Issue 55 Vol III, January 15, 2008

E D I T O R I A L

Democracy at gunpoint as Pakistan ripped asunder

GUN and democracy can not exist together and the military’s boast of being the only institution holding Pakistan together has no meaning. In any case, a corrupt armed force can hardly inspire any people. Political parties and civil society offer the only alternative and must assert clearly and confidently. Pakistan is in dire need of getting rid of an ambitious military, the greedy feudal politicians and the obscurantist mullahs.

Suicide bombings in Pakistan are now a weekly affair. Calculated attacks on security forces including the police and the political activists are tearing the country asunder. Waves of suicide attacks have killed hundreds across Pakistan over the past year. With the attacks that take away innocent lives in dozens the ability of the state to protect the people is weakened.

After all what is the basic purpose of the state; keep peace. It is of course the core issue that it can not be achieved without establishing a just society. This is what the public in Pakistan has dreaming of for decades.

Look around and see the ghastly killings. On January 10 at least 22 police and four civilians were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Punjab High Court in the commercial heart of Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city. The bomber triggered a device packed with ball bearings when police stopped him outside the court. The blast ripped through a busy square in the city centre as dozens of riot police gathered ahead of a protest by lawyers against the rule of President Pervez Musharraf. Up to 60 injured persons were rushed to hospital. Would the lawyers in the forefront of the peoples’ movement for democracy and rule of law muster enough courage to campaign? There are plenty of speculations about the motive of the  suicide bomber.

Killing of major opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto on December 27 outside Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi along with 20 innocent civilians is now a subject of intense investigation or and cover up. Earlier on December 21 as hundreds kneeled down in prayer on one of Islam’s major festivals in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, a powerful bomb exploded inside the mosque killing 48 worshippers and wounding close to 200. The suicide bomb attack in Sherpao village, at the start of festivities to mark the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, was a significant stepping up of violence in a border region wracked by violence since the U.S. launched a ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombings in 2001. Federal Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao Khan and his young son Sikandar Sherpao Khan had narrow escape, second in recent months.

President Pervez Musharraf has been targeted at least three times, even close to army headquarters in Rawalpindi. He had providential escape. People ask dejectedly who is safe then.

Yet Pakistani people have been promised national and provincial elections February 18. It is an election sans and political campaigning, particularly the tragic assassination of Benazir, sans any issue being debated and in the backdrop of reports of feared rigging. Recently US Senator Joe Lieberman after meeting cross section of public and leaders spoke about the prevailing sense of suspicion and mistrust, and warned that these sentiments did not provide a positive environment in which to hold polls.

What is at stake in Pakistan is not the future of much discredited president Musharraf and his cronies, but the very unity of Pakistan as a state. It is in a crisis that looks beyond the present dispensation and its maters in n Washington. The blood bath in which the operators of the jehadis had been doing in Kashmir for years, and earlier in Afghanistan is now as they say chickens have come back home to roost. How sad and tragic indeed for the hapless people of Pakistan.

This is the time for an honest effort and not political one up man ship for a collective strategy to be devised. The traumatized state can not protect its people without some kind resurrecting, and the might of the militants broken. Trust must be built. Pakistan can not afford to repeat the pattern seen last year, when at least 50 suicide bombings ripped through the country.

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