THERE were times when generalship and rulership went together. Until the emergence of institutions of governance and politics, powerful kings, secure on their thrones, were quite often warriors at the same time. Rulers wanting in military capability were liable to be side-tracked by generals and warlords.

With the advent of democracy politics based on physical force gave way to decision making through discussion and debate among the representatives of the people. The bearers of guns were limited to fighting when fighting became necessary to stop foreign foes or domestic insurrectionists. In performing their assigned duty, they were to be broadly subordinated to civilian authorities.

We in Pakistan have also heard that democratic governance and politics of physical force are antithetical, but some of us are reluctant to exclude force as the arbiter of issues because they are sceptical of the democratic method. Our generals are the foremost among these sceptics; they remain undaunted by their own dismal record as rulers.

The generals are not overly concerned about western opinion in this regard. They have convinced themselves-and not without good reason-that the western governments will continue to work with them as long as they (our generals) serve western interests and wrap their domestic rule in a quilt that, even with some stretch of the imagination, can be called democracy. But they must also be aware of the domestic dimension of this issue. It is one of the compelling “ground realities” that far too many of our people, political parties, and institutions of civil society want democracy. They will regard a system of governance that allows supremacy to the military as a betrayal of their aspirations.

General Musharraf is trying to find and occupy the middle ground between a military government and a democratic civilian regime, with the balance of power tilting towards the military, in the belief that he can get away with such a mix both at home and abroad. His answer to this quest is that he should wear two hats at the same time: become a “democratic” politician even as he continues to serve as a general. But another one of the “ground realities,” seemingly obscure from his view, is that mercifully God has given him only one head, which will take only one hat at a time. If he thrusts both on that one and the same head, both will get messed up and the head itself may develop an ache.

Our experience in this regard is mixed. Ayub Khan stepped down as chief of the army staff after he had lifted the martal law and become president under the Constitution of 1962. Yahya Khan remained chief and ruled by martial law. Zia-ul-Haq remained the army chief until his death but, having written his appointment as president into the Constitution, he did not go out to the people as a professional politician. General Musharraf says he is not like any of his military predecessors. True; none of them acted as an officer and as a politician concurrently.

Several of our ruling politicians were allegedly incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical, self-aggrandizing, breakers of their covenants, and violators of the public interest. The generals overthrew them and took control of the government, saying that they were going to be different. Many people accepted their action on the basis of that assurance. Needless to say, nothing is gained if the generals in power begin to act like the politicians they have ousted. But can they remain neat and clean if, as rulers, they choose to assume the role of politicians? Already we can see that General Musharraf’s attempt to wear the afore-mentioned two hats simultaneously is not working.

The general has been known as an honest, forthright, patriotic man who wants to serve the country to the best of his ability. One may disagree with his interpretations of the national interest in certain policy areas, but his integrity has not been in question. What is he doing now that is worrisome? He is out there mounting a political campaign to win popular approval of his personal goal of remaining president for a period of time. He is issuing statements and delivering speeches.

Reports have it that as a public speaker he is mediocre or worse. He is supplying this deficiency with excess in denouncing his opponents and in promising the good he will do for the country. Promises that he knows he will not be able to keep. The danger then is that the exercise he is undertaking will make him appear as an intemperate accuser and a breaker of his covenants like the very same politicians he and others condemn.

He needs audiences. In America if a couple of hundred persons turn up some place to hear President Bush, his appearance will be deemed to have been successful. But in Pakistan newsmen will project an audience of two hundred as evidence of the collapse of our good general’s campaign. His listeners must run into tens of thousands if his performance is to be rated as a success story. Now, as he is prone to telling us, let’s be realistic. Acting on their own initiative, our people do not throng to distant places to hear somebody who is not a saint or a hero, neither handsome nor eloquent, nor charismatic in any other way, and who is going to say things they have already heard. They will have to be brought to the meeting place.

