Pakistan looks to tourism to fight terrorism

By David Montero
The Christian Science Monitor
April 5, 2007

Pakistan has declared 2007 its year of tourism. And what a year it’s been: dozens of bombings, the capture of a Taliban lieutenant, and now the Chief Justice of the country’s Supreme Court has been sacked, setting off violent street clashes.

While promoting tourism isn’t likely to take precedence over finding Al Qaeda leaders, President Pervez Musharraf’s regime is making hard-selling Pakistan’s softer side a priority. Still, how do you lure tourists when you are presumed to have terrorists?

But many, including the United Nations, see this as a novel approach to stability: Get more tourists, generate income, and the number of terrorists could decrease.”There are problems of security, problems of services. But we have to explore the potential [of tourism here],” says Jorge Sequeira, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Pakistan. “Not just to generate income, but to promote social stability.”

With characteristic bravado, Pakistan’s strategy is to take an unconventional approach to a pressing chicken-or-egg question: secure stability first or tourism? They’ll bring in tourists first, through Destination Pakistan 2007, a year of promotional events including a ski tournament in the Himalayas and a jeep rally in the Cholistan desert. Of course, there could be suicide bombings in between.”We have an image problem, yes, but doing nothing about it would not help,” says Salim Gul Shaikh, secretary of the Culture Ministry.

The effort gets to the heart of Pakistan’s existential crisis: one side is progressive and rapidly adopting the accoutrements of the West; the other, conservative, and perceived as dangerous by potential visitors.

“There has to be a balance. Obviously we have to keep our culture,” says Sheikh Fayyaz Ahmed, promotions manager for the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation.

Mr. Ahmed and others are banking on cultural assets like Taxila, which is home to one of the world’s most extensive remains of early Buddhist civilization, earning UNESCO’s distinction as a World Heritage site. And it’s just an hour’s drive from Islamabad, on good roads. With the Muslim call to prayer echoing over Greek and Buddhist ruins, it’s a timely reminder that Pakistan is a historical crossroad of faiths and ideas.

Tourism promotes interaction between Pakistanis and foreigners – a dose of good PR that both sides need, observers say.

“The key is knowledge. As we are misrepresented in the media, so, too, is the West,” says Naeem Tahir, director general of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.

Tourism could also boost badly needed stability: by helping reduce poverty, it can soften the conditions that drive extremism.

“Culture is an integral part of development,” says Mr. Sequeira, who points out that tourism is the world’s second-fastest growing industry.

Pakistan is ramping up its game. Millions in investment and rising tourism revenues have expanded employment in the tourism industry from about 320,000 in 1998 to 600,000 today, mostly in rural areas where development is needed most, according to government figures.

Still it won’t be easy. Farhat Abbas sells trekking tours where Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda top brass are alleged to hang out. Mr. Abbas, with his unlikely optimism, typifies the predicament of tourism in Pakistan – and the country.

“Pakistan is one of the best countries in the world to enjoy tourism,” he says, in the Islamabad office of Alpine Trekkers, his touring company since 1999. Among the attractions: K-2, the second-highest mountain peak after Everest, and six UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Despite Pakistan’s bad press, the Ministry of Tourism reports that nearly 800,000 foreigners visited in 2005, including more than 120,000 Americans, although this may include Pakistanis with foreign passports.

Still, Abbas says he’s faced a big slump since 9/11: He used to get 25 foreign groups in a good year; now he’s lucky to get six. He’s been trying to persuade tourists that things are not that bad. “It’s very safe. Believe me, the tourists who are visiting our country, most of them are repeatedly coming,” says Mr. Ahmed.

He may have a point. As in many developing countries, tourists are more likely to be bothered by unreliable transportation and a lack of potable water than a terrorist attack.

Still, many in Pakistan wonder if 2007, a turbulent election year, is the best time for a major tourism drive. A poignant reminder came in Abbas’s office. While discussing the benefits of tourism, he gestured toward the news on TV: lawyers battling police outside the Supreme Court. Pakistan just lost its Chief Justice, putting the rule of law, already a bit spotty, on shakier ground. “I think this will create some problems for the government,” Abbas says.

Protesters gather at Pakistan court

By Munir Ahmad, Associated Press 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Thousands of lawyers and flag-waving political activists rallied for the reinstatement of Pakistan’s chief justice as he appeared before a judicial panel investigating whether he abused his office.

