LAHORE: How right was General (retd) Pervez Musharraf when he said that he will never shed his uniform? For now, we see the real man in the skin, minus the uniform. A man whose lawyer pleads crying that his client’s aged mother being unwell in Dubai, wants to see his son. This is a former military dictator who brought into disrepute the sacred institution of our armed forces, whose officers and men today are insecure because of threats of terrorism, a consequence of a war the general hastily led this nation into, without any planning or discourse to analyse the consequences of such an act. His obsession with an ill-planned Kargil operation cost this country the lives of over a thousand sons of soil and international humiliation. Here is a man who felt no remorse in accepting that he handed over citizens of this country to foreign forces, instead of trying them within Pakistan, where there exist laws, a Constitution and a functioning judiciary. This is a man who broke the oath of office that he took to uphold the Constitution and never take part in politics.
General (retd) Pervez Musharraf committed another shameful feat when he sacked the judiciary, and confined the judges, along with their families, to their homes. This is a man who stood up on May 12, 2007 and raised his fist glorifying the mayhem in Karachi as a show of force. His treacherous abuse of power helped an insurgency in Balochistan to gain foothold. His crimes are innumerable and unpardonable. Yet, like a bad sore, this country needs to surgically erase his memory, even if that means sending him into exile for life. Let it be remembered that the people of Pakistan allowed a criminal to get away on the pretext of visiting his aged mother, although justice demands that he be tried under Article 6 of the Constitution.
Malik Tariq Ali
Published in The Express Tribune, April 26th, 2013.
