Word: musharraf
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Last weekend, over 40 people were killed in Karachi in an orgy of murder, arson and looting. This was not unrest as usual in Pakistan. The carnage, which occurred when supporters of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry clashed with members of a political party allied to the President, General Pervez Musharraf, has placed new pressure on Pakistan's leader to find a way out of the vicious cycle of violence in which the nation finds itself...
...root cause of the weekend conflagration goes back two months, when Musharraf suspended Chaudhry and asked the Supreme Judicial Council, which consists of senior judges, to inquire into whether the Chief Justice had misused his office to get his son into the police force and to obtain other benefits-allegations Chaudhry denies. The Chief Justice has a reputation for incorruptibility and for defending the rights of the weak. But Chaudhry has also crossed the government repeatedly. He blocked the sale of state-owned Pakistan Steel Mills, citing irregularities in the privatization process. He launched embarrassing investigations into missing persons detained...
...many Pakistanis, Chaudhry's suspension is a stark reminder of the venal, institution-destroying politics that Musharraf claimed his 1999 coup was meant to correct. Small protests in support of Chaudhry, initially by the Bar Association, were brutally suppressed by the security forces, provoking even wider outrage. News coverage was throttled as well, with local television stations not just intimidated by regulators but physically attacked by armed police officers, in a dramatic reversal of the media freedom that many liberal Pakistanis had previously hailed as one of Musharraf's most important achievements in power...
...result, Pakistan-a frontline state in the war on terror whose stability is essential if that war is to be prosecuted with any success-is at an inflection point. An increasingly powerful opposition to Musharraf's rule has coalesced around the still-rumbling issue of the Chief Justice's suspension. It includes not just the activists of mainstream political parties such as former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party but also religious conservatives tired of being made into the scapegoats for the country's problems and progressive liberals alarmed by the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of the Musharraf...
...Where does Pakistan go from here, and who will take it there? Chaudhry has inadvertently become a rallying point for many Pakistanis disgruntled with Musharraf's regime. Another player is Bhutto, who lives in exile after twice being dismissed from power on allegations of corruption, which she denies. But she remains easily the most popular politician in Pakistan and is therefore an essential participant in any future setup that hopes to call itself democratic. The third player is of course Musharraf, well intentioned but increasingly ill advised. He has developed an alarming inability to distinguish between his individual interests...