In his continued jibes at his principal opposition on Saturday, the president compared his incarceration to the exodus of the Sharifs post the 1999 coup. Addressing different delegations of party workers in the Punjab Governor House, President Asif Ali Zardari claimed that he had been given an offer to leave the country, and told that there was an aircraft ready to fly him out. However, claimed the president, he refused the offer – and actually threatened legal action against any move to expel him forcefully.
“I’m a son of Pakistan’s soil. I will live and die on this soil,” he said, adding that only the weak-hearted leave the country and had often disappointed the nation. The allusion, of course, was to the Sharifs, who went into exile a few months after a military coup overthrew the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government in 1999.
Earlier, President Zardari interacted with Lahore-based journalists at the Punjab Governor House, and talked on a number of issues – but his comments were all off the record.
Shahbaz hits back
The president finally did get some blowback from the Sharifs, however.
Addressing public gathering in Arifwala, the younger Sharif, Shahbaz decided to hit back at the president.
Though the Punjab chief minister has, over the past few months, given a number of fiery speeches against the president, this was the first direct reply to the president’s recent verbal assault.
He said that he would rather resign from his post, and sacrifice everything and anything, than welcome the president upon his arrival to the province. Shahbaz said that if Benazir Bhutto, former PPP chairperson and the late wife of President Zardari, was alive he would give her a hundred welcomes at the airport as she honoured the Charter of Democracy and respected democratic traditions.
He said that the president hatched conspiracies against the Punjab government through the PCO courts, tried to purchase members of Punjab Assembly through funds of the Intelligence Bureau, filled his Swiss banks accounts with plundered money and presented a guard of honour to Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf.
Referring to the president’s taunting of the Sharifs as “Mohajirs,” (migrants), Shahbaz said that hundreds of thousands of people had migrated to Pakistan during Partition.
The Punjab chief minister said that migration is an honour and a Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), adding that the president had “disgraced the honour of migration.”
Published in The Express Tribune, April 8th, 2012.
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