October 23, 2008	Thursday	Shawwal 23, 1429

PESHAWAR, Oct 22: Pakistan People’s Party provincial chief Rahimdad Khan said here on Wednesday that militants, who had challenged the government, had lost their stamina and now they were asking for a truce. He said that negotiation had been government’s first priority but militants had violated the accord.

Briefing journalists after chairing a meeting of the party provincial council, he said the ministers would have to abandon their party offices. He said they could not retain both offices at a time.

He said everybody knew the government was treading a tough path as it was grappling with chronic issues like price-hike, unemployment, lawlessness and a new phenomenon of insurgency in some parts of the province.

He said acute shortage of flour and unscheduled spells of loadshedding had also made people’s life miserable. He said despite all those difficulties the coalition government was making all out efforts to solve problems of the people. He said his party was angry over the unilateral nomination of Zakat committee chairmen and it would get it corrected after consultation with the ANP.

Later during the meeting, the provincial council, through a unanimously adopted resolution, demanded of the President of Pakistan and co-chairman of PPP Asif Ali Zardari to appoint a party man as governor of Frontier.

The provincial council criticised the provincial office-bearers and ministers for ignoring district organisations in development schemes and appointments in their respective departments.

Provincial ministers, MPAs, former NWFP minister Abdus Samad Khan Toru, People’s Lawyers Forum president Barrister Masood Kausar, Sardar Ali Khan and PPP district presidents and general secretaries attended the meeting.

The district presidents and provincial council members aired their views and criticised the provincial leadership for its sluggishness towards organisational matters. They said if ANP had the chief minister, PPP should be given slot of governor in the province.

President of Mardan PPP, Ghawas Khan, said it was not the PPP left by Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Shaheed Benazir Bhutto instead it had become a platform of opportunists and timeservers, who were misusing names of party martyrs for personal gains.

He said party had practically been mortgaged to the senior coalition partner, which had made unilateral appointment from Awami National Party on Zakat committees. He said those who had been vitriolic towards the PPP leadership, they were distributing Benazir Income Support Programme forms among their party workers. He said it would harm the party in its stronghold.