Army must help Supreme Court: Beg

The former COAS insists if the army intervenes, it will be constitutional.

LAHORE:

Former army chief General (retd) Mirza Aslam Beg has urged the army to help the Supreme Court uphold the principles of justice, otherwise the situation might deteriorate beyond salvage.

He said that if the army provides protection to the Supreme Court, “this will be a constitutional step”. He was speaking at Express News’ programme ‘Shahidnama’.

Highlighting the situation in Arab countries in the region like Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere, he said that the kind of “suffocation” people were enduring in the country might become intolerable and lead to a stormy situation, adding that the army was the only institution capable of pulling the country from the brink of disaster. He said that he did not want such conditions to prevail in Pakistan.

Mirza Aslam Beg said that the imposition of martial law was certain if the army did not “come forward”, adding that there was a possibility that Supreme Court judges “will resign and so will the lawmakers of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). Maybe the entire opposition opts to resign from the National Assembly”.

When he was asked whether Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had written a letter to the army chief, he said that he was not sure, but these things should not be made public “even if this is true”. He said that there was a possibility that the Supreme Court might have complained about non-compliance, adding that if it were true, it would be a portrait of an institution’s helplessness.

He said that he was basing his assumptions on information gathered after meeting different people, adding that there was just a “road between” his house and the residence of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

He said that in the first place, the army should not intervene after letting the situation deteriorate beyond the point of no-return.

He said that he had not written any letter directly to the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), adding that he had written an article in national newspapers, addressing the entire nation and the military commanders.

He clarified that the article had been prompted by a communiqué, in which the army’s general headquarters had urged the government to address prevailing problems. He said that he had contended that it was the government which was at the root of all problems, adding that he had just reminded them “of their constitutional obligations”.

He said that nobody spoke anything about the article when it was published simultaneously in four English- and seven Urdu-language newspapers, adding that comment had started pouring in when he had read out extracts from the same article at the residence of former chief of Jamaat-i-Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmed.







Published in The Express Tribune, July 22^nd, 2011.