The newly elected prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, announced that Gen Pervez Musharraf is to stand trial for treason. Photograph: T Mughal/EPA
sage: The people of Pakistan have spoken – and been heard. They turned out in droves to vote in their new leader – despite Taliban threats and murders, rumours of a coup and in the midst of a most violent campaign. And now their new Prime Minister is reflecting their will. This is just one more step toward the representative democracy that they seek, and deserve.
By Mira Sethi, The Guardian – June 26, 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/pakistan-troubled-past-pervez-musharraf
In prosecuting Pervez Musharraf for treason, prime minister Nawaz Sharif echoes the will of the people
For the first time in Pakistan’s history, a former army chief is to be tried for an offence, treason, that until now has been reserved for trouble-making journalists and Baloch nationalists. Until Monday, the newly elected Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, had avoided making statements about the fate of the former president, General Pervez Musharraf, who is in house-prison on a number of charges, including complicity in Benazir Bhutto’s murder.
But when the PM addressed parliament this week, he made the boldest statement a prime minister has yet made about a former army chief: Musharraf was to be tried under Article 6 for treason.
Musharraf seized power in a coup in 1999, toppling a democratically elected government, and in the last year of his reign, imposed a state of emergency, a kind of mini martial law, by making himself both president and army chief. As Sharif spoke, desks were thumped in agreement, and parliamentarians from all political parties echoed the prime minister’s statements.
In a country where politicians can’t agree on a national terrorism policy, opposing the military’s interference in politics is a stand embraced now by all parties, from the nominally liberal Pakistan People’s party (PPP) to the religious Jamaat-e-Islami.
This is unprecedented. The distance travelled over the past five years is significant. Much more instructive than speculating on the outcome of Musharraf’s case – likely to end in a brokered amnesty and reciprocal exile of the kind given to Sharif in 1999 – is understanding Pakistan’s burgeoning commitment to parliamentary democracy.
For five years, from 2008 to 2013, the PPP government pushed through all manner of threats. It sacrificed economic growth at the altar of survival – including shrewd appeasement of the military when the occasion demanded – to become the first government in Pakistan’s 66-year history to successfully complete its term in office.
The PPP survived four major events – the Osama bin Laden raid; memogate (in which former Pakistani ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani was accused of conspiring against the armed forces); “Salala”, in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by US-led Nato forces at two Pakistani military checkposts at Salala, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border; and resistance to an influential preacher-turned-activist, Tahir-ul-Qadri, who held the country hostage for a week demanding the corrupt PPP government be brought down.
President Zardari survived these events in addition to removing sweeping powers of the president and restoring them to the prime minister.
Then, six months after Bin Laden was killed, and rumours of a coup began afresh, then prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani lashed out against the military, saying: “They cannot be a state within a state. They are answerable to parliament.”
This was the first time a prime minister had dared to refer to the covert actions of the armed forces – from intelligence-gathering to meddling in Afghanistan – in clear terms. The media picked up on it, and some columnists and talk-show hosts even lauded the former PM for his bravery and conviction.
Finally, the 2013 elections proved that Pakistanis themselves desperately wish to experience uninterrupted representative democracy. The most thrilling aspect of the elections was the sight of voters coming out in record numbers in the midst of the most violent election campaign Pakistan has ever seen.
The Taliban had repeatedly warned Pakistanis to stay home, to spurn democracy, to spurn parliament, to spurn the western system of governance. They killed 125 people in the run-up to the elections – especially members of the secular Awami National party – to show they meant business.
And yet, the people of Punjab voted en masse for governance, the people of Khyber Pahtunkhawa for peace, and the Sindhis – mired in the tragic history of the Bhuttos – voted on the compulsions of patronage. Caught in a web of sectarian and state-sponsored violence, Balochistan registered the lowest turnout. It is no small feat that the election commission still declared the voter turnout to be 60%.
Sharif, the 63-year-old prime minister who was born in the cradle of dictatorship, has styled himself over the past decade as the military’s wiliest baiter. Sharif’s clash with Musharraf in a 1999 coup – which led to a stint in prison followed by a decade-long exile – has left Sharif with a deep suspicion of the military.
One of the lessons Sharif grasped during his decade-long exile is that if Pakistan’s civilian leaders want to keep the military at bay, then the paradigm that keeps the military in power – enmity with India – must be changed. His constituents voted in record numbers for governance over ideology, prosperity over animosity (with India).
Pakistan has a long way to go before the benefits of representative democracy trickle down to the poor. But the groundwork of the past five years, including a successful transition to a new government, indicates that Pakistanis want to participate wholeheartedly in elections as a means of discarding failed rulers and empowering those who talk about governance. The old respect for the military continues as a diffuse “feeling” but bread-and-butter issues are far more important.
In the run-up to the elections, the cricket-luminary-turned politician, Imran Khan, moved hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis with his vision of a corruption-free “new Pakistan”. Notwithstanding continuing problems with terrorism and energy, a distinct strain of a new Pakistan has indeed been born.
It is not a country in which entrenched codes of patronage have disappeared overnight or in which a developing democracy has purged itself of an abstract noun (corruption). The new Pakistan is a country in which shifting demographics and a rising, politically aware urban electorate can increasingly determine the outcome of its choices.