Benazir & Nawaz with spouses
By Praful Bidwai
New Delhi: In the Middle Ages, despotic rulers would routinely exile anyone they didn’t trust or like—from emerging military rivals, to potential future claimants to the throne, to petty criminals and suspects. Banishment and expulsion were a rough-and-ready way of physically keeping “troublemakers” away. Medieval societies had no pretence to delivering justice based on impartiality and objectivity, or to defending citizens’ rights. (Indeed, such rights didn’t exist.)
On September 10, Pakistan witnessed a modern version of this obnoxious practice when President Pervez Musharraf’s government “deported” former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Saudi Arabia within four hours of his return to his own homeland. On arrival at Islamabad airport, Mr Sharif was served a warrant charging him with money-laundering to the tune of $31.5 million. Logically, he should have been arrested and put on trial. Instead, he was manhandled, humiliated and summarily packed off.
Only the naïve will buy into the propaganda that Pakistani and Saudi negotiators offered Mr Sharif a genuine “choice” to be jailed or deported, and that he preferred the second option. Even if one assumes that he was reluctant to face incarceration—and some of my Pakistani friends believe he almost broke down when jailed in October 1999—, it’s hard to imagine that he would have so easily spurned the chance of becoming a powerful symbol of the anti-Musharraf resistance, which would have worked to his political advantage. Besides, in all likelihood, he would have been granted bail.
If Mr Sharif were an astute politician, he would have staged a dramatic sit-in at the airport and made a fiery anti-regime speech. In the event, he allowed himself to be browbeaten and bundled off to Jeddah.
However, that doesn’t let the Musharraf government off the culpability hook. It stooped low by invoking an extra-constitutional “secret” agreement signed by Mr Sharif in 2000, and privileging it over his fundamental right, declared “inalienable” by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, to return home. This does not behove a self-respecting government with elementary respect for the rule of law.
The Musharraf government has only brought discredit upon itself through this egregious act. This will further inflame popular sentiment against the General, and more broadly, the Pakistan military, which is seen as predatory, super-corrupt and unaccountable. This sentiment has been growing in recent months, especially since the brutal attack on the Pakistani lawyers’ mobilisation in Karachi in May against the unjust dismissal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Choudhry. The extraordinary currency which anti-military slogans have acquired in ordinary public discourse further reinforces this conclusion.
In recent weeks, Mr Sharif has gained greatly in popularity, in contrast to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, precisely because he has tried to relate to the popular mood and taken a strong position against another term for President Musharraf, whether in or out of uniform.
At any rate, Gen Musharraf seems bent on committing blunder after blunder, as if driven by a self-destructive calculus. This is typical of the way all authoritarian regimes behave once they start losing legitimacy. After Mr Sharif’s return, Gen Musharraf’s best bet would have been to put him on trial in a transparent and fair manner, and while on bail, to allow him, like all others, to engage in political activity leading to free and fair National Assembly elections.
Gen Musharraf seems to have set the stage for another showdown with Pakistan’s highest court. The Supreme Court ruled on August 23 in favour of Mr Sharif’s right to come home by virtue of his citizenship. Its spirit was clearly to affirm his right to live in Pakistan. Deporting him to Saudi Arabia, with whom the Musharraf government signed a collusive agreement, makes nonsense of this rationale. Indeed, it virtually amounts to abduction and kidnapping. If Mr Sharif is a fugitive from the law, it makes no sense to banish him.
Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N) has moved the Supreme Court asking it to order the government to allow his immediate return. It would be a surprise if the Court does not rule in its favour. That would only bring more ignominy to the government.
An adverse ruling would convince the public that the government is neither capable nor willing to meet a political challenge politically. This is likely to foment vigorous mass protests. Under state repression, some of them could turn violent. The government will probably cynically try to exploit the violence by engineering inter-ethnic conflict in cities like Karachi, or prepare the ground for the imposition of martial law or a state of emergency on Pakistan. That would be a disastrously reckless move, which won’t eventually save the government.
That’s where the “foreign hand” comes in! The United States is aggressively interfering in Pakistani affairs and providing tacit but strong support to its military regime. Although the US says that Mr Sharif’s deportation is Pakistan’s “internal matter”, it is known that Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher was present in Islamabad just when the drama involving Mr Sharif’s expulsion was taking place.
Mr Boucher has acted virtually as Washington’s viceroy in Pakistan, and made an average of one trip every six weeks there to “advise” the government and ensure its survival—on the assumption that Gen Musharraf is a dependable ally in the US war against the Taliban/al-Qaeda. He was joined in Islamabad by Deputy Secretary of State and former National Intelligence director John Negroponte.
Clearly, the US wants to directly supervise a power-sharing arrangement between Gen Musharraf and Pakistan’s political forces, primarily Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party.
Just last month, Gen Musharraf was contemplating the imposition of emergency. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned him against this in a 17 minutes-long 2 a.m. telephone call. How the US will behave in today’s circumstances is anybody’s guess. If it acts in the myopic fashion typical of it, with “counterterrorism-at-any-cost” as its preoccupation, it may go along with adventurist measures which Gen Musharraf may take to “contain” violent protests and somehow rescue the political deal he’s trying to strike with Ms Bhutto.
The Musharraf’s regime talks with her recently ran into a crisis because the General rejected her demand for amending the Constitution to allow Prime Ministers a third term. (Both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif have served two terms, but Gen Musharraf after his 1999 coup brought a Constitutional amendment barring a third one.)
The US desperately wants to bring Ms Bhutto into a power-sharing deal—not least because she has promised to do its bidding, but also because it fears that Mr Sharif might again ally himself with the “moderately Islamist” Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA).
However, the US conveniently forgets that none other than Gen Musharraf struck a deal with the MMA and brought it into the rag-tag alliance, led by the King’s Party (PML-Qaid-e-Azam), which rules under him. Washington also underestimates the strength of the pervasive anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.
Earlier fuelled by resentment against the US for “leaving Pakistan in the lurch” after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, this sentiment has grown in recent years thanks to the drafting of Pakistan into the US-led Global War on Terror in the badlands along the Afghanistan border, in which thousands of Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives. In Pakistan, favourable opinion of the US is as low as 15 percent, according to a Pew Global Research survey—the third lowest in the world. Any overbearing US intervention will prove unpopular and destabilising.
Not to be discounted is Saudi Arabia’s collaboration with Gen Musharraf in deporting Mr Sharif, who is in all probability now a captive in Jeddah. It’s unclear that he’ll be allowed to leave that country even if the Pakistan Supreme Court orders his return. Saudi Arabia, a state deeply compromised with the US, is messing in Pakistani affairs—a fact much resented and reflected in the growing popularity of anti-Saudi slogans among anti-Musharraf protesters.
The Indian government’s position that the turmoil in Pakistan is its “internal matter”, and that “we want a peaceful, prosperous and stable neighbour”, might appear even-handed. In reality, India has tended to put all its eggs in the Musharraf basket. National Security Adviser MK Narayanan declared (July 29) that “the worst is over” for Gen Musharraf and there’s been “no major dent” in his influence because he accepted the Chief Justice’s reinstatement “with grace”.
Some Indian security officials have misread the meaning of Mr Sharif’s deportation. They reportedly feel “a grudging admiration” for Gen Musharraf because he pulled it off. For the past year, India has been in contact with Ms Bhutto, but not Mr Sharif. This needs correction—with a clarification that India would like a “smooth democratic transition” in Pakistan.
There’s far too much at stake in Pakistan for its neighbours or the larger world to be indifferent to its people’s struggle for full democratisation, which is now well and truly joined.
– IPA
