Benazir flees, Nawaz's men stay to protest Emergency

NAWAZ'S MEN PROTEST: protesters are furious as the Emergency is not due to be lifted until December 16.

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

Television, for politicians with a vision

Featured Slideshows

Related Headlines

powered by

• Sharif launches fresh attack on Mush
• I'll come to Pak soon: Nawaz Sharif
• Nawaz chickened out, I didn't: Benazir Bhutto

Keywords: Regional Parties, Lawyers

Islamabad:In Pakistan, lawyers were at the receiving end again, when the authorities prevented Nawaz Sharif from meeting former Chief Justice Iftikhar Choudhary.

Meanwhile, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto has left for Dubai. Though her party claimed she wanted to spend some time with her family, her departure comes amidst reports of differences with Nawaz on poll boycott.

Angry protesters ripped a poster of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to shreds for they were furious as the Emergency crackdown remained in force and is not due to be lifted until December 16.

Their leader, Nawaz Sharif arrived to stoke the demonstration, as riot police blocked their advance to the homes of Supreme Court judges, who were fired a month ago and put under house arrest.

Nawaz said,"Listen up. If we permit a dictator to kill the innocent, arrest Pakistani officials and destroy our freedoms, then history will not forgive us."

Election officials say Nawaz, who recently returned from exile, cannot run in the January 8 Parliamentary ballot because he has criminal convictions including ‘corruption while prime minister’.

Nawaz has voiced fears that Musharraf will rig the elections, but has flip-flopped on whether his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz would participate or boycott elections.

With a month to go before scheduled Parliamentary elections, Pakistan’s political Opposition remains splintered and there seems little prospect of an all-party boycott.

In a working class neighborhood of Islamabad, candidate Mia Aslam is on the campaign trail for the MMA, an alliance of religious parties. In the past factions of the organisation backed the Taliban and other militant groups. He is preaching a message of equality, education and decent housing for the poor.

That’s the kind of message that has sped the rise of religious parties among Pakistan’s poor majority. The US government fears those parties could be a seedbed for Islamic radicalism.

Back at the approach to the homes of the disposed judges, lawyers are pressing ahead with their fight against Emergency rule. They’re making fresh calls for Musharraf to quit.

As long as they and other Opposition factions squabble over their election stance, they're failing to mount a united campaign to topple President Musharraf's regime.