BY FAROOQ TARIQ
Mir Zafarulah Jamali, a feudal lord from Baluchistan, was elected as prime minister on November 21 by Pakistan's national assembly. After months of attempts to install a puppet "civilian" government, General Pervez Musharraf's military regime succeeded, but only just.
Jamali obtained 172 assembly votes, just enough to grab the PM post, but only thanks to 10 crucial votes from a group which broke away from Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).
Jamali ran as a candidate of the Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), which is backed by Musharraf. MLQ is a split away from the Muslim League of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was unseated by Musharraf in the 1999 military coup. Musharraf made himself president with unprecedented dictatorial power.
Jamali has a long and notorious record as a feudal tyrant. In 1977, under the dictatorship of Zia-ul Haq, he deprived peasants of land that was rightfully allotted to them by the previous government. The peasants initiated a resistance movement. Jamali's armed thugs killed 10 peasants, which provoked widespread hunger strikes in Sindh and Baluchistan provinces. Most of the peasants were arrested and jailed by Zia's regime. Jamali also dissolved the Baluchistan provincial assembly in 1988, when he was the province's chief minister.
During the first two sessions of the new parliament, both the PPP and the MMA, a coalition of Islamic fundamentalist parties which won substantial portion of the seats in the October 10 parliamentary election, had criticised the military regime. However, they did not offer much dissent to the regime's economic agenda. Following the election, the MMA expressed support for privatisation.
The MMA gained enormous popularity due to its vocal advocacy of democracy, defence of the constitution and support for Pakistan's sovereignty. It also gained a very high profile by voicing opposition to US imperialism, falsely earning it the image of being an anti-imperialist force.
The MMA is likely to govern in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, which border Afghanistan. Even though the MMA received 14% of the total votes nationally, it was able to win more seats than any other party in these two provinces.
The popularity of the religious parties was demonstrated at the November 19 funeral of Aimal Kansi, who was executed in the US for the killing of two CIA agents in 1993. More than 70,000 people attended the funeral procession, making it the largest ever in Baluchistan.
Based on his track record, Jamali's government will carry out anti-worker and anti-peasant policies, according to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
A new era of political uncertainty has set in. The strength of the Islamic fundamentalists in parliament, as well as the strong presence of the PPP, will not leave much room for Jamali to manoeuver.
There is a reasonable prospect that the fundamentalists will gain further popularity. Their tactical shift from being a pro-imperialist force to passing themselves off as "anti-imperialists" has paid off, thanks to the deep repulsion of US imperialism among the people of Pakistan.
Left and progressive forces in Pakistan need to oppose both the imperialists and the religious fundamentalists as they are both anti-people and anti-worker. The Labour Party Pakistan is currently working to initiate a broad-based alliance of progressive forces to campaign against both.
[Farooq Tariq is general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 4, 2002.
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