NYT : Facing a Furor, Pakistan Rejects Emergency Rule

Facing a Furor, Pakistan Rejects Emergency Rule

By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD | August 10, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 9 — Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was on the brink of declaring a state of emergency in his increasingly volatile country but backed away after a gathering storm of media, political and diplomatic pressure, Pakistani officials acknowledged on Thursday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned General Musharraf about 2 a.m. Thursday in Pakistan, the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said. Bush administration officials refused to discuss in public what was said, but one Pakistani official said that Ms. Rice exhorted General Musharraf not to declare emergency rule. The conversation lasted about 15 minutes.

“She thought it was an opportune moment to talk about a couple of things,” Mr. McCormack said without elaborating.

By the time of the conversation, Pakistan’s minister of state for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan, had said that General Musharraf was not ruling out declaring an emergency, which would give him sweeping powers to restrict freedom of movement and assembly, to suspend Parliament and to curtail the activities of the courts.

Such a step, officials in Washington fear, would further inflame the region and open the Bush administration to additional criticism from democracy advocates who say it has already been too willing to turn a blind eye toward General Musharraf’s failure to restore civilian rule.

In Pakistan, opponents of emergency rule, including some inside the government, warned that it would push the country into a deeper crisis, as the opposition parties, the judiciary, lawyers and civil society would react strongly against it.

“I fear the whole system will collapse and the country will plunge into a period of turmoil,” said one minister, warning of moves to impose emergency rule.

In his remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Khan cited both “external and internal threats” to the government, including the worsening security situation in the country’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda and many Taliban militants are based.

Other Pakistani officials suggested privately, however, that it was less the security situation driving the plan for an emergency than General Musharraf’s own political concerns as he tried to have himself re-elected to another term.

Earlier this week, General Musharraf told political supporters in Karachi that he would stand for re-election by the national and provincial assemblies as early as Sept. 15. But the public mood has soured on the general since he tried to dismiss the country’s chief justice five months ago. That move set off nationwide protests and was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

Opposition parties now seem poised to use the court to bring constitutional challenges against General Musharraf’s continued rule, particularly his decision to hold dual positions as president and army chief of staff.

Amid such political uncertainty, some of General Musharraf’s supporters had urged him to take greater control in the form of extraordinary powers.

As early as last week, close aides to the general and intelligence officials started hinting at the possibility of a “drastic step” — a euphemism for emergency rule — which has been instituted six or so times in Pakistan’s 60 years of independence. Some suggested that General Musharraf was increasingly finding himself in a dead end.

“The president is left with no other option than to clamp down emergency or a martial law to try to extend his stay in power,” an intelligence official said on condition of anonymity early this week. “It is only a matter of days.”

On Wednesday, General Musharraf canceled a long-planned trip to Kabul to serve as a co-chair of a three-day assembly of tribal elders and political leaders with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. The news fueled speculation that an emergency decree was imminent.

He instead stayed home to conduct a high-level meeting of his close military and political aides on Thursday morning. Later in the day, Muhammad Ali Durrani, the federal minister of information, issued a categorical denial that an emergency was being imposed.

“There were so many people recommending the imposition of emergency,” Mr. Durrani told the local television channel Dawn News, “but the prescience of the president was that he decided not to impose emergency in Pakistan.” He also said that the general had not signed any document to declare emergency in the country.

“The president is very clear that steps like emergency can hinder the democratic process and should, therefore, be avoided,” Mr. Durrani added. “To cope with the menace of terrorism, consensus would be developed in the country by taking political parties onboard.”

Some of the first reports to emerge about the possibility of an emergency were reported to have come from Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the leader of the governing party, the Pakistani Muslim League, which backs General Musharraf.

Mr. Hussain had floated the possibility often in the last year as a way to postpone parliamentary elections and retain the current government, opposition politicians said. On Wednesday, he was reported to have announced that a decree was coming while he was addressing the women’s chapter of his party at a dinner. But on Thursday, he dismissed the report as irresponsible and said there was “no possibility of an emergency.”

The secretary general of the party, Mushahid Hussain Sayed, also batted away the suggestion. “This talk of emergency does not make any sense,” Mr. Sayed, a former journalist, said. “Anybody who is advising the president for a state of emergency is not a friend of the president, and is not a friend of Pakistan, because this would be counterproductive, this would be damaging and there is no danger and no possibility of any emergency.”

General Musharraf’s decision to back off on imposing an emergency came after intensifying pressures from different sides, apparently including American officials who have been some of his most important backers.

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Washington has provided General Musharraf’s administration with about $1 billion annually in return for his promised cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That alliance has not been popular in Pakistan, where there is the growing sense that the Bush administration has been blindly supporting General Musharraf even as his popularity fades.

While Bush administration officials have taken pains not to appear as if they are dictating terms to General Musharraf, and continue to endorse him publicly, they privately have expressed concern over the general’s worsening political crises.

“My focus in terms of the domestic scene there is that he have a free and fair election,” President Bush said at a news conference on Thursday, “and that’s what we have been talking to him about, and I’m hopeful they will.”

The diplomatic pressure on General Musharraf appears to have been timely. “It seems that the preparation was complete for imposition of emergency, but fearing a strong public backlash, the government was forced to backtrack,” said Qamar Zaman Kaira, a member of Parliament from the opposition party of Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan Peoples Party.

“Probably they were trying to check the pulse of the public,” he said.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.