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Watch the latest news on the 2007 Pakistan Elections live on JumpTV! |
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Watch the latest news on the 2007 Pakistan Election live on JumpTV! |
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| 2007
Pakistan Election: Fear and Fearlessness in Pakistan:
General Musharraf has overcome legal challenges to his candidacy to become Pakistan's president for a second time. But with every victory the opposition grows stronger, reports Graham Usher from Islamabad For a moment last Friday the austere chambers of Pakistan's Supreme Court became a scrum. "No!" shouted one woman. "Shame! Shame!" cried a crush of furious, black-coated lawyers. Peons in white tunics moved to link arms before nine nervous judges in billowing gowns, fearful of their lordships' safety. They had cause to be. By six to three, the judges had ruled that Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, could run for another five-year presidential term on 6 October while remaining army chief. To the outraged lawyers this was an affront to both law and democracy. "This is not a verdict! It's a dictate by a junta," cried advocate Ahmad Ali Kurd, a diminutive man with floppy silver hair. He vowed that the next day lawyers would march on Pakistan's Election Commission (EC) and tear up Musharraf's nomination papers "with our bare hands". On Saturday perhaps 300 lawyers tried to do so. But -- between the Supreme Court and EC -- 3,000 police, paramilitary and plainclothes goon squads prevented them, not only by blocking the road but also with clubs, stones and tear gas, fired from the gun turrets of armored-personnel-carriers (APC). Sixty people were injured, including 20 journalists. One image lodged in the mind: an APC pitching round after round of gas shells at the Supreme Court's white façade while lawyers scurried like black rabbits below. On Sunday several hundred journalists again took to the streets in defense of their right to report. This time the police left them alone. "What is happening?" asked human rights worker, Tahira Abdullah, as she watched women lawyers being beaten by men in white coats. "This shows a government in panic, paranoia and with a sheer brutal desire to crush the slightest voice of dissent". It also showed vengeance. For ten days Pakistan's government, lawyers and media had been gripped by hearings at the Supreme Court. Six petitioners -- including opposition leaders and Bar associations -- argued that it was both unconstitutional and immoral for an army chief to be elected president. The fact that Musharraf had pledged to take off his military uniform if elected president was irrelevant, said petitioner A.K. Dogar. "The duty of the judiciary is to separate the Pakistani army from Pakistani politics". For much of Pakistan's history, the judiciary had joined them together, granting legal cover to coups, interventions and other military interference. But the hope had been that such "doctrines of necessity" were now buried. In March Musharraf tried and failed to sack Pakistan's Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, galvanizing mass protests led by lawyers. In July the Supreme Court reinstated Chaudhry and issued a slew of anti- government rulings, including the right of return to exiled Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (in contempt of court the government expelled Sharif again on 10 September). Still, the sense was "we have a reborn judiciary", said retired government bureaucrat Roedad Khan. But not yet an independent one, answered lawyer and Chairperson of Pakistan's Human Rights Commission, Asma Jahangir. The Supreme Court ruling in favor of Musharraf showed "we have a semi-independent judiciary," she says. "It is not yet ready to face up to its obligations under the constitution or come up to the expectations of the people. It is not yet ready to issue fearless judgments". She says lawyers will appeal the Supreme Court's verdict and submit new petitions against Musharraf's candidacy. He will face resistance on other fronts too. On Tuesday an alliance of opposition parties resigned from Pakistan's federal and provincial assemblies, the electorate for the presidential poll. Their aim is to render the suffrage, if not unconstitutional, then at least illegitimate. There are also two anti-Musharraf candidates contesting the presidency. But this may be so much sound and fury. Unlike the campaign to have the Chief Justice restored, lawyers and judges are divided over whether Musharraf's candidacy is a legal or a partisan cause. And one of the presidential challengers -- Amin Fahim from Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party -- hasIndus News, Indus TV, Geo News, Business Plus, KTN, Roshni TV and Rung TV. been in quiet negotiations with Musharraf on a power-sharing deal once the presidential elections are settled. Above all, the vast mass of Pakistan's 160 million people are curiously absent from what some have called their "orange revolution": they appear less concerned with the constitutional niceties of Musharraf's candidacy than with Ramadan price hikes and the increasing punch of the Taliban on Pakistan's frontier provinces with Afghanistan. Does this mean Musharraf is set for another term? Popular apathy clearly helps him, as does the stalwart support of Washington and London, both of which prefer a civilianized military ruler in Pakistan to a genuinely democratic one. But his stubborn ambition to be elected president while head of the army has polarized the judiciary and radicalized large parts of Pakistan political society. It has also done nothing to resolve the crises of legitimacy facing the Pakistani state, whether in the form of petitions at the Supreme Court, violent clashes on the streets of Islamabad or an armed insurgency on the frontier with Afghanistan. On the contrary, it has deepened all three of them, says Asma Jahangir. "The government has shown its true colors. It targeted the lawyers and thrashed journalists. So far from moving to democracy it is readying to take us out one by one. But I believe ours is a principled struggle, that the people are fed up and that we will win at some point. At the very least, we are not going to let the government sit in Islamabad and pretend to the world that it is in any way the legitimate ruler of this country".
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