In Pakistan where Does the Buck Stop?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Is the law in Pakistan uniform or is uniform the law, that’s the question.
Intrigued by it? Don’t be. Pakistan’s strange political landscape is the refuge of charlatans, rogues and scoundrels—most of them, if not all. So, it defies conventional wisdom to describe it by known standards of definition.
The electoral scene—now that it’s virtually the home stretch for the combatants in the election arena—was hot enough, already. But the parachuting of ex-commando, Pervez Musharraf, right into its epicenter, has injected a weird new element into the fracas. And it’s a venal, poisonous injection given the aggressive nature of the gate-crasher.
Why did the spoil-sport, who’d been living it up in plush exile abroad the past four years, choose to return to the country at precisely this heated moment is no brain-teaser either.
The ex-commando may be given to boasting, pugnaciously, of his prowess and fearlessness. But at heart he’s a chicken, a coward, as all bullies are. His fleeing the Islamabad High Court in panic after the cancellation of his bail is ample evidence of the Titan having feet of clay.
Of course he’d been sent out of the country with full military decorum—guard-of-honour et al—but he was still scared sick to return home, lest he was nabbed for his myriad crimes, against the state and the people of Pakistan, by the Zardari-led claptrap of a government. That only underscored his lack of political savvy. He should’ve known that thieves, too, have a code of honor: they don’t bother other thieves, unless their own turf was threatened with poaching.
So Musharraf, in his superior wisdom, timed his return from exile to sync with the induction of the toothless caretaker government.
His judgment on this account seems to have served him well. The caretaker setup—made up of imbeciles and non-entities, par excellence—has thrown up its hand, in response to the Supreme Court’s directive to file a treason case against Musharraf, under Article 6 of the Constitution. Their excuse is that they don’t have the mandate for it. But they have arrogated to themselves the non-given mandate to distribute spoils around as much as they can within the little time at their disposal.
According to my Chirya (with due apologies to Najam Sethi who has the sole rights to all the Chiryas of Pakistan) caretaker PM Khosa’s son, engaged in some non-descript work in Canada, has been rushed back to Pakistan to head some agency, of which he didn’t have the slightest clue. Making hay while the sun shines is ruling the roost under the care-takers, no matter how limited the window of opportunity.
It was Musharaf’s megalomania that wrote his ticket back to Pakistan. His bloated sense of self-importance infused him with the Messiah syndrome, a common malaise of soldiers of fortune. Pakistan is still paying a horrendous price for his Himalayan blunders but he still thought of himself as the Moses to lead a befuddled Pakistanis to the Promised Land.
The election screening process has taken all the wind out of Musharraf’s electoral sails, rendering him a non-entity. He’s out of the picture as far as elections are concerned.
But the spotlight has shifted to some things else. Musharraf’s sins of the past are revisiting him and with it the long arm of the law that he’d run away from is trying to catch up with him. That’s where extra-legal forces—the euphemism for Pakistan’s still-untamed and still all powerful establishment—are trying to shield him and save him from the comeuppance that should be his, in all fairness.
Musharraf’s downfall, from his pinnacle of power, was triggered under the weight of his blatant power grab. The civil society’s uprising against him, in the wake of his Pharonic dismissal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007, wasn’t only a backlash against his dictatorial rule; much more than that, it was for the rule of law that had been kept at arm’s length by the Pakistani Bonaparte.
Pakistan’s incumbent, pro-active, top judiciary, armed with the people’s power, has stood, unremittingly, for the supremacy of law, even in the face of the Zardari cabal’s open defiance of the canons of justice.
The basic essence of the rule and supremacy of law is equality of all—high and mighty as well as the lowliest of low—before law. That’s the whole premise of the vociferous demand by Pakistan’s energised civil society to bring an erring and arrogant Musharraf to book because he surpassed every previous Bonaparte in his defiance of the laws of Pakistan. He has the dubious distinction, in the constellation of Pakistani rogues, of having abrogated the Constitution of Pakistan not once but twice in his 8 year rule.
However, this very legitimate and popular demand to make Musharraf accountable for his crimes seems to be raising the hackles among some, if not all, of the military brass in Rawalpindi. According to a report in the DAWN of Karachi, some ‘ex-generals’ are cautioning against humiliating Musharraf.
What! Humiliation for Musharraf ? Come on, generals, have a heart. What’s humiliation for a feckless, cowering, military ruler who served Pakistan on a platter to his overseas mentors? It took just one phone call from General Colin Powell to have Pakistan in the bag of the endless ‘war on terror.’ What a price Pakistan has been made to pay for Musharraf’s obscene haste to please his masters.
What’s humiliation to a man who, in his own words in his auto (ghost-written, in fact) biography proudly boasts of having traded in human lives for cash? Those who find it hard to believe should read his In the Line of Fire, of which the Urdu translation was grotesquely misleading and self-serving: Sub Se Pehle Pakistan . Non sense. It was always him and him alone, above Pakistan.
Musharraf became an epitome of the famous Persian couplet, Qome Farokhtand, wa cheh Arzan Farokhtand (‘the nation sold, and sold cheaply’)
And what did he do with all that cash he raked in? Wolf Blitzer, of CNN, asked him this question, precisely, in an interview when he was promoting his ghost-written book. The general had no answer other than tamely fudging it.
But it doesn’t take a genius to know where that windfall was cashed. It wasn’t the manna from heavens that bought the luxury pad in one of the toniest parts of London, or the plush condo in Dubai where the cigar-smoking general had been living a life of luxury in exile.
This is not to mention the sprawling Farm House , outside Islamabad, because that’s said to be a ‘gift’ from his friend, Malik Riaz, the property tycoon who has recently showered a similar gift on Musharraf’s successor. Birds of a feather—Musharraf and Zardari not only flocking together but also sheltering under the notorious Malik Riaz.
And the roster of Musharraf’s black deeds has much more than that. His alleged role in the murders of BB and Akbar Bugti, the blood on his hands of hundreds of girls killed in cold blood in the Lal Masjid of Islamabad are some of the charges that he must answer for in a court of law.
It’s obvious, from day-one of his return from exile, that Musharraf’s partisans in khaki feel nervous over the prospect of one of ‘them’ being made accountable—and punishable—for his crimes, something that has never happened, to date, in Pakistan’s chequered history.
In the name of security, Musharraf has been given VVIP protocol befitting a head of state or government. And now keeping Musharraf captive in five-star comfort within the confines of his farm house is the ultimate stroke of partisanship. What’s this non-sense of a ‘sub-jail’ for one who’d been pronounced as an absconder and a fugitive from law.
What it all boils down to is a rehash of the malaise that has done so much damage to Pakistan. It’s that mind-set of the military brass that feeds their megalomania that they are a breed apart from the lesser mortals, the civilians. This archaic mould will have to be broken if Pakistan is ever to become a democratic polity, in spirit and not just in letter. The rule of law is what it takes for a democratic society to strike roots. But the rule of law will remain a straw in the wind until the arm of law is not allowed to reach all people without distinction or discrimination.
Pakistan is still a personification of George Orwell’s fictional The Animal Farm in which some ‘are more equal than others.’ Musharraf’s friends in khaki seem still committed to the fiction that he’s and should be above the law which, in their fertile imagination is meant only for the lesser mortals.
The battle of Pakistan’s civil society for the rule of law is far from over. But a blessing in disguise for them is that they can now clearly see the demons they need to slay before reaching their Promised Land. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and a career diplomat)
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