Another letter urges president to quit army: ‘Federation facing fault lines’
By Iftikhar A. Khan
ISLAMABAD, Aug 15: Some prominent personages have urged President Gen Pervez Musharraf to quit his army post and let the Supreme Court conduct elections through a neutral caretaker government.
In a letter, they warned that ‘fault lines’ had emerged in underpinnings of the federation during his tenure in office.
The signatories include former caretaker prime minister Mir Balakh Sher Mazari, former chief justices Sajjad Ali Shah and Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui, National Assembly’s former speakers Elahi Bakhsh Soomro and Syed Fakhar Imam, former governor of Balochistan and NWFP Miangul Aurangzeb, former chief minister of Balochistan Mir Taj Muhammad Jamali and former NA deputy speaker Wazir Ahmed Jogezai.
They said provincial discord and disharmony was being exacerbated by single-minded pursuit of policies which “must be subjected to urgent scrutiny”. “In our considered opinion these policies now pose a serious threat to the integrity, solidarity and wellbeing of Pakistan,” they said.
They expressed concern over the military action in Balochistan and Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In many areas and in numerous communities in Balochistan and Fata, women and children, the sick and the elderly, were being denied access to food and water as thousands of houses were currently under siege. On the other hand, ISPR bulletins continue to inform the media that ‘miscreants’ and ‘hidden hands’ were inflaming ‘insurgency’.
“This revives the ghosts of memories from the days of East Pakistan,” the letter said.
The former legislators, politicians and jurists said many of them had given him (Musharraf) the benefit of doubt as the seemingly ‘reluctant coup maker’, when the military took over for a fourth time.
“The Constitution of Pakistan, incrementally distorted though it may have been from its original text of 1973, primarily to meet the strategic exigencies of your predecessor regimes, was further mauled in the fourth year of your dispensation and endorsed by a legislature perceived by the public to be no more than a rubber stamp,” they said.
They reminded the president that promises he had made to people over the past seven years remained unfulfilled. They said his term in office had brought unbearable inflation, rampant lawlessness, increased graft and corruption, no improvement in agricultural or public utility services, nor in public education and healthcare, nor in containing population growth.
They accused Gen Musharraf of allowing the state to abdicate its responsibilities and pointed out that the privatisation of institutions had not been above controversy. “The fiscal space allowed to your government after 9/11 is not far from being exhausted and the taint and odour of corrupt practices which you seemed to disdain are all around you,” the letter said.
The luminaries deplored that President Musharraf had failed to respect his own oath of office while publicly insisting that he never violated the Constitution. They urged Gen Musharraf to relinquish the office of Chief of Army Staff which was being held by him for almost nine years, and dignify the office of president by obeying the Constitution.
“We earnestly beseech you, general, to hand over to the apex court, largely constituted by yourself, to conduct elections strictly in accordance with the Constitution, through a consensual neutral caretaker government.”
