Saturday, January 12, 2008

Sudan Apologizes for Shooting at UN

KHARTOUM, Jan 10, (AP) - Sudan acknowledged Thursday that its troops shot at a United Nations convoy in Darfur, reversing an initial denial, but it in part blamed the peacekeepers saying they should have notified Khartoum of their movements. The Sudanese government has demanded that the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force give it prior notification for all its movements and not move at night, conditions the United Nations has rejected. U.N. officials have accused Khartoum of trying to limit the abilities of the force or hold up its full deployment with a series of bureaucratic obstacles, including such conditions. The attack Monday night in West Darfur damaged an armored personnel carrier, destroyed a fuel tanker truck and severely injured a Sudanese driver. The U.N. has lodged a complaint with Khartoum and said "the government of Sudan has to provide unequivocal guarantees that there will be no recurrence of such activities by its forces."


Sudan's military spokesman and its ambassador to the United Nations initially denied the army had opened fire. But the military retracted the statements Thursday, saying the shoot-out did take place. It apologized for the error, which it said occurred because the U.N. force, known as UNAMID, had not given forward notice it was sending a convoy through this volatile zone of western Darfur near the border with Chad. "The Western Sudan military command has provided an apology to the representative of UNAMID in the region and that the apology was accepted, in recognition of the dual mistake committed," the state-run SUNA news agency said. Sudan's Defense Minister Abdel-Rahim Mohamed Hussein told the independent daily Al-Sahafa the army first fired warning shots at the U.N. convoy. "Those shots were ignored and that's when the soldiers opened fire, wounding the driver and damaging a troop carrier and a truck," Hussein said.

The U.N. mission began on Jan. 1 and now stands at around 9,000 peacekeepers. It is supposed to grow to 26,000 and aims at finally deploying a robust force to stop the chaos. More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million have fled to refugee camps since 2003 when ethnic African rebels took arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, accusing it of discrimination. Sudan denies multiple allegations of war crimes in the region.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Fighting in Congo Rekindles Ethnic Hatreds

MUSHAKE Congo, Jan 10th. (NY Times) — Andre Simwerayi looked on with satisfaction as the army blasted rockets over a verdant hillside, pummeling what officers said were the positions of forces loyal to a renegade Congolese Tutsi general. "If the bombs don’t do the job, we are ready with machetes to finish it ourselves,” said Mr. Simwerayi, 31, a street tough standing nearby in a tattered trench coat. "We must crush the inyenzi,” he spat, using a word made notorious by the genocide against Tutsi in neighboring Rwando more than a decade ago. It means cockroaches. The recent clashes in eastern Congo between the army and the troops of the dissident general have exacted a grievous toll on a region ravaged by a decade of war. Around 400,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, thousands of women have been raped and hundreds of children have been press-ganged into militias, the United Nations says, raising alarm among diplomats the world over.

But the fighting is also rekindling the kind of ethnic hatred that previously dragged this region into the most deadly conflict since World War II. It began with the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu extremists killed 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 1994. Many of the genocide’s perpetrators fled into Congo, igniting regional conflicts that were fueled by the plunder of Congo’s minerals, lasted for nearly a decade and killed, by some estimates, as many as four million people through violence, disease and hunger. Now a new wave of anti-Tutsi sentiment is sweeping Congo, driven by deep anger over the renegade Tutsi general. Many see his rebellion as a proxy for Rwanda, to the east, whose army occupied vast parts of Congo during the most devastating chapter of the regional war and plundered millions of dollars’ worth of minerals from the country, according to many analysts, diplomats and human rights workers. The current battle is in many ways a throwback to the earliest and most difficult questions at the heart of the Congo war, and also a reflection of longstanding hostilities toward Tutsi, who are widely viewed here as being more Rwandan than Congolese. Many Congolese Tutsi see themselves as members of an especially vulnerable minority, one that has already suffered through genocide and whose position in Congo has always been precarious. But many other Congolese see Tutsi, many of whom have been in Congo for generations, as foreign interlopers with outsize economic and political influence.

