Both Sides in Pakistan Strike Claim Victory : Asia: Many businesses close for work stoppage, but success is difficult to gauge. 11 people are killed.

The Pakistani opposition’s ambitious aim was to “jam” the nation’s economy and force Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from office. By the time Tuesday’s strike ended, 11 people were reported dead and both sides were claiming victory.

The truth seemed somewhere in the middle. The one-day work stoppage called by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was only partly observed, but a preemptive crackdown by Bhutto failed to reassure many merchants and taxi, bus and truck drivers that they could conduct business as usual.

“The business community has observed the strike almost 100%,” Sharif’s press secretary, Muhammad Siddique-ul-Farooque, said by telephone from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Public transportation, he said, was paralyzed “90%.”

Nonsense, Bhutto’s spokesman said.

“If the objective was to bring everything to a halt and bring down the government, that has failed,” Information Secretary Hussein Haqqani told the Reuters news agency. “If the objective was a massive show of public support, that has failed too.”

The strike was the third one organized in the past month by Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League, which on Sept. 11 launched an angry, high-volume offensive to topple Bhutto, who narrowly defeated Sharif at the polls in October, 1993, and to seek new elections.

Tuesday’s action was given the colorful label “chakka jam”--jamming the wheels of Pakistani trade and road and rail traffic.

In Karachi, the country’s largest city and Bhutto’s birthplace, the overwhelming majority of shops closed and most buses and taxis stayed off the streets, local journalist Zahid Hussain said. But that didn’t mean residents necessarily agreed with Sharif’s accusations that Bhutto has ruined the economy or betrayed the national interest in other ways.

“In the past year, four parties have called a strike, and each has been successful in Karachi,” Hussain said. “Most public transport goes off the road from fear.”

In one positive development for Bhutto, one powerful Karachi-based party remained neutral, Hussain said. And in Lahore, Sharif’s political power base, the “wheel jam” was only partly successful, said Javed Syed, reporter for the English-language newspaper the Nation.

“About 50% of the vehicles are plying the road,” Syed said at midafternoon.

The urban shopkeeper class, who view Bhutto as the covert champion of the Pakistani landholding gentry she was born into, is the bedrock of Sharif’s constituency. So predictably, most Lahore stores closed, Syed said. But not all.

“This is not as successful as the two previous strikes,” he said. On Sept. 29, the Lahore journalist said, the fashionable Liberty Market had been shut completely. On Tuesday, about a dozen stores remained open.

However, news reports made it clear that Bhutto’s antidotes to the strike, such as running some buses under police escort, were also only partly successful. Throughout Pakistan, many people stayed away from factories, bazaars, banks and schools Tuesday for fear of being attacked by Sharif loyalists.

In the days before the “wheel jam,” the government also detained more than 1,000 opposition leaders. Sharif’s spokesman said the actual number arrested or confined to their homes was 20,000. One was the former prime minister, who had planned to lead the strike in the industrial city of Rawalpindi.

Instead, Siddique-ul-Farooque reported, Sharif spent Tuesday “under undeclared house arrest” in Lahore.

In the same city, news reports said, supporters of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party riding on top of a bus during an anti-PML demonstration were knocked off as the vehicle drove under a bridge. Five were killed instantly and two others died in the hospital, police said.

About 50 miles north of Lahore, in the town of Gujranwala, PML activists on a rooftop showered police with rocks. When police fired tear gas, one protester reportedly fell and was killed.

In Gujrat in eastern Punjab, police shot up the residence of a Muslim League senator, killing one opposition party worker and wounding five others, the PML said. Punjabi officials corroborated the death.

In Charsaddah in North-West Frontier Province, police said opposition supporters fired on a bus, killing two people and wounding at least eight other passengers.