[But Pakistan’s courts have failed to prosecute Mr. Saeed, and he lives in the open, making a mockery of the $10 million reward that the United States government offered in April for his capture. His critics say he has remained free thanks, in part, to the tacit support of the Pakistani intelligence services.]
By Declan Walsh
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B.K. Bangash/Associated Press
Protesters on an anti-American march in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, showered
rose petals on, from left, the clerics Maulana Sami ul-Haq, Syed Munawar Hasan
and Hafiz Muhammad Saeed.
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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Angered by the reopening of NATO supply lines through their country, prominent jihadis and right-wing politicians mounted a determined show of force in the heart of the Pakistani capital on Monday, led by a man with a $10 million American bounty on his head.
Standing on a stage close to Parliament here, the protest leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, addressed thousands of flag-waving supporters in an energetic late-night address that highlighted both the strength and limitations of his militant following.
Mr. Saeed is the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a ruthless militant outfit that orchestrated the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, in which 170 people, including several Americans, were killed. In recent years, the group’s fighters have become a serious factor in the insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan.
But Pakistan’s courts have failed to prosecute Mr. Saeed, and he lives in the open, making a mockery of the $10 million reward that the United States government offered in April for his capture. His critics say he has remained free thanks, in part, to the tacit support of the Pakistani intelligence services.
“We are here to rid Pakistan of American slavery,” Mr. Saeed said, flanked by bearded young men in military-style uniforms, some of whom were seen earlier in the day openly carrying weapons.
The rally was held by the Defense of Pakistan Council, an umbrella organization for militant groups and religious parties that Mr. Saeed leads. It has become the lightning rod for anti-American sentiment in Pakistan this year. The council was formed last November in reaction to a border clash in which American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the border, prompting the immediate closing of the NATO supply routes.
But the eight-month blockade was lifted last week after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton finally met Pakistani demands for an apology over the episode, inciting a furious reaction from the vocal anti-American lobby in Pakistan.
The Defense of Pakistan Council rally started in the eastern city of Lahore on Sunday and wound its way along the Grand Trunk Road, a storied colonial-era thoroughfare that traverses Pakistan’s version of the American Bible Belt: a district of deep-rooted conservatism with strong military ties and, increasingly, a source of religious intolerance.
Many marchers supported the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. “We are supporting them because America is the world’s No. 1 terrorist,” said Saqlain Aslam, a 30-year-old from Lahore who is studying software technology. “We will give our lives to stop the NATO supply lines.”
Though the procession and rally were reported to have remained peaceful, a troubling antigovernment attack coincided with the protesters’ progress on the road to Islamabad overnight: unidentified gunmen traveling by motorcycle opened fire on a military encampment about 100 miles from Islamabad early Monday, killing six soldiers and a police officer, officials said.
The soldiers had set up the camp to search for the body of a military helicopter pilot who crashed on May 23; many were caught by surprise as they prepared for morning prayers, the army said. Another five soldiers were wounded and taken to a nearby hospital.
The attack was unusual — most such violence occurs in the northwest, along the Afghan border — and coincided with the Defense of Pakistan Council rally, whose supporters had stopped in Gujrat, 10 miles to the north.
Here in Islamabad, Mr. Saeed denied any connection to the attack. Instead, he said, it had been carried out by “another Raymond Davis” — a reference to the C.I.A. contractor who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore last year, and whose name has become a byword for conspiracy theories about dark American meddling.
Also present on the march was Maulana Sami ul-Haq, a religious leader whose madrasa, or Islamic school, helped incubate the Afghan Taliban movement; Hamid Gul, a retired head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate; and Sheik Rashid Ahmed, a former minister under President Pervez Musharraf who issued a rabble-rousing speech that supported the idea of overthrowing the elected government.
“People are praying to have this government undemocratically removed, I am sorry to say,” he shouted, pointing to Parliament.
The rally highlighted the worrisome place that extremists have carved out in Pakistani public life. After Mr. Saeed ended his speech, he was whisked away in a convoy of bulletproof jeeps. Local news media reported that another jihadi group, Al-Badr Mujahedeen, was fund-raising and recruiting on Sunday in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
But the Islamabad rally also highlighted the limits of extremist influence. The crowd was small by the standards of political rallies; the organizers were forced to hold the rally close to midnight, which excluded them from prime-time television coverage.
