Bush
Applauds Musharraf
As He Makes Himself
Pakistan’s President Till 2012
By
Keith Jones
03 December,
2007
WSWS.org
US
President George W. Bush was the first foreign leader to congratulate
General Pervez Mushraraf after he had himself sworn in Thursday to a
further five-year term as Pakistan’s president.
Musharraf,
who seized power in a 1999 military coup, imposed de facto martial law
on November 3, because he feared the country’s Supreme Court was
about to rule that his “re-election,” in a sham vote staged
a month earlier, violated the constitution. Under the state of emergency,
the top levels of the judiciary have been purged of those deemed by
the military as unreliable, thousands of opposition political activists,
trade unionists and lawyers have been taken into detention, private
broadcasters forced off the air, and government opponents made subject
to military trials.
According
to a Pakistani government spokesman, Bush telephoned Musharraf Friday
and in addition to extending his congratulations “lauded the president’s
commitment to fight extremism and terrorism.”
US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration spokesmen have
heaped praise on Musharraf for formally stepping down as Chief of Pakistan
Armed Services Wednesday and for announcing Thursday, soon after being
sworn in as a civilian president, that the state of emergency will be
lifted December 16.
These “are
all positive steps that will help get Pakistan back on the pathway to
democratic and constitutional rule,” declared State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack, Thursday.
While Washington
has been publicly urging Musharraf to lift the emergency and to stage
“free and fair” national and provincial assembly elections
in early January, it has repeatedly made clear its support for Musharraf
retaining a pivotal role in Pakistan’s government—endorsing
the sham presidential election, praising the dictator’s commitment
to democracy, and implicitly sanctioning Musharraf’s purge of
the judiciary.
Asked if
the US government did not consider Musharraf a “tainted”
president—given that he was “elected” October 6 by
legislative assemblies chosen five years ago and in a vote that was
rigged by the military and given that he had resorted to martial law
to purge the supreme court and thereby quash the constitutional challenges
to his election—McCormack declared, “Look, we are where
we are ... And it is important that President Musharraf get Pakistan
back on the road to constitutional rule and democratic governance, a
pathway that he really himself had put Pakistan on since 2001.”
An emergency by another name
Musharraf’s
promise to lift the emergency is far less than it seems. Key decrees
and changes, including the purge of the judiciary, a ban on the broadcast
of live political events and severe penalties for press reports that
bring the government or army into “disrepute” will remain
in effect.
Over the
weekend Musharraf met with the leaders of the interim provincial governments
and instructed them to impose a ban on “protest demonstrations,
rallies and sit-ins” in the run-up to the elections, which are
scheduled for January 8.
Previously,
the government announced that in the name of preventing terrorist attacks
all street processions would be banned and campaigning severely limited.
While the
government claims to have released several thousand detainees, an untold
number remain in jail or under house arrest, including Aitzaz Ahsan,
the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association. Several of the prominent
detainees who have been released bear the hallmarks of abuse and maltreatment.
Munir Malik, a leader of the lawyers’ protest movement, was hospitalized
with severe kidney problems after being held in a cell so tiny he could
not stretch his legs.
Musharraf’s
choice of December 16 as the day on which he plans to lift martial law
is no happenstance. It is the day after the deadline for candidates
to withdraw from the January 8 elections. His hope is that he can pressure
the major opposition parties into contesting the elections and thereby
lending his presidential coup legitimacy, with the lifting of martial
law offered as a potential inducement.
The Bush
administration, for its part, is actively encouraging the opposition
parties to work with Musharraf and, as a first step to so doing, to
contest the elections. To this end, US Ambassador Anne Patterson has
been making the rounds meeting with leading opposition figures. According
to the Dawn, Paterson will meet today with Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister
whom Musharraf deposed in 1999.
Sharif, albeit
not with great conviction, has been promising to lead an opposition
boycott of the election.
In the speech
meant to inaugurate his second presidential term, Musharraf threatened
to crush any boycott, just as he has the democratic aspirations of the
Pakistani people for the past eight years: “No destabilization
or hurdle will be allowed in this democratic process.” In an interview
with the US television network ABC the following day, he amplified this
threat saying political protests would not be allowed during Pakistan’s
“democratic” elections. Said Musharraf, “The opposition,
they have all along these five years tried to destabilize me and the
government. You have to understand we don’t want agitation here
... Agitation means breaking down everything, burning things. That cannot
be allowed.”
