Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq is perhaps the most infamous Pakistani in history and the man whose legacy will forever be tied to what happened on June 24, 1987. A conservative, religious man, Zia initially served in the British Indian Army, fighting the Japanese in Burma. After independence, Zia remained in the military and begun to move up the ranks. Stationed in Jordan from 1967 to 1970, he was essential in the Jordanian suppression of the Palestinian Liberation Organization revolt known as Black September. This, and his appearance as an apolitical soldier led Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to appoint him Chief of Army Staff over more senior generals. Bhutto's government had become very unpopular and, despite winning new elections in 1977, the opposition protested the results, alleging that the vote had been rigged. Finally, the impasse and calls by the opposition for the military to depose Bhutto grew too strong and Zia arrested Bhutto and declared martial law, with himself as Chief Martial Law Administrator. Zia initially pledged that new elections would be held later that year...and then backed away from that promise, as would happen repeatedly throughout his rule.
Zia began the "Islamization" of Pakistan, a step away from Bhutto's emphasis on socialist economics and secularism, as a way to both solidify the country's national identity and imprint his vision on the country. His government made adultery, blasphemy and fornication crimes, with whippings and amputation becoming punishments, and forced women to cover their heads at all times in public. That his country was allied to the Soviet Union, with its state atheism, seems to have been forgotten by Zia (as well as Moscow) in a Cold War geopolitical calculation.
Becoming president after failing to convince figurehead president Fazal Ilhai Chaudry to stay on for another term, Zia ran the country as a technocracy and finally held non-partisan elections for the Pakistani parliament in 1985 after being forced to by international pressure. However, Zia made all of his decisions retroactively legal before the new body was to first meet and gave the presidency numerous powers that allowed him to effectively ignore the will of parliament.
The coup that overthrew Bhutto had unwittingly exposed Pakistan's nuclear program to the world and international condemnation (except from the Soviet bloc) had led to sanctions on Pakistan that Zia tried hard to lift. The civil wars in Afghanistan and Iran caused Pakistan's budgets to be strained by trains of refugees and occasionally, violence that spilled across the border. This forced Zia and the other generals in his government to slash spending for other programs to pay for increased border controls and programs for the refugees
— like the country's budget for their nuclear program. However, he gained some international goodwill by allowing UNSFFI to stage its eastern invasion of Iran out of Pakistan.
Nevertheless, Zia continued to push the nuclear program along, despite numerous complaints by program administrators over the quality of the scientists the state employed, the shoe-string budget and unrealistic timetable that the regime put the program on. It was only a matter of time until disaster struck
— but no one would have imagined it would have been as bad as what did occur.
Nothing of the Kahuta Works Laboratory survived the explosion, but it is universally agreed that somehow, a nuclear bomb was armed and detonated. Most theories say it was accidental, the result of overworked and under-trained staff failing to go through proper safety procedures for testing the armament systems while a persistent few say that it was a nuclear strike by a foreign power (usually assumed to be India or Israel) made to look like an accident. Regardless, the explosion and its aftermath killed nearly 50,000 Pakistanis and left thousands injured, homeless or suffering from fallout as the trade winds shifted radiation over to northern India and China.
The explosion shocked Pakistan and the world to the core
— anti-nuclear sentiment would gain a strong symbol of the danger and folly of nuclear weapons and the standing of the state and of Zia in his country’s eyes dropped to astonishing lows. Protests began to break out within a week of the disaster, and began to snowball into massive demonstrations in every major city in the country. Tipped off of an impending coup to against him
— and fearing a fate similar to Bhutto, who was found guilty of treason by a kangaroo court and executed
— Zia resigned the presidency, handing power over to the Speaker of the National Assembly Hamid Nasir Chattha (first in the line of succession after the resignation of "Baba Atom Bomb", Senate Chairman Ghulam Ishaq Khan) and fled to China in exile.
Zia would live a quiet life in exile, and died in 2004 at the age of 79, having never set foot in a courtroom to answer for his crimes or his ultimate responsibility for Kahuta.
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