Pakistan’s Crackdown
By Mohsin Hamid
When I was growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, a dictator called General Zia-ul-Haq was our president. I remember schoolmates telling me their parents were under house arrest, unable to leave home because they opposed the regime. I remember friends of my mother, members of the Women’s Action Forum, sharing stories of how they were beaten by the police because they had marched to protest new laws that undermined women’s equality. But I was a child then, and I went about my life pretending things were fine.
I had stopped thinking very often of those dark days. Yes, since 1998 Pakistan has once again been ruled by a dictator. But I have spent most of that time outside the country. Besides, General Pervez Musharraf seemed an altogether different sort of president.
Or at least he did. On Saturday, I started to receive phone calls, text messages, emails from friends both Pakistani and non. They all told me General Musharraf had declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution.
I was asked how I felt. “Upset,” I replied.
Upset that it had come to this, that the General and his opponents could not find a way to compromise. Musharraf was about to step down as chief of the army, in just a few days. And elections were to be held in January, only two months away.
I sat down to write a magazine essay on the failure of compromise. I was disappointed with both sides, Musharraf and his opponents, for letting a deal that would have been good for the country slip away.
But the phone calls continued. I began to put faces and names to some of the thousands of opponents General Musharraf had imprisoned. One was Samina Rahman, a grandmother, school superintendent, and the mother of my friend Aisha. She had been held for days, simply because she was at the offices of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission when it was raided by the police.
Another was Aitzaz Ahsan, a heroic lawyer, former government minister, and the father of my friend Ali. He was picked up by the security forces on Saturday. He remains in jail with little or no outside contact.
And as one decent, non-violent person after another is imprisoned, I find myself increasingly angry.
I strongly prefer to look for compromise. But I am no longer a child, as I was in the 1980s, able to shut my eyes when bad things happen. I recognize that there comes a time when compromise with a tyrant serves only to perpetuate tyranny.
I am saddened by my anger, for anger on the scale of a nation can lead to dangerous places. But I feel it, none-the-less. And it is growing.
(From: NPR “Morning Edition”)
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