Detailed Evidence
Proving General Musharraf is a 'Mullah in the Closet'
By
Tarique Niazi
HAVING
BEEN jilted by Mutahida Majlis-e-Aml (MMA), an alliance of six
religious parties, that defiantly refuses to bless his dictatorship
as democracy, Gen. Musharraf has now turned the heat on. In obvious
retaliation, he has trained all his guns at the MMA government
in Pakhtunkhaw -- a province that borders Afghanistan.
To
signal his rage, he had the province’s 24 district Nazims
revolt against its government. Then, he cut the province’s
chief minister out of his June 2 meeting in Islamabad, which was
attended by all other chief ministers. Then he went over the head
of the Pakhtunkhaw government and fired two of its civil servants
– Chief Secretary, and Inspector General of Police. Reason?
The MMA government is pushing the province into Tablibanization.
Evidence? Shariat Bill! Hisbah Act!! Vice and Virtue Department!
His
Exhibit-A is, however, the charge of battery against women –
in depictions! Lately, MMA supporters marched on the streets in
Peshawar to sweep them clean of the hoardings and billboards adorned
with images of scantily-clad women advertising consumer products.
Gen.
Musharraf has turned this show of “moral zeal” into
his theatrical performance for Western audience that is still
reeling from the terrifying memory of the misogynist, theocratic
regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Act-1 of this performance
has been deftly timed to preview Gen. Musharraf’s June 24
visit with President Bush at Camp David. But hold back the champagne
yet; there is more to it than meets the eye.
Gen.
Musharraf is the reason why MMA has emerged as the third largest
party in the national parliament, a majority party in Pakhtunkhaw,
and the single largest party in Baluchistan. In the three years
to the October 2002 elections that brought victory to MMA, Gen.
Musharraf cleared the political field of respectively center-left
and center-right parties embodied in Pakistan People’s Party
(PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League (PML). He beheaded these parties
by keeping or forcing their leadership into exile, jailing their
second-tier leadership, banning them from political activities,
and having media bash their top leadership -- Ms Bhutto (PPP)
and Mr Sharif (PML) -- on a daily basis since October, 1999, which
continues to this day.
Gen.
Musharraf sensed in both parties a threat to his life in power
that he grabbed in a military coup on October 12, 1999. To neutralize
this threat, he moved in with the so-called Islamists. When he
called national elections in last October, MMA stepped into the
electoral void that he selfishly created over the past three years
to defeat PPP and PML.
Earlier,
Gen. Musharraf laid the groundwork for MMA’s allied parties
by holding local government’s elections in 2001. These elections
were cast in religious hues. The concept of “Nazims”
(the roughly equivalent of mayors), as these elections came to
be known, was borrowed from the Jamaat-i-Islami’s organizational
structure.
To
engineer an outcome of his liking, these elections spanned over
several months to allow secret services to conduct a thoroughgoing
purge of the candidates who had affiliations with PPP and PML.
In contrast, candidates from religious parties were given a free
pass on their affiliations. As a result, the country’s two
most populous cities – Karachi and Lahore – elected
Jamaat-i-Islami’s sponsored or supported candidates for
city Nazims. Local government elections thus set the stage for
MMA’s subsequent impressive showing in the October vote.
To
further make its electoral sailing smooth, Gen. Musharraf made
a college degree a primary eligibility criterion for candidates
standing in the elections. This criterion was carefully calibrated
to lop off scores of such PPP and PML candidates as were shoe-ins.
This pre-election rigging, as European Union observers characterized
it, swung open the doors for MMA candidates who were declared
eligible even with Madrassas’ (Islamic schools) degrees
(The same Madrassas that are paraded in and out of Pakistan as
the “breeding ground for terrorists.”). As many as
30 MMA candidates, with Madrassah degrees were elected. Once this
chink was drilled into the electoral armor, 70 other candidates,
mostly from Gen. Musharraf’s party of Leaguers, which is
known as Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League (QML), were sneaked through
it. All of them presented Madrassas’ degrees as their academic
credentials to contest the elections.
