Fundamentalist Leader Qazi Hussain brands Musharraf a Traitor
Qadi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami called Sunday for massive protests against the coup of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. He was speaking to a crowd of 20,000 near the major Punjabi city of Lahore. I just saw Qazi Hussain on Aljazeera condemning Musharraf as a traitor, saying in English, "This is clear treason." The Jamaat-i Islami is still largely a cadre organization rather than a mass movement, though it did win a lot of votes in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan. It has in the past organized demonstrations as big as 80,000 in the southern port of Karachi, though for a city of Karachi's size (9 million), that isn't actually all that impressive. That the Jama'at got 20,000 to rally near Lahore strikes me as a bad sign for Musharraf. What is really significant, however, is that Qazi Hussain is the only major party leader openly calling for mass resistance against Musharraf, a stance which will help the popularity of his party even if (as seems likely) he winds up in jail over it.
Newsday says that Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf seems likely to make his coup stick. Newsday argues that the major opposition leader in the country, Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People's Party, is protesting orally but not threatening to hold rallies. Hundreds of opposition figures have been arrested, and Pakistan's satellite and local television and radio stations are firmly under military control, as are the newspapers.
The Newsday article unwisely ignores Qazi Hussain and the signs of widespread resistance (marked by "preemptive arrests") of party and human rights leaders. The leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), loyal to exiled leader Nawaz Sharif, is under arrest, as is prominent human rights campaigner, Asma Jahangir (a woman).
What middle class people in Pakistan think about all this is apparent in two editorials in the Frontier Post in the Northwest Frontier Province, which condemn Musharraf for not cracking down earlier and harder on Muslim extremists and also condemn him for not using constitutional means to achieve his goals.
Benazir Bhutto is flying to Islamabad on Monday, having condemned the mass arrests, and having called for early elections.
Musharraf may postpone parliamentary elections, scheduled for January, for "a year." (Past military dictators in Pakistan have "postponed" the elections "for a year" many years in a row).
See the important string of live-blogging posts by Barnett Rubin at our Global Affairs site. Rubin is in Islamabad. He points out that Musharraf has been invoking the need to fight Muslim extremism as a pretext for his coup. But in fact, he made the (further) coup because the Pakistani Supreme Court had unanimously decided that he was ineligible to run for president, and he hasn't cracked down on the radio station of Maulana Fazalallah, a radical. He has cracked down on civilian Supreme Court justices, on lawyers, and other distinctly secular, middle class forces in Pakistani society (along with officials of the Jama'at-i Islami, the Pakistani equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has not for the most part been violent).
In fact, the Muslim extremists are in the tribal areas, and in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the hardscrabble towns and villages of northern Punjab. If you were worried about the extremists, you'd declare martial law in the NWFP and the tribal areas. Instead, Musharraf is said to be planning to give in to the demand in these northern areas that sharia or Islamic canon law be implemented! This is a defender of secularism?
Down in Lahore and Faisalabad, no one could get more than a few hundred people even to protest Musharraf's frontal assault on the Red Mosque last summer. But Musharraf didn't make his coup in the NWFP, he arrested hundreds in Lahore and elsewhere in the deep Punjab, which is mostly traditional, conservative, Sufi, Shiite, or mildly reformist. There are extremists from the eastern and southern Pakistani Punjab, but they are a small fringe. That is why it is significant that Qazi Hussain of the Jama'at-i Islami could rally 20,000 persons near Lahore. When the Punjabis get excited about something in Pakistan, there is sometimes a political earthquake.
If Bush and Cheney are ever tempted into extreme measures in the United States, Musharraf has provided a template for how it would unfold. Maintain you are moving against terrorists and extremists, but actually move against the rule of law. Rubin has accepted the suggested term of "lawfare" to describe this kind of warfare by executive order.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/05/2007 12:30:00 AM
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10 Comments:
Bashing the lawyers and politicians, while leaving the Islamists alone,does not exclude the possibility that the Islamists are the real target.
It is quite possible that he wants to avoid a costly clash with Islamists until he disables civil society and laws [which would get in the way of a crackdown] and gets time to consolidate before an attack.
The court's decision against his presidency is by no means a given, and there must be ways and means to delay and work around it: remeber USA 2001?
I notice that Musharref is arresting the Western-educated elite, not the beards.
Benazir Bhutto is seen as a U.S. 'lapdog' among certain military elements. I suspect they are right.
She's spent too much time hob-nobbing & fine-dining with Western leaders to be fully trusted by any nationalistic Pakistani.
There is most likely an attempt to purge elements of her party who would conceivably attempt to wrest party power from her as Pakistan moves towards 'American Democracy', that is, not democracy at all, but kleptocracy in the interest of maintaining Musharraf's power and Western interests in Pakistan.
IMHO, U.S. State is crying 'crocodile tears' over this coup.
I posted this to one of Barnett's postings, but it bears repeating here:
Translation courtesy of watchingamerica:
Pak Tribune, Pakistan
Again … America Backs the 'Wrong Horse' in Pakistan
"Benazir Bhutto is reputed to have been an autocrat of the first order who wouldn't even tolerate the influence of her own mother. … If they wish Pakistan well, it's time that our Western benefactors pull back from supporting her.
By Colonel Riaz Jafri(Retired)
[...] A common perception prevailing in Pakistan is that the British and American governments think that she'll be able to eradicate extremism and restore full democracy here. But what they don't realize it that by thrusting on the nation a leader alleged to be as corrupt as Benezir, they are antagonizing the very people they say they want to boost: The moderates. That's to say nothing of the religious parties, who have long had no love for her. [...]
In Full
Jamaat are well organized, disclipined, but their politics will only attract 5-10% of support from the population. MQM dominates Karachi and other urban areas in Sindh. PPP dominates in rural Sindh. PML(q) and PML(N) dominate in Punjab. Jamaat is part of MMA, a coalition of muslim parties, that controls the NWFP.
