Coup Leaves Pakistan’s Bid for Democracy in Air

The brief history of Pakistan often seems like a movie reel repeating the same sad frames: A nation elects a leader, the leader goes bad and the soldiers come in to clean up the mess.

For 52 years, this impoverished nation of 140 million people has endured weak civilian leaders and military dictators, each one promising to improve on the disaster left behind. So it was last week, when Pakistan’s top general arrested the prime minister, imposed military rule and declared himself the country’s supreme leader. Although the coup by Gen. Pervez Musharraf prompted an outpouring of relief from nearly every corner of Pakistan, many people here are beginning to wonder whether democracy’s roots will ever take hold.

“First come the civilians, then the generals, then the civilians start again,” said Taher Qayyum, who owns a cellular phone shop in Islamabad. “It’s like a cycle that never ends.”

Pakistanis are hoping that this time things will be different. When Musharraf ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday, he promised to rid the country of corruption and restore accountability to a government that in recent years has become little more than a means to enrich the people who are running it.

Musharraf didn’t say anything about restoring democracy, and on Saturday he postponed a speech in which he was expected to describe his vision for the future. Even so, Pakistanis across the political spectrum say they are hoping that the general will push through the changes needed to provide Pakistan with a stable democracy and a vibrant economy--and then go back to the barracks.

“There is an unstated social contract with the general right now,” Nasim Vehra, a newspaper columnist, said in an interview. “Let him have his two years to fix the country. But people don’t want a dictatorship.”

Fixing the country won’t be easy. To many economists and political experts here, Pakistan is a nation virtually guaranteed to thwart the best of intentions. It is a place where only the most drastic reforms are likely to make a difference, and a place seemingly impervious to change.

It is a country of legendary corruption, where politicians are remembered for the millions they stole and for the loot they tossed to their supporters. Fewer than half of Pakistan’s adults can read or write, and its economy is supported by a feudal agricultural system whose chieftains sit in the country’s parliament.

“Democracy has failed in Pakistan,” said Nadeem Naqvi, an economist in Karachi, the nation’s largest city.

“Democracy is successful in the West because there is mass literacy and institutions that work. We don’t have those here in Pakistan,” Naqvi said.

Despite the enthusiasm with which many Pakistanis greeted Musharraf’s coup, a small but influential number believe that the army’s entry into politics will probably hurt the country--no matter how good the generals’ intentions.

This is the fourth time since Pakistan was created in 1947 that the army has stepped in and pushed civilians out of the way, and the record of the military leaders is hardly impressive.

Some Pakistanis argue that they will never be able to nurture their democracy as long as the military remains a dominant force in the country’s politics.

“The army has never allowed Pakistan to be a true democracy,” said Shahid ur Rehman, the author of a popular expose titled “Who Owns Pakistan.” “It has always had a hand in running the country--either overtly or from the background.”

As a case in point, Rehman cites the notorious involvement of the army in the rise of Sharif. The now-deposed prime minister got his start in politics from Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the country’s dictator from 1977 to 1985, who named Sharif chief minister of Pakistan’s most populous province. In 1990, when the generals had tired of the populist Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, they helped engineer Sharif’s election as prime minister.

To many Pakistanis here, the first order of business for Musharraf will be restoring the institutions destroyed since the last military government handed over power 11 years ago.

Since 1997, when he began his second term in office, Sharif had attacked virtually every area of public life that posed a threat to him. He rewrote the country’s constitution to make it all but impossible to remove him. When the chief justice of the Supreme Court found him in contempt, Sharif sent a mob to intimidate him. When newspaper editor Najam Sethi publicly criticized him, Sharif had Sethi roughed up and thrown into jail. Sharif also forced his main political opponent, Bhutto, into exile, and is suspected of stealing millions of dollars of public money.

When he tried to fire Musharraf last week, the general was not alone in deciding that Sharif’s reign had gone on for too long.

“Even though there was a coup, no one shed a tear for Sharif,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a newspaper editor whom Sharif singled out for harassment. “I’m happy for my country.”

Sharif’s winner-take-all approach to politics is hardly new to Pakistan. For the last decade, his principal foe has been Bhutto, who has been indicted on corruption charges and is suspected of stealing as much as $1 billion from the nation’s treasury. Bhutto’s own father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, created a virtual dictatorship during his time as prime minister--until he was overthrown by the military in 1977 and hanged two years later.

“In this country, if you are the boss, then you expect other people to sit at your feet,” said Gen. Syed Refaqat, a top aide to the late Zia. “It is a serious defect in our political culture.”

Many economists and political experts here say that the only way to create a viable democracy would be to break the stranglehold of the feudal land barons who have always dominated Pakistani politics.

Pakistan has a largely agricultural economy, and its vast plantations are controlled by a relatively small number of families. According to one study, about 40% of the arable land is controlled by less than 1% of the landowners. One of the biggest landowning families is Bhutto’s.

Both of Pakistan’s major political parties are dominated by the big landed families, and many of their sons sit in parliament. The result, experts say, is an antiquated social structure: Practices such as sharecropping and bonded labor still thrive in the countryside. Human rights organizations have documented thousands of “ghost schools,” where teachers are often paid to not come to class.

“The feudal families don’t want representative government because they would lose their power,” said Rafaat Hussein, a professor of political science at Qaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. “We remain a traditional society.”

For all the problems that plague this country, many Pakistanis are, for the first time in years, hopeful that change is on the way.

Qayyum, the mobile phone salesman, sat with his friends and ticked off the things that he likes about his new leader: the emphasis on ending corruption and on business and economic reform. If Musharraf could just set the economy on the right track, Qayyum and his friends agreed, all the other issues would take care of themselves.

“This country needs jobs, education and an end to corruption,” Qayyum said. “After that comes the democracy.”