Asia
Pakistan: the ex-PMs' roadshow
Published 13 September 2007
Rageh Omaar reports on the political upheavals or otherwise that took place when Nawaz Sharif attempted his return from exile
I flew into Islamabad airport the day before the airplane carrying Pakistan's deposed prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was due to touch down. For two weeks previously, TV and the print media on both sides of the Atlantic and here in Pakistan had been giving the strong impression that the return of the exiled former prime minister would be a tumultuous and defining moment in Pakistani politics. It was billed as a showdown between a civilian politician and the military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who had deposed him. The outcome would determine the future of the Pakistani state, without which the so-called war on terror would be fatally undermined.
That's not the impression you get in Islamabad. There was very little to suggest a security and police presence at the airport and there was little sign of Sharif's supporters and party activists, who only turned up in modest numbers the next day. In the city itself, just a few posters hailing his return could be spotted on lamp posts and in open spaces. The political reality on the streets of Pakistan's cities was very different from the news coverage. The significance of Sharif's return lay in how General Musharraf would react to it.
The Pakistani president is a man besieged by challenges from many quarters and the return of his two key exiled civilian opponents, Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, are only symptomatic of his waning authority. Barely four months ago it would have been inconceivable for Sharif and Bhutto to have insisted on returning from exile in London, or that Pakistan's supreme court would have ruled they be allowed to do so. But that was before Musharraf's catastrophic decision to launch a full-scale military assault on the Red Mosque, the most symbolic madrasa for conservative and militant Islamist opposition movements. The battle for the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July was the real breaking point in Pakistani politics, because of the enormous damage it did to Musharraf.
The idea that the choice now facing Pakistan is between a civilian-led government and military rule is erroneous. That was certainly true before July. But what happened at the Red Mosque revealed a far more profound struggle at the heart of Pakistani politics and national identity: a struggle between a wealthy and largely urban middle-class elite, which controls a state built on secular western-style institutions (whether that be the army, commerce, industry and the media), and a large majority of the poor, religiously conservative and predominantly rural population, who live in tribal and feudal communities and believe the government has failed them.
The Pakistani state has consciously radicalised the religious institutions on which the country's rural population has depended for guidance and education - namely the madrasas. This radicalisation took place under the noses and with the active participation of the American and British governments in the 1980s, in order to provide volunteers for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. And what was an important channel for this radicalisation? The Red Mosque.
In the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, from where I am writing this article, there is an almost complete lack of interest in Nawaz Sharif. No one I spoke to on the day of his brief return, before being deported to Saudi Arabia, had much to say about it. A group of men I spoke to in the main market of Peshawar pulled me aside and urged me as a journalist to come to their home village in Waziristan. "There is conflict and upheaval there," one of them said, "the schools are shut, the military are acting like occupiers. Life is horrible for ordinary people."
He is right. You may not see it on the evening news but there is a civil conflict in parts of Pakistan's tribal areas between religiously conservative tribal communities and the Pakistani army. At the time of writing, 300 Pakistani soldiers are being held hostage.
There will be much more in the western media over the coming months about the challenge to President Musharraf from his civilian political opponents. But the real struggle - for the national identity of Pakistan - will transcend individual political moments such as the return of exiled politicians with dubious track records.
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