Nawaz repeating politics of 90s, says Zardari

ISLAMABAD: The Co-chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and former president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, bitterly criticised the PML-N government on Monday, apparently ending his reconciliation policy. He warned Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that he was repeating the politics of 1990s and said the result would be disastrous.
“We accepted the results of 2013 General Elections for the sake of democracy, although those elections were ROs’ elections. The decisions just announced by the Election Tribunals have proved our point that the PML-N received outside help and was made to win the elections,” he said in a statement that was issued from London and released through his media office in Islamabad.
The statement came two days after the PPP had decided to end the reconciliation policy, drawing the Nawaz Sharif government to the political battlefield.
Asif Zardari warned that the politics of revenge should immediately be stopped or it would have disastrous consequences.
He said that at a time when innocent citizens were being killed by indiscriminate shelling of border villages by the enemy, when the Pakistan Army was fighting a decisive war against the terrorists and also fighting at the borders, Nawaz Sharif, instead of challenging the real enemy, was targeting the PPP and other political opponents.
The former president said that the steps being taken by the government clearly indicated that they were dividing the nation in an attempt to save their natural allies the Taliban and the terrorists and weaken the war against terror.
Asif Ali Zardari said the PPP stood fully with the army in the ongoing war against terrorism. “We salute our Jawans who are giving the ultimate sacrifice in this war,” he said.
He said that first Qasim Zia and the son of Senator Bangash were arrested and now Dr Asim had been arrested. Immediately after that, arrest warrants for former prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and ailing Makhdoom Amin Fahim had been issued. The bureaucrats in Sindh were being harassed by the FIA and NAB. “The chief secretary of Sindh is on bail. All this unmistakably presents a clear pattern of political harassment and revenge,” he said. “By doing so, Sindh has been immobilised under the direct orders from the Prime Minister’s House.” he added.
The former president said that in Punjab a video surfaced in which a provincial minister, Rana Mashhood, was seen receiving money on behalf of the Mian brothers but he had not yet been arrested.
Asif Zardari said that the PPP was a party of fearless followers who could not be defeated by the threat of executions, lashings or imprisonment. “It seems that Nawaz Sharif has not learnt any lesson from the past. We are not the ones who fled to Jeddah after seeking pardon,” he said.
The former president said the nation very well knew that the ‘honour’ of applying for pardon by a politician in the country only belonged to Nawaz Sharif.
“Today Nawaz Sharif is the prime minister of the country and Shahbaz Sharif is the Punjab chief minister only because of the PPP. It was the PPP which removed the ban on becoming prime minister or chief minister for the third time — although it was evident to us that it will only serve the interests of the Mian brothers,” he added.
He said that actions being taken by the federal agencies in Sindh were a clear violation of the Constitution. If they wanted to conduct a fair accountability, they should first take action against a federal minister who had given a confessional statement before a magistrate that he had been involved in money laundering for the Sharif brothers. “Only then we will know how clean the followers of the N-League are,” he added. He demanded that the report of Justice Najafi on the Model Town killings should be made public and all involved in this gruesome murder of innocent people be arrested. He also demanded that all characters involved in the Asghar Khan case should also be apprehended.
The former president asked if those who had killed 14 people, including women, in the Model Town tragedy were not terrorists. “Why they were not being arrested.” He said that this dark night of injustice would come to an end very soon.