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Nasrullah Khan Dies
Reuters • Associated Press, Arab News
ISLAMABAD, 28 September 2003 — The grand old man of Pakistani politics, who brought the two main opposition parties together in the fight against the country’s military ruler, died yesterday, raising concerns over the future of the alliance.
Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, 85, died of a heart attack, his doctors said.
Khan was admitted to a hospital in Islamabad on Tuesday after he complained of chest pain during a meeting of party leaders.
Khan, who headed the Pakistan Democratic Party, brought together the rival parties of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif on one platform against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf.
Bhutto and Sharif, both living in exile, accepted Khan as the chief of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), after Musharraf led a coup against Sharif in 1999.
“It is a serious setback to the alliance,” Farhatullah Babur, member of the upper house and a spokesman for Bhutto’s Pakistan’s Peoples Party (PPP), told Reuters.
“He had kept the two parties with opposing political views together under the ARD,” Babur added.
“It was his personality that had kept the two rival parties, with opposing political views, together under the ARD,” Babur added.
The ARD, along with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal — an alliance of religious parties — regularly protests and boycotts Parliament, demanding that Musharraf, who is president and chief of army, quit one of the two posts.
Political analysts say the PPP and Sharif’s faction of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are likely to find it difficult to replace Khan with someone acceptable to both.
In an attempt to put more pressure on Musharraf, Khan this month traveled to London to meet with Bhutto. He also went to Saudi Arabia to get the support of Nawaz Sharif. He urged them to return to Pakistan, despite the fact both face arrest if they come back.
Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League party, said Khan’s death had created a vacuum in Pakistani politics.
“He was the last politician of the kind who never bowed before dictatorship. I cannot see any other politician who can take his place,” Hussain said in a statement.
Khan spent most of his political life in the opposition, cobbling alliances against the government of the time. He spent several years in jail during the 1960s and 1970s for his stance.
He was criticized by his opponents for his party becoming a part of the Cabinet of former military ruler Gen. Mohammad Ziaul Haq.
But Khan was later instrumental in forming a democracy movement that campaigned for years against Zia’s martial law.
Khan’s funeral will be held today in the central Pakistani town of Khan Garh, where he was born.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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