At a press conference the other day General Musharraf insisted that listeners were coming to his rallies of their own accord and by their own means, or with the help of private persons and organizations, but that public officials and agencies were not brining them over. Not true, say the newsmen. Their reports say that in the districts where the general has addressed gatherings hundreds of privately owned buses and trucks were impounded for the purpose of transporting persons to his meetings. Private persons or organizations cannot commandeer vehicles; their owners and drivers would simply not oblige. They will yield only to officials whom they have reason to fear.

A few weeks ago the general told journalists that the “nazims” would bring people to his meetings. Elected to their offices, the nazims are, nevertheless, public officials drawing salaries from public funds. Thus, public servants have been asked to act as the general’s agents for achieving his political mission. Who is financing his campaign? One may be sure that the cost of his travel to various places, and that of the civil and military officials who accompany him, is being paid out of the government treasury. He says the arrangements at the meeting places are being funded through private sources. But the identity of these sources has not been disclosed.

Eighteen-year-old persons whose names do not appear on the electoral rolls will be allowed to vote in the referendum; so will the overseas Pakistanis and those who would like to register their votes by post. These allowances are not made in an ordinary election in Pakistan. It is plain that they are open to abuse, and their availability in this referendum will inevitably detract from its credibility.

What consequences will these aspects of the general’s campaign have for our government and politics? The cardinal fact is that public officials have been employed, and public monies have been used, to advance a private purpose. Ask Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and they will both say that their participation in the forthcoming election is in the public interest. Any other candidate for public office will make the same case. Howsoever often the general and his supporters may assert that the national interest requires his continuance in office, his goal remains essentially private.

The officials who have helped the general’s campaign must know that they were asked to act outside the law. What will they now expect in return? Let us consider a situation that arises often enough. A provincial chief minister asks a police superintendent to put away one of his political opponents even though he has committed no crime. The officer does what he was asked to do. What impact does this incident have on his outlook? He will, most likely, feel that if it is acceptable to bend the law to the chief minister’s advantage, it is surely all right to bend it for his own advantage or for that of his friends and relatives.

By using public officials and monies as his instruments in this referendum, the general may have further spoiled the already decaying ethic and ethos of our public services. In doing so he has walked in the footsteps of the politicians whom he does not tire of condemning. Let us hope that this is not only the first but also the last time he has chosen to act like a politician. Let us hope also that once he has become president he will have no further use for this role. Lastly, let us hope that, if he must continue to be a politician even after the elections, he will take off his uniform, for otherwise he will run the risk of disgracing it. Considering how much he loves this uniform, one should like to think that he would not want to take that risk.

General Musharraf explained his intention of keeping his uniform the other day when he said to a newsman something to the following effect: “you know how important the uniform is; I am going to keep it on.” Is he apprehensive that if he were to resign as the army chief, his successor in that position might want to have his turn in the President’s House? If so, the implications of his concern are truly agonizing.

DESPITE the havoc the parliamentary system has wrought in Pakistan it remains the favoured form of government with the political parties and most politicians. The common man, on the other hand, looks up not to the parliament but an individual to rescue him for violence and poverty.

The reasons for the politicians’ preference for parliamentary system are both sound and selfish. They are familiar with it. It was practised, albeit in a rudimentary form, before independence and more fully for some years after it. A few hundred families, and fewer clans, drawn from the landed aristocracy and urban rich rule the parliament by turn and dispense the patronage that flows from it. That is the selfish reason for their partiality to the system. That is however not to allege that the parliament is not used for service to the people at all. The question is of basic motivation, and that is to protect the inherited entrenched interests.

Interestingly, in defending the parliamentary system the inherited interests are reinforced by the armchair liberals and professionals (like lawyers) for Westminster to them is the model of democracy and civil liberty. The ordinary people, the hoi polloi, in their longing for a leader who inspires and delivers have the capitalists and investors on their side. Both want stability and safety which they know by experience an individual leader provides better than a large parliament and the smaller cabinet it throws up. It may however be readily conceded that corruption and inefficiency can be equal allies of any government and its no particular form can lay claim to superiority on that score.

