Widespread Outage Spurs Coup Rumors In Pakistan
Technical Troubles Blamed; Musharraf 'in Good Health'

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 25, 2006

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 24 -- Panicky rumors of a coup swept through Pakistan on Sunday after a power outage interrupted national television broadcasts and later plunged much of the country into darkness.

With the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, away on an extended trip to the United States and Canada at a time of regional tensions and growing insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan, many Pakistanis speculated that he had been overthrown in absentia.

The chairman of the national power administration, Tariq Hamid, said at a 10 p.m. news conference in Lahore that the outage was caused by technical problems and that no sabotage had been involved.

Information Ministry officials, accompanying Musharraf on a visit to New York, also announced Sunday night that the president was "in good health."

Islamabad, the capital, was quiet late into the night, and there were no signs of military vehicles or troops in the streets. There were also no reports of unusual military movements in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad where the armed forces are headquartered.

But for hours, with power flickering on and off in Islamabad and half the country still without electricity by late evening, rumors continued to swirl of a possible coup against Musharraf, an army general who seized power from Pakistan's last elected leader in 1999.

"I have been flooded with calls all evening. Everyone wants to know if something is amiss. It shows you how on edge people are," said Mushahid Hussain, a senator from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League faction who is close to Musharraf.

Hussain said he had received dozens of queries by cellphone and text messaging from provincial authorities, human rights groups, Pakistanis living abroad, and even from officials traveling with the president. He said he told them everything was fine.

Rifaat Hussain, a Pakistani defense and security expert, said he, too, had received numerous calls from friends who were worried about a possible coup. He said he immediately contacted government sources, who "vociferously denied" there was any problem.

"So many people have cellphones now that rumors can snowball, and such a situation also taps into people's anxieties," he said. Many Pakistanis thought immediately of last week's coup in Thailand, Hussain said, and remembered how previous Pakistani leaders had been "unceremoniously removed."

Pakistan has had a history of military intervention in civilian politics ever since it was founded as a Muslim democracy in 1947. While elections have been held regularly, civilian rule has been repeatedly interrupted by the army or other non-elected figures.

Musharraf, 63, who is chief of Pakistan's army staff, would be highly unlikely to fall to a military coup, although it has been reported that some of the senior army commanders, who operate as a consensual policy group within the armed forces, are conservative Muslims who disagree with his moderate religious policies.

But Musharraf has lost considerable domestic support for a variety of reasons, including his refusal to relinquish his military uniform while in office, his retreat on promises to expand women's and religious rights, and his use of aggressive military tactics to solve problems in volatile border regions.

While in the United States this week, Musharraf has made several statements that could reflect poorly on Pakistan's military leadership and autonomy. He said a senior U.S. official had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate fully with the United States against al-Qaeda and Afghanistan's Taliban government after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Musharraf's comment suggested that he had yielded to intense U.S. pressure in deciding to turn against the Taliban and to help in the hunt for al-Qaeda, decisions that many Pakistani Islamic leaders have long criticized.

"Musharraf is blindly toeing the American line, thereby causing irreparable damage to Pakistan and its image in the world," said Khurshid Ahmad, a scholar and senator from the religious Jamaat-e-Islami party. "For his efforts, he gets a pat on the back while they are twisting his arm."

A second sensitive issue raised during Musharraf's visit to Washington concerned the activities of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters along the border with Afghanistan. Earlier this month, Musharraf announced that he had made a peace pact with Taliban groups inside Pakistan after thousands of Pakistani troops failed to quell them.

President Bush praised Musharraf's efforts this week but insisted he would send U.S. forces into Pakistan to track down al-Qaeda leaders if necessary. This is a sore point for the Pakistani military, and Musharraf has always insisted he would not allow it.

On Sunday night, after power had been restored in most areas, news stations broadcast footage of cities and towns lighted by candles, and messages crawling across TV screens repeated that Musharraf was in good health and that the government situation was normal.

Hamid, the chairman of the power administration, apologized for the inconvenience and the fact that the lengthy power outage had contributed to "baseless stories." News reports said some civilians had protested outside power offices and attacked one, but there were no other reports of violence.