Troops, Police Ready for Today’s Pakistan Vote

More than 100,000 police and army troops, some backed by armored personnel carriers, took up positions Tuesday at polling stations nationwide as Pakistani President Ghulam Ishaq Khan issued an election-eve warning that no one will be allowed in the streets to protest the results of today’s landmark legislative elections.

“Nobody should entertain the illusion of being more powerful than the state,” the president declared in his 30-minute nationally televised speech.

“The losers will never be allowed to give some other color to their defeat through fake claims of rigging and fraud and try to change the verdict through a show of force in the streets.”

But the president added that the government and military also will abide by the results, adding, “I pray to God our future will be better than our past.”

Today’s election, which Pakistanis expect to be the freest and fairest in their history. It climaxes an emotional and often vicious monthlong campaign by the nation’s two strongest political forces--the Pakistan People’s Party of Benazir Bhutto and a conservative and fundamentalist nine-party Muslim alliance made up largely of followers of the late military ruler, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who died in a plane crash last Aug. 17.

At stake are 205 seats in the National Assembly, from which President Ishaq Khan will nominate a new prime minister to form a government.

Bhutto, 35, who has galvanized popular support, is widely seen as leading her opponents in personal popularity after a costly nationwide barnstorming campaign. She has focused on the excesses of Zia’s regime during the period after the military strongman overthrew her father in 1977 and ordered his execution.

The ruling alliance, a diverse group of politicians and religious leaders formed largely to keep Bhutto out, also has spent millions of dollars in its campaign. It has focused its attack on the excesses and mismanagement of Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who ruled Pakistan for six years until Zia’s military coup.

A nationwide poll released Sunday by Gallup of Pakistan indicated that the ruling Islamic Democratic Alliance had a slight lead over Bhutto’s People’s Party, as did a similar poll published Monday by the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, Jang.

Several senior alliance leaders also conceded in the final days of the campaign that their own estimates showed Bhutto’s party winning as many as 120 seats, which would give her party a clear assembly majority and theoretically give her the right to serve as prime minister.

But President Ishaq Khan--who was a close aide to Zia before he succeeded the president after the mysterious Aug. 17 plane crash, and who now enjoys strong military support--has made it clear that he alone will select the next prime minister.

Justice Minister Wasim Sajjad, a close presidential aide, told reporters that the constitution permits Ishaq Khan to nominate any party leader who he believes can form a government, regardless of the vote, and that the timing of the announcement is at his discretion.

Sajjad indicated that it may take days or weeks before Pakistan’s new elected leadership is known. But Sajjad indicated that any party winning 120 seats or more would probably be chosen to form the new government.

Military’s Preference

The military, which ruled Pakistan under martial law during most of the nation’s 41 years, is known to favor the ruling alliance, which Western diplomats and other analysts say the military helped form through behind-the-scenes lobbying.

But the army chief of staff, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the country’s most powerful figure, has stressed in many recent speeches that the military will not interfere in the election and will abide by its results.

Beg has issued several public appeals to the politicians, urging them to show the same restraint and maturity as have the army and the judiciary, which have not only supported but promoted today’s elections. And the general indicated that the military would intervene only in the event of widespread violence that threatens Pakistan’s internal security.

But analysts said fears of election-day violence remained high. Although the campaign has been virtually bloodless, a rarity in the Third World, controversy in recent days has focused on a government order requiring all voters to have national identity cards in order to cast ballots.

The government acknowledges that the requirement will disfranchise about 3.7 million voters, most of them in the rural areas where Bhutto’s support is strongest, but it said that chaos would ensue without the cards.

In a recent interview, Bhutto told The Times, “If they require the national identity card, it cannot be a fair election.” She added that tens of thousands of fake identity cards are already in circulation, and, in recent days, she has publicly called on her supporters to go to the polls with or without the cards to prevent others from voting under their names.

“That is dangerous,” said one Western diplomat here, adding that confrontations are likely between cardless voters and soldiers guarding the polling stations. “And it sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy for Benazir to say she was cheated if she--and her party--doesn’t come to power.”

Whether Bhutto herself would be able to vote remained in doubt Tuesday. She told reporters that she had lost her own identity card and was trying to get a new one.

In an effort to monitor the fairness of the election, a 22-member international delegation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute will fan out to polling stations nationwide today.

A gathering of 40 fundamentalist Muslim leaders in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, released a statement declaring that the mosques of this overwhelmingly Muslim country will never support a female prime minister.

“The vote of the people shall determine if the country has to embark upon the road of Islamization or has to fall into the pit of Western cultural degeneration,” said the statement, which was distributed nationwide.

Bhutto launched a final offensive in the frontier city of Peshawar near the border of Afghanistan, blasting the ruling alliance for policies she said have created 670,000 new heroin addicts in Pakistan in eight years and flooded the nation with high-powered, Soviet-made Kalashnikov rifles destined for the Afghan resistance fighting Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan.