Is democracy nearer in Burma?

BURMA’S charismatic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, known for her exemplary courage, was freed in the first week of this month by the country’s ruling military junta after 19 months of house arrest, giving rise to speculations that a gradual return to democracy was imminent in the country.

Human rights organizations were, however, quick to warn that her release does not mean that re-introduction of democracy was round the corner in a country which has been under military rule since General Ne Win staged a coup in 1962. The generals adopted what they called the “Burmese way to socialism” — an autocratic dispensation that virtually froze the country’s prospects for economic growth and prosperity and instead blighted with poverty and repression.

Ne Win stepped aside in 1988 in the face of a popular uprising that was violently crushed by the military which put in place the current, equally repressive, government. It also renamed the country Myanmar, held a general election in 1990 but then nullified the results as being unacceptable to the ruling junta. Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), had won an overwhelming majority (82 per cent) of the seats in the legislature.

The junta’s refusal to hand over power to the NLD prompted many western countries to impose political and economic sanctions on the military regime. Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in 1989 and was freed after six years. On that occasion, too, her release had fuelled similar hopes and speculation in Burma and abroad about restoration of democracy.

Suu Kyi, 56, has become a legendary figure in Burma’s history for maintaining a dignified poise in her devotion to the cause of democracy in her military ruled country. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for struggling against, in the words of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, “a regime characterized by brutality”. The committee had described her as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades”.

Suu Kyi had shown an early interest in Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy his political struggle for India’s freedom from colonial rule but herself stayed out of politics until she returned to her homeland from Britain in April 1988 to nurse her ailing mother. Three months later, in July, she saw a popular uprising being mercilessly suppressed. She began travelling around the country to mobilize the masses against military rule. Her British husband, Michael Aris, who was been a visiting professor at Harvard University, was last seen by her in 1989. When he was dying of cancer in England in 1999, the Burmese government refused to let him visit his wife in Rangoon. Suu Kyi decided not to leave the country to see her dying husband, because she knew she would not be allowed to return to Burma. She has also not seen her sons, Alexander, 27, and Kim, 23, since September 1989, when their passports were revoked. They are studying in England.

In a statement soon after her release on May 6, she surprised many by stating that she would now adopt a more conciliatory approach to the troika of hard-line generals and that she was “ready to cooperate” with them in an effort to promote political reform. She carefully avoided criticizing the regime that has seriously harmed her party and kept her confined for more than six of the past 12 years. Instead, she preferred to give the government “credit where credit is due” for releasing her. The government suggested that it, too, was interested in reconciliation, saying it was committed “to allowing all of our citizens to participate freely in ... our political process”.

In fact, the only option the two sides were left with and after an understanding between the junta and Suu Kyi (endorsed by major powers) was to bring an end to the international sanctions which have now begun to bite. At present, Burma’s coffers are all out empty and there seems to be no way of raising revenue of any kind. The money it has earned from the sale of natural gas from the Andaman Sea to Thailand amounts to about 400 million dollars a year — not enough to run the country. Opium exports are the other means that help sustain the military regime economically.

The West and the United States, in particular, are also willing to soften their stance on Burma in the face of growing pressure of multinationals. It is evident from the fact that the Bush administration has been quick to waive a visa ban on the visit of a senior member of Burma’s military regime to Washington in the wake of Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. The US State Department has, however, tried to justify the visit from May 13 to 17 by saying that Colonel Kyaw Thein was not covered by the visa ban, which remains in place, because it applies to military officials of higher ranks. It also said the Burmese counter-narcotics official’s visit to the United States was already on the cards and not related to the release of Suu Kyi.

The US gesture is a signal to the Burmese generals that Washington may help them wriggle out of the economic crisis if more concessions being demanded by Suu Kyi were made. Even Japan has announced recently that it will give Burma’s military government five million dollars to renovate a hydro-electric plant apparently as a reward for freeing Suu Kyi. Secret talks between the two sides being conducted through the good offices of UN special envoy Razali Ismail since October 2000 have led to the release of over 250 political prisoners, allowed the NLD to reopen its offices in Rangoon, and culminated in the release from house arrest of Suu Kyi.

