Tale Of Two Dictators

The similarities between Zia ul Haq and Musharraf are uncanny and so are the differences...

By Amjad Bhatti

Some may term it an astrological surprise that the birthday of Pakistan's two dictators -- General Zia ul Haq and General (r) Pervez Musharraf -- falls one after the other. Zia was born on Aug 12, 1924 and Musharraf on Aug 11, 1943. It makes this "superstition" more intriguing when we note that Zia died as president of Pakistan on Aug 17, while Musharraf resigned from his post on Aug 18.

Zia joined the British Indian Army in New Delhi in 1943, the year when Musharraf was born and both fought the 1965 and 1971 wars against India.

General Zia was born in Jalandhar while General Musharraf was born in Delhi and the parents of both migrated to Pakistan after partition. Embedded in Mohajir identity, both overthrew the governments of prime ministers who had bypassed five senior generals to appoint them army chiefs. Some reports suggest that both were under scrutiny when the 1965 war broke out between India and Pakistan but their cases were closed because of the emergency situation.

Quick chronology

General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's is the longest martial rule in Pakistan, which continued for 11 years from 1977-1988. Appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976, General Zia-ul-Haq came to power after he overthrew the elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on July 5, 1977 and imposed Martial Law. He assumed the post of President of Pakistan in 1978 which he held till his death on Aug 17, 1988.

General (r) Pervez Musharraf rose to the rank of a general and was appointed as the Chief of Army Staff on Oct 7, 1998 when Pakistan's army chief, General Jehangir Karamat, resigned. General Musharraf was given additional charge of Chairman Joint Chiefs Staff Committee on April 9, 1999. On Oct 12, 1999, when through a bloodless coup the military took over the government in Pakistan, Musharraf became the head of the state designated as the chief executive. He assumed the office of President of Pakistan on June 20, 2001. In order to legitimise and legalise his rule, General (r) Pervez Musharraf held a referendum on April 30, 2002 thereby elected as President of Pakistan for a duration of five years.

In accordance with the deal with MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal), he agreed to leave the army on Dec 31, 2004 but continued to serve a five-year term as president, as he got a vote of confidence on January 1, 2004, from the parliament and the four provincial assemblies under the provision of the 17th Amendment passed by the National Assembly and the Senate.

Then again in another controversial move, Musharraf got himself elected for five years from the outgoing assemblies on Oct 6, 2007.

A shared doctrine

The action of overthrowing the elected governments by Zia and Musharraf was challenged in the courts but their overstepping was justified by the incumbent courts on the precedence of "doctrine of necessity" first introduced by Justice Munir in the Maulvi Tameezuddin case. In the case of Musharraf, however, the superior court not only legitimised his coup but extended the favour to let him amend the constitution at his will.

Referendum was another similar strategy employed by both military rulers through which they resumed presidency. The process and results of both the referendums were never accepted nor endorsed by political forces and independent analysts.

Both dictators grafted Pakistan Muslim League as their public face and handpicked politicians through a carrot and stick policy. If MQM was established in the Zia regime, its fullest utility was reaped by Musharraf as he always banked upon MQM as his ethnic constituency.

Common mentor

US emerged as their common mentor in securing the lease for their regimes from popular outrage and domestic resistance. The successive historical events indicate that domestic dictatorships in Pakistan were strategically subsidised by the foreign democracies. In the particular cases of Zia and Musharraf regimes, a popular perception suggests that Pakistan's security establishment was employed as a "client" to American interests and designs. First, in the Afghan Jihad and now in the 'war on terror', Pakistan entered into an active partnership with American adventures and military campaigns under the leadership of two military dictators -- first under Zia and then under Musharraf.

Some reports suggest that in 1979, President Zia's international standing greatly rose after his declaration to fight the Soviet "invaders" in Afghanistan. "He went from being portrayed as just another military dictator to a champion of the free world by the Western media," a report suggested. Jimmy Carter offered Pakistan $325 million in aid over three years. He also signed the funding in 1980 that allowed less than $50 million a year to go to the Mujahideen. After Ronald Reagan came to office, defeating Carter for the US Presidency in 1980, all this changed. Aid to the Afghan resistance, and to Pakistan, increased substantially. The United States, faced with a rival superpower looking as if it were to create another Communist bloc, engaged Zia to fight a US-aided war by proxy in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

A declassified document titled "Coordination Program for Combating Communism" dated August 7, 1951 outlined the American designs: "to destroy communist influence and develop a positive (counter) program based on the new national ideals of Pakistan." One of the purposes of this strategy enlisted in the dispatch suggested: "To show the communists as anti-God and therefore a threat to the continued existence of Muslim world as a free and independent religio-political entity."

This is the political and historical context in which American president Reagan termed the USSR an "evil empire" and engaged the Pakistan army under Zia in the "Afghan War." As a religious crusader, Zia made a para-military strategy to recruit Mujahideen and unleash a "proxy" war in Afghanistan. Religious elements became the building blocks for his regime.

Ideological divergence

But some two decades later, these building blocks for one dictator became the stumbling blocks for another; when Musharraf had to abandon his "boys" against the backdrop of 9/11.

War on terror led by America again dictated the change in Pakistan's strategy and Musharraf allowed military and intelligence support to NATO forces who designed to attack Afghanistan. Musharraf became the most important ally in the war on terror. America and Pakistan had to resume their place in the same battlefield which they left in 1989 after the withdrawal of Russian troops. But this time their target was their own nursery which had once implemented their war plans in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. As a result, a new insurgency has erupted not only on the Pak-Afghan borders but within the settled areas of Pakistan.

In the Zia regime, the protesting workers of Colony Textile Mills in Multan were besieged and targeted by the security forces, which enraged the populace. This time, in the Musharraf regime, it was Lal Masjid which brought accusations of brutality against the regime and a subsequent retaliation by the suicide bombers. Perhaps this was because of a perceived shift in the dictator's paradigm -- from "Islamisation" and "jihad" to "enlightened moderation" and liberalism.

If in the name of Islamisation a spate of sectarianism was flourished, suicide bombing was harvested by the architects of "enlightened moderation." A huge cost for an experimentation with dictatorship. It is, however, interesting to note that beneficiaries of one martial law become the protesters of other. And the tale of two dictators still continues. Neither did it end with the plane crash nor will it end with resignation. If peace is an interval between two wars, democracy is an interval between two dictatorships, at least in Pakistan.

Courtesy: The News Pakistan