Pakistan Opposition Faces Hurdles

Nisar Khuhro spent the first 23 days of his election campaign in various courts, fighting an order barring him from seeking office because his daughter had defaulted on a bank loan.

As Khuhro, head of the Pakistan People’s Party in Sindh province, battled that ban, the opposition group’s national leader and two-time former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, faced a similar fight: She had been ordered disqualified from running Thursday because she had failed to appear in an anti-corruption court.

And yet Azam Tariq, leader of an extremist group outlawed by President Pervez Musharraf, has been allowed to stand for election to the National Assembly from jail. A pro-Musharraf candidate even pulled out of the race to support the extremist leader, who is running as an independent and whose group, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, is blamed for killing hundreds of minority Shiite Muslims in bombings, shootings and grenade attacks.

“These are very sensitive matters, so they would not be left to lower-level officials,” said Afrasiab Khattak, who heads the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “There has to be a policy from above.”

As Pakistan prepares for Thursday’s general election--the first since Musharraf’s October 1999 coup--opposition groups accuse his government of trying to keep them from running, pressuring their candidates to switch sides and otherwise manipulating the process.

“Musharraf feels that he can get away with anything and everything,” said Mian Raza Rabbani, acting secretary-general of Bhutto’s party. “And I think he is pandering to the right-wing, [Islamic] fundamentalist lobby as well.”

Opposition leaders claim Musharraf is using the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to intimidate candidates.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League says it couldn’t field candidates in several districts because they were coerced by ISI agents into joining the pro-Musharraf PML-Q, nicknamed “the king’s party” by its opponents. League chairman Raja Zafar ul-Haq said many PML-Q converts were threatened with corruption charges.

In Punjab province, Rabbani said, the ISI persuaded at least 21 of his party’s candidates to defect to a pro-Musharraf party.

Sadiq Umrani, a provincial assembly candidate in Baluchistan, is a typical case of a politician pressured by an ISI agent, said Rabbani, a former federal law minister.

“He was initially told, ‘It will be better for you if you stay away from the People’s Party,’ ” Rabbani said. “When he refused, he got a notice from the [anti-corruption] National Accountability Bureau, which ordered him to appear in front of an investigating officer.

“They didn’t specify any evidence, but when he went to the investigating officer, he made the most common of charges: ‘You are living beyond your means,’ ” Rabbani said. Umrani fought and managed to stay in the race as a People’s Party candidate.

Musharraf, who will remain president after the vote, has repeatedly rejected allegations that he is manipulating the election in an effort to ensure the vote produces a compliant government. He insists he is only reforming a corrupt system, so that a new generation of politicians will serve the interests of the people--and not themselves.

“I am confident that, as a result of the forthcoming elections, a new political culture of tolerance, accommodation and responsibility will emerge, replacing the culture of complete political polarization and conflict we witnessed in the past decade,” Musharraf said Saturday in the capital, Islamabad.

Musharraf, who is also the military’s commanding general, promised that the newly elected prime minister “will be fully in charge and empowered to govern the country.”

Pakistanis have traditionally been passionate about their politics, and in previous elections, rallies drew huge crowds. But this campaign hasn’t stirred much excitement. Musharraf’s opponents say that’s exactly how he planned it, promoting minor parties and trying to neutralize several major ones that have dominated Pakistan for generations.

The country’s three biggest political names remain in exile.

Bhutto, who now lives in London, threatened to return to Pakistan but backed down after failing to get her name on the ballot.

Sharif, who lives in Saudi Arabia, was allowed to run, despite a conviction on corruption and treason charges, because Musharraf pardoned him. But he withdrew from the race in September to protest the ban on Bhutto.

And Altaf Hussain, who leads the Muttahida Quami Movement, also remains in London since fleeing Pakistan to avoid arrest in the early 1990s. His political base is refugees from the 1947 partition of India and their descendants. His party wants more autonomy for Sindh province.

Leaders of Hussain’s party in Karachi, their stronghold, said Musharraf, who fled with his family from India at the end of British rule, sent two generals to London to negotiate with Hussain. But talks fell apart after politicians from his party were assassinated and the party blamed elements of the ISI.

Bhutto supporters feel especially targeted by Musharraf. After he issued a decree prohibiting anyone who has served two terms as prime minister from running for reelection--a measure that could apply to Bhutto as well as Sharif--Bhutto insisted on running. He then amended the constitution to bar any candidate convicted of failing to appear in front of an anti-corruption tribunal.

Since Bhutto is the only one in that category, her supporters call the amendment a “Benazir-specific law” aimed solely at keeping her out of office.

Larkana, a city of about 450,000 people amid rich farmland along the Indus River, is Bhutto’s home district. It elected her to the National Assembly four times, and she was named prime minister in 1988 and 1993. It had also sent her father to that body, and he became prime minister in 1973. But he was overthrown four years later and executed in 1979.

Despite numerous allegations of corruption against Bhutto over the years, Larkana has remained a bastion of her party. Khuhro, who leads the party in the province, says that is why the government went to great lengths to try to disqualify him.

One of Musharraf’s election decrees bans any candidate who has defaulted on a bank loan. The prohibition applies even if it’s a spouse or a dependent child who hasn’t paid up, Khuhro says.

He says he was barred from running because his daughter hadn’t paid a bank $13,000, her share of what remained of a $50,000 loan taken out with three partners in 1990 to start a bus company.

After Khuhro paid up for his daughter, an election official refused to approve his candidacy until the company cleared the rest of the debt, he says. When it did, Khuhro still couldn’t get on the ballot until the provincial High Court ruled that the election law wasn’t meant to punish the father of a debtor for life.

Khuhro and other opposition leaders believe Musharraf has tried to create “a leadership crisis” among major parties “so that people don’t get reminded of what’s going on and become a problem for him,” Khuhro said. “It’s ‘divide and rule.’ He wants people to lose interest in politics and voting.”

In Larkana, at least, some old political enemies are joining to oppose Musharraf and his allies.

The Khaksar Tehrik, which has defended farm laborers and other poor people since 1931, has long been a rival of Bhutto’s party. But Sunday night, the movement’s local patron, Sabiha Mughal, urged about 500 supporters to vote for Bhutto’s candidate, saying it would be a vote for national unity.

“If the national parties are condemned, then the smaller parties from the provinces will have the power,” she said. “That will not be good for the integrity of Pakistan.”