Pakistani police were on high alert Friday to prevent a planned democracy demonstration from hijacking the military regime's official Pakistan Day parades.
Another seven politicians were arrested in the eastern city of Lahore, where hundreds of people have been rounded up this week in the biggest crackdown on the opposition since the 1999 coup.
Political leaders claim more than 2,000 people have been taken from their homes and detained, although police put the number at about 200.
In Islamabad, the military took center stage Friday with a 31-gun salute at sunrise followed by a huge parade of tanks and missiles, with air force jets swooping low in formation over the vacant parliamentary complex.
It was on March 23, 1940, that the Muslim League adopted the Pakistan Resolution, and Muslims throughout the sub-continent began their campaign to cleave a separate homeland out of British India.
Now, 61 years on, Pakistan's economy is buried under a mountain of foreign debt, religious violence between the majority Sunni and minority Shiite sects is rampant, and democratic institutions are in ruins.
General Pervez Musharraf, who led a bloodless coup against the Nawaz Sharif government in October 1999 to become Pakistan's fourth military ruler, says he wants to build a "genuine democracy" and hold elections by October 12 next year.
In his Pakistan Day message, the general called on all Pakistanis to "do some soul searching" and "renew their resolve to inculcate in themselves unity, solidarity and harmony in every facet of national affairs."
"I would like to assure our countrymen both at home and abroad that the government is committed to achieve the objectives for which our beloved country came into being," he said in the message carried on state media.
"However, a social order free from exploitation, discrimination and injustice cannot be established without the active support of the people."
Newspaper editorials compared founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah's vision of Pakistan as a "tolerant and modern society practicing a genuine democratic system" with the current reality.
"Pakistan came into being not through a revolution or an armed struggle but as a result of a process that was entirely constitutional," wrote the Dawn daily in a veiled reference to Musharraf's suspension of the 1973 constitution.
Turning its sights to the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan, it wrote: "The fact remains that religious parties had nothing to do with the creation of Pakistan. In fact, if the record is perused, they were bitter foes of it."
In Lahore, officials said an extra 6,000 police had been deployed around the city to prevent the planned democracy demonstration.
The historic Mochi Gate park in the heart of the city, where the demonstration was scheduled to take place, had been ringed with barbed wire.
Protest organizer and Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy president Nawabzada Nasrullah, who was briefly detained Wednesday, was put under virtual house arrest Friday morning.
"We will reach the venue (Mochi Gate) no matter whether they seal it with barbed wire or concrete walls," he told AFP shortly before police surrounded his house.
Pakistan People's Party leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto issued her own Pakistan Day address from exile overseas, where she has lived since shortly before her corruption conviction in early 1999.
"Let us on this day resolve to fight the urge of the military rulers to change the laws for themselves," she said.
"For unless there is rule of law and everyone is equal before the law, the future of our great country will be exposed to internal and external threats." -- ISLAMABAD (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
