Unless the Supreme Court of Pakistan rules otherwise, General Musharraf has been “elected” to a five-year term as Pakistan’s president. Now, the only hope for normality returning to Pakistan lies in national reconciliation, which Musharraf has promised and some of Pakistan’s major international backers appear to have guaranteed. But Pakistanis, used as they are to political confrontation and polarisation, are having difficulty believing that national reconciliation is possible. Some of Musharraf’s supporters and opponents both suspect that it would be business as usual once the dust of the presidential “election” settles.

Musharraf has the option of acting like Turkish General Kenan Evren, who took power in a 1980 military coup and tried to reshape Turkey’s politics by excluding the major political leaders of the time — Suleyman Demirel, Bulent Ecevit and Necmettin Erbakan — from the political arena. Evren declared himself president after a referendum in 1982 and ruled as a strongman until he realised that his scheme for controlling politics simply was not working. After free and fair parliamentary elections, Evren gradually took a back seat and allowed politics to take its course. First, Demirel returned to the political centre-stage and then Ecevit and Erbakan followed suit. General Evren completed his presidential term and retired to a Turkish Mediterranean resort town where he took up painting and still lives. If Musharraf truly follows Evren’s model, Pakistan too could have a transition to democracy.

The first step towards that transition had to be reconciliation between Musharraf’s military regime and Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). After painstaking negotiations lasting several months, Musharraf and the military-intelligence apparatus that keeps him in power finally appears to have reached an agreement with Bhutto.

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