Choice before the country
By Sayeed Hasan Khan & Kurt JacobsenFriday,August 03,2007
IS Pervez Musharraf on his way out? Don’t count on it. You might not like the consequences even if he were. In March, Musharraf demanded the resignation of the Supreme Court Chief Justice. The Chief Justice refused.
Clashes ignited in mid-May when henchmen from Musharraf’s ally, the MQM, prevented the Chief Justice from leaving Karachi airport to address a bar association meeting. (He spurned the government’s offer of a helicopter). Dozens of people were killed and scores wounded.
Street demonstrations seek full restoration of democracy, we are told, with cricket hero Imran Khan leading the charge (from overseas). Democracy is coming to Pakistan, and not a moment too soon. For Pakistan is endangered by burgeoning religious sectarianism, as evidenced by the Lal Masjid siege and its bloody consequences in Islamabad. Media commentators solemnly say this spells an end to Musharraf’s misrule and fooling around with the mullahs.
In July in London Imran Khan’s tiny party Tehrik-i-Insaf joined hands with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif of the PML (N) which, however, happens to be the party most inclined historically to do deals with the mullahs. Benazir Bhutto of the PPP stayed away, partly because she has taken a ‘no mullahs” stand. Bhutto reportedly also was negotiating with Musharraf for a deal to restore her to political life in Pakistan. Things aren’t quite what they seem in most media reports.Indeed, every political player tried at one time or another to reach an understanding with the religious zealots, which is why Musharraf did not attack the Lal Masjid earlier than he did. But, contrary to media images, the principal anti-Musharraf forces in Pakistan are the mullahs, augmented by small regional and nationalist parties operating in Balochistan and the NWFP. The most extreme clerics waged hyper-puritanical campaigns for years, raiding video shops, smashing satellite dishes, shutting down alleged brothels.
All this has been leaking lately into Islamabad via the Lal Masjid. These hidebound mullahs are the least progressive group imaginable, principally concerned with propagating Sharia laws. And yet these are the key people Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif are making common cause with, in the name of democratic values.
In the brutal burlesque played out at the Lal Masjid, Musharraf gingerly negotiated with two mullah brothers to tamp down their embarrassing excesses. Joining this mollifying mission earlier this year was government minister Ejazul Haq, a son of former dictator Zia, the man who installed the father of the two mullah brothers in the mosque in the first place.
The siege revolved around a small fanatic home-grown movement bent on cleansing the country of certain kinds of vice, evincing a narrow view which most urban Pakistanis do not share. Nearly nine out of 10 Pakistanis vote for the three majority parties, when they get the chance.
Imran Khan says that Pakistan’s elites are corrupt, although all along he has associated with select members. H was a caustic critic of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Now Khan and Sharif cheerfully embrace in order to back the Chief Justice, whose was recently restored to his seat by the Supreme Court. What is going on and why?
Apart from a few exceptions, such as the restoration of the Chief Justice, a pattern of judicial submissiveness to the government formed after partition. Pakistan’s leadership ruled through the British Colonial Act (1935), nipped and tucked to suit their needs. After the death of Jinnah, the bureaucracy and the army were the strongest forces. After the crumbling of the political process in 1953-54, leading bureaucrat Iskander Mirza — in league with the army — became the first president.
After two years, General Ayub Khan deposed him. Successor General Yahya Khan in 1970 ordered the first free elections. In West Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto got the most seats, but East Pakistan was swept by the Awami League. West Pakistan was in no humour to share power. The result was the debacle which ended in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.
Bhutto’s high jinks eventually ignited a mass movement against him. The result was Zia taking over. The judiciary was unequivocally subservient to the executive. Zia hanged Bhutto with court connivance and, without a peep from the West which was pouring in money and arms, he started his Islamicisation campaign.
Zia happily played US ally during the 1980s Soviet-Afghan war, but was killed in 1988. Elections took place. Benazir and Sharif each took two turns in power — launching selective if justified corruption investigations of one another. Musharraf refers with contempt to both leaders’ kleptocratic tendencies.
All this time the judiciary approved all the doings of the government. This is the sort of intermittent democracy Pakistan displayed. Still, it is democracy of a sort.
Under investigation during his second term, Sharif unleashed political goons on the Supreme Court until the Chief Justice stepped aside. This same Sharif today nobly backs a different Supreme Court justice. (In the 1990s Sharif had declared Pakistan should have a regime like the Taliban). Musharraf, after ousting Sharif in 1999, became a pariah but after 9/11 America needed him. The US propped up Zia because they needed him to train and arm groups like the Taliban against the USSR and now they needed Musharraf against the Taliban. The first collaboration created jihadis and the present one is required to fight jihadis. Anyone who fails to appreciate these events, their connections, and the motives behind them, cannot begin to understand the “war on terror”.
Musharraf acted because the judge had impeded his orders for privatisations and allegedly exerted undue influence for favours (getting a son appointed to the police service). When he refused to resign, the lawyers’ lobby deemed this was the best time to fight the government. Insofar as the Chief Justice is concerned they succeeded, although doing so as much in street actions as in the courts.
What of Musharraf? There are no mass movements in the streets as in the waning days of Ayub Khan or Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Lal Masjid aftermath, despite the recent bombing, is not going to topple Musharraf. Comparisons to the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 are deeply misplaced. The stakes are not even remotely the same.
Musharraf is the only reliably secular man at the top. Western powers will not ditch his policy of ‘enlightened moderation’. Musharraf’s rivals just aren’t that appetising. Anyway, the major Pakistani players want the Americans to sort out the game in their favour. The US State Department will be content with a coalition of PPP, MQM and a fraction of the Muslim League (mostly already in government) if this arrangement provides stability. So most likely, a deal will be worked out whereby Musharraf is re-elected president by the National Assembly, the Senate and the four provincial assemblies, which act as an electoral college and national elections follow before the end of 2007. Shedding his uniform would be viewed as a sign of weakness if Musharraf does so before the next elections.
The current conflict reflects badly on all parties. Musharraf was wrong to remove the Chief Justice in advance of a Judicial Council’s investigation. The lawyers are wrong to advocate that the Chief Justice be cleared, whatever the evidence against him. Musharraf, as he announced he would, accepted the Supreme Court judgment. His wisest course is to do nothing more to aggravate the situation.
The best prospect for a progressive secular coalition is President Musharraf reinstalled (minus epaulettes) plus a coalition of the PPP and the MQM along with Pathan and Baloch nationalist parties. While business is happy under Musharraf, there’s a long list of unfulfilled objectives regarding poverty, developmental projects, and anti-corruption measures to be tackled. So Pakistan will indeed enjoy the fruits of formal democracy again, but particularly here one should be careful what one wishes for.
http://www.dawn.com/2007/08/03/op.htm#2