Punishing Musharraf

What is going on? First, we heard Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan airing the view that the National Assembly did not have to pass a resolution to arraign General Pervez Musharraf (Retd) for treason under Article 6 of the Constitution. Now the PML chief, Mr Nawaz Sharif, says he is surprised at “Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s statement linking former president Pervez Musharraf’s trial to a unanimous resolution by the National Assembly”. He too says the government doesn’t need to go to the parliament on the issue and can start the process itself.

Mr Sharif obviously senses that opinion against General Musharraf is in the process of being consolidated by a section of the media and the lawyers’ movement. So he has decided to cash in and remind us that “the former dictator committed the crime of abrogating the Constitution in front of the whole world and 160 million people of the country”. Knowing that the PPP will be seen in a bad light if it is exposed as siding with General Musharraf, he has added: “conditionalities being attached by the incumbent rulers to the trial of Musharraf give an impression as if they are protecting him”.

Then comes the threat: “Otherwise, the masses can force the government to make decisions according to their whims as they played their role for the restoration of the judiciary”. Is Mr Sharif thinking of another Long March? In the same breath, however, he swears that he doesn’t want to destabilise and oust the PPP government. The Long March that he led up to Gujranwala and got Chief Justice Chaudhry restored would have ended in a zero-sum choice for the PPP government: it would have been “either Zardari or Nawaz” had the protest continued and entered Islamabad. Also, we should not forget that without the intervention of the army chief and America, there would have been no restoration of the judges.

Mr Sharif wants the Constitution to be upheld. That is all very well. But his record on this front isn’t too good. So we are entitled to be cynical. Also, we clearly note the instinct for revenge in this case. Among the media and the lawyers there are a lot of individuals who want revenge for the harm or hurt caused to them or to their interests by General Musharraf. Therefore their emotion-packed opinion betrays the instinct that nullifies justice. That is how the stage is now set: all the judges who might conceivably have been free of revenge are out of the higher judiciary; and those who occupy the benches are partisan, some of them have spoken indiscreetly in public to prove their partisanship! Meanwhile, the world is watching this and framing it in the context of the past paroxysms of accountability suffered by the country.

Journalists who should be writing objectively are waxing passionate. One paper decided to publish some intense outpourings of its chief reporter who recommends collective expressions of “hatred” on an annual basis as the foundation of his argument.

The act of abhorrence may in fact be committed by those who want revenge by divorcing the process of accountability from objective conditions, the context of the past, and point of law. Therefore it is up to the incumbent government to take the step. If it wants a unanimous resolution, it is not against the law. It has done so on past occasions to take the general pulse into confidence on political decisions, as for example both in supporting a peace deal with the Taliban and then approving military action against them.

The instinct for revenge has foreshortened the past. What about the period when General Musharraf was “covered” by the judges and given the right to rule? So when you say he is a “usurper”, you are also arraigning the judges, including the present chief justice of the Supreme Court, who validated him, and the parliament which passed the 17th Amendment. The government is the only party that can bring the case against General Musharraf and it is clearly faced with problems of “objective reality”.

The Emergency order of General Musharraf, which is being made the grounds for his trial, was issued after consultations with “the Prime Minister, Governors of all four Provinces, and Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Chiefs of the Armed Forces, Vice-Chief of Army Staff and Corps Commanders of the Pakistan Army”.

General Musharraf was no General Pinochet either, simply because Pakistan’s circumstances are different; and General Musharraf was not seen by the world as a murderous despot. In fact, he was seen to be “correcting” some excesses of the earlier government, now recognised by the Charter of Democracy, in the shape of acceptance of joint electorates and women’s seats. Even so, General Pinochet’s passage has left Chile divided, not united. On the other hand, South Africa, by embracing “reconciliation” and forgiving apartheid and its crimes, has prospered.