Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistani president, dies at 79

The trigger was not reported, however he had been receiving medical remedy in Dubai.

His tenure coincided with dramatic occasions overseas that thrust Pakistan into sharp worldwide focus and left it awkwardly perched between the Muslim world and the West.

The terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan compelled Gen. Musharraf to decide on between Pakistan’s alliance with the Afghan Taliban and Washington’s demand for cooperation within the struggle on terror. His choice to aspect with the West was unpopular at house and helped gasoline violent Islamist teams which have terrorized Pakistan.

His rule started with a cold coup on Oct. 12, 1999, when he was military chief. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had tried to fireside the overall, who was airborne en route house from a convention abroad, however military officers foiled the plot and Sharif was arrested.

The coup was condemned internationally however welcomed in Pakistan, the place Sharif was seen as corrupt and the general public had lengthy been accustomed to military interventions. However in a whiplash collection of occasions, Sharif went on to serve a 3rd time period as prime minister, from 2013 to 2017, earlier than being ousted amid revelations about his household’s offshore holdings from the Panama Papers investigative reviews. He was sentenced to a decade in jail.

Gen. Musharraf, who was 56 on the time of the takeover, reduce a contradictory determine. A profession military officer who rose by means of the ranks, he held quite a few instructions and served within the extremely skilled Particular Companies Group. He detested the elitism and cronyism of civilian politics, which he known as “sham democracy,” however he was additionally a well-educated son of a diplomat, a average Muslim and an admirer of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular-leaning military officer who based fashionable Turkey.

As soon as in cost, Gen. Musharraf laid out a sweeping agenda of reform for the nation of 180 million. He pledged to depoliticize state establishments, make authorities accountable, sort out social ills, revive the financial system and curb the exploitation of faith by Islamic fundamentalists.

“Fifty-two years in the past, we began with a beacon of hope, and at present . . . we stand in darkness,” Gen. Musharraf declared after the coup. He solid himself as a reluctant usurper of civilian rule, decided to resurrect the failed promise of Pakistan’s founding in 1947 after its traumatic partition from India.

He took quite a few measures to cement his grip on energy, but he insisted that they had been for the great of the nation. He suspended the structure, declared himself president and compelled all Supreme Courtroom justices to resign or take an oath supporting his rule. “This isn’t martial legislation, solely one other path in direction of democracy,” he asserted.

Gen. Musharraf made vital progress in turning round Pakistan’s debt-ridden financial system. However lots of his targets confronted sturdy social, spiritual or bureaucratic resistance, or had been sacrificed for political expedience. He backed off on plans to modernize seminaries, criminalize honor killings and modify legal guidelines that punished victims of rape.

Inside the military, his effectiveness was hampered by his background as an Urdu-speaking “mojahir,” or immigrant from India, the place he was born Aug. 11, 1943. The military’s ranks had been dominated by ethnic Punjabis and Pashtuns, leaving Gen. Musharraf an outsider even on the prime of his establishment.

“Musharraf had a golden alternative to set issues proper,” to “construct up civilian competence and permit for the military’s retreat from governance. He missed it,” wrote Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan skilled on the Brookings Establishment. “But as a strongman Musharraf had a deadly flaw: He wished to be appreciated.”

Gen. Musharraf professed grave considerations in regards to the development of Islamist extremism and terrorism. In 2002, he banned a number of Islamist and sectarian teams, warning that “the hazard consuming us comes from inside. . . . Pakistan is not going to permit its territory for use for any terrorist exercise anyplace on the planet.” The following yr, he survived two assassination makes an attempt attributed to Sunni militants.

Underneath his command, authorities safety companies captured quite a few al-Qaeda suspects, notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults. This effort earned him lavish reward and help from Washington. For the primary time because the Eighties, when Pakistan helped defeat the Soviet navy occupation of Afghanistan, it acquired new stature as an ally of the West.

But the overall’s secular leanings and partnership with Washington conflicted with different agendas. He continued covert assist for Islamist insurgents preventing Indian forces within the disputed border area of Kashmir, and his intelligence service maintained secret ties with pro-Taliban militants within the northwest.

As a soldier, Gen. Musharraf was raised to struggle Hindu-majority India. He participated in short border conflicts in 1965 and 1971, the latter of which led to the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. He was military chief in 1999, when Pakistani fighters infiltrated India’s Kargil peaks and fought Indian forces for 12 weeks. Sharif and Gen. Musharraf blamed one another for the failed journey, however the common later boasted that it might sometime be “written in golden letters.”

