The reinstatement of Pakistan's top judge was a triumph of politics over law, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad In a pre-dawn television broadcast on 16 March Pakistani Prime Minister Youssef Raza Gilani pronounced words many of his countrymen desired but few expected to hear. "I announce the restoration of all deposed judges including [the Chief Justice] Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry," he said. "I pledge once again to take forward the politics of reconciliation." The statement averted the most serious political crisis of his year-old government. But it remains to be seen whether reconciliation will replace confrontation as the defining relationship between Pakistan's mauled presidency of Asif Zardari and a predatory opposition, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. For now most Pakistanis are simply relieved that a political civil war is not going to be added to the other woes that afflict them: an Islamic insurgency flowing inland from Afghanistan, tensions with India, and accelerating poverty. This includes Pakistan's 120,000 lawyers. They have been fighting for the reinstatement of "their Chief Justice" ever since Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, first fired him in March 2007. (He was restored then fired again by Musharraf during a brief burst of martial rule in November 2007). On news of his "second restoration" dozens, then hundreds, of black-coated men and women climbed to Chaudhry's palatial home, nestled in Islamabad's dark, Himalayan foothills. They danced, sang and tossed rose-petals as dawn broke. There was "revolution" in the air, said Shahzad Rathmore, a young barrister. "I came all the way from England to witness this moment. For the last two years we've had only a political judiciary in Pakistan. Military and civilian rulers used it to impose undemocratic decisions on the people. That will now stop." A squat man with hooded eyes, Iftikhar Chaudhry is a judge given to long, rambling speeches. But, by quirk of fate and history, he has come to embody Pakistan's civil society's long struggle for democracy and the rule of law in the teeth of a venal political and military ruling class. Musharraf fired him because of the legal curbs he tried to impose on an unaccountable army, including the "rendering" of "disappeared" Pakistanis to the CIA for large amounts of bounty. Zardari feared him lest he reopen corruption cases pending against him and his late wife, former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. "Civilian and military dictators are alike," mused Qamar-uz-Zanan Butt, a lawyers' leader, on 16 March. "They fear justice." But it wasn't the lawyers, still less justice, that got Chaudhry his job back. It was political brinkmanship, masterfully choreographed by Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (PML) party. This cadre outnumbered the lawyers two-to-one in the crowds swelling around Chaudhry's home on 16 March. They had reason. Sharif has long supported Chaudhry's reinstatement, whether from conviction or opportunism. It formed the main plank of the PML's 2008 election campaign. He left the government in August after Zardari had repeatedly failed to honour promises to have the chief justice restored. But part of Pakistan's political class himself -- his brother, Shahbaz, until recently was chief minister in the Punjab provincial government -- he was loath to take the matter to the streets: until Zardari left him no option. Last month the Supreme Court barred the Sharifs from holding political office on the basis of charges dredged up from a decade ago. Zardari moved swiftly to fill the political void by imposing direct rule on the Punjab, Pakistan's largest, wealthiest and most powerful province. The Sharifs charged the president was trying to take by stealth what he had failed to win by elections. They rallied in the street. But they did so not in the cause of the Sharifs, but in the name of Iftikhar Chaudhry. It was a brilliant move on their part and a disastrous one for Zardari. Those other "opposition" parties he had banked on to help him "take" the Punjab, faced with violence across the province, backed away. The Americans and British -- who had helped pave Zardari's path to the presidency -- were appalled that he had created an avoidable political crisis at a time when he was pleading for cash to stave off an economic meltdown: on 14 March Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly told him that Congress "may not be inclined" to bale out a country in perpetual, self- inflicted chaos. Even the ruling -- and usually docile -- Pakistan People's Party (PPP) started to implode: two ministers resigned and local leaders wondered how they could be a "people's party" when their leader's policies were "anti-people". In terms of damage to the party's stock "Zardari has done more in 18 months than the army did in 40 years," said a senior PPP leader. Faced with flak on all sides, Zardari panicked. He arrested lawyers, closed down independent media and, literally, barricaded himself in the presidency in Islamabad. Confronted with the prospect of a lawyers "long march" on the capital on 15-16 March ship containers were strewn across every road and armed police pickets commanded every junction. It was supposed to project strength; it projected fear. And the Sharifs could smell it. On 15 March Nawaz Sharif brushed aside a police cordon thrown around his home in Lahore by driving through it. He then led a 100- car motorcade on the 400km road to Islamabad. PML cadre and activists belonging to the Islamist Jamaat-e- Islami Party fought running battles with the police in downtown Lahore, and won. Mobile hydraulic cranes were used to remove the containers. The image was of a long, mass, unstoppable human snake crawling towards the capital whose flag was the chief justice but whose quarry was Zardari. At midnight on 15 March Pakistan's army chief of staff -- still the country's most powerful individual -- told the president the situation was "spinning out of control" and "political decisions" were needed to reverse it. Five hours later Gilani made his television broadcast. The Americans welcomed his "statesman-like decision" as "a substantial step towards national reconciliation". The lawyers proclaimed revolution. But change had come the way it usually does in Pakistan: less by revolution than in a new alignment between the political elite, the army and America.
