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POLITICS-PAKISTAN: Suicide Bombings Ruin Election Campaigning

Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Feb 12 2008 (IPS) - Escalating violence in the run up to general elections on Feb. 18 has made campaigning impossible for political parties and their supporters in Pakistan’s lawless border areas.

”Only a week away from voting day, the usual election fever is missing,” observes Hashim Khan, a political analyst at the University of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). “There was some interest in the polls before opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s death on Dec. 27,” he adds.

Election meetings have been wrecked by suicide bombers and bomb attacks. A suicide blast close to the Awami National Party (ANP) rally in South Waziristan on Feb. 11 killed six and injured over a dozen people. Mohammad Nisar Khan, the ANP’s candidate in the constituency had a narrow escape.

On Feb. 9, a bomb was thrown at the party’s poll meeting in Charsadda district in NWFP. The explosion killed at least 25 persons and wounded 40.

Asfandyar Wali Khan, ANP president, who was scheduled to be present at the meeting in Shab-e-Qadar tehsil (a cluster of villages), said the attack was an attempt to wipe out the party’s leadership and postpone the polls. “Some hidden forces do not want the election to take place,” he told the media.

Unlike the past six general elections, where election meetings have been held in open places, attracting huge crowds, most candidates have restricted themselves to corner meetings and house-to-house canvassing rather than public rallies for fear of being attacked by shadowy suicide bombers.

Some 70 worshippers died last December in a village mosque that was targetted in a bid to assassinate Aftab Ahmed Khan, who stepped down as Pakistan’s interior minister and who is running in the elections. The bombing was the second attempt on Khan’s life in eight months.

Pakistan’s border region has been wracked by violence since the U.S. launched a ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombings in 2001.

Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda have found a safe haven across the porous frontier in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which includes South Waziristan, where many of the suicide bombers are believed to have been trained.

The violence has spilled over into parts of the NWFP, neighbouring FATA. The Swat Valley, a mountaineers paradise was over-run by pro-Taliban fighters last year. By December, Pakistan’s military claimed to have retaken Swat, killing 300 militants and forcing the rest to flee into the surrounding mountains.

Arshad Ali, a researcher at the Area Study Centre, University of Peshawar, believes the Taliban are playing a “huge part” in the election.

In January, Mangal Bagh a self-proclaimed militant leader convened a meeting of all the 14 candidates in the Khyber Agency of FATA, who were asked to present their manifestoes before a gathering of about 15,000 people.

“This was a dramatic development,” comments Ali. “The militant leader made the candidates take an oath that they would strive for the aggrandizement of Islam when they get to Parliament. The local administration looked the other way!”

The major political parties in the fray are the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the late Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (former prime minister Nawaz Sharif) and the Pakistan Muslim League – Q (PML-Q), loyal to general-turned-president Pervez Musharraf.

Elections are being held for the 342-seat National Assembly (parliament), and four provincial assemblies, which together have a total of 728 seats. While 577 seats will be filled through direct voting, 128 are reserved for women members and 23 for non-Muslims. Pakistan has some 80 million registered voters.

Across Pakistan, campaigning has been low-key. “If political parties don’t speed up their campaigning, I’m afraid the voter turnout will be low,” Kanwar Dilshad, Election Commission secretary told Pakistan’s largest English-language Dawn newspaper. He urged political parties to organise more rallies and meetings to encourage voters to cast their votes.

According to Ali, University of Peshawar researcher, the dull campaigning could also be because candidates have run out of electioneering funds. General elections first announced for Jan. 8 were abruptly postponed after the assassination of Bhutto – a move that was opposed by all parties except the pro-Musharraf PML-Q.

Voter apathy is apparent. “I work the whole day, I have no time,” says Azizur Rehman, a daily wage worker here, who said he has told his children to stay away from election meetings.

Moreover, the All Pakistan Democratic Movement, a coalition of opposition parties including Imran Khan’s Justice Party, has been running an aggressive boycott campaign.

At a public meeting in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province, Khan urged voters to stay away from the polls to put pressure on Musharraf to quit as president. The army should return to the barracks and leave the civilian government and an independent judiciary to safeguard democracy in Pakistan, Justice Party officials told IPS.