As soon as he grew to become Pakistan’s chief, nonetheless, Gen. Musharraf yearned to make historical past by breaking the decades-long deadlock with India over Kashmir. In 2001, he met with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Agra, however simply as they had been nearing a peace accord, the summit collapsed. There have been costs that hawks in each nations had sabotaged it. Gen. Musharraf, who had made unprecedented concessions in his eagerness for peace, returned house bitterly defeated.

The opposite issue that conflicted along with his average spiritual views and reformist agenda was political ambition. The final longed for legitimacy and used a wide range of strategies to realize it. In 2002, he held a referendum that prolonged his tenure for 5 years, then an election by which a celebration that backed his presidency was capable of kind a ruling coalition in Parliament.

In time his recognition light and his agenda faltered, but Gen. Musharraf got here to see his private rule as indispensable. He started taking what many considered as unscrupulous and repressive steps to stay in energy — all of which finally backfired. In 2003, he made a take care of Pakistan’s spiritual events that gave him sufficient assist to amend the structure, permitting him to legalize the coup and decrees increasing his powers.

Nonetheless, the overall clung to his self-image as a hero of democracy. He gave earnest speeches on the necessity for girls’s rights, common literacy and “enlightened moderation” in faith. He courted the media with disarming frankness and was simply stung by criticism.

In 2006, Gen. Musharraf outlined his grand goals for Pakistan in an English-language memoir, “Within the Line of Hearth.” The e-book was a defensive model of historical past that justified his lengthy rule as an unfinished mission to save lots of his nation. “Pakistan is extra democratic at present than it ever was up to now,” he wrote. “Sarcastically, to change into so, it wanted me in uniform.” To critics who doubted his intentions, he declared, “I hearken to my conscience and the wants of my nation.”

The occasions of the following yr, nonetheless, value Gen. Musharraf his remaining credibility and compelled him from energy. A pivotal second got here in the summertime of 2007, when armed Sunni clerics took over a mosque and seminary within the capital, making a defiant bunker of radical Islam inside just a few blocks of federal and diplomatic enclaves.

Ultimately Gen. Musharraf’s forces stormed the compound, leaving greater than 100 folks lifeless. In retaliation, militant teams turned in opposition to their former state patrons and unleashed a nationwide marketing campaign of bombings.

The president additionally confronted a rising problem from Pakistan’s authorized neighborhood, which launched road protests demanding an finish to navy rule. Fearing that the chief justice of the Supreme Courtroom would possibly invalidate the coup and his proper to hunt reelection, Gen. Musharraf suspended him twice, scary demonstrations every time.

Though he gained an oblique election in October 2007, the courts challenged his proper to rule in uniform and opponents pressed him to resign from the military. As an alternative, the overall declared a state of emergency and fired dissenting Supreme Courtroom justices.

Regardless of the crackdown, the protests gained momentum, and Gen. Musharraf reluctantly resigned his navy command in November, remaining as a civilian president. Underneath U.S. stress, he permitted the return of Benazir Bhutto, the exiled former prime minister, who sought election once more. When she was assassinated at a rally on Dec. 27, the federal government blamed Taliban insurgents, however critics voiced suspicion that the overall had been concerned.

Confronted with rising calls for for his impeachment, Gen. Musharraf resigned as president on Aug. 18, 2008, telling the nation in an emotional speech, “I by no means did something for myself; it was all for Pakistan.”

Many consultants had been much less type of their evaluation of his rule. “He got here to energy on a wave of recognition,” analyst Ahmed Rashid wrote in 2008, “but Musharraf’s legacy is a tattered and divided civilian authorities that has been emasculated by the navy, a polarized and closely armed populace, a disastrous financial disaster . . . and the newly emerged Pakistani Taliban now knocking on Islamabad’s door.”

In 1968, he married Sehba Farid, they usually had two youngsters. An entire listing of survivors was not instantly out there.

The retired common moved to London and later to Dubai and went on the lecture circuit, hinting that he would possibly return to run for workplace, however a Pakistani court docket ordered his arrest in 2011 on costs of involvement in Bhutto’s demise.

After returning to his homeland in 2013, he was disqualified from operating for workplace and charged with treason stemming from his suspension of the structure and imposition of a state of emergency.

In December 2019, a three-member particular court docket in Islamabad convicted Gen. Musharraf of violating the structure and issued the demise sentence. It was unlikely to be meted out due to the overall’s absence from the nation.

Adam Bernstein contributed to this report.