Bhutto Ousted as Pakistan’s Prime Minister

Citing rampant corruption, nepotism and incompetence, Pakistan’s conservative president fired Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her entire government Monday and promised to hold national elections in October.

President Ghulam Ishaq Khan moved so suddenly that Bhutto and her senior ministers apparently were stunned.

The move, clearly backed by the armed forces, ended 20 months of turbulence under Bhutto, a rare era of Pakistani democracy that brought the 37-year-old leader international acclaim as a symbol of freedom and a modern Islam. It was, however, also a time of widespread corruption and ethnic strife, which threatened the national economy and brought one province to the brink of civil war.

Ishaq Khan, a respected statesman with close ties to Pakistan’s military leaders, declared at a hastily convened news conference:

“The government has willfully undermined and impaired the work of the constitution. Corruption and nepotism in the federal government has reached such proportions that the orderly functioning of the government no longer carries public faith and credibility.”

Bhutto called the president’s charge slanderous but told a news conference that party members have been directed not to take to the streets. She said she and her party will fight his order peacefully, at the polls. Ishaq Khan scheduled new elections for Oct. 24; asked if she will run for reelection, Bhutto replied: “Most certainly. I intend to win.”

Bhutto hinted broadly that she suspects the army of being behind her dismissal, but took care not to accuse the military directly.

“We will not provide them any excuse to bypass the political process,” she said.

The president named as caretaker Prime Minister Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, a pro-West opposition figure who is trusted by the army and who has been working behind the scenes to overthrow Bhutto.

The move is sanctioned by an article of the Pakistani constitution that Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party have been trying to repeal ever since they took office.

The article, drafted by Pakistan’s last military ruler, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, gives the president the authority to dissolve the National Assembly if he believes the government is unable to carry out its duties. The People’s Party argues that the law gives ultimate political power to the army.

In what appeared to be a coordinated effort, the armed forces, which have ruled for nearly half of the nation’s 43 years of independence, immediately took control of the national television station and all communications exchanges. The army chief of staff, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, said the military operation was a precaution to ensure a smooth civilian transition and not another military takeover.

“We are not involved in politics,” said Beg, who took over the army after Zia was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. “We are not going to get involved.”

But Bhutto, who helped restore democracy in Pakistan after the November, 1988, elections that ended 11 years of military rule, remained skeptical of the military role in what many independent legal experts are calling a constitutional coup.

“This is very strange if this is a civilian process,” she said of the military movements.

Bhutto, whose father was overthrown by Zia in 1977 and executed two years later, went on to say: “I don’t feel betrayed by the president. I believe there were other elements that wanted me out.”

Although the timing of the president’s move stunned most of the nation, it was neither totally unexpected nor unpopular, especially among Pakistani business people and residents of Bhutto’s war-torn home province of Sind.

Bhutto’s grip has been slipping fast in recent months, and public opinion polls have shown a sharp erosion in her personal popularity in the two years since she was all but deified by a reverent nation that had installed her as the first woman leader of an Islamic land.

Corruption at all levels of Pakistani society has reportedly reached staggering heights under Bhutto. Critics, among them former Bhutto supporters, contend that government officials have enriched themselves as well as the family of the fallen prime minister’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

Patronage was massive, with more than 20,000 party workers taking government jobs in a controversial political hiring program that drove an additional wedge between Bhutto and the bureaucracy.

In an effort to capitalize on such controversy, aides to Jatoi, the man who has succeeded Bhutto, arranged several recent meetings with diplomats and the foreign press in Jatoi’s home city of Karachi. They leaked stacks of documents hinting at corruption within the ruling family.

Jatoi had announced Sunday that he would lead a campaign to topple the Bhutto government this week by means of a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly.

She survived a similar vote last November, winning by only a handful of votes even after locking up most of her People’s Party lawmakers at a resort far from Islamabad to prevent the opposition Islamic Democratic Alliance from bribing them into deserting.

Diplomats and other political analysts in Islamabad have further criticized Bhutto for failing to govern. She is widely regarded as a shrewd politician, but the National Assembly enacted only a handful of bills because she and her party were caught up in political battles with their opponents.

The political wars also took their toll on law and order, particularly in Sind, where fighting between native Sindhis and Muslim migrants from pre-partition India has claimed more than 400 lives this year. The violence forced Bhutto to call in the army earlier this year, and several analysts said she incurred the wrath of senior military officers by refusing to grant them broader powers of arrest and interrogation.

The conflict in Sind fueled long-standing tension and mistrust between Bhutto and the army. Ever since she was jailed and then forced into exile in London, Bhutto has associated the armed forces with her father’s executioners. The army, despite Gen. Beg’s defense of the democratic process during the 1988 election campaign, has been similarly wary of Bhutto and her party leaders, many of whom were jailed, tortured and publicly whipped under sentences handed down by Zia’s military courts.

On a recent visit to Sind, a senior army officer indicated that the army would appeal to the president to step in and oust Bhutto if the army were forced to remain out in force for more than two months. The officer said he feared the army would be corrupted by the conflict it is trying to police.

It was not clear precisely what role the army did play in Monday’s events, but independent analysts said the president would not have acted without an army mandate.

Ishaq Khan, who is respected and admired by many Pakistanis as a strict constitutionalist, was the key link between Zia and civil institutions throughout Zia’s reign. After Zia’s death, the army immediately vested Ishaq Khan with the power necessary to rule the nation.

NEXT STEP

Elections to replace Pakistan’s National Assembly are scheduled for Oct. 24. Until then, the country will be run by a caretaker government led by interim Prime Minister Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, a foe of the ousted Benazir Bhutto. A state of emergency declared Monday gives President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and his caretaker government the power to dissolve provincial assemblies, suspend civilian courts, make laws and suspend individual rights. The emergency can remain in effect for up to four months, unless extended by the Pakistani Senate.