The Trial of Pervez Musharraf

There is an Urdu proverb often used to greet Pakistanis who display an elastic relationship with time: “You have arrived late,” it says, roughly translated, “but it is good that you arrived.” The three judges presiding over the trial of General Pervez Musharraf may have had that saying in mind on Tuesday, when, after months of delay, Musharraf finally appeared before them. Pakistan’s former military ruler has been charged with treason for his decision, in November, 2007, to suspend the constitution and impose a state of emergency—a desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to hold on to power. The panel of judges, which was named last November, had already met twenty-two times without the General’s participation.

Many previous appointments had been frustrated at the last minute. On both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, Musharraf’s appearances were cancelled after the suspicious discovery of explosives near his Mediterranean-style villa on the outskirts of Islamabad. The explosives were somehow both amateurishly rigged and expertly unearthed. Six weeks ago, when he did manage to leave his home for another court hearing, Musharraf suddenly fell ill on the way; his car was swiftly diverted to a military hospital, where he has remained since.

The nature of his illness is still disputed. Musharraf’s lawyers argued that their client was in need of immediate medical attention abroad, an excuse long favored by Pakistani politicians eager to evade prosecution. But other medical experts said that, at seventy, Musharraf was merely suffering the gentle depredations of age. Details from a leaked medical report said that he was beset by nine different ailments, including hypertension, a clogged artery, a rickety knee, and some trouble with his spine.

The withering response to these reports provides some sense of Musharraf’s badly diminished stature in Pakistan: one well-known journalist, Murtaza Solangi, seized on the last detail with a stinging proclamation of disbelief. “How can you have spinal issues,” he tweeted, “when you don’t have a spine to begin with?” Musharraf’s lawyers have not taken kindly to the widespread suggestions that their client was afraid to face the court. At an earlier hearing, a journalist asked one lawyer, “Where is your commando?”—a reference to Musharraf’s service, forty years ago, in an elite special-forces unit. The lawyer, Ahmed Raza Kasuri, responded with characteristic pugilism, angrily calling the reporter a “paid” Indian agent.

Musharraf’s lawyers have become well practiced in the tactics of diversion and delay. On Tuesday, their client strode into court, wearing a black jacket and looking well rested, the worst of his illness apparently behind him. Twenty minutes later, Musharraf left the courtroom without receiving the indictment that had been expected: his lawyers pleaded that the court first had to rule on whether a case against a former Army chief could be heard in a civilian rather than a military court. The judges, who have earned a reputation for studied caution, suggested that the trial reconvene on Friday, when Musharraf is expected to be read the charges against him. Among local reporters, who have covered every dramatic postponement in the case, the staggered court proceedings were likened to an interminable Turkish soap opera.

After leaving the court, the former Army chief slipped back into one of the seventeen vehicles in his heavily-guarded cavalcade and drove, past more than one thousand policemen lining the road, back to the military hospital. Musharraf faces serious threats to his life from an array of dangerous militants, and he deserves adequate protection. But the ostentatious display of force also suggests that his powerful successors in the Army have taken him under their protection. According to many military analysts, they are deeply uncomfortable with one of their longest-serving chiefs being put on trial—raising the prospect of a possible clash between Pakistan’s generals and its elected civilian leaders if Musharraf is ultimately convicted.

Musharraf’s greatest misfortune is that Nawaz Sharif, the man he ousted when he seized power in a military coup in October, 1999, has returned to government. Last year, Sharif was elected Prime Minister for an unprecedented third time, still bearing the scars of his ignominious exit fourteen years before. Soon after taking office, last June, Sharif appeared in Parliament to announce that the government would try Musharraf for “high treason”—defined as any attempt to subvert or suspend the constitution. After Musharraf deposed him, Sharif was hurled into a cell in a sixteenth-century fort along with some of his closest political lieutenants, and later dispatched into exile, where he remained for seven years. Critics argue that Sharif is motivated solely by revenge and that, given the circumstances, Musharraf cannot possibly obtain a fair trial.

But Musharraf’s detractors are not only in the parliament: the judiciary is similarly ill-disposed toward the former military ruler. In 2007, Musharraf triggered his own downfall by sacking the sitting chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry. When the country’s lawyers united behind a massive movement to restore the judge to the bench, Musharraf’s public support plummeted. A few months later, fearing that Chaudhry would retaliate by challenging his hold on power through the courts, Musharraf—acting as Army chief—suspended the constitution, sacked Chaudhry again, and put sixty other judges under house arrest.

This declaration of emergency, on November 3rd, 2007, is what Musharraf is now being tried for. “It was a unique kind of constitutional subversion,” said Salman Akram Raja, a leading lawyer and constitutional expert. “A coup against his own government.” That evening, clutches of policemen cradling rusty rifles toured Islamabad in trucks, scooping up troublesome lawyers and politicians. The lively private television news channels that had also turned against Musharraf went blank. There were no tanks on the street, but the Islamabad police dropped barriers athwart government buildings. In a blunt display of symbolism, Constitution Avenue was blocked.

