GENERAL Pervez Musharraf has of late been calling for reconciliation between the various political forces in the country. His minister for information, Mohammad Ali Durrani, says that instead of adopting confrontational postures political leaders should talk things over and resolve issues.

Other observers say that the nation is polarised, Musharraf is isolated, his government is tottering, the country faces a crisis, and that we need a national consensus on what to do. On closer examination these assessments will turn out to be insubstantial.

In the ordinary sense of the term a crisis is a happening that has appeared unexpectedly, poses an imminent threat to some vital national interest, and will work a disaster if immediate measures to avert it are not taken. The United States was faced with a crisis in 1963 when the Soviet Union placed nuclear warheads and missiles in Cuba (barely 90 miles away from America’s east coast), and President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and search and seizure of incoming Soviet naval craft, all of which threatened a nuclear war and global devastation.

Pakistan went through a crisis each time it had to fight a war with India. Some observers believe that it now faces a crisis in that there are revolts in Balochistan and Waziristan, the writ of the state is not honoured, the Taliban go around coercing or killing citizens, and suicide bombings are taking place almost every day of the week.

This is all true, but none of it is new. Wilful politicians, bureaucrats, feudal lords, corporations, taxpayers, and taxi drivers — not to speak of professional thieves and robbers — have been ignoring or violating the law of the land (same as the writ of the state) for as long as one can remember. In other words, this is the normal state of affairs in this country. And that which is normal cannot be called a crisis.

Commentators have also been speaking of a political crisis. If the elections are cancelled or blatantly rigged, or if all of the opposition members of parliament resign their seats, or if martial law is imposed and the courts repudiate it, a crisis may develop. But none of these possibilities has yet materialised, and we do not, therefore, have a crisis at this time.

It may be true that certain events — suspension of the Chief Justice and the lawyers’ movement on his behalf, the carnage in Karachi on May 12, the Lal Masjid episode, the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the Chief Justice and its more recent verdict that the Sharifs cannot be stopped from returning home — have embarrassed, perhaps weakened, the present government.

But many governments in the world have dramatic failures from time to time, suffer embarrassment, and fall in public esteem. Some of them survive the trauma and keep going while others quit and make way for successors.

The present situation in Pakistan does not add up to a crisis for the country. It may be regarded as a personal crisis for General Musharraf, that is, if he treats it as such. But he is cool and calm, taking it in stride and telling his supporters not to lose nerve, because it will all pass and there is nothing to worry about.

It is conceivable that when he files his papers for election to the post of president, the courts will rule that he is not eligible to contest. That too will create a crisis for him personally but not for the country, for many Pakistanis will be pleased with the court’s verdict.

It will become a national crisis if he then imposes martial law, the Supreme Court declares his action to be unlawful and therefore null and void, and he in return sends its judges home or to jail. The likelihood is that none of this will happen.

I am not sure what is meant when it is said that the general is isolated. President George Bush is still supportive of him, even if he is not delivering all that is expected of him. The Bush administration wants Musharraf to remain at the helm in Pakistan.

This appears to be true of several other foreign governments, including those of Saudi Arabia, China, and India. They are satisfied with the way he has done business with him. There are no signs that his own corps commanders are dissatisfied with his steering of the ship of state, so to speak.

There may be some rumblings of apprehension within the ruling party (PML-Q) and even a few defections from it, but most of its members, and the groups allied with it, are likely to stay in the general’s camp. He is no more isolated from MMA, PPP, PML-N, ANP, and the smaller groups in APDM than he was two or three years ago. In the event that he and Ms Benazir Bhutto find ways of working together, he will be less isolated than he was before.

Once again, this is in no way an unusual situation. All governments, especially those in democracies, have some supporters and some opponents. Members of the ruling party may have tea and chat with those of the opposition in the cafeteria, but the two sides promptly separate from each other once they get to the floor of the House. The ruling party stays in power as long as it outnumbers its opponents. That is the case in Pakistan as well.

Let us suppose that efforts are nevertheless mounted to bring about a reconciliation, and ask who would be involved and what their terms are likely to be. Benazir Bhutto wants the court cases against her to be withdrawn, a constitutional amendment that will enable her to become prime minister for a third time, the general’s resignation from the army, and a power-sharing arrangement in which he allows the prime minister authority over all matters other than defence and foreign affairs.

As I discussed in my article in this newspaper on August 26, it is not in General Musharraf’s power to get the desired amendment passed.

Next, we cannot be sure that Ms Bhutto can offer him anything worth having in return. It is then possible that he will not have the incentive to meet her demands, other than that for the withdrawal of court cases against her.

