March 24, 2006	Friday	Safar 23, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, March 23: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has criticized what it said the latest bid by government agencies to further break the mainstream political parties with a view to rig the forthcoming general elections. In a statement on Thursday, PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar called upon the newly-appointed Chief Election Commissioner to demand that the security agencies produced minutes of all meetings with members of political parties during the last three months.

He urged human rights organizations and the international community to take note of the military dictatorship’s attempts to deny the people of Pakistan a democratic future through such attempts on the eve of the 2007 general elections.

“Having failed to pressure former prime minister Benazir Bhutto into absenting herself from the forthcoming election campaign through the motivated requests to Interpol and filing of a complaint through Mutual Assistance in Spain, the intelligence agencies have started work to further factionalize the PPP to benefit those who are puppets of the military dictatorship,” he maintained.

He said opposition to the major political parties came in the form of fictionalization and judicial abuse at the hands of the state apparatus and not through other political parties. “The state apparatus is making and breaking political parties from the time when MPAs were taken away to Changa Manga in 1988”.

He said a leader of Jamaat-i-Islami and a former ISI official had confessed that money was taken from Osama bin Laden to stop the PPP from coming to power in 1988 and a conference of Jihadi parties was called for the same purpose.