Lawyers arrested in street battles, for the sake of the constitution

Hundreds of lawyers took to the streets again in the eastern city of Lahore and in Multan, Pakistan, about 200 miles to the southwest of Lahore. The police arrested scores of protesters, and more than 100 lawyers were injured in street battles.

On Tuesday, a day after hundreds were tear-gassed, beaten and rounded up by the police, the lawyers said they had taken to the streets because they felt that Pakistan's first taste of judicial independence was being snatched away.

Behind the public rage of Pakistan's lawyers, lies a long-smoldering resentment toward the country's military president, who at first held out promise for educated, politically moderate Pakistanis, but steadily squandered their support.

That disappointment turned to fury after the president, General Pervez Musharraf, abolished the Supreme Court and scrapped the Constitution, touching a raw nerve among Pakistan's lawyers, some with degrees from the best universities abroad and with experience in how other societies had preserved legal rights.

"How do you function as a lawyer when the law is what the general says it is?" said a prominent Islamabad lawyer, Babar Sattar, who has a Harvard law degree.

The lawyers have been the only force in the country to mount protests since Saturday night. The political parties have remained notably subdued.

An estimated 700 lawyers, maybe more, are now in jail, lawyers say.

Some top corporate lawyers have been arrested, like Shahid Kardar, who among those jailed Sunday in the raid on the human rights commission.