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| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistan prepares for presidential referendum |
| 2002-04-29 |
| Pakistanis appear to believe the result of Tuesday's referendum to give military ruler Pervez Musharraf five more years as president is a foregone conclusion despite protests from opposition parties. The military regime has mobilised all its resources to ensure victory for the general who seized power in a 1999 coup and named himself president in June last year. Well, he's kinda the military's candidate, isn't he?Guess it's understandable... Private transport has been commandeered to take supporters and civil servants to the polling stations and there are growing concerns among political opponents and independent analysts over potential ballot rigging. No electoral rolls are being used and people will not be required to show official identification cards at the polling stations, so "indelible" ink used to mark the fingers of voters is the only thing to prevent multiple voting. "Vote early and often!" The Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, an umbrella group of anti-Musharraf religious and political parties, was due to hold a small protest in Karachi Monday after being denied permission for a larger rally. That's the old-line crooks... Some 15,000 people turned out at the first officially sanctioned anti-referendum rally in Lahore on Saturday, where party leaders comdemned the ballot as a farce and called for a boycott. Pakistan People's Party spokesman Nazir Dhoki said Musharraf had already engineered his victory. And he was damned jealous he wasn't able to engineer one for himself... "We have decided to boycott the referendum because we know our negative votes will be thrown into the dustbin. It is a one-sided affair and there is nobody to check bogus voting," he said. Dontcha hate it when that happens? "It is an open fraud. We know that ballot boxes will be stuffed by yes votes. Rigging has already started," he added, referring to police beatings meted out to drivers who refused to surrender their vehicles. Qazi and his religious bloc and the PPP all hate the idea. Qazi because it blocks his own ambitions, the old-line parties because of Perv's antigraft line. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |