ISLAMABAD: Pakistani politicians may be bitter rivals who exploit the tiniest chance to score points off one another, but one thing unites them as they campaign for May elections: fear of attack.
In a country awash with weapons, overstretched security forces, fractious tribes, Islamist militants and deadly political and ethnic rivalry, the spectre of violence haunts politicians from left to right, conservative to reformist.
More than five years after her murder, the ghost of Benazir Bhutto hangs over the campaign. She was killed in a gun and suicide attack after an election rally in Rawalpindi in December 2007, and her assassins have never been convicted.
Her death catapulted her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to victory, on a wave of sympathy. But it was a powerful reminder of the dangers and, heading into the May 11 polls, Pakistan today is a far less secure country than five years ago.
Violence against the Shiite Muslim minority is at a record high. Religious intolerance is worse today than five years ago. The Taliban insurgency and a Baluch separatist insurgency in the southwest have only expanded.
The Pakistani Taliban have issued a direct threat against the three main parties of the outgoing government -- the PPP, the secular Awami National Party (ANP) in the northwest and MQM, the party that rules Karachi.
The 24-year-old PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Bhutto’s son, will make few public appearances and will address crowds by phone or video link “due to security and logistical” reasons, party spokesman Qamar Zaman Kaira said. “There are security concerns. He cannot travel everywhere,” he said.
For any self-respecting politician, a bullet-proof vehicle is de rigueur. Party offices are barricaded with barbed wire and concrete blocks. Bullet-proof glass on podiums is increasingly common.
As former dictator Pervez Musharraf flew back at the weekend from more than four years in self-imposed exile, the Taliban said they had gathered a squad of suicide bombers to go after him.
AFP
