Dubai, NFAPost: Former Pakistan President and chief of Army staff Pervez Musharraf died on Sunday at the American Hospital in UAE’s Dubai after spending years in self-imposed exile. He was 79.
He was the tenth president of Pakistan after the successful military coup in 1999. There’s no official communication if his body will be brought back to Pakistan, though his family has been trying to bring him back home since last year.
According to hospital sources, Pervez Musharraf’s organs were malfunctioning because of an ailment called amyloidosis. This disease affects connective tissues and organs, inhibiting normal functioning. It’s a rare disease caused by a build-up of an abnormal protein called amyloid in organs and tissues throughout the body.
Facing charges back home for the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, Mr Pervez Musharraf has been living in Dubai for the last eight years. He had earlier expressed his desire to spend the “rest of his life” in his home country, and wanted to return to Pakistan as soon as possible.
The former President was the tenth president of Pakistan after a successful bloodless military coup in 1999. He served as the 10th Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of Pakistan (CJCSC) from 1998 to 2001 and the 7th top general from 1998 to 2007.
He was known as the architect of the Kargil war, the man who ordered his soldiers to enter India to cut off Leh from Srinagar.
In the war that followed in the summer of 1999, Pakistani soldiers, whose presence he denied, were decimated in the high mountains of Kargil. It was a catastrophic military failure for Pervez Musharraf, who had pushed forward with the plan, keeping his Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif mostly in the dark.
Almost unbelievably, two years after Kargil, Pervez Musharraf emerged stronger than ever.
Nawaz Sharif, who tried to prevent Mr Musharraf from returning to the country while he was on an official tour of Sri Lanka, was arrested, jailed, and subsequently sent to exile.
With the support of his Army, and in a bloodless coup, Pervez Musharraf appointed himself President of Pakistan in 1999.
While Pervez Musharraf tried to play the peacemaker with India post 2004, his run-ins with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Pakistan-based terror groups weakened him politically, and militarily with General Ashfaq Kayani taking over as Army Chief in 2007.
He went into political oblivion after November 2008 even though he tried to make a comeback in the 2013 Pak general elections. He left for exile in Dubai the second time in 2016.
