ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s federal Cabinet yesterday decided to ask President Asif Zardari to call the National Assembly session today at 4.30 pm.
The Cabinet met to discuss the crisis while paramilitaries went on alert as thousands rallied, one day after the country marked the biggest protests yet against President Asif Zardari, who took office last September.
Pakistan’s federal Cabinet “declared the decision to disqualify the Sharif brothers as regrettable, but according to the law,” an official statement of the Cabinet said.
Chaired by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, the Cabinet endorsed the government’s decision to suspend provincial assembly and agreed that “it was an option of the last resort.”
Police fired tear gas and rounded up protesters in the capital yesterday, with the nation in turmoil since a court banned the top opposition leader from contesting elections. Protesters are heeding a call from former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who leads the second largest party in Pakistan, to rise up after the Supreme Court on Wednesday barred him and his brother from holding public office.
Zardari and Sharif are at loggerheads over the future of Pakistan, which has been teetering under the financial crisis, extremism and weak government but remains a key US ally in the fight against Taleban and Al-Qaeda militancy. Mobs clashed with police and closed the main highway outside the capital, as well as in the nearby city of Rawalpindi in the biggest protests against Zardari since he took office in September 2008.
Riot police, armed with batons, charged into the mob, beating demonstrators and rounding up around 25 protesters into vans, the photographer said.
In central city of Multan, Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) activists staged a peaceful sit-in on a main road, blocking traffic for nearly two hours, and women activists set up a hunger-strike camp, reports said. “On the request of the Punjab government we have deployed (put on alert) paramilitary forces to maintain law and order,” Interior Ministry spokesman Shahidullah Baig told AFP.
“The situation is under control and shall remain so, Inshaallah (God willing),” he added. Members of the paramilitary Rangers unit were on alert, but were not deployed in public, AFP correspondents said.
In Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, ousted Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif addressed more than 1,000 lawyers and activists while another 500 people rallied outside the regional assembly, an AFP reporter said. Waving green party flags and portraits of Nawaz Sharif, around 100 provincial lawmakers also shouted “Go Zardari Go.”
Shahbaz, Nawaz Sharif’s brother, lost his post in Punjab, where the government suspended the provincial assembly.
The protesters in Lahore also torched tires. Hundreds more protested in the southwestern city of Quetta and in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, Twice a former prime minister, 59-year-old Nawaz Sharif has tapped into widespread public discontent with Zardari, crowning his status as a key player in Pakistani politics.
Punjab’s new administration under Gov. Salman Taseer yesterday registered cases against two lawmakers and 300 local leaders and activists of PML-N on charges of arson.
— With input from agencies
