Civil war warning unless Musharraf resigns

Pakistan’s US-allied president must resign before next month’s elections or the country could risk slipping into civil war, opposition leaders and an independent research group said today.

The calls came after the government decided to postpone crucial parliamentary polls until February 18, six weeks after they were initially scheduled, due to unrest following the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Bhutto’s death in a suicide bomb and gun attack plunged already volatile Pakistan deeper into crisis and stoked fears of a political meltdown as the nation struggled to contain an explosion of populist anger and Islamic militant violence.

The government has been criticised over its security arrangements for Bhutto, who had claimed elements in the ruling party were trying to kill her. The party vehemently denied such a plot. President Pervez Musharraf said Wednesday that Scotland Yard would join the investigation into her death.

The opposition urged Musharraf, the former army chief who seized power in a 1999 coup, to resign.

“Free and fair polls are impossible under his leadership,” said Javed Hashmi, a senior member of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party. “Such a thing is unthinkable if he is there.”

In a report on Bhutto’s murder, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group research institute called on the US to recognise him as “a serious liability, seen as complicit in the death” of Bhutto.

“It is time to recognise that democracy, not an artificially propped-up, defrocked, widely despised general has the best chance to provide stability,” the group’s Asia director, Robert Templer, said in a statement. “Unless Musharraf steps down, tensions will worsen and the international community could face the nightmare of a nuclear-armed, Muslim country descending into civil war.”

In a nationally televised address Wednesday night, Musharraf said he supported election authorities’ decision to delay the vote due to riots that followed Bhutto’s death. The violence killed nearly 60 people and caused tens of millions of pounds of damage.

He blamed Islamic militants for Bhutto’s death and appealed for public unity to combat them. “This is a time for reconciliation and not for confrontation,” he said.

In an apparent effort to blunt calls for an international investigation into Bhutto’s death, he said Britain would send investigators in the coming days to aid the Pakistani officials in their investigation.

Government critics feared the investigators’ work could be complicated by the state of the crime scene. In the hours after her death, firefighters wielding two high pressure hoses, washed away the debris and blood from the site of the attack.

A senior police investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, said Thursday that police had already secured key evidence, including the head of the suspected bomber, body parts, two pistols, and mobile phones.

Scotland Yard investigators, with their superior forensic techniques, could help them determine whether either pistol was fired in the attack and also examine video, he said.

Bhutto supporters have insisted that a UN probe would be the only way to reveal the truth behind her December 27 killing, and rejected a Pakistani investigation, even with British assistance.

“The regime has lost all credibility. Neither a domestic inquiry nor vague foreign involvement ... would lay to rest the lingering doubts and suspicions,” said Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party.

Scotland Yard said it was sending a small team of officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Counterterrorism Command. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the team would leave Britain by the end of the week.

The White House said it supported Scotland Yard’s involvement, and that a UN investigation was not necessary now.

“Scotland Yard being in the lead in this investigation is appropriate and necessary and I don’t see – we don’t see a need for an investigation beyond that at this time,” said presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino.

The election delay also drew condemnation from both Bhutto’s party and Sharif’s group. They said, however, that they would run in the polls anyway – seemingly a boost to Musharraf’s hopes of engineering a democratic transition.