Otherwise, why hasnt he lilfted the ban on public protests?
Why are the barricades in place?
Why is the media still not free?
Why is the Chief Justice and others still under house arrest?
Musharaf a coward indeed…
but wounds remain green
http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/16/top3.htm
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, Dec 15: Police barricades were still in place on Islamabad’s trouble-prone Constitution Avenue on Saturday even as President Pervez Musharraf lifted emergency but let the wounds inflicted by his extra-constitutional move remain green, with little signs of healing for quite some time.
The barricades to block protests outside the Supreme Court and parliament located on the avenue were laid on Nov 3 immediately after the president, in his capacity of Chief of the Army Staff, proclaimed emergency, under which the Constitution and fundamental rights were suspended, about 60 judges of superior courts were sacked, new restrictions were put on the media and thousands of political and legal activists were detained.
The government’s reluctance to lift such measures indicated it feared continued protests rather than hoping trouble-free celebrations over the president’s latest move after six weeks of emergency rule that provoked revulsion both at home and abroad.
The president did not seem ready in the beginning to lift emergency so soon as he had been saying he could still hold free and fair elections as had happened in 1970 under emergency imposed by a previous military ruler, Gen Yahya Khan. But the logic failed to convince many people and Dec 15 was set to change course under domestic and international pressure.
Though the president’s order on Saturday revoked the emergency proclamation, repealed his Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) and revived the Constitution with what were claimed to be unchallengeable amendments, there seemed little relief for the victims of the Nov 3 move, the worst-hit being the Constitution and the judiciary.
Attorney-General Malik Mohammad Qayyum is unlikely to find many backers of his argument that six amended articles of the revived Constitution would need no ratification by the future parliament. If he is right, this will be contrary to what happened in the past, such as with the amendments decreed by previous military ruler Gen Mohammad Ziaul Haq which he got approved by a parliament elected through party-less elections in 1985, and then with Gen Musharraf’s own decrees contained in a Legal Framework Order that was legitimised by the Seventeenth (Constitution) Amendment passed in 2003 with the help of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal alliance of religious parties.
“This unholy insistence alone is capable of sowing seeds of disaster and the dissolution (of the next) National Assembly,” former Supreme Court Bar Association president Sheikh Mohammad Akram Sheikh said about the attorney-general’s view.
“The parliament shall have to debate and decide about these questions and its existence and continuity shall very much depend on a popular answer furnished by it,” he told Dawn. “Otherwise the electoral process geared in motion may continue to spin and pave the way for another election in the country.”
The legal community and political parties are also likely to react strongly against the new presidential order’s endorsement of the removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and all other judges of the Supreme Court and the four High Courts who had either refused or were not invited to take the oath under the PCO.
Most of these judges remain under virtual house arrest and some top leaders of the lawyers’ community, including Supreme Court Bar Association president Aitzaz Ahsan, in detention.
The move seems hardly capable of setting matters at rest while the campaign for the Jan 8 general election is likely to heat up with the finalisation of the lists of contestants after Saturday’s withdrawals of candidatures and a threatened movement by lawyers and political parties boycotting the elections mainly for the restoration of the pre-Nov 3 judiciary.
The media too saw little to cheer about despite President Musharraf’s assurance in his Saturday’s post-emergency address to the nation that “I stand for the independence of the media” as curbs imposed on Nov 3 remained in force and still kept one major private television channel off the air domestically while some others from those allowed to work seemed greatly tamed.
Yet the interim government’s Law Minister Syed Afzal Haider called it a “big day” and “thanksgiving day” because emergency was lifted so soon and not prolonged as done by some previous rulers.