Ground Realities
Rejoice, for one more dictator bites the dust!
IT is a most healthy thing when a dictator leaves office quietly, having first acknowledged the idea, however reluctantly, that he is not wanted any more. When Pervez Musharraf had his soldiers commandeer Pakistan in one of its more infamous moments in October 1999, he certainly could not imagine that the politicians he was sending packing would come back to banish him into the woods. But that again was quite natural, for men who seize power by means foul often forget the way history works. That is how they make themselves suffer and their nations go through agony.
In Pakistan, a state condemned to relentless pain by the very manner of its birth, military rulers have generally made their unceremonious way out of power. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, having EBDOed all politicians in the days following the coup d'etat of October 1958, went through the grave embarrassment of negotiating with them towards the end of his rule in 1969.
He agreed to restore the parliamentary system of government, a state of politics he had derided throughout the decade he dominated Pakistan. And he agreed not to run for president at the next election and so would let the politicians take charge of the future.
That was a climb down, quite a big one. But should we be surprised? Here in Bangladesh, for no rhyme or reason, General Hussein Muhammad Ershad overthrew an elected government in March 1982, and then went on to preside over a system that was to eventually spawn corrupt politics and leave values turned on their heads. He too went out, with a whimper. And that is the whole point about authoritarian rule.
It all starts with a bang and ends in a squeak. You could think here of Augosto Pinochet Ugarte, one of the most murderous of military rulers in modern times. For years, thanks to friends like Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, he went on jailing and murdering politicians and snuffing out dissent.
He even had a political system in place, days before he left, that would have him serve as a senator for life. In the end, it all came to nothing. In his final days, he was a hounded man. A Spanish judge ordered his arrest in London. Once back home after that ordeal, he was a shrunken man.
There is a good chance that few will remember him, except to speak of him with disdain, years hence. It is always the good men dictators push out, and sometimes murder, who remain part of the broad sweep of history. You can, therefore, look forward to Salvador Allende being an icon for all times. Pinochet will be the villain in death he always was in life.
And speaking of villains who push their way to power, through a generous use of firepower, there is General Yahya Khan, again from Pakistan. All these years after his death in the late 1970s, you can sit back and wonder at the absolute absence of intelligence in the man.
Two years into power, he set about committing genocide in his country's eastern province, setting the country on the road to perdition. No one recalls him, except to speak of him with disgust.
There is much a similar condition with General Ziaul Haq. Of the four military dictators Pakistan has had so far, Zia remains the only one who was not pushed out or had his country defeated in war. He was simply blown up in the sky. The irony is that to this day no one knows who did him in. But what many of us do know is that poetic justice was served in his case.
He took Pakistan down a very dangerous road to religious militancy. He equated Islam with his stranglehold on the country; he dismissed all those appeals for a commutation of the death sentence on the hapless Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; he publicly had respected journalists flogged. And then divinity, as many among us would like to think, took care of him. Pieces of him were strewn over the bleak desert where his aircraft crashed in Bahawalpur.
But let us be fair to Pervez Musharraf. Alone among the four dictators in Pakistan's sad history, he was a decent man, almost suave in the way he dealt with the rest of the world. He knew what it meant to present a powerful media image to his people and all those other people around the globe.
Unlike other military rulers, he chose to be open in his interaction with people. He was never aloof, which point was made regularly clear in the way he answered the many questions put to him by Pakistanis. Luck has generally favoured him.
In October 1999, when Nawaz Sharif tried to force him out of Pakistani airspace, he could have chosen to oblige the prime minister. He chose to fight back, though that fight led to his seizure of political power (which was a shame!). In power, he was the target of quite a few assassination attempts. He survived all of them, almost De Gaulle-like. Abroad, he charmed people with his unassuming ways.
Westerners saw in him a new kind of dictator who did not carry himself like a dictator at all. Some of his neighbours, especially the Indians, thought there was a freshness about him that Pakistan's politicians never had before him.
And yet there are the negatives, too many of them, cancelling out all the positives in the man. He was the individual who planned, behind the back of his prime minister, the misadventure in Kargil, and almost brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. That left Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif embarrassed and humiliated before Bill Clinton.
On Musharraf's watch, the notorious Abdul Qadeer Khan, surely in association with elements in the Pakistan military, peddled nuclear secrets to rogue states abroad. And yet when the pressure piled up, from the West, for a response to the charges of Pakistan's culpability in the crime, Musharraf made sure that Khan became the scapegoat. No one touched the military.
General Musharraf engineered the break-up of political parties, Sharif's Muslim League in particular. His soldiers took Mushahid Hussain, a Sharif confidant, into custody soon after the coup. Days later, Hussain emerged, reinvented as a Musharraf loyalist, which he remains to this day. Into Musharraf's government came comic figures like Ziaul Haq's son Ejazul Haq, who for months made it his outlandish business to try to convince Pakistanis that their religious affiliations should be recorded on their passports.
And, finally, there will always be this sordid tale of General Musharraf dismissing the chief justice and other judges and placing them under house arrest because they might have ruled on the illegality of his regime.
Which all points to the ultimate truth about dictatorial rule. Dictators come in with the illusion of promise, stay on for years as they systematically go breaking the china and upsetting the furniture, and leave only when they have reduced a country into desolation. As General Musharraf slouches off into oblivion, it is Pakistan's people who must now assess the damage he has caused over the past nine years.
That in no way means, though, that Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari promise them the moon. These men have been there before; and every time they have left Pakistanis bruised. If one has brutalised the courts, the other has conveniently engaged in pilferage. And that is the hard truth. Unpalatable for many, yes, but real nevertheless.
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