To further block the center-left
and center-right parties of PPP and PML, Gen. Musharraf had his
notorious National Accountability Bureau (NAB) filed corruption
charges against their candidates. Then electoral laws were bent
at will to declare a candidate ineligible if she or he has been
simply charged with corruption, regardless of whether such charges
were proven or even brought to the courts for adjudication. This
law-bending was again aimed at PPP-PML candidates. While scores
of their candidates were thus forced out of the elections on cooked-up
charges of corruption, MMA candidates, even charged with terrorism,
were allowed to contest elections. Even after the elections, Gen.
Musharraf ordered two MMA’s members, who were convicted
of terrorism, in Baluchistan released in exchange for MMA’s
support to the Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League (QML) to form its government
there.
After
the October elections, he used MMA’s victory as an “indictment
of democracy” to frighten the West, especially the US, into
backing off its demand for a “believable democracy”
in Pakistan. At home, he used its victory to neutralize his opposition
in the PPP-PML-led democratic movement. While perfecting this
Machiavellian performance, he also became an accomplished chameleon,
prompting some to suggest that he is a two-timing cad: Sleeping
with MMA while still dating the secular West. As late as this
past May, he told the country’s media chiefs that MMA leaders
are “logical” (i.e., principled) in their approach,
while PPP-PML leaders are “power-grubbers.” He had
not yet given up on bidding for their support to his dictatorship.
His
Machiavellian scheming was not limited to MMA alone. Earlier he
played the same game with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. Since
his forcible grab of power in October 1999, he has been deceptively
resisting US persuasions to stop the Taliban from turning their
country into a safe haven for terrorism. His stock-in-trade response
would be: “Talk to the Taliban directly. They are reasonable
folks. Western media has dishonestly made villains of them.”
As
the US had not recognized the Taliban government, its initiative
to engage them directly in negotiations would amount to recognizing
their government, which was at the heart of Gen. Musharraf’s
scheme of things. He mischievously or moronically believed that
Afghanistan under the Taliban had become Pakistan’s fifth
province, which Pakistan must defend. Also, he used the Taliban
as his nursery to recruit sacrificial lambs for his egomaniac
wars such as Kargil, where, according to one estimate, 600 of
them were bombed to their charred bodies. When he was not at active
war, he would put even a finer gloss on his support to the Taliban:
We are bound to them by ethnic affinity, economic interests, and
strategic concerns. If we abandon them, it would stir millions
of Pakhtuns on this side of the border into revolt. If we sever
our ties with them, it would hurt our economic interests as Pakistan
is Afghanistan’s transit route for trade goods. If we turn
our backs on them, our western borders with them would become
unsafe and we shall lose strategic depth against India.
In
September 2001, he executed a pirouette on all these publicly
avowed positions – ethnic affinity, economic interests,
and strategic depth – to become a frontline charger against
the Taliban. His about-face on the Taliban had Indian Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee taunting him: “when we call someone
a friend, we remain friend to the last.”
Gen.
Musharraf’s earlier phase of friendship with the Taliban,
however, exacted a high price on Pakistan in its radicalization,
especially two its frontier provinces – Baluchistan and
Pakhtunkhaw. Both have now become armories of the most lethal
weapons that can hold off even Pakistan Army for weeks and months.
Not too long ago, more than a dozen army troops were killed in
Quetta, capital city of Baluchistan, while just as many were ambushed
to their deaths in the tribal areas of Pakhtunkhaw. Even Governor
of Pakhtunkhaw, an army general, once turned out to be a tempting
target of Rocket-propelled Grenades (RPGs) that were lobbed at
him, while on a tour of interior Pakhtunkhaw, from distant mountain
fasts.
Even
worse, Gen. Musharraf’s friendship with the Taliban set
off a religious war between the Sunnis and Shiites in Pakistan.
