Washington
Lauds Pakistan’s
Sham Presidential Election
By Keith Jones
09 October, 2007
WSWS.org
The
Bush administration has lauded the sham election Pakistan’s military
regime staged Saturday to extend General Pervez Musharraf’s presidential
mandate till the fall of 2012.
“Pakistan is an important
partner and ally to the United States and we congratulate them for today’s
election,” declared US National Security Council spokesman Gordon
Johndroe.
Had Johndroe been more honest,
he would have said Washington was extending congratulations to the Pakistani
military for its subverting of democracy.
Saturday’s presidential
vote was a travesty of Pakistan’s constitution and of the most
elementary democratic principles.
An electoral college comprised
of legislators from the country’s national and provincial parliaments
who were chosen fully five years ago and in elections that were rigged
by the military was empowered to give Musharraf a further five-year
term as president.
The general, who seized power
in a 1999 coup, refused to stand for election as a civilian, although
the constitution specifically bars members of the military from seeking
or holding office. Musharraf clings to his post as head of Pakistan’s
armed forces because he is acutely conscious that the military remains
his one true base of support and because he wants to be able to threaten
his opponents within the elite and the Pakistani people with martial
law, and to personally supervise the repression, should they disrupt
his “re-election.”
Moreover, the election commission,
which is staffed with Musharraf loyalists, last month declared that
it had amended the constitution—thereby exercising a power that
is vested in Pakistan’s parliament—and set aside a prohibition
on persons standing for election until two years after they have retired
from the military or state bureaucracy.
Some 200 opposition legislators
resigned their seats in the days running up to Saturday’s sham
presidential election. Even the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP),
which has struck a bargain with the military regime in pursuit of a
share of power, has challenged the legitimacy of the election and of
Musharraf’s candidacy before the Supreme Court and ordered its
legislators to abstain in Saturday’s vote.
But none of this is of any
consequence to the White House. Its attitude to the democratic rights
of the Pakistani people is no different from that of Musharraf who dismissed
all questions surrounding the legality and legitimacy of the election
by declaring “democracy means majority, whether there is opposition
or no opposition.” The general-president then refused to rule
out imposing martial law should the Supreme Court rule either the election
or his candidacy unconstitutional. Subsequently, an unnamed top Musharraf
aide told the Pakistan correspondent of the Globe and Mail that he retains
the option of “surgical martial law.”
Since September 2001 the
Bush administration has provided the Musharraf regime more than $10
billion in aid. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice have repeatedly hailed the general-president
as a pivotal ally in the war on terror, while condoning his regime’s
flagrant violation of human rights, including last May’s massacre
of opposition supporters in Karachi.
“We look forward to
the electoral commission’s announcement,” said Johndroe,
“and to working with all of Pakistan’s leaders on important
bilateral, regional and counterterrorism issues.”
No sooner were the votes
from Saturday’s election tabulated than the election commission
rushed to announce that Musharraf had won 98 percent of the votes cast
and that Musharaff’s vote equaled 55 percent of the electoral
college. But the commission has been unable to certify these results
and proclaim Musharraf elected because of a Supreme Court ruling issued
on the eve of Saturday’s vote.
The court, which has a long
history of kowtowing to the military, rejected opposition petitions
for the election to be delayed pending its ruling on the constitutionality
of parliaments chosen five years ago constituting the presidential electoral
college and the legality of Musharraf standing as a presidential candidate
while serving as Chief of [Pakistan’s] Armed Services. But Pakistan’s
highest court did declare last Friday that the election commission cannot
formally proclaim Musharraf elected until it rules on the legal-constitutional
questions surrounding the election.
The court is in all probability
badly divided over the role of Musharraf and the military in the country’s
government. There is much elite anger over the military’s burgeoning
economic interests, divisions over the concentration of political power
in Islamabad and economic power in the Punjab, and, last but not least,
growing apprehension over the mounting popular opposition to Musharraf,
military rule, and the regime’s neo-liberal socio-economic and
abject pro-US foreign policies.
Last Friday’s ruling
would appear to have been aimed at pressuring Musharraf and Benazir
Bhutto and her PPP to reach agreement on a power-sharing deal. Significantly,
the court has announced that it will resume hearing the legal challenges
to the presidential election on October 17, that is the day before Benazir
Bhutto is to return to the Pakistan from an eight-year, self-imposed
exile.
