Struggle for power in Pakistan

[Tiki Tam Tam]

Struggle for power in Pakistan


By Jo Johnson

Published: September 13 2007 18:40 | Last updated: September 13 2007 18:40

Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, former prime ministers of Pakistan, have chosen very different strategies for their return to their homeland, ruled since 1999 by the US-backed General Pervez Musharraf.

Mr Sharif, the leader of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) whom Gen Musharraf had exiled, has played an outsider’s game, seeking to unseat the army chief through confrontation, on the streets and in the courts. In contrast, Ms Bhutto, encouraged by Washington, has opted for an inside track, risking the credibility of her Pakistan People’s party by seeking a power-sharing deal with the unpopular dictator turned president.


Ms Bhutto is poised on Friday to announce her return, after Mr Sharif on Monday spectacularly failed in his attempt to enter the country. He now languishes under house arrest in Jedda.

But even though he was unceremoniously deported within hours of his arrival at Islamabad airport on an overnight flight from London, it is too early to write off Mr Sharif. He has challenged the deportation order in the supreme court, which, in a seismic ruling, last month pre-emptively declared that the former prime minister enjoyed an “inalienable right to return [to] and remain” in Pakistan.

The court’s decision said the terms of Mr Sharif’s exile, outlined in a deal guaranteed by Saudi Arabia, had no force in law. Signed in 2000, the arrangement saw Gen Musharraf give Mr Sharif a “conditional pardon” for alleged crimes including the “hijacking” of the army chief’s aircraft, provided he stayed out of Pakistan and out of politics for 10 years.

Gen Musharraf’s decision to deport him, almost certainly in violation of that court order, marks a serious escalation of his battle with the judiciary. It comes as the court prepares to rule on whether the 64-year-old commando can stand for re-election as president, perhaps the most important decision in its history.

Under the constitution, a public servant cannot stand for office unless specifically exempted by a law passed in parliament, an exclusion that lasts for two years after retirement. Gen Musharraf has circumvented this before, but legal experts say the supreme court is now likely to rule that a further waiver will require a constitutional amendment. For this, he will need a two-thirds majority in parliament – and Ms Bhutto’s support.

All this is now coming to a head, as Gen Musharraf must stand for re-election between Saturday and October 15. Under the Pakistani system, an electoral college comprised of the membership of all national and provincial legislatures elects the president. Opposition leaders disapprove of Gen Musharraf’s plan to seek re-election by the sitting assemblies, members of which are likely to be more favourable to his continued rule than their successors – Pakistan’s next parliamentary elections must take place by mid-February. They say such a move would be unconstitutional and open to challenge in the supreme court.

If she strikes a deal, Ms Bhutto could enjoy a warmer official reception on her return than Mr Sharif, whose supporters were arrested in their hundreds on Monday and barred from massing at the airport to greet him. Under pressure from the US, Gen Musharraf has accepted the need to broaden his political support- base at a time when his own popularity is plunging to George W. Bush-like levels. Having alienated the religious parties that once backed him as president-in-uniform, he can no longer afford to ignore the lifeline that Ms Bhutto is extending to him.

If the two can overcome their mutual distrust and put the final touches to a power-sharing deal, Ms Bhutto could soon enjoy a third stint as prime minister and see what she claims are “politically motivated” corruption charges against her dropped.

An opinion poll released on Tuesday by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based non-profit organisation, showed that Mr Sharif was catching up on Ms Bhutto in terms of popularity, with 57 per cent of the 1,044 adults polled last month having a favourable opinion of him, compared with 63 per cent for the PPP leader. Osama bin Laden, with 46 per cent support, was viewed more favourably in Pakistan than Gen Musharraf, whose 38 per cent rating makes him the most unpopular figure in Pakistani politics. The nationwide poll showed that 67 per cent of respondents in North-West Frontier Province, where most militants are based, opposed the Pakistani military’s pursuit of al-Qaeda or Taliban forces.


In her negotiations with the government, Ms Bhutto, who lives in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, has focused on seven key concessions in return for the PPP’s support for Gen Musharraf’s re-election: the “doffing” of his uniform within a defined period; the removal of the president’s powers to dissolve parliament and oust the prime minister; the establishment of an independent election commission; the release of all political prisoners; and the holding of free, fair and transparent elections. She also has insisted on the repeal of a 2003 constitutional amendment banning twice-elected prime ministers (such as herself) from serving again and the removal of corruption charges against her and other ex-officials.

While Mr Sharif’s popularity has surged as a result of his anti-Musharraf and anti-US posture, Ms Bhutto’s has plummeted because of what is widely seen as self-interested deal-making. The popular view that she is motivated principally by a desire to see the various corruption cases against her dropped is a concern to her party, which shows signs of a potential split. “She’s desperate to do a deal to get the corruption charges dropped and believes that she has no choice,” says Imran Khan, leader of Tehreek-e-Insaf (Justice party) and former Pakistan cricket captain. “It’s much more important for her to do a deal and get off all these charges than to prevent her party from sinking.”

