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Musharraf must make way for “coalition of interests”

LAHORE: The former Pakistan Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, on Tuesday came close to indicating that she was prepared to throw her lot with the other opposition parties against President Musharraf.

In an interview to BBC, she said Gen. Musharraf must quit and make way for a “coalition of interests” to take over the reins of government and supervise the coming parliamentary elections.

This is the closest Ms. Bhutto has come to the position of her opposition rival, Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader Nawaz Sharif.

It has been the PML (N)’s position that fair elections cannot be held under President Musharraf, and that he must quit to make way for a neutral caretaker government of national unity. Free elections would be possible only under such a set-up, Mr. Sharif has long held.

The PML (N) and other opposition parties have indicated that they may boycott the elections if they are held under emergency rule. Ms. Bhutto too has not ruled out the option. A boycott by the entire opposition would render the parliamentary elections, which President Musharraf has said will be held before January 9, meaningless.

The PPP leader condemned the government for putting her under house arrest, saying the government had deployed 4,000 policemen to guard her, when it should be using them to combat terrorism and militancy in the frontier areas of the north-west.

She said the long march would go ahead despite her detention. “We are marching to end martial law, and to ask Musharraf to quit,” she said, as a few hundred supporters took to the road for the march, and were reported to have reached the central Punjab town of Kasur by evening.

The government cited threats to her security for preventing the long march, but clearly, the ruling party was also worried at the political fall-out of a PPP mobilisation possibly on the same scale as the party did in Karachi to welcome her back to Pakistan.

While Ms. Bhutto remarks suggested she had broken off talks for power-sharing with President Musharraf, scepticism continues about her intentions.

Observers are especially surprised that the PPP, which demonstrated the ability to summon hundreds of thousands of supporters for Ms. Bhutto’s end-of-exile welcome procession in Karachi, was not out in strength on the streets of Lahore, or even at the barricades outside the house where she is in detention, to protest her house arrest.

Ms. Bhutto has been steadily upping the ante against President Musharraf over the last few days, but many believe that her words and actions of the last few days, as well as Tuesday’s latest remarks, may well be aimed at putting more pressure on the Pakistan ruler, rather than indicate any real break in the talks.

The remarks, which came as the international community too turned up the heat on the Pakistan leader to end the emergency, raised the possibility that Ms. Bhutto may be acting in tandem with the outside world, mainly the U.S. and the U.K.

The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, is due to visit Pakistan later this week. Although officials said his visit was for the scheduled U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue, there was speculation that Mr. Negroponte might be the special envoy the U.S. is planning to send, according to a report in the New York Times, with a message to President Musharraf asking him to lift the Emergency.

Japan also threatened to slash aid to Pakistan if the emergency was not lifted, while the Commonwealth has put President Musharraf on a ten-day notice for expulsion. The PPP said it welcomed the Commonwealth warning and said it showed the people of Pakistan were not alone in their hour of crisis.

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