Musharraf appears to have few regrets. In the final week of 2013, days before he was due to appear in court, the pensioned dictator invited sympathetic interviewers to question him on television. “Everything I did was for the country, for Pakistan,” Musharraf said in one interview, slipping into his favored bullet-point style. “I was at the helm of affairs,” he boomed, raising a clenched fist. “The state of the country is one way, the constitution is the other. What should I have done? Should I have run?”

In the interview, Musharraf displayed few signs of the incipient illness that would prevent him from appearing in court a month later. His only visible symptom was an inflamed sense of self-importance. “First thing, number one: I’m no ordinary citizen,” he said, rather modestly. “This is something to be understood. From where did God raise me? From a middle-class home, he made me Army chief, chairman, Prime Minister, President.”

Musharraf seems to be propelled by the belief that he is still his country’s savior: there is no other explanation for his decision to return to Pakistan last year from his comfortable exile in London, despite the best advice of his erstwhile allies in both government and the Army. When he arrived in Karachi, Musharraf told a modest-sized welcoming crowd that he had come to “save Pakistan.” The world, however, had moved on. At the elections, his party won just a single seat. The supporters who had once crowded around him at the height of his popularity fled to rival parties.

The Pakistani Army had long urged Musharraf not to return. The former Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who stepped down last November, believed that his predecessor’s plunge back into politics would invite legal troubles and damage the Army’s image. In this, he was correct: the Army is now trying to fend off a crisis it never wanted in the first place. However much it has since distanced itself from Musharraf’s ruinous legacy, it nevertheless cannot abide one of its own former chiefs being convicted for treason.

According to Pakistan’s constitution, anyone found guilty of suspending the constitution is, by definition, a traitor. The army finds this language inflammatory, and particularly galling when applied to the former chief of an institution that has long seen itself as the ultimate guardian of Pakistan’s security. Furthermore, the new Army chief, General Raheel Sharif (no relation to the Prime Minister), has a longstanding family connection to Musharraf. His brother, the war hero Major Shabbir Sharif, was a close friend of the man now on trial. To honor that bond, one senior politician told me, General Sharif ordered the Army to take Musharraf under its protection.

To complicate matters further, the army remains uneasy with the government’s decision to pursue negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban, particularly at a moment when the militants are killing Pakistani troops. Last month, when twenty soldiers were killed in the frontier town of Bannu, General Sharif responded with immense force. For a moment, it looked as if Pakistan was about to mount a sweeping offensive against the Taliban. But the government used the threat of further force to lure the militants to the negotiating table.

The Taliban have been quick to exploit the new space yielded to them. Their chosen interlocutors have spent much of the past fortnight diverting attention away from the question of terrorism and toward the far more urgent matter of whether Pakistan has a truly “Islamic” form of government. Meanwhile, the bombings have continued: in Peshawar, cinemas and pro-government tribal elders have been attacked. In Karachi, eleven policemen were killed. Three different media organizations were either attacked by bombs or threatened with them. And on Sunday night, the Taliban beheaded twenty-three soldiers in their custody.

This last act of savagery frayed the military’s patience with what it has long seen as a dangerous inclination to indulge the Taliban. Just after midnight on Thursday, fighter jets bombed targets in North Waziristan, a tribal area along the Afghan border notorious for its concentration of militants, while gunship helicopters strafed their allies in the nearby Khyber agency. The new fighting, which signals the end of talks with the Taliban, and perhaps a wider military offensive, diminishes the odds of Musharraf’s trial continuing.

As one retired general told me, soldiers cannot be expected to die for the country while their former chief is on trial for treason. “If the offensive against the Taliban starts,” he said, “the Army will be pulled in two different directions. It will be fighting on one front and facing a media trial of their former chief on the other. That will make the situation very tense.” Many observers feel that Pakistan faces too many other problems right now—terrorism, a crushing energy crisis, a torpid economy—to devote its attention to punishing an already-chastened Musharraf.

Members of Prime Minister Sharif’s government say that he doesn’t want to prolong Musharraf’s ordeal. He merely wants a conviction for the record: something that helps him to even the score, and that will stand as a warning to any future generals tempted to promote themselves into power. If Musharraf is convicted, Sharif may opt to issue a swift pardon, clearing a route for Musharraf from his maze of legal miseries straight to Islamabad’s international airport.

Either way, it seems, Musharraf will soon leave Pakistan once again and return to his life as a discarded strongman in exile. As his failed attempt to restore himself to glory in Pakistan nears its undignfied end, it is hard to avoid thinking of Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional account of the last days of Simón Bolívar—a once-admired general who had been fêted around the world but spent his last days yearning for exile in Europe. “Let’s go, as fast as we can,” the forlorn protagonist tells his companion on the first page of “The General in His Labyrinth.” “Nobody loves us here.”

_

Omar Waraich is a foreign correspondent covering Pakistan. He tweets at @OmarWaraich.

_

Above: Photograph by Anjum Naveed/AP.