ISLAMABAD, Dec 18: The People's Party Parliamentarians and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) have taken exception to President Gen Pervez Musharraf's remarks that former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif cannot return to the country.

PPP spokesman Senator Farhatullah Khan Babar, in a rejoinder to the president's statement that Ms Bhutto must face cases against herself after her return, said Gen Musharraf should know that "persecuting people on political grounds was witch-hunt and not enlightened moderation".

The senator said Pakistan would neither have enlightened moderation nor true democratic culture as long as "the judicial process was abused to persecute political opponents". He said everybody knew that the cases were no more than political blackmailing to keep Ms Bhutto tied down from court to court and city to city.

He said the hollowness of the cases was exposed when former senator Asif Zardari was released after eight years of solitary confinement without any conviction. The falsity of the cases was also exposed when the Supreme Court set aside a conviction in 2001, observing that "the bias of the trial judge floated on the surface of the record", which forced the trial judge and the chief justice to resign, Senator Babar said.

He said the genuine democratic leaders were being persecuted by the regime to drive them out of the political field and mislead the international public opinion into believing that the choice in Pakistan was either to accept military dictatorship or face a religious dictatorship. He said the genuine leaders were also kept out by tampering with the electoral lists and making special laws with retrospective effect in an electoral exercise dismissed by the European Union as "seriously flawed".