In a television interview on August 27, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz seemed to be saying that even the withdrawal of cases was problematic, because the law would have to take its course.

Mr Nawaz Sharif says he will sit down with General Musharraf in a conference of all political leaders only if he declares that he will not, now or ever, be a candidate for political office.

In other words, he is demanding the general’s unconditional surrender. Almost the same holds for Qazi Hussain Ahmad and his Jamaat-i-Islami. Maulana Fazlur Rahman is said to be soft on Musharraf, but what he wants and what he can offer are both shrouded in mystery. In the general’s reckoning, reconciliation with ANP and the nationalist groups in Sindh and Balochistan is not even worth the effort.

Negotiations to ensure that the coming elections will be free and fair, and that the election commission is independent, will be of no avail. For one thing, several opposition leaders have repeatedly said that elections cannot be fair if the general is still in office. A meeting of minds cannot then be expected.

Second, the government will probably take the position that the existing law is adequate to ensure free and fair elections. Third, consensus on any additional arrangements that might be deemed desirable will be virtually impossible to reach.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US
Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE time was bound to come when France and the rest of the world would miss that old crook, Jacques Chirac, but who could have guessed that it would arrive so fast?

Only three months have passed since Chirac reluctantly relinquished the presidency –– he was last seen sulking (or maybe just hiding from various judicial investigations) in Biarritz –– and already he begins to look good. If only because his hyper-active successor, Nicholas Sarkozy, seems so strange.

There has long been a debate in France about whether the new president is really as shallow as he seems, or whether his shoot-from-the-lip populism –– like calling the participants in last year’s urban riots “scum” (racaille) –– is a deliberate strategy to appeal to the prejudices of right-wing voters. It will never be settled beyond doubt, but the evidence for the “stupid” hypothesis is getting hard to resist.

Just a month ago, during a brief visit to Senegal, Sarkozy gave a speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University that was addressed not just to Senegalese but to all “the youth of Africa.” African intellectuals from half a dozen countries instantly condemned it as a warmed-over version of 19th-century French colonial and racist ideology (he never actually said that France has a “civilising mission” in so many words, but the old phrase hovered over the whole discourse), and there was a certain amount of controversy about it in France as well.

What gave the issue wings, however, was the letter that South African President Thabo Mbeki then wrote to Sarkozy thanking him for the speech and praising him as “a citizen of Africa.” The letter was leaked to the Paris newspaper Le Monde, the South African media erupted (in English), and as a result Sarkozy’s curious views finally got a global audience.

”The problem is that Africans have never really entered history,” Sarkozy told his African audience. “The African peasant who has lived with the rhythm of the seasons for millennia, whose ideal is to live in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal cycle of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or the idea of progress.”

“In this universe where nature controls everything, (African) man avoids the anguish of history that torments modern man, but he remains immobile, (trapped in) an immutable order where everything seems to be predetermined. He never strikes out for the future. It never occurs to him to stop repeating the past and invent a destiny for himself....Africa’s problem is...to realise that the golden age which it always dreams of will never return, because it never existed.”

There is a fancy five-syllable word to describe people who think like this: Orientalist. There is a simpler four-syllable word that does the same duty: patronising. And there is an ugly two-syllable word that sums it up: racist. God knows who vetted Sarkozy’s speech before he gave it, but they are as ignorant as he is. As an analysis of modern Africa’s problems, it is simply pathetic.

Why does Sarkozy talk like this? Because he likes to shock, and he knows his real audience is in France, not in Africa. Also because he doesn’t know history, and he lacks the patience and perhaps even the ability to tolerate complexity and ambiguity. And why did a man as intelligent as Thabo Mbeki write to congratulate him on his speech?

Because that is how things are done behind the scenes; Sarkozy had also said in his speech that France was willing to commit resources to Africa’s “renaissance,” and so the South African president wrote him a letter that ignored all his stupid remarks. ––Copyright

THE much touted virtue of the parliamentary reforms introduced by Gen Musharraf was stability. That the present National Assembly would be the first to complete its term of five years under the new system may be a catchy thought, but it is not an indicator of stability.

Any parliament could complete its term if the prime minister is not made to feel compelled to seek its earlier dissolution on losing his majority or in order to call fresh elections to his own advantage.

Such an eventuality did not arise in the lifetime of the Assembly now nearing its term as the prime ministers were appointed and removed by the president of his free will. Had Mr Zafarullah Jamali, instead of resigning in anguish, advised the president to dissolve the Assembly, which remained his prerogative despite the Seventeenth Amendment, it would have caused not just instability but given rise to a grave crisis.