The rally broke up peacefully after the speeches ended; organizers said they would resume protests later this month, closer to the border.
Waqar Gilani contributed reporting from Jhelum, Pakistan, and Salman Masood from Islamabad.
GATEWAY TO MYANMAR’S PAST, AND ITS FUTURE
[These monuments, on a red-dirt plain thinly populated by monks and goat herders, are an unparalleled concentration of temple architecture, featuring sophisticated vaulting techniques not seen in other Asian civilizations and elaborate mural paintings whose counterparts have not survived well in India.]
By Andy Isaacson
More than 2,200 tiered brick temples and shrines sprawl across an arid 26-square-mile plain on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy River, remnants of a magnificent Buddhist city that reached its height in the 11th and 12th centuries.
These monuments, on a red-dirt plain thinly populated by monks and goat herders, are an unparalleled concentration of temple architecture, featuring sophisticated vaulting techniques not seen in other Asian civilizations and elaborate mural paintings whose counterparts have not survived well in India.
“It’s as if all the Gothic cathedrals were clustered in one spot,” said Donald Stadtner, author of “Ancient Pagan” and “Sacred Sites of Burma.”
As Myanmar opens to the outside world — and an influx of tourists — after decades of totalitarian rule, Bagan is far from the only site that is now of interest to scholars, many of whom were long put off by the country’s politics.
The Tibeto-Burman peoples from southwestern China who settled the upper Irrawaddy as early as the first century B.C. left behind large cities enclosed by brick walls and moats, and evidence of ingenious irrigation networks.
At Beikthano-Myo, one of the earliest of these settlements, archaeologists have found monasteries and shrines, or stupas, resembling those erected by Buddhists in eastern India, along with ornate burial urns and silver coins bearing auspicious symbols — marking the site as a staging point from which Buddhism spread across Southeast Asia.
Well before the political opening, Myanmar’s military rulers sought to restore historical monuments and establish local museums. In the late 1970s and ’80s, the authorities undertook a major rebuilding of Bagan, which an earthquake had devastated in 1975.
The restoration, supported by individual Burmese patrons eager to earn religious merit and by the United Nations Development Program, relied mainly on a close circle of domestic experts and has been sharply criticized by some outside scholars.
Critics took issue with the use of inauthentic building materials, like cement in place of stucco, and contend that certain architectural features — in particular the decorative finials that top religious monuments — were reconstructed according to imagination rather than science. A few prominent temples contain incongruous elements like disco lights flashing around the heads of Buddha statues.
“It’s been an unmitigated disaster,” Dr. Stadtner said of the restoration. “It’s as if every archaeological principle has been turned upside down in the past. I think there would be universal agreement that the damage to the monuments has been done, and is irreversible.”
Michael Aung-Thwin, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii and a longtime Myanmar scholar, dismisses such criticism as overstated, calling it “propaganda issued by the dissidents.”
“They made tremendous progress given the resources they had,” Dr. Aung-Thwin said.
U Win Sein, who was Myanmar’s culture minister during the 1990s, has defended the government’s renovations, which strived to reconcile antique preservation with Buddhist concepts of donation and refurbishment.
“These are living religious monuments highly venerated and worshiped by Myanmar people,” he wrote in a state-run newspaper. “It is our national duty to preserve, strengthen and restore all the cultural heritage monuments of Bagan to last and exist forever.”
Elizabeth Howard Moore, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of London, says she expects that Bagan will eventually be designated a World Heritage site, a change that will attract renewed interest from foreign scholars. Many research questions at Bagan remain, including the nature of Buddhist life in the city and the relationship between the kingdom and its foreign neighbors. (Several of Bagan’s murals appear to have been painted by Bengali artists.)
Already, the new political climate has invited more foreign technical experts to bring the country up to international standards, and the Ministry of Culture is actively welcoming proposals by outside scholars.
“This was not happening 10 years ago,” Dr. Moore said. “The lifting of sanctions has not only brought renewed cultural awareness at a national level, but increased funding for business has started to encourage more and varied support for cultural and educational programs.”
@ The New York Times
@ The New York Times
