What’s Zardari up to?

The falling out between the president and the PPP co-chairman is centred on Zardari’s insistence on a UN probe into what he calls Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The general called it an accident or blamed the extremist militant Baitullah Mehsud whose suicide bomber might have caused Bhutto’s death as she fell after the detonation. With Zardari forgoing an autopsy and all evidence washed clean minutes after the assault, Scotland Yard, too, had reached the same conclusions as the government investigators did on the December 27 fatal attack on Bhutto. Zardari cried foul and made a UN investigation one of the central issues in the PPP’s election campaign.

The question now is: will the army see a UN probe into Bhutto’s death as infringing on its self-proclaimed sovereignty as opposed to that of Pakistan? Surely if an elected government cannot trust the state’s own investigation mechanisms operating under its own supervision, there is more than meets the eye in the whole sordid affair. Days before her death, Benazir had complained to her American friends: “His (Musharraf’s) goons are making me insecure.” The general did not move into the Army House in Rawalpindi instead of occupying the president’s official residence in Islamabad for nothing after doffing his military uniform.

Zardari’s latest somersault on the president may also be seen as a bid to redeem himself. He had inched too close to the establishment which obliged him by withdrawing all corruption and criminal cases against him. Within the PPP this created ripples as party workers shied from defending Zardari’s cosying up to Musharraf, the man many believed could have prevented Benazir’s death.

By exchanging vitriolics with Musharraf, Zardari perhaps hopes to regain some of the lost ground with the public. However, those who know him well could also say that it is another attempt to divert attention from the inertia gripping the PPP-led government on the judges, the economy, the energy crisis and other pressing issues. The lawyers, together with the Sharifs, are all set to make music in the streets of Punjab, come June 10. Their rallying cry is “Go, Musharraf, go”, underpinned by the petition that all judges sent packing on November 3 be restored, and those who replaced them sacked.

By attacking Musharraf now, Zardari can have Sharif back in the fold and defang the planned street agitation. If this is the gambit, will Zardari succeed? And if it is not, will he be able to restore the prestige the PPP lost by entering a US-brokered deal with Musharraf?

If push comes to shove, the MQM in Karachi can be used as the trump card that Musharraf still holds, even as he goes down. But the situation can still be salvaged and a middle ground found between the PPP and the president if potential interlocutors, the army and the US, could devise a compromise. It will have to be the PPP offering indemnity to the November 3 actions taken by Musharraf followed by his resignation at an agreed time down the road in exchange for stripping him now of his powers as the president.

The judges? Well, like Zardari said, the PPP never made their cause part of its election campaign.

The danger is that if all fails, it could be back to October 12, 1999 — another coup underwritten by the US, given its “war on terror” priorities, with or without new exiles being shipped out.

The writer, an editor with Dawn, is based in Karachi murtazarazvi@hotmail.com