Two of Pakistan’s bigger opposition parties said today they would probably boycott the parliamentary elections due to be held in early January if the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, persisted in holding the vote while still maintaining emergency rule.
However, the leader of the biggest opposition party, Benazir Bhutto, has not yet said whether she would pull her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, out of the election.
On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto said General Musharraf’s announcement that elections would go ahead in January was a positive though insufficient step. Today she assumed a slightly tougher tone, suggesting her negotiations with General Musharraf had come to an end.
“We cannot work with anyone who has suspended the Constitution, imposed emergency rule and oppressed the judiciary,” she said. “We are saying ‘no’ to any more talks.”
Ms. Bhutto said she would go ahead Tuesday with a protest march from the eastern city of Lahore to Islamabad, the capital.
Raza Zafarul Haz, the chairman of one of the country’s biggest parties, the Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said that for free and fair elections to go ahead, emergency rule would have to be lifted and that judges who were fired after the imposition of emergency rule must be reinstated.
“Under the current circumstances, it is very difficult to expect there will be fair elections in the country,” Mr. Haz said. His party would make its final decision in the coming week, he said.
Liaqat Baloch, the secretary general of Pakistan’s most popular Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islaami, said the party was considering withholding its candidates if the emergency was still in place in January.
Despite Ms. Bhutto’s tougher comments today, analysts said they believed she had not completely moved away from her original plan, devised with the backing of the Bush administration, to seek some kind of conciliation with General Musharraf in a potential power-sharing deal.
The prospects for such a deal, however, looked increasingly difficult after General Musharraf announced Sunday that the emergency rule he imposed more than a week ago would prevail beyond the election.
As the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which has traditionally commanded about one-third of the popular vote in Pakistan on a populist platform, Ms. Bhutto is trying to steer a path between a desire to return to power, while at the same time not seeming to be too close to the widely unpopular General Musharraf.
Ms. Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan twice and was twice dismissed before she completed her term. She has made no secret that she would like be prime minister once again.
Today she remained closeted at a house in Lahore, meeting party aides and planning strategy for the protest march across Punjab Province.
In order to keep her people united under her banner, she has vowed to go ahead with the protest, which she has dubbed a “long march,” even if the authorities try to shut it down.
One aide said the party was not afraid of “a battlefield” between party workers and the police.
The chances of such a long protest going ahead along such an exposed route through the center of Pakistan seemed slim, however. Last Friday, the Pakistani government suppressed a rally that Ms. Bhutto tried to stage in Rawalpindi, the garrison town close to Islamabad, before it even started, and there were signs the authorities would do the same with the “long march” from Lahore.
The authorities argue that no protests are allowed under the emergency rule. They also maintain that Ms. Bhutto is a high-risk target for suicide bombers and other militants, and that the rally must be stopped for her own safety.
A major Pakistan daily newspaper, The News, reported today that one of General Musharraf’s chief political operatives, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, who is also the powerful chief minister of Punjab, thought that the general’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League, was well placed to win in the elections in early January.
General Musharraf has become increasingly unpopular in the last year as he has extended his dual role as president and head of the army far longer than expected.
But according to The News, Mr. Elahi believed “a few hundred lawyers and a couple of dozens politicians behind bars” would not hurt his chances.
Western diplomats believe about 2,500 people, including lawyers and human rights advocates, have been jailed since emergency rule was imposed on Nov. 3.
The United States has given more than $10 billion in assistance to Pakistan over the last six years since Sept. 11, 2001, when General Musharraf pledged to become an ally of the Bush administration in its campaign against terror.
The majority of that aid has gone to the Pakistani military, including more than $5 billion to fight terrorism, an effort that Washington complains is not going well.
A tiny portion of the total $10 billion packet — $26 million — has been devoted to supporting democratic elections. But the prospect of truly democratic elections taking place, with no courts, a suppressed independent media, and a lack of independent supervision of the election commission, appears diminished.
Three days into the emergency rule last week, the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, announced that $26 million was assisting voter education, computerization of voting rolls, and the training of poll watchers.
She said the final 80,000 transparent ballot boxes of the 430,000 purchased by the United States and Japan for Pakistan would be delivered by Dec. 9.
– nytimes
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