Pakistan Arrests Before the Ballots

Almost from the moment he seized power in a military coup in 1977, Pakistan's President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq has been assuring his countrymen that he wanted nothing so much as to call free elections and restore his country to a democratic system. He finally got around to staging a referendum last December in which Pakistani voters were invited to say whether they endorsed Zia's program of Islamization and in effect whether they wanted him to continue as President. About 98% of those who voted said they did.

This week the country holds its first elections for the National Assembly since 1977. The last Assembly was disbanded on the day Zia proclaimed martial law eight years ago and has not met since. In a move described as a precautionary step in preparation for the latest elections, Zia last week ordered the arrest of hundreds of opposition politicians and others who might prove to be a disruptive influence to his vision of "Islamic democracy." Said a senior Western diplomat in Karachi: "This is an invisible election. The constraints have choked the life out of it."

To make sure the elections go ahead without troublemaking by the opposition, Zia laid down some severe restrictions. Candidates were not permitted to hold outdoor meetings or rallies. A few who tried to get around this by using mosques for political meetings were disqualified. Processions were forbidden. Loudspeakers and microphones were banned, making it difficult or impossible for candidates to use large halls for campaign speeches. Instead, the military rulers decreed that candidates could go from house to house, speaking only to as many people as could fit comfortably into a single room.

When the eleven-party opposition alliance, which calls itself the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, rejected Zia's invitation to participate in the elections, the President was furious. Said he: "Their decision has closed the doors on any dialogue. I will not talk to them while they continue to call for a boycott of the elections. They are out of the game by their own choice." By last week, estimates of the number of people arrested throughout the country ranged between 400 and 3,000.

Conspicuously absent from the election campaign was the one person who retains much of the charisma of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the fiery and popular Prime Minister who was overthrown by Zia in 1977 and later executed (on the charge of being implicated in the murder of the father of a political opponent). That figure is Benazir Bhutto, 31, daughter of the late Prime Minister and today the acting head of her father's Pakistan People's Party. She has been in self-imposed exile in London for the past year. Pakistani police have gone to extraordinary effort to see to it that Bhutto did not try to return during the campaign and disrupt the painstakingly planned proceedings. At Karachi International Airport, security officials carefully checked the identities of veiled women returning from overseas. In London, Bhutto declared that she had originally planned to go home for the elections but had changed her mind after learning that she would be arrested on arrival.

Her second-in-command in the P.P.P., Party Vice President Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, 53, remained in Pakistan during the campaign and was arrested. When asked why the relatively powerful P.P.P. had not chosen to participate in the elections and thereby gain a strong voice in the National Assembly, Jatoi contended, "Nobody knows what Zia has up his sleeve. He is a man of surprises and suspense. He just wants to have the facade of elections. If a facade of democracy is what Washington wants, that's what it will get out of this election."

That is, in fact, the very least the Reagan Administration would like to see achieved by the current elections. The two countries have been allies for decades, and the relationship has been particularly strong following the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in 1979. Since that time, the U.S. has agreed to supply Pakistan with $3.2 billion in military and economic assistance. The hope now is that with the long-delayed elections taking place at last, Zia will bring an end to martial law and, as he has so often promised, restore the country to civilian rule.