September 15, 2007	Saturday	Ramazan 2, 1428

LAHORE, Sept 14: The news conference (in Lahore) where PPP Secretary-General Jahangir Badr announced the schedule of party chairperson Benazir Bhutto’s return turned out to be a public meeting as hundreds of workers had thronged the venue.

Reporters (as happened in Islamabad also where Amin Faheem addressed a similar news conference) failed to find a place for them as the Lahore Press Club’s auditorium where the announcement was made was jam packed with workers carrying banners and party flags and chanting slogans.

When reporters objected to the noisy workers and Mr Badr asked them to leave, one worker told him in an angry tenor that they had been invited to the “function” by some party leaders themselves.

The workers embraced each other and distributed sweets. Later, they swarmed the road outside the LPC where they displayed fireworks, lit clay oil lamps with ‘desi ghee’ and kept dancing and raising slogans in joy.

A small police posse diverted traffic to Davis Road as the Shimla Pahari Chowk remained virtually under the PPP workers’ control at a time when the first day of Ramazan was coming to its close.

Earlier, Mr Badr conceded a virtual failure of the dialogue with the Musharraf government, saying talks had hit a deadlock.

He said the decision by the regime that Musharraf would seek his re-election from the same assemblies while retaining his uniform was the ‘major stumbling block’ in the talks.

“But we are prepared for all eventualities; if the chairperson is arrested on her return, she will not find herself alone as hundreds of party workers across the country will follow her to the prison. We have also decided to launch a resistance movement,” the PPP secretary-general said when asked what would be the party’s move if Ms Bhutto was taken into custody on her arrival.

He said the PPP felt that the presence of the chairperson in Pakistan was necessary as the country was passing through a ‘great crisis’; its unity was in danger because of the regime’s faulty domestic and foreign policies.

The PPP chairperson left for Dubai on April 4, 1999, soon after she addressed a workers meeting at Larkana on the occasion of the death anniversary of party’s founding chairperson Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

She went into self-exile a day before the Lahore High Court’s accountability bench, headed by Justice Malik Mohammad Qayyum, was to announce a decision in the references against Ms Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, that the Nawaz government’s Ehtasab Bureau had filed on the charges of receiving kickbacks from two foreign companies for pre-shipment inspection and levy of fee on merchandise before export.