Their religious militias – Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-i-Janghvi
(Sunnis), and Sipah-i-Muhammad (Shiites) –have long been
operating in full view of law and its enforcers. The remnants
of Al-Qaeda, according to Western media reports, have found their
hideouts among these outfits. Are these militias out of Gen. Musharraf’s
control? On the contrary, the only vote that tipped the election
last November in favor of Gen. Musharraf’s nominee for Prime
Minister, Zafrullah Jamali, came from a member of the National
Assembly (MNA), who leads Sipah-e-Sahaba and reportedly has dozens
of murder and terrorism charges against him.
Both
Sipah-e-Sahaba and Sipah-i-Muhammad thrive on the blasphemy law
that was framed and enforced by Gen. Musharraf’s predecessor
military dictator, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, and which Gen. Musharraf continues
to enforce with religious zeal. Sipah-e-Sahaba wants the law expanded
and enforced to its letter, while Sipah-i-Muhammad resents its
selective application. The law essentially carries the death penalty
for blaspheming the founder and leaders of Islam. Most
of its victims, however, have been non-Muslim minorities, especially
Christians.
When
Gen. Musharraf announced the so-called Legal Framework Order (LFO),
a package of 29 amendments in the 1973 constitution, minorities
hoped that he would remove the blasphemy law from the statute
books. But not only did he leave the law alone, he used it against
his own rivals, especially in the media. In January 2001, he declared
the country’s feistiest broadsheet, The Frontier Post,
which has long been a thorn in his side because of its avowed
liberal-left leanings and its support for ethnic minorities, guilty
of blasphemy for publishing a letter to the editor entitled, “Why
Muslims Hate Jews?”
Gen.
Musharraf discussed the letter at a cabinet meeting and publicly
denounced it for its contents that he found “insulting to
the Prophet of Islam.” Soon after his public denunciation,
five of the Post’s journalists were hauled off in hand-cuffs.
Gen. Musharraf’s denunciation incited the religiously charged
members of society to violence, who led a march on the Frontier
Post’s offices and burned them down. On top of it,
Gen. Musharraf ordered the newspaper shut down for several months.
When Newsweek published an article –“Talking
is dangerous in Pakistan” – in September 2001 against
the blasphemy law, Gen. Musharraf had the article ripped out of
the newsmagazine before allowing its circulation in Pakistan.
Has
Gen. Musharraf slackened in his zeal of a Mullah? Hardly. As late
as last month the country’s premier University of Punjab
in Lahore was ordered to purge the English curriculum for its
MA classes of words that were “morally corrupting”
for the nation’s youth. “…the order for a clean-up
operation came from no less a figure than the president, General
Pervez Musharraf” (The Economist, May 31, 2003).
The University’s vice chancellor and registrar, both are
retired army officers, have entrusted the clean-up job to one
Dr. Shahbaz Arif, who told The Economist: “The
word rape in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ evokes a negative
image. Words like vodka, whisky, and wine are strictly taboo in
an Islamic society and will have to be removed.”
Does
Gen. Musharraf think that he can get away as a double-crosser
without being detected? Bernard Henri Levy, France’s best-selling
author, thinks to the contrary. He warns the US government in
darkest terms: “Pakistan supposedly President Bush’s
brave ally in fighting terrorism is playing a ‘double, even
triple game’ and could even have helped plot the September
11 attacks. What a mistake to be obsessed with Iraq when the real
rogue is a fanatical and nuclear-armed Pakistan” (The
Economist, May 24, 2003).
Gen. Musharraf is indeed neither
pro-West, nor pro-Islam, nor pro-Pakistan. He is an all-weather
pro-Musharraf. To keep his job, he has long been playing off the
West, Islam and Pakistan against one another. His jig is now up.
Don’t be surprised on June 24 if you hear someone at Camp
David greet him with a “Hello, Mullah Musharraf!”
