Lahore, Pakistan

THE chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court,
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and his family have
been detained in their house, barricaded in with
barbed wire and surrounded by police officers in
riot gear since Nov. 3. Phone lines have been cut
and jammers have been installed all around the
house to disable cellphones. And the United
States doesn’t seem to care about any of that.

The chief justice is not the only person who has
been detained. All of his colleagues who, having
sworn to protect, uphold and defend the
Constitution, refused to take a new oath
prescribed by President Pervez Musharraf as chief
of the army remain confined to their homes with
their family members. The chief justice’s lawyers
are also in detention, initially in such medieval
conditions that two of them were hospitalized,
one with renal failure.

As the chief justice’s lead counsel, I, too, was
held without charge - first in solitary
confinement for three weeks and subsequently
under house arrest. Last Thursday morning, I was
released to celebrate the Id holidays. But that
evening, driving to Islamabad to say prayers at
Faisal Mosque, my family and I were surrounded at
a rest stop by policemen with guns cocked and I
was dragged off and thrown into the back of a
police van. After a long and harrowing drive
along back roads, I was returned home and to
house arrest.

Every day, thousands of lawyers and members of
the civil society striving for a liberal and
tolerant society in Pakistan demonstrate on the
streets. They are bludgeoned by the regime’s
brutal police and paramilitary units. Yet they
come out again the next day.

People in the United States wonder why extremist
militants in Pakistan are winning. What they
should ask is why does President Musharraf have
so little respect for civil society - and why
does he essentially have the backing of American
officials?

The White House and State Department briefings on
Pakistan ignore the removal of the justices and
all these detentions. Meanwhile, lawyers, bar
associations and institutes of law around the
world have taken note of this brave movement for
due process and constitutionalism. They have
displayed their solidarity for the lawyers of
Pakistan. These include, in the United States
alone, the American Bar Association , state and
local bars stretching from New York and New
Jersey to Louisiana, Ohio and California, and
citadels of legal education like Harvard and Yale
Law Schools.

The detained chief justice continues to receive
enormous recognition and acknowledgment. Harvard
Law School has conferred on him its highest
award, placing him on the same pedestal as Nelson
Mandela and the legal team that argued Brown v.
Board of Education. The National Law Journal has
anointed him its lawyer of the year. The New York
City Bar Association has admitted him as a rare
honorary member. Despite all this, the Musharraf
regime shows no sign of relenting.

But for how long? How long can the chief justice
and his colleagues be kept in confinement? How
long can the leaders of the lawyers’ movement be
detained? They will all be out one day. And they
will neither be silent nor still.

They will recount the brutal treatment meted out
to them for seeking the establishment of a
tolerant, democratic, liberal and plural
political system in Pakistan. They will state how
the writ of habeas corpus was denied to them by
the arbitrary and unconstitutional firing of
Supreme and High Court justices. They will spell
out precisely how one man set aside a
Constitution under the pretext of an “emergency,”
arrested the judges, packed the judiciary,
“amended” the Constitution by a personal decree
and then “restored” it to the acclaim of London
and Washington.

They will, of course, speak then. But others are
speaking now. The parliamentary elections
scheduled for Jan. 8 have already been rigged,
they are saying. The election commission and the
caretaker cabinet are overtly partisan. The
judiciary is entirely hand-picked. State
resources are being spent on preselected
candidates. There is a deafening uproar even
though the independent news media in Pakistan are
completely gagged. Can there even be an election
in this environment?

Are they being heard? I’m afraid not.