In Pakistan, tensions are rising between the ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan and his former protectors at the top of the army. Hundreds of supporters of the former cricket team captain have been gathering outside his home in Islamabad since last night to prevent his arrest, ordered by a judge to answer untimely charges of "sedition" and "terrorism".
The judicial persecution of Imran Jan, the most popular politician in Pakistan, comes in a critical week for the country, pending a conditional loan from the International Monetary Fund. The arrest warrant has been issued by a judge, in response to a complaint filed last night at the police station by another magistrate. According to him, the political leader, at his rally on Saturday, accused the government's top brass, the police leadership and a judge of covering up the "torture" of his chief of staff, Shehbaz Gill, who has had to be hospitalized after his arrest, motivated by alleged calls for insubordination within the Armed Forces. Jan said that he would take them to court, which the government described as a "threat to public office", capable of being described as "sedition" and "terrorism", which would carry prison sentences.
In any case, Imran Jan's lawyers would have obtained this noon a grace period of three days so that Imran Jan can go to the Anti-Terrorist Court on his own feet to defend himself, without fear of being arrested.
The leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), or Movement for Justice, lost power in April in a controversial no-confidence motion. The head of the opposition, Shehbaz Sharif, replaced him as head of government, which had already been occupied on several occasions by his brother Nawaz Sharif, currently on the run in London due to corruption problems.
Since then, Imran Jan has not stopped presenting the sum of the parties and turncoats who have promoted the youngest of the Sharifs as "an import government" and its members as "thieves" and "a bunch of scoundrels". What few doubt is the collusion of the army, despite the fact that in his day it promoted Jan and his party, when it was about maintaining the political line in Afghanistan.
The expulsion of the foreign coalition from Kabul, and particularly the loss of India's footing, is seen in Pakistan as its greatest foreign policy achievement in recent decades. However, once Taliban control of the country is secured, the military leadership has found in the war in Ukraine a window of opportunity to repair its battered relations with Washington, while India - whose arsenal is overwhelmingly Russian-made - returns to flirting with the not alignment.
To this must be added the mysterious elimination, according to the US, of the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, in Kabul, at the beginning of the month and with a drone. As in the case of Osama bin Laden, there are no images of the body, but there are questions about the role of Pakistani intelligence, both for having flouted his status as the world's most wanted man for so many years and for having stopped doing so at this time. . According to some sources, the apartment in which he would have been bombed would currently belong to the circle of the Haqqani, the closest allies of Pakistani espionage within the Afghan insurgency, now in power.
It should be added that Pakistan, which traditionally spends the largest item in its budget paying interest on its foreign debt, is again on the verge of bankruptcy. And the solution, from the point of view of the establishment -which not only does not pay taxes, but also grants itself loans from public banks that it never repays- is once again a request for a loan from the International Monetary Fund. In this case, 1,200 million dollars, which experts believe should arrive at the end of August, at the latest.
The ghost of the sinking of Sri Lanka haunts the entire region. China, which has not saved the Rajapaksa brothers, its great allies in Colombo, from shipwreck, now has the alibi for not having to rescue a country ten times more populous and corrupt, like Pakistan, a veritable bottomless pit.
Unheard of, it is the Pakistani Army Chief himself, Qamar Javed Bajwa, who has begged the IMF to unblock the loan. Imran Jan has cryptically accused "the neutrals" of "begging" and of giving evidence of "the weakness" of Pakistan, in a speech whose broadcast was interrupted live, including blocking of YouTube.
In fact, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) has just banned the country's channels from rebroadcasting Khan's speeches without prior censorship, a move the PTI will challenge in court "as fascist."
The situation is dire for the coalition government of Sharif and the Bhuttos' party. It was demonstrated a few weeks ago, when the PTI recovered with authority at the polls the government of the Punjab, the former fiefdom of the Sharifs. Jan, adored by the young and the middle class, is the great favorite for the next elections, which he demands to be brought forward and which in any case should be held in a year.