At the center of this latest rebellion is the renegade general, Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi with longstanding ties to the Tutsi-led Rwandan government. He has refused to integrate his men into Congo’s national army, as the other militias that fought in the sprawling civil war have done, arguing that Tutsi face unique perils that require his special protection. “Our enemies have the ideology of genocide,” General Nkunda said in December at his hide-out in lush eastern Congo. “We are fearing they will continue their genocide in Congo.” Like many of Congo’s historical figures, General Nkunda, a tall, rail-thin 40-year-old with angular features, has developed a cult of personality. He has a penchant for flamboyant accessories: in a recent interview he cradled a black cane topped by a silver eagle’s head. Other times he has worn a button that says “Rebels for Christ.” He likes to refer to himself in the third person. “Is Nkunda the problem?” he demanded. “Why? How can Nkunda be to blame? I am only trying to protect my people.” General Nkunda said Congo’s small Tutsi minority was vulnerable to attack by militias, particularly the remnants of the Hutu extremist forces that carried out the genocide in Rwanda. Many of the extremists still roam the jungles of eastern Congo, and he has demanded that this militia be disbanded and that Tutsi refugees who fled into Rwanda be allowed to return.

Many Congolese Tutsi share his fears. “We are always seen as outsiders, but we are Congolese,” said Sanvura Birida, who lives with her four children in a camp for displaced people in territory controlled by General Nkunda. “The government does not protect us.” But that feeling of vulnerability does not always mean people are being personally victimized. “In response to the cumulative deaths of fewer than 20 Tutsi over the past two years, Nkunda has launched offensives that have killed over 100 persons and displaced hundreds of thousands,” said a report published in October by the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent or resolve deadly conflicts. “While Nkunda has defended the Tutsi minority in North Kivu, he has become a potential danger to the community’s security as a whole.” Representatives of his militia and others involved in recent fighting were expected to participate in a peace conference called by the government and originally scheduled to begin Jan. 6. It has been delayed by logistical problems, according to Reuters.

In many ways, Congo’s Tutsi are a people apart, an unusual minority with influence but also problems beyond its size. These differences are reflected in a unique way of life. When the Congolese Army routed General Nkunda’s forces in one of the strategic towns they occupied in a recent, ultimately failed push, the army celebrated with stiff pulls of rotgut whiskey. But when General Nkunda’s men routed the army with a much smaller force a few days later, they toasted their victory with cups of milk from the most prized of Tutsi possessions, dairy cows. This reputation for sobriety and determination helps explain why Tutsi have been so successful in business, according to Tutsi community leaders in Goma, the regional capital. “When we were investing and working, the Congolese were listening to music and playing football,” said Modeste Makabuza Ngoga, a Tutsi who is one of Goma’s richest men, with investments in transportation, telecommunications, tin ore and the gasoline trade, among other things. “Are we to be blamed for that?”

But the history of the region tells a different story. Before the elections of 2006, the area was controlled by a Rwandan-backed rebel group turned political party, the Congolese Rally for Democracy. It helped Mr. Makabuza Ngoga and other Tutsi build fortunes through patronage of the state government and special deals to buy valuable agricultural land, according to analysts and Western diplomats in the region. Wealth also helps fuel the Tutsi sense of vulnerability. A power-sharing agreement that ended the war in 2003 enabled a party dominated by a handful of Tutsi to essentially control one quarter of the country, which is the size of Western Europe, and thus considerable wealth. But in the election, the first democratic vote in Congo in more than four decades, only one Tutsi from this region was elected to the National Assembly. Some of Goma’s wealthy Tutsi feel so unsafe that they sleep in Gisenyi, a town just inside the Rwandan border, a fact that reinforces the common perception that Congolese Tutsi are more Rwandan than Congolese. Rwanda’s history is a powerful touchstone for Congo’s Tutsi. Similar disparities — a small group controlling considerable wealth and influence, amid a powerful sense of grievance from the majority — helped create the conditions that led to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Like many African ethnic groups, the Tutsi were divided in the 19th century among the European colonies; in the case of the Tutsi, those areas became Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. In each of these places, they have at times been co-opted and cultivated as a favored elite by those in power.

