Musharraf is Pushing
Pakistan into Talibanization, Theocracy
By
Tarique Niazi
GENERAL
Musharraf is hyping to heaven the threat of “Talibanization”
of Pakistan that he has craftily imagined to peddle fear at home
and abroad, and shift the spotlight from his dictatorship to his
invention: Talibanization.
He
is hop-scotching the country from Lahore to Kohat to Islamabad
to explain the terror of this phantom menace. In Lahore, he spoke
to the lawyers on the dangers of Talibanization. In Kohat, his
audience was made up of both Pakistanis and international diplomats.
In Islamabad, he limited his comments to the press.
His
relatively more significant address was made in Lahore to a tamed
audience of lawyers. He went there to speak to them in anticipation
of their nation-wide protest call against his Legal Framework
Order (LFO), a package of 29 amendments in the constitution. Lawyers,
in general, boycotted his address, except for those who were allied
with his Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League.
He
offered them a stark choice: “Do you want a theocratic Pakistan
or an Islamic Pakistan?” “Islamic Pakistan!”
they shouted back on cue. According to his categorization, which
is more dangerous—a theocratic Pakistan or an Islamic Pakistan?
Just think about parallel questions: Do you want a Brahmin-led
India or a Hindu India? Do you want a Church-led America or a
Christian America? Do you want a clergy-guided Britain or a Protestant
Britain? Do you want Papacy or Catholicism in France? Do you want
a Nazi Germany or a Germany of the nation of Aryans? These are
meaningless questions.
When
Gen. Musharraf asks his audiences to choose between a theocratic
Pakistan and an Islamic Pakistan, he means to ask them to choose
his dictatorship over his opposition. Theocracy and Talibanization
are his code words for his democratic opposition led by liberal-left
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), center-right Pakistan Muslim
League (PML), and a six-party religious alliance in Muttehidda
Majlis-e-Aml.
Is
Ms Bhutto a harbinger of theocracy? Is Mr Sharif an usher of Talibanization?
Is MMA, which stands alongside Ms Bhutto in her struggle for democracy,
a standard-bearer of misogyny? Is the MMA-led Pakhtunkhaw legislative
assembly that passed a unanimous resolution demanding on Gen.
Musharraf to let Ms Bhutto return to Pakistan to lead her nation
a misogynist chamber?
PPP,
PML and MMA are bound by one common cause: restoration of democracy.
Since the October 2002 elections, they have come to agree that
the only person who stands between Pakistan and democracy is Gen.
Musharraf.
They
have since been rallying the nation around their call for restoration
of democracy and their struggle for an end to dictatorship. It
is their commitment to democracy to which the whole nation has
so passionately responded.
A
case in point is the civil conscience of the nation: the legal
community. On June 9, the leading organizations of the country’s
lawyers in the Supreme Court Bar Council and Pakistan Bar Council
converged in Islamabad to take on Gen. Musharraf’s Legal
Framework Order (LFO). When the lawyers found their passage to
the Supreme Court bar council’s offices in the Supreme Court
building blocked, they literally got their show on the road: They
held their nation-wide convention on a pathway with hundreds of
police officers, attired in riot gear and armed with lethal weapons,
forming a circle around them.
A
day before their convention, Gen. Musharraf, through bribe and
intimidation, engineered a breakup in the legal community of the
Punjab, which finally enabled him to speak to the Punjab’s
Lawyers’ Forum (PLF). It was followed by a division bench
ruling at the Punjab High Court, which returned a verdict in favor
of his LFO, his simultaneous holding of dual offices as President
and Army Chief, and legitimacy of his election as president in
the April 30 referendum.
Earlier,
the Punjab legislative Assembly passed, with a majority vote,
a resolution accepting his LFO as part of the constitution, and
him as holder of dual office as President and Army Chief. There
are reports that the National Assembly Speaker is soon to follow
suit by ruling LFO as part of the constitution.
Despite his elaborate schemes of coercion, cooptation, and collaboration,
he has not been able to sell himself as a legitimate ruler at
home or abroad. At home, he stands stripped naked of any legitimacy
whatsoever, although he went to the great lengths to seek it.
Since
October, 1999 when he seized power, he has been trafficking sleaze
against the country’s two top leaders, who pose the main
challenge to his dictatorship – Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif.
