June 12, 2003	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, June 11: The opposition parties on Wednesday walked out of both houses of the parliament the second consecutive day boycotting the budget debate.

The opposition is protesting against the Legal Framework Order and extraordinary presidential powers, which he enjoys holding dual offices, including the office of the chief of the army staff.

As they did on Tuesday at the start of the debate on the federal budget for fiscal 2003-4, the opposition parties turned down requests from various members of the ruling coalition government, asking them to end the boycott and return to the Assembly and Senate minutes after they left amid brief desk- thumping and slogan-shouting against the president and the LFO.

“No Musharraf, Go Musharraf” and “No LFO, No”, the opposition members chanted as they first marched out of the National Assembly at the start of the day’s proceedings.

Deviating from their previous protest strategy, opposition members wore black arm-bands instead of paper stickers they previously used to wear on their chests or shoulders.

Members of the combined opposition, which includes the People’s Party Parliamentarians, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and Pakistan Muslim League-N, speaking later at a news conference reiterated their resolve to wage a joint struggle against the LFO, with the MMA specially coming down hard on the president.

Terming the president’s uniform symbolizing hatred, MMA leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman criticized President Pervez Musharraf’s insistence to retain posts of the president and army chief for five more years.

Harshly reacting to the president’s rebuke against the MMA government in the Frontier on Tuesday for its alleged aims to impose a Taliban-style regime there, MMA chief Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani argued that by insulting the Islamic tenets, the president had committed a “big crime” rendering him ineligible as the head of the state.

Another MMA leader, Liaqat Baloch, insisted that Gen Musharraf could not speak for the country as he had become a controversial person and, therefore, his planned visit to the United States and other countries should be cancelled.

Expressing his readiness to go to the last extent, Maulana Fazlur Rehman viewed the move to pick up a quarrel with the NWFP MMA government just prior to his visit to the US as being a bid to portray himself as a vocal opponent of the religious alliance.

“If he wants to go to the last extent, we will ... be ready ..., Maulana Fazl.

Much before this was said, an apparently worried Prime Minister Jamali told reporters that the opposition boycott did not augur well for democracy.

He said he could only request the opposition to participate in the discussion on what he called a national budget rather than of a single party.

The prime minister said the ruling coalition had been discussing the LFO with the opposition after last October’s elections and was prepared to discuss it again “any time”.

He dismissed as a mere excuse an opposition complaint that he had failed to convene a promised meeting of heads of parliamentary parties for a final decision on the report of a bipartisan parliamentary committee that deliberated on the LFO last month, and said this was “no big issue”.

Only five ruling coalition members spoke in the general debate on the budget in the National Assembly, praising the budget.

However, there was a prolonged debate in the Senate to discuss the budget for the first time to submit only non-binding recommendations to the National Assembly as required by the Constitution.