UNITED KINGDOM / FILE: Twice-elected former PM Benazir Bhutto wants to return to Pakistan in October to contest elections

Record ID: 722239

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM / FILE: Twice-elected former PM Benazir Bhutto wants to return to Pakistan in October to contest elections
  • Date: 11th September 2007
  • Summary: (EU) LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (SEPTEMBER 10, 2007) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) BENAZIR BHUTTO'S SPOKESMAN WAJID HASSAN SAYING: "The formal announcement will be made on the 14th of September from the four capitals, provincial capitals in Pakistan and the Punjab president yesterday announced that it will be made at 5.30 in the evening. And the Pakistan People's Party has already gone into action for organising public rallies to organise a big welcome for Miss Bhutto. So once the date is announced everything will be ready to receive her and she will, inshallah, get a big reception in Pakistan because people are waiting since almost eight years to see her back."
  • Embargoed: 26th September 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA1RC1JH2YOPKJZGHQNGCVO7X4Q
  • Story Text: Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto aims to return from exile in October to contest national elections, a spokesman said on Monday (September 10).
    "The formal announcement will be made on the 14th of September from the four capitals, provincial capitals in Pakistan and the Punjab president yesterday announced that it will be made at 5.30 in the evening," Bhutto's spokesman Wajid Hassan told Reuters Television.
    He said Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party had already started to organise "a big welcome for Miss Bhutto" on her return to Pakistan for the first time in almost eight years.
    The announcement comes the same day as another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was arrested and deported to Saudi Arabia within hours of arriving home from exile vowing to end the rule of President Pervez Musharraf.
    President and army chief Musharraf, who seized power from Sharif in 1999, is preparing to seek another term in a presidential election in the national and provincial assemblies some time between September 15 and October
    A general election is due around the end of the year.
    Unlike Sharif, Bhutto is in talks on a pact with the president, whose popularity has slumped since he tried to fire the Supreme Court chief in March, to let her return.
    He said an agreement was close but had not yet been struck as there were still some issues to be resolved.
    Hassan said a sticking point in the negotiations was the right of the president to dissolve the National Assembly and dismiss governments. Bhutto wants presidents stripped of the power to do this.
    Bhutto has already been prime minister of Pakistan twice. On both occasions she was dismissed from office by the president for suspected corruption.
    "So we don't want that thing to repeat in the future. We want the powers to be diluted and to be, you know, chastened," Hassan said.
    "The president in power should be chastened", he said.
    Hassan also said those who held office between the years of 1988 and 1999 should be "immunised" so that all those people who had been victimised during this period were able to return to Pakistan and participate in elections.
    Bhutto also wants Musharraf to step down as army chief, immunity from prosecution for herself and others who ruled in the late 1980s and 1990s and the lifting of a ban on a prime minister serving a third term.
    "As far as my understanding with General Musharraf is concerned the ban on the twice elected prime minister must go before the election period kicks in and if that ban does not go then obviously the agreement is not there," Bhutto told a reporter in New York recently.
    In return, her party would bolster Musharraf's support base and help clear the way for him to run for re-election after he quits as army chief by backing a constitutional change waiving a bar on state servants running for office.
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