ISLAMABAD: The body of Pakistan’s exiled former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who became a key US ally during the “war on terror,” was repatriated on Monday, aviation sources told AFP.
Musharraf, who fled Pakistan in 2016 for medical treatment after a travel ban was lifted, died on Sunday aged 79 in Dubai, after a long illness.
The plane carrying his body landed late Monday evening in Karachi, the sources said.
It was expected that he would be buried in the southern city, where his family settled after leaving Old Delhi following the partition of the Indian subcontinent.
A military source told AFP that his funeral would take place on Tuesday.
Musharraf seized power in a 1999 bloodless coup and was acting simultaneously as Pakistan’s army chief, chief executive, and president when the 9/11 attacks on the United States took place.
The general twice suspended the constitution and was accused of rigging a referendum shoring up his power, as well as rampant rights abuses including rounding up opponents during his nearly nine-year rule.
“In the end he left Pakistanis with a deep distaste for direct military rule — so that even though the military wields much power behind the scenes now, it does not want to be in power directly again,” Madiha Afzal, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, told AFP.
Musharraf became Washington’s chief regional ally during the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in 2001, a decision which put him in the crosshairs of Islamist militants, who made several attempts on his life.
But it also earned Pakistan a huge influx of foreign aid, which bolstered the economy.
In Pakistan, where the military remains supremely powerful and enjoys significant support, Musharraf is a divisive figure.
“There was good in him,” 69-year-old Naeem Ul Haq Satti told AFP in an Islamabad marketplace.
“But his one act, which will be remembered throughout history, was he violated the constitution,” the retired civil servant added. “The most important thing a country has is its constitution.”
Musharraf had been suffering from a rare disease known as amyloidosis and last summer his family said he had no prospect of recovery.
Senior military chiefs “express heartfelt condolences on (the) sad demise of General Pervez Musharraf,” a brief statement released by the military’s media wing said Sunday.
Former military ruler Musharraf’s body arrives in Pakistan
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Former military ruler Musharraf’s body arrives in Pakistan
- Plane carrying his body landed late Monday evening in Karachi
- It was expected that he would be buried in the southern city, where his family settled after leaving Old Delhi following the partition of the Indian subcontinent
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
