WHEN General Musharraf seized power on October 12, 1999, most people welcomed the change and heaved a sigh of relief. He had one big advantage: his accession to power was quite genuinely accepted as the only way out of the mess created by Nawaz Sharif. Hopes and expectations were pinned on the young, unsullied soldier. For a brief ethereal moment, the country almost fell in love with him. “Surely, here was a star to follow surely, here was a guide to follow”.

In public perception, what happened on October 12, was not a simple substitution of existing authority by fresh authority. It sounded the death knell of a corrupt, rotten socio-economic order. The old order represented by corrupt politicians had collapsed and was dead and gone. General Musharraf now had a unique opportunity to design and build a new structure on the ruins of the old in fulfilment of the aspirations of the people of Pakistan.

At the end of three years of military rule, people looked forward to a fresh beginning and a better future for themselves and their children in a genuinely democratic Pakistan. It is our misfortune that, instead of holding free, fair and impartial elections and allowing the people to choose their representatives, pre-poll rigging was done, and ballot boxes were tampered with and results manipulated in many cases. Not surprisingly, a distorted picture has emerged which does not reflect the ground reality and has aroused fears about the prospects of political stability ahead.

The split verdict has created a hung parliament incapable of ending the political uncertainty. Consequently, there is hardly any reason to be optimistic as Pakistan steps into a democratic future. The country totters, pulled in one direction by the inertia of its authoritarian past and in another by the wobbly momentum of a democratic future. Regrettably, Pakistan’s democracy does not always produce democratic results. The country has not put the worst days of electoral fraud behind it.

Even as the parliament meets in Islamabad after more than a month of its election, behind the scenes, brisk horse-trading is in progress. The phenomenon of political turncoats or ‘lotas’, is now accepted as a fact of life in Pakistan and has official blessing. There is a special phrase for ‘lotas’ in the Serbian language. Such people are known as “tumbling pigeons”, after a breed of pigeons that perform dazzling flips and somersaults in flight. The pigeons can’t help themselves. They have evolved for this kind of behaviour over many centuries. Our elected representatives, on the other hand, know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.

But where is the ringing outcry of disgust, and where is the sense of moral outrage and loathing that it should have created? In the old days, mass protests were the standard reaction to fraudulent elections. Why this public passivity now? To borrow the final questioning, death cry of Ken - Saro - Wiwa: “What sort of a nation is this? What sort of a nation is it that permits this? What sort of a nation is this, within which I take my definition?” Is it any wonder that democracy in its twisted, uniquely Pakistani form inspires no passion in the Pakistani body politic?

The country appears to be adrift, lacking confidence about its future. Never before has public faith in the country’s future sunk so low. Nobody knows where the country is headed and very few seem to care. Traditionally proud, Pakistanis have begun to despair. Talk today is of lost dignity, of a nation diminished in ways not previously imaginable. It is almost as if no one wants to acknowledge a sad end to what once seemed a beautiful dream. Is it our Karma? Is it our destiny? Is there some evil spirit that hangs over Pakistan? Are we on a phantom train that is gaining momentum and we can’t get off? Surely, this can’t be our signature now that we have entered a new millennium.

Somehow, our history has gone awry. We were such good people when we set out on the road to Pakistan. What happened? An evil spirit now hangs over Pakistan. The people are too tired, too disappointed, too disillusioned, too often betrayed and too ill-informed to comprehend the issues churning beneath the placid surface of life. With the exception of the Frontier and Balochistan where an electrical earthquake shook the region’s politics to its foundations and wiped off its complacent, exhausted and corrupt leaders, depression, fear, frustration and anger no longer have an outlet in politics. The people have, therefore, turned inward, to religious orthodoxy, to intolerance, the small things in life, to local politics and impotent rage.

How will history remember President Musharraf’s three years of rule? That he was no crusader; no Tribune of the people, no enemy of entrenched privileges; that he held a dubious referendum to enable himself to rule for another five years; that he allowed blatant use of the administration and official machinery in the election in support of the king’s party; that he denied the people the right to elect their president in accordance with the Constitution; that he disfigured and mutilated the Constitution of Pakistan; that he promised a great deal and delivered very little.

The contrast between the current tide of public disappointment and the grassroot enthusiasm for President Musharraf three years ago, is indeed quite stark. Three years ago, he was widely seen as the people’s champion. Today he risks being dismissed as the latest in a long line of easily forgotten rulers. The electorate is reverting to its customary cynicism. It sees President Musharraf as a prisoner of powers he vowed to tame. Instead of crushing the corrupt, he has been captured by them.

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. President Musharraf’s integrity is beyond reproach. Unlike his predecessors, both civilian and military, his hands are clean. Yet a sense of aching disappointment hangs over his presidency.

