Islamabad street protests threaten Musharraf's power

Protesters have united against Pakistan's president after he sacked the country's top judge last week.

By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 19, 2007 edition

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ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - President Pervez Musharraf's immediate threat may no longer be militants, or nuclear rival India, or an American Congress that is increasingly skeptical of the general's rate of return when it comes to the US-led war on terrorism.

This week, it is the ordinary citizens laying siege to his regime that could be more potent than any other threat, analysts say.

In an unexpected show of force, hundreds of lawyers and opposition politicians clashed with police on Friday and Saturday in Islamabad and Lahore, protesting the removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry. Some of Musharraf's own party members have turned on him, and more protests are on the way.

Few say that they expect this to prove the undoing of the Musharraf regime. But the rattled opposition, long dismissed as ineffective or dead, has a new rallying cry. In championing constitutional rule, their united stance is quickly winning public opinion to their favor, considerably weakening Musharraf's reelection bid, observers say.

"If anybody thinks maintaining a dictatorship is easy – this is not Burma or Egypt. People will stand up," says Shafqat Mahmood, an independent political analyst in Lahore.

More than 100 protesters arrested

For almost a full week, Pakistan's major cities have seen a surge of violent protests against Musharraf's regime, pitting lawyers and intellectuals in bloody confrontation with the police. The spontaneous political reaction surprised many Pakistanis; given how carefully Musharraf's regime divided political parties over the years, many in the country's political establishment had written off the opposition's ability to push back against the president.

After years of building or burning bridges of political convenience, and working loopholes in the Constitution, the president has left the opposition and most political institutions stymied by apathy, internal conflict, or both.

"This is the cleverness of Musharraf's regime, the use of intelligence agencies and state institutions to scatter the political parties so there is no unity," says Mustak Ali Khan, a member of the provincial council of Jemaat-Islami, one of Pakistan's largest opposition Islamist parties.

The protests, now a week old, come at a critical juncture, observers say, and could snowball into an even larger movement. At their core is a new middle class which, with greater access to electronic media and more wealth, could prove instrumental in inspiring others to join the fray.

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