Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (30 page)

Along with journalists and other members of the press, lawyers were also vocal critics of Zia’s regime. Since the earliest days of the junta, Pakistani lawyers ‘intermittently held conventions, organized protest marches, boycotted the courts and offered themselves for arrest’
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to press for the demand that martial law be withdrawn, the judiciary freed, and civil and political rights restored. The lawyers’ movement that rose against Pervez Musharraf’s regime in 2007 was by no means the first of its kind; it had its roots in the lawyers’ movement against Zia ul Haq.

In the first few months of 1981 alone, 460 lawyers were arrested for demonstrating against martial law.
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The lawyers’ resistance was a clear reaction against the junta’s co-opting of the judiciary and its
interference in the state’s legal affairs. The infamous Doctrine of Necessity, which claims that ‘that which otherwise is not lawful, necessity makes lawful’, had been used retroactively by Pakistan’s courts to justify every period of martial law imposed by the army, and was also used to condone Zia’s seizure of power.
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Once the way had been cleared by the doctrine for Zia’s regime to remain in power, the General began to cultivate a judiciary favourable to the junta. By 1979 those judges who had demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm for the military in government had been swiftly sacked and replaced.
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The power of the civil courts had been clipped and Sharia courts and military tribunals were created to do the bidding of the regime.

The federal Sharia benches were comprised of clerics, often lacking any background in civil legal affairs. It was their job to examine whether laws were ‘repugnant to the provisions of Islam’ and on that basis declare the offensive laws immediately null and void.
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Meanwhile, the military tribunals were given a greatly expanded jurisdiction and were able to operate without civilian review. According to Ordinance 77, the tribunals were afforded the authority to hear all cases involving ‘political offences, violations against martial law regulations and all other offences under the Pakistan penal code’.
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The military tribunals wasted no time in discarding basic civil and legal liberties; under the new draconian court system prisoners did not have the right to be charged, could be held for indefinite periods without charge, the court was under no compunction to keep records of the charges or the ensuing legal proceedings, the number of cases tried under such courts were not made public, and legal counsel for the accused could only observe, not participate in, the proceedings against their clients.
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Several cases came to light in 1984 that encapsulated the illegality of the regime and spurred the legal community to further resistence. Two cases, both involving gross legal violations, especially galvanized it. The first was the Rawalpindi Jail Case in which eighteen defendants were arrested for ‘anti-state’ activities, though it would be a year before specific charges were lodged against them. Eventually their trial was held
in camera
in prison and they were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the
government with the aid of an unnamed foreign power. The defendants were denied a fair trial and refused access to their families, the press and often to their legal counsel.
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The second case, the Kot Lakhpat Jail Case, was an escalation of the previous one: fifty-four defendants were held on similar charges. However, in this case their lawyers were required to take a ‘secrecy oath’ by which they swore not to reveal any details of the trial, which was also held
in camera
in prison. Fifty of the defendants in the Kot Lakhpat Jail Case boycotted the trial and went on hunger strike to protest being held in subhuman conditions and denied the right of a fair trial.
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While these two particular trials garnered tremendous media attention and legal outrage, bringing more lawyers to the streets in protest, it was only the beginning. The regime had begun putting people to death for ‘anti-state’ activities at an alarming rate. It’s estimated that between 1979 and 1985, the peak of the junta’s brutality, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 people were put to death by the state. While mercy pleas were allowed, by the mid-1980s General Zia had not once commuted a death sentence.
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Zia had a penchant for the theatrical; along with sweeping midnight arrests and raids, it was possible to go to a neighbourhood stadium or cricket ground – it is worth noting that the national cricket team never protested and seemed more than happy to be used by the regime whenever necessary, such as in Zia’s foreign policy triumph of ‘cricket diplomacy’ with India, which was as one-dimensional as it sounds – and watch public floggings, public executions and, in time, public stonings of women. According to Foucault, public torture and executions do not re-establish justice, but rather ‘reactivate power’.
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They are highly political rituals wherein the injured ruler is restored to grandeur and sovereignty by manifesting his power at ‘its most spectacular’.
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While women were active in the political resistance and were members of the press and legal community, the Hudood Ordinances of 1979 opened up a new front for opposition led largely by women. The
Ordinances, which still remain in place today, are a compilation of laws dealing mainly with women’s bodies and the notion of
zina
, which in Arabic denotes sexual intercourse between an unmarried man and woman.
Zina bil jabr
is a variant taken to mean rape; however, under the junta’s new definition, consent was not the issue, but intercourse. A woman could be convicted by law after being raped because, willingly or not, she had had intercourse out of wedlock. Under the Hudood laws, rape victims were prosecuted alongside their rapists for engaging in
zina bil jabr.
The Ordinances also dealt with adultery, basic sexual relations and prostitution.
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The Hudood laws carried clauses prohibiting alcohol and narcotics, untoward activities carried out by minorities (whatever those may be), theft and other petty crimes. They were unusual not only in their puritanical reordering of private life but also in the punishments they prescribed for these ‘crimes’; most commonly public flogging and imprisonment, but also public stoning to death, amputations and fines.
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Prior to the implementation of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s penal code did not label fornication a crime, but rather had provisions for dealing with the crime of marital rape and viewed rape itself as a crime where the rapist, not the victim, was the sole party to be indicted under law.
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Moreover,
zina
laws under the Hudood Ordinances stipulated that an individual could be ‘found guilty with or without the consent of the other party’,
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which meant that women, as a result of medical evidence, were more likely to be convicted under the Ordinances than men. A simple examination could prove that a woman had recently had sex, or that she was no longer a virgin, but men’s innocence rested simply on their word.

