Sherpao denied chance to wind up debate on Bajaur, Dargai
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD, Nov 14: The government lost out in the National Assembly on Tuesday after the opposition assailed it for the entire day over recent massacres at a madressah and an army garrison but denied the interior minister a chance to reply to charges.
A lack of quorum in the lower house prevented the minister, Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, from winding up the opposition-sought debate on the Oct 30 missile strike on the madressah in the Bajaur tribal area that killed 83 people and the apparently retaliatory Nov 8 suicide bombing at the Punjab Regimental Centre parade ground in Dargai in the North West Frontier Province which killed 42 army recruits.
All the 15 opposition speakers condemned both the attacks, rejecting government statements that the missile strike was conducted by its own forces and killed only militants training for terrorist activities. Nine from the ruling coalition defended the Bajaur attack as justified in Pakistan's fight against terrorism, some of them accusing hardline religious groups of being behind the Dargai suicide bombing.
Most opposition members, including two from the Bajaur area, accused the government of “wrongly putting the blame for the Bajaur attack on the Pakistani military,” saying that it was actually the work of a pilot-less American drone in the second such deadly violation in the area by US forces in Afghanistan in nine months.
There were demands for an investigation by a parliamentary committee, change of policy by the government and payment of compensation to the families of those killed in Bajaur.
Mr Sherpao was due to wind up the debate which earlier saw Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Niazi saying: "It was no loss to the nation if terrorists were killed" in the Bajaur seminary and Population Welfare Minister Chaudhry Shahbaz Hussain blaming the Dargai incident on the NWFP government's "negligence", provoking a protest from an MMA member who said the cantonment area was outside the provincial jurisdiction.
But before Mr Sherpao was called to speak, the last MMA speaker, Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali, pointed out the lack of quorum, which forced Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain to adjourn the house until 10am on Wednesday after brief recess failed to bring the required minimum of 86 members of the 342-seat house to the chamber.
While the debate was opened by MMA deputy parliamentary leader Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, who said the Americans had carried out the Bajaur strike to sabotage a planned peace accord in the area, seemingly most confident statements on the issue came from two other MMA members from the area, Sahibzada Haroon-ur-Rashid and Maulana Mohammad Sadiq, who rejected government allegations of the madressah being used for terrorist training and said innocent religious students were killed there.
Mr Rashid, who had announced his decision to resign from the house in protest soon after the Bajaur attack, formally handed his resignation to the assembly secretary after challenging the government to prove any of its allegations and claims before an independent inquiry.
"We did not find even a knife there," he said as he spoke about how he and other people of the area collected bodies or limbs of those killed and buried them. "No terrorist activity was going on there."
"Innocent people were martyred but the government is taking the blame on itself," said Maulana Sadiq.
A pro-government independent member from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Munir Khan Orakzai, asked the government not to use force against the tribal people who, he said, “will not go even to paradise by force but could be taken to even hell with love.”
PPP member Naveed Qamar wondered why about 80,000 troops deployed in the tribal area bordering Afghanistan could not arrest them if there were terrorists in the Bajaur madressah.
Some eye-brows were raised when parliamentary secretary for defence Tanveer Hussain Syed said he had once been a member of the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba guerrilla group fighting in Kashmir as he told the house of what he called intelligence reports about training of terrorists having links with Indian consulates in neighbouring Afghanistan.
MQM's Haider Abbas Rizvi traced the militant activity in the country to what he called a "tribalised Islam" imposed by Gen Ziaul Haq's military government through the eighth constitutional amendment and called for a high-level inquiry into the Dargai suicide bombing.
Khwaja Saad Rafiq of the PML-N blamed the present situation on what he called four to five generals who, he said, were "going to disappear in the dustbin of history."
