KARACHI: It was a year of triumph and tragedy. Pakistan’s legislature pulled off a feat of sorts when the ruling Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party sank their differences – albeit temporarily – to pass a women’s rights bill amending the heavily criticised Hudood laws. The entire episode, marked by frenzied back-door politicking, caused a severe embarrassment to Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal lawmakers whose red-faced refusal to carry out their threat of resigning from parliament upon the passage of the bill exposed the alliance of six religious parties to endless derision.

Tragedy struck the strife-torn province of Balochistan when Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the chief of more than 200,000 Bugti tribesmen, was killed along with over 35 men-at-arms following a rocket attack by Pakistan army’s helicopter gunships on his hideout in the Bhambore mountain range in Kohlu on Aug 26. Having got rid of one former chief minister of Balochistan, the powerful ruling establishment cast another former provincial chief minister, Akhtar Mengal, into prison without the slightest compunction.

While brute force was employed against the autonomy-seeking parties of Balochistan, the army, getting a bloody nose in the restive North Waziristan tribal region, signed in September a much-maligned peace accord with fiercely independent militants who pledged to halt cross-border movement and stop attacks on government installations and security forces. The peace agreement, which at first earned the approbation of the United States, was greeted with squeals of protest from the beleaguered Afghanistan government which feebly grappled with a resurgent Taliban force.

Just when the government was reportedly close to signing a similar peace accord with militants in South Waziristan, an early morning military airstrike at a religious seminary in Damadola in the Bajaur tribal region on Oct 30 left over 80 inmates, mostly young students, dead. While locals insisted that the airstrike was carried out by fixed-wing US drones that fired hellfire missiles at the seminary, the army received a rude shock when exactly nine days later a suicide bomber killed at least 40 trainee soldiers at a military base in Dargai, 100 kilometres from Peshawar.

While human rights organisations describe the Bajaur air raid as a crime against humanity, they also share public disquiet over “enforced disappearances” of people believed to be unlawfully detained by the country’s secret agencies. They say that of 242 people missing since 2000, 110 are from Balochistan, 70 from Sindh, 42 from Punjab and 20 from the NWFP. In a commendable display of judicial activism, the Supreme Court gave the federal government a rap over the knuckles and made frequent inquiries into the illegitimate detention of victims of “enforced disappearances”. The apex court also delivered a landmark judgment when it annulled the widely criticised privatisation deal of the Steel Mills.

While the year 2006, as noted earlier, was a year of triumph and tragedy, it could also be described as a year of the book. It was in September that President Gen Pervez Musharraf launched his controversial memoirs and supervised a well-orchestrated publicity campaign during his sojourn in the United States. The American media conglomerate whose publishing arm launched President Musharraf’s book also owned the TV channel on which he disclosed that former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage had made an unhappy choice of words to put the fear of God into Pakistan’s heart shortly after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. By all accounts, it wasn’t the president’s finest hour.