On November 4, 2007, President and Army Chief Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan suspended the Pakistani Constitution, and placed Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudry, many of the lawyers in the Lawyer’s Movement, and many human rights activists, like Asma Jahangir, under house arrest. It was widely covered in the West as being a dispute with the court over whether or not to permit President Musharraf to run for president again. In reality, the deciding factor was probably that CJ Chaudry had ordered the government to produce nearly 60 of the Pakistani "disappeared", those who have disappeared into custody uncharged with any crime — many handed over to the U.S. and transported — in court or release them.
What followed were chaotic plans for an election, backroom deals in which former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto returned to the country to participate in elections of unknown legality, bombings, and, on December 27, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated after delivering an anti-terrorist speech in Liaquat Park in Rawalpindi, named for Liaquat Ali Khan, a colleague of Muhammed Ali Jinnah, who was assassinated on the same spot, years before. The election was moved to February 18, 2008.
In February and March, after a chaotic election which was kept fair by cell phoners and bloggers taking pictures of ballot fraud, using SMS messages to inform of movements of the Rangers, and engaging in street protest, the Lawyer’s Movement launched Black Flag Week, culminating in the Long March from Lahore to Islamabad to get the Constitution re-instated, culminating finally in the end of the emergency and Pervez Musharraf relinquishing office to a coalition of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N), and the Awami National Party (ANP), which in Pakistan is a largely Pashtun secular party that ran and won in the NWFP. Subsequently, it took nearly a year, and another Long March, to get Chief Justice Chaudry reinstated, get the benches at the other courts invalidated, and get the government to sign a pledge to implement the Charter for Democracy, which demands rescinding constitutional changes back to 1993, specifically putting the Prime Minister back at the top of government, getting rid of the ability of the President to dissolve the Parliament, and other changes.
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Thanks for the reminder of when that got started. I still fantasize about what it would be like for our country to have thousands of lawyers take to the street to demand restoration of the Constitution. The teabaggers are a very poor substitute, but reflect the Constitutional ignorance of the general populace.
Pakistan was an ally, and Musharraf was our great hope to get al qeada.
Pakistan hasn’t worked out so good, neither did Musharraf, and we haven’t gotten al Qeada, and our dreams of making all those Countries over there into our liking is disintegating fast.
Not quite as fast as our bank account though, but they will say we have no choice but to keep trying what has failed.
The real failure is not in those countries, but in our military commanders and our Government back here that takes their advise, and makes the policies.
Fixing that area of the world is not much more challanging than fixing our Government that doesn’t work.
We will put more effort there, meaning more problems here. We are a country of wrong priorities, and any change in that is doubtful.
But at least a clear understanding of what has actually gone on should point to better thinking on what to do next. Without knowing that we’ve had two major opportunities to back the right people in two years, and blown it both times, you might get the feeling this all had to do with Musharraf. It actually has to do with democracy and the rule of law.