Over the past four months,
the US has been strongly pushing for Musharraf and Bhutto to strike
a power-sharing deal, in which the PPP would assist the general in staging
his “re-election” and, in return, the military would allow
Bhutto to lead her party in legislative elections scheduled for early
2008 and to subsequently become prime minister.
Rice reportedly telephoned
both Bhutto and Musharraf last Thursday, when it appeared that the power-sharing
negotiations were on the point of collapse and Bhutto was threatening
to instruct the PPP’s legislators to resign their seats. Only
hours later both the government and Bhutto announced that a deal, subsequently
called an “understanding,” was imminent.
The key to the deal was a
sordid “National Reconciliation Ordinance 2007” signed into
law by Musharraf late Friday. It provides an amnesty to all those holders
of public office between 1986 and October 12, 1999—the day Musharraf
seized power—accused of corruption but whose cases have not yet
been adjudicated.
The government of Nawaz Sharif,
whom Musharraf deposed in 1999, had mounted various politically motivated
corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and
these were continued by Musharraf as a means of pressuring Bhutto and
her PPP. It should be added, however, that the Bhutto regime, like that
of Sharif, and the current military regime, was notorious for its corruption.
Bhutto’s husband Zardari earned the nickname “Mr. 10 percent.”
As per the deal, orchestrated
by the Bush administration, Bhutto’s PPP broke ranks with its
erstwhile opposition allies Saturday and, while refusing to vote for
Musharraf, signaled that it will be ready to work with him if he carries
out his pledge to be sworn into office for a new presidential term as
a civilian.
Washington favors a Musharraf-Bhutto
partnership because it fears that the current regime could unravel in
the face of mounting popular opposition and because it wants a politically
strengthened government in Islamabad to unleash the full force of the
Pakistani military against the Taliban and other Islamicist militias
active in the country’s remoter and more backward regions.
Traditionally such elements
have been dependent on the support of the Pakistani elite, especially
the military. But in recent years, as Islamabad has been forced to realign
its geo-political posture in accordance with US demands, these groups
have gained greater popular support by appealing to opposition to US
imperialism in Afghanistan and elsewhere and the social grievances born
of the manifest failure of the Pakistani state to provide basic public
services.
Recent months have seen the
Pakistani military repeatedly thrown on the defensive in confrontations
with Islamic militia groups. In South Waziristan some 200 army personnel
have been held hostage for several weeks. Yesterday the military announced
that it had killed 130 pro-Taliban insurgents in two days of heavy fighting
in North Waziristan, while suffering 45 army fatalities.
Given the Pakistani military’s
indifference, if not hostility, toward democratic rights and judicial
norms there is every likelihood that an all-out assault on the Taliban
and Islamicist forces under a Musharraf-Bhutto government would take
the form of a veritable civil war against the local population in those
parts of Pakistan where Islamabad’s writ has been challenged.
While Washington is placing
great stock in a Musharraf-Bhutto combination there are many reasons
to suggest it may prove short-lived.
The leaders of the pro-Musharraf
PML (Q) have bitterly resisted a power-sharing deal with Bhutto and
may yet try to scuttle it. On Saturday, the president of the PML (Q)
Shujaat Hussain boasted that they had gotten the better of Bhutto: “Our
aim was that the opposition must not be united.”
Meanwhile, Information Minister
Tariq Azim complained that Bhutto was now Washington’s favorite.
“It is hypocritical for anyone in Washington,” exclaimed
Azim, “to decide that Benazir Bhutto is to be prime minister and
at the same time say that elections must be ‘free and fair’.”
Bhutto, for her part, is
insisting that only the first stage of power-sharing negotiations have
been completed and that the PPP’s alliance with Musharraf must
be tied to the placing of limits on the president’s powers and
the lifting of a constitutional prohibition on her serving as prime
minister for a third time.
Bhutto has justified the
PPP’s alliance with Musharraf and the military with the warning
that a popular mobilization against the government could soon escape
the control of the political elite.
But Bhutto’s return
to Pakistan, despite her best efforts and those of the PPP leadership,
could well prove to be a catalyst for mass protests against the discredited,
US-backed Musharraf regime.
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