http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2007/11/13_pakistan.php
"Following last week's military crackdown in Pakistan and the detention of hundreds of lawyers, the Harvard Law School Association has decided to award Pakistani chief justice Iftikhar Choudhary its highest honor: The Harvard Law School Medal of Freedom. Chaudhary was detained after he convened the Pakistani Supreme Court to declare the current state of emergency imposed by General Pervez Musharraff null and void."
Naturally, the first world did not do its due homework on the third world before dishing out golden glories in the support of their forever-blaring bandwagons for democracy. I understand that everybody calls him a hero. I understand that he is confronting the army right now like no other member of the judiciary has done in a long time. I understand that he is the symbol of Pakistan's call for democracy and the end of military rule. I understand all of that. In addition, though said to have misused his power and resources, he hasn't headed any court ruling as of now that might have openly supported the military. Though, he sat on four pivotal Supreme Court benches between 2000 and 2005 that validated the military takeover by Gen Musharraf, his referendum, his legal framework order (LFO) and the 17th constitutional amendment that gave the president additional powers and allowed him to continue as the army chief, he wasn't heading any of them.
So yes, I understand that in the aftermath of 9th March, he was the perfect candidate for the representation of everyone's displeasure with the military. Musharaff got what he deserved, but I also think that the CJ got MORE than what he deserved. Previously, people like Nelson Mandela have been awarded Harvard's Medal of Freedom. Nelson Mandela and his achievments DO NOT compare to the CJ's. Like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, CJ Iftikhar Chauhadry is "riding the wave", with a lot less charisma and perhaps a lot more manipulation.
Symbols should be clearly differentiated from individuals. When people make a figure into a symbol, most of the time, the figure can't live up to that image, and in fact, is not required to do so because that symbol is simply the external face of a movement that is being kept alive from below by those who choose this person as their symbol. The figures who become these symbols generally just do through the fortunate stroke of circumstance, and an accidental action on their behalf-the force of any movement that follows only uses these circumstances and the accidental action as an impetus to let out what had already been brewing under the surface. Most of the social and political activists, and legal groups in Pakistan were already pretty sick of Musharaff's blatant manhandling of the constitution. The Chief Justice issue was just the right amount of flame needed to set off the dynamite that had already been waiting for the right chance to blow.
This is not to say that subsequently, the Chief Justice did not act in the cause of the lawyers' cry for democracy. He did, but from that point onwards, he knew he could because he had a soft lawyer-cushion to fall back on. Right place, right time, not a lot of self-driven initiative.
Harvard Law School, as it announces to the press that its giving the CJ this prestigious "Medal of Freedom", should also announce the names of who it has given this medal to in the past, and the criteria according to which it awards this medal. It might turn out, that Asma Jahingir(of the Asma Jillani Case against Yahya Khan) might turn out a better candidate than our current flag-waver of the "people's cause".
Wednesday 14 November 2007
The legacy of a Dictator
In his feverish attempts to hold on to power, and to emulate his predecessor, Zia-ul-Haq, Pres.Musharaff forgot one last detail of his dress-for-success rode to dictatorship:
Zia was assassinated.
Yeah, he might have died in a plane crash, but mot post-crash investigation concluded that the plane was sabotaged. Somebody killed him.
Musharaff survived two assassination attempts on him during the early period of his “reign”. Once one lives through death, one feels one can live through anything. This confidence is misleading. One can run, but in today’s world, it is impossible to hide. Musharraff is paving the way to his death. Quite frankly, Zia should have been assassinated long before he wrecked the religious dynamic of Pakistan. I think history has a glaring lesson, and I'm not talking about history repeating itself in quite the same way. It should speed up, no?
Zia was assassinated.
Yeah, he might have died in a plane crash, but mot post-crash investigation concluded that the plane was sabotaged. Somebody killed him.
Musharaff survived two assassination attempts on him during the early period of his “reign”. Once one lives through death, one feels one can live through anything. This confidence is misleading. One can run, but in today’s world, it is impossible to hide. Musharraff is paving the way to his death. Quite frankly, Zia should have been assassinated long before he wrecked the religious dynamic of Pakistan. I think history has a glaring lesson, and I'm not talking about history repeating itself in quite the same way. It should speed up, no?