The junta, known officially as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), appears to have finally caved in under international pressure to soften its repressive policies — to avoid tougher political and economic sanctions. The European Union renewed its economic embargo on April 22 and the EU parliament is facing pressure from its members for a ban on investments in Burma. The US Congress has legislation pending before it for an additional ban on imports and Washington was already poised to impose a series of severe economic and travel restrictions on Burma, in addition to a ban on investment, bilateral aid and arms sales.

Analysts believe that Suu Kyi has struck a deal with the junta over her release, but both sides are maintaining a studied silence on its terms. Though the opposition leader has asked the international community to maintain its economic embargo, she has, at the same time, made a number of conciliatory gestures. She has not given any call for protest rallies or demonstrations and has agreed to inform the authorities if she wished to travel outside the capital. At a press conference in Rangoon, Suu Kyi hinted at ongoing negotiations, saying “the phase of confidence building [with the junta] is over” and we “look forward to moving across to a more significant phase.” Amnesty International estimates that 1,500 political prisoners still remain in Burmese jails.

Suu Kyi’s preference for greater reliance on international sanctions and the West’s sympathy for her cause than on people’s power to achieve her objective of democratic restoration speaks of her adherence to the norms of capitalist democracy. In the midst of mass anti-government protests in 1988, she had adopted a similar stance and called off the demonstrations after reaching an agreement with the military junta on holding of national elections. The generals used the opportunity to crack down on more militant opponents and strengthened its hold on power. After losing the 1990 election, the junta simply ignored the result.

The US and other major powers, it seems, have been backing Suu Kyi against the military less out of any concern for democracy and more because of a realization that the junta has become an obstacle to foreign investment in which the western firms are keenly interested, as the country is seen to promise good profits because of its cheap labour and the absence of trade union bodies. Burma’s is a highly regulated economy.

President Bush has joined other western leaders in hailing Suu Kyi’s release, calling it “a new dawn”. The European Union’s key leader, Javier Solana, has described it a vindication of her “long campaign for political and human rights” that could help begin the process of Burma’s “re-integration into the international community”.

After years of bitter confrontation, these developments are seen as the most hopeful indication that the military and its democratic opposition could be on way to a peaceful settlement. Their ultimate goal is a broader sharing or a transfer of power. But making that happen will require Suu Kyi to eschew both confrontational rhetoric and some of the demands she has made of the government. Striking a conciliatory posture, she has held out an assurance to the generals that she would not use her newly-won freedom to barnstorm the country or hold large public rallies. It is evident that the NLD has realized that confrontation won’t work any more and that if it wants an orderly democratic transition to materialize, it will have to find a way to coexist with the ruling junta for some time more.

Such a prospect may not be easy for the NLD rank and file to swallow nor would the ordinary people be able to appreciate Suu Kyi’s changed stance. There are already reports of concern among the common Burmese over Suu Kyi’s failure to adopt a tougher stand against the generals. Although the generals had long opposed any public role for Suu Kyi, they appear to have calculated that the costs in lost aid and the threat of additional sanctions outweighed the political risks involved in setting her free. One diplomat commented to the Washington Post: “Releasing Suu Kyi was the easy step. The generals know she’s not going to rock the boat too much, and they’re getting a lot of good publicity for it.”

Terrorism & development

IN choosing the subject for this week’s column I am allowing myself to be distracted by a current development — the suicide bombing outside Karachi’s Sheraton hotel on May 8. I had promised last week that today’s column will be devoted to an analysis of what the Musharraf administration needed to set in place before letting elected politicians into the government. That subject can wait to be picked up next week. We need to concern ourselves today with the motives of the people who caused so much damage to Pakistan’s reputation on May 8.

The bombing took the lives of about a dozen French naval personnel who were in Karachi on a project backed by their government to supply submarines to Pakistan. The attack — the worst carried out on foreign nationals in Pakistan — followed a spate of terrorist incidents in the country. Three such incidents have taken place following the decision by President Pervez Musharraf to support the American war on terrorism. American citizens were the targets of the two previous attacks. Why did the terrorist single out French citizens this time around? The attack was not on France but on a group of western citizens who presented a relatively easy target. As such the impact of this incidence on Pakistan will be significant since it gives the dangerous signal that there are forces present in the country who are prepared to treat the entire West as one, indistinguishable enemy.

