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| India-Pakistan | |
| Pakistan 'gave funds' to group on UN terror blacklist | |
| 2010-06-17 | |
| Pakistan's Punjab province government gave about $1m (£674,000) last year to institutions linked to a charity on a UN terror blacklist, it has emerged. The charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, denies accusations that it is a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group. Punjab officials say the funds were humanitarian in nature and were not given directly to the charity.
It is the first time that the authorities in Pakistan have formally admitted allocating money to institutions linked to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, BBC correspondents say. The government has long been under international pressure to crack down on militants or groups suspected of supporting them. There was no immediate response from the government in Islamabad. News that schools and hospitals run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa have received Pakistan state help is unlikely to go down well with the Indian or US governments. Funding details came to light when the Punjab provincial government published spending figures for 2009-10. "At least 80 million rupees [$940,000] have been allocated for the institutions [linked to Jamaat-ud-Dawa] during the current fiscal year," Rana Sanaullah, a senior Punjab minister, told the BBC. However, he maintained that the institutions - which include two schools and a hospital - were no longer attached to Jamaat-ud-Dawa. "The government has taken control of the schools and appointed an administrator to run each of them." He said the UN had been notified as the issue was a humanitarian one. "There was a boys' school with 400 students, a girls' high school with 350 students and a hospital which addressed the needs of the entire area in question. "If we had closed down the institutions it would have proved counter-productive. It would have aggravated the sentiments of the people and made them sympathise with [Jamaat-ud-]Dawa." When asked why the Punjab government had allotted money in the budget for institutions it managed, a spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Hafiz Abdur Rehman, said: "The truth is that we are ourselves astonished at this." He said the institutions in question were now being managed by the charity. "When restrictions were initially imposed upon us, the Punjab government did appoint an administrator but it was neither liked nor accepted by our people. By the grace of God, now everything is running exactly the way it was running under the Jamaat's system." Jamaat-ud-Dawa has frequently denied accusations that some of its schools are used as militant training camps. Its leader is Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, who set up Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of most feared groups fighting against Indian rule in part of the disputed territory of Kashmir. After it was banned in Pakistan in 2002, the organisation divided itself into Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar-e-Taiba, correspondents say. Jamaat-ud-Dawa now works as an Islamic charity all over Pakistan. It played a major role in relief efforts following the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. Pakistan arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba's senior leaders after the Mumbai attacks. But most of them, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, were later freed on appeal. | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 They were accused of having links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban The Taliban aren't on the terrorist blacklist, either. |
| Posted by: Lumpy Elmoluck5091 2010-06-17 09:16 |
| #2 From Halfway to Freedom by Margaret Bourke-White, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam's thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. "Surely America will build up our army," they would say to me. "Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in." But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. "No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan." This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan's own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze. Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. .... |
| Posted by: john frum 2010-06-17 06:05 |
| #1 Pakistan gets how much from USA? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2010-06-17 03:17 |