ISLAMABAD: While decks have been cleared for setting up constitutionally protected military courts to try civilian terror suspects, some conciliatory voices were raised in the National Assembly on Thursday to bring on board some religious parties opposed to the new scheme of things on a religious point.

The calls were made during an inconclusive debate on the Dec 16 terrorist attack on an army public school in Peshawar that killed 149 students and staff.

Nafisa Shah, a PPP lawmaker from Sindh, said if her party had been in power, it would have left no stone unturned to get the 21st Amendment Bill and the Pakistan Army (Amendment) Bill passed by parliament unanimously rather than see the JUI-F and the Jamaat-i-Islami boycott the vote held on Tuesday.

Read: Parliament passes 21st Constitutional Amendment, Army Act Amendment

She disputed oft-stated claims about the country’s political leadership being on one page and said “we are not on one page”.

“This was not a unanimous amend,” she said, citing the absence of three parties, including the PTI that has boycotted the National Assembly from mid-August in a protest over alleged rigging of the 2013 general elections.

Ms Shah, whose party played a crucial role in the passage of the two bills because of its decisive position in the Senate, urged the government to “bring” all the dissenting parties to be part of the joint fight against terrorism in what she said had become a civil war.

Ibadullah Khan, who said he received 67 bodies of members of his extended family killed by Taliban militants over the past few years in his Shangla district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, pointed out the influence of clergy in the Pakhtun society and said “this war” could not be won without winning their hearts and minds.

Also read: JUI-F, JI rattle govt on military courts law

But while referring to official claims of success in the 2009 army operation against the Taliban revolt in Swat valley, he said those who supported the army were even now being targeted “on a daily basis”.

MINISTER’S FURY: Railways Minister Saad Rafique, whose Umra pilgrimage kept him from the house when it passed the two controversial bills, began his return to the house with a furious attack against alleged misreporting about him after he took notice of some PIA “irregularities” at Lahore airport on his arrival from Jeddah on Thursday.

He said the plane that brought him from Jeddah carried only 50 passengers against a capacity for 250 while an unspecified number of people seeking seats were left behind.

After the plane landed at Lahore, he said, an automatic bridge to be attached to it for the passengers to disembark malfunctioned and a manual stairway had to be brought after keeping the passengers inside like “chickens” in a coop.

The minister was particularly bitter about the electronic media and what he called the “menace of breaking news” and one report attributed his activity at the Lahore airport to a presumed loss of his luggage containing precious gifts or denial of protocol, which, he said, was not the case.

Mr Rafique also had a word of warning that if the media channels continued levelling false allegations, politicians would be forced to contradict each of them by name every day.

Minister of State for Interior and Education Balighur Rehman too had his own complaint of a private television channel of having wrongly reported when he returned from Haj last year that he got a Karachi-bound flight diverted to Islamabad for his sake.

Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi, who chaired the proceedings at the time, referred allegations against the PIA to a concerned standing committee of the house on a suggestion from Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed, who also talked of recurrent complaints about the airline though he said its overall profit ratio “is increasing” and that the prime minister was trying to improve its performance.

However, until the house was adjourned until 10.30am on Friday, the minister of state failed to bring a promised response from the water and power ministry about PPP member Shazia Marri’s complaint about what she called plans to withdraw 650MW of electricity being supplied from the national grid to K-Electric.

Both she and an MQM member, Abdul Waseem, warned against serious consequences to Pakistan’s commercial hub before members of both the parties stormed out of the house in a token walkout.

Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2015

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