President Jacques Chirac of France condemned the incident as a “murderous, cowardly, odious terrorist attack” and accepted General Pervez Musharraf’s invitation to immediately dispatch counter-terrorism experts to Karachi. For the French president the death of his citizens in a distant Muslim land had a special meaning. He had just fought off a serious challenge by Jean Marie Le Pen in the presidential election concluded three days earlier, on May 5. The Le Pen campaign was premised on the assumption that France was seriously threatened by the growing presence in the country of a large number of foreigners. A fairly large number of these foreigners are Muslims. The murder of so many French citizens in the world’s second largest Muslim country served as a grim evidence for those who were inclined to accept that point of view.

What could have motivated the perpetrators of this crime? What was it that they sought to achieve? Why did they choose a set of foreigners who were helping Pakistan with its defences? Why did they pick a high class hotel in Karachi as the site of their attack? These are not difficult questions to answer and I will get to them in a moment. First, let us look at what happened and what were its immediate consequences.

The bomb that destroyed the navy bus was described by experts as an extremely sophisticated device. According to one report in the American press, the TNT used in the explosion “was fashioned like a rod, a configuration that extended the explosive impact of the bomb along the length of the car carrying the device, maximizing damage to the adjacent bus”. The press accounts provided other details that suggest that some meticulous planning went into the design of this operation. The perpetrators of the crime knew that the French left Sheraton hotel in the navy bus precisely at 7.45 every morning. According to the security camera that watched the entrance of a neighbouring store, the explosion occurred at 7:52:30 after the last Frenchman had entered the vehicle. There can be no doubt that those who planned this assault wanted to cause the maximum amount of economic damage to Pakistan and its reputation in the western world.

According to The Washington Post, many Pakistanis were extremely concerned by the “losses beyond human life. Singapore Airlines, whose flight crew had been eating breakfast in the Sheraton restaurant behind the bus, immediately cancelled its Pakistan routes. The Karachi stock exchange, which had been booming, lost 3 per cent of its value. And the New Zealand cricket team, which had been staying in the hotel across the street, cancelled its final match and hurried home in a hail of bad publicity”. The correspondents of the Financial Times painted an even more ominous picture. “Yesterday’s suicide bombing is likely to add to the country’s already considerable economic woes” they wrote for their newspaper. “By targeting foreign defence personnel in the heart of Pakistan’s commercial capital, it appeared to be aimed at the Pakistani state.”

There is a widely held view that the Sheraton attack was the work of Al Qaeda: according to one Pakistani expert, the attack had the “signature of Al Qaeda written all over it”. If true, this has far-reaching consequences for Pakistan. General Musharraf told a group of foreign journalists a few days before the Karachi incident that the impression that Al Qaeda had deeply penetrated Pakistan was highly exaggerated. “If you think they have come here and taken over whole chunks of territory and established themselves, no, this is not possible at all, zero possibility.” The important question for Pakistan is not what kind of presence Al Qaeda has established in Pakistan. The real issue is how some segments of society can be weaned away from the type of thinking represented by Al Qaeda. Unless that is done Pakistan will not be able to achieve either economic or political stability.

It is my strong belief that economic stability will have to precede political stability and to achieve the former, Pakistan will need a great deal of foreign capital. By hitting at the presence of foreigners in the country, the terrorists are hurting Pakistan’s economic future. All three terrorist attacks attributed to Al Qaeda and committed on the Pakistani soil — the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, the bombing of a church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave and now the attack on the French in Karachi — were designed to have the maximum amount of impact on the foreigners’ perception about the situation in the country.

Now the question: Why have the terrorists decided to target Pakistan? We can only guess at their motives. These probably go as follows. The anti-terrorism campaign launched by the United States following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was based on the correct premise that terrorist operators needed a sanctuary before they could mount successful operations of the type carried out on September 11. The United States, supported by its allies, were able to get Al Qaeda virtually out of Afghanistan. Its sanctuary in Afghanistan may have been destroyed but many — if not most — of the organizations members and supporters appear to have survived the US-led efforts. They are in search of a home. Pakistan could conceivably be one such home if it could remain economically, politically and socially unsettled. If this line of reasoning is correct, the terrorists will now focus on Pakistan and the countries in a similar situation. While they are searching for a new home they are unlikely to mount new attacks on the West, even though the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe will remain their ultimate objectives. What should be Pakistan’s response?

Western diplomats and some Pakistani observers asked for quick action by the Pakistan government. A diplomat advised General Musharraf to act quickly and decisively. “If I were him, I would crack down with a vengeance,” he said. But acting out of vengeance and despair would only playing into the hands of those who wish to disrupt the situation in the country. What is required, instead, is a careful and deliberate effort that should aim to address the main problem confronting Pakistan and a number of other Muslim societies. There is no point in contesting the fact that there are segments in the Muslim world who are not prepared to accept democracy, western values, capitalism, and globalization. There are such segments present in Pakistan and their ranks may have been augmented with the members of Al Qaeda who have escaped from Afghanistan and are hiding in Pakistan.

Only a multi-faceted strategy will work if not to contain these elements but to stop them at least from spreading their influence. I see at least three components in this strategy: education, economic revival and political development. Education, long neglected by the government, has to be given a high priority in order to rescue a large number of people from the madressahs. Tens of thousands of families send their children to the religious schools in the absence of public institutions. Suicide bombers who have now struck Pakistan are the product of these schools where even religious instruction does not strictly observe the teachings of Islam. Many Islamic institutions use sophistry to bestow religious authority on a cynical political strategy. The use of suicide bombers for political purpose is one example of the perverse use of religious teachings.

According to Amir Taheri, an Islamic scholar, “suicide bombing falls within the category that is forbidden (haram). To change its status as a concept, its supporters must give a definition (ta’rif), spell out its rules (ahkam), fix its limits (hadoud), find its place in jurisprudence (sharia) and common law. Such an undertaking would require a large measure of consensus (ijma) among the believers, something the prophets of terror will never secure.” It is only by providing modern education to its citizens that Pakistan will be able to stop people to work against progress in the belief that it is against the basic tenets of Islam. Pakistan must rejoin the world and for it to that it must modernize its educational sector.

It must also revive the economy. Some senior members of the Pakistani economic team tell me that they are now focusing on reviving the economy and getting the rate of growth back to respectable levels. As I have suggested on previous occasions, the aim of a growth-oriented strategy must be to alleviate poverty. That will need sustainable rate of GDP increase of no less than 6 per cent a year.

Finally, we must establish a participatory system of government that gives voice to all segments of the population. It is the lack of this voice that sometimes drives people to commit desperate acts, such as suicide bombings. It is only with the full participation of the people in the country’s political life that we will beat back the evil designs of the terrorist groups on the Pakistani state.

Greatest war novel ever: ALL OVER THE PLACE

MY father belonged to the Indian Medical Service (I.M.S.) and being an army doctor, as a family, we were always on the move. Moving with us was the family library and I remember one book in particular that never got left behind. It always seemed to be on the shelves. It was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

I cannot say whether any member of the family had actually read it for I cannot remember any ‘team discussion’ on it. I imagined the book to be a war novel of all time, that one of the first acts of Hitler, on coming to power, was to ban it and the author had been advised to flee Germany before Hitler’s goons got their claws on him. I decided to get a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front and when I did, I found I could not put it down and read it in one go. The book goes beyond the savagery of war, though there are dead bodies, dying soldier, cries of pain on every blood stained page, it is the most damnable indictment of war.

The war is World War 1, the Great War and its Armistice Day is still observed through a Poppy Day. Millions died, the less fortunate were left blind or limbless, broken in body and spirit. All Quiet on the Western Front is about this, not a novel but a documentary. The French newspaper Le Monde, reviewing the book wrote that it should be distributed in the millions and read in every school.