That trend began with Mobuto Sese Seko, Congo’s longtime ruler, after independence and later included Laurent D. Kabila, who became president after rebelling in 1996 with backing from Rwanda and Uganda. These alliances allowed Tutsi to dominate the economy and political life of much of North Kivu Province here, with its tin mines, rich pastureland and transportation links to the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Large parts of the province’s best farming and grazing land is controlled by a handful of Tutsi owners, according to analysts and human rights workers. But at times allies of the Tutsi have turned on them, sometimes savagely. In 1983, facing pressure from other ethnic groups in the region, Mr. Mobutu revoked citizenship for residents who could not trace their roots in Congo to 1885, effectively turning thousands of Tutsi and Hutu into stateless people. A decade later, ethnic violence exploded in North Kivu. As many as 10,000 people were killed, and 250,000 Hutu and Tutsi fled. Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Congolese Hutu and Tutsi coexisted relatively peacefully and in many ways faced the same kinds of persecution from other ethnic groups that considered them outsiders. But when the Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide flooded into Congo, tensions rose between Congolese Hutu and Tutsi as well. These Hutu extremists made common cause with the Mobutu government. When Mr. Mobutu fell in 1997, Mr. Kabila took power, and an unknown number of Rwandan Hutu refugees were killed. Mr. Kabila broke with his Rwandan allies, who in 1998 sponsored another rebellion, this time led by Congolese Tutsi. Mr. Kabila joined forces with the Hutus behind the genocide, igniting a second civil war in Congo. Joseph Dunia Ruyenzi, a human rights activist in Goma, said that despite this history, Tutsi must put their trust in the fledgling democracy of Congo. “All Congolese must see themselves as Congolese first, and as having a stake in peace and prosperity,” he said. “Our only option is to be in this together.”
by Lydia Polgreen
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U.N. Official Fears For Darfur Force

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 10th. (LA Times) - The U.N. peacekeeping chief told the Security Council on Wednesday that a Sudanese attack this week on U.N.-led troops reinforces concerns that the force may be unable to protect itself or civilians in Darfur. The violence, along with foot-dragging by the Sudanese government and the lack of necessary helicopters and equipment, may doom the peacekeeping effort, Jean-Marie Guehenno told the council. "Without decisive progress on each of those three issues, we will indeed face dire consequences for the international efforts to help the Sudanese bring peace and stability to Darfur," Guehenno said.

On Monday night, an armed force in Darfur attacked a peacekeeping supply convoy of more than 20 vehicles marked with the United Nations logo. Guehenno said that the area commander for the Sudanese military confirmed responsibility for the attack shortly afterward by telephone. On Wednesday, however, Sudanese officials in the capital, Khartoum, and New York denied responsibility and said rebels backed by neighboring Chad had orchestrated the attack to put the government under pressure. "They were not the government," said U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem. "The rebels did that. No doubt about it." The attack was only the most immediate problem facing the new peacekeeping mission. The African Union forces switched their berets from AU green to U.N. blue on Dec. 31, signaling the beginning of a joint peacekeeping operation by the two organizations that ultimately is expected to include 27,000 personnel. So far, about 9,000 troops and police are in place to protect civilians threatened by conflict in an area larger than California. But Guehenno lamented that continued obstacles put up by Sudan make many countries reluctant to offer personnel and equipment.

The government has rejected non-African soldiers and said it won't allow a team of Scandinavian engineers to help build roads and airstrips, further delaying deployment. Khartoum still has not consented to night flights, supplied land and water for bases in some areas or provided visas, Guehenno said. The government insists that African personnel wear green berets and non-Africans wear blue to differentiate them, a demand the U.N. has ignored, saying it goes against the original agreement as well as the U.N. charter. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir after the attack, and the pair will meet in two weeks at an African Union summit in Ethiopia to iron out remaining technical and political obstacles to the force's deployment. Guehenno told the Security Council in December that it might be better to not deploy a U.N. force at all than to deploy one that was too vulnerable, recalling tragedies involving overwhelmed peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

But the people of Darfur have little choice, with more than 300,000 people newly displaced in 2007 and malnutrition rates rising, despite the decrease in attacks on civilians by government-backed militias that earlier in the decade drove more than 2 million people from their homes. Aid workers are also at risk, with 13 killed and 147 abducted last year. Rebels continue to clash with government soldiers and militias, as well as with other rebel groups, over wealth, power and land. Peace talks have made little headway in stopping the 4-year-old conflict. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Zalmay Khalilzad, said the Bush administration considers the continuing conflict in Darfur to be "very important" and a challenge "to the credibility of the international community, the credibility of the U.N., the credibility of the Security Council. But we're not where we need to be," he said. "We need to take stock and see what adjustment needs to be made."
by Maggie Farley
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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Kenyan Foes Agree to Meet on Vote Unrest

