Zardari vows to clip Pak President's controversial powers

Washington, Sep 4 (PTI) Pakistan's ruling P.P.P. chief
Asif Ali Zardari, the front-runner in the race for presidency,
vowed to trim the President's sweeping powers on Thursday,
which included authority to dissolve Parliament and dismiss
Premier.

"If I am elected president, one of my highest priorities
will be to support the prime minister, the National Assembly
and the Senate to amend the Constitution to bring back into
balance the powers of the presidency and thereby reduce its
ability to bring down democratic governance," he said in an
Ope-Ed piece in 'The Washington Post'.

His comments came ahead of the September six Presidential
poll in Pakistan, which will witness a triangular contest
among Zardari, P.M.L.-N.'s nominee Saeed-uz-Zaman Siddiqui and
P.M.L.-Q.'s Mushahid Hussain Sayed.

"Two military dictators, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and Pervez
Musharraf, reconfigured the constitution to consolidate their
power; they broadened the president's responsibilities to
include the authority to sack democratically elected
governments," Zardari said.

Amid allegations that his party's government resorted to
the 'selective' reinstatement of judges sacked by Musharraf
during the emergency rule last year, he said it is essential
that Pakistan's independent judiciary must be reconstituted.

The Pakistan government has so far restored 12 of the 60
deposed judges.

Former Premier Nawaz Sharif's P.M.L.-N. recently withdrew
from Pakistan's P.P.P.-led ruling coalition accusing Zardari's
party of reneging on several agreements to restore the deposed
judges at one go. Sharif had also demanded that the
President's sweeping powers should be curtailed.

In the Op-Ed piece, Zardari said the majority of
Pakistan's people have been "ignored and even subjugated" by
the country's 'establishment', a euphemism for army.

"This concentration of unchecked power has strained our
government to the point of fracture. The P.P.P. is the only
party with support in all four provinces as well as in
(Pakistan-occupied) Kashmir and the federally administered
tribal areas. The P.P.P.'s success in democratising the
presidency will strengthen Pakistan's viability as a nation,"
he said.

Zardari said Pakistani politics has always been a
struggle between democratic forces around the country and "an
elite oligarchy, located exclusively in a region stretching
between Lahore and Rawalpindi-Islamabad."

"The provinces of Sindh, North West Frontier (Province)
and Balochistan, as well as all of rural Punjab, have often
been excluded from governance," Zardari said in the article
titled 'Democracy Within Our Reach'.

Zardari's comments in The Post come against a backdrop of
private concerns expressed in the U.S. and elsewhere on his
running for the Presidency.