Mr Sharif could yet disrupt these carefully crafted plans for what the US, approvingly, calls a “stable transition” to democracy. If his petition is successful, the court could order the government to produce him in Pakistan, potentially in time for him to play a disruptive role in the elections. In his petition, he accuses the government of engaging in a “criminal conspiracy to contemptuously defeat and disobey the supreme court order” of August 23, noting that commandos had bundled him into a waiting aircraft before he had cleared immigration and technically entered the country. He denies the government’s claim that he left Pakistan willingly rather than face a trial that could end in years of confinement in the sizzling heat of a local jail.

Eight years ago, few Pakistanis would have trusted Mr Sharif, whose two terms in office were marred by allegations of government corruption and incompetence, more than they did Gen Musharraf. Today, however, the Pakistani media overwhelmingly prefers his version of events to the government’s. “I was literally dragged out of my country against my fundamental rights and will, and forced into exile,” Mr Sharif told his lawyer, Fakhruddin Ibrahim, on Wednesday by telephone.

Pakistan

He maintains the authorities tricked him on to the waiting aircraft by telling him that he was being taken to a destination inside Pakistan – either Karachi, the southern port city, or Attock Fort, a detention centre halfway between Islamabad and Peshawar, where he would await trial on his own set of money laundering and corruption charges.

“It was only after the flight flew for a couple of hours and did not begin its descent that Mian Nawaz Sharif was told the plane was heading for Jedda,” says Shahbaz Sharif, Mr Sharif’s brother and principal political confidant, speaking by phone from his London base. “It was total deception.”

Tanvir Ahmed Khan, a former Pakistani foreign secretary, says the government has been “lying through its teeth”. Officials “want to establish that he lacks courage and is a spoilt man from a rich family who can’t take the heat”, he adds. “They want to suggest that he opted for the easiest course and almost willingly went back into exile.”


There has been no sighting of Mr Sharif since Monday. Siddique-ul-Farooq, a PML(N) official, says the former prime minister is in complete confinement in Jedda. “His home has effectively been turned into a jail, he is not allowed to receive visitors or phone calls and he can’t make any calls,” he says. Human rights groups have called for his release. “Sharif must be allowed to leave Saudi Arabia and return to Pakistan if he so wishes, and the international media and independent monitors must be provided immediate access to him,” says Ali Dayan Hasan, of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Anything less would make a mockery of international law.”

On the same day as Mr Sharif was being dispatched to Jedda, around 2,000 activists from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a Karachi-based party loyal to Gen Musharraf, stormed the Sindh high court. The mob disrupted its inquiry into May street clashes that had left 43 dead in the city and had prevented Iftikhar Chaudhry, then fighting an eventually successful campaign to be reinstated as supreme court chief justice, from addressing a local bar association.

Raja Mohammad Riaz, a lawyer who had been closely involved in the struggle to reverse Gen Musharraf’s suspension of Mr Chaudhry, was on Monday shot dead as he sat in a taxi near the provincial high court.

Shafqat Mahmood, a political analyst and former cabinet minister, says Gen Musharraf is creating an atmosphere of “threat and intimidation” to deter the justices in the supreme court from upsetting his election plans. “He’s telling the court, ‘If you guys don’t behave, I’ll go to any length’. I’m more than convinced that he is seriously game- planning a surgical martial law that would give him just enough power to get rid of the judges and justices.

“Of course the US and the UK will make disapproving statements, but frankly the US needs Musharraf so much that they’ll, yet again, just say, ‘Well, he may be an SOB but at least he’s our SOB.’ ”

Gen Musharraf has come close to declaring a state of emergency. Only the US managed to stop him doing so on August 8 when Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, deployed all her dissuasive powers in a phone call. But Gen Musharraf’s political backers in the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) remain concerned about their own political fortunes. The powerful Chaudhrys – Shujaat Hussain, PML(Q) president, and his cousin Pervaiz Elahi, the Punjab chief minister (they are unrelated to the chief justice) – would prefer Gen Musharraf to suspend the democratic timetable and the judicial system than to see him enter a power-sharing agreement with Ms Bhutto or allow Mr Sharif back.

For its part, the US has failed to dispel a widespread impression that it is not unhappy about Mr Sharif’s deportation and that it put pressure on Saudi Arabia to come to Gen Musharraf’s assistance last week. In Islamabad on Wednesday, John Negroponte, deputy secretary of state, simply said Mr Sharif’s deportation was an internal issue for Pakistan, adding that “our only wish is that whatever is done be done in a peaceful manner and that it lead to a peaceful and democratic political evolution”.

