ISLAMABAD, 7 December 2006 — Hard-line groups must be defeated in the next election, President Pervez Musharraf said, but at the same time, he vowed to keep the leaders of two main moderate parties out of the polls.
Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, is widely expected to preside over a general election that he said would be held between November next year and January 2008 — the second under his rule.
He is also expected to secure another term in office next year. The president is elected by the National Assembly and provincial assemblies and Musharraf has said the current assemblies can vote for president.
In an interview with the India’s NDTV, Musharraf — a major ally in the US-led war on terrorism — said moderate forces must win the election. “Moderate forces, enlightened forces, must win against these religious elements ... obscurantists ... I call them,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview. But he also said the leaders of the two main moderate parties — former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — would be barred from the polls.
The two exiled politicians want to return but Musharraf has refused, accusing them of corruption, which both of them deny.
“No,” Musharraf said when asked if the opposition leaders would be standing in the vote. “Firstly, one of them is convicted. The other is also convicted. Both of them are actually convicted.”
Pakistan’s Islamist groups have traditionally fared poorly in elections. Prior to 2002, they had never won more than a dozen seats.
But they made spectacular gains in the 2002 election, partly because of widespread anti-US feeling after the US-led invasion of neighboring Afghanistan the previous year. Musharraf said the time had come for those gains to be reversed.
“They must go down to the level where they were before. They never had more than three to four percent. Now they have about 17 or 18 percent in the assemblies. They are running one of the provinces. They must be defeated.”
But an analyst said Musharraf’s efforts to marginalize the Islamists without allowing the two popular leaders back into politics was a contradiction.
“By sidelining the leadership of the mainstream political parties he would create a vacuum that is most likely to be filled by the hard-line groups, as it was in the past,” said Talat Masood, a former army general and analyst. “This is a big contradiction.”
Musharraf said he would not give up his position as the chief of the army before polls next year. He said he would continue to hold the job as the army chief as long as the constitution allowed him to.
“The constitution allows me to hold it till 2007, so I will hold it... So if the elections, as I said are in November, I will be in uniform,” Musharraf said. He said it was not easy to give up the army uniform.
“It’s not easy, because there are some perceptions. At this moment what Pakistan is facing needs a unity, a unity of command over important organs of state. That includes the military, the political and the bureaucracy.”
