A few hours ago a spokesman for Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared that former prime minister Benazir Bhutto will be prevented from leading the three-day motorcade from Lahore to Islamabad set to begin tomorrow. As I post this the latest news is that the government has put Bhutto under house arrest for seven days.
The authorities used house arrest to prevent Bhutto from attending a rally in Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh last Friday, and her compound in Lahore is already surrounded by barbed wire, barricades, and hundreds of police. However, Bhutto has called on all Pakistanis to join the procession and vowed that it would go ahead even if police try to block her. A spokesperson for her Pakistan People's Party said, "If police try to stop us, in every town and district of Punjab, there will be a battlefield between PPP activists and police."
Over the weekend Musharraf attempted to defuse the situation by announcing that parliamentary elections will be held by January 9th, but he has not agreed to restore the constitution or end the state of emergency. Key opposition parties have announced that they will boycott the planned elections if they are held under Emergency rule. (These parties are the Pakistan Muslim League (N) of exiled former premier Nawaz Sharif, the Jamaat-e-Islami religious party of Qazi Hussain Ahmad, and the Tehreek-i-Insaaf of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan.) Bhutto has not formally announced a boycott of the elections but has insisted that they cannot be fair if emergency restrictions continue. (What kind of elections can be expected with a blackout of independent media, a ban on processions and rallies, independent judges removed from the courts, and continued detention of thousands of party activists?) In London, an extraordinary session of the 53 foreign ministers of the Commonwealth (a body composed mainly of former British colonies) today gave Musharraf until November 22 to end emergency rule and take other steps to address his country's problems, or Pakistan would face suspension from the organization.
Until the last few days the Bush administration had appeared to be stubbornly counting on Musharraf's political survival through this crisis, but over the weekend there were hints of a realization that it might not happen. A Washington Post article today quotes an unnamed administration official as saying, "We don't know what this is going to look like next week, never mind three months from now." A European diplomat is even more stark: ""This could go south very, very quickly. It's one of the worst international crises we have had -- and I include Iraq in that statement."
Meanwhile, Pakistanis are heaping flowers and messages of good will at the homes of deposed judges who have refused to take a new oath of support for the emergency as a condition of reinstatement. Students and lawyers are protesting around the country, wearing black armbands and carrying black flags, and in one intriguing photograph (at right) carrying signs with the familiar "eject" icon from the Apple desktop. Demonstrations have also taken place in London , Berlin, the Hague, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere around the world, and blogs are reporting events on the ground and drawing inspiration from the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose daughter Selima Hashmi was arrested last week (translated here by Poorvi Vora):
Wet eyes and a crazed will are not enough;
Nor are accusations of a furtive love;
Stride in the bazaar today, shackles on your feet.
Stride with arms spread open and in wild abandon;
Stride with dust-covered hair and blood-stained shirt;
Stride, all the beloved city watches the road.
I am following the unfolding crisis with a kind of prickly, obsessive dread. In 1976, as a skinny college student majoring in Asian Studies, I spent several months in Pakistan, mostly in Lahore but also in Peshawar and Karachi. At that time Benazir Bhutto's father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People's Party were in power, but Islamic fundamentalists were advocating regime change. Bhutto had been ushered into office on a socialist platform (hence the name of his party, and even his distinctive hat that was meant to be reminiscent of Mao's cap.) His program of nationalizing industry and redistributing land to the poor had foundered, however, as he was compelled to enter into political alliances with landlords and industrialists because of his strained relations with the army. He put down a secessionist rebellion with a brutal four year military campaign that continued while I was in the country. He had also banned the rival National Awami Party and arrested its leadership following the assassination of his lieutenant Hayat Khan Serpao in a bomb blast in Peshawar the summer before I arrived. (I attended a ceremony at the U.S. Information Service office in Peshawar marking the anniversary of that occasion.) In short, it was a time not too far removed in spirit from present events. After my stay, following disputed elections in early 1977, Bhutto was deposed in a military coup by Gen. Zia ul Haq in July and eventually executed after a highly questionable trial for conspiracy to commit murder of a political rival.
