Pakistanis Deal a Blow to Musharraf
Opposition Parties Head for Big Victories in Parliamentary Elections

By Candace Rondeaux and Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 19 -- Voters in Pakistan appeared to deliver a sharp rebuke to President Pervez Musharraf on Monday, handing significant victories to the country's two leading opposition parties in parliamentary elections, according to early returns and Pakistani politicians.

Official vote tallies were not expected to be released for several days, but by early Tuesday morning, there were indications that the party of Musharraf, a top U.S. ally, had fallen far out of favor with voters. The country's opposition groups were outpacing other parties by wide margins in several key provinces, including Punjab, home to more than half of this country's 80 million eligible voters.

The president of Musharraf's faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, along with several other prominent party leaders, lost their seats in parliament, according to Pakistan's Dawn News, an English-language television station.

In a televised address early Monday, Musharraf, who had promised to hold "free, fair and transparent" elections, pledged to abide by the results.

"This is the voice of the nation," he said on state-run Pakistan Television. "Everyone should accept the results. That includes myself."

Sporadic reports of clashes at polling stations and several bombings across Pakistan appeared to have kept many voters at home, particularly in urban areas. Opposition parties and election observers cited some instances of rigging and voter intimidation.

Pakistan has experienced widespread tumult since last year, when huge protests erupted following Musharraf's decision to fire the chief justice of the Supreme Court and place him and several other jurists under house arrest. In the following months, public frustration grew over increasing insurgent violence, rising consumer prices and corruption. In December, following the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, the president's popularity fell to an all-time low.

Monday's elections were widely seen as a referendum on Musharraf. Critics alleged that, because the president had been weakened, his government would attempt to manipulate the results to ensure his allies remained in power. A hostile parliament could move to impeach Musharraf, who has held power since a 1999 coup.

Rana Muhammad Riaz, 50, an engineering administrator who cast his vote in Rawalpindi, shrugged off suggestions that rigging would affect the outcome.

"I'm hopeful that we will have a democracy," he said. "Right now we have democracy, but it is not a complete democracy."

In the Punjab city of Lahore, the nation's cultural hub and second-largest city, polling was generally orderly, but turnout was extremely low. A provincial assembly candidate was killed Sunday night, casting a pall on voting throughout the city.

Across Lahore, a stronghold of the Pakistan Muslim League faction headed by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, early returns showed his party to be winning by a landslide, with the opposition Pakistan People's Party coming in a distant second and Musharraf's party trailing further behind.

But a majority of voters, it appeared, decided not to go to the polls at all. By 1 p.m., at one polling station in Lahore's densely populated Old City, only 250 out of 1,500 registered voters had cast their ballots. Similar low turnouts were reported at many other stations.

"This is due to the uncertain atmosphere, the threat of terrorism," said Mohammed Badwa, an economics professor who served as the manager of one polling station. "The procedure is transparent and orderly inside, but the people are very much afraid of violence outside."

Lahore has been at the epicenter of protests by Pakistan's lawyers, who took to the streets by the thousands in November following Musharraf's decision to fire the Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, and detain the president of the Supreme Court bar association, Aitzaz Ahsan, both of whom had been critical of the government.

Several opposition politicians and groups called for the chief justice's reinstatement. Most notable among them was Sharif. Although Sharif is not running for office, his stance on the judiciary appeared to garner the party widespread support at the polls.

"He espoused very clearly and very stridently the cause of the chief justice," said Ahsan, who spoke by phone from his home in Lahore. "This was an election about Pervez Musharraf. I think that had the Pakistan People's Party adopted the same position from the outset, I think it would have swept the polls, and the national grief with Bhutto's assassination would have translated into a strong position, and nothing would have stopped them."

Sherry Rehman, chief spokeswoman for the Pakistan People's Party, said that it was too early to predict the outcome and that Bhutto's party had a strong showing in several areas of the country, including the party's traditional stronghold of Sindh province, Bhutto's ancestral home. Rehman said the party had received hundreds of complaints from voters about rigging at the polls, adding that a delay in delivering ballots to officials charged with counting the vote was especially troubling.

"We're not getting the results. They have been delayed, which in Pakistan means they will be changed," Rehman said.

A Western election observer who spent the day touring polling stations near the northwestern city of Peshawar reported witnessing violence and irregularities. The observer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said problems were particularly rife at several women's polling stations.

"The most egregious irregularities we saw were at the women's polling stations. There were missing voters' lists, misuse of ballot boxes, intimidation of voters," the observer said. "These were in the most secure areas and more affluent areas. I mean, if this was happening here, I could just imagine how bad it must have been in some of the rural areas."

In Pakistan's restive tribal areas, local officials reported that nine security officials were believed to have been kidnapped in the town of Baka Khel in North Waziristan. Police launched a search for them, but there was no immediate word on their whereabouts.

Many polling stations across the northwest were all but deserted during the first half of the day. Problems were compounded as reports of violence around the country began to trickle in. Local news media and several local officials said three explosions occurred in the northwest Swat Valley. The once-serene valley has been roiled in the past year by dozens of skirmishes between Taliban fighters and government troops.

In the densely populated military enclave of Rawalpindi, the flow of voters at one polling station was snarled for more than an hour after election officials opened the polls late.

"I arrived about an hour ago, and I have been unable to vote because they did not open the polls, and the election officials are saying that they do not have the list with my name on it," said Hafiz ur-Rehman, a supporter of the Pakistan People's Party.

Tempers ran high when election officials at the station said they could not find a list containing the names of 324 voters. "It's very concerning to me, because it's our right to cast our vote. We are not servants; we are voters," said Salehain Quereshi, a local council member and People's Party supporter who said election officials refused to record his complaints.

Confusion over the missing voter rolls also incensed some of Musharraf's backers at the station. Khanja Muhammad Khursid Alam shook his head in disgust as he watched an election worker struggle to find another voter's name.

"They are untrained people. They don't know how to work in polling stations. People come out and want to vote," said Alam, a polling representative and member of Musharraf's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q.

Official election results are expected to be tallied and released before the end of the week.

Constable reported from Lahore. Special correspondents Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar and Shahzad Khurram in Islamabad contributed to this report.