December 5, 2003	Friday	Shawwal 10, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, Dec 4: The Senate meets on Friday to begin what is likely to be a long and noisy session that seems to serve some immediate legal or political interests of both the government and the opposition.

The session, beginning at the Parliament House here at 3pm, will meet a legal necessity for the government to complete the business calendar of the first parliamentary year of the present upper house while the opposition parties have vowed to use the opportunity to resume their anti-LFO protest in parliament before launching a threatened public agitation.

The 100-seat Senate has been in session intermittently for only 28 days since its inauguration on March 12 last year and must meet for 62 days more to complete the mandatory 90 days of session in its parliamentary year ending on March 11 next.

That leaves the upper house with 97 days to do the job more comfortably than the 342-seat National Assembly’s completion of a similar exercise last month in a much tighter schedule amid widespread complaints that parliament had done little legislative work because of a deadlock over the controversial Legal Framework Order (LFO).

Unless the government decides to originate some serious legislative business there, the Senate session could be as barren as National Assembly’s last 84-day session, which wrapped up a mandatory 130-day calendar of business for the lower house.

There was no indication if the government would prefer to initiate a constitutional amendment bill in the Senate, rather than in the National Assembly, to meet an opposition demand to seek a parliamentary approval for the LFO, which the opposition parties have rejected for the sweeping powers it gives to President Pervez Musharraf.

The Constitution allows a constitutional amendment bill to originate in either house of parliament, where its passage needs a two-thirds majority in each chamber.

While one major opposition grouping — Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) — has kept out of LFO parleys for the government’s refusal to retract its stand that the document has already become part of the constitution, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance of six Islamic parties has given the ruling coalition up to March 17 to bring a bill on settled LFO issues or face a “long march” on Islamabad.

The ARD, the MMA and other allied opposition groups will resort to their standard desk-thumping and slogan-chanting when the Senate starts proceedings on Friday but could change the mode of protest in the next few days, opposition sources said.

But Senate chairman Mohammedmian Soomro has taken much of the sting out of the opposition plans by disallowing some moves seeking to discuss the conduct of military officials, particularly in the 1999 conflict over Kargil in Kashmir and the role of the intelligence agencies.

BABAR: Senator Farhatullah Babar of the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) said Mr Soomro had disallowed four such resolutions he had sought to move in the session, including one calling for a parliamentary committee to look into the Kargil fighting and recommend measures for avoiding such incidents in the future.

But he told Dawn that self-exiled Pakistan People’s Party leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had informed the Commonwealth and the European Union about the Senate chairman’s unusual actions, apparently to highlight the opposition view that President Pervez Musharraf has not restored full democracy in the country.

Mr Babar said a letter sent to him by the Senate secretariat had cited “national security” as the ground for disallowing his resolution on Kargil and another seeking suitable legislation to oversee the functioning of the Inter-Services Intelligence and other intelligence agencies in dealing with Pakistani nationals.

Mr Babar said a third resolution seeking charge of road toll tax from military officers travelling in private vehicles was disallowed without citing any reason while another calling for rewarding a Lahore police constable who stopped a senior army officer’s car with banned tinted glasses was turned down as a trivial matter of no public importance.

The opposition parties and ruling coalition have called separate meetings of their parliamentary groups on Friday before the start of the Senate session to chalk out their plans.