Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteISLAMABAD (Reuters) - President Pervez Musharraf rejected calls to declare emergency powers and wants Pakistan's elections to happen, a spokesman said on Thursday after reports the beleaguered leader would opt for authoritarian rule. [1]
Emergencies, in general, are never rejectionable. Earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, and fires all the way forward to insurrections and the sacking of cities care not for bureaucrats, definitions, and their laws.
However, both time and peace plus contemplation and consideration have made emergencies of all sorts gradable.
As some earthquakes are small, after all, some challenges to the powers may be that also.
Time tells.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's most recent decision to err on the side of democracy in action fits a line of decisionmaking that has long defied American expectations, if not western and global ones in general, about what a dictator should be and how that being should act.
Instead of the angry fists, the street fights, the Kalashnikob's burping, Musharraf's coup spilled no blood; the only persons truly physically threatened by the process would seem to have been Musharraf himself and the passengers and crew of the airplane conveying his return to an airport that until pursuaded otherwise refused his landing.
I've come to Musharraf's story late and through the prism of Lal Masjid.
The short "back story", as Hollywood would call it, for the mosque includes six months of progressive nose twisting in the vicinity by Madrasah students under fundamentalist leadership.
Any ordinary Stalin would have crushed that impertinence without apology, but this one who is no Stalin, thank God, seems to ahve patiently weighed the consequences of considered actions against the long-term potential effects on his country, economically, politically, socially for about six months.
He evidently neither wished to see his country come apart or become isolated.
With student actions ramped up to targeting foreign nationals and then baiting and engaging his police with those aforementioned props, the banging Kalashnikovs, Lal Masjid set Musharraf's course--and then there's the delicate--I think masterful--choreography of the event from the government's side: getting out and providing amnesty to students willing and able to take that course and returning them to their families; producing ample time for negotiating a peaceful resolution to the crisis, putting that ball--the one that would keep it a violent engagement--clearly in the militant's court; not only lining up the facilities for the wounded and dead to come, but also the identification technologies, the swift buriel policy and related logistics, all of that, to minimize trauma to the country overall; and then, having much less of an idea about how much firepower had been laid up in the mosque, committing the military's best, most disciplined rangers to still rescuing children and sparing lives down to the bloddy and fiery end (and one militant, I recall, was spared when found alone in a bathroom).
The superficial knee-jerk American hoo-ha often reverts to the notion that Musharraf was pushed by American "diplomacy" (bullying) to take the stance he has against terrorism, and that sentiment finds its returning chorus in Pakistani xenophobia, whose most vocal proponents play the General as an American puppet, a sentiment I believe has its roots in the same soup from which their American counterparts draw succor: a deeply ingrained sense of vulnerability that pushes out in boast and violence.
More to the core of Musharraf psychology may be the characteristics of the universal middle class experience: not humiliation, but humility; not elitism, but the common good decency that may be founded in a broad and generous education; not intemperance in warfare, the world, or politics but a modest affluence and a moderate temperament to suit.
That's not a dictator.
Dictators erect monuments to themselves.
Dictators assemble crowds and produce shows of adulation, often with troops lending encouragement to participation by providing their customary dose of menace.
Dictators do away with their competitors, no questions asked, no apologies offered.
Where dictators fear insurrection and protest, elected presidents may find both healthy and informative and seldom so insurmountable as to have created an emergency.
1. Haider, Zeeshan. "Musharraf rejects emergency." Reuters, August 9, 2007, 5 p.m. EDT
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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