Doug Lorimer
On May 21 human-rights activists in Lahore finally succeeded in holding a mixed-sex marathon after the authorities decided against intervening or stopping the event by force. An earlier mixed marathon, on May 14, was stopped by police, who arrested most of the 45 participants.
According to the May 22 Dawn newspaper, Lahore police chief Aftab Cheema said that since the May 21 marathon was "a sporting activity" there was "no question of a violation of section 144" of the Pakistani criminal code, which bans the assembly of more than five people in a particular area.
"The participants, led by Human Rights Commission of Pakistan representative Asma Jehangir, made victory signs and raised slogans against fundamentalists and the establishment all along the route", Dawn reported.
The route of the Marathon for Civil Liberties was, however, changed at the last minute as protesters from the right-wing Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) religious alliance had gathered on the road it was originally to be staged on.
Members of the MMA and the Shabab-i-Milli fundamentalist group had also assembled at the Gaddafi Stadium where the event ended but were kept away from the 700 marathon participants, including 200 women runners, by a heavy police presence, Dawn reported.
"In our culture, no parent would like to see their daughter running on the roads along with the boys and that, too, in shorts", Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, the deputy leader of the MMA, Pakistan's main conservative Islamic party, told reporters.
The May 25 Belfast Telegraph reported that the "attempts to have the mixed-sex races banned are the most visible part of a campaign by Islamists to enforce cultural orthodoxy in Pakistan, particularly where women are concerned. The MMA recently introduced a bill to ban women from appearing in advertisements. Making or publishing an 'indecent' advertisement will be a crime, with indecency including anything against the Muslim religion or traditional cultural values. Anyone making an ad using a woman model will be jailed for a year — five years for repeat offenders. The MMA also recently succeeded in forcing Pakistanis to list their religion in passports — something religious minorities fear will expose them to persecution."
After the race, Asma Jehangir said: 'The authorities realised violence and heavy-handedness are counterproductive. It was a symbolic marathon to make the point that this tyranny had to be broken."
Writing in the May 24 Lahore Daily Times, freelance contributor Rashed Rahman reported that at the May 14 event "the police descended on the participants, mercilessly beating and dragging women by their hair. Some women had their clothes torn in the melee. All were unceremoniously bundled into police vans, taken to various police stations, and released after a few hours...
"It became clear that the government had taken an 'enlightened' decision not to treat the second 'marathon' with the same ferocity and brutality as the first, no doubt to overcome the negative image of the country produced worldwide by the first response...
"This does not mean that the government has changed its policy of kowtowing to the mullahs."
Evidence of such "kowtowing", Rahman added, "is visible in the decision to reintroduce the religion column in passports and backing down from supporting 'marathons' in the other cities of the Punjab after an attack by the MMA on the officially-sponsored run in Gujranwala" on April 3.
Both the suppressed May 14 and the successful May 21 mixed marathons were organised by the HRCP and the Joint Action Committee for Peoples Rights, an coalition of about 30 social and political organisations, including the liberal Pakistan Peoples Party, which controls the provincial government in Punjab, and the socialist Labour Party Pakistan.
LPP general secretary Farooq Tariq, who was one of seven elected organisers for the May 21 marathon, told Green Left Weekly that the "religious fundamentalists had threatened to stop the race by force. They have been in all the national media, threatening to kill anyone who participated."
Tariq said the police attack on the May 14 marathon had exposed the alliance between the religious fanatics and the government of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, despite their public rhetoric against each other.
Tariq agreed with Rahman's assessment in the Daily Times that "by making the government back down from its threatening posture" and thwarting the plans of the religious fanatics to attack the race, the May 21 marathon was "a moral victory" for the liberal and progressive forces in Lahore.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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