Pakistan election won’t end strife, warns rights warden
Pakistan’s preeminent rights activist describes the upcoming election as a messy melodrama staged by an emboldened military, unlikely to bring down the curtain on a cast of crises plaguing the country.
Millions of people will vote in polls in less than two weeks, in a campaign marred by allegations of pre-vote rigging with the opposition heavily suppressed.
“I don’t see Pakistan’s problems going away after this election,” said Munizae Jahangir, co-chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).
“We’re headed towards the next mess that nobody will know how to fix,” she told AFP last week in the capital Islamabad.
The lacklustre election campaign feels like a sideshow compared to the backstage drama between jailed ex-prime minister Imran Khan and the military kingmakers who once backed him.
Khan was ousted in 2022 in a parliamentary no-confidence vote he claims was orchestrated by the country’s powerful generals.
“They have a schizophrenic relationship with Imran Khan,” Jahangir said of the military brass.
“Nobody can predict what the military is going to do because they first make up all these leaders and then they demolish them.”
Jahangir hails from a family that for decades has faced down threats to check abuses of power.
In 1986 her mother Asma Jahangir – who died in 2018 – co-founded the HRCP, today a globally respected watchdog.
Described as Pakistan’s “moral compass”, the human rights lawyer set up the first legal aid cell for women and minorities, winning landmark cases that were sometimes met with violent threats. She was ordered under house arrest in 2007 by Pervez Musharraf -- Pakistan’s last military ruler who suspended the constitution and detained hundreds of critics.
“She had a way of collecting people and in a way strategising to push the military back to the barracks and create more civilian space for the politicians,” Jahangir said of her mother.
Pakistan has been ruled by martial law periodically since the country was created out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Although Pakistan is now in its longest period of civilian government, political parties still require the backing of the armed forces, euphemistically dubbed “the establishment”, to clinch power.
Khan was arrested in August after heaping scorn on generals over his 2022 ousting and accusing them of plotting an assassination bid that left him wounded.