Pakistan: the struggle continues

Submitted by Anon on 28 June, 2007 - 12:33

BY Mike Rowley

Pakistan is going through a period of heightened struggle against the military-based government of Pervez Musharraf. The current struggles began in earnest on 14 May when a general strike shut down Pakistan’s major cities, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Quetta. This followed two days of protests, some of them violent, against the attempt by the government on 9th March to suspend Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had ruled against it, on unspecified charges.

Nearly forty people were killed, mostly opposition supporters. The government authorised paramilitary police to shoot demonstrators “involved in serious violence”. Lawyers were beaten up by police and demonstrators were attacked by quasi-fascist pro-Musharraf mobs. Nevertheless, the police admitted that the ciries were “totally paralysed” by the strike. It was the first time since Musharraf took power that a strike call had been so widely observed.

Musharraf is up for election towards the end of the year. He had promised to quit as head of the army by the end of 2004, but he backed out of the commitment. Constitutionally, he is due to give up his army job by the end of December, but he is believed to be reluctant to do so; and Chief Justice Chaudhry is thus a potential block to his continued rule.

The opposition blamed the government and the pro-government Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), which runs Karachi, for the violence. In Islamabad, opposition politicians stormed out of parliament shouting “the general is a killer”, referring to Musharraf, and “MQM is a killer”.

The government has responded with attacks on the unions and on press freedom. At the beginning of June, a new decree authorising the government to fine TV stations, physically shut them down and even temporarily ban them for supposed “misconduct”, was accompanied by an anonymous threat to kill Syed Huma Ali, President of the Pakistani Federal Union of Journalists. Massive demonstrations and strikes were organised by the journalists’ unions against the proposed crackdown. Mazhar Abbas, another journalists’ union leader, said that: “The media is directly under attack. Even the freedom of expression is under serious attack, and it’s a clear indication that the government is not interested about restoring democracy in Pakistan.”

As a result of the journalists’ action, the government’s anti-media decree was suspended and referred to a consultative committee. However, non-state journalists have been excluded from parliament, and debates on the decree have not been allowed. Lawyers have boycotted courts and are organising a legal challenge to the decree. Asia Media observes that “Burning of an effigy of General Musharraf has become a permanent activity”!

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Sugar Mills Workers’ Federation has demanded the abolition of the contract and daily-wage system in the industry. Inflation is out of control, the prices of basic goods are skyrocketing and the government is doing nothing to enforce the already extremely low legal minimum wage of 4,000 rupees a month; some workers are being paid half that. The contract and daily-wage system has actually been held illegal by the courts, but this is ignored by the government and the bosses.

The union resolved to fight the “hegemony of capitalists” and demanded permanent status for all contract and daily-wage workers, reinstatement and restoration of facilities for all sugar mill workers and freedom of union activity in the sugar mills.

Significantly, the union sees the need to broaden the struggle, supporting the protests in favour of Chief Justice Chaudhry and calling for a wage-rise for all workers and price controls for basic goods in order to meet working-class subsistence needs.

In the midst of this struggle, Farooq Tariq, General Secretary of the socialist Labour Party of Pakistan, was arrested on 4 June. This was his third arrest in two months. The police refused to tell him why he had been arrested or if there were any charges against him; and they told a court that he was not in their custody. Effectively, he had been kidnapped by the state.

He was held at first in a warehouse belonging to an official of the Muslim League, the ruling party in Punjab. On Tuesday 19 June he was released, as he says “not due to mercy granted by the Punjab government, but our local and international massive solidarity campaign forced them to do so.” The LPP organised two demonstrations and a night vigil plus a huge international solidarity campaign, forcing the government first to admit they were holding comrade Tariq and then to release him. (See box for more.)

The opposition to the Mushjarraf government consists of a cross-class alliance of unions, lawyers, the liberal Pakistan People’s Party (formerly the ruling party), the Muslim League (who played a major role in the illegal detention of Farooq Tariq) and far-right Islamists. However, these forces are not comfortable with each other.

Farooq Tariq said recently that “class contradictions are on the rise” in Pakistan. As the example of the sugar workers shows, workers are starting to generalise their demands against the capitalist class and the capitalist state in Pakistan; and as the example of Farooq Tariq’s arrest shows, the right-wing opposition parties are united with the government when it comes to their class interests.

The government’s only answer to the increase and growing concretisation of class struggle is to try to whip up religious tension. This is the meaning of the absurd comments of Musharraf’s religious affairs minister, Muhammad Ejaz ul-Haq (son of the former military dictator and notorious torturer Zia ul-Haq) that the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie justifies suicide bombing: “If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the prophet Muhammad, his act is justified...[unless something is done] the situation will get worse and Salman Rushdie may get a seat in the British parliament”!

However, the left and the working class generally in Pakistan are beginning to split from bourgeois political organisations. The Labour Party Pakistan, which has fought successfully against privatisation and led workers and peasants in struggle, is best-placed to ensure that the growing anger aomong Pakistani workers is channelled neither into bourgeois opposition movements nor into religious lunacy, but becomes the basis of a genuine independent working-class political force in Pakistan.

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