The Pakistani security agencies are in a heightened state of alert all over the country to prevent any violent outbreak after the Friday prayers on May13, 2005, in protest against allegations of desecration of the Holy Koran by US guards at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
These allegations were first voiced by the American magazine Newsweek.Its report has been picked up all over the Islamic world and the allegations are spreading like wildfire right across the tribal region on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, resulting in an unprecedented outbreak of violent incidents.
These incidents have been directed not only against the US and President George Bush, but also against President Karzai of Afghanistan, who was out on one of his frequent visits to theWest--this time to Brussels--when the riots broke out in Jalalabad near the Pakistan border and from there spread to Wardak, Laghman andKhost.
The initiative for organising the protest demonstrations, which culminated in violence, was taken not by theMullahs, but by the local students, who burnt effigies of Bush and Karzai. The outbreak shows that despite being a Pashtun himself, Karzai enjoys very little support amongst the Pashtuns of the area despite his impressive victory in the presidential elections of last October.
Many of the detenus at the Guantanamo Bay, Arabs as well as Pashtuns, had been arrested by the US forces in this area after the US military intervention inOctober, 2001, and by the Pakistani security agencies in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Reports of the ill-treatment of the detenus by the US forces responsible for the camp have been spreading in the area for over a year after some of the Pakistani tribals released by the US authorities returned to their villages. Their reports of individual ill-treatment of the detenus by the US forces did not cause the kind of anger and outrage that has now been caused by the allegations of the desecration of the Holy Koran. The entire tribal belt is boiling with rage.
The escalation in anti-US and anti-Karzai anger, which is being exploited by the Taliban, Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami and the Pakistani jihadi organisations allied with the Al Qaeda in the International Islamic Front (IIF), has come at a time when the Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami have launched their spring offensive in southern and eastern Afghanistan, coinciding with the 13th anniversary of the overthrow of the pro-Moscow Najibullahgovernment by the Afghan Mujahideen in April,1992.
There has been a large number of fatalities in the clashes which have taken place during the last two weeks, between the Pakistan-based cadres of the Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami on the one side and the US and the Afghan Government forces on the other.
While the US and Afghan authorities have attributed the casualties to the large number of trained cadres deployed by the Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami, these organisations have alleged that the fatalities were actually of innocent civilians killed by the US and Afghan forces due to their excessive use of force.
Reports of the fighting received so far indicate the presence of a large number of Pakistanis, Uzbecks and Chechens in the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami contingents, which have launched the offensive. The return of the body of the one of the Pakistanis killed in the clashes to his town called Sarobi in North Waziristan on May 11 led to a large anti-US protest in which about 6,000 local tribals participated.
As more and more dead bodies of Pakistanis allegedly killed by the US and Afghan forces are brought back into Pakistan and as the allegations of the desecration of the Holy Koran spread further, the protests in Pakistan too could take a violent turn. They could be directed not only against the US, but also against President PervezMusharraf.
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B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai, Chapter.
