Thousands of Police Block Pakistan Rally
November 9, 2007
By JANE PERLEZ and DAVID ROHDE
nytimes.com
Benazir Bhutto spoke to reporters outside her house in Islamabad today from behind concrete barriers and barbed wire placed by Pakistani police.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 9 — In a massive show of force, the Pakistani government stopped a protest rally by the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, before it started today, blanketing the rally site with police, blocking roads and barricading Ms. Bhutto inside her residence in Islamabad.
In Rawalpindi, the garrison town close to Islamabad, the capital, where the rally was due to take place, double lines of police and police vans prevented most of the thousands of demonstrators from entering the city to protest against the emergency rule declared by the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, six days ago.
Dump trucks blocked roads, preventing access to Liaquat Park, where the rally was due to be held, and shutting down the center of Rawalpindi.
By late afternoon, tensions between police and the small groups of protesters who had managed to enter Rawalpindi started to mount, but later more or less dissipated as police began to leave.
As many as 5,000 party workers had been arrested across the country over the last three days, party officials said, and today any groups of people that formed on the street were immediately moved on by police. The authorities said there were 8,500 police on the streets of Rawalpindi, and there were many more plain clothes officers and intelligence officials. Some demonstrators threw stones at the police and were hauled off in vans.
But the detention by police of Ms. Bhutto at her home appeared to prevent her party activists from organizing any major demonstration in Rawalpindi, and many said they were still waiting for orders to stage a major demonstration.
“As soon as she comes to Rawalpindi, we will go and break the barriers,” said Shiaz Kayani, a Pakistan Peoples Party district president.
At Ms. Bhutto’s residence, a large two-story house at the end of a tree-lined cul de sac in Islamabad, lines of police, barbed wire and concrete barricades made her a virtual hostage.
Hours before the scheduled rally, lines of about 200 police officers turned the house into a fortress, placing concrete barriers and barbed wire at the entrance road, and police said she would not be permitted to attend the rally. A party worker said Ms. Bhutto had been served with a formal detention order.
However, the government said Ms. Bhutto was not officially detained at her home. “She is not under house arrest,” a superintendent of police, Aftab Nasir, told the official Pakistani press agency. “Only the security has been enhanced.”
Amid chaotic scenes, an attempt by Ms. Bhutto to leave was thwarted by the police as they moved an armored personnel car and a police bus to block her way. Sitting in a white four-wheel drive car and speaking through a megaphone, Ms. Bhutto pushed through two barriers before she was stopped.
“Brothers from police,” she could be heard saying on the megaphone. “Leave the way.”
Later, she made a speech to reporters in front of her house, saying that she had not spoken to General Musharraf and would not negotiate with him until emergency rule was ended and the Constitution revived. “I have been illegally stopped by barbed wired and blockades,” she said.
By 5 p.m., local time, hours after the rally in Rawalpindi was scheduled to begin, Ms. Bhutto had still not left her house.
“She has been served with a detention order,” Syeda Abida Hussain, a party leader, told reporters outside Ms. Bhutto’s residence. “She has refused to accept it and not bothered to look at how many days are marked on it.”
Police were arresting any Pakistan Peoples Party worker who showed up near Ms. Bhutto’s residence, and by early afternoon, at least 20 workers, including at least 6 females, had been arrested.
Workers shouted “Prime minister Benazir!” before being shoved into police buses and vans.
Aides to General Musharraf had said that they hoped Ms. Bhutto would cancel the demonstration because it was forbidden under the emergency rule. They also said her own security was at stake. When she arrived back in Pakistan last month from self-imposed exile abroad, her motorcade through the streets of Karachi was attacked by a suicide bomber, killing more than a hundred people.
The rally that was scheduled today in Rawalpindi has assumed critical importance in the political machinations between Ms. Bhutto, who served twice as prime minister and wants to return to power, and General Musharraf.
Outwardly, the stand-off today appeared to deepen the confrontation between the two, making Ms. Bhutto an opponent of General Musharraf rather than a partner with him in the transition to democracy that she and her American sponsors who helped negotiate her return to Pakistan envisaged.
Behind the scenes, however, the strategies for both sides for the day were probably worked out in advance, analysts said, in order to give each side a face-saving way to avoid a potentially bloody clash on the streets.
The government arrested a large number of potential protesters before the rally, sealed the protest location, and cordoned off the area around it. Ms. Bhutto had already tried to leave her house earlier today to go to the protest, but her car was blocked when it tried to leave by the side entrance, her press aide, Sherry Rehman, told reporters.
At one point, Ms. Rehman said that Ms. Bhutto would be “leading the protest, but not joining it.”
In another sign of what seemed like behind-the-scenes co-ordination between Ms. Bhutto and the authorities, Ms. Bhutto’s voice came over official Pakistani television at 4 p.m. this afternoon as she made a long speech setting out her demands. A still picture of her appeared on the screen while she spoke.
Ms. Bhutto has rejected the announcement that the president made on Thursday that parliamentary elections would be held by Feb. 15. She said his announcement was "vague" and it also fell short of her demands that he relinquish his role as head of the Army and end emergency rule.
But Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf are described by Western diplomats as continuing to negotiate a power-sharing deal that was envisaged when she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile abroad last month.
“If the tensions persist, the negotiations might be in jeopardy,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and military analyst in Lahore who also lectures at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.
"The stage is set for a serious confrontation with massive arrests within a couple of days," Mr. Rizvi said. Adding to the government’s troubles, Mr. Rivzi, said was the pledge Thursday by Jamaat Islaami, a religious party, that it would stage large protests if General Musharraf did not step down as leader of the military by November 15.
Mr. Rizvi said there was no sign of General Musharraf renouncing his military role.
“If Musharraf can contain these protests for three days, fine,” he said. “But if the protests spread to cities and persist for a week then Musharraf will have problems."
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
