Former Pakistan President and dictator Pervez Musharraf has died. He passed away in a Dubai hospital on February 5.
The cunning and double-speak general had resigned from his position in 2008 after the ruling coalition threatened to impeach him.
Musharraf’s ouster from power was the culmination of not one particular reason.
Towards the end of his tenure, the leader was in the soup because of several conflicts brewing within Pakistan. He also had a death sentence hanging over his head in Pakistan, hence could not return to his own country. He was in self exile.
Musharraf had seized power in Pakistan in 1999 in a bloodless coup and was the architect of the Kargil War of 1999 which Pakistan badly lost. Today Pakistan, in a dire financial situation, can blame Musharraf for its owes.
The family of Musharraf has now filed an application in the Pakistani consulate in Dubai to shift the former leader’s body to Pakistan where he will be buried in a Karachi graveyard.
Politicians in Pakistan expressed their condolences over Musharraf’s demise with former prime Minister Nawaz Sharif saying, “To Allah we belong and to Him is our return.”
The former general’s demise came after he struggled with a rare disease called amyloidosis. His illness came to light in 2018 when his party the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) had announced the same. And in June last year, he had been hospitalised in Dubai where he lived in self-exile for three weeks with his family stating that he was “going through a difficult stage where recovery is not possible and organs are malfunctioning”.
He was embroiled in a number of court cases following his loss of power, including accusations of failing to provide adequate security for former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose assassination by the Taliban in 2007 shocked Pakistan and the world.
And his career ultimately ended in disgrace and arrest, when he was sentenced to death in absentia for treason in 2019. Though that sentencing was later reversed, he never returned to Pakistan.