In looking up to an authoritative individual rather than an assembly for leadership, Pakistan’s common people would find the founder of their country also on their side. When Mr. Jinnah chose to be the governor-general rather than the prime minister elected by the parliament (Constituent Assembly) he wanted to head the government and not be merely a ceremonial head of state as a governor general or president invariably is in a parliamentary system.

Speaking at the Army Staff College at Quetta on June 14, 1948 he said “the executive authority flows from the head of the government of Pakistan who is the governor-general and, therefore, any command or order that may come to you cannot come without the sanction of the executive head”. Mr. Jinnah’s message, typically blunt and unambiguous, was meant both for the people and politicians of Pakistan, and the venue he chose to deliver it suggests it was also meant for the armed forces.

Though Mr. Jinnah was speaking under the Government of India Act, as adapted for use in Pakistan, it should be remembered that the adapted Act was the forerunner of our present parliamentary system under which the country was governed till the chief of the army chose to act contrary to Jinnah’s warning. Since then the parliamentary form and the constitutions that sustained it have been repeatedly subverted to a point where though the parliament remains in existence the system has lost its soul as well as its fundamental features.

What kind of a parliamentary system it is where the president elected by the parliament can dissolve it and dismiss its leader? That was Zia-ul-Haq’s idea of check and balance. Again, how a system can be called parliamentary where the elected members of the parliament are required by the Constitution (Nawaz Sharif’s 14th amendment) to follow the directive of the party boss rather than the dictates of law and conscience? And will it be still a parliamentary form if the elected parliament itself were to be made subordinate to a nominated National Security Council as Pervez Musharraf intends doing?

The quintessence of a parliamentary form of government is that the parliament is supreme and all authority emanates from it. The past parliaments failed this test and the upcoming after the April 30 referendum and October election will fail it once the NSC and the president are installed and more amendments, not yet specified, are made to the Constitution.

Pervez Musharraf’s reforms and referendum have created a welter of conflicting opinions on the form of the Constitution, structure of the government, autonomy of the provinces, dominance of the Centre and its patronage of the district governments circumventing the provincial governments, and numerous other questions of public importance. Out of this state of flux it would be unrealistic to expect that the parliamentary system, or its surviving remnants, will emerge unscathed.

The parliamentary system in any case has proved itself to be unsuited, much less indispensable, to the welfare and prosperity of the people of Pakistan. Whenever it was superseded by a presidential decree or martial law starting with Ghulam Mohammad, Iskander Mirza, Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and now by Pervez Musharraf even the parliamentarians, most among them if not all, welcomed it and the judiciary found a way to uphold it. The masterful of them all, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was coerced into adopting a parliamentary constitution. In return he combined in his own person both the power of the prime minister and prestige of the president.

The direction in the Supreme Court’s judgment to protect the parliamentary system should be construed no more than a veneer on the absolute authority that the judgment conferred on the Musharraf administration. It is borne out by the fact that the author of that judgment is now conducting a referendum which, whatever other political or legal justification might be found for it, detracts from the essential norms of the parliamentary system.

The gamut of the constitutional questions having been thrown open, the people, the politicians and all the other privileged classes should apply their mind to the form of government that serves the best interest of the country and all of its people uninhibited by the consideration that it has to be parliamentary. It wasn’t truly parliamentary even in its original form in 1973. It ceased to be parliamentary altogether with Zia-ul-Haq’s amendments in 1985 and Nawaz Sharif’s in 1997. Now it hangs somewhere between theocracy and authoritarianism.