Benazir Zardar: "I tried to like her"
Ever since the days when I used to go to school in Bata shoes, I have grown up seeing Benazir’s face on the television. It used to scare me as a child because I thought there was something slightly masculine about her boxed suit jackets and her voice; and for a child living for skinny Barbies and pink dresses at the age of seven, a man-like woman can be a little disconcerting. I grew up with the chaos of Pakistan’s politics, like most everyone in my generation did, perhaps more exposed to its importance from an early age because I was from a politically opinionated, vocal and educated family in Islamabad. My mother walking into the kitchen saying “Zardari khaa gaya Pakistan ko”(Zardari has eaten Pakistan) as she paused in the lounge to hear a snippet of the news, my uniformed father having heated arguments about Benazir’s wide scale “corruption” with my staunchly civilian grandfather and both my aunt and my mother, recounting the charisma of Bhutto’s speeches as they simultaneously belittled his daughter were images that became a daily part of my after-school-leaving-bag-in-the-hallway routine. As I grew older, I was first inclined to support Benazir against all the accusations being launched at her from the four corners of my household because I opposed everything on autopilot. From the age of 13 to the age of 21, I honestly tried to search for reasons to validate her government, at first to irk my parents, and after I had grown out of that, to find some way to convince myself that a woman who spoke so well and had gotten such an excellent education had to have some substance somewhere, and must not be made a victim of anti-female-leader default intuition.
I regret to inform myself, after all these years, that speaking well and getting a degree in an Ivy League college says nothing about a person’s abilities to hold themselves accountable for something. I also regret to inform myself, that if the people of this country and more specifically, the members of Pakistan’s People’s Party(Benazir’s father’s party) are stoned enough to allow her back into the government or their party after all that she has done, or even allegedly done, they deserve her. As William Dalrymple wrote in The Guardian, during her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto's premiership was also marked by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari - widely known as "Mr 10%" - faced allegations of plundering the country.
I do not need to go into a laundry list of the corruption charges against her and her husband because they have already been stated many times by many people. If you didn’t read them, you can always google them.
In a final attempt to give her the benefit of doubt, I tried considering who supports her at this point in time. Interestingly, her lobby consists of two diametrically opposing quarters: Pakistan People’s Party apologists and Gen. Pervez Musharaf. Both say that the power sharing agreement that seems to be formulating itself between Benazir and Musharraf is the fastest, most viable way to usher in a civilian, more democratic rule. Arguments for that run from the likes of Benazir being the only political force strong enough to oppose the army, to how if we can’t have a fully cut democratic process, we should settle for the underdog. Every argument, without exception, fails to stand in the face of glaring historical reality. This isn’t the first time she is making a “deal” with a military dictator. In 1984, in a deal with Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, negotiated by an important associate of the US administration, Peter Galbraith, she left Pakistan. Similarly in 1986 and 1988, she returned and came to power by making “deals” with the military. Even if we were to give it to the political pundits that Benazir Bhutto may have been the strongest political force to counter the General this time, I regret to inform the happily oblivious that she chose not to become that. She’s making deals with Generals and not with the general public. She isn’t an opposing force, but a collaborating one, as she has always been. Collaboration might even be considered if the balance of power in this agreement was tipping in favor of Benazir which it is not. Musharaf is in power, and will remain in power with a constitution that grants a President the powers of a fascist. Why is such an analysis even necessary? This should be obvious from every single deal that a civilian government has made with a ruling general in a history of 60 years. Power has almost never effectively changed hands. It has only pretended to do so to serve the personal vendettas of those who make the deals. If those deals were for the good of the nation, they wouldn’t be “deals”. They would be transparent political proceedings. If she had real “grassroots” level support, as Musharaf claims, then why not put it to test, why not let her make an open deal with those “grass roots” instead of signing on the badge of a jaded General?
This power-sharing arrangement being seen as the lesser of the two evils is actually not true. Consider for a moment what might happen if this deal was not made and if Benazir was not allowed to return: Musharraf, who has allegedly won the elections without actually having been made a legal candidate yet (the ridiculousness of this statement itself is enough to make a literate person gag), will most probably have his candidacy status validated by the courts and allowed to become a de facto civilian president for at least 5 years (if of course, he can get out of those military lapels). If that happens, I would imagine that opposition parties would continue with their zealous attacks against everything he does, the USA would have their left over bone sent in a nicely wrapped package to Pakistan, and “free and fair” (that are neither free nor fair) elections will choose a Prime Minister who bows to Musharraf like a courtesan-no changes whatsoever to the status quo. Apparently.
