Pakistan

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, 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.

***

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.

United States President Donald Trump announced that the US would continue the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which is already the longest war in US history, Democracy Now! on August 22.

The Pentagon is likely to deploy about 4000 more US troops to Afghanistan in the coming months. In recent months, the US has intensified its air war in Afghanistan. During June, the US carried out 389 airstrikes in Afghanistan — the highest monthly total in five years.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously on July 28 to disqualify the country’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from office in relation to the exposure of secret assets as part of the Panama Papers leaks.

The court has referred Sharif’s case to the country's top anti-corruption authority for an investigation into his family's offshore assets. His party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, will have to appoint an interim prime minister to serve until the next election, due midway through next year.

Song of Gulzarina
By Tariq Mehmood
Daraja Press
November 2016

Sing to the Western wind the song it understands.

Song of Gulzarina, by British-Pakistani filmmaker and author Tariq Mehmood, stands out as a unique piece of literature that intertwines personal issues such as migration, identity crisis and romance, with the impact of racism, Islamophobia and Western imperialism in the Middle East.

Under President Barack Obama, the US acknowledged killing between 2867 and 3138 people in strikes in countries like Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan.

In the waning days of his presidency, Obama took some steps to improve transparency about drone strikes, including providing the total estimated death toll. However, a new report by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies says that the US is still lagging in providing a full accounting of its drone program.

For the better part of six years, Baba Jan, a founding member and activist of the left-wing Awami Workers Party (AWP) in the Pakistani-occupied disputed territory of Gilgit-Baltistan, has been behind bars on a life sentence for ‘terrorism’ charges. His crime? Demanding rights for Hunza’s poor and displaced.

Balochistan, in Pakistan’s south-west, is the site of an intense struggle for self-determination that has been met with violent repression from the Pakistani state. Baloch Students Organisation-Azad (BSO-A), which organises for Baloch self-determination, released the statement below calling for justice for Baloch activist Zahid Baloch, who was abducted in 2014.

***