A video of a girl being lashed has raised questions about government policy and the nature of the Pakistani state, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad Far worse things have happened in Pakistan's Swat Valley than the flogging of a 17-year-old girl by alleged Taliban. But a grained, jerky video of the event -- shot on a mobile phone but beamed throughout local and global TV networks -- has shaken Pakistan in ways in which scores of suicide attacks have not. Not only has it put at risk an agreement the government wants to sign with Islamic clerics to bring peace and Islamic law to the valley. It has raised the question that has dogged Pakistan since its inception: what kind of Muslim state should this be? Or whether the state any longer functions in places like Swat on Pakistan's North West frontier with Afghanistan. Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry posed the question directly in one of his first acts since a two-year long campaign restored him to office. On 6 April he ordered the establishment of a police committee to investigate the flogging. He was visibly angered by the government's impotence in preventing such lawlessness, and not just in Swat. "It is easy to arrest judges, but when it comes to enforcing a law the progress is not so well," he told government officials. Chaudhry had been deposed and detained by Pakistan's last military government and prevented from returning to office by the present civilian one. The footage lasts two minutes. It shows a burka-clad woman held down by two turbaned men while a third lashes her 34 times. She was apparently being punished for having "illicit relations" with a man other than her husband. Hundreds of men and boys witness what is clearly a public event. As chilling as the imagery is the soundtrack. In desperate, high- pitched Pushto, you hear her cry: "Stop this or kill me." Circumstances are a fog. Local journalists say the flogging happened in a Swat village on 13 March, a month after a deal was struck with local clerics in which the Pakistan Taliban pledged to end such vigilantism in return for the introduction of Islamic law. The Taliban and provincial government say the footage is "fake", concocted by "hostile" NGOs who want to sway President Asif Ali Zardari from signing the agreement into law. Matters are muddied by the alleged denial by the girl that she was flogged. The contending interpretations mirror a political polarisation that has split Pakistan from tip to toe. On release of the footage small, but combative, bands of civil society and women's activists took to the streets in Pakistan's main cities including Peshawar, Lahore and Islamabad. In Karachi the secular MQM party organised a rally of several thousands, mostly women: their remedy for the crime was punishment. "I urge President Zardari... to arrest and try [those involved in the flogging], sentence them to death and keep their bodies hung publicly for as many days as they had flogged the innocent girl," raged MQM leader Altarf Hussein in a speech broadcast live from his redoubt in London. In response the crowd bayed: "O Taliban! Listen to us carefully. This rally is tantamount to your death." Other demonstrations were more sober but as insistent that any government admission of Islamic law in Swat would be a prelude to the full-blown "Talibanisation" of Pakistan. "If Zardari has any power, he should not sign this law," said Bina Hyat, a women's activist who led a protest march in Islamabad on 4 April. "If we don't stop the Taliban now, we will never stop it and it will seep into the centre and the provinces. Talibanisation will be everywhere and we women will be crushed once and for all." Islamic students held smaller demonstrations where the furore over the video was denounced as an "American plot" designed to pit Muslim against Muslim. "These NGOs want the Pakistan army to launch operations in Swat," said Tal Hassan, a medical student, who organised "Islamic" counter- demonstrations in Islamabad. "Then all the militants would fight a useless war against our security forces. We don't want that. We want our militants to fight the Americans in Afghanistan." Stretched between these extremes was the confusion of Pakistan's main political parties, with the exception of the Islamic ones who deemed the flogging "a small thing" compared to American missile attacks that have killed hundreds on Pakistan's border regions. All others condemned the flogging as "shameful", calling on the perpetrators to be brought to justice. But none believed it wise to withhold Islamic law from Swat. In this they are buttressed by mass sentiment in the valley and by Pakistan's lawyers, including head of Peshawar High Court Bar Association, Latif Afridi. "Swat has gone," he lamented on 6 April. "There is no writ of the government and the fundamental rights of the people are violated every day." But he believed the only way the state could wrest back control was through the introduction of Islamic law in Swat. "The Taliban demand that Islamic law be enforced. Let it be fulfilled. Let's see if peace then comes to Swat. Let's put the extremists on trial." If the Taliban fail that trial, the government would then have the moral and legal right to authorise "a purpose- oriented operation to end the violence and violators" in Swat, he said. Pakistan's civil and women's movements agree. "Pakistan army eliminate the Taliban," demanded one banner at the Islamabad demonstration. The man empowered to act on such demands is Zardari. It goes against the grain. His preferred policy is inaction. But in the cauldron that is Pakistan, he and his government no longer have that luxury: others are beginning to act for them.