If he allows Benazir to come back and her account is unfrozen(which by the way, lest we forget, is worth $1.5 billion), she will stand for elections, probably be elected as Prime Minister(with foreign affairs and national security still with the military for at least 5 years) and will continue to curtsy like a courtesan to Musharraf. Musharaf’s worries about her rebellion are also kept at bay with the fact that all the Generals and ex-Generals in the past have simply amended the constitution when they’ve had to face non-cooperation from their Prime Ministers. In addition, Benazir has never been one to put her position of power in jeopardy. Given all that, even if Benazir does manage to hold her own, you still have someone in power that, by her own designs or her husband’s, was charged for immense bouts of corruption not just once, but twice. Even if she were to say that the charges against her are false and she was victimized by Gen. Zia, the fact of the matter is that the charges come from five other countries, and that all charges, false or otherwise, stand unless they are put to a fair trial in court. In fact, I would think it would benefit Musharraff to have her tried for that in a public trial, instead of promulgating the NRO which allows her to go scot-free. Of course since he, himself, is not a perfect cherub when it comes to corruption, he probably realizes that this would be akin to opening Pandora’s Box.
Either way, the two scenarios do not differ much. One of them openly mocks a democratic political process and the other does the same in secret.
Even if someone was to show how they could both lead to different ends, in this case, the means to that end is just as important. What the people of this country need to realize, and it has taken sixty years to do that, is that this whole system of “political process” in Pakistan is an absolute sham. We didn’t start off democratically, or even fairly democratically. We started off with a class that was ready to rule to lead to democracy. In some cases in the world, that might work, but for Pakistan, the democratic process that the ruling class was “leading” to have not been allowed to appear. The means does not justify the end and the end does not justify the means. Both are inextricable from each other on the political arena and hence, if you want an actual democratic process, you have to start democratically at some point in history. I understand that everyone keeps harping on about changing the “system” and I might just be one of them, but in Pakistan there is no “system” to change. There are simply men, already in power, openly asserting this power, getting drunk on it(no pun), and when they die/are hanged/go to jail etc, we are back to ground zero and have to start all over again. With both alternatives that I previously mentioned, the situation remains the same: namely, pathetically part-civilian, part-military. The government is not a business, and the government is not a border.
I am actually quite proud to say that I honestly tried extremely hard to find some way of liking and supporting Benazir for a good seven years. She was a woman, a good speaker, educated from colleges, the likes of which, I had attended myself, and if I could justify her behavior, perhaps I would find it easier to blame the army alone. As an absolute final resort, after thumbing through history books and newspaper clippings and every piece of literature I could find on her and by her, I even allowed myself to google “Why should I support Benazir” in a dire attempt to find a last thread of reconciliation. However, I regret to inform me that I cannot support Ms. Benazir Zardari as a political leader of Pakistan. I say “Zardari” and not Bhutto, because that is who she really is. Benazir “Bhutto” is the refuge that supporters of her father take when they are reminiscing about their long-forgotten ideals; them and people like myself. But now I must extricate the ideal and the reality. I regret to inform myself, that I do not like Ms. Benazir Zardari and cannot support her for my country.
I regret to inform myself, after all these years, that speaking well and getting a degree in an Ivy League college says nothing about a person’s abilities to hold themselves accountable for something. I also regret to inform myself, that if the people of this country and more specifically, the members of Pakistan’s People’s Party(Benazir’s father’s party) are stoned enough to allow her back into the government or their party after all that she has done, or even allegedly done, they deserve her. As William Dalrymple wrote in The Guardian, during her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto's premiership was also marked by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari - widely known as "Mr 10%" - faced allegations of plundering the country.
I do not need to go into a laundry list of the corruption charges against her and her husband because they have already been stated many times by many people. If you didn’t read them, you can always google them.
In a final attempt to give her the benefit of doubt, I tried considering who supports her at this point in time. Interestingly, her lobby consists of two diametrically opposing quarters: Pakistan People’s Party apologists and Gen. Pervez Musharaf. Both say that the power sharing agreement that seems to be formulating itself between Benazir and Musharraf is the fastest, most viable way to usher in a civilian, more democratic rule. Arguments for that run from the likes of Benazir being the only political force strong enough to oppose the army, to how if we can’t have a fully cut democratic process, we should settle for the underdog. Every argument, without exception, fails to stand in the face of glaring historical reality. This isn’t the first time she is making a “deal” with a military dictator. In 1984, in a deal with Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, negotiated by an important associate of the US administration, Peter Galbraith, she left Pakistan. Similarly in 1986 and 1988, she returned and came to power by making “deals” with the military. Even if we were to give it to the political pundits that Benazir Bhutto may have been the strongest political force to counter the General this time, I regret to inform the happily oblivious that she chose not to become that. She’s making deals with Generals and not with the general public. She isn’t an opposing force, but a collaborating one, as she has always been. Collaboration might even be considered if the balance of power in this agreement was tipping in favor of Benazir which it is not. Musharaf is in power, and will remain in power with a constitution that grants a President the powers of a fascist. Why is such an analysis even necessary? This should be obvious from every single deal that a civilian government has made with a ruling general in a history of 60 years. Power has almost never effectively changed hands. It has only pretended to do so to serve the personal vendettas of those who make the deals. If those deals were for the good of the nation, they wouldn’t be “deals”. They would be transparent political proceedings. If she had real “grassroots” level support, as Musharaf claims, then why not put it to test, why not let her make an open deal with those “grass roots” instead of signing on the badge of a jaded General?
