Pakistanis not scared to demand change from polls

Feb 18, 2008, 17:41 GMT

Rawalpindi, Pakistan - Rifaz Aziz did not expect to have so little to do on Monday. A Pakistan election official at a female polling station in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, Aziz spent most of her morning waiting for a rush of voters that never came.

'People are scared, scared of suicide bombings and blasts. There are 1,100 registered voters in this area but only 10 have so far cast ballots in the first two and one-half hours,' she said.

Voters' fears are not unfounded: Aziz's polling station is located only a few kilometres from a military base and the official residence of President Pervez Musharraf, in a neighbourhood that has seen around a dozen suicide attacks killing more than 100 people, many of of them Army soldiers.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was also assassinated in Rawalpindi in a gun and suicide bomb attack at an election rally on December 27. Last Saturday, 47 people died when a bomber targeted the office of a parliament candidate in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.

In a country where voter turnout is already traditionally low - just 42 per cent in 2002 - the spectre of violence kept many people at home.

But not everyone is frightened. Tens of millions of people nationwide still cast ballots, many of them demanding change.

'I am not afraid of anything. Life and death are in God's hands. When Benazir was not frightened, why would I be?' said Hamida Khizer, 40, who was queuing at a female polling station in Rawalpindi.

'Musharraf has ruined our lives. People have to wait for hours in long queues to get wheat flour, cooking oil and sugar, and at the end of the day they go empty-handed,' she said.

'We have come here to deflate the bicycle of PML-Q,' Hamida Khizer, 40, said in a reference to the election symbol of Musharraf's political backers, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid.

Musharraf's popularity has nose-dived since he declared emergency rule in November 2007 and sacked the country's Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, and around 60 other judges to prevent the court from overturning his controversial re-election the previous month.

The emergency was lifted six weeks later but not before Musharraf, a recently-retired Army general who seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, had his victory affirmed by new, handpicked judges.

Some are hopeful that the main opposition parties will win the vote and join forces to impeach him.

Rashid Nasim Abbasi, provincial candidate for parliament in Rawalpindi, warned that opposition parties would take to the streets if the elections were rigged in favour of Musharraf's backers.

'It doesn't make much difference for us whether PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) or PPP (the Pakistan Peoples' Party) wins because both parties have one target: To remove Musharraf,' he said.

Khizer added, 'If you don't take the dead dog out of the well, you cannot clean it' - an old Pakistani saying about change.

The resentment outside the polling station was clear. Not a single voter had approached the information booth set up by PML-Q, while the booths of the opposition PML-N and Bhutto's PPP were packed with people.

'It is not a big deal which information centre they might go to, at the end of the day the voters are going to vote for PML-Q,' shrugged Humaira, 15, a party volunteer who must wait three more years before she is eligible to vote.

Questioned further, Humaira said that she was actually against Musharraf and was being paid 500 rupees (8 dollars) to work at the booth.

Despite opinion polls showing Musharraf's popularity rating at less than 25 per cent, he and the PML-Q have their share of supporters around the country, especially in the influential Punjab province.

'Regardless of whether I like him as a person or not, I support his policies and I'm going to vote for PML-Q because Musharraf supports it. Under him, Pakistan has seen huge economic progress and many development projects,' said Mohammed Saghir Raja, 38, as he was preparing to cast his ballot.

He acknowledged that Islamic extremism has grown during Musharraf's rule but said he could not be blamed for that.

'It is the opposition parties that did not cooperate with him,' Ali said. 'They kept on opposing him on everything, and he had to spend a lot of time dealing with them instead of the militants.'

Not all supporters of Musharraf even follow his national policies, instead concentrating on grassroots issues that plague the government such as inflation, power rationing and rising food and fuel prices.

'We are voting for a party candidate because of local issues. Otherwise we would like Musharraf to go,' said Riaz, 27, who was transporting fellow PML-Q workers to polling stations in his car.