Pakistani protesters eager for Bhutto-Sharif deal

As Pakistani opposition leaders mull running in January elections, analysts doubt street activists' patience for a decision on Musharraf.

By Shahan Mufti | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 7, 2007 edition

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Islamabad, Pakistan - Shahid Khan, a university student in Lahore who became politically active this year in the street movement against President Pervez Musharraf, is losing patience. With a month to go before the general elections in January, major opposition leaders who have recently flown in from all across the globe still haven't let activists and party workers in on a very basic element of the opposition's strategy: Will they participate in the elections or will they boycott?

As student groups, journalists, and lawyers continue to demonstrate across the country every day to maintain the momentum on the streets, and party workers lay the groundwork for possible election campaigns at the grass-roots level, most major leaders seem frozen in their collective indecision.

And some in Pakistan are beginning to seriously question whether the old-guard political leadership can be agents of change after all. Tiring of instability and martial law, some even seem ready to tolerate President Musharraf's continued rule, rather than throwing their lot with what seems like a deeply fractured opposition that is doing little but add to the general air of uncertainty.

"How much longer will this go on?" asks an exasperated Mr. Khan. "If they can't even decide what they want right now, why should we expect that they can work together and lead us in the future?"

Former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have spent a good part of the last several weeks hammering out a list of demands for Musharraf in return for calling off a boycott that could spoil the legitimacy of parliamentary elections, which will take place in January "come hell or high water," according to the president.

With the major leaders' negotiation in stalemate, the debate on how to approach the elections has been thrown wide open in the print and broadcast media, in online chat rooms, and roadside tea stalls. It appears to be a debate of pragmatism versus idealism. But with each passing day that the two leaders meet and fail to arrive on any common platform, frustration and skepticism is rising.

Unless the opposition takes a strong stand against Musharraf, says Shuja Nawaz in a blog posting, "The country may have to wait for its Velvet Revolution for a long time, though many in Pakistan hope not the 20 years that Czechs and Slovaks had to wait for their democracy."

Sounding an accommodationist note, an editorial in the Daily Times, a large English-language newspaper, argues that "the demands" by the opposition "will have to be realistic and should encourage the government and [Musharraf] to 'give ground.' "

The decision to boycott is a very delicate political calculation – no one party can go at it alone.

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