I am at the far left in this photograph, thirty-one years ago, aboard the famous Khyber Mail about to travel to Karachi near the end of my stay. When I see the photographs and watch the video clips from Pakistan today, it brings back sights, smells, sounds, and faces from that distant time with gripping clarity. My fellow American students and I had stayed for weeks in a university dorm in Lahore, from which we were shepherded to night-time political meetings where activists aligned with the Jamaat-i-Islami party called for an end to the Bhutto regine. I remember walking around the back way to the stadium at night, avoiding the police patrols. We heard long passionate political speeches by student revolutionaries who hadn't been to a class in months. The students received messages and delegations from other provinces, declaring national unity and unity of purpose in seeking political change. A few weeks later I was on an airplane back to the United States. Pakistan was soon plunged into political turmoil and, within a year, into fundamentalist-backed military rule.
I cannot claim to be any kind of expert on the current situation or to know more about the country than any informed visitor, but there are some basic things about Pakistan that Americans need to keep in mind. First, Pakistan is no provincial backwater. It is the sixth most populous country in the world (over 160 million people), and the second most populous Muslim-majority nation (after Indonesia). It has a large gross domestic product (estimated at $454 billion) with thriving industries and a large and well-equipped military. Second, Pakistan holds a unique and symbolic place in the world as the only nation specifically created to be a homeland for Muslims. Third, although Pakistanis are very proud of their national identity, that identity is subject to competing claims of provincial, ethnic, and clan loyalties. Fourth, Pakistan has no track record of political stability, with its first constitution having been adopted in 1956 and suspended in 1958, and its second having been adopted in 1973, suspended in 1977, reinstated in 1991, and now suspended again in 2007. Pakistan's three military rulers before Musharraf did not distinguish themselves or bring stability to the nation. Ayub Khan (1958-69) presided over the second war with India and handed power to Yahya Khan (1969-1971) with the country in disarray. Yahya Khan's reign disintegrated over the secession of what is now Bangladesh and the third war with India. Bhutto was ousted by Zia ul Haq (1977-88) who tried to impose religious law and died in a mysterious plane crash. In short, Pakistan is an extremely large, extremely important, and potentially extremely unstable country. AND it has weapons of mass destruction.
The crisis is rendered all the more complex by the fact that neither Bhutto nor the other former premier, Nawaz Sharif, are ideal candidates to assume the reins of power from Musharraf. The economic and political situation deteriorated during the decade in which they alternated in office (1988-99), with corruption and mismanagement marking the governments of each. However, what they have going for them is that neither threw out the constitution and sacked the judiciary to stay in power. At this point, the only clear and unmistakable step that must be encouraged is for Musharraf to undo those abuses. What should happen next is less clear, but if the wishes of the Pakistani people are to be respected it must take the form of a democratic political process in which Bhutto and Sharif and other opposition leaders are free to participate. In other words, the only acceptable road forward is for Musharraf to end the emergency, to reinstate the real Supreme Court, and to abide by its ruling on Musharraf's eligibility to serve as President. Holding elections under martial law, with no independent media and no rallies and thousands of party workers in detention, is not an acceptable alternative.
The people of Pakistan are keeping up the pressure on Musharraf from within. The United States should be applying pressure from without. Instead, the Bush Administration is grasping at straws as it praises Musharraf's illusory promise of free elections and clings to the flawed notion that Musharraf is an effective and indispensible ally against terror. If this war on terror is a struggle for freedom, as we are continually reminded, then it cannot be won by supporting a tyrant who jails judges and critics to preserve his undemocratic rule.
UPDATE: Benazir Bhutto has now clarified and simplified her demand of Musharraf: he must step down, and Bhutto now explicitly rejects the idea of serving as Prime Minister while Musharraf is President (as the Bush administration had envisioned). In the Pakistani blogs there is a sense of frustration and disappointment that the demonstrations are not more widespread, although some commentators are observing that the opposition seems to be energizing Pakistan's youth culture in a way that may outlast the immediate crisis.
Something that deserves more attention in all this is Musharraf's overt imitation of his ally George Bush in legitimizing and preserving his abuse of power. In his initial speech Musharraf invoked Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, echoing apologists for Bush's curtailment of habeas corpus in connection with non-citizens detained at Guantanamo as enemy combatants. Musharraf also railed against "judicial activism" by the Pakistan Supreme Court, a very familiar Bush refrain. And Musharraf amended Pakistani law to allow military trials for civilians suspected of terrorism or subversive activity, a change that a Musharraf spokesman called "similar to the United States Patriot Act."