Pakistani woman races from rags to riches

Pakistani athlete Naseem Hamid (R) wins gold in the women's 100 metre race at the 11th South Asian Federation Games in Dhaka. She ran to victory in the 100 metres, becoming Pakistan's first woman to sprint to gold in the championship's 26-year history.AFP - It took Pakistani athlete Naseem Hamid just 11.81 seconds to change her life and become the fastest woman in South Asia.

She ran to victory in the 100 metres in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Games in Bangladesh, becoming Pakistan's first woman to sprint to gold in the championship's 26-year history and shooting from rags to riches.
"It still hasn't sunk in," said 23-year-old Naseem, who received a rapturous welcome home. Cash prizes worth millions of rupees poured in from President Asif Ali Zardari and businessmen, and parliament promised her a bigger house.
"It definitely is a fairytale success and will take some time to digest."
Brought up in humble surroundings, Naseem comes from a one-room house in the Korangi slum area of Karachi. She was never discouraged by her impoverished background, but nor did she like it mentioned.
It only came to light when television channels rushed to find her house when she rose from nowhere to success in Dhaka.

Pakistani athlete Naseem Hamid (C) is flanked by her parents as she poses with her gold medal following her arrival in Karachi. Cash prizes worth millions of rupees poured in from President Asif Ali Zardari and businessmen, and parliament promised her a bigger house.

"I asked my coach Maqsood Ahmed to pinch me so I realise it's not a dream," she reminisced after the February 7 race. "For the first 30 minutes it felt like a dream and what followed is also a dream."
Growing up, Naseem knew little of fairytales.
She watched her father Hameed Ahmed struggle to make ends meet on daily wages as a labourer. At times, the family had little to live on.
Undaunted, Naseem forgot her problems once she entered the world of sport, where only the best, and not the rich, excel.
She started an athletics career and soon became the driving force in the family, earning 9,000 rupees (104 dollars) a month after being recruited into the Pakistan army's sports section three years ago.
"I used to forget all the problems when I ran on the track," said Naseem. "I used to train very hard and there were times when I came back home with my legs aching and fell asleep before my parents woke me up for dinner."
The family could not afford proper running shoes, so Naseem ran bare foot. But she had the sprint to succeed and was talent spotted by physical education teacher Abida Ahmed at her Korangi college.
"I knew Naseem was destined for bigger successes," said Abida. "Besides 100 and 200 metre races, Naseem also competed in the high jump and made us champions at inter-college level in 2005 and 2006."
Her sister Quratul Ain is a member of the women's football squad in southern province Sindh, while her only brother took up table tennis.
Mother Nasreen has taken pride in her daughter's nerves of steel since she recovered from typhoid in childhood.

"Naseem has always been very brave. She is like a son to me and overcame lots of trouble but never lost heart, even when she couldn't win races," her mother recalled.
"Our relatives were against her going into sport but it was her will power that helped her stick to the game and attain such success," said Nasreen, whose home was mobbed by crowds of relatives after her daughter's win.
Part of Pakistan's bronze medallist 4x100m relay team in the 10th South Asian Games in Colombo in 2006, injury meant that four years ago Naseem had to watch her colleagues run the 100-metre race from the sidelines.
"Failures have always given me heart to perform," said Naseem, who beat two Sri Lankans and an Indian for the title of South Asia's fastest woman.
But the sky holds no limits for Naseem.
"I know the standard at the Asian and Commonwealth levels is very high, but I will try my level best to win more laurels for my country," said Naseem.
"I know you can beat all odds through your determination, and I have done that in Dhaka."

Penalties for anyone who leaves Islam

Most ominous for Christian believers, who are not named in this story due to the present dangers they face, is a measure pushed before parliament May 9 creating stiffer penalties for anyone who leaves Islam. Under the new Apostasy Act, a male accused of departing Islam will receive the death penalty. Women apostates will be imprisoned for life, or until they "repent." Those found guilty forfeit all property rights and lose legal custody of their children. And the new measure requires only the testimony of two adult witnesses for a conviction.

At the same time parliament rejected an attempt to amend Pakistan's blasphemy laws. Under the current law, anyone convicted of blaspheming Muhammad in word, deed, or symbol can be sentenced to death, and one found guilty of "insulting Islam" or "desecrating the Quran," to life in prison. The laws are often used to punish and eliminate Christians.

Lawmaker M.P. Bandhara received widespread support in Pakistani media when he proposed incorporating into law instead a statement carried at Pakistan's constitutional assembly in 1947 that "religion would have nothing to do with the business of state." The blasphemy laws are a more recent invention—they have been on the books since the 1970s—but lawmakers rejected Bandhara's effort to return to the founding era.

In the National Assembly Bandhara was booed by the mullahs of the opposition parties known as MMA, an alliance of six Islamist parties. Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afgan Niazi said, "The sacredness of our way of life that is more than mere religion must not be touched upon by anyone. This is the parliament of an Islamic State, not a secular one. No one can dare to present a bill here which hurts the sentiments of Muslims."

