‘Day of Love’ a day of rage for Pakistan

Anti-film strife deadly there; fed-up Libyans attack militia

Police in Peshawar, Pakistan, chase protesters during an anti-U.S. rally Friday during the country’s “Day of Love for the Prophet.” Demonstrations were held throughout Pakistan on Friday, with many participants ignoring officials’ call for peaceful protests.
Police in Peshawar, Pakistan, chase protesters during an anti-U.S. rally Friday during the country’s “Day of Love for the Prophet.” Demonstrations were held throughout Pakistan on Friday, with many participants ignoring officials’ call for peaceful protests.

— Thousands angered by an anti-Muslim film ignored pleas for peaceful rallies and rampaged in several Pakistani cities Friday in battles with police that killed 19 people and touched off criticism of a government decision to declare a national holiday to proclaim devotion for the Prophet Muhammad.

The film, which was produced in the United States and denigrates the prophet, has angered many in the Muslim world in the 10 days since it attracted attention on the Internet, and there were new, mostly peaceful protest marches in a halfdozen countries from Asia to the Middle East.

But it is Pakistan that has seen the most sustained violence, driven by a deep well of anti-American sentiment and a strong cadre of hard-line Islamists who benefit from stoking anger at the U.S. At least 49 people — including the U.S. ambassador to Libya — have died in worldwide violence linked to the film.

In Libya, hundreds of protesters angry over last week’s killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans stormed the compound of the Islamic extremist militia suspected in the attack, evicting militiamen and setting fire to their building Friday.

Analysts accused the Pakistani government of pandering to extremists by declaring Friday to be an official holiday — calling it a “Day of Love for the Prophet.” Officials urged peaceful protests, but critics said the move helped unleash the worst violence yet caused by the film, titled Innocence of Muslims.

In addition to those killed, nearly 200 others were injured as mobs threw stones, set fire to cars and movie theaters, and battled with police who responded with tear gas and gunfire.

In an attempt to tamp down the anger, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad purchased spots Thursday on Pakistani TV that featured video of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the film. But their comments, which were subtitled in Urdu, the main Pakistani language, apparently did little to mitigate the anger that filled the country’s streets.

Police fired tear gas and live ammunition to push back the tens of thousands of protesters they faced in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, and the major cities of Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar. They were successful in preventing the protesters from reaching U.S. diplomatic offices in the cities, even though the demonstrators streamed over shipping containers set up on major roads to block protesters.

Clinton thanked the Pakistani government for protecting the U.S. missions in the country and lamented the deaths in the protests.

“The violence we have seen cannot be tolerated,” Clinton said. “There is no justification for violence.”

Clinton called on “responsible leaders” everywhere to explicitly condemn violence sparked by the video. But Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, standing beside Clinton at the State Department, ignored the invitation.

Instead, Khar focused her remarks entirely on the film, which Muslims believe is blasphemous. She thanked Obama and Clinton for speaking out against the video and making clear it did not have the support of the U.S. government. But she avoided direct criticism of the violence.

The deadliest violence occurred in the southern port city of Karachi, where 14 people were killed, said hospital officials. More than 80 people were injured, said the top government official in the city, Roshan Ali Shaikh. At least three of the dead were policemen, one who died when hundreds of protesters attacked a police station.

Five people were killed and 60 wounded in the northwestern city of Peshawar, said police official Bashir Khan.

At least 45 people, including 28 protesters and 17 policemen, were wounded in clashes in Islamabad, where police fought with more than 10,000 demonstrators in front of a five-star hotel near the diplomatic enclave where the U.S. Embassy and other foreign missions sit. A military helicopter buzzed overhead as the sound of tear gas being fired echoed across the city.

In northwestern Pakistan, demonstrators burned the Sarhadi Lutheran Church in the city of Mardan, but no one was injured, said senior police officer Salim Khan

The government temporarily blocked cell-phone service in 15 major cities to prevent militants from using phones to detonate bombs during the protests, said an Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Blocking cell phones also made it harder for people to organize protests.

Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf urged the international community to pass laws to prevent people from insulting the prophet, and the Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. charge d’affaires in Islamabad, Richard Hoagland, over the film.

