Pakistan works to stop Asia Bibi leaving after blasphemy protests
NB: This is a government and a polity of misogynists and murderers, pure and simple. In the words of a former editor of Dawn, it has gone insane. Millions of men are thirsting for the blood of a poor and helpless woman labourer. Shame on you. DS
Pakistan’s government
has been accused of signing the “death warrant” of Asia Bibi after it said it
would begin the process of preventing her leaving the country. Bibi, a Christian farm
labourer, was acquitted of blasphemy on Wednesday. She had spent eight years on
death row after she drank from the same cup as a Muslim, prompting false
allegations that she insulted the prophet Muhammad.
Bibi’s lawyer,
Saif-ul-Mulook, has reportedly since fled the country amid fears for his life,
telling AFP: “I need to stay alive as I still have to fight the legal battle
for Asia Bibi.”
The ruling Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration signed an agreement with the
anti-blasphemy group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) on Friday night, giving
in to many of its demands in the face of massive,
countrywide protests calling for Bibi to be put to death. In a document signed
by the PTI’s religious affairs minister and the TLP’s second-in-command, Pir
Afzal Qadri, the government promised not to oppose a court petition to reverse
Bibi’s release. It also pledged to work in the meantime to put her name on the
exit control list (ECL) which would prevent her leaving the country.
“Placing Asia Bibi on
the ECL is like signing her death warrant,” said Wilson Chowdhry of the British
Pakistani Christian Association. Bibi, a mother of five, remains in the same
prison where last month two men tried to kill her, although she has been
shifted out of her windowless cell.
The agreement was a
“historic capitulation”, tweeted analyst Mosharraf Zaidi. On Wednesday night,
the prime minister and leader of the PTI, Imran Khan, defended
the verdict acquitting Bibi and suggested the government would clamp
down on protesters it termed “enemies of the state”.
The TLP has agreed to
call off its protests, which saw thousands of Islamists blockade the country’s
major motorways, burning cars and lorries and chanting that they were ready to
die to protect the honour of the prophet. Meanwhile, the
government has promised to free any TLP workers arrested during the three-day
protest. The group has only apologised for the damage it caused, the cost of
which one government official estimated at $1.2bn (£900m). Afzal Qadri told the
Guardian “the government has almost accepted our maximum demands” and that if
it backtracked “we can come [out on the streets] again”... read more:
