On the Lam!

Farooq Tariq of the communist Labour Party of Pakistan continues to post about life on the run. I couldn't help chortling over this part:

The plainclothes police came to LPP office in Lahore and checked if I was there. They went to the Good Books bookshop and remained there for some time on the pretext of buying books. They tried to ask about the whereabouts of the different comrades, pretending that they were LPP supporters and wanted to joint the party.

The comrade in charge of Good Books is an experienced comrade, and he immediately realised who they were. He cleverly convinced them to buy Tariq Ali’s book Clash of Fundamentalisms, while offering comradely hospitality, tea and a good political talk. Comrades proudly told me the story after they left the office: ``They came to look for you but instead took a book that may change their minds.’‘

I add my own recommendation to that of the comrade in charge of Good Books and endorse Tariq Ali's 'Clash of Fundamentalisms'.

The Hijacking

Finally, towards the end of the day came the news that Bhutto had ordered the PPP cadres to start protesting. To make up for lost time, a small bunch tried to storm the police barricades around the parliament building and some managed to make enough of a nuisance of themselves to get arrested. This pantomime has already worked wonders for Bhutto in the rather credulous foreign press, as this BBC report testifies. All this after Bhutto flew to Islamabad, met with "democratic opposition parties" (this is what reports in the Guardian, International Herald Tribune and BBC are all saying but I can't figure out yet just who these opposition parties are since the PTI, the PML-N, and the JI, all of whose senior figures are either in hiding or in jail, did not attend the meeting. Who does that leave exactly? I suppose I may find out more in the newspapers tomorrow), and held a press conference to which the world press was invited - all with no hindrance at all from the government. After the press conference, the gathered reporters and photographers were treated to the sight of a small bunch of PPP activists getting into a ridiculous tug-of-war with the police at the nearby parliament building.

This stretches credulity at Bhutto's "confrontation" with Pakistan's dictator to breaking point. Here is a photograph of Bhutto descending into the lion's den of Islamabad to risk life and liberty for the sake of democracy.


Looks rather tense and worried about the future of her country, doesn't she? (Source: The Guardian)

Finally, from the IHT comes this gem:

Earlier in the day, Syeda Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and a member of Bhutto's party, said that foreign officials have said that they saw little popular opposition to Musharraf's decree, but that the protests would demonstrate that this was wrong. "The international community is saying we don't see a popular protest," she said. "So now we're going to make a protest."

And so BB moves in to hijack the nascent democracy movement....

UPDATE: Its still tough to get a full sense of what BB was up to in Islamabad yesterday. The media blackout is so frustrating! This is what I can piece together from news reports in the press today. The PPP was in Islamabad to attend a meeting of the ARD (the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy which was a platform on which all opposition political parties are represented.) I try to untangle the mess here.

Bedtime Reading

Some interesting articles from the foreign press worth reading:

Arif Rafiq writing in the Baltimore Sun notes that "Mr. Musharraf’s dualism is contradictory and paralyzing. As chief of army staff, he needs widespread public and elite support to isolate and defeat the terrorists. As a partisan president, he needs to divide and conquer the opposition to maintain political power."

In a truly excellent article in the New York Times, M. Hanif notes that "Faced with increasing demands to give up his position as military chief and confront the complexities of civilian rule, General Musharraf decided to topple President Musharraf."

He goes on to note that by a happy coincidence, saving Pakistan from itself has been a particularly lucrative and profitable mission for the army. "Under his command Pakistan’s armed forces have become a hugely profitable empire. It’s the nation’s pre-eminent real estate dealer, it dominates the breakfast-cereal market, it runs banks and bakeries. Only last month Pakistan’s Navy, in an audacious move, set up a barbecue business on the banks of the Indus River about 400 miles away from the Arabian Sea it’s supposed to protect."

The Huffington Post notes that the Musharaf government has hired lobbyists in Washington to build support for his recent moves, to the tune of $55,000 a month. So that's where my tax money goes...

