Day of Peace in Pakistan Turns to Day of Rage

A day of violent protests in Pakistan has left several people dead and injured. The Pakistani government had declared a public holiday and urged people to demonstrate peacefully. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Declan Walsh, who is covering the protests for The New York Times.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is “The World”. What was supposed to be a day of peace in Pakistan turned into a day of rage instead. In the country’s main cities thousands of people protested the anti-Islam video made in America that sparked unrest around the globe. The Pakistani government declared today a public holiday and urged people to demonstrate peacefully, but the protests turned violent and several people were killed. Declan Walsh is the Pakistan Bureau Chief for the New York Times. Declan, can you tell us what happened where you are in Islamabad today?

Declan Walsh: Well, there were some fairly dramatic scenes close to the diplomatic enclave, that’s the part of the city where most Western embassies and diplomatic missions are. We had scenes where several thousand protestors, many of them led by people from extremist religious groups, marched on that part of the city. They clashed violently with the police, clouds of tear gas in the air, and that went on for a good part of the afternoon.

Mullins: And why didn’t it get as violent as it was in some other places? And I want you to take us to those other places after you tell us what happened in Islamabad.

Walsh: Islamabad is a relatively small capital city. Karachi, on the other hand, has somewhere between eighteen and twenty million people. There are a number of religious, and some extremist, groups that are very active there and they certainly seem to have rallied very strongly during the day, particularly after Friday prayers ended in Karachi. Some of these marchers were carrying flags and banners that identified them as members of extremist groups, and they led a number of different protests. American diplomatic premises were very much a target for protestors. The Pakistani government made a very concerted effort to guard those premises and in many cases there were several rings of security usually created by dropping large shipping containers across the main roads to stop protestors from getting there, and those shipping container barricades the focus of clashes between the police and the protestors.

Mullins: Declan, you said that the protests, the most violent which seemed to be anti-American in nature. There is a television ad that is right now airing on Pakistani TV featuring President Obama talking about America’s tradition of religious tolerance, it features Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying that Washington, and she hopes that it’s obvious, had nothing to do with the making of this anti-Islam video. Has that advertising campaign by the US done anything at all? Has it had any impact?

Walsh: It’s safe to say that it hasn’t had the impact that the US government might have wished. The US has really been at pains here in Pakistan to try and distance itself from the controversial video that has stoked all of this trouble. The reality is that many of the people who are out on the streets protesting probably haven’t even seen this video. YouTube has been banned here in Pakistan now for several days, so it’s hard to imagine that most of the people who we see on these very dramatic television pictures have watched that video, but they’ve been told by their leaders that the United States has somehow been involved in promoting this hatred, as they see it, towards the Prophet Muhammad, and it does seem that no matter what American diplomats and government officials say, it doesn’t seem to be able to blunt their anger and prevent them from heading on to the streets.

Mullins: Declan, just, again, for perspective, the Pakistanis who stayed home today, did not go out on the streets, is there a critical mass of them that’s saying, ” What’s going on here? And why the violence?”

Walsh: Well, certainly during the day, as part of it’s efforts to control these protests, the government shut down mobile phones services across most of the country or certainly in the large cities. What that meant is that certainly for those people who had access to computers and could afford it, they were left communicating on the internet. So on social media services, like Twitter or Facebook for instance, I saw a lot of despair really, frustration, anger, and despair among ordinary Pakistanis, for want of a better word, who were sitting at home watching these scenes unfold on television and really feeling a sense about their own country that this small and radical [??] of people was able to hold the rest of the country hostage effectively for an entire day. Those considerations are going to come up over the coming days when people are looking at the decision of the government to declare this is as what is officially termed as “a day of declaration of love for the Prophet Muhammad.”

Mullins: Thank you. Declan Walsh, Pakistan Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He spoke to us from Islamabad.

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