Jamaat-ud-Dawa Chief Hafiz Muhammed Saeed has said his fate is in the hands of God, not America and he moves about like an ordinary person.
In an interview with the New York Times, Hafiz Saeed said that he wants to correct “misperceptions.” Mr. Saeed insisted that his name had been cleared by the Pakistani courts, adding, “why does the United States not respect our judicial system?”
Interestingly, the ten million dollars bounty put on Saeed’s head by the US has not made any Pakistani plot arrest of Hafiz Saeed by US agencies. Saeed leads a public and apparently a fearless life in a middle-class neighborhood of Lahore. He said that “I move about like an ordinary person, that’s my style.”
The United Nations has placed him on a terrorist list and imposed sanctions on his group. But few believe he will face trial any time soon in a country that maintains a perilous ambiguity toward militancy, casting a benign eye on some groups, even as it battles others that attack the state. Mr Saeed’s very public life seems more than just an act of mocking defiance against the Obama administration and its bounty.
At his Lahore compound, a fortified house, office and mosque, Saeed is shielded not only by his supporters, burly men wielding Kalashnikovs outside his door, but also by the Pakistani state. On a recent evening, police officers screened visitors at a checkpoint near his house, while other officers patrolled an adjoining park, watching by floodlight for intruders. His security seemingly ensured, Mr Saeed has over the past year addressed large public meetings and appeared on prime-time television, and is now giving interviews to Western news media outlets he had previously eschewed.
During the inter view, Saeed warmly narrated his visit to the United States in 1994, during which he spoke at Islamic centers in Houston, Chicago and Boston. “At that time, I liked it,” he said with a wry smile. He added that “the militant struggle helped grab the world’s attention, but now the political movement is stronger, and it should be at the forefront of the struggle.”
Pakistan analysts caution that Mr Saeed’s openness is not a random occurrence. What it amounts to, however, may depend on events across the border in Afghanistan, where his group has been increasingly active in recent years. In public, Mr Saeed has portrayed himself as a pillar of Defense of Pakistan Council (DPC), a coalition of right-wing groups that lobbied against the reopening of NATO supply routes through Pakistan last year.