reduced the level of violence in Pakistan. There was a temporary lull during Pervez Musharraf’s presidency between 1999 and 2007, but over the past few years there has been a further deterioration.
At the same time, the stability of Pakistan has become vital to the peace of the region, with the withdrawal of allied forces from Afghanistan. The new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has said that he will help the process by allowing NATO to use Pakistan’s roads for the transit of troops and equipment, but large convoys of US or UK forces on their way home will make a tempting target for the local Taliban and its associates. The presence of well organised and well armed groups of terrorists in Pakistan also poses a threat to neighbouring states, as we saw from the Mumbai atrocity in 2008.
Last Wednesday, my noble friend Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon perceptively suggested that Russia’s support for Assad was not a matter of looking after its only remaining supporter in the Middle East but a consequence of its experience in Dagestan and other Muslim republics where there was a war between Sunnis and Shias. My noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater also referred to the Shia-Sunni conflict, and he coupled this with the spread of jihadism and fundamentalism. In Syria and Iraq, there are interreligious civil wars.
The agenda of Sunni extremists such as al-Qaeda and its imitators across the Islamic world is to eliminate the Shia and other varieties of Islam, as well as the Kaffirs or unbelievers, from the face of the earth. Their ultimate goal is a universal caliphate based on what they imagine were the principles of governance under the four “rightly guided caliphs” who followed the Prophet in the seventh century. In Pakistan, one active and ruthless group of terrorists belonging to this loose coalition is the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. This outfit tried to kill Nawaz Sharif when he was Prime Minister in 1999, and the suicide bomber who killed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and 26 others in 2007 was probably a member of the organisation. It claimed responsibility for the murder of four American oil workers in 1997 and for the bombing of the Protestant International Church in Islamabad in March 2002. But its main target has always been the Shia, as it brazenly acknowledges when it takes credit for the atrocities that it commits. The group says that the Shia are infidels, that they should be labelled as non-Muslims under the law, and that they are “wajib-ul-qatl”, an Urdu expression meaning “worthy to be killed”.
A semi-legal organisation with the same ideology of hatred is the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, which took over from a banned organisation called Sipah-e-Sahaba. The ASWJ fielded 130 candidates in the recent Pakistani elections, generally under the banners of the PML-N
and an alliance of five Sunni religious parties generally known as the MDN. Under one of these labels, a man who had spent five years in prison for murdering six people in 1998 was elected to a seat in Punjab, and other terrorists may well now also be MPs. The Election Commission of Pakistan directed that in 55 constituencies, listed sectarian terrorists should be disqualified from standing, but it turned out that this was not within the powers conferred on returning officers by the ECP itself.
I am not going to recite the whole appalling history of the crimes perpetrated by these terrorists because it would take all day, but a couple of examples illustrate their mode of operations. On 3 April 2012, six buses were stopped in Chilas in the northern territories en route to Gilgit, Baltistan. The male passengers were taken off the buses and their identity cards examined for Shia names. At least 25 were shot dead on the spot. No official report has been published on this massacre and, although I understand that four or five people were arrested, no trials have taken place.
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Europe
While, I do appreciate the long article based on the contributions of various members of the House of Lords regarding the violence, Taliban and other extremist groups in Pakistan, the following comment by Lord Avebury is totally prejudicial and reeks of ignorance.
The noble lord should have reflected deeply on history before saying what he said. He of course forgot to mention that the extremism in the Islamic world has no religion, creed and culture. It is multi-facet and has its roots in poverty, injustices wrought by the western powers in the past and intrigues of the present as well as constant interference in the internal affairs of Muslim states.
When it comes to taking over the world, no body in his/her wildest dreams would wish to take an open confrontation with the superior west, let alone take over the world. It would have been more plausible for the Lord to explain, how these few thousands long bearded fanatics plan to carry out this conquest. The learned lord also did not know that Caliphate is a pipe dream and very few Muslims subscribe to it.
While Lord Lord Avebury played the role of an arrogant, know nothing Englishman , Lord Desai on the other hand was very thoughtful because he knows the area well and realizes the root cause of extremism.
So my advice to the MT editorial team would be to stop propagating against Pakistan as a state and instead criticize individuals, groups or movements who are responsible for the violence against minorities in Pakistan.
The reason Pakistan as a country is being held responsible for the atrocities within it’s borders is because, the government of that country does absolutely nothing to curb all the lawlessness that is carried on within it’s borders.
Therefore, non-Pakistanis tend to believe that what goes on in that country is with the express permission of it’s law upholders.
In other words the police, the courts and the various politicians take no action, say nothing and the ones that do e.g. Salman Taseer are made past tense by their own so-called body guards.