JUI’s factional rivalry: ‘Sami kept out of APC to please Fazl’

Though not in parliament, JUI-S could have been invited for Taliban influence: Officials.

ISLAMABAD:

The two Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam factions do not get along, so one of them had to be dropped out from the All Parties Conference held on Monday.

Maulana Samiul Haq’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Sami (JUI-S) was not invited to the APC in which the country’s political and military leadership was invited. His party features nowhere in the government’s plans of initiating dialogue with the Pakistani Taliban.

Meanwhile, JUI’s Fazl group with its chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman managed to earn himself a special place in the APC as one of the proposed facilitators in the talks with the Taliban. However, it can be argued that the APC is for those political parties that are represented in the parliament, which is why Sami was not invited.

Fazl worked behind the scenes to get Sami removed from the government’s preferred list of facilitators, alleged a government official involved in the agenda setting for the APC.

“Although it was for parliamentary parties only, Sami could still be specially invited but the government did not want to offend Fazlur Rehman,” he told The Express Tribune on Tuesday.

Earlier, the PML-N government did invite Sami for facilitating the government’s intended peace negotiations.

“We did not receive any invitation from the government to attend the APC after the initial contact. They said it was for parliamentary parties only,” Syed Ahmed Shah, the JUI-S chief’s secretary, told The Express Tribune.

Nevertheless, JUI-F’s spokesperson Jan Achakzai denied his party chief had issues with the government inviting Sami. He said his party has wide political base throughout the country and it was a prominent stakeholder, particularly in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and FATA, while JUI-S, on the other hand, has no parliamentary representation.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2013.