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Aarwaa · #**150** Friday, January 25, 2008

President faces tough time defending judges’ removal

By Khaleeq Kiani

DAVOS, Jan 24: President Pervez Muhsarraf had a tough time defending removal of senior judges and refuting allegations of pre-poll rigging at the World Economic Forum here, but most of the questions relating to the tricky issues remained by and large unanswered.

At one of the sessions, a questioner asked him who will deliver justice to a complainant if elections turn out to be fraud as being alleged by the opposition parties and given the fact that he has removed all the independent judges and put in place his “hand-picked judges”.

President Musharraf first skipped the question but was reminded that he had missed the main thrust of the question. He had to go into detail about how the election results would be announced at the polling stations, votes will be polled in transparent boxes and results would be put on the internet and said it was his commitment that elections will be free, fair and transparent. “And I have added a new word. The elections will be peaceful as well”.

The president was questioned time and again about his actions like imposition of emergency to remove judges and complaints about “fraud elections”. He said the former chief justice of the Supreme Court had paralysed the executive machinery and described Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry as “inept and corrupt”. What will you do when authority of the executive is undermined, he posed counter question.

Asked as to how he saw his working with the new prime minister after elections and about the anti-terror drive in tribal areas and elsewhere, the president said the majority party will form the government and if it turned out to be a hung parliament, then a coalition government would come into being and elect a prime minister. He said the new prime minister will be the chief executive of the entire country as defined in the constitution but he as president would deal with terrorists in the tribal areas that fell directly under his jurisdiction. “I am not a difficult person for anybody to work with,” he said and added he would work comfortably with any prime minister and said he would play his role for the new coalition in case of a hung parliament.

The president felt relaxed when his co-panellist from Bangladesh Fakhruddin Ahmed, chief adviser (Prime Minister of Bangladesh), said he would soon be allowing “indoor political activities”.

President Musharraf said the West should not see the developing countries “with idealistic and unrealistic” angles of human rights and democracy. Responding to a related question, he said he was working on a multi-pronged policy to deal with terrorism. He said there was no place for Al Qaeda foreigners in Pakistan who would be confronted head on militarily while the Taliban was a local phenomenon who would be brought into mainstream through force and social uplift schemes.