The Washington Post, comments on the incongruity of this image (source: Metroblogging Lahore):


"Man in Suit confounds the usual revolution images. In one photograph he is wearing glasses, his jacket is buttoned, he has something pinned to his lapel, and his cuffs peek out from his sleeves. These details make him an individual, even as a crowd is barely visible through the haze behind him. That individuality puts his anger on a different plane, it requires an interrogation of the image that we might not otherwise make."

Personally I am really taken with this photo. If anything it is even more incongrous. (I'm not sure about the original source - one of the Urdu papers I'm guessing. I found the image at Chapati Mystery):

Protests at Lahore Campuses

More on the LUMS protest can be found here. Photographs such as this one...




...can be found here. There is a mediocre CNN report on the LUMS protest on the 5th here (at least they didn't mention Bhutto in the report). Its possible that the authorities took a harder line today because that report made it to a major western news outlet. At least they aren't ignoring the protest. Thats success of a sort, right?

Today there were protests at a couple of other university campuses in Lahore. The Lahore Metroblog has some updates on whats happening there. FAST appears to have had a significant protest despite the fact that Musharaf is the Chancellor of the institution!!!

Metroblog Lahore also has links to Imran Khan's video messages.

Update: A good description of the LUMS protest can be found here. According to bloggers in Lahore the standoff at NUS-FAST has also ended peacefully. I get the feeling the cops were trying to frighten the students by demanding that the administration hand over anyone who was carrying a placard. (The administration, kudos to them, stood fast and refused to do so.)

Bread and Circusses, Part II

From The Washington Post, we learn:

"It's like the government is declaring war on civil society and they just wish we would all zone out and watch South Asian film stars dancing around, instead of the news. We aren't some huge danger to the state. Why don't they go target the suicide bombers?" said Romessa Khan, 20, a major in painting at the National College of Arts Lahore, where students gathered in a courtyard Tuesday, worried about family members and neighbors who had been carted off to jail.

But the NCA is not exactly a hub of pro-democracy activism (unlike, say, LUMS where a large demonstration has just been raided). As the article goes on to note:

A group of students at the National College of Arts chain-smoked, passed around headphones pumping out Urdu pop and riffed on the best way to protest emergency rule. In the end, they decided that any form of civil disobedience -- be it a protest song or an artistic rendering of jail scenes -- would be too dangerous.

Back to the news about LUMS. The administration really deserves praise and recognition for being the only university administration in the country to criticize the arrest of members of its faculty and express solidarity with those who wish to exercise "their right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression."

On Updates...

Teeth Maestro is providing some good minute by minute updates on the anti-emergency protests in Pakistan.

And if you are wondering what it is like to be on the run from the police, check this article out. Why doesn't Farooq Tariq (of the Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP)) want to go to jail? Because he has enjoyed the hospitality of the government before.

Kamila Shamsie glumly compares Musharaf's speeches after the 1999 coup with the more recent one.

Imran Khan is also in hiding and sending out messages to the public to "encourage" resistance. As usual, he is aiming most of his invective against the United States. Let us recall that he belongs to the 'everything is the United States' fault and if the U.S. would only leave well enough alone, all would be right with the world' school of thought. Oddly enough all the retired military types who pad out his political party's leadership are all still roaming about free.

As expected, the western media is now beginning to present BB as a fearless saviour of democracy taking on the evil dictator. Its vital that she hold her rally, even if it gets suicide bombed, so that she can claim to the west that she's bringing the people out into the streets in support of democracy!

Pathetic!

Finally, perhaps one of the greatest drawbacks about the media ban is that we can no longer experience the fun-filled pleasures of watching Fox News and chortle over their expert analysis, such as this: Hamid Karzai is the leader of Pakistan... no, wait, its Nawaz Sharif!

Bread and Circuses...

Peace deal notwithstanding, militants in Swat have taken over another town. This comes as Indian intelligence analysts announce that Pakistan has pulled soldiers away from the border in Kashmir to deal with the militants. This article in the Guardian captures the extent of the militants ascendancy in Swat.

