islamabad - A large number of people from different segments of society on Saturday staged a protest demonstration against the alleged abduction of the activists of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement.
Students, intellectuals, political activists and citizens gathered outside the National Press Club, Islamabad to protest the alleged crackdown on the organisers and activists in Karachi prior to a rally called by the PTM.
The protest focused in particular on the Karachi University’s professor Dr Riaz Ahmad as well as Hashim Khan who were instrumental in organising the protests after the killing of Naqibullah Mehsud in a fake encounter of the Karachi police which led to the formation of the PTM.
Protestors raised slogans at the Press Club for an hour before embarking on a peaceful march to the Super Market and from where they dispersed peacefully.
Addressing the protestors, Awami Workers Party leaders Ammar Rashid and Alia Amirali said that the youth of FATA who assembled under the banner of the PTM, only demanded their constitutional rights to be safeguarded.
Alia Amirali said: “State repression over the decades has never succeeded in containing the popular demands of ordinary people and the clampdown prior to the Karachi rally would also prove unsuccessful again”.
Speaking on the occasion, an activist Junaid Babar said that the arrests of people like Dr Riaz Ahmed revealed that the PTM is gaining popularity among all peace-loving and democratic people across the country.
He said that on the PTM’s call a wide cross-section of Karachi’s population, as well as activists from across Sindh, are coming out to share their demands for equal citizenship rights and accountability of those elements in the state that are responsible for the dastardly practice of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings.
The protest ended with a pledge by Jahanzeb Wazir to firmly stand with all pro-democracy movements such as the PTM.
“The resort of the state’s coercive tactics is an indicator of weakness rather than strength,” he said, saying crackdown on peaceful and democratic voices is no longer accepted by a wide cross-section of young people which now constitute the single biggest demographic group in Pakistan. The genuine public interest, he said, will now increasingly be determined by these emergent democratic voices.
