Asia Security
Monitor
No. 3, November 21, 2002 Extremist parties dominate Pakistan’s elections;
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November 9: Pakistan's religious party alliance, Muthida Majlis-e-Amal, formally selected cleric, Maulana Rahman as its leading candidate for the country's pending election, reports the Associated Press. Rahman, who heads the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI), is likely to become Pakistan's next Prime Minister. He is known to be fiercely devoted to creating a purely Islamic state and is also openly sympathetic to the exiled Taliban government and al-Qaeda terrorist group. While he was silent on the stationing of U.S. troops in Pakistan, Rahman's lieutenant and vice president of the JUI, Mir Hussain Gillani, stated in reference to Afghanistan: "Absolutely the Americans will be told to go... It is our duty to give protection to the oppressed Muslims, and America is the biggest oppressor." In the first national election since Gen. Pervez Musharraf's 1999 military coup, the Muthida Majlis-e-Amal won 59 out of 342 parliamentary seats, posing a threat to the Musharraf government, which won only 103 out of the 172 seats needed to form another majority military government. [Editor's Note: One of Pakistan's most feared terrorists, Azam Tariq, was elected from his prison cell, which led to his immediate release as an unrepentant free man. His outlawed pro-al Qaeda, pro-Taliban Sipah-e-Sahaba party is blamed for some 400 killings in Pakistan last year alone.] November 12: Just days after his release from prison, popular Kashmir separatist Yasin Malik held a press conference in Srinagar criticizing Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's amnesty plan for Kashmir freedom fighters, the BBC reports. Malik, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), claims Sayeed's plan is nothing more than an attempt to ease regional tensions without challenging New Delhi's assertion that the recent referendum was a vote in India's favor. Malik, who wants a Kashmir nation independent from both India and Pakistan, also faults the Indian government for failure to hold free elections monitored by a neutral third party. November 13: Russia has recently signed an agreement with Pakistan that would link Iranian gas-fields with India, the BBC reports. The Russian state-controlled gas enterprise, Gazprom, signed a memorandum of understanding with Pakistan's Ministry for Oil and Natural Resources agreeing to construct a gas pipeline that will pass through Pakistan's coastal waters. Iran and India are also expected to sign similar agreements with Gazprom. November 14: The Indian government has presented the United States with evidence that Pakistan is continuing to support insurgency movements in India's Kashmir Valley five months after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged to an American envoy that it would end, reports The Washington Times. India's evidence includes aerial surveillance photographs of purported training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-held Kashmir, statements by captured infiltrators, radio transmission intercepts between Pakistan and Kashmir, and identity documents seized from killed or captured insurgents. The U.S., however, seems skeptical of their authenticity and more willing to accept Pakistan's assertion that some of the evidence may have been fabricated by India to conceal an inability to cope with an indigenous uprising. |
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Copyright
© 2002, American Foreign Policy Council.
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