PAKISTAN:Benazir Bhutto called on a "contaminated" President Pervez Musharraf to quit power yesterday, ruling out further co-operation and saying her party may boycott elections.
"It is time for him to go. He must quit as president," she said by phone from the Lahore house where she was under house arrest. "I will not serve as prime minister as long as Musharraf is president." The strong rhetoric marked a significant departure from her earlier position and could signal a momentous shift in Pakistan's unfolding power game.
Previously she had only called for him to resign as head of the army. Just a few days earlier, she was refusing to rule out a powersharing deal with the general, who imposed emergency rule 11 days ago. But analysts said it could still prove to be a gambit in a military-assisted return to power. Ms Bhutto was placed under house arrest on Monday night, thwarting plans to lead a "long march" motorcade across Punjab to the capital, Islamabad.
Several thousand officers ringed the house and approach roads were blocked with barbed wire and trucks filled with sand. For good measure, the front gate of the house - officially turned into a "sub-jail" - was locked from the outside.
Lahore police chief Aftab Cheema said there were also security worries, citing intelligence reports that up to three foreign suicide bombers had reached Lahore on a mission to kill Ms Bhutto. "It is meant for her own safety," he said of the security arrangements. Bhutto officials rejected this as an excuse.
In phone interviews Ms Bhutto criticised Mr Musharraf in unusually strong terms. "Negotiations between us have broken down over the massive use of police force . . . There's no question now of getting this back on track because anyone who is associated with Gen Musharraf gets contaminated," she told Reuters.
A rival opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, welcomed her apparent change of heart and called for a united opposition front to unseat Mr Musharraf.
"What I'm hearing on TV, her statements today that she has cut off all her links with Pervez Musharraf and wants him to resign from both offices, I think is a positive development," he said by phone from Saudi Arabia where he is in exile.
Ms Bhutto has been under pressure to sever ties with Mr Musharraf since March 9th, when he sparked the present crisis through a clumsy attempt to fire the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
Yesterday's statements suggested she was close to a definitive break. A senior diplomat in Islamabad, while calling the new statements "very strong", was cautious. "It will be very hard for her to roll back [ from this] but it's been done before," he said. "Pakistani politics has always been a very murky game."
Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband, backed a Commonwealth threat to suspend Pakistan unless Mr Musharraf rescinds emergency rule by November 22nd.
Thousands of people remain in jail, many of them lawyers. Human Rights Watch said 45 per cent of high court lawyers in Baluchistan were behind bars. Yesterday the government banned the import of satellite dishes.Islamist violence in North-West Frontier province worsened. The army said it had killed four fighters in the Swat Valley. A boy was killed in a suicide bombing in Peshawar. - (Guardian service)