Re: Pakistan elections to be held before January 9.
**Pressure builds as Bhutto pushes ahead to endgame](The Observer archive | The Guardian)
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President Pervez Musharraf began buckling to international pressure yesterday as Pakistan’s attorney-general, Malik Mohammad Qayyum, suggested the state of emergency - announced eight days ago amid his ‘post-modern coup’ against his own regime - could be lifted within a month.It came as the temporary house arrest imposed on former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, to prevent her from addressing a rally of tens of thousands of her supporters in Rawalpindi on Friday, was also lifted.
The latest concession by the President and chief of the army to the demands of Washington and London, which have been attempting to broker a power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto, comes after Musharraf suggested elections, originally planned for January, would go ahead by 15 February.The reversals came as Bhutto aligned herself for the first time with deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. The move by Musharraf is unlikely to be enough to end days of protests - led by lawyers and journalists - over Musharraf’s purging of the country’s Supreme Court, which had sought to hold the regime accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.
The drama has given the impression of a series of contrived set-piece performances designed to bolster the individual standing of Musharraf and Bhutto. As such it has appeared to diplomats as an increasingly cynical game, divorced from the realities of a country being pulled apart by Islamist extremism, Musharraf’s dictatorial tendencies and the political opportunism of Bhutto.
Under pressure to respond to the declaration of emergency on 3 November, Bhutto has gradually shifted her position from one that for days saw her pointedly ignore the plight of the detained chief justice of the Supreme Court towards a defence of the ‘real Supreme Court’, which she now insists is the only court that can rule on the legality of Musharraf’s re-election as President by a compliant National Assembly without having first given up the role of Chief of Staff of the Army.
The changing of her narrative was in evidence on Friday, as ‘BB’ was trapped inside a pleasant, leafy street of Islamabad to prevent her leading a rally of her Pakistani People’s party supporters to the neighbouring garrison city of Rawalpindi. As she addressed supporters and the media, after failing to cross a barricade of barbed wire that she charged was ‘illegal detention’ by the state, Bhutto’s rhetoric, when she described Musharraf’s proposals for a February election as a ‘bit vague,’ had coalesced into a more powerful peroration.
In it she subtly elided the crucial issues of Pakistan’s current political crisis to suggest a continuum between the ‘dictatorship of the Taliban’ in Afghanistan, infecting northern Pakistan, with the ‘dictatorship’ of Musharraf. If it is a performance that Bhutto is putting on, it is familiar. On 18 November 1992, in the middle of an identical struggle with the then Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto was penned in by barbed wire in an adjoining street as she tried to reach the same Rawalpindi Park, the Liaquat Bagh. She spoke then as now of a ‘long march’ from Lahore to Islamabad.
‘It is all a game,’ said Kashif Abbasi, one of the blacked-out anchors from ARY One World TV in the scrum outside Bhutto’s house. ‘It’s all part of her negotiation.’
It was not only among staff of the television stations closed down for criticising Musharraf that the tepid leadership of ‘BB’ and other ‘opposition’ leaders has come in for criticism in the last week. Outside the District Court in Islamabad last week, Tasadduq Abbosi, a 25-year-old lawyer, joined several hundred colleagues, including senior members of the Islamabad Bar Association, to demand that Musharraf step down.
‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that civil society is just not moving. It is just the lawyers really. We need the unions and public to join in.’
The issue of the lack of more popular support was taken up by Zaffar Abbas, the Islamabad editor at Dawn newspaper. ‘You cannot blame the market traders for standing by while the lawyers demonstrate,’ he said last week as a direct feed from an affiliated TV station played in his office. Images that, if they were not blacked out, might have had a profound effect on mobilising support against Musharraf’s clampdown.
‘They will only join the rallies when they think there can be a chance of change. Unless one of the opposition parties gets its people on the streets it will remain like this.’
The result is the opposition to the emergency thus far has limped along with demonstrations of a few hundred, largely uncovered in a country whose televisions have effectively been unplugged and amid targeted arrests of precisely those people at local level - lawyers, human rights activists and party organisers - who could act in organising large-scale opposition. Yesterday, however, in a reversal of her lack of support for Chaudhry, Bhutto put on a show with a new script, appearing in her white SUV at the head of a column of supporters, to very publicly demand his restitution. ‘He is the real chief justice,’ Bhutto blared over a megaphone.
Bhutto repeated her call for supporters to join her in a ‘long march’ next week from Lahore to Islamabad to insist that ‘President Musharraf honour his commitment before the Supreme Court and the promise he made to the Pakistan People’s party during talks that he’ll take off his uniform by 15 November.’ But the story of the last week is of her airbrushing the chief justice out of the picture, along with her sponsors in Washington or the UK, including British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The troubled history of the Supreme Court under Chaudhry - suspended by Musharraf in March, reinstated after a campaign, and now purged again along with like-minded judges - is at the heart of the crisis.
For in Pakistan, where the Supreme Court has traditionally been weak in the six decades since the state’s establishment, Chaudhry and his colleagues had in 12 months reinvented it as a powerful new interlocutor in Pakistani society after eight years of steady, unpopular army encroachment into all aspects of Pakistan’s life. Acting on its own initiative, the court has demanded the appearance of intelligence chiefs to explain the disappearance of hundreds of ‘missing’ people held by the agencies on suspicion of militancy. It challenged nationalisations from which it suspected senior government figures had received kickbacks.
And following the siege in July of the militant Red Mosque in Islamabad - the Lal Masjid - it insisted on investigating the circumstances of the assault on the mosque, upholding the rights of hundreds of madrassa students being held without charge, before most controversially ordering its reopening.
The central, divisive issue was the suspicion by Musharraf that the court was preparing to declare his recent re-election as President while still in uniform illegal.
And while Musharraf has said one of the reasons for purging the court was its reopening of the mosque, it has not been lost on his critics that two of the judges who have agreed to join his new Supreme Court with reduced powers are the same who ordered the reopening.
Nor has it been ignored that Musharraf’s new Supreme Court is essentially powerless. Its size has been cut by almost a third. Its so-called ‘suo moto’ privilege to call cases on its initiative has been removed. Crucially Musharraf’s new provisional constitution insists no court should be able to issue decrees against ‘the President, Prime Minister or any authority designated by the President’.
Bhutto hesitated in calling for Chaudhry’s restitution because the allegations of corruption against Bhutto were revoked by a National Reconciliation Ordinance thrashed out with Musharraf. An aggressive and independent Supreme Court - under a reinstated Chaudhry - might yet revoke that ordinance.
‘The crisis here has emerged in large part because Musharraf and others are not used to the idea of the courts doing what they ought to,’ says Ali Dayan Hasan, the Human Rights Watch researcher in South Asia, based in Lahore. ‘The army is resented by just about everyone now, including the Pakistani elite. In Musharraf’s years in power it has extended its influence into all areas of society.’
So much so, argues Hasan, that Bhutto could not be ‘swanning around’ without the army’s permission. ‘It is,’ he adds, ‘a good reason to be cynical.’
, let us be rich in money, regardless of how poor we remain in morals, social and national levels.
