September 05, 2008	Friday	Ramazan 04, 1429

WASHINGTON, Sept 4: Asif Ali Zardari, the front-runner in the race for presidency, vowed on Thursday that if elected, he would trim the president’s sweeping powers, which included the authority to dissolve the National Assembly and dismiss the prime minister.

“If I am elected president, one of my highest priorities will be to support the prime minister, the National Assembly and the Senate to amend the Constitution to bring back into balance the powers of the presidency and thereby reduce its ability to bring down democratic governance,” Mr Zardari said.

In an article in The Washington Post, Mr Zardari noted that under the Constitution, the president was to be the head of state but not responsible for day-to-day governance. Two military dictators, Mohammed Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf, reconfigured the Constitution to consolidate their power; they broadened the president’s responsibilities to include the authority to sack democratically elected governments, he added.

His comments came ahead of the September 6 presidential election --- a triangular contest among Mr Zardari, PML-N’s nominee Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui and PML-Q’s Mushahid Hussain Sayed.

Mr Zardari claimed that the “gravity of the situation” had led him, at the insistence of his party, to run for president. Otherwise, “my children and I are still mourning our beloved leader, wife and mother, Benazir Bhutto.”

Mr Zardari also vowed to build an independent judiciary in Pakistan, rejecting allegations that he only supported ‘selective’ reinstatement of judges sacked by President Musharraf during emergency rule last year.

“It is essential that our nation’s independent judiciary be reconstituted. Judges who were dismissed arbitrarily by Musharraf in November are being restored to the bench by the government my party leads, and I believe Parliament must enact a system of judicial reform to ensure that future judges are selected based on merit,” he wrote.

Mr Zardari also claimed that the majority of Pakistani people had been “ignored and even subjugated” by the country’s ‘establishment’. “This concentration of unchecked power has strained our government to the point of fracture. “The PPP is the only party with support in all four provinces as well as in Kashmir and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The PPP’s success in democratising the presidency will strengthen Pakistan’s viability as a nation,” he said.

In the article, Mr Zardari focussed his criticism on central and northern Punjab, saying that this region was ruling over the rest of Pakistan. Interestingly, this is also the region where his allied party PML-N received majority of votes in the last election.

Mr Zardari said Pakistani politics had always been a struggle between democratic forces around the country and “an elite oligarchy, located exclusively in a region stretching between Lahore and Rawalpindi-Islamabad”.

“The provinces of Sindh, North-West Frontier and Balochistan, as well as all of rural Punjab, have often been excluded from governance,” Mr Zardari said in the article titled “Democracy within our reach”.

Mr Zardari said the dictatorial forces that had dominated Pakistan for so long were now seeking partners to destabilise the new democratic government. “The establishment and its allies have unleashed a barrage of attacks against me, my wife and even our children,” he wrote.

“This is consistent with the politics of personal destruction and character assassination that have defined the elites for more than 30 years.”

Mr Zardari also vowed that Pakistan would continue to work with the United States to defeat terrorism. “Chief among the challenges that all Pakistanis face is the threat of global terrorism, demonstrated again in this week’s assassination attempt against Prime Minister Gilani.

“I will work to defeat the domestic Taliban insurgency and to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used to launch terrorist attacks on our neighbours or on Nato forces in Afghanistan,” he added.

“We stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked,” he said in the article.

“It is important to remember that Pakistan, too, is a victim of terrorism ... Our soldiers are dying on the front lines; our children are being blown up by suicide bombers.”