Modern South Asia

[sidecross]

Benazir Bhutto: An Age of Hope Is Over

By Barbara Crossette, The Nation

Nineteen years ago at the end of December, Benazir Bhutto, fresh from her first, exhilarating election victory and newly sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, met Rajiv Gandhi, the youthful prime minister of India, for talks in Islamabad. She was 35, he was 44. There was obvious good will, almost intimacy, between them. The air was full of promise and hope that these two modernizing scions of dominant political families would turn decades of war and hostility between their nations into a new era of peace.

Three and a half years later, Gandhi was assassinated. There had been no breakthrough with Pakistan to bolster his legacy. Now Bhutto is dead, at another moment of renewed anticipation. An age of hope is over.

There is a terrible symmetry in the lives and deaths of these two political leaders. Both were the children of powerful people: Indira Gandhi as India's prime minister and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto her counterpart in Pakistan. Together, in 1972, they had negotiated an agreement over Kashmir, but their heirs were never able to build on it. Their respective children, Rajiv and Benazir, had seen those parents suffer politically motivated deaths: Indira murdered in 1984 by bodyguards revenging her attacks on Sikhs, and Zulfikar hanged under the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul Haq in what many Pakistanis consider a thinly disguised judicial execution.

Young Gandhi and Bhutto, both killed by suicide bombers, ultimately became the victims of inherited policies. Rajiv Gandhi had tried to put an end to Indian meddling in Sri Lanka and its support for a vicious Tamil Tiger rebellion. He was killed by a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber, a woman who moved toward him to touch his feet in an age-old gesture, then triggered an explosion that blew them both apart. While it is too early to know who killed Benazir, Pakistan's policies on Afghanistan are the backdrop to this tense and dangerous moment. Her father and his successors had supported Afghan rebels in order to become a player in Afghanistan and counter Indian influence in Kabul lately aligning riskily with American policies. Rajiv's mother, whose intelligence agencies roamed the region causing havoc, had set out to weaken Sri Lanka, South Asia's most developed nation.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi were both campaigning to return to power when they died. Both had been elected, then vilified. She lost support among middle-class Pakistanis for her feudal ways and unwillingness to take on social issues -- child labor or the mistreatment of women -- or chip away at the power of the military, and was driven from office twice on charges of corruption, much of it attributed to her husband. In India, Rajiv was the perennial butt of attacks from unreconstructed leftists and traditionalists who scoffed at his Westernized style, Italian wife and fresh ideas that rattled the khadi crowd. On the night he died, a policeman told me they had identified his remains by his expensive imported running shoes. Suspicions linger that Gandhi or those close to him may have been involved in illegal payments for arms contracts.

Tragically, political violence has been the bane of modern South Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan east to Bangladesh. Militants and fanatics of all stripes and dogmas and grievances have assassinated leaders since much of the region gained independence from Britain in the mid 1940s. It has been a formidable hindrance to development of political institutions.

In New Delhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed in 1948 by an outraged Hindu. Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951 -- in the same Rawalpindi park where Benazir Bhutto died -- and General Zia ul Haq perished in a still mysterious plane crash in 1988. In Sri Lanka in 1959, Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike fell victim to a fanatic Buddhist monk, the first of two generations of more than a half-dozen leading politicians to die in shootings and bombings. (Tamil Tiger rebels would later try but fail to kill Bandaranaike's daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, when she was president.) Sheikh Mujibir Rahman, founder and first Prime Minister of independent Bangladesh, was murdered in 1975; in 1981 Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, was shot in an army coup. Nepal's entire royal family was wiped out in one evening in Kathmandu in 2001, apparently by a disaffected crown prince.

Hindus and Muslims killed one another by the hundreds of thousands after the partition of British India in 1947 into Pakistan and modern India. And compared with Pakistan since then, India has experienced much more large-scale sectarian and political violence, with thousands of Sikhs butchered in the streets of Delhi and elsewhere in North India after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, and up to 2,000 Muslims slaughtered by Hindu nationalists in Gujarat -- Mahatma Gandhi's birthplace -- in 2002. In both cases, political parties have been deeply implicated yet no political leader has been punished -- in a democracy.

As the world mourns the loss of Benazir Bhutto, it would be myopic to focus only on Islamic-inspired violence and on Pakistan. This is a region with a turbulent post-independence political history. Our (Islamophobic?) preoccupation with Muslim terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan often blocks out a bigger picture. From end to end, South Asia is a region drenched in blood.


http://www.alternet.org/story/71810/

[craazyman]

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

-Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1899

[Isaiah Mpski]

Hehe,the silent American Indian,
the new kind of his breed.
We have been waiting here in Heaven
until you begin to see.

White Man.

WHITE MAN

It is time for you to follow,
to leave your folly behind.
You came here and taught us terror
and tell us the jew knows it all.:skeptic:

To hell white man.To hell with you and your jews.
Learn to see who was vanquished and who was trodden down.
You say-it doesn't continue.The white way treats us right.
To hell with you white man.I piss upon your grave.:eek:

[willoweyes]

I'm assuming Craazy was exercising his ironic muscles, perhaps in respect to some New Year's Pledge.

Isaiah, I've always felt like my ancestors (pillagers, gypsies, cossacks and pirates all) have sent down some throwback gene that makes me want to go native. When I used to drink to excess, my poor suffering husband could find me by following the trail of discarded household goods, as I wheeled my barrow deeper into the wilderness.

Not much news about the e-mail Neil Seigel recieved from Bhutto, on Oct. 27, to be released only upon her death. That e-mail stated that Mushie would be the man to focus on in the event of her death.

Mushie's first statement was: (and I paraphrase--the little slip of paper has disappeared: "Pakistan is a big place--lots of people moving around. What can you do if someone wants to get themselves killed?")

Although Bhutto begged for protection, and begged that the first bombing attempt on her life, which killed 150--be investigated by the FBI, it was NOT investigated, by anyone.

What a dirty game world power is.

[sidecross]

In Memory of Benazir Bhutto, Cut US Ties to Musharraf

by Medea Benjamin

Our hearts and thoughts are with the Pakistani people as they mourn the death of Benazir Bhutto. We extend our deep sorrow to her family and the millions of supporters who for decades have seen the Bhutto family as a source of inspiration. We also extend our condolences to the families of the other Pakistanis who were killed in this heinous crime.

We at CODEPINK were in touch with the former Prime Minister when we were writing our book Stop the Next War Now. In fact, Bhutto graciously contributed an essay that was a plea to counter extremism and “a clash of civilizations that can lead to Armageddon, where there will be no winners on earth.”

Bhutto’s assassination is a blow to people all over Pakistan, and the world, who hold life sacred and believe in the basics precepts of democracy. It is also a blow to women worldwide who took strength from seeing such a courageous, articulate and charismatic woman playing a leadership role in a powerful Muslim country. Inside Pakistan, even her most bitter critics wept at the news of her death, understanding that it is indeed a dark day when assassination becomes a tool for eliminating opposing viewpoints.

There is much speculation about who committed this odious act. It could certainly be religious militants opposed to a leader like Bhutto who repeatedly expressed her determination to combat violent extremists. Bhutto was perceived by many Pakistanis as too “pro-Western,” especially after remarks that if elected Prime Minister, she might allow U.S. military strikes inside Pakistan to eliminate al-Qaeda.

But it is not too far-fetched to think that the assassination could have been orchestrated by Pervez Musharraf or members of the military. Many in Pakistan speculated that the government was responsible for the bomb blasts that killed 140 Pakistanis when Bhutto first returned home on October 18, citing the fact that the street lights were turned off just before the attack and questioning the lack of a serious investigation afterwards. In fact, Musharraf had refused Bhutto’s request that an independent foreign team be brought in to help with the investigation. This time, there must be a serious investigation conducted by a body independent of the government and those responsible must be found and held accountable.

Elections scheduled for January 8 must be postponed. Even before this tragedy, there were no conditions for free and fair elections. The Musharraf regime had fired independent judges, censored the press and stacked the Election Commission. It is absolutely key that an independent judiciary and free press be restored, and that elections then be scheduled under the aegis of an independent electoral commission.

The international community must put pressure on Musharraf not to use this tragedy to impose another round of emergency rule like the one he imposed on November 3, which led to the crackdown on lawyers, students, journalists and other members of Pakistan’s vibrant civil society. Bhutto’s death will be doubly tragic if it becomes an excuse for Musharraf to stifle the very civil society that is the true bulwark against extremism.

If Bhutto’s death proves anything, it is the utter failure of Musharraf’s regime and the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy of supporting Musharraf. Pakistani civil society has long been calling for Musharraf to resign. Now leaders like former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif have added their voice to that call, publicly holding Musharraf responsible for Bhutto’s death and demanding he step down.

