You, Too, Could Vote in Pakistan!

Last week's referendum in Pakistan is being widely hailed in the US press as a vote of support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who originally seized power in a coup in 1999. As the main US ally in the region, this vote--"yes" to support Musharraf or "no" to reject him--is very important to maintaining the fiction that the US government only deals with democratically elected governments.

The vote itself, however, was largely a joke. Turnout was dismal, with far less than 30% of original registered voters participating, even after Musharraf opened polls in hospitals, army barracks, and prisons, where a captive population was told to vote for Musharraf. He also expanded the age eligibility from 21 to 18 to try and boost the vote. In urban areas, turnout was even more dismal--about 5% in Lahore and 3% in Karachi.

Cheating was widespread. There were no voters lists, so anyone could vote anywhere--and vote multiple times, as several Pakistani journalists did, voting up to eight times at different polling stations just to test the system, and then writing about it in the Pakistani press. Minors under the age of 18 were witnessed voting at several polling places, as were foreign tourists who wanted to vote "just for the fun of it." In some polling places, government workers were seen stamping "yes" on handfuls of ballots and stuffing them in ballot boxes.

Notably, there were no independent, international observers for this referendum. It should be a priority to send election observers to a country suffering under a military dictatorship, but Pakistan is a US ally, so the observers stayed home. (Not that George Bush & Co., having benefitted from a Supreme Court-sanctioned coup, actually support fair elections.)

Meanwhile, a democratically elected official--Yasser Arafat--was finally released from his besieged headquarters in Ramallah. The US press was full of scorn, implying that Arafat is a criminal who should never be allowed to go free. Such articles never make clear that Arafat is not really free. He can move around the West Bank, but if he leaves the West Bank, he will not be allowed back, as Sharon has affirmed. Further, Arafat's first act was to spend three hours under heavy security touring the damaged city of Ramallah before heading back into his bombed-out headquarters. He obviously is not free to leave even Ramallah for fear of assassination--a reasonable fear on his part, as both Ariel Sharon and George Bush have said that they're tired of negotiating with Arafat and want to seek a replacement.

The untold story is that Yasser Arafat gained his limited freedom at the expense of the UN investigation into the massacre at the Jenin refugee camp. The UN team was poised for more than a week to go to Israel, but was blocked by the Israeli government. Israeli Communications Minister, Reuven Rivlin, told reporters the following: "Rivlin said Bush held three separate conversations with Sharon on Saturday about the Ramallah plan. Rivlin said that not to agree to the plan would leave Israel `to face the need to fight the [UN investigative] committee when the Americans would be angry with us.'" ("Deal may free Arafat," Susan Sevareid, Associated Press, reprinted in the Seattle P-I, 4/29/02, A1.)

So Israel and the US brokered a trade-off. In the face of Israeli refusal, last week UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was forced to disband the investigative committee. There will be no UN investigation of what happened at Jenin--only the cursory attempts by human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to publish some of their concerns about it. Last week Human Rights Watch threw up its hands and said it had no information of massacres at Jenin (most of the rubble hasn't yet been sifted for the dead and likely won't be for months). HRW said, however, that it appears Israeli forces committed war crimes, including targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and using human shields. Without a UN team to investigate and confirm this, however, it will remain an allegation and not an actual crime, and there will be no sanctions against the Israeli government.

The Palestinians feel that, once again, they have been abandoned by the world. They also know that Yasser Arafat has benefited at the expense of the residents of Jenin. His credibility will be damaged at a time when homeless Palestinians will be seeking some way to get redress for what happened at Jenin. Militant groups, including Hamas, will surely benefit.