The Pakistan Army has taken the right course by deciding that
officers owing allegiance to banned organisations cannot be tolerated. A military court has sent to jail five military officers, including a brigadier,
for membership of a terrorist organisation called Hizbut Tahrir (HUT)
and for attempting to overthrow the political order in the name of
religion. Brigadier Ali Khan got five years while Major Sohail Akbar,
Major Jawwad Baseer, Major Inayat Aziz and Major Iftikhar have been
jailed for three years, two years, and 18 months each, respectively.
Brigadier Khan came into the focus of army investigators after al Qaeda
chief Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in May 2011. He called
for the resignation of army and ISI chiefs over bin Laden’s killing and
wrote letters to army generals on how to become self-reliant and cleanse
the army of American influence.
The army is a part of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Anyone who
arrogates to himself the right to work towards overthrowing the
constitutionally established military institution in favour of whatever
personal programme is guilty of treason and cannot be allowed to operate
freely.
UK-based HUT and its sister outfit al Muhajirun
were allowed into Pakistan in the early 2000s under former General
(retd) Pervez Musharraf’s government. Their founder, Umar Bakri, a
Syrian Arab preacher, has since been exiled from the UK. Among his
followers were many Pakistanis belonging to the largest Muslim minority
in Britain.
According to a former HUT activist, Majid Nawaz, the HUT was set-up
in Pakistan in the early 1990s by Imtiaz Malik, a British Muslim and in
1999, a call was sent to British HUT members to move to Pakistan, which
prompted the movement of some of the UK’s top quality activists to South
Asia. At least 10 British activists were planted in each of Pakistan’s
main cities. Egypt, Libya and Pakistan banned the HUT which was
proscribed by Pakistan in 2004, following an alleged plot to assassinate
former president Pervez Musharraf.
More recently, on October 22, 2009, the HUT was banned in Bangladesh
for allegedly trying to destabilise the country. The home secretary of
Bangladesh said the government “feared the HUT posed a serious threat to
peaceful life”.
In his book, Islam under Siege: Living Dangerously in Post-Honour World (Polity Press 2003) Akbar S Ahmed, a former Pakistan’s High Commissioner in the UK, wrote:
“In Britain, Sheikh Umar Bakri’s Khilafah, the journal of the Hizbut Tahrir, attacked Jinnah as a kafir
and an insult for a Muslim. Moreover, it accused Jinnah of being an
enemy of God and of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) because Jinnah supported
women, Christians and Hindus, and advocated democracy. Why, I asked
myself, did they pick on Jinnah? Because, I concluded, Bakri saw him as a
major ideological opponent. Significantly, after the American strikes
in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, Bakri emerged in the media to claim
that he represented Bin Laden in Europe” (P 113).
It is common knowledge in Pakistan that non-state actors have decided
to shift their allegiance from Pakistan to terrorist organisations like
al Qaeda. The Pakistan Army is fighting them in parts of our tribal
areas and offering sacrifices in the shape of casualties to save
Pakistan from the clutches of these terrorists. One deserter army
officer, Major Haroon Ashiq, is in jail for working for al Qaeda, putting the nation on notice about the kind of danger Pakistan faces.
Misguided officers were moved more by blind emotion than by reason
and information, otherwise they could not have joined an outfit that
condemned the founder of Pakistan and the idea of Pakistan on the basis
of which Pakistan has given itself a constitution. The army is
overwhelmingly loyal to the ideology of Pakistan but a few officers may
be led astray because of their insulation from civil society. In
Pakistan, despite its efforts, the HUT has not won any support from an
electorate that accepts democracy and votes for parties that accept the
representative system operating in the country.
