Pakistani Elections Postponed Until Feb. 18
KARACHI, Pakistan _ Pakistan’s election authority announced Wednesday that nationwide parliamentary elections due next week will be postponed until Feb. 18. It blamed the delay on the destruction of electoral materials during unrest triggered by the assassination last Thursday of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
The decision left Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party and other opposition groups in a quandary over how to respond after their repeated warnings that they wouldn’t accept a delay in the polls, originally set for Jan. 8.
Some opposition officials had threatened to call protests. Protests, however, would risk fresh violence that would further destabilize the nuclear-armed country, already gripped by tensions over Bhutto’s death, demands for President Pervez Musharraf’s ouster and violence by Islamic insurgents allied with al Qaida and the Taliban.
But accepting the delay could be portrayed as capitulation to Musharraf that could fuel splinters in the opposition.
A postponement also could hurt the Pakistan Peoples Party by preventing it from swiftly capitalizing on the huge outpouring of sympathy generated by Bhutto’s slaying, which some experts predicted could sweep the party back to power for the first time since 1994.
The party and the other major opposition group, the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, opposed a postponement, charging that it would give the government time to rig the vote in favor of the pro-Musharraf Pakistani Muslim League-Q.
Chief Election Commissioner Qazi Mohammad Farooq asserted at a news conference in Islamabad that the polls must be delayed because of the wave of violence that paralyzed Pakistan after Bhutto’s death.
The unrest “affected printing of ballot papers for four days and created a hindrance of the distribution of ballot papers,” Farooq said. “Due to these ground realities, supplying papers and voter lists was not possible on Jan. 8.”
“In the light of the circumstances, the new date for general elections is Feb. 18, 2008, instead of Jan. 8,” he said.
Farooq pledged that the elections would “be fair, free and transparent,” and he urged the opposition parties “to accept this decision in the supreme national interest and participate fully.”
The commission, however, is widely viewed as a tool of Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 military coup and whom opposition politicians charge with playing a role in Bhutto’s slaying.
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(c) 2008, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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PHOTOS (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): PAKISTAN
GRAPHICS (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): PAKISTAN
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