DEMOCRACY NOW
We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali. Ali also discusses devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed nearly 800 people over the past two months, and have never happened “on this scale.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We turn now to look at the political crisis in Pakistan, where the former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been charged under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act. It’s the latest escalation between the Pakistani state and Khan, who remains very popular following his ouster from office in April in what he described as a form of a “U.S.-backed regime change.” Khan has continued to hold major rallies across Pakistan. But over the weekend, Pakistani authorities banned TV stations from broadcasting his speeches live. Then, Monday, police filed anti-terrorism charges against him after he a gave speech accusing police officers of torturing one of his close aides who was jailed on sedition charges. Soon after the charges were announced, hundreds of Khan’s supporters gathered outside his home to prevent police from arresting him. Later Monday, Khan responded to the charges in a speech in Islamabad.
IMRAN KHAN:
I had called to take legal action against them, the police officers and judicial magistrate, and the government registered a terrorism case against me. In the first place, they do the wrong thing. When we say we will take legal action, they register a case against me and take out an arrest warrant against me. What does this show? There is no rule of law in our country.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re joined now in London by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, on the editorial committee of the New Left Review, author of many books, including Uprising in Pakistan: How to Bring Down a Dictatorship, which came out a few years ago, and Can Pakistan Survive? His latest book, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, we’ll talk about on another show. And we’re also talking about this in the midst of these massive floods of Pakistan, and we’ll get to that in a minute.
Tariq, talk about the significance of the terrorism charges against Imran Khan, who was ousted in what basically he calls U.S.-backed regime change.
TARIQ ALI: Well, Imran had annoyed the United States. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. He had said — when Kabul fell, he said publicly, as prime minister, that the Americans made a huge mess in that country, and this is the result. Then, after the Ukraine war was unleashed by Putin, Imran was in Moscow that day. He didn’t comment on it, but he was just surprised that it happened during his state visit. But he refused to back sanctions against Russia, and he was criticized for that, to which he replied, “India is not backing the sanctions. Why don’t you criticize them? China is not backing them. The bulk of the world, Third World, is not backing them. Why pick on me?” But he had become a nuisance. Whether the United States put too much into it, we don’t know. But certainly, the military, which is very dominant in Pakistani politics, must have thought that to please the United States, better get rid of him. And there’s no doubt that without military support for his removal, he wouldn’t have been ousted.
Now, what they thought or what they assumed was that Imran would lose all popularity, because his government had made many mistakes. There was talk of corruption by his wife, etc., etc. Then something happened in July which shook the establishment, which is that in the most populous and important province in the country, important in terms of power, the Punjab, there were 20 by-elections for parliamentary seats, and Imran won 15 of them. He could have won another two, had his party been better organized. So that showed that support for him, if it had evaporated, was coming back, because people were just shocked by the government that had replaced him. And that, I think, also gave Imran a lot of hope that he could win the next general elections quite easily. And he went on a grand tour of the country, of which there were two prongs: The military has put corrupt politicians in power, and the United States has organized a regime change. And one of the biggest chants on all these demonstration, which had hundreds of thousands of people on them, was “He who is a friend of the United States is a traitor. A traitor.” That was the big chant and a very popular chant at the time. So, he has, no doubt, built himself up again.
And I think it’s that event, Amy, in July, of showing popular support via elections, when he isn’t even in power, that worried them, so they’ve been waging a campaign against him. Arresting him under the anti-terrorism laws is truly grotesque. He has attacked judges in the past. He was attacking some of the judicial authorities in his speech the other day. If you want to arrest him, you have — you can accuse him of contempt of court, so he can go and fight against that, and we’ll see who wins, and in which court. But instead, they’ve arrested him under the terrorism laws, which is a bit worrying, that if the aim is to keep him out of the next elections because of the so-called terrorism charges, that will create more havoc in the country. He is not too worried at the moment, from what I can gather.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, I wanted to ask you — given the massive protests that have erupted in support of him, is it your sense that even people who may have been opposed to Imran Khan are unifying behind him, against the political and military establishment of the country? After all — and the potential for continued disruption in a country that’s the fifth-largest country in the world in terms of population.
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