Pakistan Opposition Parties Issue Election Demands

Via Guardian Unlimited UK -

Pakistan's opposition parties today were close to agreement on a set of conditions for their participation in elections scheduled for January.

Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's party and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League-N have both threatened to boycott the parliamentary vote set for January 8 unless the president, Pervez Musharraf, meets their demands.

They are expected to demand restoration of an independent judiciary and the constitution, and the creation of a neutral caretaker government and independent election commission. The opposition is also expected to set a deadline for the government to meet its demands.

"We're optimistic that we'll reach agreement because everyone wants to pull the country out of this crisis and prevent Musharraf from rigging the elections," said Ahsan Iqbal, spokesman for Sharif.

"Despite our differences in the past, we are legitimate democratic parties while Musharraf is an illegitimate military dictator."

A boycott would be a severe blow to Musharraf who claims that he imposed emergency rule on November 3 to ensure a smooth transition to democracy.

As the opposition prepared to issue its set of demands on the January election, police blocked Sharif from leading a march to the home of Pakistan's sacked chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Officers also stepped up security around Chaudhry's official residence. The judge has been under house arrest ever since Musharraf declared a state of emergency and sacked most of the supreme court. Musharraf declared the emergency just before the supreme court was about to rule on the validity of the president's re-election in October.Since then, Musharraf has stacked the court with loyalists, who have promptly dismissed all complaints against the former general's election.

Dozens of Sharif supporters chanted anti-Musharraf slogans and tore down and stamped on a poster of the president. Scores of lawyers opposed to the government had earlier tried to approach Chaudhry's home.

But they were outnumbered by a massive police presence, and their path was blocked by a barricade of concrete blocks, heavy sheets of steel and barbed wire. Hundreds of lawyers clashed with police in the south-eastern city of Multan.

"The act of dismissing 50 judges in one go was the biggest blow the judiciary has ever known in Pakistan," the former chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah wrote in yesterday's Dawn newspaper. "Now the president has nothing to fear from the judiciary."

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have demanded the immediate release of the detained judges in Islamabad and Lahore. They say Chaudhry is held incommunicado with his teenage daughter and seven-year-old son.

Human Rights Watch says Chaudhry has managed to communicate with the outside world intermittently by mobile telephones smuggled into his home, but the government has repeatedly used signal jamming equipment and other means to disable them. The group also says Chaudhry has not had access to television or newspapers since November 3.