APDM agrees to disagree on boycott
By Our Special Correspondent/Agencies

Islamabad—The APDM meeting held at the residence of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif concluded without reaching any conclusion regarding their participation in the upcoming elections. Nawaz Sharif was chairing the meeting of an alliance of 33 opposition parties and political groups in the Lahore Sunday evening to decide whether to boycott Pakistan’s Jan 8 parliamentary polls.
However, they were unable to agree on whether to demand that around 60 Supreme Court and high court judges that Musharraf sacked last month be immediately reinstated. Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Imran Khan maintained their stance to boycott the forthcoming elections and stressed that there would be no use of participating in the elections without restoration of judiciary and lifting of emergency in the country. However, PML (N) leader Raja Zafarul Haq said after the meeting that the APDM would continue to remain in the country. Earlier in the meeting, most of the participating political parties gave arguments in favour of taking part in the elections. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif now wants his party to take part in a January general election after failing to clinch a boycott pact with his rival Benazir Bhutto, party aides said on Sunday. Sharif had hoped that fellow opposition leader Bhutto would join an alliance of parties seeking to isolate President Pervez Musharraf in protest at his declaration of emergency rule, but now feels he has no choice but to participate.
“After failing to get (Bhutto’s) Pakistan People’s Party on board, he does not want the field to remain open for all Musharraf’s loyalists and he wants to turn the election into a referendum,” said Ahsan Iqbal, spokesman for Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N). “His recommendation is that after failing to have People’s Party on board, he is in favor of taking part,” he added, before a meeting of a cluster of parties with whom Sharif had sought to build a boycott consensus.
He said Sharif wanted the vote to be a referendum on reinstating judges Musharraf deposed on November3 to fend off challenges to his re-election while still army chief. “We should ask people to vote for us if they want restoration of the judiciary, so that we can block their attempt to legitimize the November3 action through parliament,” Iqbal said. Sharif and Bhutto failed to agree on whether to insist that the judges Musharraf sacked be restored to their positions before the election, and on whether to issue a deadline for other demands they did agree on.
Sharif, who is calling for the judges — including several deposed Supreme Court judges still under house arrest — to be reinstated prior to the election, has been barred from running because of past criminal convictions he says were politically motivated. Bhutto has filed her nomination papers for the election, arguing a boycott would leave the field open for a walkover by Musharraf’s allies and says she reserves the right to protest after the vote if she deems it was rigged.
“If People’s Party and other parties are participating in these elections, then it will be an exercise in futility if we are not part of the elections,” said Javed Hashmi, a top party official tipped as a possible candidate for prime minister. “We tried our level best, we went to Benazir Bhutto, we requested her ... (to) become part of this boycott. But then she decided to participate,” he added. A boycott by the two main opposition parties and smaller allies would have deprived the vote of credibility and prolonged instability that has raised concern about the nuclear-armed U.S. ally and its efforts to fight growing Islamist militancy.
Violence flared in the restive northwestern Swat valley on Sunday when a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a police checkpost, killing six people including two children and a policeman, the military said — the latest in a rash of clashes and attacks by Islamist insurgents.
Bhutto, who is on a private trip to Dubai to visit her family, says the next parliament should decide whether to reinstate the deposed judges, which include former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. The United States, keen to see stability and a moderate government focused on battling al Qaeda and pro-Taliban militants, has encouraged all parties to take part in the vote. Musharraf has decided to lift emergency rule and restore the suspended constitution on December 15, a day earlier than planned, Attorney General Malik Mohammad Qayyum said on Saturday. That leaves political parties three weeks before a January8 election.