CODEPINK agrees that Musharraf is the biggest obstacle facing a democratic Pakistan today. He is not capable of either fighting extremists or building a society that respects the rule of law. My colleague Tighe Barry and I recently had a taste of his dictatorial ways when we were kidnapped and carjacked at gunpoint and then deported for supporting the pro-democracy movement.

The US government must use this time to radically change its policy in Pakistan. The Bush administration has been a staunch supporter of Musharraf, providing his regime with over $10 billion in financial aid since 2001. In return, Musharraf was supposed to fight religious extremists. But Osama bin Laden has never been caught, and in the last few years al-Qaeda and the Taliban have become stronger in Pakistan. In the meantime, Musharraf’s use of US funds to crack down on the country’s democratic forces has led to growing anti-American sentiments among the nation’s moderate, secular forces. The U.S. government should withhold assistance until Musharraf steps down and a caretaker government restores the independent judiciary, lifts restrictions on the press and sets up the conditions for fair elections.

We should also begin to focus our attention on one of the key underlying causes for the growth of extremism in Pakistan: the extreme poverty that persists, especially in the tribal areas where al-Qaeda is most active.

Benazir Bhutto spoke about this in the essay she wrote for our book. Her words were poignant then, and are even more poignant upon her death:

“The neglect of rising poverty against the background of religious extremism can only complicate an already difficult world situation,” she said. “The war against terrorism is primarily perceived as a war based on the use of force. However, economics has its own force, as does the desperation of families who cannot feed themselves.”

“Militancy and greed cannot become the defining images of a new century that began with much hope. We must refocus our energy on promoting the values of democracy, accountability, broad-based government, and institutions that can respond to people’s very real and very urgent needs.”

We, as global citizens, can pay tribute to Bhutto by rising to her challenge. Whether in Pakistan or in our home countries, we can dedicate ourselves to building a world based on tolerance, cooperation and fulfilling the urgent needs of the human family-which are the pillars of a more peaceful world.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/28/6028/

[willoweyes]

New Questions Arise in Killing of Ex-Premier
By JANE PERLEZ

LAHORE, Pakistan — New details of Benazir Bhutto’s final moments, including indications that her doctors felt pressured to conform to government accounts of her death, fueled the arguments over her assassination on Sunday and added to the pressure on Pakistan’s leaders to accept an international inquiry.

Athar Minallah, a board member of the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was treated, released her medical report along with an open letter showing that her doctors wanted to distance themselves from the government theory that Ms. Bhutto had died by hitting her head on a lever of her car’s sunroof during the attack.

In his letter, Mr. Minallah, who is also a prominent lawyer, said the doctors believed that an autopsy was needed to provide the answers to how she actually died. Their request for one last Thursday was denied by the local police chief.

Pakistani and Western security experts said the government’s insistence that Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, was not killed by a bullet was intended to deflect attention from the lack of government security around her. On Sunday, Pakistani newspapers covered their front pages with photographs showing a man apparently pointing a gun at her from just yards away.

Her vehicle came under attack by a gunman and suicide bomber as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters, and where the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency has a strong presence.

The government’s explanation, that Ms. Bhutto died after hitting her head as she ducked from the gunfire or was tossed by the force of the suicide blast, has been greeted with disbelief by her supporters, ordinary Pakistanis and medical experts. While some of the mystery could be cleared up by exhuming the body, it is not clear whether Ms. Bhutto’s family would give permission, such is their distrust of the government.

Mr. Minallah distributed the medical report with his open letter to the Pakistani news media and The New York Times. He said the doctor who wrote the report, Mohammad Mussadiq Khan, the principal professor of surgery at the Rawalpindi General Hospital, told him on the night of Ms. Bhutto’s death that she had died of a bullet wound.

Dr. Khan declined through Mr. Minallah to speak with a reporter on the grounds that he was an employee of a government hospital and was fearful of government reprisals if he did not support its version of events.

The medical report, prepared with six other doctors, does not specifically mention a bullet because the actual cause of the head wound was to be left to an autopsy, Mr. Minallah said. The doctors had stressed to him that “without an autopsy it is not at all possible to determine as to what had caused the injury,” he wrote.

But the chief of police in Rawalpindi, Saud Aziz, “did not agree” to the autopsy request by the doctors, Mr. Minallah said in his letter.

