Pakistan's Musharraf cracking down on foreigners in Madrassas

[irishgrl]

This guy has guts.

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf said all the estimated 1,400 foreign nationals studying in the country's madrassas would have to leave the Islamic seminaries.

"All foreigners are to be removed" from Pakistan's more than 10,000 Koranic schools, said Musharraf, and no new visas would be issued to non-Pakistanis wishing to study in the seminaries and prayer schools.

The ban would also apply to holders of dual nationality.

"An ordinance to this effect will be adopted in the next coming days," General Musharraf said, as part of new rules requiring all seminaries to register with the government by the end of the year.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has urged Pakistan to move against extremists and radical madrassas following news that some of the London July 7 bombers had recently visited the South Asian country.

Musharraf vowed to continue a crackdown on hardliners he ordered last week, in which security forces said they had rounded up more than 600 suspected militants and Islamic clerics.

"Till now there is no suspect arrested" directly related to the London bombings, Musharraf said. "The investigation is going on. It's a little premature to draw a conclusion. It's a very tedious job."

The president, who has banned 10 extremist groups, said the raids had aimed not at rounding up large numbers of people but at catching the leaders of the Islamic radical underground.

"I don't want to arrest the workers," he told a group of foreign correspondents. "I want the leaders of the banned groups. I'm not impressed by figures. We want to get all of the bigwigs."

Musharraf also pledged to enforce a ban on anti-Western hate speeches being spread from mosque's loudspeakers or through audio recordings.

Asked about the seriousness of the arrest campaign, Musharraf: "I have never done anything not seriously. I don't bluff. I do act with realism. I am realistic, not idealistic. I am very, extremely serious."

Madrassas offer free religious education and board for more than one million Pakistani children, especially in areas neglected by state education services, but some have been targeted for preaching hatred against the West.

Many hardline schools were set up as indoctrination and military training sites during the 1979-1989 US-backed war against the Soviet occupation in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Under the registration drive, the tribal and staunchly-Islamic North West Frontier Province had registered 720 religious seminaries, provincial law and parliamentary affairs minister Malik Zafar Azam said late Thursday.

As part of the sweeping arrests, Pakistani security services this week arrested Hashim Qadeer, a fugitive suspect in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

US President George W. Bush later Thursday phoned Musharraf to discuss the "war on terrorism" and regional issues, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan without giving further details.

Security sources believe Osama bin Laden may still be hiding in western Pakistan, but Musharraf said this week his forces had dismembered Al-Qaeda and broken its communications structure.

Pakistan shares a 2,400-kilometres (1,500-mile) border with Afghanistan in the rugged and lawless mountain areas of the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, tribal regions which were for long beyond the reach of the central government.

Almost daily violence rocks the region, where 70,000 Pakistani troops are hunting Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked insurgents who use remote mountain hideouts to stage cross-border raids on US and Afghan government targets.

In another step set to tighten border security, Pakistan has said it would start issuing machine-readable visas with photographs within six to eight weeks to foreigners, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

And machine-readable Pakistani passports, recognized by the United States and Britain, had already been issued to Pakistani nationals in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, said senior immigration official Brigadier Khalid Habib.