The first prime minister under the new dispensation should have preferred to be voted out by parliament rather than submitted to the dictates of the president. A grand opportunity to reassert the principle that the prime minister was answerable to parliament and not to the president was thus lost.

It was not Musharraf’s untried innovative scheme of checks and balances but his enhanced constitutional powers as president, buttressed further by his direct control over the armed forces, that kept parliament going. Musharraf himself had no reason to dissolve it for it readily endorsed all his laws and policies. Musharraf’s official authority and personal influence, as we all see, extends not only to the executive, legislative and (until recently) judicial organs of the state but also to the political conglomeration that supports him.

The president appointing a party chief (Chaudhry Shujaat) as prime minister and timing him to resign after 100 days did not represent the stability or checks and balances of the system but his absolute control over the state and party apparatuses.

It is a perfect illustration of the failure of Musharraf’s constitutional scheme that as his authority wanes and the term of the National Assembly draws to a close, the atmosphere is charged not with the excitement of general elections but with the fear of emergency and martial law. That also explains Musharraf’s wariness in giving up his army post before he has secured for himself another presidential term.

The people came to him defecting from other parties not out of love for him or his ideas but for the taste of power. With that bent of mind they will inevitably pursue power wherever it goes to reside next. The flight has already begun.

Gen Musharraf, too, can be seen conceding the failure of his constitutional experiments. An evidence of this has come in Benazir Bhutto’s demand for going back to the constitutional position as it was on October 11, 1999, and his willingness to negotiate it. In the evolving situation, he has hardly another choice.

Equally obvious, and with wider repercussions, has been the failure of Musharraf’s experiments with the institutions of governance. After an initial, short-lived stunning effect, crime, corruption, cronyism and all other evils have gone up and the standards of administration have come down. The economy has fared better but in a period of boom its growth remains lower than China’s by five to six per cent and by two to three per cent than India’s.

Considering that with the exception of the decade of the nineties which was blighted by sanctions, maladministration and instability, Pakistan’s economic growth rate had been historically higher than India’s, the average growth of six per cent now is not much to crow about. High inflation (higher than India’s and much higher than China’s) and the iniquitous distribution of income remain the seamier side of this passable rate of growth.

It is a mirror of the thinking of our political elite that whether it is denunciation of the regime, collaboration with it or thriving under the wings of the general, concern is shown only for political power and the interests of the politicians including amnesty for their crimes and acts of corruption. Little is said about the welfare and aspirations of the common man, nor how his larger participation is to be secured in a free and fair poll.

Let it be recalled that even in 1997, the year of the Muslim League’s sweeping victory, only 35 per cent of registered voters turned up to vote. Accounting for omissions in the electoral rolls and bogus voting the actual turnout could be have been as low as 25 per cent. Nawaz Sharif and Chaudhry Shujaat’s combined party then did not poll even one-half the votes cast. Thus the “heavy mandate”, the hubris of which led to Nawaz Sharif’s downfall, came from less than 15 per cent of the adult population.

The parliamentary system has not been able to dig roots in Pakistan because the elections have not been fair and frequent. Another reason no less important but much less emphasised is the indifference of the common man to voting because of his deep-seated belief that no matter what party or individual, and how, comes into power his fate to live a life of poverty and exploitation will not change.

It was this pervasive cynicism which persuaded the intelligentsia to counsel Gen Musharraf in the initial year of his rule not to embark on a mission to purge, punish and reform but just set a model system of fair elections and accountability and go back to the barracks.

Noteworthy among the counsellors, then collected by him in a day-long powwow, were jurists Javed Iqbal, Hafeez Pirzada, S.M. Zafar and civil servants Roedad Khan and Ijlal Hyder Zaidi — both had spent a lifetime dealing with the wild tribes at the one end and urbane opinion makers (media men) at the other. A peeved Musharraf turned to others in the Assembly who were ready to assure him that he was indeed the man of destiny.

That destiny has eluded him but an opportunity has come his way again to go by the sane advice he then ignored.

If he really wishes, as to this day he insists he does, to change the course of Pakistan’s politics from self-aggrandisement to one that focuses on service for the people one is left wondering how he ever imagined that a government led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain with a retinue larger and greedier than ever before would fare better than the governments of Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto.

The deal now in the making does not raise many hopes. Yet all the machinations going into it will be vindicated if it were to draw a line between the moderates and extremists.

Those who hover on both sides of this line — Musharraf’s two former prime ministers Shujaat and Jamali are among them — have to fall on one or the other side. The game of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds must now come to an end.