PPP rejects WSJ article

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) has rejected the contents of an article published in The Wall Street Journal last week.
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, PPP spokesperson Farhatullah Babar said that Arthur Herman says the current wave of hatred of General Musharraf has little to do with the nature of his government and that Benazir Bhutto and a small elite hate him only because they are intolerant of an ethnic minority member wielding political power.
Any one who claims that Musharraf is popular should pause and ponder why the General refuses to shed military uniform which he calls as his skin and why he is manipulating to get himself re-elected for a second five-year term from his hand-picked parliament whose own term has come to an end and in a manner that is not provided in the Constitution? Babar asked.
Babar said: "General Musharraf himself knows how much the people dislike him. That is why he dreads shedding military uniform. That is why he is morally afraid of offering himself as a candidate for political office in an open and level playing field. That is why he banished former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from politics and from the country."
"There is also no bias against Musharraf for ethnic reasons. If there had been he could not have risen to become the army chief in the first place." Babar said: "The people of Pakistan hate Musharraf as they have hated all the three previous military dictators namely General Ayub Khan, General Yahya, and General Ziaul Haq. Musharraf knows it and that is why when he took over in 1999 he sought to allay public fears by publicly declaring: "I am neither Ayub nor Yahya nor Zia. I am different".
"Eight years into his military dictatorship and after trampling all state institutions one by one lately the Supreme Court, people have learnt Musharraf actually was worst; he was Ayub plus Yahya plus Zia besides much more else. That is why he is hated like no dictator before," said Babar.
"As for allegations of corruption against Benazir Bhutto it has been a favourite theme of dictators to undermine democracy by tarnishing the image of democratic leaders through media trial. Writing about Pakistan in the same newspaper (WSJ) on May 10 last year, Lord Patten, former EU Commissioner for External Relations said: Pro-dictatorship voices regularly argue that those parties were highly corrupt.
But they refuse to condemn or even acknowledge the military's large-scale, institutionalised corruption. So much has been grabbed by the military that it will take years just to catalogue it. The military has acquired vast tracts of state-owned land at nominal rates; its leaders dominate businesses and industries, ranging from banking to cereal factories.