Musharraf Says ‘Sorry’ After Bloody Attacks

Police in Pakistan’s Lahore city stormed a convention of lawyers on Saturday and arrested several of them, according to latest reports.

“Lawyers attending the meet were brutally beaten up and lawyers in the High Court struck back with stones. Lawyers in business suits poured out of the meeting and hurled stones at police who threw them back. Police chasing stone-throwers ransacked nearby offices, witnesses said.

“The High Court has now been sealed. The violent standoff began after President Pervez Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhry of Pakistan’s Supreme Court on March 9.”

There is yet another crisis as no lawyer is willing to represent Pakistan government in judge’s case. The government is unable to find a lawyer of any standing to represent it before the supreme judicial council in the reference against the chief justice, says DNA.

“Bar councils and bar associations throughout the country are quick to suspend the memberships of lawyers perceived to be associated with the government in this crisis. All this, in support of a chief justice who was no one’s favourite, in fact, against whom lawyers had grievances regarding his behaviour in court.

“Furious, and unanimous in their condemnation of the attempt to sack the chief justice, lawyers see this as a reprehensible step by a general-sitting-as-president to rob the judiciary of what is left of its independence.

“The manner in which the chief justice was ‘summoned’ by the president and kept waiting for hours at his camp office; the haste with which Justice Javed Iqbal was sworn in as acting chief justice without waiting for Rana Bhagwandas, the senior most judge, to return from his leave; the detention and holding incommunicado the ‘suspended’ chief justice; his manhandling by the police; the baton charge and pelting of lawyers taking out a procession in Lahore; preventing lawyers from entering Islamabad to protest outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday; taking independent TV channels off air to stop them from reporting. All this can not merely be the result of incompetent advice because no one can be that consistently and perpetually incompetent.”

Now the typical bluff and bluster Musharraf game begins. After bashing up the media organisations black and blue, the General orders a ‘judicial enquiry’, suspends 14 policeman, lifts restrictions imposed on the movement of the battered and bruised chief justice…the list goes on. But is he fooling the world or himself?