I assumed duty in the ever-busy and boisterous port city of Karachi as Nigeria’s consul-general in May, 1999. At that time, Nawaz Sharif from the Sharif family of Lahore, Punjab Province, was the prime minister. He was of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) political party. The ceremonial president was Muhammad Rafiq Farrar. As any serious- minded diplomat would do, I took keen interest in everything happening, not only in my Consular District but in the whole of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
My first impression was that the government of Nawaz Sharif was tottering, with no clear direction; and the newspapers, especially the DAWN and The NEWS, relentlessly pilloried it.
The Kargil conflict with India, a mortal enemy of Pakistan, was raging with the Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf, leading from the front. He was daily on Pakistani television stations giving an update on the battlefield. His exertions and professionalism caught my attention and I began to track his activities. As a young military officer he had fought in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 and the one of 1971. He was a tested war veteran and through dint of hard work, professionalism and patriotism, this artillery General was deservedly promoted as the Chief of Army Staff by Nawaz Sharif in 1998.
In Pakistan, the armed forces are the most important and powerful organ of the state because of the history of the country. The positions of Chief of Army Staff and Head of the Military Intelligence (Inter-Services Agency) are never toyed with by the political class and certainly not by a bumbling government like that of Nawaz Sharif, which most people were fed up with. It then began to filter that there was uneasy calm between Nawaz Sharif and General Pervez Musharraf.
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It will be recalled that for decades there had been “musical chairs” between the civilians and the Armed Forces (Army, more correctly). General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq toppled the government of the charismatic and populist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and later hanged him in 1977 despite national and international pleas for clemency. General Zia ul-Haq was a few years later blown to pieces when his military plane was shot down. The American ambassador also went down with him.
It is a tragedy of immense proportion for Pakistani politics that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif served as prime minister on three occasions and they were removed from office on each occasion because of corruption, malfeasance etc.
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated when she was campaigning for a fourth attempt to become prime minister. Nawaz Sharif was in his fourth stint as prime minister when he was ignominiously removed from office by the Supreme Court due to corruption charges. His younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, is the current prime minister after the dismissal of the government of the Oxford-educated Imran Khan, a famous cricketer.
When I served in Pakistan, the dominant political parties were the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Lahore, Punjab Province, on November 30, 1967. He was the father of the late Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto, who took on the mantle of leadership of the party following his hanging. She was also assassinated at a campaign rally over a decade ago. Her son, Bilal Bhutto Zardari, now leads the party. The PML had been in the firm grip of the Sharif family.
Feeling insecure, Nawaz Sharif hatched a plan to sack his Chief of Army Staff, General Musharraf but didn’t know how to go about it. The opportunity presented itself when General Musharraf went to Colombo, Sri Lanka on an official visit. He cowardly waited until after the General’s plane had left Colombo on its way back to Pakistan that the sack was announced. The pilot was instructed to land in any other country, and when he complained about insufficiency of fuel, he was directed to land at a remote airport in Pakistan but not Karachi or Islamabad.
Sensing that something was amiss because the flight was taking too long, General Musharraf went to the cock pit to find out what was happening. He was then told of the problem. He immediately contacted his colleagues who assured him that they were on top of the situation and that the pilot should land in Karachi where the obstacles strewn on the runway had been cleared. When the plane eventually landed, it had only five minutes flight of fuel left. That was dangerous because a five-minute delay would have led to crash and fatalities. To decisively deal with the situation, Nawaz Sharif was promptly arrested and detained by the army and later charged for aircraft high-jacking and endangering lives. General Musharraf assumed office as the chief executive of Pakistan and later as president after removing the ceremonial president, Farrar. He ruled for eight years.
On becoming a chief executive and later, president, he was decisive and ruthlessly efficient.
There was no room for prevarication; therefore, my interest in his activities grew more. He decisively dealt with the ulamas (clerics) spewing disinformation and hate and in equal measure. They hated his guts but he was unrelenting. They even tried fruitlessly to assassinate him. He famously said, “The conundrum facing Islam is that those who should teach it are not doing so, while those who should not teach it are the ones teaching it.”
It was only in 2000 that I personally met him when he was invited to give a lecture at the Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies, Karachi, on Pakistan, Regional and Global Affairs. The director-general of the institute, Dr Massuma Hassan, who was Pakistani Ambassador to Vienna, Austria when I also served there between 1995 and 1998, invited me.
Without any prepared text, for nearly two hours, through sheer brilliance, erudition and full mastery of the issues, he kept us glued to our seats. My respect for him just soared. He reminded me of Brigadier- General Alabi Isama who, during the induction programme in 1976 for the 1975 recruited Foreign Service officers, impressed us by his brilliance and mastery of the subject matter and command of the English language. I still respect him.
General Musharraf was born in New Delhi, India, on August 11, 1943, before Pakistan was partitioned. It was remarkable that when he went to India on a state visit in 2001 or thereabouts, he visited the family house they abandoned in 1947 and even asked to see the nanny who raised him as a kid. Even as a ruthlessly efficient General, he had a softer side. He was mostly seen in the company of his wife. But he was neither soft with Nawaz Sharif who endangered his life nor with the quisling Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who was simply a puppet of America. Although he supported America in the war on terror, he rejected any denigration of Islam.
The mistake he made, in my opinion, was to dabble into the murky waters of politics, which opened him up for condemnation and vilification. After a long battle with “amyloidosis,” a rare disease which causes organ damage, he died on February 5, 2023 in the American Hospital, Dubai, United Arab Emirate (UAE). His family had emotionally written on June 13, 2022: “Going through difficult stage where recovery is not possible and organs are malfunctioning.”
May Allah forgive his mistakes and make Aljannatul Firdausi his final abode, Amen.
Dahiru, OFR, is a retired career diplomat
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