Incidentally, while the military has shut down all local private TV channels (the few exceptions include the the Dalda cooking channel and three music video channels -give us bread and circuses!) and have banned radio stations from making news broadcasts, it goes without saying the the militant Maulana Fazlullah's Jihadi radio station in Swat is still on air, along with a host of other Jihadist stations. I recall reading somewhere that there were up to 300 illegal short range radios transmitters in operation. I will try and find the link to that info. Meanwhile, this interesting article from last year gives an insight into how the illegal stations operate.

Benazir's conspicuous liberty while other opposition party members were being arrested in droves has led many to believe that the much ballyhooed 'deal' between BB and Musharaf may still be revived. One possibility was that the PML-Q, who were never terribly happy about dealing with Bhutto in the first place, had convinced Musharaf that he could settle the terms of the deal from a position of strength after imposing the Emergency. It was noticeable that , by her own admission, Benazir had been informed by the government about the imposition of the Emergency beforehand. Furthermore, while other parties called for protests etc., she merely made a lightweight pronouncement that Musharaf should keep his promise to resign from his military post and hold elections on time. No mention of the emergency. That other loyal partner of the military mascarading as an opponent of the regime, Maullanah Fazlur Rahman of the Jammat-e-Ulema-e Islami (JUI (F)) has announced that there is no harm in contesting elections under the PCO (where, for example, it is illegal to criticise the government or any of its members or policies, which would make campaigning an exercise in futility)!

But there seems to be some evidence that things are not all going according to plan. Speaking after the emergency was imposed, the Prime Minister announced that elections could be delayed for up to a year. This sparked off a furor abroad and the initial lukewarm announcements from the U.S. about 'reviewing our aid' to Pakistan were replaced with tougher statements. The E.U. similarly announced tougher measures and yesterday the Secretary General of the UN and the Pakistani ambassador got into a public spat about the emergency. This has led to some furious backpedaling in Islamabad with repeated assurances that elections will be held on time and that Musharaf will quit his post as army chief. Today Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain announced that the emergency would be over in three weeks.

Perhaps goaded on by her erstwhile backers in the west, seeing which way the wind is turning and perhaps realizing that her fuzzy stance on the emergency was at odds with her self-declared image of the "saviour of democracy", Benazir Bhutto has finally made a stronger statement of opposition to the emergency and the government's action against the judges. There seems to be an ongoing spat between the government and the PPP about whether a previously announced election rally scheduled to take place in Rawalpindi will go ahead or not.

While some western media outlets will no doubt present Bhutto as leading the fight to restore democracy in Pakistan, have a look at this article from the pro-PPP Pakistani Daily Times. This is the writer's description of the the PPP leadership flying to Islamabad to NOT have talks with the government (according to BB!)

During the course of the flight I spoke to all the PPP leaders travelling with her and the body language was relaxed and laughter was in the air. Something told me that there might be a chance of dialogue soon with the president.

The journalist went on to ask BB if she was going to become a care-taker prime minister, which she denied. This seems to be obvious, since the spectacle of running for Prime Minister while being the caretaker PM would be a rather odd one. Some people however are speculating that if Musharaf decides to dump the PML-Q once and for all, Amin Faheem, who was the titular head of the PPP when BB was abroad may be a good candidate for the slot. Some analysts are asserting that the emergency may have actually backfired and weakened Musharaf's hand vis a vis the 'deal' with BB.

In the last article I linked to, there is the interesting suggestion that Musharaf may well have achieved some of his limited goals if he had followed the constitutional route and used the support of BB and Maulana Fazlur Rahman to pass legislation in the assemblies curbing the power of the Judges and giving certain emergency powers to the government. The contours of the next government seem to have become pretty well defined by now. Here is my prediction: PPP, JUL(F), MQM alliance with the PML(Q) playing a larger or smaller role depending on how much of the pie they can secure for themselves.

It certainly doesn't leave much hope for any kind of significant positive changes in the country. Its the same old, same old... sigh...