Here is Wallerstein's take on Musharraf. It analytical social science, and looks at the competing forces in Pakistan that I'd never bothered to learn about before: http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/214en.htm
You say:
"If Bush and Cheney are ever tempted into extreme measures in the United States, Musharraf has provided a template for how it would unfold. Maintain you are moving against terrorists and extremists, but actually move against the rule of law"
I would say that the way the Watch List has been developed shows not only that this is exactly how the Bush administration would proceed, but how they are already proceeding.
Re. the (genuinely) wonderful news about US military deaths in Iraq in October, does anyone know how many contractors died in October? I'll bet no one outside the Bush administration has any clue about those numbers, which I suspect are WAAY up. I'd like to believe that peace has broken out in Iraq, but what I DO believe is that this administration is able to do only one thing, and that is, cook the numbers.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf has now joined a long line of Pakistani Army officers who, having tasted political power, were narcotized into destroying democracy and instituting a police state in Pakistan...
Musharraf shares the murky pedestal now with dictators such as Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the American ally who fathered the Salafist terrorist movement and the Pak Atomic bomb, and Gen. Yahya Khan, who worked with Nixon and Kissinger to open a path to China but also slaughtered thousands of Bengali intellectuals in order to suppress the self-determination in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
While the threat of terrorism is very real in Pakistan, there is little evidence that such an "Emergency" measure was required to deal with this threat, or that it will be appropriate in defeating or mitigating the radicals behind the terror attacks. Instead, they may very well draw the Islamists and pro-Democracy groups closer in an alliance against Musharraf.
Of course, when the terrorists attacked former PM Benazir Bhutto's welcome parade, I could not help but muse as to how the chickens had come home to roost... It should be noted that while Zia created the monster of Salafist terrorism (with equal aid from the Saudis and the Reagan administration), it was Bhutto's democratically elected government that created the Taliban movement in a power tussle with the Pakistani ISI, which was then backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's radical militia, Hizb-e-Islami. Now, of course, the Taliban and Hekmatyar have joined hands with Al Qaeda in seeking to destroy the Musharraf-Bush alliance in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Musharraf's tactics closely mirror those of previous Pak dictators, although he is not getting his hands as bloody as previous Pak military regimes... For now, the police are cracking down on pro-democracy protests, led by Pakistani lawyers, and have placed several politicians and judges under house arrest. Musharraf has also shut down all of Pakistan's private mass media, including about 50 cable and satellite TV channels, in order to control the press.
And so it is that this general, Musharraf, who had at one time compared himself to Mustapha Kemal 'Ataturk' in seeking to reform Pakistan into a Ultra-Light Muslim state, is now quoting Lincoln to speak directly to his Bushiite backers...
Well, given today's baton charges and mass arrests, it is quite clear how Musharraf's strategery against the lawyers' strike is unfolding. Meanwhile, the radicals that Musharraf cites as the reason behind this "Emergency" have reacted predictably, condemning Musharraf as a "traitor" (see Prof. Juan Cole's blog post today) and calling for nationwide protests.
I think Musharraf's actions, as with such similar dictatorial crackdowns by the Shah in 1970s Iran, will result in forging an alliance between the radical Islamist parties and the secular pro-Democracy groups, thereby making the Islamists more relevant to the mainstream of Pakistani politics.
You wrote in your article:
"But in fact, he made the (further) coup because the Pakistani Supreme Court had unanimously decided that he was ineligible to run for president, and he hasn't cracked down on the radio station of Fazlur Rahman in the north (one of the Pakistani clerics who trained the Taliban and who denies that al-Qaeda exists)."
But I believe you mean Mualana Fazalullah, not Fazlur Rahman. Fazlur Rahman is the head of the JUI -the largest component of the Islamist MMA coalition and has long had ties to the army (and the taliban). Bringing the JUI into the government was one of the major negotiating points in the deal between Bhutto and the military. Bhutto was apparently reluctant because being partners with the JUI might reduce her anti-extremist credentials in the west. However it is widely assumed here in Pakistan that she agreed because the JUI helped elect Musharaf in the recent presidential elections. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of the JI, which is also a member of the MMA coalition, has expressed his disappointment in the JUI and has publicly doubted whether the MMA coalition will last after this elections.
Mullana Fazlullah is the son in law of Mullanah Sami who headed a Jihadist organization which had close ties to the ISI and was involved in militant activity in Kashmir, and in sectarian violence. The government had cut a deal with him several months ago where he continued to run his illegal radio station calling for Jihad etc. in Swat in return for not attacking local administration and law enforcement officials. After Lal Masjid, he declared that his madressah would become a second lal masjid and the deal seemed to fall apart.
US deaths down cause air strikes are up, up up. These are not good for Iraqis but deaths don't get included in stats of sectarian kills.
About Iraq... Remember Iraq?
From TPMuckraker (They've got muck. We have rakes.)
Number of Iraqi Displaced Persons Skyrockets
Despite the surge, sectarian and other violence has forced over two million Iraqis to flee their homes for safer harbors inside Iraq, the Iraqi Red Crescent reports:
"The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has more than quadrupled since the U.S. troop buildup began in February, leaving 2.3 million Iraqis displaced and further dividing the country along sectarian lines, according to a new report from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.
The figures, which measured the number of internally displaced people at the end of September, present a grim accounting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding as Shiite militias and Sunni insurgent groups drive civilians, usually from the opposite sect, out of their homes, neighborhoods and cities.
More than 83 percent of those displaced were women and children, and most children were younger than 12, the report found. Most lived in Baghdad. Many lack adequate health services, cannot transfer their children to new schools and cannot find jobs."
In full with links
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