Random Chusses…

As reported by the daily times the local MNA Pir Saqlain Shah (who is responsible for the initial FIR against the Ahmadis) in Layyah has been instigating people to protest today against the Ahmadis accused of blasphemy.

LAHORE: A Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) member of National Assembly from Layyah has instigated the local people to observe a protest today (Tuesday) against four teenagers and a man belonging to the Ahmadiyya community arrested on the charges of blasphemy, a rights body said on Monday. The accused will be brought before a court today. A press release issued on Monday by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) stated that some radical groups had announced a show of strength against Ahmadis to pressurise the court not to grant bail to the five Ahmadis. The accused were arrested on January 28 on charges of writing blasphemous comments in a mosque toilet. They were shifted to Dera Ghazi Khan Central Jail, where the fundamentalist groups had asked other inmates to ‘fix up’ the Ahmadis, according to the statement. The commission urged the Punjab government to stop the violent campaign. staff report

As most of the press, especially the Urdu media refuses to cover this story, the Friday times has included a series of articles on the Layyah case in this weeks edition. Syed Hussain has even chronicled the whole incident. I’ll include some excerpts here:

On the evening of February 9, 2009, several thousand protestors – over 10,000 accoring to independant sources – gathered in Chak 172/TDA in the Layyah district in Southern Punjab. The protestors including many belonging to banned and active extremist organisations like the Jama’at-ud-Dawa, were chanting anti-Ahmadi slogans and calling on the government to sentence to death four Ahmadi youths (students of class 9 and 10 at a local academy) and an Ahmadi teacher for alleged blasphemy under section 295 of the Pakistan Penal Code. Seven Ahmadi families were at the mercy of the mob that evening, and were threatened, but did not leave the village.

They were accused of ‘disgracing’ the name of the Holy Prophet and they protests were organized by groups like Tehreek-e Khatm-e Nabuwwat, Sipah Sahaba and Jama’at-ud Dawa. They police arrested the accused stating that it was for their own ‘protection’. There was obviously no eye witnesses or any other proof.

The main Mullah in this campaign is Maulana Noor Elahi Kulachi a Jama’at-ud-Dawa activist and his son Shahbaz Qasim who on January 28 got together with Iqbal Hussain Shah, uncle of local MNA Pir Saqlain Shah and filed an FIR against the four accused children. The arrested were sent on judicial remand by the local court of Feb 4 despite the lack of any sort of evidence. That’s why these cases should NOT be heard in local courts.

The sole argument presented by the accusers is that since no Muslim can dare write the name of the Prophet on a latrine wall, it must have been written by someone from the Ahmadi sect.

That’s quite an argument. Apparently it made a big impression on the local magistrate. The local Ahmadi community has of course since faced social boycott. There’s a vigorous campaign under way against the Ahmadi. The Mullahs are back in business doing what they do best. They’re having a field day distributing incendiary pamphlets and reminding people that Ahmadis are wajib-ul-qatal and should be eliminated. Police remains powerless. They don’t want to enrage the local MNA’s uncle as the Islamists enjoy his support. Interestingly the Imam of the Gulzar-e-Madina mosque has been kept out of the loop by the extremists.

The imam of the local mosque, Maulvi Saeed told TFT that graffiti on toilet walls is a norm here, and people write each other’s names all the time. He was asked by some villagers to stop people  from writing each other’s names on toilet walls. Saeed stated that there is no eyewitness for the incident, adding that “when i saw the graffiti the next day, it had almost completely been erased”. Saeed was not invited to the Feb 9 ‘conference’ organised by local religious and political groups. Saeed also alleges that he was forced by Shahbaz Qasim and his associates to remain absent from the scene during police investigations.

(Furthermore) minority circles in the government and the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, are quiet on the issue. Previously, while outside government, they had been vigilant and had protested incidents of persecution and discrimination.

Since these tools of Islamic extremism were enacted by the late General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, they’ve been frequently used by extremists elements to persecute minorities. But nobody in the government and the civil community has had the courage to stand against the Mullah and have them repealed. With the acceptance of Shariah law in Swat and the unwillingness to stop the prosecution of minorities the current government seems to be following the same path…

As part of my current job as a software worker one of the things that I have to do is debug windows services. .Net services to be precise. Our project consists of several windows services that do some very important tasks. Never really liked Windows services. I’ve always found them hard to debug and monitor. Sometimes we don’t even need one and a console application driven by the Windows® task scheduler can do the job just fine. Anyway, earlier I used to output messages on the event log to see what was happening. But it seems there’s another way (news for me) and that is:

     System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch();
     System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Debug();

Planting this code in maybe the OnStart() method of the service pops up the window asking you whether you want to debug. You say yes, Visual Studio opens up and you are on your merry debugging way. Once it starts debugging your breakpoints work too.

Of course its easy to do this in the local development environment but the problems occur in production environment and getting to the root of that can be a lot of pain. First of all there’s usually no development environment on the production machine (I mean Visual Studio of course). There’s also no code. And sometimes you don’t even have access to the production machine. Plus the production environment has its own settings (connection strings, DB, email servers etc). So it can be lot of fun…or pain…

So finally Pakistan get a test series. Didn’t think this was possible but apparently PCB has got the Sri Lankans to come and play a 2 test series. After the fiasco in Mumbai, Sri Lanka was our only option really, after Bangladesh of course. Sooo the first test starts Feb 21 in Karachi followed by the second one on 1 March in Lahore (I wouldn’t be watching of course with all the office work). Last test Pakistan played was in Bangalore in December 2007 against India. That was a long time ago. The time when Mohammad Yousuf was the leading batsman of test cricket scoring lots of runs and centuries. But then Pakistan was boycotted and Yousuf didn’t get a chance to show his skills anymore. So he joined the ICL again. To give Pakistan strength in the middle order Asim Kamal, one of my favorite players who never made it, has been included in the preliminary squad. The forgotten hero is back in business it seems. At last his chance to score a century. He used to score a lot of half centuries but never got to 3 figure. Shoaib Akhtar the superstar, the only superstar that we have, is of course injured…

