September 20, 2008	Saturday	Ramazan 19, 1429

ISLAMABAD, Sept 19: President Asif Ali Zardari will restore a constitutional norm ignored for years by addressing a joint session of parliament on Saturday, when he is likely to unveil the path his yet-powerful presidency will tread in a parliamentary democracy.

His maiden speech to parliament at 3pm 11 days after taking office comes amid an acute suspense over what basically will be a choice between a full transition to the parliamentary system of government and the present autocratic powers of country’s most abused top political office.

President Zardari, who was elected by more than a two-thirds majority of a parliamentary electoral college on Sept 6 and took office three days later, is also expected to speak about the plans of the coalition government led by his Pakistan People’s Party to tackle other problems ranging from the prevailing economic hardships and food and energy shortages to the so-called war on terror.

But while so much has already been said about these issues since Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani took office at the end of March, most public attention will be focussed on Mr Zardari’s post-election ideas on clipping the presidency of its autocratic powers and making up for his broken promises to restore superior court judges sacked by his disgraced predecessor Pervez Musharraf.

President Zardari had sidestepped questions about the presidential powers at his first press conference after taking office on Sept 9 that he addressed with his visiting Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai and simply said he would leave the matter to be decided by parliament.

But there is hardly any doubt that the present parliament will move on the issue without his consent because of his full grip on his party after the Dec 27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto and on the PPP-led coalition.

While there was no official word about the possible content of his speech, party sources said the president would speak on all the important political, economic and foreign policy issues.

Political sources said that any attempt to sidestep issues such as the presidential powers and the judiciary could further erode the president’s credibility and provoke protests from a parliamentary opposition rejuvenated with the leadership of the Pakistan Muslim League-N after the party left the coalition over his previous failure to keep his pledges for restoration of the deposed judges.

The PML-N’s new opposition leader in the National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, fired the first shot on Thursday by demanding that President Zardari announce in his speech plans to repeal the controversial 17th Amendment that gives the president powers to dissolve the National Assembly, sack a prime minister and appoint armed forces’ chiefs, provincial governors and the chief election commissioner, and also to step down as PPP leader to really look as a symbol of the federation.

Both the PPP and PML-N are committed to restoring the Constitution to its pre-Oct 12, 1999, Musharraf coup position in the Charter of Democracy signed by late Benazir Bhutto and PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif during their exile in 2006 and in their election manifestos which, in turn, makes it a people’s mandate to the elected members of parliament.

But political sources said these commitments had been clouded by Mr Zardari’s about-faces on the judges’ issue before his election, his embrace of some of the ardent former Musharraf loyalists and the government’s apparent moves to divide the judiciary by a selective reinstatement of the deposed judges and undermine a lawyers’ movement that actually shook the Musharraf regime last year before politicians stepped in.

Saturday’s will be the first joint session of the National Assembly and the Senate called for a presidential address in more than four years, after then military president Pervez Musharraf gave up the idea of speaking to parliament after the opposition downed his first such speech in “go Musharraf go” slogans on Jan 17, 2004.

Before him, hostile shouting in parliament was faced once each in the 1990s by then presidents Ghulam Ishaq Khan (from the PPP) and Farooq Leghari (from the PML-N), but the two men did not turn their back on Article 56 of the Constitution that requires the president to address a joint session “at the commencement of the first session after each general election to the National Assembly and at the commencement of the first session of each year”.

By a strange coincidence, while the government and parliament will celebrate the revival of a constitutional obligation by Mr Zardari, some estranged members of the Bhutto family will observe the 12th anniversary of the mysterious murder of the president’s brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto, which happened in Karachi less than two months before Ms Bhutto was sacked as prime minister by her own handpicked president Leghari.