General fiddled while Karachi was burning

DNA ANALYSIS

ISLAMABAD: “Nero fiddled while Rome was burning”, aptly described General Pervez Musharraf while he was celebrating and dancing on sounds of trumpets outside the Presidency in Islamabad where the ruling Pakistan Muslim League had organised a rally on Saturday despite the fact that Karachi was burning at that time.

Prominent human rights groups and civil society organisations in Pakistan have condemned the Saturday violence and killings of dozens of innocent people in Karachi, saying that a fascist and ethnic Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) was allowed by an Urdu-speaking Mohajir dictator to use its brute force to physically eliminate three dozen innocent Sindhi, Punjabi, Patahan and Baloch residents of Karachi, thus leading the country into further lawlessness and a deeper crises.

The participants of the Islamabad rally, who largely comprised farmers, tenants, junior government employees and labourers, did not show interest in what was going on at the venue and did not respond to slogans raised by the organisers.

The meeting started at 8pm, but the participants were seen roaming around the venue aimlessly without paying heed to what their leaders were saying from the stage.
Musharraf came to the venue at 9:30pm, but not more than 15,000 people heard his address - the rest had left by the time the president reached the parade ground. Though the organisers had arranged thousands of vehicles to carry the participants for the rally, most buses were seen carrying only a dozen people each.

Analysts in Pakistan believe that with the rapid elevation of the suspended chief justice to a national symbol of resistance against Musharraf, the latter’s room to manoeuvre in the crisis is diminishing at the same rate. They say the political crisis has gone beyond the issue of the chief justice and it can create so much internal pressure in the country that could burst out at any time, eventually forcing Musharraf to step down.

• "The HRC has irrefutable evidence to prove that fully backed by the dictator of the day, the MQM had planned the bloodshed during its tit-for-tat rally in Karachi on Saturday against the opposition parties’ call to welcome the suspended chief justice.”  —Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission

• "Whatever the General did in Islamabad was beyond comprehension. The so-called Pakistan solidarity simply failed to attract more than 20,000 people despite lofty claims by Musharraf that his party supporters would gather more than 3,00,000 people for a successful show of his government's strength”.—Imran Khan, Cricketer turned politician

• "The arrival in Karachi of the suspended chief justice was not taken lightly by Musharraf after the great show of force of the anti-Musharraf forces in Lahore. The official circles had apprehensions that all parties would make it look like a massive no-confidence vote of the people against the General.” —Mahmood Mirza, President of the Citizens' Protection Forum