Word: ayub
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PAKISTAN'S President Mohammed Ayub Khan might well embrace that melancholy observation as his political epitaph. He had promised to renounce power on the expiration of his presidential term next year, and meanwhile to restore parliamentary democracy to his disturbed land. Far from calming the civil disorders racking Pakistan, his renunciation intensified the dissensions threatening to tear apart the fragile unity of East and West Pakistan, and led to still more bloody rioting. Last week, with the disruption beyond his control, Ayub abruptly departed, turning over to the army the world's fifth most populous nation. His voice...
...Ayub added: "The country's economic system is paralyzed. Every problem is now being solved in the streets. Mobs surround any place they like and force acceptance of whatever they like. There is nobody left to raise a righteous voice." Accordingly, the President declared, there was no alternative but for the army's chief of staff, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, to assume all the powers of government...
Marauding Mobs. Parts of rural Pakistan were afire with a savagery unprecedented in the recent rioting. For the first time, large-scale disorders spread into the countryside north of Dacca, the eastern capital. Marauding mobs of villagers executed at least 60 of Ayub's "basic democrats" (electors) and "criminals" who had allegedly been favorites of the regime; the victims were drowned, beheaded or burned at the stake. Five policemen were killed trying to stop the rampage. In Dacca itself, where four cinemas were sacked and burned, demonstrators and strikers brought the commercial life of the city to a halt...
...Idealistic. The turmoil stemmed in part from the plans that Ayub had made for handing over his power. To a gathering of the leaders of eight moderate opposition parties, he candidly admitted the failure of his "basic democracy," which gave the power to choose Pakistan's President and rubber-stamp National Assembly to 80,000 popularly elected village elders and landlords. "I tried to evolve a system that was too idealistic or too unrealistic," Ayub said of the arrangement, which was based on the fact that four-fifths of Pakistan's 125 million people are illiterate. Still, Ayub...
...scope of Ayub's concession delighted some of the opposition leaders, but it did not please the President's principal critic, ex-Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He called for Ayub to resign in favor of a caretaker government, presumably to be headed by himself. Nor did Ayub's plan mollify two leading East Pakistan politicians, Sheik Mujibur Rahman and Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani, the 83-year-old leader of the pro-China faction of the National Awami Party...