See how it looked in 1977

Army patience wilts; Pakistan taken over

By Geoffrey Godsell | Overseas news editor of The Christian Science Monitor

Pakistan is back under military government after nearly six years of the civilian premiership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The Army chief of staff, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, announced an Army takeover July 5, the detention of both Mr. Bhutto and opposition leaders, and the dissolution of both the national and provincial assemblies.

General Zia said martial law was being imposed and that he would be martial law administrator, assisted by a military council. President Fazal Elahi Chaudhry would continue as titular President of the Republic.
In effect, this means that the Pakistan Army’s patience has been exhausted by:

*Four months of civilian-politician bickering and intermittent violence in the wake of last March’s general election, with the opposition challenging Mr. Bhutto’s victory at the polls on the grounds that the voting had been rigged.

*Pakistan’s growing economic difficulties made worse by the political instability of the past four months – and further underlined by postponement of the scheduled meeting of the international aid consortium helping Pakistan.

*The continued obligation to use force if necessary to maintain law and order to perpetuate authority of a Prime Minister who, as some saw it, was more interested in office for himself than national tranquility.

Yet for all his autocratic ways, Mr. Bhutto can rightfully claim that he did call the first election ever held under a civilian government in Pakistan, and that he as much as anybody else restored national morale after his country split apart with the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971.

‘Fastest gun’ view

Of him, the London Economist wrote back at the time of the March election, “True, his westernized veneer – a product of Eastern wealth combined with Oxford and Berkeley training – is too easily mistaken for a commitment to Western-style democracy. He should be seen, rather, as the fastest gun in what is still, politically, a frontier society – determined to hold on to power, frequently abusing it, but also using it to push and pummel his half-developed, half-primitive country into the modern world.”

In the March election Mr. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party won 155 seats in the 200-set National Assembly. The main opposition party, the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), itself a nine-party coalition, won only 36 seats. The PNA leader, Air Marshal Muhammed Asghar Khan, had said during the bitterly fought election campaign that if the election proved rigged, the opposition would not accept the result.

Crying ‘foul’

That is exactly what happened. The one-sided outcome of the election led the PNA to cry ‘foul’ and to take to the streets to try to force both the resignation of Mr. Bhutto and the holding of new elections. Mr. Bhutto’s reaction was tough: martial law in the most troubled urban centers, arrest of virtually the entire opposition leadership, and the use of the Army to restore order.

Some opposition leaders thought the Army might be reluctant to intervene on the side of one political grouping against another, particularly since it was being asked to protect the power of a wealthy civilian intellectual against the threat of an opposition led by a retired air marshal. But Mr. Bhutto took out insurance by bringing into his administration former Army chief Gen. Tikka Khan, who, in many military eyes, had gotten a raw deal for his role in the events leading to the breakaway of East Pakistan and the establishment of Bangladesh nearly six years ago.

Now that the Army’s patience has been exhausted, it should be noted that the military has in fact acted against both teams of civilian politicians, government and opposition alike. So both have lost out to the military, which presumably blames both for the long-drawn-out squabbling since March.

Ironically, Mr. Bhutto and the opposition leaders had seemed close to agreement on a compromise at the beginning of June. Mr. Bhutto promised new elections in October, although he balked at resigning in the meantime. Final agreement was on again, off again as June dragged on. But on July 2, the negotiators from both sides thought they finally had an acceptable draft – only to have it rejected by the PNA central committee the following day. Presumably that was the last straw for the Army and the coup followed.