Telegraph : Bhutto: 'Contaminated' Musharraf must quit

Bhutto: 'Contaminated' Musharraf must quit

By Isambard Wilkinson, Pakistan Correspondent | November 14, 2007

Benazir Bhutto has demanded that President Pervez Musharraf quit office to bring an end to his "contaminated" rule of Pakistan.

After months of power-sharing talks, the former Pakistani prime minister told The Daily Telegraph that she had definitively broken off negotiations with the military ruler. "It is over with Musharraf," she said.

Speaking by telephone from her residence in Lahore, where she was earlier detained behind barbed wire and surrounded by hundreds of armed policemen to stop her leading a mass procession against emergency rule, Ms Bhutto said: "General Musharraf must quit.

"He must quit as president and as chief of army staff. I call on the international community to stop backing him.

"I would not serve as prime minister under a man who has repeatedly broken his promises, who is a dictator," she added, referring to him as "contaminated".

Her first unequivocal call for General Musharraf to resign suggested that Britain and America’s strategy for a "peaceful transition to democracy" was unravelling.

They had hoped that Ms Bhutto, who returned from eight years of self-imposed exile last month, would form a broad-based, secular government as a counter-force to growing Islamic militancy, serving as prime minister once Gen Musharraf had shed his uniform to become a civilian president.

Despite her comments, Pakistan’s tangled political web leaves all possibilities open, meaning that Ms Bhutto may have hardened her rhetoric to exert maximum pressure on the general.

When she was pressed on whether she categorically ruled out renewing talks with Gen Musharraf she explained that she had told a US diplomat in late night talks earlier this week that she doubted the general’s intentions to hold free and fair elections.

"This is a decision he has forced on me. The framework backed by the West has always been about restoring democracy. What they have backed has not happened on the ground," she said.

Police managed to prevent Ms Bhutto from leading the rally but scuffles with her supporters broke out across Pakistan, with shots reportedly in Karachi.

Her comments set off a flurry of diplomatic activity in the capital, Islamabad, as she sent the message that one of Gen Musharraf’s last supports had been kicked from underneath him.

"It will be almost impossible now for her to come to any agreement in the future with him," said a Western diplomat in the capital. "She has departed from the script."

Gen Musharraf now faces the choice of "rolling back" from the crisis by lifting the emergency or taking further autocratic steps to tighten his grip on power.

The general, who sacked the chief justice and most of the country’s most senior judges, needs to find one or two more judges to enable the Supreme Court to remove obstacles to him taking oath as president for second term perhaps later this week.

He has said that he will then step down as army chief but has so far given no indication that he will lift the emergency.

Washington is to dispatch the hard-hitting deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, who will travel to Islamabad later this week to impress upon the general America’s dissatisfaction with his plan to hold elections unless he first lifts emergency law.

Anne Patterson, the American ambassador to Islamabad demonstrated her concern that general was vacillating over his democratic commitments: "The United States is urging your government not to throw away in weeks what it has taken years to achieve," she said.

Pakistan rejected a Commonwealth deadline to end emergency rule in 10 days or face suspension.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, asked if the British Government backed that call, said: "Absolutely, the Commonwealth position was one that the UK played an important part in creating."

Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth in 1999 after Gen Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup. It was readmitted in 2004.

The exiled former prime minister Nawaz Sharif welcomed Ms Bhutto’s change of stance and called for a united opposition.

Questioned about Ms Bhutto’s sincerity, he replied: "I have to believe her because if we keep doubting each others intentions the cause of democracy will suffer."

Gen Musharraf was reported to be planning to visit Saudia Arabia, a key power-broker in Pakistani politics and Mr Sharif’s place of exile.

"I hope he does not come here to meet me," said Mr Sharif, who was unceremoniously deported by the general after a recent four-hour stay in Pakistan. "I am in no mood to talk to him".

Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, said he would launch a joint opposition campaign with Ms Bhutto if she agreed to boycott elections. Ms Bhutto has yet to announce such a move.