Below The Beltway

Of Pakistan’s fight against dictatorship:

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — They inhabit a world of shabby, obscure respectability, meeting clients in mazes of open-air cubicles with old typewriters and frayed files, conferring in narrow alleys around crumbling courthouses and appearing in dim, chairless chambers whose hand-scrawled schedules are tacked to the door frames outside.

But for two weeks, the black-suited lawyers of Pakistan have been at the forefront of the campaign against President Pervez Musharraf, boycotting courts across the country, protesting the emergency rule he imposed on Nov. 3. The strike has delayed thousands of bail hearings, lawsuits and trials.

Each morning, hundreds of lawyers, who call one another “barrister” and “advocate” in the British style and normally confine themselves to the obscure realms of the law, gather at bar association offices in major cities. On signal, they emerge and stride briskly around each court district wearing their black business suits, shouting anti-government slogans as squads of riot police stand guard. Sometimes there are shoving matches, blows and arrests, creating the pointed spectacle of justice under siege.

“How can you walk into a courtroom and address a judge as ‘My lord’ if he has taken an oath to a dictator?” demanded Asad Abbasi, a bar association leader in Islamabad who leads daily marches around the district court but sleeps in a different house each night, fearing arrest. “Musharraf’s actions are illegal, and he is destroying the rule of law.”

The clash between Musharraf and the judiciary is at the heart of Pakistan’s political crisis. Many analysts say he imposed the emergency largely to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling in favor of opposition petitions challenging the validity of his Oct. 6 election to a new term by compliant national and provincial legislatures.

In recent days, much international attention has focused on the drama surrounding Musharraf’s charismatic political rival, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who has attempted to orchestrate mass street protests and denounced Musharraf daily despite being under house arrest, which was lifted Friday.

But on many levels, Musharraf’s more important adversary is Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the twice-deposed chief justice of the Supreme Court. After a battle of legal rulings and public protests that erupted when Musharraf first removed Chaudhry in March, the outspoken judge is now also under house arrest in the capital, enshrined as a democratic hero while Musharraf struggles to remain in power.

Instead of just being an assault on democratic rule, Musaharraf’s actions are better seen as an attack on something much more fundamental to liberty — the rule of law.  While the Pakistani justice system is surely imperfect, it is interesting to see it’s lawyers on the front lines of this fight against dictatorship.