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Desperate measures

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto drove discredited Pakistan’s discredited dictator, Pervez Musharraf, and his puppet Cabinet into a seemingly precarious position. Under domestic and international pressure, he has sought to create an impression of being reasonable. First, he had the Election Commission ‘consult’ all the political parties before announcing its decision to put off parliamentary and provincial assembly elections by a modest 40 days. Then h e inducted Scotland Yard into the investigation of the assassination, to neutralise the demand of the Pakistan People’s Party that a wider probe should be conducted by an international commission under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council. This is the third time in Pakistan’s history that Scotland Yard detectives have been brought in to assist investigations into high-profile assassinations; and, unfortunately, their efforts produced nothing of consequence on the previous occasions, in 1951 and 1996. As shown by the frustrating pace of the investigation into the assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, external agencies work against the odds in complicated situations on alien soil. With conspiracy theories flying around, a large number of Pakistanis seem to believe that their intelligence services were involved in the assassination. Suspicions on this score have only been strengthened by the way the Musharraf regime kept changing its narrative on how Benazir died. At first it came up with an ‘intercept’ pointing to an Al Qaeda plot featuring the Taliban warlord in Waziristan, Baitullah Mehsud, who denied any involvement. Then it trotted out the story of death by sun-roof fracture, with neither bullet nor explosive hitting the target. This yarn collapsed after DawnNews aired footage that established that a gun was fired by an apparent sharpshooter from about two metres away and that Benazir collapsed through the sun-roof into the car before the suicide bomber exploded. Scotland Yard certainly has its work cut out considering that much of the evidence at the assassination site was washed away through ‘inefficiency’ (as President Musharraf has claimed) or worse (as the PPP has alleged), and that the legal requirement of a post mortem was waived (at the request of Benazir’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari).

The postponement of the poll also smacks of an attempt to make the best of a bad situation. From all accounts, the PPP appeared poised to sweep to power on a sympathy wave much as the Congress did after the Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi assassinations. Such an outcome would hardly have been welcomed by a Musharraf regime that was clearly uneasy about the United States-brokered deal it had made with Benazir. All opposition forces in Pakistan expressed the apprehension that the government would use the assassination as an excuse to postpone the election well beyond the scheduled date of January 8. The electoral prospects of the ‘King’s Party,’ the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), which seemed hopeless in the wake of the assassination, could only improve if sympathy for the PPP abated, dissent cropped up within that party, and the opposition’s show of unity weakened during a prolonged hiatus. The Musharraf regime’s footing appears to be weak since it could put off the election only to February 18.

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