NAIROBI, Jan 8th. (Toronto Star) –Kenya's feuding political leaders stepped back from the brink yesterday, bowing to pressure for face-to-face negotiations as officials reassessed higher the severity of a week of bloody clashes that followed the release of disputed election results. As many as 500 people died in the spasms of ethnic and political violence that now have ebbed in all but three remote parts of Kenya, according to a new government tally released yesterday. Opposition sources said the numbers could be nearer to 1,000. President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, whose Orange Democratic Movement says the Dec. 27 election was stolen, are expected to meet as early as tomorrow for talks with African Union chair John Kufour, the president of Ghana. Calling the agreement for outside mediation "a major, major breakthrough," Odinga cancelled nationwide rallies planned for today, easing fears of renewed violence.

While the deadliest attacks have subsided, sporadic clashes continue in remote rural areas mostly west of the capital, many pitting Odinga's Luo and allied factions against Kibaki's Kikuyu, the largest of Kenya's mosaic of 42 tribes. The rival political camps have traded accusations that grassroots party provocateurs are behind much of the violence. "Mr. Kibaki must bear responsibility for the deaths we are seeing in our country today" because of blatant "rigging" of the elections, Odinga told Sky News. Government officials, meanwhile, said officials were investigating reports of "premeditated murder" involving opposition operatives suspected of orchestrating attacks on people who were forewarned they would pay if they voted for Kibaki. An official in neighbouring Uganda told The Associated Press yesterday 30 fleeing Kenyans were thrown into the border river Saturday by Kenyan attackers, and were presumed drowned. Two Ugandan truck drivers carrying the group said they were stopped at a roadblock mounted by vigilantes who identified the refugees as Kikuyus and threw them into the deep, swift-flowing Kipkaren River, said Himbaza Hashaka, a Ugandan border official. The drivers said none survived.

The pressure to bring the two sides together was led by U.S. envoy Jendayi Frazer, who yesterday confirmed the election was rigged in her first public comments after three days of intense behind-the-scenes diplomacy. "Yes there was rigging," said Frazer, who declined to name which side took greater advantage. "I mean there were problems in the vote-counting process ... both the parties could have rigged." Frazer pointedly criticized Kenya's independent electoral commission, which after days of delay finally confirmed Kibaki's re-election, only to admit later it had been subjected to political pressure to award the victory. The collapse of confidence in the commission, which won praise for its independence in past votes, has prompted opposition leaders to insist that any recount or repeat election must include international oversight. Adding to the chaos, the Law Society of Kenya, accused electoral officials of "ineptitude," called Kibaki's swearing-in "null and void," and urged a fresh vote.

As diplomatic efforts continued, Nairobi shops and businesses reopened yesterday, bringing traffic gridlock back to the capital for the time since the crisis began. "This is the first sale I have made since Christmas," said shop clerk Elizabeth Otieno, 23, as she packaged a pair of pants for a Kenyan customer. "If we don't sell we don't eat. People are still worried. But it helps to see business coming back." Tourism, which together with the tea and coffee industries is Kenya's biggest earner, has been clobbered by the fallout with mass cancellations upwards of 60 per cent, according to government officials.
by Mitch Potter
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Monday, January 7, 2008

Kenyan City Is Gripped by Violence

KISUMU, Kenya Jan 6th. - Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, is Kenya’s third-largest city. Dozens of stores have been looted, torched and smashed by rioters and then picked clean by an army of glue-sniffing street children searching for whatever was left. The scorched Ukwala supermarket looks as if a bomb blew up inside it. The gates of Zamana Electronic are mangled. People here say this is just the beginning. “We will never surrender!” yelled a man who attended a rally for opposition leaders on Saturday. “We want guns, guns!” another man added. While much of Kenya is trying to get back to normal after a week of post-election violence that has claimed more than 300 lives nationwide, Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city, is still quivering with anger. Few places have been so thoroughly gutted by the turbulence as here.

With Kenya’s leaders still at an impasse despite the efforts of Jendayi E. Frazer, the American assistant secretary of state for Africa who met with both sides on Saturday, it looks as if the tensions will linger dangerously for some time. Kisumu is the stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who said he had been cheated out of the presidency, and the town’s main street is named after his father, a local hero. The people here followed the election so closely that they remember the precise hour last weekend, on Saturday, when the vote count suddenly changed, and Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, went from trailing badly to winning with a suspiciously thin margin of victory. The town exploded, and a furious mob stormed up Oginga Odinga street. The biggest businesses are now in ashes. Fuel, food and cellphone credit are in short supply. And around 2,000 people from Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, the Kikuyu, are camped out at the police station, trying to escape a wave of revenge killings. “If I stay here, I’ll be lynched,” said Waweru Mburu, a Kikuyu, as he nervously waited outside a supermarket, one of the two open in this town of half a million people. His wife had been waiting for hours, trying to buy milk.

Trucks carrying Kikuyu and evacuees from another tribe, the Kisii, many of whom supported Mr. Kibaki, are jeered at as they pull out of town. Those doing the jeering are mostly Luo, like Mr. Odinga, who live here in great numbers. “Traitors!” some Luo shouted on Saturday as a truck passed. People on both sides said the tensions would not ease as long as Kenya’s political leaders refused to even speak to each other, which has been the situation since the election on Dec. 27. On Saturday, Mr. Kibaki indicated that he was ready to form “a government of national unity.” Mr. Odinga did not reject that outright but said he would not entertain any offers until the two sides sat down in the presence of foreign mediators. The government initially rebuffed outside help, but seems to have relented slightly and sent a diplomat to Ghana to discuss a role for the African Union, according to Reuters. Ms. Frazer met separately with Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga and urged them to work together to solve the crisis, which has dented Kenya’s image as one of the most stable countries in Africa and could cause permanent economic damage if peace is not restored soon.

It seems that momentum is growing toward negotiations. “There is slow progress being made,” said Salim Lone, a spokesman for Mr. Odinga. Kenyans are waiting. Some areas, like the capital, have quieted down considerably. In the Rift Valley, the area most torn by violence, fewer killings have been reported in the past few days, but tens of thousands of people are displaced and in need of food. In Kisumu, the killings have stopped, for the most part. But the banks are running out of money, few stores are open and the looting continues. There is some opportunism to all this. The rage that swept through town was selective, striking at electronics shops, cellphone kiosks and shoe stores but leaving the drapery dealer alone. On Saturday, Monica Awino tiptoed through the shattered interior of a Bata footwear store. Glass was everywhere. She used to work here and now is out of a job at the best time of year. No after-Christmas or back-to-school sales for her. “I’m angry at everybody,” she said. Up the street, Bernard Ndede, a high school English teacher, watched street children carefully sift through inches of rubble on the floor of a charred supermarket, as if they were urban archaeologists. He said he did not approve of the looting, but he understood the anger. “People woke up so early that day to vote for change,” he said, referring to election day and the millions of people who voted for Mr. Odinga. “They felt robbed.” For some, the disappointment was lethal. On Saturday, Albert Ojonyo, an insurance agent, went to the city morgue to pick up the body of his brother, Daniel. More than 40 people were killed here in election-related violence. Many bodies have not been identified and wait in a sweltering room under strips of red cloth with their feet poking out. Mr. Ojonyo said his brother, who was 27, had been shot in the head, most likely by police officers trying to quell the rioters. “Daniel felt very strongly about these elections,” he said. “Afterward, he was a very bitter boy.”
By Jeffrey Gettlemane
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Sunday, January 6, 2008

The World's Most Dangerous Place

Nothing else has worked: it is time for Pakistan to try democracy
Jan 3rd 2008, Economist - The war against Islamist extremism and the terrorism it spawns is being fought on many fronts. But it may well be in Pakistan that it is won or lost. It is not only that the country's lawless frontier lands provide a refuge for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and that its jihad academies train suicide-bombers with global reach. Pakistan is also itself the world's second most populous Muslim nation, with a proud tradition of tolerance and moderation, now under threat from the extremists on its fringes. Until recently, the risk that Pakistan might be prey to Islamic fundamentalism of the sort its Taliban protégés enforced in Afghanistan until 2001 seemed laughable. It is still far-fetched. But after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister, nobody is laughing. This, after all, is a country that now has the bomb Miss Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, craved so passionately as prime minister in the 1970s.