The foremost questions needing a free thought and debate could be: one, the head of the government (president) should be directly elected by the people; two, the president and parliament should exercise check on each other’s powers but neither should be able to dismiss the other; three, the same pattern should be followed in the provinces with the governors directly elected; four, more subjects should be assigned to the provinces to make them autonomous in their internal affairs; five, the local councils (not governments) should be constitutionally protected; six, the judiciary and services in their appointments and working should be governed by prescribed codes without interference by the political authority.

These and similar other changes could in the future spare the country the authoritarian prime ministers like Z.A. Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, pathetic presidents like Fazal Elahi and Rafiq Tarrar as also long and frequent interludes of military or presidential rules and political expediency to which the critical and humanitarian issues like Kashmir and economy have long been held hostage.

On Friday last a politician of clerical variety who has the means to advertise his views as merchants do their wares appealed for sticking to the course on which the people had traveled long and hard and the destination of an Islamic system was now in sight. Among the landmarks on the highway to salvation he recounts the aborted Khilafat movement of the twenties, struggle for independence inspired by faith in the unity of Allah resulting in the miraculous creation of Pakistan on an auspicious night, the Objectives Resolution, blasphemy law and the court ruling against interest.

Can the advertising scholar deny that while his class had no hand in wroughting the miracle of Pakistan, the course that we have since followed has only fostered religious violence, corruption and crime, personal morals and community ethics have plummeted; has involved the army in politics, destroyed the independence of the judiciary and neutrality of the public services and stunted the growth of the institutions.

On the very day it was advertised that the Islamic system was in sight, eight or more Muslim women and children were done to death while at prayer by some other Muslims in the sleepy, dusty, backward Bhakkar town of Punjab. Only the other day I ran into Bhakkar’s district police officer. He said time stands still there, nothing ever happens. The stillness is since broken by gunfire and wails of women. When fanaticism reaches to kill even in Bhakkar it is time to change course.

THE UN’s main human rights body, reversing its stance of the past two years, has surprisingly absolved Russia from accusations of widespread abuses in Chechnya. The annual Commission on Human Rights, meeting in Geneva on April 19, rejected a European Union resolution, condemning Moscow for its alleged summary executions, torture and other brazen violations of human rights by just one vote.

It was a shocking spectacle to watch most of the Islamic states, instead of supporting the resolution, abstaining on it, thus enabling Moscow to escape censure for its ‘dirty war’ in Cnechnya. It is not clear from news reports how Islamabad voted on this resolution.

Human rights activists have lashed out at the Commission’s decision because it has rewarded Moscow for ignoring past demands for an independent probe into accusations regarding mass civilian graves, with tortured and mutilated bodies and disappearance of hundreds of Chechens after being picked up by Russian security forces. The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights League {FIDH} has described the Commission”s decision as “a scandalous disregard for the victims of the Chechnya conflict”. Last week’s decision of the Commission actually reflects the transformation in attitudes that has taken place since September 11. Within the space of less than a year, Chechnya’s separatist rebels have suffered a dramatic reversal of their image on the global stage. For years, the Chechens were seen as freedom fighters whose human rights needed to be protected from Russian military excesses. But since America’s “anti-terrorist campaign”, they have been increasingly seen as terrorists representing the sinister side of “Islamic extremism”.

The same reversal of fortune is evident in other regions of the world where Islamic separatists are fighting for their freedom. After September 11, the freedom fighters in Kashmir, Palestine and the Philippines have found themselves on the wrong side of the propaganda battlefield. The regimes in these countries have shrewdly exploited the global mood to justify their crackdown on domestic insurgencies. New Delhi has,for example,accused the Kashmiri freedom fighters of having links with the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda.

By portraying their opponents as “terrorists”, the regimes in these countries are seeking a military solution to their domestic problems,rather than making efforts to deal with the underlying political issues by making compromises.

In Central Asia, the US anti-terrorism campaign has strengthened the authoritarian regimes of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan where the US military set up bases or used air space during the war in Afghanistan.

