General Zia: 'buffoon’ who fooled all the pundits

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 17

General Zia: 'buffoon’ who fooled all the pundits

MARY ANN WEAVER,

of the London

“Sunday Times,” talks with an out-of-the-ordinary dictator.

On the face of it. Pakistan's present leader is a reluctant dictator. General Zia-ul-Haq has never moved his family into the sumptuous presidential residence once occupied by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister he deposed and later executed. Neither does he work from Bhutto's presidential suite, preferring instead its ante-chamber, a bare room with a bookcase containing an alarm clock and two goldplated inscriptions from the Koran.

“1 am." he says in explanation. "simply on passage through the presidency." Many people in Pakistan would ’ greet that remark with a snort. His passage, they might say. has been exceedingly long: and there is. as yet.' no destination in sight. Zia confesses to a dilemma. “I've grown in office.” he says. ‘'l've become a politician over the years. But should I begin acting like a politician? I have none of the traits — I'm not clever, dogmatic or charismatic — but by running this country. I've put myself into the thick of politics.

"I will not remain in my present position indefinitely. Pakistanis have tolerated me for nearly six years, but eventually people get fed up. If I decide to continue running this country. I'll get the people's mandate." When and how are questions Zia is not prepared to answer. Perhaps because he can't. His thoughts on how Pakistan could make the

transition from dictatorship to democracy have always been vague. Political parties have been barred since he last clamped the country under martial law in 1979, and many of their leaders have been in and out of prison or held under house arrest. Certainly. it seems highly unlikely that, in his thinking about an eventual transition, he foresees any role for Bhutto’s Pakistan People's Party (P.P.P.).

“Zia's entire internal strategy." one Western official said, “is based on the premise that, in any election, the P.P.P. would win. So his domestic policies are based on excluding the P.P.P. - and particularly the group which surrounds Bhutto's daughter, Benazir — from any kind of power.” Zia has few friends among the intelligentsia and. for all his years in power, had done little to foster popularity among the peasantry. He has never barn-stormed the country, nor tried to develop a personality cult. Now, as when he first took over five years and a half ago. the armed forces are his only constituency. Yet he has a beguiling charm. It is difficult to characterise him simply as a military dictator. The principal philosophical and personal influences on his life were, he says, his father and mother.

Zia's character appears to have been set in the city of Jullundur. in what is now the Indian Punjab. His father, a

middle-level civil servant in the British administration, was a devout Muslim.

“It was a highly disciplined household. We were up at dawn each morning, saying our prayers. I learned to read the Koran very early." Today. Zia talks of creating an Islamic society, yet he has offered no programme and few clues’. His critics charge that there is no programme and that he is ruling Pakistan in a makeshift fashion. In conversation, he emphasises Islam's humanitarian, egalitarian side. But when I asked him if a military dictatorship, without consensus, was not in conflict with Islam, he replied: “It was the caliph, or ruler, who was to be picked by consensus, and consensus (according to the Koran) means the affirmation of will of those who matter.” Such didactic interpretations are said to be typical of him.

In the next moment, though, he softens appreciably. “Other than the Soviet Union, Pakistan was the first

state created purely on ideological lines. We were created as a Muslim state. If we had wanted to be secular, we should have stayed with India. We would have been far better in that respect.

"Look al Israel. Apart from the United States lobby, its ideology is its main source of strength. We in Pakistan have lost sight of this today, and. without it. you're like a straw being thrown about in the ocean. We're Sindis. Baluchis, Punjabis. Our binding force is Islam. Without it. Pakistan wtjuld fall like a house of cards."

When Zia seized power on July 5. 1977 — suspending the constitution and abrogating all human rights — few Pakistanis took him seriously. Most had never heard of him; among those who had, he was considered insignificant — a buffoon, a sycophant. How is it that the 58-year-old General is not only still in place but. more secure than ever?

He has combined deft management of the economy with shrewd manipulation of the army. He has been helped by geopolitics and a large measure of luck: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: good harvests: a steady flow of remittances and aid from abroad.

Which world leader has most impressed him?

"Margaret Thatcher. I wish I could be more like her and speak my mind. I took her to the Afghan border in 1981 and, without any warning. she bolted straight to the crossing point. Of course it w’as dangerous but I guess she assitmed no-one was going to shoot at the British Prime Minister.

“High heels and all. she climbed up the hillside. We all clambered behind. Then she said, looking towards the Soviet positions in Afghanistan: ‘Over there are the godless people.’ She said it with so much conviction. I knew Britain was on our side."

Zia denies categorically that Pakistan is developing nuclear weapons — insisting with unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, that with only “modest" enrichment facilities and no reprocessing plant, the country has no capability for producing a nuclear warhead.

This may or may not be true. What is undeniably true is that Pakistan's conventional armoury is becoming much deadlier. Recently Zia received the first of 40 American F-16 fighters, adroitly circumventing United States congressional restrictions on military assistance to countries believed to be developing nuclear weaponry. It is, indeed, one of many controversial issues he has adroitly sidestepped over the years — unfulfilled promises to hold elections, for example. "It's not important what people say about you now," he observes, “but what they say and what history remembers after you're gone.”