Over 100,000
supporters of Pakistan's largest religious political party gathered in Karachi
on Friday and condemned drone attacks by the United States in the country's
troubled northwest.
The public
meeting organized by the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI) party also demanded that the
government continues the two-month blockade on NATO supplies crossing into
Afghanistan.
“We are not the
enemies of the people of the West and the United States, but we reject the
Americans' attitude by which they always demand of a servile obedience from us,"
JUI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman told the crowd in Pakistan's financial capital,
Karachi.
Senior police
official Ahsan Zulfiqar said more than 100,000 people attended the gathering in
front of the mausoleum of the country's founder Mohammad Ali
Jinnah.
Rehman said
communism vanished after the fall of Soviet Union and a similar fate was
beckoning the West, with the U.S. staring at an "imminent defeat" in
Afghanistan.
"Movements like
Occupy Wall Street are just the beginning of the end of the imperialism of
America and its Western allies," he said.
"We are being
forced to become extremists. When you and your religion are humiliated in
Guantanamo Bay detention centre and your children are being crushed under tanks,
then what the victims will ultimately do? They'll counter your extremism with
extremism." AFP
The
U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at
least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Washington Post The
Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade
ago, and has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones in 2012. NY
Times The
United States was identified in June 2010 as the world's No. 1 user of targeted
killings -- largely as a result of its dependence on unmanned drone attacks in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. CNN In
2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the U.S., the drone strikes
escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so
became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of
northern Pakistan. CBS News According
to Pakistani sources, the U.S. drone strikes kill some 50 civilians for every
militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent. NY Times
KA/ARA
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