NYT : Pakistan Detains Bhutto in Bid to Stop Protest March

Pakistan Detains Bhutto in Bid to Stop Protest March

By DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ | November 13, 2007

LAHORE, Pakistan, Tuesday, Nov. 13 — The Pakistani government placed the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest on Monday for seven days. The move was an attempt to block a planned “long march” of her supporters from this eastern city to the capital, Islamabad.

Police officers arrested hundreds of workers from her political party around this city on Tuesday. Riot police officers were deployed outside government buildings here as well, in anticipation of protests by Ms. Bhutto’s supporters.

It was unclear what Ms. Bhutto would do in response to the government’s move. Dozens of police officers and trucks surrounded the house where she was staying here. On Friday, a huge police presence in the city of Rawalpindi prevented a rally planned by her there.

A government spokesman, Tariq Azim Khan, citing intelligence data, suggested that Ms. Bhutto could be a target for militants. She survived a suicide-bombing attack last month in Karachi when she returned to Pakistan, after eight years in self-imposed exile, to lead her party in parliamentary elections.

Although there is widespread agreement that a threat to her exists, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is widely seen here as using the specter of terrorism to expand his own powers and squelch all opposition. Party officials scoffed at the notion of a threat. “It’s a drama — there is no reality to it,” a local spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Several dozens members of Ms. Bhutto’s party showed up to protest at the police barricades surrounding the house where she was staying Tuesday. It was unclear whether more would show.

The government, now nine days into an emergency decree that has effectively put Pakistan under martial law, would stop the protest in the same way it shut down a rally that had been planned by Ms. Bhutto on Friday, Mr. Khan said.

On that day, in a huge show of force, lines of policemen, barbed wire and concrete barricades confined Ms. Bhutto to her home in Islamabad. At the same time, thousands of police officers locked down the site where the rally was to have taken place, in a park in Rawalpindi, the garrison city close to Islamabad.

Mr. Khan said he did not know the details of how the police would prevent protesters from converging on the route of the planned march this week, 160 miles through Punjab Province from Lahore to Islamabad.

About 140 of Ms. Bhutto’s party workers were killed in the attack in Karachi on Oct. 18. The government has used that attack as public justification for stopping her protests. It has also made clear that any demonstrations are illegal under the emergency decree.

The decree has also cast uncertainty on parliamentary elections, scheduled for January.

Two of Pakistan’s bigger opposition parties said Monday that they would probably boycott the elections if emergency rule was still in place. Ms. Bhutto has not said whether she would pull her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, out of the elections. General Musharraf, said Sunday that emergency rule would continue at least until the elections.

On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto called the announcement a “positive” but insufficient step. She assumed a slightly tougher tone on Monday, suggesting that her negotiations with General Musharraf had come to an end.

“We cannot work with anyone who has suspended the Constitution, imposed emergency rule and oppressed the judiciary,” she said in Lahore.

Raza Zafarul Haz, the chairman of one of the country’s biggest parties, the Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said that for free and fair elections to go ahead, emergency rule would have to be lifted and judges who were fired after the imposition of the rule would need to be reinstated.

“Under the current circumstances it is very difficult to expect there will be fair elections in the country,” Mr. Haz said. His party will make its final decision within a week on whether to participate, he said.

Liaqat Baloch, the secretary general of Pakistan’s most popular Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said the party was considering withholding its candidates if the emergency was still in place in January.

Despite Ms. Bhutto’s tougher comments on Monday, analysts said they believed she had not completely moved away from her original plan, devised with the backing of the Bush administration, to seek a power-sharing deal with General Musharraf.

As the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which has usually commanded about a third of the popular vote, Ms. Bhutto is trying to steer a path between a desire to return to power and not to appear to be too close to the widely unpopular president.

Ms. Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan twice and was twice dismissed before she was able to complete her terms.

Separately, foreign ministers from the Commonwealth of Britain and its former colonies said Pakistan would be suspended from the organization unless the decree was repealed and General Musharraf stepped down as army chief by Nov. 22, The Associated Press reported.

Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and David Rohde from Lahore, Pakistan.