LAHORE, Jan 16: The Supreme Court Bar Association has asked President Gen Pervez Musharraf to organize a a conference of all political parties to seek a political consensus on all issues of vital national importance.

“If the president failed in holding such a conference, the SCBA will be obliged to organize the moot because a host of national issues, including the return home of the popular leadership, need to be considered”, SCBA president Malik Mohammad Qayyum told Dawn here on Monday.

Mr Qayyum said the country was passing through a critical phase mainly because the government was not allowing the popular leadership to return home and play a role which was due of them in helping resolve issues like Kalabagh Dam and the situation emerging in the wake of developments taking place in Afghanistan, Balochistan and Northern Areas. The absence of such a leadership, he said, was only resulting in making the national issues complex and complicated.

The SCBA president said that Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Husain had constitutional right to return home. He said no agreement on blocking the return of the leadership could be concluded and as far as he understood there was no such understanding between the Musharraf government and the family of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He said the SCBA would extend all possible legal help to the exiled leadership in superior courts if the government prevented their return home on ‘flimsy’ grounds.

SHERPAO: Meanwhile, Malik Qayyum said that Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao would pay a visit to Lahore on Jan 28 to participate in the ‘SCBA encounter’ to answer questions by lawyers on a number of issues of national importance. The SCBA hosted MQM leader Altaf Husain in the same programme last month.