“If denying the Holocaust is a crime, then is it not fair and legitimate for a Muslim to demand that denigrating and demeaning Islam’s holiest personality is no less than a crime?” Ashraf said in a speech to religious scholars and international diplomats in Islamabad.

Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany and several other European countries but not in the U.S.

U.S. officials have tried to explain to the Muslim world how they strongly disagree with the anti-Islam film but have no ability to block it because of free-speech guarantees.

Khar, the foreign minister, said in an interview Thursday that declaring a national holiday for Friday would motivate the peaceful majority to demonstrate their love for the prophet and not allow extremists to turn it into a show of anti-American anger.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik defended the decision, saying the holiday made it easier for police to tackle protesters in Islamabad because the city was empty of people who normally commute there for work or school.

But Riffat Hussain, a professor at the Islamabad-based National Defense University, said the government mismanaged the situation by calling for people to demonstrate and not providing a venue to do so peacefully, such as a rally with religious and political leaders.

Elsewhere on Friday, about 3,000 protesters in the southern Iraq city of Basra condemned the film and caricatures of the prophet published in a French satirical weekly. They burned Israeli and U.S. flags and raised a banner that read: “We condemn the offenses made against the prophet.”

U.S. flags and effigies of Obama were burned by about 2,000 people in a protest after Friday prayers in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. They demanded that the United States ban the film.

In Bangladesh, more than 2,000 people marched in the capital, Dhaka, and burned a makeshift coffin draped in an American flag with an effigy of Obama. Small and mostly orderly protests also were held in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Tens of thousands of supporters of the Shiite Hezbollah movement held a raucous protest in the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek. Later, a few thousand supporters of a hard-line Sunni cleric gathered in the capital, Beirut.

Police clamped a day-long curfew in parts of Indian-controlled Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar and chased away protesters opposing the anti-Islam film. Authorities in the region also temporarily blocked cell-phone and Internet services to prevent viewing the film clips.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at the West over the film and the caricatures in the French weekly, Charlie Hebdo.

“In return for [allowing] the ugliest insults to the divine messenger, they — the West — raise the slogan of respect for freedom of speech,” Ahmadinejad said at a speech in Tehran. He said this explanation was “clearly a deception.”

Meanwhile, in an unprecedented show of public anger at Libya’s rampant militias, hundreds of protesters overwhelmed the compound of the Ansar al-Shariah Brigade, an Islamic extremist militia, in the center of the eastern city of Benghazi.

Ansar al-Shariah fighters initially fired in the air to disperse the crowd but eventually abandoned the site with their weapons and vehicles after it was overrun by waves of protesters shouting “No to militias.”

No deaths were reported in the incident, which came after some 30,000 people marched in Benghazi against armed militias earlier in the day. One vehicle also was burned at the compound.

For many Libyans, the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was the last straw in one of the biggest problems Libya has faced since the ouster and death of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi about a year ago — the multiple miniarmies with their arsenals of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades are stronger than the regular armed forces and police.

Residents of another main eastern city, Darna, also have begun to stand up against Ansar al-Shariah and other militias.

“The killing of the ambassador blew up the situation. It was disastrous,” said Ayoub al-Shedwi, a young bearded Muslim preacher in Darna who says he has received multiple death threats because has spoken out against militias on a radio show he hosts. “We felt that the revolution is going in vain.”

Officials in the interim government and security forces say they are not strong enough to crack down on the militias. The armed factions have refused government calls for them to join the regular army and police.

U.S. intelligence indicates that 50 or more people, many of them masked, were responsible for the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Gun trucks provided added firepower. The attackers set up a perimeter, controlling access in and out of the compound.

Intelligence reports were still coming in, but officials said that what may have initially seemed like a protest over an anti-Islam movie that had spun out of control now showed the hallmarks of a more sophisticated operation.

Information for this article was contributed by Sebastian Abbot, Zarar Khan, Munir Ahmed, Adil Jawad, Zaheer Babar, Riaz Khan, Nasser Karimi, Aijaz Hussain, Zeina Karam, Matthew Lee, Bradley Klapper, Maggie Michael, Matt Apuzzo and Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/22/2012

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