ISLAMABAD - The shadow of
militant group Hizbul Tehrir (HuT) looms large in
the interrogations of Pakistan army Brigadier Ali
Khan and four majors who have revealed senior
military officers planned to lead a coup against
the government in Islamabad in an attempt to
convert the country into a pure Islamic state by
reviving the Khilafat (caliphate) system
envisaged by the al-Qaeda-linked organization.
The officers are being interrogated in the
garrison town of Rawalpindi by the Special
Investigation Branch of the Military Intelligence
(MI) after their arrest for suspected ties to
militant organizations, reinforcing fears that the
Pakistan's armed forces have been infiltrated at
all levels by al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked Islamic
extremists.
The detained officers have
conceded that they were in touch with
the HuT, which had incited
them to launch a rebellion against the country's
military and political leadership over what they
see as pro-American policies. Investigators have
concluded that HuT has the same objectives as
al-Qaeda - the enforcement of Islamic rule in
accordance with sharia(Islamic laws) in
Muslim-majority countries and the restoration of
an Islamic caliphate.
A group of junior
army officers linked to HuT had previously tried
to stage a military coup against the regime of
Pervez Musharraf regime in 2003 with the help of
their moles in uniform. However, the plan was
foiled and the plotters were court-martialed,
followed by a government ban on the activities of
the HuT in Pakistan. The authorities had also
arrested Omar Khan, a British-born Pakistani who
was identified as the person enlisting and
indoctrinating the men in uniform on behalf of the
HuT.
Islamic groups and parties have been
striving since the inception of Pakistan to
Islamize the country in accordance with the
Objective Resolution, adopted by the Constituent
Assembly in 1949, which stated that Muslims living
in Pakistan would be enabled to mould their lives
in line with the teachings of Islam. HuT is one
such Islamic group and presents itself as a global
revolutionary movement with branches in over 50
countries across the globe, including the United
Kingdom and the United States.
HuT claims
to be a political party with Islam as its
ideology. It was actually established in Jerusalem
in 1953 by Shaikh Taqiul Deen al-Nabahani
(1909-1977), a cleric and a judge in the sharia
court. The stated goal of the HuT at that time was
to establish an expansionist super-state called
the Khilafah, initially consisting of
Muslim-majority states and finally expanding to
the rest of the world.
Following the May 2
killing of Osama bin Laden in an American military
raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, HuT activists had
been distributing leaflets, urging army officers
to rise up in revolt against their leadership.
"It is a slap in the respected officers'
faces that American helicopters intruded in the
dark of night and barged into a house like
thieves. Remember, it could not have been possible
without the acquiescence of your high officials,"
one such the pamphlet read.
The contention
of the Pakistan chapter of the HuT is that the
current rulers of Pakistan, civilian as well as
military, are agents of the United States and
their only agenda is to protect American
interests.
The group propagates that the
American and the Pakistani governments are
responsible for the killing of innocent men, women
and children in drone attacks and military
operations which are being conducted in the tribal
areas in the name of the "war on terror".
According to the manifesto of the Pakistan
branch of the HuT, following the establishment of
Khilafah, part of the second phase will be
to spread the borders of the state through
offensive jihad or aggressive warfare.
The
HuT's focus on Pakistan was motivated by the
nuclear tests carried out by the country in 1998,
as the group wanted to facilitate the acquisition
of nuclear technology for the Khilafah
state. Secondly, the HuT considers Pakistan's
strategic location, particularly its proximity
with Muslim-majority countries including Central
Asian states, suitable for implementing its
agenda.
Being a proscribed organization,
the HuT does not have any offices in Pakistan and
its organizational affairs are mainly looked after
by its office bearers from their homes. However,
the problem for Pakistani agencies is that the
actual leadership of the group in Pakistan remains
undisclosed, even to members, due to security
fears.
The Pakistan chapter of HuT was
established in December 2000 when a group of
British youth of Pakistani descent (headed by
Imtiaz Malik and guided by British-Pakistanis Dr
Abdul Wajid in Lahore and Dr Abdul Basit Shaikh in
Karachi among others) decided to use Pakistan as
the base camp for their movement to re-establish
an Islamic caliphate.
While Imtiaz is
considered the underground leader of the HuT in
Pakistan, his deputy, Naveed Butt, a graduate of
University of Illinois in the United States,
remains the most vocal group leader in Pakistan
who is assisted by two youngsters, Imran Yousafzai
and Shahzad Sheikh, both British nationals of
Pakistani origin.
The first national-level
conference of HuT was organized in Lahore in
November 2003, two-and-a-half years after it was
formally launched in Pakistan. The conference was
attended by over 2,000 members. Hardly three days
later, the group had been banned by the Musharraf
regime.
HuT's challenge to the ban in the
Lahore High Court was dismissed. Another petition
filed in 2006 is still pending before the
Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore High Court. Since
its inception in Pakistan in 2000, however, the
HuT has been able to make considerable progress in
recruiting dedicated members in the civil society
as well as the armed forces of Pakistan.
Those investigating Brigadier Ali Khan and
several other senior officers of the Pakistan army
for their HuT links say despite claiming to be a
non-violent political party, the HuT had a violent
jihadi agenda to overthrow the government and
remove the military top brass.