We didn’t think he came to fiddle with the electoral process. We thought he came to change the direction of the ship and restore Jinnah’s legacy. He ignored the lesson of history that you do not stifle democracy in the name of saving and strengthening it. How much could have been achieved? How much went awash?

The old order is dead and gone. Nobody knows what is going to replace it. We are in a terrible mess. Despair and dejection roam the country’s political landscape. Pakistan has dug itself into a deep hole. The least we can do to save the country is to follow the first rule of holes. Stop digging. God made this country right side up. Don’t turn it over.

The November 7 resolution of the Security Council denied the US for the time being the right to attack Iraq on non-compliance with the directive of the UN weapons inspection team on the one hand and put Baghdad on a tight schedule for declaring its weapons of mass destruction (WMD), if any, and their speedy destruction on the other.

Iraq was given seven days beginning with the date of the passage of the resolution to declare its unconditional acceptance of the terms of the Council resolution 1441. (Iraq has since accepted the resolution without any condition).

Thereafter, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and Mohammad El Baradei would proceed to Baghdad with about two dozen technicians to set up communications, transport, offices and laboratories. In all, the team would consist of 80 to 100 inspectors and support staff and will complete its assignment within 45 days. The inspectors have been armed with unprecedented powers to inspect any place, including the presidential palaces and interrogate anybody anywhere in Iraq. They would hopefully finish their wok in time for them to submit their findings to the Council by February 21, 2003. According to the resolution, the Security Council and not the US, will decide any future course of action.

The resolution, though tough and demanding on Baghdad, is a clear departure from the US draft that had provided for automatic armed action against Iraq by the Council or by the US in case of non-compliance by Iraq with the disarmament resolution.

In the changed version of the resolution, in the event of any delinquency on the part of Baghdad, Council would consider the action it deems fit, not excluding resort to force. In other words, George Bush and his Pentagon extremists have for the moment been deprived of the pleasure of launching a strike against Iraq under the cover of the UN resolution.

This is, however, not to say that the US would not attack Iraq on its own. For the US ambassador at the Council, John Negroponte, has reserved his country’s right to unilateral action against Iraq in the name of self-defence. “This resolution does not constrain any member state”, he said, “from acting to defend itself from the threat posed by Iraq”.

Clearly, this runs counter to the letter and spirit of the resolution 1441 and is aimed at bypassing the Security Council. What the American ambassador meant to say is that if the Security Council did not take action against Iraq, US would attack that country. Under what law? one may ask. And how plausible is America’s plea of self-defence in this contest?

Does the Bush administration want the world to believe that while the American armada and warplanes and ground forces have laid siege to Iraq and the British and American planes have been routinely bombing the northern and southern parts of that country and the US has raised and armed a force of Iraqi dissidents in order to overthrow the Iraqi government, Iraq still poses a threat to the US that lies twelve thousand miles away? In this situation it is Iraq which is threatened and not the US.

George Bush argues that Iraq is a constant threat to the neighbouring states and reminds the world community of Baghdad’s war against Iran and Kuwait. But both these victims of Iraq’s aggression do not feel threatened by it any more and have been pleading with George Bush not to attack Iraq. Saudi foreign minister has declared that his country would not allow the US to invade Iraq from Saudi soil or use his country’s airspace for that purpose. So have the Emirs of Bahrain and Qatar. As for Turkey, it fears that the US attack on Iraq would not only break up that state but could also be a prelude to the secession of its south-eastern part inhabited by ethnic Kurds.

Jordan, it may be recalled, opposed the American attack on Iraq in 1991 and continues to do so. Syria, which had volunteered its army units during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, is vehemently opposed to any American military adventure in the region. Pakistan fears that India may attack it in the event of another Gulf war. So the American war against Iraq is unpopular in the region and beyond as shown by mass protests and rallies worldwide against the American threat of an attack on Iraq.

But still George Bush wants his war. He has already obtained a mandate from the Senate and the House of Representatives to attack Iraq. In this aggrandizement, he enjoys the backing of the oil companies and oil services such Chevron-Texaco, Schlumberger and Halliburton which want their share in the spoils of war to obtain oil concessions from a compliant regime that would most likely be set up by the US in Baghdad after Saddam Hussein has been overthrown from power.

This serves the oil business represented by George Bush, his Vice-President Dick Cheney who had been running Halliburton, an oil service outfit until he gained the Bush administration, and National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a member of the board of directors of Chevron-Texaco, until 1999.

Instead of negotiating with Baghdad for oil concessions in return for the lifting of the crippling economic sanctions, the Bush administration has chosen to seize it by force, gangster-style. In its calculation the war would be short and hence, inexpensive, but there is apprehension that under its cover, Israel may seek to liquidate the Palestinian resistance and attack Syria. This may widen the theatre of war in the Middle East.