And of course, Jayawardene will step down from captaincy after the Pakistan series. He shouldn’t just resign because he lost 4-1 to the invincible Indians. Indians are unbeatable these days. You can’t take a defeat to them to heart. He wants his successor to have sufficient time to ‘build the team for the 2011 world cup’. Seriously! what’s with this world cup? Its only a tournament. You can’t play every series trying to build for the world cup. A few days ago Ranatunga was also worried that SL won’t win another world cup. Who cares about the world cup? World cup is over rated and over hyped. India is going to win it anyway. So why bother trying to ‘build for the world cup’…

After much drama and confusion Mohammad Asif gets a one year ban from the IPL tribunal for his drug activities. The ban will run till September 21, 2009 after which he might be eligible to play cricket. He’s already been released from his IPL team of course. What a waste of talent. Not that it matters much I guess. During this whole drug thing Pakistan hasn’t exactly played any cricket. Let’s see what new stuff Asif comes up with now…

Pictures taken on January 19th 2009…

Police has arrested another Ahmadi in Layyah after being put under pressure by the local Mullah driven mobs who threatened “to seal the city and attack the houses of Ahmadis”. On 30th January the mullah lead mob of angry and uneducated villagers tried to set the houses of Ahmadis on fire a day after four minor boys were arrested on blasphemy charges.

Police had registered a case (number 46/9) in the Kot Sultan police station against Tahir Imran (16), Tahir Mahmood (14), Naseer Ahmad (14), Muhammad Irfan (14), and Mubashar Ahmad (45) under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code.

According to BBC Urdu Liaquat Ali the guy who registered the FIR says there was some blasphemous material written on the latrines of the local mosque. The boys had been prohibited by the locals to offer prayers in the Muslim mosque. The blasphemous stuff may have been in response to that.

Noor Elah Kulachi seems to be the master Mullah behind this operation. Member of both Sipah-e-Sahaba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa he knows his business well. Saqlain Shah the MNA thinks that instead of denying charges the matter should have been resolved in line with local traditions(Seriously?)…

Noor Elahi Kulachi – a retired schoolteacher, and, as the SHO confirmed, a member of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba – complained to Iqbal Hussain Shah, the uncle of the local National Assembly member Saqlain Shah. According to the FIR, Iqbal Hussain called the SHO and the people who had seen the writings to his outhouse, where they “probed the incident” to find the Ahmadi children guilty.

But the local leader of the Ahmadiyya community alleged that Kulachi – who was also a member of Jamaatud Dawa – had pressured Iqbal Hussain to direct the police to register the case, and the latter complied because of the Jamaatud Dawa votebank in the constituency.

Saqlain Shah, an MNA from the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, denied his uncle had pressured police. But he said representatives of the Ahmadiyya community should have visited his uncle’s residence for the matter to be resolved in line with local traditions, instead of denying charges.

The new arrest comes just a day after the boys were arrested.

LAHORE: The police in Layyah on Friday arrested another person from the district’s Kot Sultan area, accusing him of blasphemy, Station House Officer (SHO) Rauf Khalid told Daily Times.

The man, Mubashar Ahmed (45), is the fifth person of the Ahmadiyya community to be detained in the blasphemy case since Wednesday.

Four other minor boys, aged between 14 and 16, have also been charged in the case under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code.

According to the First Information Report (FIR), the boys are accused of writing blasphemous material in latrines of Kot Sultan’s Gulzar-e-Madina mosque. The boys are students of grade nine and 10 at the Superior Academy in Chak 172/TDA of Layyah.

Remand: The SHO said he had obtained a two-day remand of the boys, adding Layyah District Police Officer (DPO) Dr Muhammad Azam and Dera Ghazi Khan Investigation Police Superintendent (SP) Pervaiz Tareen were heading the probe.

Tareen said he had returned to DG Khan after completing his probe on Friday, adding he had appointed a deputy SP to conduct the remaining investigation.

The SP said he would not question the accused boys anymore, but refused to disclose his findings.

A group of lawyers on Friday announced to argue the boys’ case for free, while a press release by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) condemned the charges against the four boys.

Pressure: After contacting the Layyah DPO, the boys’ relatives were told that the police were under pressure from fundamentalists to act against the boys, AHRC said in the statement.

“The DPO said if he did not arrest the accused, the group had threatened to seal the city and attack the houses of Ahmadis. Worried about civic unrest, the officer arrested the children,” the AHRC said.

Evidence: It said no evidence had been provided prior to the five arrests. However, Kot Sultan SHO Khalid told the AHRC that the gravity of the case justified the arrests.

According to an amendment made by parliament in 2004 in Section 295-C of the constitution, the police are bound to thoroughly investigate blasphemy accusations before levelling criminal charges. The aim of the amendment was to reduce the scope of the blasphemy laws, which are still widely and frequently abused, and often result in death penalties. The AHRC urged President Asif Ali Zardari to immediately intervene and order the release of the detained people.

I highly doubt President Zardari would do anything. After all it was his father in law that declared the Ahmadis Non Muslims. Even if he or the police want to its going to be difficult to appease the angry uneducated mobs driven by Mullahs. They only listen to their Mullahs and of course the Maulvis will never back down. Its after all their job…to persecute innocent minorities like the Ahmadis using poor uneducated mobs. We should remember these kids in our prayers…