Investigators say the HuT leadership had
actually marked Pakistan as a base from which it
wanted to spread Islamic rule across the world.
Pakistani intelligence sleuths responsible for
monitoring HuT activities say the group is working
in tandem with al-Qaeda under the garb of
pan-Islamism.
They reminded that 35 HuT
members were arrested in June 2009 from an
Islamabad residence that was allegedly being used
as a base to plan a coup. A few weeks before these
arrests were made public, the Pakistan chapter of
the HuT had talked about spilling blood to stage
an Islamic revolution.
At the same time,
Tayyab Muqeem, a London-based key HuT leader,
declared in July 2009 that many HuT activists had
been sent to Pakistan to bring about Islamic
sharia by force. He claimed that HuT had
successfully converted four senior officers of
Pakistan army during their training at Sandhurst
elite military training academy in the United
Kingdom.
According to an October 2010
report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace
Studies, far from being deterred, the HuT has
continued efforts to infiltrate the high echelons
of the Pakistan army and Pakistani social elite.
The report titled "Hizbul Tehrir in
Pakistan: Discourse and Impact", quoted Shahzad
Sheikh, a Karachi-based HuT leader, as saying that
the group had been persuading the Pakistan army to
stage a bloodless coup to overthrow the government
in Islamabad.
The report observed that
apart from the failure of the Pakistani
intelligence establishment to weed out pro-jihadi
elements in the military and intelligence
establishment, another cause of concern was the
continuing failure of agencies to identify the
current leaders of the highly secretive HuT and
its "supporters in uniform". According to
Maajid Nawaz, a former HuT member now serving as
director of the United Kingdom-based think-tank
Quilliam, the menace of the HuT infiltrating the
Pakistani armed forces was exported from Britain:
Hizbul Tehrir advocates violent
overthrow of democratic states through military
coups in order to enforce a single
interpretation of Islam. Recruiting from the
world's Muslim-majority armies is a fundamental
tenet of their call. Groups such as HuT do not
seek to launch a mass movement; rather they
specifically target the intellectual elite and
the military apparatus of the countries in which
they operate.
For years, leading
journalists and the intellectual elite of
Pakistan have been targeted by highly educated
English-speaking Islamists from Hizbul Tehrir.
They have been seeking to convert prominent
opinion shapers to their supremacist ideology.
Once this sector is taken, a military coup can
be staged by key officers sympathetic to the
cause, who would in turn face minimal resistance
from society. After the coup, the military would
be capable of establishing the authority of
Islam. Hence a coup d'้tat would be the
manifestation of a political change, as per the
HuT dream.
But the HuT's tactics to
achieve its objectives differ from place to place.
For instance, the group had for some time followed
the "keep your ideology in your heart" strategy in
the United Kingdom, without vocally or tacitly
supporting any of the violent acts being carried
out by militants.
But in Pakistan, the
group not only accuses Pakistani and Western
governments of involvement in acts of terrorism
but also extends its sympathies and support to
militant groups that, according to HuT, are
sincerely fighting to establish Islamic rule and
strongly resisting the "nefarious designs of the
infidels against the Muslims of Pakistan and
Afghanistan".
The HuT approach to such
issues in the UK will be totally different. There,
after the July 2005 London suicide attacks that
killed 55 people, it increasingly disguises its
support for jihad, anti-Semitic beliefs and
intolerant ideologies. The London bombings were
carried out by four British nationals of the
Pakistani origin who were indoctrinated in the
British capital by extremists belonging to
al-Mohajiroun and HuT.
Still, despite
being a banned organization in Pakistan, HuT
members can be seen at key mosques on Fridays in
Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, openly
distributing volatile literature propagating the
revival of the caliphate.
Apart from
organizing secretive meetings and seminars, the
HuT has used text messages on cell phones and
social networking sites to spread its message. An
open letter dated June 3, 2011, addressed to the
"sincere officers" of the Pakistani armed forces,
and posted on the website of the Pakistan chapter
of the HuT (www.hizb-pakistan.com), called for
removal of the "traitors" among the civilian and
military leadership of the country for their
alliance with the United States.
The
letter, titled "O Muslims! Deliver this letter to
all the sincere ones whom you know in Pakistan's
armed forces", accused Pakistani rulers of bowing
before the US and India. The letter was published
simultaneously in English and Urdu on the HuT
website. It read:
You are currently leading the
largest and most capable Muslim armed forces in
the world. The Muslim armed forces alone have
the material strength to establish the
Khilafah. As such, you are duty bound to
establish an Islamic state in Madinah [the Saudi
city]. You must move now to uproot Pakistan's
traitor rulers. For even though the weaknesses
of America and India are more evident than ever
before, Pakistan's traitor rulers are racing to
extend support to them, using the considerable
resources of the Muslims to do so ...
The traitor rulers are allying with the
infidels, as if this was the source of strength
and well-being for the Muslims. In reality,
their alliance with the infidels is a source of
fragility, weakness, despair and humiliation.
Allah said, "The tale of those who seek allies
other than Allah is that of a spider who builds
a house; but indeed, the weakest of houses is
the spider's house - if they but knew." (Surah
al-Ankaboot 29:41).
Amir
Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist and the
author of several books on the subject of militant
Islam and terrorism, the latest being
Talibanisation of Pakistan: From 9/11 to
26/11.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online
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