Opposition keeps up protest shouting in both houses
By Our Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD, Sept 22: Opposition parties kept up protest shouting in both Houses of parliament on Monday.
They also walked out of the National Assembly and the Senate sessions held in the evening after two-day weekend recesses and said the president, because of the controversy about his position at home, had no right to speak for Pakistan in the United Nations General Assembly he is scheduled to address on Wednesday.
To add focus to their objection to General Musharraf’s presidency, parties in the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD) announced plans for a token hunger strike by their members outside parliament on Tuesday.
Spokesmen for the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) said their alliance of six Islamic parties, which is yet to announce its response to the government constitutional package it received on Friday, would decide on Tuesday morning whether to join the hunger strike.
But they made it clear the MMA was dissatisfied with the package though it stayed short of an outright rejection before the alliance’s supreme council meets on Tuesday.
“The draft given to the MMA is totally different from points agreed (in talks between the negotiators of the two sides) on Sept 6,” MMA deputy parliamentary leader Hafiz Hussain Ahmed told reporters after the Opposition’s walkout from the National Assembly.
“There is a forgery in the government draft,” said the MMA leader, who belongs to the main Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam faction led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman.
But another MMA spokesman, Liaqat Baloch of the Jamaat-i- Islami, was not that forthcoming and said a final decision would be announced after Tuesday’s meeting of the MMA supreme council.
One MMA source said the alliance could ask the government to amend the package, which has conceded little on key Opposition demands to clip the president’s sweeping powers he had assumed through the LFO and that he give a date when he would leave the chief of the army staff’s post.
“The parliament has not given President Musharraf the authority to speak for Pakistan nor does he represent Pakistan,” ARD parliamentary party leader Javed Hashmi said. “He has no right to rule Pakistan.”
The Opposition walkout in the Senate came after deputy chairman Khalilur Rehman, who presided over the sitting while upper house chairman Mohammedmian Soomro had taken over as acting president because of President Musharraf’s absence from the country, disallowed MMA’s Prof Khurshid Ahmed to speak.
The two Houses held only brief proceedings after the Opposition walkouts.
