In that note, Musharraf reportedly wrote that if the duo shared power after the 2008 elections in Pakistan, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry would have to be dismissed in the new arrangement. Benazir had rebutted Musharraf with the words, “I disagree.”
But Baz Mohammed – who led the rallies to restore the chief justice after Musharraf dismissed him for “insubordination” – said Benazir was merely “point scoring.” Still, he arranged for the chief justice to meet Benazir’s emissary, Farooq Naik, where the two discussed the judiciary’s role in a future PPP government.
Benazir clearly planned for difficult times ahead. In her second tenure as prime minister, she had been irked by the independence of the judiciary. At the time, she had clashed with her own appointed chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah after he refused to endorse her choices of judges to the Punjab High Court and instead laid down the principle for their appointments.
PML (N) chief, Mian Nawaz Sharif proved to be even less tolerant of an independent judiciary and in 1997 sponsored the storming of the supreme court when it was poised to give a verdict against him. But in 1999, Sharif was ousted in a military coup by Gen. Musharraf and forced to go into exile in Saudi Arabia. With both Sharif and Chaudhry falling victim to Gen. Musharraf’s autocratic behavior, the ousted prime minister would use his clout to help reinstate the ousted chief justice.
For the newly-returned Benazir, it had become essential to square off with a chief justice who had become a folk hero in Pakistan. Even PPP’s former law minister from the Punjab, Aitzaz Ahsan – who had in 1986 watched Benazir take his city of Lahore by storm – had in her absence aligned himself with the defiant chief justice. Not only did Aitzaz drive the ousted chief justice to massive public rallies because – as political commentator I. A. Rehman wrote – “he liked driving,” but because he sought to bridge the espoused ideals of the PPP and an increasingly independent judiciary.
Anxious to show that she too considered the chief justice a hero, Benazir appeared to temporarily forget that she had returned to Pakistan through a quid pro quo deal with Musharraf. Instead, as Musharraf ousted Chaudhry for a second time in November 2007, she led a group of human rights activists to demand that he be released from house arrest.
The world saw Benazir stand outside the residence of the chief justice, where she bellowed into a megaphone, “He is our chief justice,” and asked for bar cutters to cut through the barbed wires.
But an e-mail sent by Benazir to PPP loyalist Taj Haider only six days before her murder showed she remained privately skeptical of Chaudhry. In it, she wrote “Judges are highly politicized and need to be judged in light of their judgments.”
Baz Mohammed said that when Benazir came to Quetta, she told him that once the PPP government came to power they would “restore all the judges except the chief justice.” He says she was most concerned about the Supreme Court’s ruling against the NRO, which threatened to reopen corruption cases against the PPP government.
Anticipating that the NRO would become the Achilles heel for the PPP government, in July 2007 Bhutto had secretly worked with President Gen. Musharraf to remove the wealth of her family and Zardari’s close friends from Swiss banks. “There was pressure on her to do so from Zardari’s “friends,” who lived overseas and now form part of his government,” sources close to her told me.
“Not so fast,” said officials of the US government, who deployed their National Security Agency (NSA) – tucked away behind clumps of trees along the Baltimore Washington parkway – to wire tap phone conversations between Benazir and her son Bilawal. In them, she was alleged to have spoken to Bilawal about the family’s secret bank accounts before she embarked on the dangerous trip to Pakistan.
Despite Benazir’s best efforts, the reinstatement of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Chaudhry and his revocation of the NRO would come back to haunt the PPP government long after she was gone.
The Chief Justice Notices the Disappeared
To understand why the chief justice from Balochistan was considered a hero at the time of Benazir’s return, it is essential to put his actions in context. In a nation where supreme court judges have endorsed military regimes, Iftikhar Chaudhry’s refusal to resign on President Gen. Musharraf’s orders was unprecedented. Moreover, the Baloch insurgency had peaked when he summoned the intelligence agencies to produce persons “disappeared” by the military.
