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Landslide for Musharraf in fraud-marred referendum

REUTERS, Islamabad
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf won a landslide victory on Wednesday in a referendum to extend his rule for five years, but allegations of poll fraud tarnished his win.
Election officials said Musharraf won with over 97 per cent of votes in his favour, adding the turnout was more than 70 per cent. The opposition said a faction of that number voted.
Criticised internationally after seizing power in a bloodless coup in October 1999, Musharraf has since become a darling of the West since he threw his weight behind the US-
led war on terror in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The referendum was supposed to give him a popular mandate to continue his economic and political reforms, and to remain in power after parliamentary elections due in October.
But some analysts said the result could actually weaken his position because of the way the referendum was conducted, with the machinery of the state employed to ensure victory.
"The referendum has been General Musharraf's biggest political mistake since he took office," said Mushahid Hussain, a former minister and political analyst.
"The whole process was not fair, not free and not transparent. It has weakened him politically, and morally it has brought him down a few notches."
The turnout at the last parliamentary election, in 1997, was under 36 per cent and the results surprised independent observers who said polling stations were largely quiet in the country's two biggest cities, Karachi and Lahore.
Opposition political parties, which called for a boycott of the referendum and dismissed it as undemocratic, estimated a turnout of just five to seven percent and called for Musharraf to step down.
"We reject this," Farhatullah
Babar, a spokesman for exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told Reuters shortly after the official results were announced on state television.
"The turnout was not more than five per cent. The Musharraf regime has decidedly massively rigged the referendum vote."
A respected human rights group also said the turnout was low and reported widespread irregularities in the vote.
"It was farcical," said IA Rehman, director of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). "The question of turnout is totally irrelevant because every
where the votes were stuffed."
But the government said political parties had decided the turnout would be low before the referendum even began, and were sticking to that position in the face of the evidence.
From a total electorate of just under 62 million, Chief Election Commissioner Irshad Hassan Khan said Musharraf had won 42.8 million "yes" votes, against 883,676 "no" votes and 282,935 spoiled papers.
Although Musharraf is genuinely popular among many sections of the population for his efforts to stamp out corruption, his critics say he used state machinery to ensure a resounding referendum victory.
Reuters journalists saw evidence of public sector workers being pressured to vote in an apparent effort to bolster the turnout, and, in one instance, saw ballot boxes being stuffed by officials and local government officers.
The United States has refrained from criticising the referendum, but Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon said Pakistan would be monitored and discussed at the
next Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group meeting.
"The Commonwealth would be concerned if the referendum… were used to entrench any undemocratic form of government," he said in a statement released in London. "We wish to see a full return to constitutional rule in Pakistan."
Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth, a grouping of former British colonies, after Musharraf's coup.
In a preliminary report on Tuesday, the human rights group HRCP said voting irregularities "exceeded its worst fears", and political parties said the final results were not credible.