February 26, 2008

The old is new again (minus ideas) in the murky world of Pakistani politics

Eric Ellis
 

AUSTRALIANS know how it feels. They felt it last November. A nation rises the day after an election with the warm inner glow of having voted for change, a fresh start. Everything seems new again.

That's a bit how Pakistanis feel after last week's election. Civilian rule is to be restored after nine years of dictatorship. They voted out the pro-Taliban Islamists as well, so the terror-panicked West gets to feels the love too.

Except that in Pakistan, it's always complicated. Pakistanis have voted for a fresh start, but they have also taken a trip back to the future. It's a democratic step forward in a country too often denied it, but the election underlines how limited and rancid Pakistani politics is.

There was no Rudd, Garrett or Wong in the ranks of the winners, the parties of Benazir Bhutto's widower Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. They are well known to Pakistanis — and each other.

They didn't win the election on policy, or the persuasive power of new ideas. They won the poll mostly because they weren't Pervez Musharraf, the hated career general of a president and America's best friend in Washington's war on terror.

When Australians vote, as in most democracies, they go to the ballot box in the reasonable knowledge of who could be prime minister, and often have a fair idea of the presumptive treasurer and who is lined up for the other senior cabinet slots.

Pakistanis voted into an executive vacuum, with no idea who will formally be running their country. The five most important political figures in the country were not candidates. President Musharraf did not run because this was a parliamentary poll and Pakistan has adopted an unwieldy co-habitation system.

Election winners Sharif and Zardari did not stand either. Sharif was convicted of hijacking and corruption. Zardari was also charged, with corruption and murder, and faces money-laundering charges. Benazir's son, Bilawal, whom she anointed as her party's co-chairman with her husband, Zardari, was, at 19, too young to stand. And Altaf Hussain, the powerful man in Karachi, who runs the city by telephone and loudspeaker broadcasting his calls from London, has hundreds of criminal cases pending against him and doesn't dare return.

Pakistan's cleanest politician is probably its most ineffective one, former cricketer Imran Khan. He gets Western media coverage only because he was once a famous sportsman and had a glamorous English wife, Jemima. Khan has as much relevance to contemporary politics in Pakistan as perhaps Ted Mack did in Australia.

This election heralds a fresh start with craggy old faces. Zardari and Sharif represent two feudal dynasties, Zardari's from Sindh in Pakistan's south and Sharif's from Punjab, the dominant north-central province. Both dynasties have twice been in power before, when Pakistan was at its most corrupt.

The Bhutto dynasty financed the Taliban, Sharif built Islam's first atomic bomb. All four of their terms were cut short by military coup or constitutional removal by the judiciary or the presidency on grounds of corruption.

The wealthy Zardari, "Mr 10%" as he is known to Pakistanis, has never been prime minister — the closest he got was environment minister in his late wife's first administration.

But he did spend 11 years in jail on charges from corruption to murder, first imprisoned by Nawaz Sharif and happily kept inside by Musharraf.

Having ousted the "King's Party" — the Musharraf-friendly government — now he's the king-maker, if not the king himself, because his Pakistan People's Party got the most votes. Now he has to co-exist with Sharif, the man who jailed him, to form Pakistan's first national unity government and together perhaps oust the man who jailed both of them, Musharraf.

But Musharraf has Pakistan's powerful military and the US on his side, and still has four years constitutionally to run as president. The support of two-thirds of the parliament is needed to start impeachment proceedings against him, votes that Zardari-Sharif don't quite have, votes the US hopes they will never get.

Islamabad seethes with intrigues and long memories of how venal political retribution can be here. Musharraf's ousted parliamentary leader, Sheik Rasheed, knows it — he exiled himself to Spain on election day.

It all reduces to who hates whom less. But so far everyone is being nice to each other. This is particularly unusual in Pakistani politics. There has never been a peaceful transfer of power in Pakistan between two elected governments.

Pakistan has been run by the military for 34 of the 60 years since independence from Britain, and in a country where people identify themselves by their region first, then as Pakistanis, the military sees itself as the custodian of the moderate unitary state. And the nuclear weapons are pointed at India.

Pakistan is scarred deeply with a violent vengeful past. For all of this to work, this shiny new Pakistan will need forgiveness, to have not just one Mandela among its leaders' ranks, but a score of them.

There are no Mandelas in Pakistan. All it has is hope.

Eric Ellis, the South-East Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine, was an official monitor of last week's Pakistan election.