The resolution 1441 is deficient in that it demands strict compliance on the part of Iraq without even a hint of the withdrawal of the 12-year sanctions that country should it meet its obligations. It is one-sided, unjust and unfair to Baghdad. The other members of the Security Council, especially France, Russia and China should have insisted on reciprocating Iraq’s compliance with the total scrapping of the cruel embargo which has taken a toll of half a million innocent lives in Iraq.

Moreover, the Security Council has been selective in its application of the disarmament resolution 687 in that the world body has singled out Iraq for the purpose, exempting Israel which has a large arsenal of nuclear arms and missiles, from its operation. The resolution aims at eliminating the weapons of mass destruction from the whole of the Middle East region and not just Iraq.

The disarmament of Iraq is within the meaning of the resolution but a step toward the destruction of weapons of mass destruction in the entire region, Israel included. Now that a resolution on Iraq has been passed by the consensus of the Security Council members, in all logic and fairness the Big Five should opt for a similar resolution requiring Israel to submit to similar weapons inspection in its territory, so that the Middle East is made a zone of peace, free of the weapons of mass destruction. If the Security Council does not disarm Israel and other Middle Eastern states and, instead, trains its guns on Iraq alone, it will be seen as giving Israel an opportunity to establish its hegemony over the Islamic world.

The new 342-member national assembly made up of graduates with a fair sprinkling of over 60 women gives a new dimension to the substance and quality of the house.

The government merits credit for bolstering women representation in the national assembly by allocating 60 reserved seats for them. However the system of proportional representation prescribed for filling the 60 reserved seats for women has served more as a vehicle for serving the interests of a handful of political and feudal families rather than the cause of democracy in the country. Instead of picking up a set of credible female leadership from a wider base, the political parties have picked up wives, sisters, daughters and other relatives of top leaders to fill these seats. This applies to all parties.

The presence of women in the national assembly now accounts for more than their strength in the US Congress and the Senate, houses of British parliament and many other countries.

The recently elected 603 member lower house (Bundestag) of the German parliament with 194 female members has perhaps the largest women representation in any parliament at present.

All eyes are now focused on the new assembly for two reasons. First the world and our own people are anxious to watch the achievement of the country’s first-ever all-graduate house. Second, they await performance of the women who combined with those elected on the general seats make up close to one-fifth of the total strength of the house.

Separately the women representatives in particular face a heavy agenda comprising a litany of problems and some complex social issues like the vice of dowry. They also come face to face with a defining moment of identifying their future role and the pathway to be chosen by them to retrieve the women community from a life of appalling squalor.

As the first largest parliamentary debutant group in the political history of the country they are expected to get the cause of women heard. A huge backlog of issues accumulated by decades-old neglect and patriarchal indifference await their attention. Women still live under the yoke of discriminatory traditions like forced marriages.

The general question of equality between the sexes is not yet settled even in western countries. In France, for instance, for equal work women are paid on average 15 per cent less than men, they are over-represented among the unemployed and part-time workers of whom women constitute 60 per cent and 80 per cent respectively. Luckily they get the same wages as men in public service in Pakistan.

It is generally alleged that our culture is rooted in violence and that is gaining in intensity by the day. Women bear the brunt of this violence. Figures show thousands of severely battered women, a substantial number of whom die each year. As a part of the tradition especially in Punjab women are deprived of ancestral property in inheritance.

By means of deception, coercion or contrived consent they are prevented from claiming their share in property.

The spectacle of death looms over them on account of trivial excuses of compromising ‘honour’ of the family. Call it honour killing or Karo Kari, the shadows of this evil tradition are cast over their heads in all parts of the country. From cradle to grave most of the women especially from the lower and middle-income groups endure life from moment to moment wading through heaps of bias and gender discrimination.

Meagre amount of dowry bedevils a woman’s future with her in-laws. The incidents of deaths of newly married women from stove-bursts are reported in newspapers. The cases of tit-for-tat violence and divorcing of women in swap marriages (watta satta) abound in rural areas of the country. The laws are inadequate to protect them against such ordeals.

The general thirst for dowry in the society from the brides and the inability of poor parents to afford it is tearing apart the society at its seams. According to some estimates there are between 8 to 10 million girls on the threshold of marriage in the country. Of them four million have passed the ideal age for marriage. There are two girls of marriageable age in every fourth house. Ill-assorted marriages don’t work. According to a report one thousand cases for dissolution of marriage or seeking payment of maintenance to divorced wives were filed in lower courts in Lahore city alone, in one month.

