WASHINGTON, June 23: Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said on Monday that President Pervez Musharraf was re-writing the civil-military equation in Pakistan for all times to come.

The general, she said, had seriously undermined the country by “arrogating to himself the right to re-write the Constitution.”

In a message on the launching of a Website (voiceofppp.com), which also coincides with President Musharraf’s visit to the United States, Ms Bhutto accused the president of imposing “a sham democracy on the nation.”

The election process that brought this “sham democracy,” she said, was flawed and was described as such by the European Union and other independent observers who watched the elections.

The referendum that was used to justify Mr Musharraf’s takeover, was illegal and later regretted by the general as well, Ms Bhutto said.

“The political opposition is hounded through gross abuse of the judicial process. The genuine leaders of the people were forcibly kept out of the election by making new laws and giving them back-dated effect,” she said.

In the name of accountability, she said, human rights are being massively violated “while the corrupt and those convicted for wrongdoing have been released from jails and co-opted in the new power structure.”

Referring to political prisoners, the former prime minister said that her husband Asif Zardari has been incarcerated for the past seven years without conviction.

“Judges and judiciary have been undermined as never before and the concept of independent justice and due process almost vanished,” she charged.

Half of the Supreme Court judges, Ms Bhutto said, were sent home and the remaining were asked to take fresh oath of allegiance not to the Constitution but to an individual.

“It is a measure of the undermining of judiciary by the dictator that the Supreme Court Bar Association has publicly declared not to take constitutional petitions before the superior judiciary because in their view the judiciary is no longer independent,” she said.