There are many other reasons why the murder of Miss Bhutto (and some 20 other people unlucky enough to be near her) makes Pakistan seem a frightening place. That terrorists could strike in Rawalpindi, headquarters of the Pakistani army, despite having advertised threats against Miss Bhutto, and despite the slaughter of some 150 people in Karachi on the day she returned from exile last October, suggests no one is safe. If, as many in Pakistan believe, the security services were themselves complicit, that is perhaps even scarier. It would make it even harder to deal with the country's many other fissures: the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims; the ethnic tensions between Punjabis, Sindhis, Pushtuns and “mohajir” immigrants from India; the insurgency in Baluchistan; and the spread of the “Pakistani Taliban” out of the border tribal areas into the heartlands. Miss Bhutto's murder has left her Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the country's biggest, at risk of disintegration. It is now in the hands of her unpopular widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, who by rights should be punting and partying with his classmates at Oxford, not risking his neck in politics. The election whose campaign killed Miss Bhutto was due on January 8th, but the Election Commission has delayed it by six weeks. The PPP will reap a big sympathy vote. But bereft of Miss Bhutto, the party—and the country—look desperately short of leaders of national stature. Other Bhutto clan-members are already sniping at her successors. The other big mainstream party, led by her rival Nawaz Sharif, another two-time prime minister, is also in disarray. Both parties have been weakened by their leaders' exiles, as well as by persecution at the hands of President Pervez Musharraf's military dictatorship. In truth, both Miss Bhutto and Mr Sharif were lousy prime ministers. But at least they had some semblance of a popular mandate. The systematic debilitation of their parties benefits the army, which has entrenched itself in the economic as well as the political system. But it also helps the Islamist parties—backed, as they are, by an army which has sometimes found them more congenial partners than the more popular mainstream parties. The unpopularity of the Musharraf regime, hostility towards America, and resentment at a war in neighbouring Afghanistan that many in Pakistan see as directed at both Islam and their ethnic-Pushtun kin, have also helped the Islamists.

So, ironically, America's support for Mr Musharraf, justified as necessary to combat extremism next door, has fostered extremism at home. Similarly, in the 1980s America backed General Zia ul Haq, a dictator and Islamic fundamentalist, as his intelligence services sponsored the mujahideen who eventually toppled the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. In the process, they helped create what Miss Bhutto called a “Frankenstein's monster”—of jihadist groups with sympathisers in the army and intelligence services. The clubbable, whisky-quaffing, poodle-cuddling Mr Musharraf is no fundamentalist. But the monster still stalks his security forces. Yet Pakistan's plight is not yet hopeless. Two things could still help arrest its slide into anarchy, improbable though both now seem. The first is a credible investigation into Miss Bhutto's murder and the security-service lapses (or connivance) that allowed it to happen. Mr Musharraf's willingness to let a couple of British policemen help the inquiry is unlikely to produce this. Every time a bomb goes off in Pakistan, people believe that one of the country's own spooks lit the fuse. Until there has been a convincing purge of the military-intelligence apparatus, Pakistan will never know true stability.

Second, there could be a fair election. This would expose the weakness of the Islamist parties. In the last general election in 2002, they won just one-tenth of the votes, despite outrageous rigging that favoured them. Even if they fared somewhat better this time, they would still, in the most populous provinces, Sindh and Punjab, be trounced by the mainstream parties. An elected government with popular support would be better placed to work with the moderate, secular, professional tendency in the army to tackle extremism and bring Pakistan's poor the economic development they need. Sadly, there seems little hope that the security forces will abandon the habit of a lifetime and allow truly fair elections. The delay in the voting—opposed by both main opposition parties—has been seen as part of its plan to rig the results. The violence that has scarred the country since Miss Bhutto's assassination may intensify. The army may be tempted to impose another state of emergency; or it may cling on to ensure that the election produces the result it wants—a weak and pliable coalition of the PPP and Mr Musharraf's loyalists.

For too long, Mr Musharraf has been allowed to pay lip-service to democratic forms, while the United States has winked at his blatant disdain for the substance. The justification has been the pre-eminent importance of “stability” in the world's most dangerous place. It is time to impress upon him and the generals still propping him up that democracy is not the alternative to stability. It is Pakistan's onlyhope.
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