ISLAMABAD: Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, seeking to return to power through the ballot after her adrupt dismissal in August on charges of corruption and mismanagement, was decisively defeated in national elections on Wednesday.

With votes counted in most of the 204 National Assembly Islamic Democratic Alliance had won a mere 15% seats. At least 25 more seats went to allied parties, giving the coalition an unassailable lead.

Ms. Bhutto’s People’s Democratic s opponents in the Alliance, which is dominated by her own Pakistan People’s Party, had 26 seats. Small parties and independents accounted for the remaining seats.

Defeated in National Race

In a stunning personal upset, Ms, Bhutto lost one of two seats she was contesting in Peshawar, by a large margin.

She won the second seat easily in her home constituency in Sind province. But the contest in Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier province, had been intended to demonstrate her national strength.

The former Prime Minister said that “the President and his cronies” had been involved in fraud and “massive rigging” of the vote. According to news agency reports from her home in Larkana, she predicted civil unrest in the wake of her defeat.

“Pakistan will face a deeper crisis,” she was quoted as saying.

Reporters who visited dozens of polling places on Wednesday found little visible evidence of tampering, least of all on a large scale, but these samples were limited. Four international teams are in Pakistan to observe the voting. Among them is a 40member group from the Washington based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, which will be issuing a preliminary report.

The president of the Islamic Democratic Alliance and the man who may become Pakistan’s next Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, said the voters had chosen stability. Mr. Sharif, an industrialist, was Chief Minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s most prosperous and developed province. His alliance was sweeping the province today.

”God willing,” he said in a statement on Wednesday night, “we will be able to form a strong government, which will play a vital role in the development of Pakistan, bringing it out of economic backwardness and ushering an era of industrial and agricultural revolution.”

A strong political debut was made in this election by Ijaz Ul Haq, a son of the late president, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul Haq. He won in two Punjab constituencies.

The elections were largely peaceful across the nation, with pockets of violence that left at least 33 people dead, according to early reports. Nearly all of the victims were identified as supporters or candidates of the Islamic Democratic Alliance, a coalition that is not as fundamentalist as other political parties in the Muslim world that use the word Islamic in their names. Troops were patrolling tense areas of the country.

Most leading politicians won National Assembly seats, including the caretaker Prime Minister, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, and his son, who defeated Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in Nawabshah, in Sind.

Bhutto’s Husband Elected

Mr. Zardari, who is in custody in Karachi on charges of kidnapping and extortion, was elected from a safe Bhutto family seat in the city that wife vacated at the last moment, Running for office in more than one constituency is common in Pakistan. This assures a better chance of being elected.

Article extracted from this publication >> November 2, 1990