Women also suffer socially and financially from broken marriages. Some affluent people including politicians and the feudals sign up new marriages and divorces without any let or hindrance. Some of them indulge in wife bashing to a point that women agree to forsake the right to property or gifts given them at the time of marriage in their ‘khula’ cases to buy their freedom from the cruel matrimonial bondage.

Much as the women MPs would try to tackle problems facing the womenfolk they perhaps would not go beyond scratching the surface. The vices are too deep-rooted in the social fabric to be weeded out in a five-year term.

Maybe their effort becomes the starting point of a crusade to rid the women of the shackles of ignorance, poverty and discriminatory traditions.

ENLARGEMENT of the European Union to bring in the former communist nations of Eastern Europe and after that Turkey was never meant to be so tense an affair.When the Berlin Wall came down opinion makers in Western Europe were breathless before the quite unexpected overthrow of tyranny and were falling over themselves in their attempt to wave broadly stretched arms of welcome to those who could join the historic mission of making Europe one.

In the event the incorporation of these nations into NATO (where Turkey has long been an unquestioned member) was easier to pull off than economic integration into the EU. It needn’t have been. It wasn’t the economics of the argument. It was the politics: in the military arena politicians simply have more independent room for manoeuvre. And anyway president Bill Clinton was pushing for it for his own internal political reasons — he needed the east European ethnic vote.

In a few weeks time at the summit in Copenhagen of European leaders the final details about most of Eastern Europe’s admission will be settled and grudgingly, too grudgingly, the clock will start to tick to entry day. Most of us small band of commentators who write about European affairs were waiting for Copenhagen to raise the next question: what about Turkey?

But Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France and now the president of the conference writing a constitution for a united Europe, has jumped the gun with an acidic article in Le Monde that says “it will be end of the European Union” if Muslim Turkey is allowed to join.

At the same time we learn that Giscard has been in Rome to meet the Pope where they apparently agreed between themselves that the new European constitution should contain a reference explicitly stating that Christianity is essential to the historic identity of Europe.

This takes us back to a famous BBC broadcast to a defeated Germany in 1945 by the poet T.S. Eliot. “I do not believe”, he said, and “that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith”. Otherwise, one can say, what is Europe but a peninsular of Asia?

Even non-believers like me have no trouble in seeing that much of Europe’s rich literature, art, architecture and music are grounded in the Christian faith, not to speak of its morality, even the twisted morality of the utopian beliefs of Marxism and Nazism that led to the worst wars the world has ever experienced.

Indeed, what is good in Christian Europe is breathtakingly beautiful and wonderful, not just in artistic forms but in say the creation of Scandinavia’s national health services, Spain’s lack of racism, Italy’s refusal to bear a historical grudge or the British sense of tolerance and fair play. Yet what has been bad has come from the same sources.

The Germans (and their Austrian cousins) are second to none in their creation and love of all artistic forms since the days of the Enlightenment, not least in music, but their politics has been despicable and evil. The Germans, it should be underlined, were influenced at the time of their worst mistakes by nothing from outside Christian Europe.

The European Union, founded by Germany and France, was also a Christian creation. The early engine drivers were Christian Democrats and Socialists. This was their inspired answer how to end future wars in Europe, by binding the various peoples of Europe so closely that war could never be a practical or necessary proposition.

Now the European Union can look back on half a century of its evolution to what it is today about to become- the broadest political and economic alliance in world history that has developed almost unwittingly an anti-war culture, for which the recent German election is the best witness.

Thus Europe has changed, and in many other ways too. It has given itself more personal freedoms, in sexual behaviour and artistic freedom not least, and has put such a stress on human rights that the rest of the world finds itself almost bowled over by Europe’s enthusiasm.

Thus, as the frontiers of Europe are pushed outward in social and economic waves, why shouldn’t they be in political matters too? Are we Europeans really so self-consciously Christian these days that we can’t take in a neighbour if they share the same values? Turkey has become so westernised that even its fundamentalists are rather less fundamentalist that some of those in Western Europe and North America- look at the important role of women in Turkish politics.

Despite the victor in last week’s election being an avowed Islamic party, it is determined to lead a modern Turkey into a modern Europe. The carrots which have the last few years been substituted for the stick by the European Union have worked wonders. Under the out going government human rights standards have been ratcheted up and the attitude towards Kurdish self-expression has begun to change.

It is clear from everything that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the victorious leader, has said that this process will be speeded up. It will accelerate even further if European leaders don’t go around uttering the kind of anachronisms spoken by Giscard d’Estaing.

If Orthodox Greece, not so long ago Turkey’s bitter enemy, can become the first to champion Turkish entry it shouldn’t be too hard for Catholic and Protestant Europe. — Copyright Jonathan Power