ISLAMABAD, Sept 6: A pall of uncertainty hung over the National Assembly on Wednesday as a member of the Balochistan National Party (Mengal) resigned from the house in protest and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal threatened to do the same over different reasons.
Members expressed mixed feelings about the military’s role in their speeches marking the Defence Day, with opposition attacks directed at President Pervez Musharraf.
Abdul Rauf Mengal, the only member of the BNP-M in the assembly, resigned in a defiant style, saying the Baloch people would fight to the finish for their rights.
The resignation, which he handed to the assembly secretary after an angry speech, was in line with a party decision to quit both houses of parliament and the Balochistan Assembly in protest against the Aug 26 killing of Baloch leader Akbar Khan Bugti in a military operation and what it sees as his dishonourable burial.
“This state loves not the Baloch people but their resources and to loot (them),” he said about the military crackdown in his province and added: “So long as they will want our heads we will offer heads (for sacrifice). The heads will not finish but the military will finish.”
The MMA said its 66 members would resign from the house if the government went ahead with its plans to get the women’s rights bill passed by parliament.
“The whole of the MMA will walk out and resign if the bill (seeking amendments to Hudood laws) is passed,” he told the house about an overnight alliance decision that seemed to shift its previous focus on possible dissociation from the PML-led coalition government in Balochistan.
The law is due to taken up by the house on Thursday.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi rejected the allegation that the bill negated the Islamic Hudood and said about the MMA: “If they want to run away let them run away.”
But Law and Justice Minister Mohammad Wasi Zafar later told reporters a joint committee of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League and the MMA was likely to resolve the controversy over the bill, which enjoys a tacit support of the People’s Party Parliamentarians, though it stands for repeal of all the four Hudood ordinances.
Mr Mengal, whose resignation was the second protest exit from the present assembly, said his party’s Senator Sanaullah Baloch would also submit his resignation from the upper house if he was allowed to return home from his foreign trip or he would fax a letter to the Senate chairman.
Most opposition members and some from the coalition went to Mr Mengal to embrace him and say good-bye after his speech during which he accused the army of trying to further divide the country after the 1971 sepa ration of former East Pakistan and called for intervention by the United Nations and human rights organisations to stop the military action in Balochistan.
Raja Nadir Pervez of the PML-N, a veteran of the 1965 war, started a mini debate on the Defence of Pakistan Day accusing generals of lowering a high prestige the military enjoyed then.
PPP’s Aitzaz Ahsan questioned the justification of celebrating the anniversary of a war whose gains at the battle-front, he said, were lost by then military president Field Marshal Ayub Khan on a conference table to then Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri at a Soviet-brokered peace deal in Tashkent.
But the celebrations were strongly defended by Education Minister and ex-general Javed Ashraf, Labour and Manpower Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan and Zeb Gohar Ayub, a daughter-in-law of the late Ayub Khan.
PPP’s Naheed Khan demanded that the government disclose details of what she called surrender by military authorities to militants in North Waziristan in a peace accord signed by the two sides on Tuesday.
While Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain said he would ask Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao to make a statement in the house though he could not force him to do so, Mr Niazi denied there was any surrender in the accord which he said was ‘very good’.
Pro-MMA member from North Waziristan Maulana Merajuddin said the accord was ‘nobody’s victory or defeat’.
The parliamentary affairs minister, while responding to a call-attention notice from five PPP members, said the Crescent Investment Bank had committed financial irregularities, including those related to maintaining ‘parallel books’, loans given to companies for investment in real estate and borrowings at high rates. But he ignored the PPP members’ queries about why the head of the bank, Salim Altaf, had been appointed chairman of Erra.
