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Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 21:23:39 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Pashtun.code.of.conduct.may.be.helping.bin.Laden]
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Pashtun code of conduct may be helping bin Laden
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, Sept 18, (Reuters)
*****
- Giving shelter to one who asks is a centuries-old Pashtun tradition
that may be why Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden lives in
Afghanistan as a guest and is not on trial for the deaths of thousands
in worldwide attacks.
Shelter is part of an unwritten code called Pashtunwali, or Pakhtunwali
-- the way of the Pashtuns -- that people in this region are required to
uphold even at the cost of their lives.
Its violators risk derision of their descendants for generations.
Bin Laden is the prime U.S. suspect in last week's devastating attacks
in New York and Washington and is also wanted for several other
anti-U.S. attacks across the world. But Afghanistan's Taliban rulers,
who are Pashtun, have refused to hand him over.
Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic community in Afghanistan as as well as
in the North West Frontier Province of neighbouring Pakistan.
Other pillars of the Pashtunwali code include hospitality, revenge and
honour -- the last being responsible for frequent honour killings of
Pashtun women who marry outside the tribe without their parents'
consent.
DEATH OR HONOUR
Under the code, Pashtuns must give protection to those who ask for it --
even if they are fugitive criminals -- and give their lives to protect
Pashtunwali.
Often people committing crimes in Pakistan flee to the country's
semi-autonomous Pashtun tribal area, which borders Afghanistan, to
escape arrest.
A Pakistani Pashtun journalist who has met Taliban supreme spiritual
leader Mullah Mohammad Omar several times said he once asked him whether
he followed Islam or Pashtunwali in giving shelter to bin Laden.
Omar replied that he followed Islam, said journalist Rahimullah
Yousafzai.
But Islamic scholars say Islam does not grant protection to those who
commit a crime.
A chieftain in a Pakistani tribal area once gave sanctuary to a man
accused of murdering the brother of the Frontier province's then
military governor, Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, in the 1980s.
The governor sent a Frontier paramilitary force into the Mohmand tribal
area to arrest the alleged killer. The tribal chieftain died fighting
to protect his guest.
Pashtuns are known to take pride in their ethnicity and, for this, some
Pakistani Pashtun politicians have been accused by their critics of
lacking patriotism and Islamic faith.
Confronted with a similar situation in the late 1970s, Pakistan's
veteran Pashtun politician Abdul Wali Khan, once said:
"I am a Pashtun for 5,000 years, I am a Muslim for 1,400 years and I am
a Pakistani for only 40 years." Pakistan was created in 1947.
08:36 09-18-01
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