It was in Balochistan, whose capital, Quetta is nestled by hilly ranges lightly dusted with snow in winter, that the chief justice’s ruling against disappearances received the widest acclaim. Balochistan has an undulating terrain of grey hills, which stretch seamlessly northwest into the Taliban insurgent areas of Qandahar and Helmand in Afghanistan. To the west of Quetta, the desert plateau meets the Taftan-Zahidan border – where the operations by the Sunni Baloch Jundallah against Iran’s predominantly Shia population have created a new tension between Pakistan and Iran.
The convergence of “cross border intelligence agencies,” in Balochistan has turned it into a hub of conspiracies and made governance from Islamabad an even more daunting task.
After 9/11, the Musharraf administration’s alliance with the US in the ‘War on Terror,’ allowed the army to clamp down on a simmering Baloch insurgency with the type of secrecy they used to hunt down Al Qaeda militants. While the Afghan Taliban was left free to operate in Balochistan, the administration made Baloch secessionists disappear under the smokescreen of combating terrorists.
Fuelling Balochistan’s insurgency was the fact that its disarming barren exterior hides rich deposits of minerals, coal and natural gas, which make a significant contribution to the nation’s energy needs. Islamabad’s failure to pay royalties and subsidies to Balochistan and its tight fisted control of the provincial government has fanned the tribal and secessionist movement, which reached a new pitch under Musharraf.
In 2005, when tribal leaders Nawab Akbar Bugti and Khair Baksh Marri mounted an insurgency against Musharraf, the army hunted down and killed their tribal fighters in the mountainous strong holds of Dera Bugti and Kohlu districts. In turn, the militant tribesmen ambushed and killed constabulary from the Frontier Corp, blew up gas pipelines and sabotaged train supplies to the province.
As rocket attacks accelerated, the Musharraf government set up a new military base and camps for army officers along the Sui gas field. The military and Baloch militant nationalists now engaged in a full scale war, backed by missiles and propaganda from both sides. From the government side, the District Coordination Officer Dera Bugti Abdus Samad Lasi told me that the tribal leaders like Nawab Akbar Bugti were responsible for keeping their people poor and backward, even as they used their tribesmen to fight their wars.
Enter a young woman doctor from Karachi, Dr Shazia Khalid, who then worked in Pakistan Petroleum Ltd, which manages the gas fields in Balochistan. Living alone at the company’s onsite hospital, she was woken one night in January 2005 and reportedly raped at gunpoint by an army officer. Despite company directives to stay quiet, she testified against the offending captain.
Shazia’s testimony to the media sent a match through the smoldering Bugti insurgency. Baloch insurgents intensified their attacks on army personnel and blew up gas pipelines, severing gas supply to the rest of the country.
Hustled into exile into London, Shazia spoke to me from her new location. Gen. Musharraf had rejected insinuations that any army man could be involved. However, annoyed by the negative publicity, Pakistan’s officials had arranged for her to go abroad. As she awaited an immigration visa for Canada, Musharraf added insult to her injury with his remark, quoted in the Washington Post in September 2005: “If you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.”
The remark, obviously intended for a victim of rape, hurt the young woman. “It has made me lose hope of receiving any justice in Pakistan,” Shazia told me in a voice muted with pain.
From his hiding place in Dera Bugti, t
he former governor of Balochistan and tribal chieftan, Nawab Akbar Bugti was livid that Shazia had been raped by an army man – and that he was being protected by the military president. In a voice that shook with anger, he told me that Baloch tribesmen would not rest until Shazia’s rapist was brought to trial. Without waiting to differentiate, he declared, “You in the West may take rape lightly but we in Balochistan consider it a grave human rights violation of women.”
On August 27, 2006, the army used satellite telephones to trace Bugti to an elaborate complex of caves he inhabited in Dera Bugti, where he was killed in a massive army operation.
In the US, where President Musharraf had managed to blur the lines between the terrorism launched by the Taliban and the insurgency by Baloch nationalists, Bugti’s murder was lumped with Pakistan’s ongoing war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The day after Nawab Akbar Bugti was murdered, an influential US newspaper cited Bugti’s murder as the death of a “terrorist.”
