ISLAMABAD, Jan 27: Both houses of parliament adjourned on Friday to mourn the death of veteran Pukhtun leader Abdul Wali Khan, delaying until Monday debates on the deadly US air-strike in Bajaur tribal area in the National Assembly and on the Balochistan situation in the Senate.
As parliamentarians dispersed from the two chambers, a demonstration was held outside the parliament house against the Jan 13 strike in Bajaur Agency’s Damadola village with Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) leaders targeting President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz for “unresisted aggression” and “a national insult”.
Riot police were present in force but did not interfere with the demonstration by several hundred people who carried placards and chanted slogans condemning the Bajaur strike in which 18 people were killed.
Several members from the opposition and ruling coalition both in the National Assembly and the Senate praised the services of Wali Khan for democracy as they called for the adjournment of their respective houses as a mark of mourning for the politician who died in Peshawar on Thursday after a prolonged illness.
In the National Assembly, which met shortly before the Senate after a 10-day recess, People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) and Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy chairman Amin Fahim recalled Wali Khan’s role as opposition leader with the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as prime minister in the 1970s, when the house unanimously passed the 1973 constitution.
MMA deputy parliamentary leader Liaqat Baloch proposed a discussion on Wali Khan’s services in the next sitting before Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain adjourned the house until 5pm on Monday.
The Senate, which met shortly afterwards, followed suit and was adjourned until 4pm on Monday after brief remarks of tribute to Wali Khan by several members from both the ruling and opposition parties.
But presiding officer Khalid Ranjha, chairing the upper house proceedings while Chairman Mohammedmian Soomro is acting president during President Musharraf’s trip abroad, said the opposition-sought debate on the Balochistan situation would be held on the next working day after Monday, which will be devoted to private members’ business.
While the two houses adjourned on a sombre note, Liaqat Baloch and some other MMA parliamentarians thundered outside the parliament building before protesters who repeatedly chanted: “Whoever is a friend of America is a traitor”.
HAMAS REPEAT PREDICTED: Mr Baloch predicted a “humiliating departure” of America from Afghanistan and said anti-American Islamic forces would prevail in Pakistan as well – in the same manner that Hamas had won this week’s Palestinian elections against what he called “companions of America”.
He said the solution of Pakistan’s problems lay in the “departure of the country’s military dictator and allowing people to choose the leadership and system of their choice”.
MNA Maulana Merajuddin of South Waziristan tribal agency, some of whose remarks would surely have been expunged if made inside the National Assembly, said if military generals could not perform their constitutional duty of defending the frontiers “they should step aside and we (tribal people) ourselves will confront foreign aggression as we did in the past”.