A former senior Pakistani police official, Wajahat Latif, who headed the Federal Investigative Agency in the early 1990s, said that in “any case of a suspected murder an autopsy is mandatory.” To waive an autopsy, Mr. Latif said, relatives were required to apply for permission.

At a news conference Sunday, Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, said he had declined a request for a post-mortem examination. “It was an insult to my wife, an insult to the sister of the nation, an insult to the mother of the nation,” he said. “I know their forensic reports are useless. I refuse to give them her last remains.”

The question of an autopsy has become central to the circumstances of Ms. Bhutto’s death because of conflicting versions put forward by the Pakistani government, which have stirred an already deep well of distrust of the government among Ms. Bhutto’s supporters and other Pakistanis.

On the night Ms. Bhutto was assassinated, an unidentified Interior Ministry spokesman was quoted by the official Pakistani news agency as saying that she had died of a “bullet wound in the neck by a suicide bomber.”

The next day, Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, recast that version of events, saying at a news conference that Ms. Bhutto died of a wound sustained when she hit her head on a lever attached to the sun roof of the vehicle as she ducked a bullet and was thrown about by the force of the blast. “Three shots were fired but they missed her,” Brigadier Cheema said. “Then there was an explosion.”

The new images of the men who appear to have been Ms. Bhutto’s assassins showed one dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and rimless sunglasses, and holding aloft what appeared to be a gun. He had a short haircut and wore the kind of attire reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials, though Al Qaeda and other militants have also been known to dress attackers in Western-style clothing in order to disguise them.

That man is seen standing in front of another whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has regrouped in the past year. He is described in the newspaper Dawn as the suicide bomber.

Mr. Minallah, the hospital board member, said Ms. Bhutto’s doctors raised the likelihood of a bullet killing her in their report, when they wrote, “Two to three tiny radio-densities underneath fracture segment are observed on both projections.”

The report said the doctors tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It said “the patient was pulseless and was not breathing,” when she arrived at the hospital. “A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region, through which blood was trickling down and whitish material which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound,” it said.

Ms. Bhutto’s colleagues who were in the vehicle with her said the interior was covered in blood, and the doctors wrote that “her clothes were soaked with blood.”

An account of her death that did not involve a gunshot wound was the optimal explanation for the government, said Bruce Riedel, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and a former member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. “If there is a gunshot wound, the security was abysmal,” Mr. Riedel said. The government did not want to be exposed on its careless approach to security, he said.

On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Mr. Zardari, said he received a call from the Punjab home secretary on Thursday evening with a request for his permission for a post-mortem examination. He said he refused because he did not trust the government investigation to prove the cause of her death.

In ordinary circumstances, an autopsy runs counter to Islamic belief that a body should not be tampered with and should be buried as quickly as possible. But several Pakistanis said that in certain classes of Muslim society, particularly the better educated and more urban people, autopsies were not ruled out on religious grounds.

There were also provisions under Pakistani law for the exhumation of a body and a delayed post-mortem, Mr. Latif, the former senior Pakistani police official, said. In those cases, the state or a family can ask a magistrate for exhumation. The magistrate then forms a board of doctors to carry out the procedures, he said.

An international inquiry on Ms. Bhutto’s death could not be carried out without an exhumation, a difficult decision in a Muslim country, Mr. Latif said.

In response to a question at a heated news conference Saturday, Brigadier Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the government was ready to exhume the body if the family asked.

But Ms. Bhutto’s supporters noted that the family and the party were so furious at President Musharraf, whom many of them blame for her death, that it was unlikely the Bhuttos would trust an exhumation that involved the government.

Pressure came from a number of quarters for an inquiry modeled after one carried out by the United Nations after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in 2005.

Though the Lebanon inquiry has moved very slowly, American and British officials, as well as an increasing number of Pakistanis, said that an investigation under the United Nations or some other international effort would restore confidence in the Pakistani government.

On Sunday a conference of Ms. Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, called for an inquiry led by the United Nations.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress, Nancy Pelosi, said Saturday that the Bush administration should condition its future aid to Pakistan on its willingness to undertake an independent international inquiry.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said Britain was ready to offer whatever help was needed.

Brigadier Cheema made clear, however, that an international inquiry was not in the cards. “At this point in time we are quite confident with the kind of progress that is going on with our inquiries,” he said Sunday.

