Pressure Builds As Bhutto Pushes Ahead to Endgame

President Pervez Musharraf yesterday began buckling to international pressure as Pakistan's attorney-general, Malik Mohammad Qayyum, suggested that the state of emergency - announced eight days ago in the midst of his 'post-modern coup' against his own regime - could be lifted within a month.

It came as the temporary house arrest imposed on former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, to prevent her from addressing a rally of tens of thousands of her supporters in Rawalpindi on Friday, was also lifted.

The latest concession by the President and chief of the army to the demands of Washington and London, which have been attempting to broker a power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto, comes after Musharraf suggested that elections, originally planned for January, would go ahead by 15 February.

His latest reversals came as Bhutto yesterday aligned herself for the first time with deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. The move by Musharraf is unlikely to be enough to end days of protests across the country - led by lawyers and journalists - over Musharraf's purging of the country's Supreme Court, which had sought to hold the regime accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.

The drama, at least where its two most visible protagonists - Musharraf and Bhutto - have been concerned, has given the impression of a series of contrived set-piece performances designed to bolster the individual standing of each. As such it has appeared to Pakistani and Western diplomats as an increasingly cynical political game, divorced from the realities of a country being pulled apart by Islamist extremism, Musharraf's dictatorial tendencies and the political opportunism of Bhutto.

Under pressure to respond to the declaration of emergency on 3 November, Bhutto has gradually shifted her position from one that for days saw her pointedly ignore the plight of the detained chief justice of the Supreme Court towards a defense of the 'real Supreme Court', which she now insists is the only court that can rule on the legality of Musharraf's re-election as President by a compliant National Assembly without having first given up the role of Chief of Staff of the Army.

The changing of her narrative was in evidence on Friday, as 'BB' was trapped inside a pleasant, leafy street of Islamabad to prevent her leading a rally of her Pakistani People's party supporters to the neighboring garrison city of Rawalpindi.

As she addressed supporters and the media, after failing to cross the police barricade of barbed wire which she charged was 'illegal detention' by the state, Bhutto's non-committal rhetoric, when she described Musharraf's proposals for a February election as a 'bit vague,' had coalesced into a more powerful peroration.

In it she subtly elided the crucial issues of Pakistan's current political crisis to suggest a continuum between the 'dictatorship of the Taliban' in Afghanistan, infecting northern Pakistan, with the 'dictatorship' of Musharraf, twin challenges for Pakistan. If it is a performance that Bhutto is putting on, it is one familiar to Pakistanis. On 18 November, 1992, in the middle of an identical struggle with the then Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto was penned in by barbed wire in an adjoining street as she tried to reach the same Rawalpindi Park, the Liaquat Bagh. She spoke then as now of initiating a 'long march' from Lahore to Islamabad.

'It is all a game,' said Kashif Abbasi, one of the blacked-out anchors from ARY One World TV in the scrum outside Bhutto's house on Friday afternoon. 'It's all part of her negotiation.'

It was not only among staff of the television stations closed down for criticizing Musharraf that the tepid leadership of 'BB' and other 'opposition' leaders - both in political and civil society - has come in for criticism in the last week. Outside the blue-painted District Court in Islamabad's F8 district last week, Tasadduq Abbosi, a 25-year-old lawyer, joined several hundred colleagues, including senior members of the Islamabad Bar Association, to demand that Musharraf step down.

'The problem,' he said, shouting to be heard above the chants of 'Go! Musharraf Go!', 'is that civil society is just not moving. It is just the lawyers really. Just one institution is out on the streets. We need the unions and public to join in.'

The issue of the lack of more popular support was taken up by Zaffar Abbas, the Islamabad editor at Dawn newspaper. 'You cannot blame the market traders for standing by while the lawyers demonstrate,' he said last week in his editorial offices. A direct feed from an affiliated TV station played in his office. Images that, if they were not blacked out across the country, might have had a profound effect on mobilizing support against Musharraf's clampdown.

'They will only join the rallies when they think that there can be a chance of change. Unless one of the opposition parties gets its people on the streets - in particular the People's party - it will remain like this.'

The result is that the opposition to the emergency thus far has limped along with demonstrations of a few hundred, largely uncovered in a country whose television has effectively been unplugged and amid targeted arrests across the country of precisely those people at local level - lawyers, human rights activists and party organisers - who could act in organizing large-scale opposition.

Yesterday, however, in a dramatic reversal of her lack of support for Chaudhry, Bhutto put on a show with a new script, appearing in her white SUV at the head of a column of her supporters, to very publicly demand his restitution. 'He is the chief justice, he is the real chief justice,' Bhutto blared over a megaphone, from within her car where she was blocked by police.

Bhutto repeated her call for supporters to join her in a 'long march' next week from Lahore to Islamabad to insist that 'President Musharraf honor his commitment before the Supreme Court and the promise he made to the Pakistan People's party during talks that he'll take off his uniform by 15 November.'

But the story of the last week is of her airbrushing the chief justice out of the picture, along with her sponsors in Washington or the UK, including British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

The fate of Chaudhry is not simply a technical issue affecting the lawyers and the judiciary, nor is it a personality clash with Musharraf. The troubled history of the Supreme Court under Chaudhry - suspended by Musharraf in March, reinstated after a four-month campaign by lawyers, and now purged again along with a group of like-minded judges - is at the heart of the crisis.

For in Pakistan, where the Supreme Court has traditionally been weak in the six decades since the state's establishment, Chaudhry and his colleagues had in 12 months reinvented it as a powerful new interlocutor in Pakistani society after eight years of steady, unpopular army encroachment into all aspects of Pakistan's life under Musharraf.

Acting on its own initiative, the court has demanded the appearance of intelligence chiefs to explain the disappearance of hundreds of 'missing' held by the agencies on suspicion of militancy. It challenged the state nationalization that it suspected senior government figures had received a kickback from.

And following the siege in July of the militant Red Mosque in Islamabad - the Lal Masjid - it insisted on investigating the circumstances of the assault on the mosque, upholding the rights of hundreds of madrassa students being held without charge, before most controversially ordering its reopening.

The central, divisive issue was the suspicion by Musharraf that the court was preparing to declare his recent re-election as President while still in uniform illegal. And while Musharraf has said one of the reasons for purging the court was its reopening of the mosque, it has not been lost on his critics that two of the judges who have agreed to join his new Supreme Court with reduced powers are the same who ordered the reopening.

Nor has it been ignored that Musharraf's new Supreme Court is essentially powerless. Its size has been cut by almost a third. Its so-called 'suo moto' privilege to call cases on its initiative has been removed. Crucially Musharraf's new provisional constitution insists no court should be able to issue decrees against 'the President, Prime Minister or any authority designated by the President'.

And why Bhutto has been so hesitant in calling for Chaudhry's restitution is simple - the allegations of corruption against Bhutto in Pakistan were revoked by a National Reconciliation Ordinance thrashed out with Musharraf. An aggressive and independent Supreme Court - under a reinstated Chaudhry - might yet revoke that ordinance.

'The crisis here has emerged in large part because Musharraf and others are not used to the idea of the courts doing what they ought to,' says Ali Dayan Hasan, the Human Rights Watch researcher in South Asia, based in Lahore. 'The army is resented by just about everyone now, including the Pakistani elite. In Musharraf's years in power it has extended its influence into all areas of society.'

So much so, argues Hasan, that Bhutto could not be 'swanning around' without the army's permission. 'It is,' he adds, 'a good reason to be cynical.'