Countrywide protests against Sharif Brothers Ban

Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:53 pm

Countrywide protests against Sharif Brothers Ban Thousands of protesters marched across Pakistan on Thursday, torching pictures of President Asif Ali Zardari as a nervous government put paramilitaries on alert and detained 30 lawmakers.

Security forces sealed off the Punjab provincial assembly but thousands of people stormed the barricades for a sit-in outside the governor’s residence in Lahore, punching their fists in the air, local and international media reported.

It follows a Supreme Court ruling Wednesday which barred opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, from running for office.

The protesters torched two large hoardings showing Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and beat pictures of Zardari with sticks and shoes before setting them ablaze.

Many shops across the country have closed and the government, alarmed about the mobs’ reaction to the court ruling, has deployed riot police.

“The Punjab government has requested the deployment of the Rangers and we have accepted their request,” a spokesman for the interior ministry told an international news agency, referring to a paramilitary force.

Lawyers and opposition activists heeded a call from Sharif for nationwide action to condemn the ruling, which also threw his brother Shahbaz out of his post as chief minister of the Punjab province.

Rallies were also reported in Faisalabad, Rawalpindi and Muzaffarabad, as well as in 15 districts in Punjab.

In Islamabad, enraged protesters turned to violence when police attempted to bar them from torching tyres on roads. Hundreds of protesters torched various vehicles and hurled stones on law enforcement personnel who fired tear-gas shells to disperse them.

Protest rallies also held in other provinces, especially in various areas of Sindh consider a stronghold of ruling Pakistan Peoples Party.

Zardari and Nawaz Sharif have long fought over the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militancy.

In Lahore, police detained about 30 lawmakers outside parliament while riot police armed with truncheons and tear gas stood guard.

“Police bundled the lawmakers into waiting vans and drove them to an unknown place,” Rana Mashhud, the regional parliament’s deputy speaker, told reporters.

The government has suspended the provincial assembly in Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city, bringing Punjab under Islamabad’s direct control.

Sharif, 59, has re-emerged as a key player in Pakistani politics since he returned here after seven years in exile in Saudi Arabia.

“I think the nation will have to rise against such actions. I assure the nation (that) if they back us, we will establish a democratic set-up in this country,” he said late Wednesday after the court ruling.

His conservative Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) — the country’s second biggest party — is demanding the reinstatement of constitutional court judges sacked when former president Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule in 2007.

Police said hundreds protested in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where mobs late Wednesday attacked banks and torched a memorial to former premier Benazir Bhutto, Zardari’s wife, who was assassinated in December 2007.

Some 700 people rallied in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, chanting “Murderer of democracy, Zardari, Zardari!” and torching his picture, reports said.

Wali Mohammad Khan, president of the PML-N lawyers’ forum, said the verdict was “political suicide” for Zardari and had “created chaos”.

On Wednesday the country’s stock market lost five percent, its worst single day performance in two and a half years.

The Supreme Court confirmed a lower court verdict in Lahore last June that Nawaz Sharif was ineligible to stand in a by-election.

It followed an earlier conviction over the 1999 “hijacking” of an airliner carrying Musharraf, Pakistan’s then army chief.

Sharif, who was prime minister at the time, denied it landing rights, but Musharraf landed anyway and led the coup which toppled him.

Countrywide protests against Sharif Brothers Ban

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