Foreign experts did not have the expertise, he said, to deal with the peculiarities of tribal areas that are the base of the nation’s terrorist activities. “This is not just an ordinary criminal case where you only need forensic expert,” he said. “We understand the dynamics better.”

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from Karachi, Pakistan.

[suebee]

i didnt read all the above postings on this subject (so maybe this has been said) and i am sad for the people of pakistan but how does someone "beg for protection" then in response to crowd adoration, pop her head up out of a car sunroof? what possibly could protect her from herself?

[craazyman]

December 30:
Washington Redskins 27
Dallas Cowboys 6

We're on the War Path and looking to scalp some Cowboys again at Texas Stadium in a few weeks (if we can make it out of Seattle with our guns and horses).

Ho Ho Ho:p

[craazyman]

Yes Willow you have found me out, called my shot, penetrated my veil and otherwise nailed my number.

What sort of astonishes me is that someone like Ms. Crossette, whose brave reporting as a foreign correspondent I used to read in the NY Times, is not, at this point in her career, meditating on the human condition in front of a replica (the original would be out of a book author's price range) of Heironymous Bosh's Garden of Earthly Delights. Or alternatively, embedded in a nunnery in prayer.

The liberal sentiment dies hard, to be sure.

At some point Ms. Crossette may get upset enough to send in the marines, or the Peace Corps, or even, God forbid, the missionaries, to save the savages from themselves.

It makes me appreciate George W. (the first president, not the current one) more and more for his warning to the young nation not to get embroiled in foreign entanglements.

[willoweyes]

What a treat, to be finally doing the penetrating. . . . I thought Id have to wait til the next Incarnation.

It's the Butterfly Effect Craazy--you pitch 12 billion at a culture that is at a different place from yours, and strange things happen. . . .

And if it wasn't for that wretched blonde Judas Jennifer somebody, your Washington Skins would be on their knees.

[craazyman]

Yes Willow, and the pitch of $12 billion sails past home plate and the public purse and end ups, somehow, in a Swiss bank account, opened under an assumed name and guarded to the teeth by bankers and lawyers who know how their bread is buttered.

These Asian politicians know it's always easier to steal $100 each from 20 million people than $200 million each from 10 people, under the theory that if someone has $200 million, he or she probably knows how to keep it--until that is, Wall Street calls to offer advice.

And the Bhutto's of the world, God Bless Her Soul, and the long list of cronies know the account password. It's not ethics or morality, it's simply business as usual for this crowd, administered with guns and money and the occasional hit, at which we Western Liberal Moralists wring our sentimental hands and look to some hapless soul to whom we can offer our well-meant advice.

No, at some point, they have to save themselves. And perversely, the best thing that could probably happen would be for the radical Islamist to get into power. Because they would make such an even more hideous mess of things that they'd eventually be puked up like curdeled milk and the general poplulation would come to the West on hands and knees for help and salvation. But there'd surely would have to be a lot of blood shed in the process. And it would get messy for a while. But it would end the problem once and for all.

My tentative sense is the Musharraf is probably the least of our problems. He seems like the kind of guy who knows what he's dealing with over there, and how bad it could be if all hell broke loose.

[sidecross]

"...On Tuesday, an aide to Ms. Bhutto, Senator Latif Khosa, said Ms. Bhutto had been planning to give two visiting American lawmakers a 160-page report accusing the Musharraf government of taking steps to rig the Jan. 8 vote, according to The Associated Press. The meeting, with Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, was scheduled for a few hours after she was killed."



January 3, 2008

Pakistan Postpones Vote Until Feb. 18

By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s election commission announced Wednesday that parliamentary elections would be postponed until Feb. 18, a delay of six weeks, after the death of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and the riots that have damaged some election commission offices and paralyzed parts of Sindh Province.

The chief election commissioner, Qazi Muhammad Farooq, made the announcement in the capital, Islamabad. He said the commission had made the decision after consulting political parties and the chief secretaries of Pakistan’s four provinces.

Mr. Farooq said a number of election commission offices had been burnt, and ballot papers, voting lists and election screens destroyed in the protests since Ms. Bhutto’s assassination last week.

They could not be replaced before Jan. 8, the date originally scheduled for the elections, Mr. Farooq said. Security also remained unsteady and not conducive to elections, he said.

Some of the heaviest rioting has taken place in Sindh Province, where Ms. Bhutto’s hometown, Karachi, has been worst hit by the post-assassination violence.

