HYDERABAD, May 19: Political parties and civil society groups have assured lawyers that they are not alone in the latest round of their movement for independence judiciary, and will find political workers and civil society activists with them in the upcoming long march.

The Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan said that the people would not be deceived by the rulers who wanted to sabotage lawyers’ movement on the pretext of dialogue.

JUP senior vice-president Dr Sahibzada Abul Khair Mohammad Zubair said in a statement that lynching of dacoits in Karachi was a clarion call to the rulers and should serve as an eye opener for them. “This is a sign of revolution,” he warned and said that if price hike, rampant unemployment, poverty, hunger, lawlessness and street crime were not controlled and the deposed judges were not restored, the ‘inferno could explode any time.’

Lauding sacrifices of the lawyers, Dr Zubair said that the Khadimeen of the JUP would struggle side by side with them for restoration of judges.

Meanwhile, the Peace and Human Rights Trust has announced that their officials and activists would take part in the long march.

The trust president, Aslam Rana, said that the poor, particularly bonded peasants, could not get justice from the courts except through Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Choudhry and other judges who had refused to take oath under the PCO.

Talking to journalists at the press club here on Monday, Mr Rana was all praise for Justice Choudhry and said that his dispensation of justice was unprecedented. No judge before him had ever heard grievances of those peasants who were forced to work under bondage at farmlands of landlords and kept in private prisons, he said.

He recalled that it was Justice Choudhry who had taken suo motu notice in the case of Mannu Bheel, a peasant of Jhuddo, whose entire family was kidnapped by the henchmen of an influential landlord of Jhol in May 1998.

Mr Rana said that on the orders of Justice Choudhry, the landlord was arrested and was still in Hyderabad central jail but the Mannu Bheel case had not been heard by the Supreme Court since March 9, 2007.

He called on the ruling party to take steps to liberate more than two million bonded peasants still languishing in private jails of landlords and to make arrangements for rehabilitation of liberated haris who were living under inhuman conditions in seven camps in Kotri and around Hyderabad.

He also urged the PPP leadership to implement land reforms initiated by the party founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and distribute state land in Sindh among landless peasants.

He urged Sindh Dr Shoaib Suddle to post honest and God-fearing police officers in Sanghar and Mirpurkhas district who could recover family of Mannu Bheel and other bonded peasants from private jails of landlords.

Mr Rana announced that Iqbal Ahmed Khan had been appointed the trust coordinator for Hyderabad district.