Who should be charged for treason...

[Mahmood]

I am very confused...

As for as I understand constitution of almost every country in the world, including Pakistan, strictly treats a coup-de-tat as treason. and teh penalty is death.

Case of treason against a Prime Minister who dismiss his junior (when he had the legal authority to do so) would probably be written very prominently in the history of our time.

[Nova]

I dont know if " Law of Necessacity" would be applicable here......
Otherwise legally speaking , present government would have to be called illegal...
This exposes a hole in the current constitution....What do do if an autocratic individual starts acting unconstitutionally....Why wasnt anything done when the supreme court was raided by members of muslim League...Is the government that allowed or actually made somehting like that happen , constitutional in the first place...

[The Piscean]

WE ALL SHOULD BE CHARGED WITH TREASON

The people we are talking about to bring to the book, are only those we ourselves voted them to the corridor of powers. These are the people we love to hate — yet we will be rushing to get our ID cards punched once again for them as soon as elections are held. Most of us will like to see them hanging in the streets, yet we will also flood the area where Bhuttos and Sharifs will be holding a public meeting.

If they are bad people, than we are worst people for letting them use our shoulders whenever they want. We stand equally responsible for the plight our country is in this time.

[Mahmood]

Let us not think emotinally..

Have our politicians been ever given a fair chance. Each military rule lasted for more than 10 year. These illegal rulers ruled with the power of guns. But where these peiods any better than the democratic short periods of time.

The political leaders have only been able to rule, mostly for 2, 2 1/2 years. Even these governments have always been held at ransom by the powerful armed forces.

Now is it fair to blame only the politicians for everything bad in teh country, when they have not been given any chance to develop or grow up?

Please go through a nice article below which appeared in Guardian - London.

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Waiting for the miracle that may never happen

Pakistan's army generals are the problem, not the political solution
Pakistan coup: special report

Peter Preston
Monday October 18, 1999

Here we go again. Robin Cook and the mighty leaders of Europe, gathered in a small town in Finland, wag their fingers. Bill Clinton wags his, too. Sanctions will be duly imposed: democracy must be restored forthwith. But in another small town, called Islamabad, there is only derisive laughter.

Democracy butters no chapatis for Pakistan; and sanctions at this point are the emptiest of gestures. The country (as the American ambassador on the spot says) is already sanctioned up to here. Lofty westerners, spouting the usual world community stuff, only have seats in the back stalls for another long night of tragedy and farce - begun with a whimper, ending perhaps with a nuclear bang.

It has been my queasy misfortune to make the acquaintance of all three of General Pervaiz Musharraf's predecessors as military dictator.

There was Ayub Khan, with his ramrod back, his plain man's version of a Sandhurst moustache and masterly penchant for higher cant. Ayub invented a "basic democracy" which allowed 80,000 basic democrats to choose who should rule 100m people. He'd have found us a mayor for London in 15 minutes.

There was squat, blank-eyed Yahya Khan, who unwittingly gave birth to Bangladesh. I remember his first great press conference. "Turn off the lights," he said, peering into a giant arc of TV cameras. Protests brushed aside: lights off, spiel on. But then a reporter from ABC pointed out that Yahya's statement hadn't been filmed because it was too dark. "Oh," said the top army brain of his era. "Turn on the lights." And he did his turn over again.

There was General Zia ul-Huq of the waxed moustache and waxen smile: a creepy Iago who put his trusting prime minister to death and ruled by fear, manipulation and shameless pandering to the most backward religious forces in his land.

Every one of them was a disaster. Two of them blundered into wars which they promptly lost. None of them left anything good behind; nothing with roots, nothing for the future.

And yet, of course, they were also leaders of Pakistan's most successful party since independence - the party that has governed overtly for 25 of the last 41 years, the party that has covertly called most of the shots for half a century: the party we may call the Punjabi Military Alliance. Sometimes the guys in braid sit in the front office, sometimes they sit in the back: but they are never really out of office. General Musharraf is no aberration. He is the next in line.

This, crucially, is where the cries for sanctions and pleas for restored democracy fly so hopelessly wide of the mark. Robin Cook (and all those who sing the same tune) seem to see a nation with two distinct leadership strands: the civilian politicians and the army generals. The politicians get their turn from time to time, and are then locked up or put to death as the supreme moustaches move in.

Fundamental misunderstanding. The generals, on their record, do not stand aside from the political system. They are an umbilical part of it. They are Pakistan's occasional opposition-in-waiting and much less occasional natural party of government. Ballots? Bayonets? Who cares? The journalists last week who professed amazement at the becalmed public reception for the coup have not been around long enough. This is the way, the well understood way, that the baton passes. This is the system at work.

Suppose today - or at any time in the last half century - that you were a middle class lad with an incipient thirst for political power growing up on a Punjab estate. After college, you have a definitive career choice. You can stuff envelopes, knock on doors and stand for election yourself - or you can get an army commission and try the other route. The choice isn't politics or no politics: the choice is which kind of politics. And General Musharraf probably thinks he chose correctly. He offers "stability, credibility, transparency and accountability" with the facility of any hack rhetorician. Well, naturally.

The system is a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair. Why, by and large, are Pakistan's elected politicians such a depressing assemblage of the corrupt and the incompetent? Why are their foreign bank accounts too often flush with siphoned funds and their ministries stuffed with chums? Because they know they are living on borrowed time. Because the army never quits. Because Pakistan has no ability to weather hard times, so that any prudent politician salts away his (or her) pension while the opportunity exists.

The elected lot are awful because their careers are always short, brutish and nasty. They take their turn on the carousel and then fall off. They foster the widespread corruption Clare Short complains of. But the thought that the army, the heirs of Zia, can offer something cleaner, is imbecility. They are the problem, not the solution.

Back to our wagging fingers, our sanctions, our lectures about democracy. The new pencil moustache, of course, makes all the right, soothing noises - but a second's thought tells you how worthless they are. Will Musharraf let Sharif out of clink and take the first jet back to Sri Lanka? Will he call Benazir Bhutto back from exile? His neck is at stake as well. There are no democratic leaders around he can hand over power to. He'll spend obfuscating years creating (yet again) a civilian regime of bureaucrats and hacks, while behind them another generation of fleeting democrats evolves.

Sanctions - like scotching Short's £20m of development aid - won't change that. Sanctions, after Pakistan's nuclear tests, haven't brought a national lurch towards sanity, but just the reverse. Sanctions haven't ousted Saddam Hussein or brought Milosevic to his knees: on the contrary, they keep the gangsters in the gangster states in power. It is time to be clear-eyed about what sanctions can't do - and they can't create a culture of freedom which doesn't exist.

Pakistanis are some of the cleverest, most diligent people on earth. Where they have immigrant communities, they rise on toil and talent. They produce brilliant scientists, great technicians and shrewd economists. They are the underpinning of the Gulf states and much else.

But, back home, their country is a bloody shambles of high birth rates and low expectations. They cannot escape from national myths; and the army party, gobbling resources to feed to its uniformed constituents, has no vested interest in any escape. More deprivation, more isolation, more lecturing? Forget it. Only prosperity and growth and open trade offer a better future to Pakistan, the thought that one day the lad on the Punjabi estate will choose politics as a matter of course. That, alas, is an Asian miracle beyond current imagining.