Punjab Province and the North West Frontier Province have also suffered damage, and tensions remain high there, Mr. Farooq said.

The postponement until Feb. 18 will also not interfere with Muharram, the annual festival for Shiite Muslims that begins Jan. 10 and runs through Feb. 8. The festival is often an occasion for sectarian violence in Pakistan.

“I assure all political parties that the elections will be fair, free and transparent,” Mr. Farooq said, according to Agence France-Presse. “I appeal to them to accept this decision in the supreme national interest and participate fully.”

President Pervez Musharraf is scheduled to address the nation later Wednesday.

It remains unclear in what way the two main opposition parties will act following the announcement of the new timing of the elections. They had threatened protests against the government over the delay even before the new date was confirmed Wednesday.

“Whatever reasons they give are such lame-duck excuses, because the electoral papers and lists were burnt in the districts but they have those lists in the central office,” said Farzana Raja, a spokeswoman for the Pakistan Peoples Party, the party that Ms. Bhutto used to lead, Reuters reported. “We reject their baseless excuses. We’re ready to fight the election.”

Opposition party members and Western diplomats have said the decision to push the election into February was largely meant by the government to deprive the opposition of a huge sympathy vote after Ms. Bhutto’s death.

Opposition officials have said the delay is an attempt by Mr. Musharraf to recoup some of his plummeting popularity and let the sympathy toward his critics wear off.

Furor continues in Pakistan over the Musharraf government’s assertion that Ms. Bhutto did not die from gunfire or from shrapnel caused by a suicide bomber’s explosion, but from striking her head as she tried to duck into her car during the attack last week.

Many of her supporters blame the government for her death, some accusing it of poor security and others of outright complicity.

With skepticism growing inside and outside Pakistan about the competence and objectivity of the investigation into Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, Mr. Musharraf is expected as early as Wednesday to ask Scotland Yard to send technicians to help with the inquiry, an American official said on Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

Senior Bush administration officials and American lawmakers from both parties have privately been urging Mr. Musharraf to allow international involvement in the inquiry to help tamp down civil unrest and to give the inquiry credibility with Ms. Bhutto’s family and supporters.

On Tuesday, an aide to Ms. Bhutto, Senator Latif Khosa, said Ms. Bhutto had been planning to give two visiting American lawmakers a 160-page report accusing the Musharraf government of taking steps to rig the Jan. 8 vote, according to The Associated Press. The meeting, with Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, was scheduled for a few hours after she was killed.

Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Lahore, Pakistan, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Graham Bowley from New York.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/world/asia/03pakistan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[Rob P]

...

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/72350/

...

[sidecross]

...

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/72350/

...

The government of Pakistan is a rookie at the art of the ‘cover up’.

They should take lessons from how the U.S. handled the recent 9/11 investigation not to mention the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F Kennedy to mention just a few botched investigations.

[craazyman]

I wonder if you liberal-age-of-aquarius-we're-all-one-consciousness-limousine-riding-tax-and-spend-big-government-celebrity-wanna-be do gooders are keeping an eye on what's going down in Kenya.

"Kurtz, he dead."

Kurtz is long dead, and the British are long gone. But the natives still hack away at each other with machetes, bows and arrows. They are almost as bad as my ancestors--the Scots and the Germans--until someone invented the Englightenment.

Indeed, Thomas Hobbes was an optimist.:twisted:

[willoweyes]

"Life in the state of nature is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'." (Thomas Hobbes' summation of existence--and his legacy--poor man).

As some wag stated in the NYTimes last week, "Obivously Hobbes didn't have any children."

Cheer up Craazy--in the most brutish life, machete-hacking, proportionally, occupies only a smidgeon.

[bopes]

". . . the British are long gone. But the natives still hack away at each other with machetes, bows and arrows."

Oddball: Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

Moriarty: Crap!

Oddball: Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.

[craazyman]

Oh but my negative waves usually have an ironic smile somewhere, and they discharge the crust of the world's fecal matter, so the real human smile can shine through.;)

[suebee]

dont you think tribal competetors being freed from a century of serfdom might end up with machetes after the lords suddenly up and exit?

bopes i have to say that among the negative posters here, c-man doesnt make the list. :p

[bopes]

dont you think tribal competetors being freed from a century of serfdom might end up with machetes after the lords suddenly up and exit?

bopes i have to say that among the negative posters here, c-man doesnt even make the list. :p

Agreed. I just couldn't resist an opportunity to get in a quote from one of my favorite hippie dippie WWII movies, Kelly's Heroes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065938/quotes). What a cast! Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles(!), Donald Sutherland (playing Oddball, same year MASH came out), Gavin McCleod (playing Moriarty!), Harry Dean Stanton . . .

