October 18, 2007	Thursday	Shawwal 5, 1428

LAHORE, Oct 17: The Women’s Action Forum (WAF) is concerned at the Supreme Court’s recent suo motu action with regard to Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa, whereby it understands that the apex court has directed the government to reopen the mosque, to return it to its previous management, and to reconstruct Jamia Hafsa building at its former location.

A WAF press release said on Wednesday the forum had been resisting religious extremism in all its forms for the last 26 years. “Today, we believe that extremist ideology and militant Islamism threaten our country’s unity and stability,” the release added.

It said categorically that until such trends were discouraged, the country would neither progress, nor be at peace with itself or others and added: “The WAF has condemned the extremists’ provocative stand-off and the subsequent actions of both the mosque’s management and the law enforcement agencies, as well as the bungled attempts at a political resolution (of the issue) between January-July 2007, and in particular, the senseless killings of 13 July under the Operation Silence”.

However, it said, the WAF held the Lal Masjid/Jamia Hafsa management, especially Umme Hassaan and the Aziz-Ghazi brothers, responsible for the ordeal of the innocent and helpless students under their charge, who, it added were ‘completely brainwashed and were eventually used as a physical shield for the management’.

The WAF, the press release said, believed that masjids and madressash were not inherited private properties with unlimited freedom, but were controlled by state institutions and laws, just like all the other NGOs and private entities.

In what may be called a whitepaper against Lal Masjid clerics, the WAF said the Aziz-Ghazi family violated numerous state and municipal laws and turned the sacred precincts into battlefields. They built the madressah illegally by encroaching upon state (Ministry of Education) land, obtained and stashed large quantities of illegal weapons and ammunition within the mosque and madressah premises, were responsible for anti-state indoctrination of seminary students and providing military training to them, held hostage the Children’s Library for six months, abducted and publicly humiliated a private citizen, Begum Shamim, kidnapped, tortured and publicly humiliated Chinese citizens working in Islamabad, closed down the commercial activities of Aabpara and Melody markets, caused the siege of an entire sector’s residents under curfew for a prolonged period, depriving them of even the basic necessities of life and livelihood, set fire to state property, confiscated and burnt large quantities of privately-owned CDs and DVDs, terrorised the neighbourhood shopkeepers, threatened women teachers and students of co-educational institutions (especially at the Quaid-i-Azam University), and took police personnel hostage, it added.