This power-sharing arrangement being seen as the lesser of the two evils is actually not true. Consider for a moment what might happen if this deal was not made and if Benazir was not allowed to return: Musharraf, who has allegedly won the elections without actually having been made a legal candidate yet (the ridiculousness of this statement itself is enough to make a literate person gag), will most probably have his candidacy status validated by the courts and allowed to become a de facto civilian president for at least 5 years (if of course, he can get out of those military lapels). If that happens, I would imagine that opposition parties would continue with their zealous attacks against everything he does, the USA would have their left over bone sent in a nicely wrapped package to Pakistan, and “free and fair” (that are neither free nor fair) elections will choose a Prime Minister who bows to Musharraf like a courtesan-no changes whatsoever to the status quo. Apparently.
If he allows Benazir to come back and her account is unfrozen(which by the way, lest we forget, is worth $1.5 billion), she will stand for elections, probably be elected as Prime Minister(with foreign affairs and national security still with the military for at least 5 years) and will continue to curtsy like a courtesan to Musharraf. Musharaf’s worries about her rebellion are also kept at bay with the fact that all the Generals and ex-Generals in the past have simply amended the constitution when they’ve had to face non-cooperation from their Prime Ministers. In addition, Benazir has never been one to put her position of power in jeopardy. Given all that, even if Benazir does manage to hold her own, you still have someone in power that, by her own designs or her husband’s, was charged for immense bouts of corruption not just once, but twice. Even if she were to say that the charges against her are false and she was victimized by Gen. Zia, the fact of the matter is that the charges come from five other countries, and that all charges, false or otherwise, stand unless they are put to a fair trial in court. In fact, I would think it would benefit Musharraff to have her tried for that in a public trial, instead of promulgating the NRO which allows her to go scot-free. Of course since he, himself, is not a perfect cherub when it comes to corruption, he probably realizes that this would be akin to opening Pandora’s Box.
Either way, the two scenarios do not differ much. One of them openly mocks a democratic political process and the other does the same in secret.
Even if someone was to show how they could both lead to different ends, in this case, the means to that end is just as important. What the people of this country need to realize, and it has taken sixty years to do that, is that this whole system of “political process” in Pakistan is an absolute sham. We didn’t start off democratically, or even fairly democratically. We started off with a class that was ready to rule to lead to democracy. In some cases in the world, that might work, but for Pakistan, the democratic process that the ruling class was “leading” to have not been allowed to appear. The means does not justify the end and the end does not justify the means. Both are inextricable from each other on the political arena and hence, if you want an actual democratic process, you have to start democratically at some point in history. I understand that everyone keeps harping on about changing the “system” and I might just be one of them, but in Pakistan there is no “system” to change. There are simply men, already in power, openly asserting this power, getting drunk on it(no pun), and when they die/are hanged/go to jail etc, we are back to ground zero and have to start all over again. With both alternatives that I previously mentioned, the situation remains the same: namely, pathetically part-civilian, part-military. The government is not a business, and the government is not a border.
I am actually quite proud to say that I honestly tried extremely hard to find some way of liking and supporting Benazir for a good seven years. She was a woman, a good speaker, educated from colleges, the likes of which, I had attended myself, and if I could justify her behavior, perhaps I would find it easier to blame the army alone. As an absolute final resort, after thumbing through history books and newspaper clippings and every piece of literature I could find on her and by her, I even allowed myself to google “Why should I support Benazir” in a dire attempt to find a last thread of reconciliation. However, I regret to inform me that I cannot support Ms. Benazir Zardari as a political leader of Pakistan. I say “Zardari” and not Bhutto, because that is who she really is. Benazir “Bhutto” is the refuge that supporters of her father take when they are reminiscing about their long-forgotten ideals; them and people like myself. But now I must extricate the ideal and the reality. I regret to inform myself, that I do not like Ms. Benazir Zardari and cannot support her for my country.
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