What was striking to observers about last month's developments was the government reaction to it. According to Pakistan's Daily Times, "The government did not oppose the [apostasy] bill and sent it to the standing committee concerned. If passed, the bill will override all other laws in force at present." Pakistan already has some of the strictest laws forbidding conversion and blasphemy. In the past Musharraf has opposed measures that embolden already entrenched conservative-to-radical Islamic clerics and has stood against further erosion of free speech and minority rights.

But now Musharraf is in political death-throes himself. Unpopular for siding with the United States on terrorism—in spite of the $10 billion in U.S. aid his support has brought the country since 2002—Musharraf is under increasing pressure from MMA and the Islamist leaders it represents.

Further, Musharraf frustrated more than just the radicals when he suspended Pakistan's chief justice in March. Musharraf charged the Supreme Court's Iftikhar Chaudhry with misconduct and removed him from office. The charges include family use of government vehicles and unlawfully helping his son gain admission to medical college. But it is widely believed that Musharraf removed Chaudhry because he prosecuted anti-corruption cases against state-connected businesses and because he stood to block Musharraf's bid to win another five-year term in office later this year, when parliamentary elections are held. Such a move currently is unlawful.

The action against Chaudhry has provoked months of street demonstrations and violence, including the May 12 killings in Karachi, weakening the government and strengthening radical elements. But the recent chaos is more than a spasm of political upheaval, according to Elizabeth Kendal of the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission: "It is the inevitable consequence of at least two and a half decades of systematic state- and Saudi-sponsored Sunni Islamization which has continued post-9/11 despite all the rhetoric to the contrary."

Kendal said Musharraf has "played two hands at once" since siding with the Bush administration in the war on terror, allying himself with the United States in exchange for military aid, while at home staking his political future to the pro-Shariah, pro-Taliban MMA in exchange for votes in the National Assembly. MMA was a minority coalition but has grown disproportionately powerful, reports Kendal, because under Musharraf it has come to hold the balance of power on almost any issue.

"As President Musharraf makes quid pro quo deals with the MMA to advance his agenda, which is to stay in power and in uniform, he empowers the MMA to advance its agenda, the Islamization of Pakistan," said Kendal. Six months ago Kendal published a WEA report titled "Musharraf's Maneuvering" that predicted persecution of Christians would escalate through 2007 as a result.

Christians, who make up 3 percent of the population, say the forecast is coming true more quickly than they imagined. The pastor who left Karachi two weeks ago said that when killings and bombings broke out last month, "local police took no action against those people who were using their weapons so openly and freely. As a matter of fact, the police [were] taking shelter from these gunmen, and the gunmen are part of the government."

In Charsadda, a district outside Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province, local market stalls trading in "un-Islamic" commodities like videos, music—even haircuts—have been bombed or otherwise shut down. Girls have been ordered to stop attending school. "It is getting worse, no doubt," said the wife of a pastor who also has left the country. "Women especially don't feel safe going out, and even Christian men do not go out alone." In the North-West Frontier Province, where she is from and still has relatives, "the Taliban is taking a stronghold, and the government says it is doing something about it, but we don't see it. At the moment the government is not doing much because the religious people are getting too strong."

The rising strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has direct impact on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, despite efforts to win Pakistan's aid in routing both Taliban and al-Qaeda from the border region. Local newspapers say fears of "Taliban reprisal" are gripping northern provinces, including local and long-standing jirgas, or assemblies of tribal elders who traditionally rule by consensus.

At one recent jirga in the northern Mohmand region, a Karachi-based cleric named Shaykh Fazal Muhammad told the gathering of about 1,500 men—which included "armed and masked Taleban"—that the mujahideen lacked modern weapons, but were using suicide bombers to fight U.S. forces. One of the Taliban, a youth introduced as Umar Baacha (according to the Daily Times) said: "We will sacrifice thousand more lives to drive out the Americans from Afghanistan."

Temperature rising

DEMONSTRATORS CARRY POSTERS OF SUSPENDED CHIEF JUSTICE CHAUDHRY AS THEY CHANT ANTI-MUSHARRAF SLOGANS DURING A RALLY IN KARACHI

In Karachi a pastor and his wife fled the city after rioters killed 49 people in one day. Another pastor in the port city, Pakistan's largest, was poisoned, reportedly by a man pretending to be a new convert to Christianity, who dumped him on a roadside for dead (he survived).

At the other end of the country, in the North-West Frontier Province town of Charsadda, Taliban-linked Islamic leaders issued to local Christians threats of bombings and killings if they do not convert to Islam or leave. In nearby Peshawar a young Pakistani Christian was kidnapped, driven 400 miles and held for 10 days, then suddenly released.

And that was just May.

Pakistan, ruled more often than not by the military in its 60-year history, is losing its law-and-order grip on its 165 million mostly Muslim citizens. Islamist leaders together with Taliban exiles from Afghanistan are forcing the government of President Pervez Musharraf to give ground, not only on protections against minorities but in overall internal security, in ways eyewitnesses say they never before have seen.