ISLAMABAD, 24 April 2007 — President Pervez Musharraf will be elected for a second term in office by the sitting Parliament before it is dissolved ahead of general elections due later this year or early 2008, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said.
While Musharraf has made no secret of his plans to stand for a second term, the comment from Aziz was the clearest sign yet the president will take a route that opposition has labeled “unconstitutional.”
“The election of the president is due in September-October this year and President Musharraf will be re-elected by the present assemblies with comfortable majority,” state-run Associated Press of Pakistan quoted Aziz as saying late on Sunday.
He added that Musharraf himself would decide when to step down as army chief and that the current assemblies “through two-third majority had passed a bill to allow President Musharraf to keep the uniform till December this year.”
“The next Parliament may elect him, the next Parliament may not elect him,” Shafqat Mehmood, a political commentator, said. “By getting himself re-elected from the sitting Parliament he obviously wants to get a guarantee that he is here for the next five years, no matter who wins the next elections.”
Opposition Activists Arrested
Hundreds of opposition activists and lawyers were detained by the Punjab police yesterday to prevent protest rallies from taking place during the hearing of the case against suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry today. Opposition parties and lawyers have planned rallies in favor of the suspended chief justice outside the Supreme Court when the Supreme Judicial Council takes up his case today. The Supreme Court will also hear another petition filed by Chaudhry.
According to reports, Punjab Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi has instructed district officials to send their supporters to Islamabad to outnumber the protesters.
The government has issued notices to a few private TV channels, which had covered Chaudhry’s address to the Peshawar High Court Bar Association recently.
Musharraf-Karzai Meeting
Pakistan hopes that a meeting between President Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai in Turkey next week will help clear up misunderstandings.
“It is always useful to maintain dialogue,” Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said at a weekly briefing when asked what Pakistan’s aims to achieve from the meeting due on April 29. Tasnim said statements from Afghanistan “reflect a lack of understanding about Pakistan and our policy and what we are doing is to ensure that there is no cross-border movement by undesirable elements.”
The Foreign Office spokeswoman said that Pakistan has stood by Afghanistan “in all times of adversity very consistently” but said that its neighbor faced massive internal problems including from drugs, warlords and a lack of national reconciliation efforts.