Another US official, requesting anonymity, says: “Musharraf has been the best to work with on counter-terrorism but we’d be prepared to work with whomever we have to . . . If it were Nawaz Sharif, he’s got a lot of friends among US political types.”

That is not how Imran Khan, an ally of Mr Sharif’s, sees it. In his view, as in that of many others in Pakistani politics, Washington is lobbying aggressively for a form of “managed democracy” that would see Ms Bhutto gain a share of power but essentially leave Gen Musharraf, in charge of policy execution in the two areas of greatest concern to the US: confronting the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the Afghan border and making sure that Islamabad’s nuclear weapons stay under lock and key.

“The Americans are prepared to allow so much bloodletting in the name of democracy in Iraq and then they throw it out of the window here in their attempt to manufacture their dream-team of Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf,” Mr Khan says.

Additional reporting by Farhan Bokhari

A burdened military is vexed by its missing 240

By Farhan Bokhari

Pakistan’s military still has trouble explaining exactly how it happened that, on August 30, more than 240 of its soldiers were taken captive by militants in the remote region of South Waziristan, just when they should have been on their highest state of alert.

According to the armed forces, not a shot was fired by the soldiers, but senior military officials insist that was because the troops were under orders to show restraint. The debacle raises questions about the loyalty of combat troops and their reliability in the fight against militant extremists.

The scale of the kidnapping is unprecedented, even in Pakistan’s unruly tribal areas, which lie largely outside the control of the state. South and North Waziristan, on the Afghan border, are thought to be the regions where much of the al-Qaeda leadership has sought refuge after being driven out of Afghanistan earlier in the decade. The US has been pressing Pakistan to hunt down militant leaders in these areas.

For the moment, the Pakistani government is trying non-violent means to secure the soldiers’ release – using a local council of tribal leaders known as a jirga to negotiate with the hostage takers – though an imminent end to the crisis appears unlikely. The hostage takers are demanding the release of several hardcore militants, arrested in the past three years, as the price for the soldiers’ freedom.

Officials in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the region that surrounds the tribal areas, warn that the soldiers have been split into nine groups that are being kept well apart. Rescue is thought impossible without a risk of large-scale casualties, including hostages.

Earlier last month, militants in the same region kidnapped 16 paramilitary soldiers. Only 15 returned: the other was beheaded by a teenager and a video of that act delivered to Pakistani officials as a reminder of what could happen to soldiers in captivity. “Those who saw the video still have sleepless nights. It was a reminder of how cruel these people are,” says an NWFP government official who has spoken to some who watched the clip.

“You can’t have a sustained operation of this kind over three years. . . against your own people without this kind of outcome,” says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defence commentator. “Militaries are trained to fight well-armed enemy troops. When you make them fight your own people, there is always the danger of troops becoming either demoralised or simply taking the view that their battle has no legitimacy.”

Retired Lieutenant General Moinuddin Haider, the former interior minister, warns that the kidnappings have wider repercussions for public morale across Pakistan. “Pakistanis could see this event as a voluntary surrender even though there’s no evidence that these soldiers simply walked over to the other side. The image of what has happened has considerably damaged the view of the government.”

Western military analysts say the Pakistani military continues to be at a disadvantage in the tribal areas – a region that was simply out of bounds for the government before 2003. In their three-year operation, Pakistani military troops have relied on support from paramilitary soldiers who are largely recruited from the tribal areas and become part of what is known as the Frontier Corps. “You can argue the FC boys will always have split loyalties. In many instances, they will be told to operate in places against their friends or even family,” says one western analyst. “How can you be sure [FC troops] will come along willingly?”

Gen Haider warns that the kidnappings have come at an inopportune time for President Pervez Musharraf just when he is under mounting pressure to tackle security problems across the country.

On September 4, two suicide attacks – including one that targeted a bus carrying junior employees of Inter Services Intelligence, the country’s counter-spy agency – left up to 29 dead. Particularly disconcerting for the military, the incidents took place in the heart of Rawalpindi, the garrison town where the army’s headquarters are located, just outside the capital Islamabad.

Investigators are looking into possible links between the attackers and the militants who are holding the soldiers in South Waziristan.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT.com / Home UK / UK - Struggle for power in Pakistan

Could some Pakistani posters who is aware of the happenings indicate as to how far this article brings out the political conundrum that is facing Pakistan?

 

[Awesome]

Mush is going to deal with BB, but BB can't trust Mush coz she has to grant him the favor FIRST.

Basically PPPP and PML-Q make the constitutional amendment, he gets elected as President, he farts in her face and says no deal.

That could happen.

 

[Tiki Tam Tam]

I believe that even if Ms Bhutto returns, the cases will continue.

What about the CJ. Would he take the deportation of Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif as a contempt of court?

Imran Khan seems to be very active with statements.

What about the Mojahir leader, Altaf Hussain of MQM. What is his stand?

Are there any more leaders who could make a material difference?

What about the CJ? Has he too some political ambition?