Bush pleased as Gen. Musharraf yields to U.S. pressure

On July 10, even as a third U.S. aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, was on its way to the Gulf to threaten Iran and other countries in that besieged region, the Pakistani army, under orders of President Gen. Parvez Musharraf, was storming a mosque in the center of its capital city, Islamabad.

The assault on the Lal Masjid mosque—with tanks, heavy machine guns, teargas and explosives—killed scores of its defenders, including young women students from the seminary, or madrassa, located inside the large compound.

This brutal and bloody end to what had started months ago as a seemingly minor issue over a land title involving the madrassa can only further enflame popular outrage at the Musharraf regime. Musharraf, who first took power through a military coup in 1999, was already widely seen as a tool of the Bush administration’s offensive against militant Islam and a collaborator with imperialist powers bent on expansion throughout the region.

The mosque had been under siege by the army for seven days. On July 9, a delegation of prominent figures, including Muslim clerics, tried to negotiate a peaceful end to the standoff. After nine hours, however, the area around the mosque was cleared and negotiations were broken off under orders of the army.

The assault began at 4:30 a.m. on the 10th. By that evening, the mosque had reportedly been occupied by the soldiers; its leader, Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, was killed along with his mother and other relatives. However, fierce resistance coming from the women’s seminary was still being reported as of the next day.

Asia Times Online headlined its July 10 story about the storming of the mosque: “Pakistan’s iron fist is to the U.S.’s liking.” Written by the paper’s Pakistan bureau chief, Syed Saleem Shahzad, the article suggested that negotiations with mosque leader Ghazi had been broken off and the assault begun as a result of direct U.S. pressure.

Shahzad wrote that the negotiators and Ghazi had arrived at an agreement whereby all those inside the compound would be guaranteed “safe passage” if they left. Rafi Usmani, one of the negotiators and also the Grand Mufti of Pakistan, told Asia Times, “[T]he talks were successful. The draft was written. Abdul Rasheed Ghazi was to be allowed a safe passage, but then the draft was sent to the president and he amended it. Things were back to Square 1 and the talks failed.”

What had happened? Wrote Shahzad, “Asia Times Online contacts claim that the situation was complicated by the sudden appearance of a delegation of members of Parliament belonging to the government’s coalition partners, the Muttahida Quami Movement. They are believed to have met with a U.S. official at his official residence, after which the situation changed within an hour.”

The article also cited an unnamed source as saying that Musharraf, when ordering the assault, explained he was “heavily under duress from his allies,” meaning Washington.

President George W. Bush, asked by reporters about what had just happened in Pakistan, replied: “Musharraf is a strong ally in the war against these extremists. I like him and I appreciate him.”

While the military said at least 60 people died in the storming of the mosque, “Abdul Sattar Edhi, head of the private relief agency Edhi Foundation, said the army had asked him to prepare 400 white shrouds used for covering the dead.” (aljazeera.net, July 11) There is no independent source yet for the casualties, and the army barred media from the area.

Ghazi, according to Asia Times Online of July 11, “enjoyed widespread popularity in Pakistan, although he was not a mullah—he had a master’s degree in international affairs from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, as well as a master’s in political science. He worked as an assistant director in the United Nations Children’s Fund but after the murder of his father in 1998 he chose to become deputy prayer leader at the mosque.”

In his final words to the media, Ghazi said by cell phone, “The room is full of smoke and I am having difficulty in talking. I appeal to the nation to stand up against this system of exploitation and work for an Islamic system of life. ...

“I know my martyrdom is certain and I tell you that the government was never sincere in talking to us. After every sentence [while negotiating] they threatened us. They don’t want talks. They just want to break us and humiliate us, so we prefer death.”

Right after this bloody event, more than 100 armed local people and religious students near Batagram, in northwest Pakistan, joined a protest over the storming of the mosque by temporarily blocking a road leading to China.

Another 500 Islamic school students in the eastern city of Multan blocked a main road and burned tires, chanting “Down with Musharraf.”

The Musharraf regime has been losing its grip in many of the rural areas of this strategic country, which has 165 million people and borders on Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, China and India.

Western imperialist news sources are treating the storming of Lal Masjid as a move by a friendly government against al Qaeda and other “foreign militants” allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to their accounts, the mosque and madrassa were recruiting and training “terrorists,” who had to be stopped.

However, many opponents of the Musharraf regime, including secular forces in the democratic movement, see this terrible tragedy as a deliberate plan by the regime to flex its muscles while taking the limelight away from growing opposition to the dictatorship at a time when Musharraf is maneuvering to get himself re-elected.

During the second week of July, an All-Party Conference was being held in London of parties opposing the Musharraf dictatorship. This meeting came after the general’s dismissal of Chief Justice Muhammad Chaudhry in March had provoked a mass movement. A car caravan led by Chaudhry was greeted by hundreds of thousands of people along the way. As lawyers throughout Pakistan began boycotting court procedures and opposition parties organized huge rallies, some of which met bloody police repression, the demand was growing for Musharraf to step down.

Then came the siege and storming of the Lal Masjid mosque.

Musharraf first came to power eight years ago in a military coup that overthrew the elected government. He quickly got himself declared president and soon dissolved the Senate and both National and Provincial Assemblies. He was an embarrassment to the West and sanctions were voted against the regime.

However, soon after 9/11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Musharraf in Islamabad, promising him economic and humanitarian aid. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell also met with him and got his “indefinite support” for Washington’s “war on terror.” The sanctions were eased and Musharraf agreed to let U.S. forces use two airfields near the Afghanistan border.

Last year Musharraf himself publicly described how then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had called Pakistan’s intelligence director shortly after 9/11 and threatened military action if Pakistan did not support the U.S. According to Musharraf, Armitage warned: “Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.” (Interview with CBS News “60 Minutes,” Sept. 24, 2006)

By the end of October 2001, after protests erupted over Musharraf’s support for Washington, he barred the use of mosque loudspeakers at anti-government rallies. In November of that year, when the U.S. was bombing Afghanistan heavily, he closed Pakistan’s borders with that country, cutting off approximately 300,000 refugees seeking asylum.

While this angered Pakistanis, it played well in the U.S. and Britain, the former colonial power in South Asia. “The man who was denounced as a tin pot dictator by many in the West when he ousted then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif became, almost overnight, a pivotal player on the world stage, a close ally welcomed in Washington and London alike as a statesman of international standing.” (BBC News, Sept. 24, 2004)

He followed the neoliberal, pro-privatization agenda of Western corporations, allowing them easier access to Pakistan’s economy and markets. In 2004 Musharraf nominated Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister and a former joint president of Citibank and head of Citibank Private Banking, as prime minister.

An activist with the Pakistan-U.S. Freedom Forum told Workers World that the community in exile in the U.S. had wanted a peaceful resolution of the mosque struggle, but now “the whole country is in turmoil.”

“This situation is the responsibility of 16 army generals who now control Pakistan,” said Comrade Shahid. “But we also see it as a replay of the Indonesian disaster of the 1960s, when the U.S. was behind a bloody military coup. Then it was the communists who were repressed; today it is the Muslims.

“We who believe in independence and freedom of speech don’t want to live under outside rule. We don’t want to be used against our neighbors, like Iran. We want democracy and self-determination.”