By Ron Moreau
Newsweek International
Sept. 4, 2006 issue - After nearly seven years in power, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is suddenly running into heavy political flak. His two main political rivals—former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who are both in exile—have begun cooperating and are pledging to return in time to campaign for general elections scheduled for late next year. Several prominent Pakistanis, including retired Army generals and former Supreme Court chief justices, have written open letters to the president, who serves concurrently as Army chief of staff, asking him to retire from the armed forces and to hold free and fair elections next year under a caretaker government. Last week, 141 members of the formerly divided opposition in the National Assembly came together and presented a 500-page no-confidence motion against Musharraf's handpicked prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, detailing a litany of alleged misdeeds ranging from the shady privatizations of state companies to allowing well-connected monopolies to fix cement, energy and sugar prices at artificially high levels.
The government has a solid majority in the National Assembly and is expected to easily defeat the motion when it comes to a vote this week. But Aziz, and the president by extension, will take a serious political hit during the debate. Musharraf can be proud of Pakistan's 6 percent GDP growth over the past three years and of a 10 percent reduction in the number of Pakistanis living below the poverty line in the last five. But he and Aziz have failed to curb inflation that is running at about 9 percent. The resulting rise in prices for essentials such as sugar, wheat flour, rice and beans is squeezing most Pakistanis. "It's the first shot of the opposition's election campaign to win over public opinion," says Samina Ahmed, the South Asia director of the International Crisis Group. "It's going to have an impact."
The prospect of elections is galvanizing a formerly fractious opposition that includes Bhutto, Sharif, more than a dozen smaller, secular parties and the Islamic religious alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. They all fear that Musharraf and his political allies will cement themselves in power for years to come unless the opposition begins mobilizing Pakistanis against the government now. "This is a do-or-die situation for us," says Ahsan Iqbal, a senior official in Sharif's faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML).
Musharraf's men downplay the opposition's offensive and deny that the government has engaged in any wrongdoing. "Our problem is just the usual vulnerabilities of incumbency," says Mushahid Hussain, secretary-general of the pro-Musharraf ruling PML. Even so, the president's men are leaving nothing to chance. They make it clear that Musharraf is determined to retain his controversial dual role as president and Army chief of staff for years to come, and to seek re-election for a second five-year term not from a freshly elected Parliament next year, as the opposition wants, but from the present body, which he controls and which was elected in widely criticized elections four years ago. (The president is elected by both houses of Parliament and the four provincial assemblies.) "Why shouldn't the same Parliament elect the president twice for 10 years?" asks the PML's Hussain.
The president's critics charge that, if Musharraf takes that route, he'd be demonstrating that he and the military don't trust free and fair elections. "Musharraf is increasingly seen by people as being more interested in perpetuating himself in power than in anything else," says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood. "If he is re-elected by this Parliament, then Musharraf will become another [Hosni] Mubarak [of Egypt], staying in power for two decades or more." That's a troubling scenario, but it remains to be seen if the opposition, an uneasy and still potentially fractious alliance, can do anything about it
|