November 28, 2002	Thursday	Ramazan 22, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, Nov 27: Pakistan People’s Party on Wednesday hailed the European Parliament for its resolution on the referendum and elections.

The European Parliament had, with an overwhelming majority, passed a resolution declaring the election and referendum “seriously flawed.”

In a statement issued on Wednesday, PPP Information Secretary Taj Haider said the party rejected the election results and alleged that they were massively rigged.

“The administration was biased, the state media politically motivated, the electoral lists flawed, the polling stations wrongly located and the intelligence agencies used blatantly to create, fund and run the king‘s party and its allies,” he said. He alleged that the vote count was withheld for three to 36 hours to change the results”.

The election results did not reflect the will of the people, he said and added that only those elections could be meaningful which were held according to the returning officers manual of 1985. That manual provided for multi-identity and immediate announcement of the vote count through a decentralized system, where the returning officer was the sole authority, he said.

The military regime was overconfident of its ability to manipulate the results and now found itself lacking legitimacy, Taj Haider said.

He said the European Parliament’s resolution hit the validity of Pervez Musharraf’s presidency by questioning the referendum.

The resolution said electoral legislation by the military government was designed to bar selected politicians, including the two exiled former premiers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, from contesting the elections. By a vote of 415 to three, the European Parliament endorsed John Cushnahan’s conclusions that the elections were “seriously flawed,” he said.