Bhut to's ordeal
Simon Winchester
Lahore Just a few months ago, when Mr Bhutto was still Prime Minister of Pakistan, about six people were dying violently every day in pitched battles being fought from one end of the country to the other by the two principal political factions, Last week with Mr Bhutto in jail near Lahore and an election campaign of sorts being run under the benign invigilation of General Zia ul-Haq, almost total peace prevailed across Pakistan. True, there were odd incidents — a train derailed here, a man shot and wounded there, some stones being tossed about and the 'odd house burned — but, by contrast with the earlier days of the crisis, the Islamic Republic was strangely serene.
So anyone who happened into the palmstudded television lounge of Faletti's Hotel in Lahore last Saturday would have been rather surprised to hear what General Zia was telling the nation. 'Dangerous crisis Upon us...impending catastrophe...violent incidents. . .regret must postpone elections.. .martial law will be stricter, will reign supreme, no one will speak against it. . .press must be stopped from making inflammatory remarks.. .' and so On, and so on. It sounded very much as though the cities were about to be engulfed In flames again, and that armoured cars would be thundering down the Malls of Rawalpindi and Lahore, and knife-rests thrown up to protect suburbanites in the Posher outskirts of Karachi. But no, it was not like that at all — it was just another ordinary Pakistan Saturday, the streets busy With shoppers, the offices alive with workers and the hotels as rich with businessmen and tourists as ever. Why, then, the crisis talk and why the need to call off the polls? The most likely explanation can be found from the reports that were beginning to filter into the capital last week from the further cities on the progress of the campaign. The Pakistan People's Party, shorn of its leadership by General Zia, who had Flapped Mr Bhutto and ten other luminaries in a variety of remote country prisons, and the Pakistan National Alliance, the nineparty opponents who had come so close to victory in the disputed election of last March, were, in essence, the only contenders. Consider these messages from a variety of correspondents stationed across the country: 'The PPP workers do not disrupt the PNA's meetings, but they neutralise their Political effect by hoisting party flags in big numbers and raising slogans of Mr Bhutto's everywhere, (Hyderabad) 'After the March debacle there has been a visible improvement in the position of the PPP — they are very much in the race'. (Peshawar) 'The PNA are not doing too well here — Mr Illahi cancelled his meeting and so did Maulana Anwar.' (Kot Lakhpat) 'The PPP announced it would hold a meeting — the public response created panic in PNA circles.' (Multan) There can be little doubt that General Zia, in his bunker in Rawalpindi, was being forced to listen to this discouraging litany. No matter how sternly he acted against Mr Bhutto, it seemed, the hydra-headed party that the deposed premier had founded and commanded rose again and again to haunt him. The PNA, despite all the help Zia had offered, were performing abysmally. Mr Bhutto — or rather Mrs Bhutto — seemed all set to win.
What, Zia must have wondered last week, woold happen if Nusrat Bhutto did lead her party to victory? If, as the Pakistan Ambassador to the United Nations promised last week, the army had relinquished power ten days after the elections, the People's Party would be back in office. Mr Bhutto would win his freedom from his Punjabi jail cell with consummate ease, and — as Mrs Bhutto said in an interview ten days ago — would resume leadership of the country. General Zia, had he been unwise enough to remain within reach, would have been arrested, cashiered and probably shot. The army would have been purged. There might well have been the makings of civil war — and all hope for a constructive conclusion to this chapter would be lost.
Of course, Zia might well have gone back on his UN promise. He might have declared the election results void, refused to release Mr Bhutto and the ten other PPP leaders, and taken the irritating Bhutto womenfolk out of circulation for good measure. He would have consolidated army rule in the name of preserving national stability — and a bitter people, angered at having endured the rigours of a second pointless election in eight months, might have turned round and reacted with sullen defiance. That, too, was a risk Zia could hardly afford to take.
So he took the easy way out. He complained to the press that the Butto women Benazir, the Oxford Union President of last term, in particular — were acting irresponsibly, inciting the electorate to violence. He noted that the police were daily being called upon to extinguish brush-fires of political discontent that were the direct result of the dangerous crisis presently upon his country. And he announced he deemed it unwise and unsafe to hold the elections on the stated date. Just as soon as the courts had dealt with Mr Bhutto — against whom a bewildering flora of colourful charges have been laid — he would think again about holding fresh polls. But for now, Pakistan was not quite ready for the ministrations of civilians with all their sins of ambition, sediilarism and greed.
Thus far at least the public have taken the announcement with a mixture of relief and scepticism. A month ago, when I arrived at the Khyber Pass after driving overland from London, I asked the local Pathans in a little roadside tea house how they felt about the coup, and about promised elections. `I'm all for General Zia staying on said one old man, a former supporter of Mr Bhutto, but a man who had turned against him in the aftermath of the last, rigged, election. 'I know he is not a clever man, like BhuttoSahib. But I think he is honest, and knows what is good for the country. Our people need a little discipline.' That feeling is reflected now, with Bhutto and all the old Islamic priests involved in waging the campaign banned from public appearance.
General Zia — almost alone in the senior ranks of the Pakistani army — is a devout, almost fanatical, Muslim. He believes implicitly in the necessity for the imposition of Nizam-i-Mustafa, the code of Koranic laws that run from prohibition to the amputation of the limbs of recidivist thieves. He believes his country was founded by a veritable saint (though the history of MrJinnah tells us otherwise) and that it has a destiny that transcends mere global politics.
After many years of increasing secularism — rural Pakistan has much of the appearance now of post-Ataturk Turkey, rather than, let us say, Saudi Arabia — there are few indications of a massive national desire for a return to the ways of Islamic dogma. The excuse that the massed poor are in favour of a return of Koranic rigours — one often employed by both the Mullahs of the PNA, as well as by General Zia's supporters — is contradicted by the certain knowledge that those same rural massed poor from Mr Butto's power base, and evidently have approved, and still do approve, of his western, secular habits.
That being so, it can be suggested that General Zia is in danger of provoking unhealthy resentment by sternly forcing the tenets of his religion down the throats of a Pakistani people who, the evidence was beginning to suggest, were moving away from blind acceptance of the creed. And given that some of the General's military colleagues — lqbal, for example, here in Lahore, is known to like his liquor and his lady-friends — do not share Zia's rigid adherence to Islamic purity, it is not entirely improbable that factions will develop, given time, within the senior ranks of the army. Two years of unbending martial law in Bangladesh appear to be leading to instability within the armed forces there. Unless Zia returns to Pakistan the freedom of choice he took away last weekend, he may find himself before long in the same kind of trouble that his namesake faces, two thousand miles to the east.
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