MQM terms it politically motivated crackdown

Published March 21, 2015
Sattar repeatedly warned all parties that if prison cells were opened for the MQM, others could meet the same fate.—PID/File
Sattar repeatedly warned all parties that if prison cells were opened for the MQM, others could meet the same fate.—PID/File

ISLAMABAD: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement returned to the National Assembly on Friday in strength after an unannounced three-day boycott, pleading to be spared what it called an unfair, politically motivated security crackdown.

And if Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government failed to stop it, the party’s parliamentary leader Dr Farooq Sattar warned, “We may then meet at Attock Fort” prison, where the prime minister spent last days of his captivity following the overthrow of his party’s second government in a 1999 army coup.

But Mr Sattar seemed to be speaking only to deaf ears in a poorly attended house where, in the absence of senior ministers, a junior minister from Attock district where the dreaded 500-year-old fort is located, laughed off the warning as a joke.

Also read: Nisar talks of ‘proofs’ of Imran Farooq’s murder

However, Mr Sattar, who said he did not know if he would be able to address the house again, took pains to drive his point home, repeatedly warning all parties in parliament that if prison cells were opened for the MQM, others could meet the same fate.

The MQM, which at present has 23 seats in the 342-seat house, seemed to have taken the treasury benches by surprise with its unannounced return on a day many of the ruling party and opposition members would have been either watching the cricket World Cup quarter-final between Pakistan and Australia at Adelaide on television or left for home before a two-day weekend.

SURPRISE TO TREASURY BENCHES: Chanting slogans like “lathi goli ki sarkar nahi chalegi” (rule of stick and bullet will not be allowed) and “jeay Altaf (hailing self-exiled party chief Altaf Hussain), the MQM members demanded an immediate opportunity to be heard and got the question hour suspended by Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq on a suggestion from Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed.

That ended an apparent pact of silence the party had made with the government by withdrawing an adjournment motion for a debate on the March 11 raid by paramilitary Rangers at the party’s headquarters in Karachi while Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had agreed not to make a policy statement on the issue in the house.

But some serious developments happened since then such as the registration of a criminal complaint of the Rangers against the MQM chief for allegedly making threatening statements against Rangers officials who had conducted the raid, the surprise emergence of a taped video in which an MQM worker on death row, Saulat Mirza, accused Mr Hussain of ordering the 1997 murder by him of the then managing director of the formerly Karachi Electric Supply Corporation soon before the convict’s execution was stayed for 72 hours, and the interior minister telling the National Assembly on Thursday that the government could share with British authorities “what proofs” it had about the 2010 murder of an MQM leader Imran Farooq in London.

“Whatever is happening today has political motives,” Mr Sattar said and, wondering if it had the consent of the prime minister, warned the government that if it adopted the same attitude as during a bloody 1992 crackdown against his party in Karachi, “then it will be in nobody’s power to save this system”.

Still Mr Sattar said his party was prepared to cooperate with authorities in fighting crime and terrorism for which, he said, it had “zero tolerance”. He even asked authorities to share intelligence with his party about the presence of any criminal elements hiding in the MQM so that action could be taken against them.

Mr Sattar made what he called a “dardmandana (compassionate) appeal” by name to the prime minister, the chief of army staff, and heads of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and the Rangers and the army corps commander in Sindh as he called for allowing the MQM to play its due political role in the country and in restoring peace in Karachi.

“Let there be eradication of crime, eradication of terrorism...but a middle-class party should not be crushed,” he said before ending his long speech.

MINISTERIAL JOKE, NO REPLY: There was no government reply to Mr Sattar’s harangue that consumed almost the entire sitting, while state minister Sheikh Aftab Ahmed preferred to take a lighter view of all this, saying he would be prepared to play host to the MQM leaders if they came to his native Attock district, but at a rest house rather than the Attock Fort.

Mr Sharif was released from Attock Fort in December 2000 to be sent on a 10-year exile in Saudi Arabia in a deal with then military president Pervez Musharraf.

ACHAKZAI’S FURY: Mehmood Khan Achakzai, head of the government-allied Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, was furious against the government succumbing to the MQM shouting to get the question hour suspended at the start of the sitting in violation of rules, warning that Imran Khan, head of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf that is boycotting the house since mid-August, could come “tomorrow” and do the same.

“We should listen to one other, but nobody should make a farce of parliament,” he said.

Some protest shouts from the MQM benches, prompted Mr Achakzai to threaten that he could confront them with a recorded audiotape of what he called an 18-minute telephone talk of an unspecified MQM leader with the then American ambassador to Pakistan soon after the May 12, 2007 massacre of people in Karachi to block a visit to the city by then suspended chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

There was no MQM response to Mr Achak­zai’s threat before Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi adjourned the house until 4pm on Tuesday, with assurances that no more violation of rules would be allowed and pleading for a democratic attitude from all parties.

Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2015

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