The Hudood Ordinances define Zia’s medieval and barbaric rule, but he did more than just brutalize the nation’s laws; he fundamentally changed its people and society. In 1983, Lal Mai from Liaqatabad became the first woman to be publicly flogged on adultery charges under the Ordinances. Reports indicated that 8,000 men witnessed Mai receive her fifteen lashes.
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It’s unclear whether the spectators at Mai’s punishment were brought to the scene by the police and made to watch her public torture, as happened in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or whether
they were there out of morbid curiosity. But they were there, in their thousands.

Women all over Pakistan took to the streets calling for the removal of the Hudood Ordinances and were viciously beaten and arrested by the police for their protests.
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In addition, women lawyers organized under the Pakistan Women Lawyers Assocation (PWLA) and called conferences, under the threat of severe government harassment, in 1982, 1983 and finally 1985 to bring attention to the brutality of the Ordinances.
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Besides the PWLA, other women’s groups that exist in Pakistan today trace their origins back to the movement of resistance against Zia’s archaic laws. Several groups sprang up to organize women and campaign for increased rights, notably the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) and the Women’s Action Forum (WAF).
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No section of society was safe from the army’s interference in the early 1980s. Besides insinuating itself politically and legally into all corners of daily life, the army began to meddle in the running of Pakistan’s economy. If the army could not set the price of goods in the economic market, those goods would simply disappear. If the army could not take a cut out of black market profits, those vendors would be arrested and often flogged.
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Marx’s ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ did not produce a compliant labour force, but exactly the opposite, at least until 1985, when politics destroyed the resistance movement against the junta. Merchants and small street vendors were politically powerful in terms of numbers and engaged in visible grass-roots resistance. Traditionally, the group had not ‘actively supported any government except Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s’
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and thus made up a lively section of the resistance movement against the military junta. The short-term economic restrictions of making a living did not hinder merchants, traders or labourers from hitting back against the junta. Zia squeezed the group by attacking their rights and working conditions. They resisted by staging strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and marches in the streets throughout Zia’s tenure.
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Labour unions were broken by the regime and Zia actively oversaw the weakening of unionization and the labour rights movements. In 1981, the General banned all union activity in Pakistan International Airlines. PIA’s union offices were sealed and union office bearers and workers were arrested when they resisted the government’s decision.
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When workers of the newly commissioned Karachi Steel Mills demonstrated for more labour freedom in late 1981, they were beaten by the police and the president of the workers’ union was carted off to jail.
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The Pakistan Labour Conference, set to be held in Lahore that same year, was closed down by the government as their forces worked overtime blocking the entry of labour leaders into the Punjab province.
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The more union members resisted Zia’s anti-labour laws, the more ruthlessly they were punished. A trade union leader was notoriously held in both Camp and Kot Lakhpat jails and after being stripped on arrival in both prisons was stretched out on a
tiktiki
– an A-frame to which his hands, feet and midriff were tied – and whipped.
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Factory workers all over the country were routinely arrested, beaten and tortured by prison authorities for opposing the government’s anti-labour dictates and rallying for better working conditions.
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Urban professionals and intellectuals also played a substantial role in resisting martial law. The medical profession, otherwise neutral, took a unique and unprecedented stand against the junta. The Hudood Ordinances ordered that thieves be punished by amputation of the hands, and as the sole group qualified to mete out the punishment doctors refused to comply.
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Ghulam Ali from Okara was convicted of stealing a clock from his local mosque and sentenced to have his right hand removed; yet not a single doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the amputation, whereas we know that in countries where similar punishments are prescribed against theft, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, amputations were and are still carried out with the aid of the local medical communities. The courts had no choice but to convert Ghulam Ali’s sentence to six years of rigorous imprisonment instead.
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