ISLAMABAD, July 31: Religious parties’ support for militants seemed to strain opposition ranks during a law and order debate in the National Assembly on Tuesday, which was also marked by a protest walkout by them after a verbal clash with a government ally.
The walkout by the six-party Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal came towards the end of the day’s proceedings after a shouting match with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement over what was the strongest speech of the two-day debate from an otherwise depressed ruling coalition by MQM parliamentary leader Farooq Sattar.
While the People’s Party Parliamentarians, which has its own strong views against the MQM, did not join the walkout, other opposition groups aligned with the MMA in the newly formed PPP-less All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) alliance did not seem going the whole hog with the religious parties.
In a repeat what they did with some ruling party members on the first day of the debate on Monday, MMA members vainly tried to shout down Dr Sattar who provoked them by describing what he called the biggest danger facing the country in the form of “religious fanaticism and religious extremism” sweeping the MMA-ruled NWFP and the adjoining Fata and accusing the religious parties of setting “high examples of hypocrisy” and shedding only “crocodile tears” over their own failures of governance.
“Karachi, Karachi”, came the first chant from MMA benches in a reference to the May 12 bloodbath in the country’s commercial capital that blocked a visit there by then-suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry while the MMA members continued shouting other slogans as well that accused the MQM of being responsible for those killings and of extortion -- the charges the party denies.
Dr Sattar questioned the justification for storing weapons in mosques and madressahs and cited the Saudi military action against the 1979 occupation of the holy Kaaba by a dissident group to justify the government’s deadly military operation that routed militants at Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa early this month.
There was also some retaliatory shouting from the MQM that drowned out MMA deputy parliamentary leader Liaquat Baloch who protested against Dr Sattar’s speech before leading the walkout, which was initially joined by Pukhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party leader Mehmood Khan Achakzai and Awami National Party member Shahabuddin Khan in an apparent deference to their parties’ association with the APDM, but the two men came back soon to their seats while MMA members stayed away for the rest of the proceedings.
Members of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) were not seen around at the time, although their party too has taken a strong line against the anti-militancy campaign, and one of them, Pervez Malik, called for the resignation of the present government in his speech earlier in the day.
At one point, MMA members came to the house and moved towards the rostrum in what seemed to be a move to stage what has often happened during nearly five years of this assembly to stage a shouting show before Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain.
But for some unexplained reason, they walked back to the opposition lounge while a PPP member, Yasmeen Rehman, was making the day’s last speech in the debate, which the speaker said would be continued and wound up by Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao on Wednesday, when the house will meet at 5pm after a meeting of the federal cabinet earlier in the morning.
The MMA members showed little reservations in justifying the defiant stance taken by the late Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the last stages of the military operation before he was killed, despite earlier objections by some of their figures to the prolonged defiance of state authority by the mosque management and madressah militants.
“Abdul Rashid Ghazi’s attitude was right,” MMA senior member Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri said about the cleric’s reported consent to surrender some of the militants in exchange for a safe passage for himself in the last moments of the Lal Masjid operation and regretted that “despite that women and children were murdered”.
Another MMA member, Farid Ahmad Piracha, who demanded the formation of a high-ranking judicial commission with the participation of lawyers and parliament members to investigate the Lal Masjid operation, said if whatever was done by Maulana Ghazi and women and children killed there was a crime “we own it”.
One member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Diwan Jaffer Bokhari, accused Maulana Ghazi of obduracy in maintaining an illegal occupation of state land on which constructions had been made that led to the operation, while his colleague Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry seemed to be departing from the party line by asking the government to distance itself from American policies and called for the rejection of US aid with newly-announced strings about performance in the fight against terrorism.
PPP’s Manzoor Hussain Wassan and Azra Fazal Pechuho called for the promotion of democracy as a way to fight extremism and terrorism.
The house interrupted the debate to pass a resolution moved by PML member Mehnaz Rafi to pay tributes to the role of Madar-i-Millat Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah in the struggle for the creation of Pakistan along with her brother Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah to mark her 144th birth anniversary and demand the establishment of a Madar-i-Millat Academy.
But PML member Riaz Hussain Pirzada, who was chairing the session at the time, disregarded MMA member Mohammad Hussain Mehanti’s amendment to the resolution to mention the Madar-i-Millat’s “challenge to a military dictator” in the 1960s when she contested and lost the presidential election against Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan.
