Murder charge haunts Musharraf’s return

Tom Hussain, foreign correspondent

• Last Updated: October 26. 2009 10:34PM UAE / October 26. 2009 6:34PM GMT

ISLAMABAD // Pervez Musharraf, who in the eight years before 2007 was undisputedly the most powerful man in Pakistan, faces arrest without the possibility of bail on murder charges if he chooses to return home after a lengthy lecture tour of Britain and the United States.

The murder charge, registered on October 8 on the orders of the Balochistan High Court, pertains to the 2006 killing, in a military operation ordered by Mr Musharraf, then the president, of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a tribal chief and politician who led an insurgency in western Balochistan province.

The court order is the latest chapter in the fall from grace of Mr Musharraf, the former army chief who seized power in a bloodless coup in October 1999, rapidly growing in stature from being a self-anointed “chief executive” in commando fatigues to an immaculately groomed global statesman of the post-September 11 era.

The August 2006 killing of Bugti, for 40 years the leading politician of Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, sparsely populated but rich in natural resources, is the earliest in a sequence of acts of dictatorial governance that have come to haunt Mr Musharraf.

He had greeted news of the killing, while sojourning at a hill resort, by issuing a late-night public statement of congratulations to the participating army units.

An instant wave of public revulsion prompted his publicists to withdraw the statement the next morning, but the damage it caused to the public’s perception of Mr Musharraf was irreversible.

For the first time, his soft-touch government had owned up to being the military junta it was, and an unrepentant, ruthless dictator replaced the dashing figure cut by Mr Musharraf, who had actually succeeded in overshadowing Pakistan’s exiled popular politicians, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Indeed, the filing of the murder charges against a former head of state, unprecedented in Pakistan’s legal history, is a blowback from Mr Musharraf’s next contentious move – his attempt in March 2007 to force Iftikhar Chaudhry, the chief justice, to resign.

The blocking of that move by a rebellious judiciary sparked the first popular protests of the Musharraf era, and turned the private cable news channels, which owed their existence to a decision taken in the generous early days of the Musharraf era, into his fiercest critics.

Stubborn and uncompromising, Mr Musharraf went on to declare a state of emergency (which he admitted shortly afterwards was civilian window-dressing for the imposition of martial law) in November 2007, using it to fire judges, shut down private news channels, and promulgate a law – the National Reconciliation Ordinance – that granted him immunity from prosecution for those acts, in return for the withdrawal of longstanding corruption and criminal cases against many politicians, notably Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, the current president.

Mr Musharraf had evidently thought the law – part of a political transition deal brokered by the United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia – would enable him to stay on as president for another five-year term, and to use the constitutional powers of the post to control a fractious parliament.

However, the assassination of Bhutto in December 2007 changed the political mood of the country and swept her Pakistan People’s Party into power in February 2008.

Under intense political and public pressure, the army, which had months earlier assured Mr Musharraf of its support, deputed Gen Nadeem Taj, a relative, to ask him to step down “for the sake of the reputation of our institution”, leading to his resignation in August 2008.

Mr Musharraf’s political career has since gone into freefall, with erstwhile confidants abandoning him in droves.

His legal team, led by Sharifuddin Pirzada, author of constitutional amendments enacted by several Pakistani military juntas, and Malik Abdul Qayyum, a disgraced High Court judge who was Mr Musharraf’s attorney general, have leaked to the press their refusal to represent Mr Musharraf in the Bugti murder trial. The team has not in fact represented Mr Musharraf since he stepped down from power.

Indeed, Mr Musharraf and two of the three politicians also charged have to date been unable to find a lawyer willing to defend them in the Bugti death.

Similarly, practically all the politicians persuaded or coerced into joining the civilian government pieced together by the military’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate after elections in 2002, which Bhutto and Mr Sharif were barred from contesting, have in recent months issued public statements saying there was no room in their respective parties for Mr Musharraf.

One motivation is the fear of being tarred with the Bugti murder brush. Another is an attempt by Mr Musharraf, even after being forced to step down, to manipulate those politicians, with the aim of returning to the political arena, ideally as the head of the Pakistan Muslim League faction he created soon after seizing power – a move that caused the faction to fracture.

Mr Musharraf thus finds himself on the margins of “Af-Pak”, a geostrategic play he helped create, fighting another futile battle for survival in the eyes of his former international partners, and helpless to exorcise the ghosts of his domestic excesses.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae