Ghosts of the past

There is apparently a season in which our past political masters make a re-entry into the present day, and Pakistan is in the middle of it. Not only is Mr Zardari to make a spectral appearance within days, but now Pervez Musharraf our most recent ex-military-dictator is having his headline moment. It will be recalled that Mr Musharraf ousted then PM Nawaz Sharif in October 1999. The two men goes the saying, have a history. Mr Musharraf has of late been abroad ostensibly to seek treatment for a range of afflictions, and has now decided to have his say about just how it was that he was able to engineer his exit. In doing so has implicated former army chief General (Retd) Raheel Sharif and the superior judiciary who he suggests were strong-armed into allowing him permission to leave, pending court cases notwithstanding.



There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in Mr Musharraf’s revelations, saying as he does that ‘our judiciary have to move towards justice’ while at the same time alleging that that very same judiciary were subject to background pressures from the sitting government — of PM Nawaz Sharif. In order to ‘relieve’ those pressures a past military commander made an intervention and the Musharraf exit was achieved.

Unsurprisingly the government of today takes a dim view of this, and has moved to a swift rebuttal, and even Mr Musharraf’s lead counsel seems perplexed, saying he was unaware of any such moves. Given the current political climate this is a controversy that is surplus to requirements, and does nothing to further stability or cohesion. The casting of aspersions on key institutions — in this case the judiciary and the military — serves nobody well and given the gravity of the insinuations an absence of corroboration is to say the least irresponsible. We know not what the motives of Mr Musharraf might be. He is today a political irrelevance, a part of past history undeniably but his day is long gone and the nation needs to move past, beyond. Meddling old dictators should moulder quietly in the background. Understood, Mr Musharraf?

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2016.

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