ISLAMABAD, Nov 28: It will be another troubled presidency that Gen Pervez Musharraf will begin on Thursday as a civilian, with uncivil powers. The political crisis gripping Pakistan will not allow him any honeymoon period at the start of the new five-year term in face of a wave of unpopularity at home and abroad and a raging controversy surrounding his disputed election.
Though he will be a retired General Musharraf when he takes a fresh oath of office on Thursday, a day after handing over the army’s command to new Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, yet he will wield too much power, which is the main cause of the prevailing turmoil and promises a continuing confrontation with most political parties and other sections of the society seeking Pakistan’s return to full democracy after eight years of military-led rule.
It will hardly be an auspicious beginning for a presidency with the Constitution remaining suspended under the Nov 3 emergency imposed by Gen Musharraf as army chief, opposition parties threatening to boycott the Jan 8 general elections that they fear would be rigged, and lawyers, journalists and other sections of the civil society up in arms over a virtual massacre of the superior judiciary and one of worst clampdowns on the media.
In this situation, with opposition politicians certain to be missing from the president’s swearing in ceremony at Islamabad’s Aiwan-i-Sadr, his induction to the new term is unlikely to match the pomp of his Wednesday’s handover at Rawalpindi’s Army Stadium the command of the army that he held for more than nine years, contrary to the regular tenure of three years.
Speculation was rife that Musharraf, who gave up his army uniform under international and domestic pressure, could soon part with more of his extra-constitutional powers assumed under the emergency in an effort to appease the opposition parties, whose demands include a rollback of all emergency decrees, restoration of the pre-Nov 3 Supreme Court and provincial high courts, formation of an independent election commission and an interim government of national consensus to replace the one dominated by his loyalists.
But there was no official word if an expected address to the nation by President Musharraf possibly on Thursday evening would contain any concessions.
His previous five-year presidential term, which was based on a controversial 2002 referendum — rather than the vote of a parliamentary electoral college as happened on Oct 6 — and expired on Nov 15, was also marked by a confrontation with opposition parties.
But the president won a parliamentary legitimacy after one section of the opposition — the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal alliance of six Islamic parties — cooperated with the government in passage to the controversial Seventeenth Constitution Amendment in December 2003 by two-thirds majority of the National Assembly and the Senate.
The president then also enjoyed a high international prestige as a key ally in the US-led so-called “war on terrorism”. An erosion of that position could be gauged from a nearly universal condemnation of the emergency proclamation, threats of aid cut-off, non-stop demands from American President George Bush’s administration to do more to ensure free elections and democratic transition, and the second suspension of Pakistan from the Commonwealth since he seized power in the October 1999 coup.
Internally, all opposition parties, lawyers’ associations, human rights groups, journalists’ unions and other media organisations are continuing protests for weeks. Barring the Pakistan Muslim League of the president’s loyalists and a few of its allies that were in the pre-Nov 16 ruling coalition, anti-regime talk is galore in marketplaces, offices, workshops and tea shops, where it seems it requires some of the state television’s expertise to get a pro-Musharraf comment.
The goodwill the regime claimed to have won from an economic turnaround under Musharraf, a move towards the so-called “enlightened moderation” and development work done through local bodies seems to have been greatly eroded by food inflation and the happenings from the unsuccessful March 9 move to sack Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to the Nov 3 emergency that saw the entire Supreme Court and the four provincial high courts purged, private television channels put off the air and thousands of political activists and lawyers put in jail.
But despite the return of charismatic former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from years of exile, the opposition political parties still seem to be struggling to put their act together.
