The sit-ins demanding the release of 14 political prisoners and justice for the victims of police brutality, in early October in Gilgit-Baltistan, have ignited a movement that crosses gender and religious divides, write Sonia Qadir and Haider Ali.
Pakistan
For years, the Pakistani state has resorted to violent repression and indiscriminate warfare in the south-western province of Balochistan. Faisal Baloch reports human rights abuses are rampant and soldiers act with impunity.
Twenty-nine people were arrested in Islamabad on January 28 while peacefully protesting the arrest and imprisonment of Manzoor Pashteen, leader of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), writes Susan Price.
Capitalism has locked us into a logic that is forcing humanity to participate in its own spectacular self-annihilation, writes Ammar Ali Jan.
Ali Wazeer and Mohsin Dawar, members of the Pakistan National Assembly, were arrested in May on trumped up terrorism charges. An international solidarity campaign is calling for their release.
"The path to reducing and finally eliminating terrorist attacks such as in Pulwama does not lie in belligerent posturing or ‘surgical strikes’ across the border, let alone in escalating military tensions and actions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours."
Ali Wazeer, a central committee member of The Struggle group, has won a seat in the national parliament with 23,530 votes on July 25. His closest rival for the seat, from a religious alliance, got only 7515.
A key leader of the Pashtun Tahafaz Movement (PTM), Wazeer was one the organisers of the mass meetings organised in major cities that demanded fair compensation to the victims of the “war on terror”. This campaign also demanded the release of all “missing” persons, or else that they be tried in court.
In his election victory speech on July 26, Imran Khan gave a sober talk that ran contrary to the violent language he used throughout the election campaign, notes Farooq Tariq from Lahore.
Khan’s Pakistan Tereek-e-Insaf (PTI) “won” 116 seats in the National Assembly out of the 342 seats, of which 278 seats are contested directly on the First Past the Post (FPTP) system.
Large swathes of Pakistan are in the stranglehold of a caricatured feudalism, writes Farooq Tariq.
The leaders of 10 progressive and left-wing Pakistani parties have agreed to form an alliance.
About five million women went on strike and marched in Spain on March 8 in support of a call for an international women’s strike to mark International Women’s Day and demand a just and egalitarian society, TeleSUR English said that day.
Asma Jahangir was a Pakistani social activist and world-renowned human rights lawyer, who died on February 11, aged 66. Below is a statement released by the Awami Workers’ Party (AWP), a socialist party in Pakistan formed by the merger of several left parties in 2012.
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The leaders and workers of the AWP are shocked and grieved at the devastating news of the demise of Asma Jahangir, who passed away from cardiac arrest on February 11. It is hard to put into words the tragedy that her loss represents.
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