So much so that his three and a half year in power has been a
running commercial against the two.
Through
their character assassination, he hoped to erase their names from
the collective memory of the Pakistani nation, and implant his
own, instead. He has miserably failed at the first, but exceedingly
succeeded at the second. Today, his name, which has become a handy
stand-in for all that is wrong with Pakistan, is deeply etched
on the memory of every Pakistani.
He
is so heavily weighed down by his nation-wide rejection that in
his speech to the lawyers in Lahore, he asked: “What harm
I have done to Pakistan?” After three and a half year of
absolute power, he has nothing good to show the nation. Instead,
he is asking what harm he has done to merit the nation’s
angry rejection.
In
utter frustration, he is now resigned to his fate as a “national
reject.” What gives him hope to accept this hopeless outcome
of his years of dictatorship is the outside world. But, alas,
the outside world is no less unkindly to him than “his nation”.
On
May 19, the British Commonwealth refused to accept his post-October
façade as a legitimate democracy. On the heels of this
refusal came the rejection of his dictatorship styled as democracy
from the European Union. Even the United States has refused to
lift sanctions against Pakistan, except for a limited one-year
waiver, that it has enforced after his coup in October 1999. His
only hope is President Bush. He is indeed in the good graces of
the President. Their scheduled meeting on June 24 will be one
more chance for Gen. Musharraf to place his dictatorship in democratic
wrappings and make it saleable at least to the West.
Which
is why his blazing rhetoric against the “straw man”
of Talibanization and theocracy is getting so red-hot? Within
a week since his May 8 speech, he availed himself on three occasions
to warn the nation against the specter of Talibanization. Going
by his rhetoric, it seems that the Taliban are already at the
gates of Islamabad and Gen. Musharraf is the last warrior left
in the theocratic Pakistan to fend them off.
Nothing
could be farther from truth. His antics are simply meant to bamboozle
the Western world. Taliban came of age on his watch. He babied
them all the way to Kabul as Director General of Military Operations
(DGMO) in 1993-1996, although he regretted to his journalist-friend
Mary Weaver his role as the creator of the Taliban.
This
regret is, however, only skin-deep. On June 14, an MMA leader,
Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, accused the government of setting free 18
members of Sipah-i-Sehaba, who he alleged were involved in acts
of terrorism, in exchange for the vote of Maulana Azam Tariq to
elect Gen. Musharraf’s nominee for Prime Minister. Hafiz
Ahmed attributed the recent wave of sectarian terrorism in Baluchistan
to the terrorists released in that deal.
To
save his own power, Gen. Musharraf has been in talks with MMA
as late as this past month. At one point, he came so close to
embracing MMA that he reportedly sent a special plane for Maulana
Fazl ur Rahman, a powerful MMA leader, to fly him out of Quetta,
where he was visiting, into Islamabad for an urgent one-on-one
meeting with him at his official residence in the Army House.
Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman, reportedly refused to meet with him.
This
overture was preceded by his “special cell” aides’
– Tariq Aziz, and Generals Ehsan and Ehtasham of the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) – visit with Maulana Rahman to get him
to accept the Legal Framework Order (LFO) as part of the constitution
and him as both President and Army Chief. In return, Maulana Rahman
was offered places of Leader of the Opposition in National Assembly
and the Senate of Pakistan.
The
lure should have been irresistible as leaders of opposition in
both chambers of parliament sit on the proposed almighty National
Security Council (NSC) that General Musharraf has structured into
LFO. Maulana Rahman did not succumb to this temptation either.
While pursuing MMA, Gen. Musharraf has been all praise for its
leadership. In early May, he told a nation-wide gathering of editors
and commentators in Islamabad that MMA leaders are “logical,”
while PPP and PML leaders are “power-grubbers.”
He
now has executed another about-turn on all his avowed positions
on MMA to blackball its leadership as the alter-ego of Taliban
and proponents of theocracy. In reality, they are death-knell
to his dictatorship. If they succeed, only democracy will return
to Pakistan. If Gen. Musharraf succeeds, winners will be Talibanization,
theocracy, and terrorism.
All
those who care about democracy in Pakistan know that Gen. Musharraf
is pushing Pakistan into Talibanization and theocracy by standing
in the way of liberal-left and center-right parties of Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League (PML). The
longer he stays in power, the likelier will become the Talibanization
of Pakistan.
