Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has passed away from our world at the age of 79, and his name will continue to haunt every historian of the Western war led by the United States of America on Afghanistan 2001-2020, and it will be difficult for any historian or analyst to talk about that era without mentioning the president. Pakistani Pervez Musharraf, who is considered one of the rare presidents in the world who wrote his memoirs, while they are still on the pyramid of power.
Nawaz Sharif decided to prevent Musharraf’s plane from landing at Karachi airport while he was returning from Sri Lanka on October 2, 2001, and Musharraf was able to communicate with his military leaders from his plane and issued orders to his officers on the ground to carry out a coup, so it was the first coup to happen from the air.
Musharraf documented his memoirs in his book “On the Line of Fire” translated into Arabic. In the book, he confessed to handing over hundreds of Arab and Pakistani fighters to the United States of America in order to imprison them in Guantanamo in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars. There are many questions, especially among human rights organizations, especially after the United States of America released many of them without being charged or convicted.
The story of Pervez Musharraf as the leader of the Pakistani army began to shine when he supported some Kashmiri armed Islamic groups that carried out attacks on the strategic Kargil heights with India, then this developed into the intervention of the Pakistani army itself on its side, and when the army fell into a real impasse with the Indian forces, and a confrontation almost broke out. Between nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan, Musharraf found himself in a trap.
At the time, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif flew to US President Bill Clinton asking for his intervention, who apparently stipulated the handing over of Osama bin Laden, who is in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s ally, or allowing US special forces to track him down in Afghanistan, with the support of Pakistani intelligence, and it was approved, according to What many American sources say.
Here began the dispute between Sharif as prime minister and Musharraf as commander of the army, which Sharif wanted to abandon, and the differences deepened until Nawaz Sharif decided to prevent Musharraf’s plane from landing at Karachi airport while he was returning from Sri Lanka on October 2, 2001, and Musharraf was able to communicate with his leaders The military from his plane, which is still in the Karachi sky, and he issued orders to his officers on the ground to carry out the coup, so it was the first coup to happen from the air.
Indeed, his plane landed at Karachi airport after the success of the coup, and Nawaz Sharif was immediately arrested and placed in the Citadel prison on the “Peshawar-Islamabad” road, and Musharraf assumed power again to be the tenth Pakistani president and the fourth military general to rule Pakistan, whose civil and military rule equals during its history. since its separation from India in 1947.
Musharraf and attempts to assassinate him
Since he came to power, his opponents have grown and multiplied. In addition to the two main opponents, the two main parties, the Muslim League party led by Nawaz Sharif, who turned against him and imprisoned him, and the Pakistan People’s Party led by Benazir Bhutto, a dangerous bloody opponent emerged, which is the armed Pakistani jihadist movements, because of their anger at his position on the handover of Arab and Pakistani fighters to the Americans for imprisoning them in Guantanamo, in addition to another opponent, which is the Kashmiri armed groups, who also turned against them, accusing them of terrorism, in order to please India after the Kargil impasse, taking advantage of the atmosphere of war on what is described as terrorism.
The environment required him to cool the problem politically with India, and the Kashmiri jihadist groups, which had been for a long time supported by the Pakistani army and intelligence, paid the price. In the procession in which he was walking near Rawalpindi, the military capital of Pakistan, which took place in coordination with Pakistani officers and soldiers from Musharraf’s narrow circle, where many military officers, especially retired ones, did not hide their anger and resentment against Musharraf for his abandonment of the Taliban movement and his cooperation with the Americans, and he expressed that To me directly, the former Pakistani army commander, Mirza Aslam Beg, and the former director of the Pakistani military intelligence, General Hamid Gul, who described his alliance with the Americans as treason.
Supervisor and the challenges of legality
In 2002, President Pervez Musharraf sought to legitimize his rule and coup, so he held general elections, after he supported the defection of the pro-Muslim League party led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, and the Muslim League party established the greatest leader wing in reference to the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the nascent party formed an alliance With other parties, most of them Islamic, under the name of the Islamic Action Council, and the alliance with pro-Musharraf parties was able to obtain a two-thirds majority through which he was able to make an amendment to Amendment 17 of the Constitution, an amendment that guaranteed him the legitimacy of his coup and his rule, which he had been lacking for the past two years.
But the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry, standing up to him cost him a lot, until Musharraf later turned against him and overthrew him as chief justice, which led to the uprising of the black coats, as it was called, which was formed by lawyers who rejected Musharraf’s rule, and who saw in his steps a coup against the constitution. This eventually led to his resignation, and general elections won by the Pakistan People’s Party, led by Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s husband, who died in a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi a few months before the elections.
Musharraf and high treason
After his resignation, and his allies retreated in the 2007 elections, Pervez Musharraf resigned from power and left for Dubai, and trials began to haunt him until a Pakistani court sentenced him to death in 2019 because of his high treason in suspending the constitution and imposing a state of emergency, and he was accused of not providing the necessary protection for the former Pakistani prime minister. Which allowed her to return from voluntary exile, which led to her killing in a Taliban suicide bombing, and the report of a special international commission of the United Nations accused Musharraf of intentionally not providing personal protection for Bhutto, which caused her death.
The Pakistani people during Musharraf’s rule will not forget the massacre that he committed during his rule in the Red Mosque, in which he killed – as part of a campaign led by the Pakistani Special Units – dozens of civilians, including young children. I still remember that day when we entered after storming the mosque, and the shoes of the young children were stained with blood. As well as the walls of the rooms that were inhabited by children who study Islamic law in it, and they sleep in it, and this happened after the leaders of the religious school fortified themselves in the mosque, demanding the application of Islamic law. The bloody incursion received widespread internal criticism, and the siege could have been lifted without these exorbitant bloody costs, in the view of many observers of the scene, especially since the besieged are defenseless and powerless.
Supervisor and end in Dubai
The tenth President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, closed his eyes in Dubai after suffering from a disease that doctors described as a rare disease, which is called “amyloidosis”, a rare disease that occurs when a protein called amyloid accumulates in the organs of the body. And the accumulation of amyloid protein can negatively affect organ functions. Among the organs that may be affected by it are the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, nervous system and digestive tract. Musharraf continued to aspire before his departure to return to Pakistan, but he failed to obtain a judicial pardon that would enable him to return without being pursued, but today he is able to return dead to be buried there.
