[Now Mr. Zardari’s party will dominate the upper house until
March 2015, giving it the power to block legislation — even if it is defeated
in general elections, which are scheduled for February 2013, but which analysts
expect this fall. “This election is the result of political maturity, from all
the parties,” said Senator Raza Rabbani of the Pakistan Peoples Party, one of
the winners, on Friday evening.]
By Declan Walsh and Salman Masood
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
— The government here cemented its grip on power on Friday with strong gains in
Senate elections that represented a psychological victory for the beleaguered
president, Asif Ali Zardari, and should ensure his party’s influence for
another three years.
By late evening, the governing Pakistan Peoples Party and
its coalition allies had won 32 of 49 possible seats; another 5 seats were to
be announced, but the result could not prevent the government from taking
control of the upper house of Parliament.
It was an important milestone for Mr. Zardari and his
supporters, who only a few months ago were dogged by sporadic speculation of a
military coup and threats from assertive judges and lurid political scandals.
Those dangers have not entirely abated, but the Senate
victory showed that Mr. Zardari’s party — whose supporters not long ago warned
of a “soft coup” — has greater staying power than its critics ever imagined.
“This is a huge boost for the P.P.P.,” said Cyril Almeida, a
senior columnist with Dawn, Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper. “At
a time when few people believed this government would survive, they have
managed to pull it off.”
Now Mr. Zardari’s party will dominate the upper house until
March 2015, giving it the power to block legislation — even if it is defeated
in general elections, which are scheduled for February 2013, but which analysts
expect this fall. “This election is the result of political maturity, from all
the parties,” said Senator Raza Rabbani of the Pakistan Peoples Party, one of
the winners, on Friday evening.
The government is not in the clear yet. The prime minister,
Yousaf Raza Gilani, faces contempt charges as part of a Supreme Court
corruption investigation. He could also be jailed for six months and barred
from public office. The economy is in a chronic state of disrepair and, in the
northwest, Islamist militants are pressing their violent campaign.
Two bloody clashes on Friday in the Khyber tribal agency,
along the Afghan border, underscored the challenge facing Pakistan’s leaders. A
predawn assault by dozens of fighters from Lashkar-e-Islam, a local militant
group, on a government security post killed 10 soldiers and 23 militants, said
a local security official who spoke anonymously.
Hours later, Lashkar-e-Islam itself came under attack when a
suicide bomber blew himself up outside the group’s base in the Tirah Valley,
killing another 23 people, the local administrator, Mutahirzeb Khan, said.
Officials speculated that the bomber had been sent by a rival Islamist militia,
possibly the main Pakistani Taliban group.
Mr. Zardari’s Senate triumph arrived as the theatrical
scandal that gripped the political system just a few months ago appeared to be
fizzling out.
Last fall, Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of
Pakistani origin, caused a sensation with claims that he had written a private
memo to the United States government last May, on behalf of Mr. Zardari,
requesting American assistance in the event of a military coup.
Mr. Ijaz said the government had offered to neuter the
powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in return for American help —
a claim that set off fury inside the military, whose leaders have long
distrusted Mr. Zardari, and which led to the formation of a judicial commission
of inquiry that started work in January.
But although the scandal cost the job of Hussain Haqqani,
Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington whom Mr. Ijaz accused of complicity in the
memo, it failed to produce the promised fireworks that would damage the
government. After initially refusing to travel to Pakistan to testify, citing
security concerns, Mr. Ijaz finally gave evidence via video link from London
this week.
But he failed to produce hard evidence to back up his
earlier allegations, although he did make fresh attacks on the president.
Citing “intelligence sources,” Mr. Ijaz told the commission on Friday that Mr.
Zardari had prior knowledge of the American Special Forces raid in May that
killed Osama bin Laden.
Moreover, he said, during the operation, Mr. Zardari had
urged the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, not to scramble F-16 fighter
jets against American military helicopters after they were detected in
Pakistani airspace.
If proven, the claims would devastate Mr. Zardari’s career,
given the strength of anti-American feeling in Pakistan. Instead, they were
received with a virtual national shrug.
The military and president’s office offered no reaction,
while lawmakers from all the main political parties concentrated on filling the
104-member Senate, which includes reserved seats for minorities, women and
technocrats. Half of the Senate’s 100 members run for re-election every three
years; a recent constitutional amendment provided for four new seats for
non-Muslim minorities.
The election was also marked by allegations of corruption.
Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the opposition leader in the National Assembly, said
some seats had been “publicly auctioned,” a reference to allegations that some
contestants bought the winning votes. A relative of one parliamentarian from
the northwest, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that his relative’s
vote was on sale for 20 million rupees, or $222,000.
Away from the wheeling and dealing of parliamentary
politics, the failure of Pakistan’s leaders to tackle the enduring problems of
prejudice facing their country remained painfully obvious. Christians
commemorated the first anniversary of the death of Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister
for minorities, who was gunned down, reportedly by Islamist fanatics, in an
Islamabad suburb in March 2011.
