Toppling Musharraf: Heat rises on Pakistani leaderHis critics call him a Western poodle, the cartoons have fanned the flames, and now Bush is coming to town. Katherine Butler reports from Islamabad on the attempts to unseat the President
Independent - Minutes after India's cricketers beat Pakistan in Lahore last week, a casually dressed man with a moustache strolled confidently across the ground and was handed a microphone. Relaxed and smiling, Pervez Musharraf looked every bit the modern politician, delighting the crowd with jokes about India's star batsman's long hair. The style was more Bill Clinton than military dictator. And there was scarcely hint that this was a man who had survived two assassination attempts, or that he is struggling to hold his turbulent Islamic nation together and is now facing renewed threat as Pakistan hovers on the edge of an anti-Western implosion.
Just 24 hours after the cricket international the centre of Lahore was in flames and dead bodies lay on the streets, as the crisis over the "blasphemous sketches", as Pakistanis call the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, moved into a new, violent and for Musharraf, treacherous phase. After a week in which protests spread like a rash across the country, many of them violent, Musharraf intervened yesterday to ban a mass rally planned for the capital, Islamabad, and ordered the detention of hundreds of ringleaders.
Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the religious party that called yesterday's rally, was placed under house arrest. Just hours earlier he had warned of a nationwide campaign to unseat the President if Musharraf were to hinder the protests. "We will not stop till we achieve our objectives against the present rulers," he said. "General Pervez Musharraf is acting as the representative of western civilisation and is fighting a battle against Islamic values." ...
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posted 20 February 2006 03:45 PM
