Re: The sweet chorus of Musharaf antagonists singing his demise…
Another article… Interesting point… Everyone who has ever tried to make deals with the dictator ends up dead!!! hmmm
Election and reconciliation
By Asha’ar Rehman
AUGUST 2006: Nawab Akbar Bugti killed in an operation by Pakistani troops. The action came after the Nawab went into hiding in the mountains following the breakdown of a dialogue between him and the Musharraf government.
The two sides had been engaged in talks for some time, and at one juncture in 2005 it was reported that a Balochistan package addressing some of the crucial issues facing the province had been reached. The official mediators — Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Mushahid Hussain — had then told the media that the two sides had agreed on around 30 issues and only a couple of points remained to be settled. These two points were to be cleared by the president.
July 2007: Abdur Rashid Ghazi, the Red Mosque cleric involved in a stand-off with the government was killed when an official force led by the Pakistan Army stormed the mosque. Ghazi for long held firm against the siege of the mosque, vowing that he was prepared to die as a ‘martyr’ committed to his cause. However, in the hours immediately preceding the official operation, he showed a willingness to end the occupation of the mosque in return for safe passage for him and his mother to their village in southern Punjab. The official negotiators told him that the decision about whether or not he could be provided safe passage lay with the president. The storming came soon afterwards.
December 2007: Ms Benazir Bhutto, the chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party, assassinated in Rawalpindi after surviving an attempt on her life in Karachi on Oct 18, 2007. The official security cover she was provided with was blown to shreds as the assailant hit her from close range. Ms Bhutto had returned to the country as a result of many rounds of talks between her and emissaries of President Pervez Musharraf. She said she had returned to Pakistan to promote national reconciliation. The National Reconciliation Ordinance was issued and Ms Bhutto held that it would also help others like Mian Nawaz Sharif. The initial amicableness between the PPP leader and the president gradually gave way to a period of mounting tension in which each of them pointed the finger at the other.
Given what each one of them had stood for, Akbar Bugti, Abdur Rashid Ghazi and Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto had little in common. Yet, in the period just before they were killed, all three of them had been advanced the offer of reconciliation with the authority they had been pitted against. All three showed an inclination of giving it a shot and in all three cases the term reconciliation was wrongly applied: there can be no reconciliation without the authority first confessing excesses. Bugti, Ghazi and Mohtarma are no more but the respective groups of people that they represented and continue to represent in death will never be able to reconcile with the past and move towards the future until and unless this serious flaw is removed.
The word reconciliation in its current connotations is borrowed from countries such as South Africa and Argentina and Chile, which are all seeking to make a new beginning after living in the shadow of dictatorship for long. We are applying the term in a hurry without first meeting the preconditions.
According to Commissioner Wynand Malan of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission it means: “the acknowledgment of the dignity of victims for long ignored. It restores the individual’s capacity to take hold of herself and to manage the future and herself in that future. It restores the capacity to live with or alongside the other. It allows us, while remembering, to bring closure to a chapter in our past. It enables us to live in the present, making our life as a nation and our lives as individuals in a shared future. It always remains a never-ending process.”
The violence must end but before we can have an atmosphere as described in the above definition, there is a certain prerequisite that has to be met. In an article titled ‘Truth commissions and national reconciliation: Some reflections on theory and practice’, Charles O. Lerche III says: “When oppressors publicly acknowledge what they have done, knowledge becomes, in a sense, truth, and victims are (to some extent) assured that the past will not repeat itself. This in itself contributes to victims’ healing and, thereby, facilitates dialogue.”
That admission is nowhere in sight. There is no feeling of remorse and those in power continue to rule arbitrarily. A general election can restore the balance in favour of other major players in the political arena of Pakistan and as such can provide the starting point for an understanding putting us on the path of some kind of reconciliation in future. The arbitrary manner in which the polls have been put off for 40 days till Feb 18 in the face of opposition from major political forces such as the PPP and PML-N severely jeopardises hope for a genuine involvement of all parties in the search for a dialogue out of the current turmoil.