It is interesting to note that the Uzbek president Islam Karimov used the September 11 attacks to justify his imprisonment of more than 7000 Uzbeks who have been opposed to his autocratic regime. Many of them were arrested for nothing more than praying or attending mosques.

What is, however, more surprising is that the United States has condemned the largest Islamic rebel movement in Uzbekistan as a terrorist organization, thereby strengthening Mr. Karimov ‘s hands to crack down on Islamic activists, opposed to his regime, whether they are terrorists or not. Washington has also muted its criticism of Karimov ‘s violations of human rights.

Since September 11 the United States has muted its previous criticism of human rights violations by Russian troops in Chechnya. On the contrary, it has allowed Moscow to portray the Chechen war as just another front in the international fight against terrorism.

Some time ago Mr.Putin”s spokesman on Chechnya boasted that the US campaign against terrorism has been “a good service “ to Russia.

The Russians have very cleverly created over the years the myth of Chechen-Taliban collaboration to gain foreign sympathy by portraying their war against the Chechens as a campaign against terrorism. Moscow has relentlessly used its clients in the Northern Alliance to spread the propaganda message that the Chechens are terrorists and extremists with close links with the Afghan training camps of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. This message was constantly echoed in the world press without any evidence being produced. Hardly any Chechens have been found amongst the thousands of Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Even President Bush declared that some of Osama bin Laden’s terrorists were based in Chechnya, though no evidence to that effect has so far been produced.

It is therefore not surprising that US relations with its cold-war adversary, Russia, have grown noticeably warmer since September 11. Moscow even gave Washington permission to use its air space and to station its forces in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia during the American campaign in Afghanistan. Russia ‘s support of US intervention in Afghanistan was to get American support for its own war in Chechnya.

There was a time, not long ago, when the Americans used to watch Russian submarines, with nuclear missiles pointed at US cities, “12 minutes off the coast”. Now there is talk of Russia joining the NATO. But many analysts believe that Russia’s new friendliness could be a fleeting change calculated to gain cover for its onslaught against Chechen separatists.

It is now no longer a secret that Russian secret services staged a wave of deadly bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 to start the war in Chechnya and propel Putin to the Kremlin. Last month Boris Berezovsky, a close ally of former president Boris Yeltsin disclosed at a press conference in London that President Putin knew that Russian security service was behind a wave of bombings that killed hundreds and provided him the excuse for military intervention in Chechnya. A documentary produced by two French journalists has also uncovered new evidence linking the explosions, for which the Chechens were blamed, to the Russian secret services.

From 1994 to 1996, Russian troops had unsuccessfully fought a war in Chechnya in an attempt to crush the independence movement. After the apartment bombings, Moscow got an excuse to relaunch its offensive in Chechnya.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, reporting for the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta, visited Chechnya 28 times since the start of the second conflict three years ago. In her epoch-making book A Dirty War, she rejects Moscow ‘s claim that the “terrorists” are being weeded out and order is being restored. Instead, she reveals a region fraught with massive human rights abuses and widespread destruction. What has happened in Afghanistan has also happened in Chechnya: bombing the whole territory without any thought to the people who live there. It was Anna Politkovskaya who brought to the public notice excavation of mass civilian graves with tortured and mutilated bodies. She has seen in Chechnya bodies with their heads cut off and pregnant women with their bellies slit open. People are harassed, tortured and detained by the Russian troops in the villages and at passport checks.

The First World War was “the war to end all wars”.The Second World War was fought to “make the world safe for democracy.” The 1991 Gulf War was supposed to yield” a new world order”, a phrase made famous by Mr. Bush’s father.

Justifying his anti-terrorism campaign, President Bush has promised that “out of this evil will come good —- hope amongst all nations of a new beginning where we seek to resolve all differences in a calm and ordered way, greater understanding between nations and between faiths, and, above all, justice and prosperity for the poor and the dispossessed”. It is hoped these brave words will not prove empty rhetoric as in the past.