The Hindu : Front Page : Clampdown thwarts Sharif show of force

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Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007
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Clampdown thwarts Sharif show of force

Nirupama Subramanian

Opposition parties call for strike on Tuesday

ISLAMABAD: Trucks parked across the main approach road, and hundreds of policemen and paramilitary personnel standing guard ensured that nothing on two legs that did not have the right letters from the Defence and Interior Ministries or valid travel tickets got any closer than 2 km to the airport for hours before the plane carrying former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was to touch down on Monday.

A shuttle service picked up departing passengers from and dropped off arrivals at the first barricade, 5 km from the airport. Plainclothesmen boarded the vans at points in between and checked tickets that people held out.

Red alert sounded

As Mr. Sharif, returning from exile after seven years, boarded a PIA flight in London on Sunday night, a red alert was declared at the airport here, ostensibly in response to a terror threat but it served the purpose of keeping out the media and activists of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) who were expected to turn out for the returning opposition leader’s welcome. This correspondent had to turn back 2 km from the airport.

Journalists who reached the airport on Sunday night were the only ones present when Mr. Sharif’s flight landed. Even they were ordered to leave but won the right to stay on in the parking lot of the airport after tough negotiations with security officials.

Some journalists bought tickets to Lahore to get inside the airport. But the authorities made communication as tough as possible.

Cell phones stopped working inside the barricaded area and some television journalists made calls to their offices from the landlines of residents in the area.

Activists of the PML (N), who were supposed to have turned out in their thousands from all over the country to fill the roads to the airport to welcome Mr. Sharif, were not much visible. One small group managed to reach close to the airport from the Rawalpindi side but were quickly dispersed with teargas. Some rallyists were held in Islamabad.

Their sympathisers put it down to the overnight crackdown on the leadership of the PML (N), and the tight security measures that did not allow political workers to enter the city.

Top leaders of the PML (N), including chairperson Raj Zafrul Haq and, the former President, Rafiq Tarar, were arrested on Sunday night.

Other opposition leaders such as Jamaat-i-Islami’s Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazlur Rehman of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami, who are together in the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition, were placed under house arrest on Sunday night.

They are part of the All Parties Democracy Movement that pledged to turn out in Mr. Sharif’s support.

The APDM has given a strike call on Tuesday to protest the deportation of the PML (N) leader to Saudi Arabia. But PML (N) critics, such as Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid, mocked the party’s inability to mobilise activists in large numbers.

“For political activists, barricades are there to be broken. But you can do it only when you have the numbers. If there had been 10 lakh people as the PML (N) had promised, the barricades would not have mattered, no one would have been able to stop them,” Mr. Rashid said on Dawn television.

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