March 11, 2003	Tuesday	Muharram 7, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, March 10: President Pervez Musharraf sent a deadlocked National Assembly into an indefinite recess on Monday after another day of an obstructive opposition protests against his sweeping powers.

Although the ruling and the opposition parties began talks to settle row over the Legal Framework Order, opposition legislators prevented the 342-seat lower house from conducting any business for the third successive sitting in six days.

The presidential prorogation order, read out by a seemingly helpless Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain, was hardly audible in the din of “No LFO no” and “Go Musharraf go” chants by opposition members besieging the dais.

However, Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali, who came to the house for the first time since the begining of the anti-LFO protest inside the assembly on Wednesday, braved the opposition slogan-shouting to make a brief speech on the Iraqi crisis, saying his government had decided not to support any “designs of war” against Baghdad.

In an apparent move to appease the opposition parties protesting against a possible US-led war against Iraq, Mr Jamali said his government and its allies had resolved “not to cause any harm to the Iraqi people. The decision about them (Iraqi people) will be made by their rulers.”

Coming to the house after presiding over a meeting of his cabinet, he also said: “We have decided that Pakistan will not help any designs of war against Iraq.”

But it was unclear from his remarks whether Pakistan, a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, would back or oppose a proposed resolution sponsored by the United States and Britain for war to disarm Iraq or would abstain when the 15-member Council votes on it.

However, the prime minister’s remarks hardly pleased the opposition members who kept their slogan-chanting until the Speaker vacated his chair after reading out the president’s order proroguing the assembly indefinitely.

As in the previous two sittings on Wednesday and Friday, opposition members stood up and rushed to the dais chanting “No, no” immediately after the recitation from the holy Quran at the start of the sitting, which was delayed for more than two hours because of behind-the-scene contacts between the representatives of the PML-Q and opposition parties.

After the shouting started, the Speaker was able to say that talks between the two sides on the Legal Framework Order (LFO) had begun, calling it a “happy move forward”.

But opposition leaders said no headway had yet been made in the talks.

Before giving the floor to Prime Minister Jamali, the Speaker said the house was being adjourned to give more time to the government and opposition parties to settle the Legal Framework Order row, over which the chair itself was yet to give a ruling promised last November.

The opposition parties have threatened to shift their anti-LFO campaign to the newly elected Senate where the mettle of the ruling coalition’s senators will be put to test when the 100-seat upper house meets on Wednesday.

The National Assembly session was plagued with tension from its start on Feb 26, first over the alleged kidnap of some tribal MNAs to influence the election of Senate members from Federally-Administered Tribal Areas and later over opposition complaints of a partisan attitude of the Speaker and then over opposition objections to the Constitution’s amendment by the LFO without parliament’s approval.

There was little business conducted in what was the assembly’s first regular session since its election last October, except on a private member’s day on Tuesday when the house unanimously passed resolutions urging the United States to stop allegedly discriminatory treatment of Pakistanis living there and asking the government to take steps to reduce high prices of medicines.