Oh man. I gotta watch that again.

[craazyman]

Yes the British surely taught them how to fire guns and fly helicopters, but they were pretty good at killing each other with bows and arrows long before the British showed up.

As the true proverb says, "The dog is turned to his own vomit again, and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire."

And if you think this is racist, just look at what happened to the Germans. After two thousand years of tribal warfare, they finally came together for a few decades, only to blow their top on the Jews.

Merry Christmas.

[suebee]

yes and the now venerated american indians killed each other off in droves. people need their time to evolve in their own environments. when their evolution is forcibly delayed, they seem to take up where they left off and with somewhat understandable amplified fevor???

bopes i may have spoken too soon.

[bopes]

craazy, methinks thou dost protest too much. Who said anything about racism?:confused:

Ah. Never mind. I see it came up earlier in the thread.

Anyway, what's going on in Kenya is now officially being called ethnic cleansing (http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5j1CBNI3Z7lk5mCXid-3gdWwVJuaQ).

All that crap about never letting stuff like this happen again is also a lot of hooey, especially if it happens in places like Kenya or Rwanda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide). Is that racist?

[suebee]

oops, i mean 'fervor'. race isnt a cause; poverty or hopelessness maybe, but business men with obscene amounts of money are also guilty of unspeakable violence against others, even children (mining, sex trade).

im thinking we are just a violent species doomed by our lizard brains and there but for fortune. what can we do about genocide? i know my country contributes to its cause, but what can we do? an aerosol laughing gas? knock out drops floating down from crop dusters? what ? more weapons for more idiots?

[craazyman]

Suebee, I share your antipathy toward businessmen with obscene amounts of money. But there are so few of that type. Most pradations are poor on poor.

Bopes, what the heck can we do? It's nice to think we can do something, but I'm inclined to think not. The forces at work are far bigger than our little western liberal notions and our messiah complexes can understand. Either we re-colonize or we have to let them at each other. Look at Zimbabwe for the future of Kenya. I hope not, but we'll see.

Really though, not to get melodramatic. I do think some vigorous diplomacy is going on and that's about all that can be done. When an addict wants a drink badly enough, there's little you can do to stop them.

[bopes]

The powers that be will enforce international law against genocide if it's in their interest, like in Kosovo. Whereas mass killing in Kenya doesn't rate, at least not yet. Whatever "lessons" were learned from the holocaust are only applied selectively, at best.

[suebee]

speaking of asia, here's a great little video called monkey with a death wish. :p

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK4ZqskRBPw

[Isaiah Mpski]

SueBee.You're crazy.

Only peace and mother nature can work that out equiptably.
I want to deny it but it exists.The whole AIDS virus thing either came from the wild Monkeys of Africa or it really was a plot by French scientists to wipe out the black race.
It was done to my people in the Americas,Bopes.I know what I'm talking about.Earthquake.

[bopes]

Obama is our only hope, then. :)

[craazyman]

Not because I'm against him. In fact, I'm for him. But because he's my age. Holy Shit. Someone my age is running for president.

Seriously, anyone remember that movie with Morgan Freeman as president when the asteroid hits the earth and wipes out all life.

I remember joking, after I saw it, "Talk about bad luck, a black guy finally gets elected president and he has to lead the world while an asteroid destroys the earth."

I think Obama has a good chance. But if he wins, the expectations for change are going to be so high, that it will be very hard to live up to them. The problems we confront aren't democrat/republican, they are capital/labor. Capital has too much power and labor too little. I don't think Obama can change that, and I'm not sure he even understands it, being the lawyer that he is. Maybe he does, but to get elected president means you've got to play the system, not change it.

[suebee]

exactly. i mean c-man's take on obama. and edwards is out so you are in c-man.

the monkey video doesnt come up on the web address i cited above but you can google and there are several on youtube. it is hilarious and nothing to do with aids, lobato. by the way, that belgian doctor is thought by many to have started aids by using some blood of monkeys not supposed to be used with humans to grow a polio vaccine and testing it in the belgian congo.

and schwartzenegger, i am totally over that guy.