For a while Musharraf’s operation against the Baloch nationalists broke the back of the insurgency. But in death, Bugti became a martyr. It rekindled memories of Balochistan’s forced annexation to Pakistan and further provoked Baloch militants to seek arms and money from other countries in order to secede from the federation.
Around the time of the operation against Bugti, intelligence agencies secretly picked up secessionist leaders, locked them in 4×4 ft prisons without sunlight and tortured them in order to force them to “confess” their links with India and Afghanistan and foreign intelligence agencies. Baloch activists were picked up, blindfolded and thrown from a detention center across Balochistan’s hot desert plateau – with their whereabouts kept secret from their families.
Balochistan Republican Party (BRP) leader Mir Wadood Raisani’s mother has, for 14 years, campaigned against the intermittent detention and interrogation of her son. When I met her, Raisani was still missing. His nephew Nisar Ahmed – a young man with a proud demeanor – was angry with the run around given to the family. His spirit exemplified the new generation: “We are not going to beg them to release my uncle. We will keep on fighting until we get Balochistan liberated from Pakistan.”
Around this time, Sindhi nationalist Asif Baladi was also kidnapped by military intelligence officials and questioned about his “Indian connections.” Baladi was taken to Quetta, Balochistan where he saw hundreds of missing Baloch youth whose families had given them up for dead.
Figure 12 Protest rally against enforced disappearances of nationalist leaders of Sindh and Balochistan, taken in Hyderabad, Sindh on July 1, 2007 (Dawn photo).
Another activist from Baladi’s Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz, Dr Safdar Sarki, was also abducted by intelligence officials from his Karachi residence when he visited Pakistan in 2005. Sarki, a US citizen, was blindfolded and kept in detention centers whose locations he guessed at by their temperature or by the accents of his interrogators. Although US officials questioned his disappearance, military authorities in Pakistan shrugged off knowledge of his whereabouts.
Six months later, the chief justice of the Supreme Court managed to get Sarki produced before a Zhob magistrate in Balochistan. He was found sick and emaciated after being tortured. In May 2008, Sarki returned to the US to talk about his ordeal. He said that after his release, he had looked with trepidation at his image in the mirror: “The person who looked back at me made me break down in tears.”
Dressing the Wounds of Balochistan
In November 2007, Benazir arrived in Balochistan with a message of reconciliation for the Baloch. In Karachi, she visited tribal chief, Sardar Khair Baksh Marri, to condole him for the death of his son, Balach Marri, who was killed during Musharraf’s army operation in Kohlu. She also demanded the release of Baloch chiefs like Sardar Akhtar Mengal and Sardar Talal Bugti, who had been imprisoned in this period.
With the upcoming election in mind, Benazir worked to smooth anger against the federation and mobilize for a provincial PPP government in Balochistan. Much needed to be done to allay perceptions that she might follow in the footsteps of her late father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – whose dismissal of the National Awami Party government in Balochistan had, in 1973, triggered the Baloch insurgency.
The wizened PPP secretary general in Balochistan, Bismillah Khan Kakar – who sits in an unassuming party office in the crowded Quetta bazaar – shuddered at the way Benazir ignored security in favor of populism. As the trusted party official in charge of her security, in December 2007, Kakar vainly tried to dissuade Benazir from visiting the home of PPP worker, Azizullah Memon, who had recently passed away.
“We told her the security situation was not good but then she insisted that she would go on foot,” said Bismillah Khan, the despair penetrating his sing-song Pushto accent.
Benazir went to address a rally in Afghanistan’s border town of Quetta with the words people had come to hear: “Every dictator has to date been supported by the US. All we have got under Musharraf are dead bodies in Karachi and warlords in Afghanistan.”
The US – which had negotiated the Benazir-Musharraf deal to allow their strong man to rule with a democratic face – was, by then, growing embarrassed by her public denunciations. The Bush administration’s ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson privately communicated to Benazir that she should tone down her rhetoric.
