ISLAMABAD, 21 August 2003 — Pakistan’s Parliament was to reopen late yesterday after a six-week break under the shadow of a crippling row over President Pervez Musharraf’s sweeping constitutional powers.
Opposition parties, who hold 148 seats in the 342-seat house, vowed in a joint meeting ahead of the new session to keep up their protest, which has hamstrung the nascent legislature all year and prevented the passage of any bills other than the federal budget. “We want to keep it up,” Siddiqul Farooq from the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) of deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif told AFP.
The opposition demands that President Musharraf surrender his army post and submit to a standard presidential election. They also oppose clauses that provide a political role for the military and give him the power to sack the Parliament. The PML-N, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the six-party Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) stressed that constitutional changes enacted by Musharraf to consolidate his hold on power before October polls were invalid. The polls restored Parliament after a three-year suspension imposed in the wake of Musharraf’s coup. “No individual has the right to amend the constitution unilaterally,” Farooq said, echoing opposition complaints since Parliament was restored.
The lower house, in which Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali’s ruling coalition that supports Musharraf holds a slender majority, has met for only 47 days since it opened in November.
Earlier proceedings have been disrupted by opposition MPs staging rowdy protests, forcing the speaker to adjourn sessions. Under Pakistan’s consititution, the Parliament must be in session for a minimum 130 days each year.
The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) said no bills were on the agenda, despite Parliament’s failure to pass any laws since it was revived. “The basic aim is that the Parliament should function and we should keep the system in motion,” PML-Q senator Mushahid Hussain told AFP.
Anti-Graft Drive: President Musharraf vowed yesterday to continue “the drive against corruption” in public sector organizations. “We don’t live in an ideal world and to expect 100 percent results overnight would be unrealistic,” Musharraf told a conference by the Berlin-based anti-corruption organization Transparency International (TI).
TI placed Pakistan among the most corrupt nations in the mid-1990s. Technocrats, businessmen and representatives of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are attending the conference to discuss public and private sector corruption with government representatives.
“Strong and autonomous state institutions, merit-based selections, and removal of discretionary powers are the basic ingredients to check corruption,” Musharraf said in reference to the economic reforms introduced in October 1999, when he seized power from Nawaz Sharif.
Musharraf said the creation of an anti-graft watchdog National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and the Securities Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) plus complete autonomy of the central State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) were just some measures aimed at wiping out corruption.
NAB chief Gen. Muneer Hafeez told the conference his organization had recovered a little less than three billion dollars from former ministers, ex-government officials and businessmen. Hafeez claimed that, “it is just the tip of the iceberg,” and NAB was vigorously pursuing more cases of abuse of state power and resources. Major opposition parties allege that many of the ministers in Jamali’s Cabinet had been on the NAB hit-list, but were given a clean slate once they had switched political loyalties.
