May 09, 2023
Today former prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was arrested while visiting the Islamabad High Court in an unrelated case. The arrest comes at a critical point for Pakistan's economy. Behind the scene U.S. and China are wrestling for influence.
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been arrested as he appeared in a court in the capital, Islamabad, to face corruption allegations, sparking protests across the country.The arrest on Tuesday is the latest twist in a months-long political crisis and follows several unsuccessful attempts to apprehend the cricketer-turned-politician, including a police raid in March at his residence in the eastern city of Lahore which he had managed to evade.
Last year Imran Khan was ousted from office after a few turncoats in his PTI party decided to vote with the opposition against him. He has alleged that the Pakistani military, and behind it the U.S., were involved in the scheme. Since then he has called for new elections.
Khan continues to be the most popular politician in the country and has a large following. His supporters are now out in the streets to protest against his arrest.
The case that led to this arrest is one of several dubious ones launched against him:
Akbar Nasir Khan, a top police official in Islamabad, told Al Jazeera that Khan was arrested in a case related to the Al-Qadir University Trust. The anti-corruption National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had issued an arrest warrant against Khan on May 1 in relation to the case, he said.The accountability body issued a statement saying Khan had been arrested “for the crime of corruption”.
“The former prime minister has not given any adequate response to the summoning notices of NAB. His arrest has been made in accordance with the NAB ordinance and the law,” the statement read.
Since his removal from power last year, Khan has been slapped with dozens of charges, all of which he denies and says are politically motivated.
There is video of the unruly arrest by some 100 paramilitary rangers in riot gear.
Khan had recently accused the head of the Pakistan's military intelligence service ISI of being responsible for two assassination attempts against him:
The military on Monday issued a harshly worded statement, terming the accusations of its involvement in last year’s shooting “highly irresponsible and baseless”.“We ask the political leader concerned to make a recourse to legal avenues and stop making false allegations,” the statement said.
Khan, however, doubled down on the allegations in a video message he released early on Tuesday, before leaving Lahore for Islamabad to attend a court hearing in a separate case.
“This man [Major General Faisal Naseer] tried to kill me twice and whenever an investigation is carried out, I will prove that it was this man and there is a whole gang with him,” the PTI chief said.
The PTI has called on its supporters to protest against the arrest. There have since been some riotous scenes throughout Pakistan's cities.
Arresting Khan over some dubious issue after his recent spat with the military looks bad. The current unelected government will be seen as illegitimate instrument of the military, a role Khan himself was accused of before he was ousted.
There will now come days of rioting and violent police and probably military response throughout Pakistan. These will continue until Khan is released. In similar cases Pakistan's supreme court eventually ruled that arrests like the one of Khan are illegal:
“In a state like ours, the state’s power to use violence and restrict an individual’s freedom is often used to punish politicians and leaders who have lost the establishment’s favour. Without prejudice to the merits of the case against Imran Khan, his recent arrest can hardly be viewed with a legal lens alone.“Even when viewed from a legal lens, the arrest appears derogate with the judgment rendered by the supreme court in the Khawaja Salman Rafia’s case, where it held that arrests before conviction are an aberration given the serious erosion of fundamental rights that it entails.
“Additionally, the court in that case had alluded to accountability laws being used for political engineering. While the PTI government had preferred a review against the afore-noted decision in 2020, its leader now appears to have been embroiled in the same web of political engineering, thus showing the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Pakistan's economy is extremely weak with very high inflation, food scarcity and too few currency reserves. It might default soon. An announced but not agreed upon IMF program will impose even more harsh conditions that the country will be unable to fulfill.
It is possible that the U.S. controlled IMF is intentionally trying to push Pakistan into default. Much of the country's debt is to Chinese institutions and the U.S. has for some time tried to involve Chinese belt and roads project related debt into national restructuring attempts. China has rejected that scheme. To then let Pakistan default will only make it more reliant on China.
The U.S. however may still try to do it.
Posted by b on May 9, 2023 at 16:20 UTC | Permalink