Which is why I am writing this column about this book, to show the obscenity of war, its wastefulness both human and material, As one surveys the world, one sees “ignorant armies” clashing by night, we see conflict and strife, armies massed on the borders of India and Pakistan, the coalition partners engaged in Afghanistan, Israeli army murdering Palestinian men, women and children, preparations for an assault on Iraq that will engulf the Middle east, regional wars, local conflicts in every part of the world, a world spinning out of control in which law and order has broken down on a global scale.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the testimony of Paul Baumer who enlists with his classmates in the German army in World War 1. “I am young. I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.

“What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; — it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”

These are the tough questions the author asks through his twenty year old spokesman. This is as relevant today as it was in 1928 when the book was written. Sadly, what followed was Hitler and World War II and more slaughter of young lives. And because humankind had made giant strides in technology, there was the bonus of atom bombs: just one big bang and a mushroom cloud and an entire city could be turned to rubble and those living there either killed, or in the words of Graham Greene, become lepers who had lost their bells and were moving around, meaning no harm.

So unrelenting is the description of the horror of that war, page after page, that one looks for some relief. Some touches of humour and the closest one comes is in a conversation that Paul Baumer has with his comrades: “Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena, the ministers and generals of the two countries dressed in bathing drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”

This would be a logical follow-up to what Oscar Wilde said: “Those who call a spade a spade, should be made to use one.” Those who are in the forefront of advocating war should be the first ones who should be kitted up, handed an AK-47 and sent to the front. Along with them should be those who make great fortunes out of war.

All Quiet on the Western Front is as relevant today as it was when it was first written over 70 years ago. It tells the truth about war. There are no heroes, only victims.

Erich Maria Remarque himself took part in combat during World War 1, and was wounded five times, the last time very severely. He wrote other books and these too were about the worst horrors of the age, about war and inhumanity, but none of them had the same explosive power. Adolf Hitler banned the book but I don’t think he read it.

I would strongly suggest that all those who are thinking of taking their country to war should be made to read the book. If they still wish to wage war they should be made to lead the charge. Or better still, the first to have their homes bombed.

Controversy over race

The decision last week by the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan law school makes likely a showdown in the Supreme Court over affirmative action in higher education.

The 6th Circuit was angrily divided over the case, and its decision is marred by an ugly fight among the judges over a procedural question. Still, the opinion resoundingly affirms the authority of a state institution to use a well-crafted admissions policy that considers race and ethnicity for the purposes of admitting a diverse class. This holding is in sharp contrast to a 5th Circuit ruling in 1996 striking down the use of race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas law school. Given these different outcomes at the appeals court level, the Supreme Court will have to decide whether ensuring a diverse student body is an adequate justification for universities’ departing from the race-blind ideal of the 14th Amendment.

That decision will be of monumental importance. The lower-court cases so far have dealt only with public institutions, but what is at stake goes even beyond that. While the Constitution does not forbid private schools from discriminating, federal law forbids discrimination by private institutions receiving federal money, which is to say almost all private universities.

The Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on this issue — in the famed 1978 case of University of California Regents v. Bakke — was hardly a model of clarity. The court in Bakke appeared to permit race to be a factor in admissions so long as race-consciousness did not prevent all candidates from receiving full consideration. But the decision was so splintered that people have been arguing ever since about exactly what the ruling does and doesn’t allow.

We hope not. Nobody ought to be comfortable with government’s treating people differently because of race, even if for noble purposes. The diversity of a university class is, in any event, a gauzy kind of interest, one whose benefits are diffuse and difficult to measure. Yet the courts should not underestimate diversity’s importance to education in a multiethnic democratic society. American universities function as training grounds for democracy, places where members of the future leadership of this country learn to engage with one another as citizens. That educational function would be undermined if universities were forbidden as a matter of constitutional law to ensure that their student bodies included something approximating the range of people, experiences and ideas that actually inhabit the United States.

— The Washington Post

Reviving the Constitution

NOW that the inevitable exercise for legitimacy is over the general faces the same question as was faced by others before him. How to revive the constitution? As the Constitution of 1956 was abrogated, Field Martial Ayub Khan framed his own constitution.