Just a few miles away, there were signs that such
intolerance has not abated. In Rawalpindi, which adjoins Islamabad, police
blocked members of the minority Ahmadi community from reaching their place of
worship in Satellite Town neighborhood on Friday morning.
The police blockade was a response to a demonstration a week
earlier outside the Ahmadu mosque by members of Jamaat ud Dawa, an Islamist
charity seen as a front for the militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since
then, several Ahmadis have received death threats.
“We are being denied the right to worship,” said a senior
member of the Ahmadi community, speaking on condition of anonymity because he
feared for his safety. “You can never placate these elements. Today they are
objecting over Friday congregation. Tomorrow they will raise another issue.
They will never be happy.”
BODIES OF WESTERN SCRIBES HANDED TO EMBASSIES
[The pair recounted their harrowing experience from the moment Syrian rockets began hitting their makeshift media centre, and said Syrian forces seemed to be directly targeting journalists in Homs. “There were at least five successive explosions, very near. We really had the impression that we were directly targeted,” the Figaro daily quoted one of them as saying. “The Syrian activists who were with us, were used to these bombardments and understood the danger immediately. They told us that we must leave right away.” Colvin and Ochlik were the first to leave. A missile struck in front of the press centre. ]
Agence France
Presse
DAMASCUS: The
bodies of two Western journalists killed in Syria were handed over to the
French ambassador and to a Polish diplomat in Damascus today, an AFP
correspondent reported.
Veteran US reporter Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in a rocket attack in the rebel
Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs on February 22. Their bodies were taken to the French hospital in the Kassah neighbourhood, the AFP correspondent said.
French Ambassador Eric Chevallier boarded an ambulance that carried the body of Ochlik, while the Polish diplomat went in a separate car behind another ambulance that carried Colvin’s body. The coffins are due to be kept in the hospital’s morgue until plans are finalised to fly them to Paris.
The bodies were formally identified in Damascus yesterday by French and Polish diplomats. The Sunday Times has said Colvin and Ochlik were killed when a rocket hit the front of the building they were in, burying them both in debris. French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro newspaper and British photographer Paul Conroy were wounded in the attack. Bouvier (31) and photographer William Daniels (34) who was not hurt in the rocket attack, were smuggled out of Homs by activists earlier this week to Lebanon and then flown to France.
The pair recounted their harrowing experience from the moment Syrian rockets began hitting their makeshift media centre, and said Syrian forces seemed to be directly targeting journalists in Homs. “There were at least five successive explosions, very near. We really had the impression that we were directly targeted,” the Figaro daily quoted one of them as saying. “The Syrian activists who were with us, were used to these bombardments and understood the danger immediately. They told us that we must leave right away.” Colvin and Ochlik were the first to leave. A missile struck in front of the press centre.
“The explosion was massive, Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were practically at the point of impact. They were killed on the spot,” the Figaro reported. The injured Bouvier couldn’t move her leg. “I screamed” and Syrian insurgent fighters took the journalists to a field hospital in a nearby house.
The two French journalists were trapped for days, even after members of the rebel Free Syrian Army managed to get the wounded Conroy and Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa out of the country and into Lebanon. The United States closed its embassy in Syria in early February and pulled out all its staff after two deadly bomb attacks in Damascus in December and January, and amid an intensification of the regime’s crackdown on dissent.
Veteran US reporter Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in a rocket attack in the rebel
Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs on February 22. Their bodies were taken to the French hospital in the Kassah neighbourhood, the AFP correspondent said.
French Ambassador Eric Chevallier boarded an ambulance that carried the body of Ochlik, while the Polish diplomat went in a separate car behind another ambulance that carried Colvin’s body. The coffins are due to be kept in the hospital’s morgue until plans are finalised to fly them to Paris.
The bodies were formally identified in Damascus yesterday by French and Polish diplomats. The Sunday Times has said Colvin and Ochlik were killed when a rocket hit the front of the building they were in, burying them both in debris. French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro newspaper and British photographer Paul Conroy were wounded in the attack. Bouvier (31) and photographer William Daniels (34) who was not hurt in the rocket attack, were smuggled out of Homs by activists earlier this week to Lebanon and then flown to France.
The pair recounted their harrowing experience from the moment Syrian rockets began hitting their makeshift media centre, and said Syrian forces seemed to be directly targeting journalists in Homs. “There were at least five successive explosions, very near. We really had the impression that we were directly targeted,” the Figaro daily quoted one of them as saying. “The Syrian activists who were with us, were used to these bombardments and understood the danger immediately. They told us that we must leave right away.” Colvin and Ochlik were the first to leave. A missile struck in front of the press centre.
“The explosion was massive, Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were practically at the point of impact. They were killed on the spot,” the Figaro reported. The injured Bouvier couldn’t move her leg. “I screamed” and Syrian insurgent fighters took the journalists to a field hospital in a nearby house.
The two French journalists were trapped for days, even after members of the rebel Free Syrian Army managed to get the wounded Conroy and Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa out of the country and into Lebanon. The United States closed its embassy in Syria in early February and pulled out all its staff after two deadly bomb attacks in Damascus in December and January, and amid an intensification of the regime’s crackdown on dissent.