For months
the Bush administration has been seeking to recalibrate Pakistan’s
government so as to give it greater popular legitimacy while ensuring
that the military, with which the Pentagon has a five decades long partnership,
retains effective control.
But the Bush
administration’s plans, which centered on brokering a power-sharing
deal between Musharraf and Pakistan People’s Party life chairperson
Benazir Bhutto have repeatedly been upset by the erosion of popular
support for Musharraf and the sharp divisions within the Pakistani elite.
While Musharraf boasts of an economic revival, the bulk of the population
has seen their livings standards badly eroded by soaring prices and
the increasing marketization of life. And many in the elite resent the
extent to which the military and their business cronies have appropriated
the fruits of Pakistan’s capitalist economic expansion. Musharraf
is also increasingly seen as a toady of the Bush administration and
an accomplice of its predatory wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Musharraf condemns foreign pressure
In the view
of important sections of the US establishment, the Bush administration
has been reckless in so demonstratively supporting the discredited Musharraf.
The US would have more leverage over Islamabad, including in getting
it to do its bidding in suppressing pro-Taliban elements, and would
not be so popularly identified as a bulwark of militarily rule, argue
the Democrats and the New York Times, had the Bush administration begun
distancing himself from Musharraf before his regime started to unravel
last spring.
Musharraf
however is clearly chagrined by the pressure that the Bush administration
has placed upon him, first to seek an accommodation with Bhutto and
now to step down as head of the army, his one true power base.
In the address
inaugurating his second presidential term, Musharraf lashed out at the
assembled western diplomats. He chastised them for “an unrealistic
or even impractical obsession with your form of democracy, human rights
and civil liberties, which you have taken centuries to acquire and which
you expect us to adopt in a few years, in a few months.”
“We
want democracy,” added Musharraf, “but we will do it our
way, as we understand our society, our environment, better than anyone
in the West.”
That Musharraf
continues to see his principal constituency to be the military was well-illustrated
by the speech he gave the day before, when handing over the post to
of army chief to the US-trained General Kayani. “I am fortunate,”
said Mushararf, “to have commanded the best army in the world.
The army is an integrating force, the saviour of Pakistan. Without this
army, the entity of Pakistan cannot exist.”
While the
mass of the Pakistani people are seething with hatred toward the military-dominated
government, the opposition parties are preparing to bow to Washington’s
wishes and contest the elections.
Bhutto has
announced that her PPP will stand candidates in “protest”,
claiming that otherwise the pro-Musharraf PML (Q) and MQM will have
an open field. After Musharraf announced he will lift the emergency
later this month, Bhutto said that she was “not in a hurry”
to accept Musharraf as a civilian president. But she has already shown
she is willing to collaborate with him. Under the Bush administration’s
sponsorship, the PPP has been seeking to reach a power-sharing deal
with Musharraf and the military for at least the last eight months.
On Friday,
the PPP issued an election manifesto chock full of populist phrases
and commitments to Pakistani big business, international capital, and
the military. The World Socialist Web Site will have more to say about
the PPP manifesto in future articles. But its right-wing character is
summed up in the following passage that could have been penned by one
of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown’s minions: “The PPP is proud
of being the voice of the poor, the working classes and the middle classes.
Our policies, while dedicated to the underprivileged, created conditions
that enabled the business and trading classes to compete in the open
market. The Party will foster a social market economy, a partnership
of the public and private sectors, predicated upon a synthesis of economic
liberalism with a strong social democratic agenda of Stare responsibilities
for satisfying basic human needs ...”
Nawaz Sharif’s
PML (N) is an openly right-wing party and a traditional ally of the
military. Like the PPP, it is opposed to any genuine popular movement
against the Musharraf regime for fear of facilitating the masses’
entry into politics and undermining the army, the bulwark of the privileges
of the entire Pakistani elite.
Since returning
to Pakistan last week, Sharif has been hedging on his earlier boycott
threats, while make a series of statements meant to convince the Bush
administration that he can be a reliable ally. Indeed in an article
he penned for the Washington Post, Sharif said of the US, the country
that has supported, armed, and financed one military dictatorship in
Pakistan after another, “America has always been a friend of Pakistan.
It is our strategic and natural ally.”
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