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SWAT jolt for Pak's victorious
Chief Justice: it tells courts to get out
 ISLAMABAD:
When Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary walks into his office at the
Supreme Court on Tuesday after a gap of 16 months, he has to contend
with the troubling reality that his court has no writ in seven whole
districts of the North West Frontier Province, including Swat.
Last week, Sufi
Mohammed, a hardline Islamist cleric and chief of the
Tehreek-i-Nifas-i-Sharia Mohammadi, with whom the provincial
government entered into an agreement in February to set up Sharia
courts in the Malakand division of the NWFP in return for peace in
Swat, ordered the regular courts in the region to stop functioning.
Denouncing the
courts as anti-Shari and anti-Islamic, the TNSM head asked judges
and lawyers to stop going to work. In Swat district, Sufi Mohammed
qazis have started holding court.
“The qazi courts
are taking up cases. The regular judiciary is paralysed, and the
lawyers are all sitting home with nothing to do,” a lawyer from Swat
said. He did not want to be named.
More than 300
lawyers are registered with the Swat Bar Association, and lawyers’
associations in other parts of the country have expressed concerns
about the welfare of their colleagues in the troubled NWFP district.
The irony is
that Sufi Mohammed’s order came on the same day that the government
announced Mr. Chaudhary’s restoration following a “long march” led
by the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and lawyers demanding
his restoration as basic to the “rule of law” in the country.
It led to the
comment by columnist Ejaz Haider in the Daily Times that unless the
Swat situation was fixed, “the title Chief Justice of Pakistan would
need a suffix in parenthesis — sans Swat — because the system
Justice Chaudhary heads is not acceptable to Sufi Mohammed running
his satrapy.”
Dawn newspaper
reported that at least one “qazi court” has already pronounced a
judgment in a civil case, directing the respondent to pay Rs.17,000
to the applicant, and a further Rs.20,000 in four instalments.
Sufi Mohammed’s
son Rizwanullah Khan told journalists that the regular judges had
taken a “wise decision” not to attend courts.
“In Sharia,
there is no room for courts functioning under English law,” he said.
Some lawyers had tried to persuade Sufi Mohammed to allow them to
practice; but he rejected the appeal, telling them their profession
was against Islam.
The Swat lawyer
said that people of the district had accepted the new system because
it was giving them quick justice. “The people are not on our side,
they will not fight for us, and the lawyers here are not strong
enough to fight back on their own,” he said.
25 March 2009
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