His constitution was a personal document deriving its authority from him and not from a constituent assembly. It was tailored for him. Every road led to the president. He was elected through already elected basic democrats and the same electoral college also chose the legislatures. He could dissolve legislatures without losing his job. Every institution was subservient to him. There was no federal structure. No wonder the extremists in East Pakistan were more active in his time than ever before.

When General Yahya Khan scrapped Ayub’s constitution he cashed in on popular sentiments by issuing what was called the Legal Framework Order. The document substantially met demands of political leaders like one-man one vote, joint electorate and the disbanding of the infamous One Unit. Free and fair elections were held to frame a constitution as well as to transfer power to the elected representatives of the people. Both objectives were realized after paying the heavy cost of losing East Pakistan. What the general could have achieved on the table was tragically won only after the general lost in the battlefield.

Ironically, it was the embarrassment of the rank and file of the armed forces on what the generals did that led to their withdrawal from the political scene. The Constitution of 1973 was thus framed unanimously by the elected representatives of the people sans East Pakistan, which was then renamed Bangladesh.

The Constitution of 1973 has the tenacity not to be abrogated so far. But the generals remained active. After a successful stint with democracy for a term of office of an elected government, those who could not compete in the elections made the results of the following elections a rallying point. A movement was built up with the active support of certain vested interests. General Zia made it an excuse to step in. He not only suspended the constitution — a step he described as keeping it in abeyance — he also hanged an elected prime minister on trumped-up charges. Both deeds were done with the help of the superior courts of the country.

When General Zia was pressured to revive the Constitution of 1973, he demanded, and was paid, the price of his personal continued authority in the constitution. The legislature, elected on a non-party basis, obliged him by bringing the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution which, among other things, invested the president and his governors in the provinces with power to dismiss elected governments and legislatures in his own discretion without the advice of the elected heads of the executives. For his own legitimacy, to continue as president after the revival of the constitution, he incorporated the incident of his referendum in the constitution.

Ironically his name still lingers on in the constitution despite the fact that his career as constitutional president came to an abrupt end by his violent death.

The death of General Zia led to the revival of popularly elected governments on a party basis. But the elected presidents also enjoyed Zia’s power to dismiss the elected heads of the governments and dissolve the legislatures — a power that they willingly exercised to the detriment of the nation. This, however, has since been taken away by a constitutional amendment.

The above narration of history is a pointer to the temptation the general may have in the circumstances he is placed in. He has to resist it if he is to be different from others. General Musharraf assumed power when Mian Nawaz Sharif failed to grasp the ground realities of power. He walked outside the constitutionally mandated frontier of his governance. He devoured the other organs of government and wore a mantle, which hung on him like borrowed robes.

Mercifully, the general did not abrogate the constitution and did not proclaim martial law. Fundamental rights, barring those affected by the proclamation, remained untouched. But, alas, he was ill-advised to hold a referendum to attain legitimacy as president for five years. Come October he shall also face the task of reviving the constitution. The legitimacy extended to his assumption of power by the Supreme Court depends on his transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people. The Constitution of Pakistan has no prescription for such a revival of the constitution. The Supreme Court has refused to interfere in the referendum order issued via the authority of the Provisional Constitutional Order. However, it has not pronounced on the consequences flowing from the referendum held under such an order. It shall, therefore, be a delicate task to skillfully revive the functioning of the constitution. And, the referendum has not made it easier to do so.

Eggheads around the general are already talking of amendments in the constitution. History tells us that such amendments without the consent of those who shall work the constitution after the proposed General Elections shall not have requisite permanence. There must not be such changes in the constitution as to completely mis-shape it. The general may any way entrench his position as president by preserving the referendum constitutionally for a five-year period. His image of neutrality and impartiality, tarnished by the referendum, could be restored by giving free rein to the existing constitutional provisions for the formation of an elected government.

The period leading to elections should see robust political activity without any reservations from the government. Apart from protecting important reforms like the new local government system, perhaps the only change conceded for stability in future is the formation of a constitutionally backed National Security Council with defined powers. The rest could be safely left to the elected apparatus of government prescribed by the constitution. Such a course may save the general from adopting the perilous course that the other generals have tread before him.

The writer is a former attorney-general of Pakistan