But Benazir had set a populist tone, which Asif Zardari too was obliged to follow. In the post-Benazir period, President Zardari apologized to the people of Balochistan for the military action under Musharraf. His government set up a commission entitled Aghaz-i-Huqooq-i-Balochistan (Initiation of the Rights of Balochistan), headed by PPP Senator Raza Rabbani, which promised repayment of billions in arrears owed for sui gas from the province, as well as royalties for its rich natural resources.
But although the tone of the PPP government had changed, the content remained the same. There was little follow up to ensure that the province received its due share. Instead, Balochistan remains economically depressed to this day: major power outages have undercut water provided by tube wells and damaged agriculture. Unemployment remains high – in 2010, nearly 40,000 graduates turned out to apply for 5,000 teaching jobs.
After Zardari took over as President, the chief of the UNHCR and American national, John Solecki was kidnapped in Quetta and the secessionist Baloch Liberation United Front claimed responsibility. Around that time, three Baloch nationalist leaders – Ghulam Muhammad, Sher Muhammad and Lala Munir – were abducted from a lawyer’s office in Turbat, Makran. While Solecki was released, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Baloch nationalists were found in the desert.
In a small town like Quetta – where intelligence officials lurk in plain view outside the court where the nationalists were to be tried – people appeared to know their killers. When a shutter down strike ensued in the impoverished Balochistan province, it was not only a protest against the “hidden hands” but a referendum on the helplessness of the Zardari government.
Late Tahir Mohammed Khan – who had served as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s federal minister and confidante – had watched Benazir try to dress Baloch wounds while she moved through his hometown in Quetta. Speaking with the considered wisdom that matched his experience he said, “Even if Benazir were alive today, she would have remained subservient, because the establishment and the bureaucracy remain very strong.”
Musharraf’s Emergency Breaks
On November 3, 2007, as President Gen. Musharraf lost his grip over power and imposed emergency, the frenetic pace of events only intensified Benazir’s sense of mission. Convinced that the chief justice would not revalidate his second term as president, Musharraf put him under house arrest, removed 60 judges and curtailed civil rights, including media freedom.
As if sensing that everything would unravel, Benazir flew from Dubai to Pakistan the same day that Gen. Musharraf imposed emergency. Given that her deal with Musharraf was public knowledge, she took extra pains to distance herself from the general. It was, in every sense, like
walking a tight rope. Benazir’s association with Musharraf threatened to damage her vote bank as well.
Shortly after the emergency, I too flew to Karachi to a succession of unfolding events that would usher in the current political landscape. Thousands of lawyers, journalists and NGO leaders were under house arrest or jailed for their opposition to President Musharraf’s Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO), which mandated loyalty to him rather than the constitution. In Sindh, 12 out of 17 high court judges had adopted the chief justice’s directives and refused to take oath under the PCO – a pattern replicated by judges in the country’s four provinces.
Among those who refused to take oath was the deposed chief justice of the Sindh High Court, the late Sabihuddin Ahmed. After the emergency, police had blocked the road to his home to stop him from officiating as chief justice. With his curling moustache and a habit of drawing puffs of tobacco smoke between short and often sardonic remarks, Justice Sabihuddin greeted me warmly at the door.
Inside, Justice Sabihuddin leafed through the constitution to show me the paragraph that read that it was illegal for the chief of army staff to declare an emergency when there was no external threat to the country.
Shortly after becoming a judge, Justice Sabihuddin had flagged me down from his official chauffer driven car. I had pulled over to the side of the road, wondering if I had violated traffic laws. On my rolling down the window, he had walked up to my car – puffing away, with his big agreeable smile – to say, “Do drop by and see me sometimes. You folks have stopped seeing me since I became a judge.”
But in November 2007, the legal community was in turmoil. A retired judge of the Sindh High Court, Justice Majida Rizvi was upset at Musharraf’s novel methods to induct new judges. In Sindh, she said, lawyers received phone calls from the intelligence agencies saying that the government would revive cases pending against them in the National Accountability Bureau if they did not agree to become judges.
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