What don’t we know?

What don’t we know?

By Kamran Shafi

WHAT is it that Gen (retd) Musharraf knows that we don’t? There must be something, lots of something actually, considering his actions and that of his junta of the past few weeks. Consider:

It’s been a full fifty-three days since His Lordship the Chief Justice of Pakistan and sixty other judges of the Supreme and High Courts were thrown out of office by the chief of the army staff using emergency powers bestowed upon himself by abrogating whatever we had left of the Constitution.

Fifty-three days later, with the exception of a few judges, the majority of them including the CJ continue to remain under house arrest. The arrest is so all-encompassing that even their children — the CJ has a young family — are not allowed out of the house lest they indulge in nefarious activities such as going to school, taking exams, etcetera.

Fifty-three days later, Islamabad the Beautiful still gives the look of a city under siege: there are barricades everywhere you look, manned by rude and offensive and loutish personnel of some ‘agency’ or the other.

Fifty-three days later, Aitzaz Ahsan, Justice Tariq Mahmood and Ali Ahmad Kurd are under arrest in their own homes, Munir Malik only getting his release when his health deteriorated to such an extent that the junta had to get him off their hands lest it be charged with murder. The latest on Aitzaz is that he was manhandled and re-arrested on the motorway while on his way to Islamabad the Beautiful with the approval of the authorities.

The worst moments during the re-arrest of this eminent barrister, former many-time member of both houses of parliament; former interior minister; presently president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, came when the goons in civvies pointed a cocked weapon at his young son’s midriff. Way to go, Gen (retd) Musharraf!

It’s been 53 days since he ‘sorted out’ the CJ, and yet Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf does not tire of saying the nastiest things about him, his latest tirade coming at a dinner thrown by PAK-PAC, going to the extent of accusing the CJ of common theft and repeating the ludicrous charges that were laughed at by most of the country when the reference was being heard.

For example about the CJ summoning “senior officials” of the government to appear before him for little infringements. The retired general little realises that for a populace that has been kicked about by government officials for well on 60 years it is sweet revenge to see someone, in the instant case the CJ, kick the “senior officials” about for a change.

He has also carped again about how the CJ was conspiring against him. The facts of the matter are that the CJ recused himself from the bench hearing the petitions against Gen (retd) Musharraf and appointed a judge considered ‘friendly’ to him and who has now, by the by, been appointed Chairman of the Press Council or whatever it is called, with salary and perks commensurate with that of a judge of the Supreme Court. So let’s get off that one!

Gen (retd) Musharraf should take a quick course in the judicial history of Pakistan. He will find that judges have sat on benches despite the accused declaring no confidence in them as in Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s case before Maulvi Mushtaq.

When Mr Bhutto complained about Maulvi’s partiality, Maulvi addressed the former president and prime minister of this luckless country in words to the effect: “Shut up, you are an accused” and when Bhutto protested: “I can even have you whipped in jail.” “Remove his chair,” Maulvi thundered to the court staff. He then made Mr Bhutto stand for two days during his hearings before the LHC bench which subsequently sentenced him to hang. This is what Pakistani justice is about, General Sahib (retd). My Lord Iftikhar Chaudhry proved his impartiality as a judge by removing himself voluntarily from all the cases to do with you.

May I, in passing, make a suggestion? Since the CJ has so got under Gen (retd) Musharraf’s skin, why doesn’t he challenge the CJ to a TV debate, no holds barred, on any TV channel, even PTV? Why, even a foreign channel, say CNN, could be requested to host it (which any of them would give their right arm for!).

Gen (retd) Musharraf is very well spoken; he looks extremely well-presented and handsome in his designer suits as Mushahid ‘Mandela’ Hussain has always assured us. Let him then level any accusation he might, and let the CJ defend himself. Most people including my readers and I are simply up to here with hearing the same, tired allegations over and over again.

This reminds me. Whenever I refer to Mushahid Hussain as ‘Mandela’ I get a huge number of emails castigating me for even taking the man’s name in the same breath as the great Nelson Mandela’s. Every time that happens I explain that it has nothing to do with the man sharing any of Nelson Mandela’s great attributes of head and heart.

The reason I refer to our own ‘Mandela’ now and again is because he had the temerity to compare his own three-month imprisonment after Nawaz Sharif’s government was overthrown, in what could only be an Army Officers Mess, with Nelson Mandela’s long incarceration. In his own words:

“About a year earlier, I had been assigned as minister-in-waiting to Nelson Mandela … I had asked him, as the 20th century’s most celebrated political prisoner (Mushahid being the second-most?), what were the most difficult moments of his 27 years in detention. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, ‘solitary imprisonment’.

“My time in solitary imprisonment would be much shorter, my experience far less harrowing. But I was to learn something of what he meant … I scheduled my day. I would study the Quran with concentration for a stretch of two hours, take a break, walk the 22 paces I had marked out in my room, do some stretching and then resume my Quranic reading”. Twenty-two paces marked out in his “room”? I ask you!

What effrontery is the man’s! For 20 years, the over-six-foot Nelson Mandela was kept imprisoned in a six-foot by seven-foot cell on Robben Island with barely enough space to lie down. He was supplied just one bucket in which he defecated, and after cleaning it out, in which he had to wash too. All day, every day, he was put to work in a rock quarry breaking rocks. And Mushahid ‘Mandela’ Hussain “marked out” 22 paces in his “room”? By golly the man has brass.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Mushism of the Week: “We issued a code of conduct and asked them to sign it. It’s as good as you have in your own country.” And when told that there was no ‘code of conduct’ for the media in the US, “No, the code of conduct is there in most countries of the world. Why should we compare the United States to Pakistan?” — Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf; Washington Post, Dec 16, 2007

P.S. Musharraf has even held on to Army House — what does he know that we don’t?

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk