Pakistan Elections Feb 18: A Roundup Of Fears/Dangers…

On Monday (February 18) morning, 64,000 polling stations will open in Pakistan’s 272 constituencies. Polling stations are thought likely to shut at 5 pm local time, and counts will be completed some two or three hours later. So will the elections be fair?

“On a scale from terrible to great, it’ll be somewhere in the middle” is what Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, said when asked about the possibility of fraud. For The Guardian Q&A on Pakistani polls please click here… For the CNN Q&A please click here…

Recent opinion surveys show the opposition poised for a landslide victory amid disenchantment with eight years of military rule under President Pervez Musharraf, according to the Associated Press. “Although Musharraf is not up for re-election, he could face impeachment if the opposition wins a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Opposition politicians fear the results will be manipulated in hopes of assuring the ruling party enough seats to block any impeachment.

“Last week, New York-based Human Rights Watch questioned the election commission’s impartiality, saying it has ignored complaints of harrassment against opposition candidates. On Friday, Sen. Joseph Biden, Delaware Democrat who is head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States should consider cutting off military aid to Pakistan if the elections are rigged.” More here…

Sushant Sareen, an expert on Pakistan, says that “after 1970, Pakistan has never ever witnessed a free and fair election. There is no reason to believe that the February 18 elections will be any different. The stakes for Pervez Musharraf, his cronies (the Pakistan Muslim League and allied parties), his patrons (the Americans) and perhaps also for his erstwhile core constituency (the Pakistan army) are so high that the luxury of a clean election cannot be permitted.” More here…

Mr Wajid Shamsul Hasan, a senior diplomat and former Pakistan High Commissioner to London, says “numerous sources from the Pakistan People’s Party’s monitoring unit, with information collected from every region, confirm that systematic election rigging is already under way by President Pervez Musharraf’s party workers. Already 25 million voters have disappeared from the electoral rolls. Perhaps as many as half the polling booths have been closed in key areas, making it almost impossible to vote. So it certainly is an uneven playing field.”

Based on polling and other indicators, the odds favor Bhutto’s party coming in first, with Sharif’s party second — trailed by a handful of smaller parties, including those most closely associated with extremist factions, according to a CNN analysis.

Meanwhile President Pervez Musharraf promised the “mother of all elections” when Pakistan goes to the polls on Monday, says the Financial Times. “The president of the troubled south Asian country rejected accusations of pre-poll rigging and warned opposition parties against succumbing to the temptation of street protests.”

According to Shuja Nawaz in the Huffington Post: “If the pre-rigging that is being widely alleged does not take hold and derail the electoral process on February 18, and instead people cast their ballots freely on the basis of the deteriorating economic situation and inflation on the one hand and the lack of security on the other, Musharraf may end up being the biggest loser when the results are announced. Under that scenario, the opposition parties may garner enough seats to overturn many of his fiats of dubious legal validity of the recent past.

“This time around, he may not have the coercive power of the army behind him, an army whose new chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has been signaling a shift in its internal priorities from political involvement to professionalism. Musharraf may thus find himself isolated and abandoned by his supporters. If the PML Q manages to eke out a win then street protests may erupt across the country, adding to the violence from terrorism.”

According to The Dawn of Pakistan: “A US-based human rights group on Friday released, what it claimed, was an audiotape of Pakistan’s attorney general acknowledging that the general election would be ‘massively’ rigged.”

I live in the neighbourhood of Pakistan and wish that an average Pakistani’s dream of their country heralding democracy comes true. A Paksitani blog carried my post to this effect…please click here to read that piece…