Some 4,000 gathered near the Supreme Court in Islamabad, deriding President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for suspending Ifitkhar Mohammed Chaudhry as the court’s top judge three weeks ago. Some scuffled with police but the protests were largely peaceful.

“Musharraf, killer of justice,” protesters chanted. Thousands more lawyers rallied in Lahore and Karachi.

Chaudhry’s suspension has provoked a series of demonstrations across Pakistan and Musharraf’s worst political crisis since he seized power nearly eight years ago.

The government insists it acted constitutionally in suspending Chaudhry, who denies any wrongdoing. A panel of three judges is examining whether he abused his position by securing unwarranted privileges and bullying officials to give his son a police job.

However, critics of Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, accuse him of seeking to tame the court to ensure it doesn’t stand in the way of his continued rule.

During the last hearing against Chaudhry, on March 16, riot police fought with stone-throwing demonstrators and stormed the studio of the Geo television channel that was broadcasting footage of the unrest. Musharraf apologized in person to the TV station, but failed to silence accusations of authoritarianism.

Information Minister Mohammed Ali Durrani said Tuesday’s demonstration was permitted.

“Everyone is allowed to express their views, but it should be peaceful,” he said.

Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops were positioned near the court, where concrete blocks and coils of barbed wire closed approach roads to traffic. Police scuffled briefly with demonstrators who tried to follow Chaudhry’s car into the court complex.

On Monday, authorities placed the leader of an alliance of religious parties under house arrest, and the Pakistan Peoples Party, the biggest opposition group, complained that police had picked up a dozen of its activists in and around the capital overnight.

That failed to deter demonstrators who waved colorful party flags, chanted “Down with Musharraf!” and brandished banners with slogans including “Don’t destroy the judiciary.”

“Everyone should support the chief justice, it is our moral duty,” Makhdoom Amin Fahim, vice president of the Pakistan Peoples Party, told the crowd. “Everyone should also help us get rid of President Musharraf, who is the root cause of every problem.”

A parallel demonstration in the eastern city of Lahore drew about 2,000 lawyers, who staged a sit-down in front of the provincial parliament. In Karachi, Pakistan’s southern port, about 1,500 lawyers marched to the provincial High Court chanting slogans in support of the chief justice. There was also a small gathering of lawyers in Quetta, near the Afghan border.

The United States, which considers Musharraf a key ally in its fight against terrorism, and the European Union have both expressed concern about the standoff and its implications for parliamentary elections due at the end of 2007.

Musharraf is expected to seek re-election as president from the outgoing legislature, a move the opposition could challenge in the Supreme Court, especially if he refuses to give up his post as army chief.

Pakistan: Fundamentalists Abduct Brothel Owner

By Matthew Pennington, Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Female Islamic students on an anti-vice drive have abducted an alleged brothel owner and have locked her up at their fundamentalist seminary in the Pakistani capital, police said Wednesday.

Authorities have arrested four of the seminary’s teachers in connection with the abduction. With jihadist songs playing on the loudspeakers of a neighboring mosque, about 200 students staged a protest at the school Wednesday demanding their release.

Abdul Rashid Ghazi, vice principal at the seminary, threatened jihad, or holy war, unless the teachers were freed by 4 p.m. He said this was in line with a religious decree issued by the Lal Masjid mosque’s prayer leader — Ghazi’s brother, Abdul Aziz.

“These vulgarities (brothels) are destroying society and the decree says that in this situation, jihad is the only way,” he said, without specifying what that would entail. “They (police) have arrested our respected, veiled teachers for a corrupt woman.”

A police officer confirmed that a number of the Jamia Hafsa seminary’s teachers had been arrested Wednesday for holding an alleged brothel owner known as Aunty Shamim.

Authorities are holding negotiations with the school administrators to hand over the woman to the police but they are “being unreasonable,” the officer said on condition of anonymity because he was unauthorized to make comments to the media.

“They have taken the law into their hands,” the officer said.

Ghazi confirmed that some of Jamia Hafsa’s students had abducted Shamim in a raid of the alleged brothel late Tuesday, along with “a few” of her employees. He said Shamim had promised to close the brothel, but they still had her locked up in a room at the seminary.

The Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad and associated seminaries have a reputation for preaching hardline Islam and links to an outlawed militant group. Their defiance of the government has exposed its failure to regulate Pakistan’s thousands of religious schools, even in the federal capital.

Since January, hundreds of its female seminary students have staged a sit-in at a municipal children’s library next door, to protest authorities’ demolition of mosques that have encroached on public land. They are refusing to vacate the library until all the mosques are rebuilt.