Upper house proceedings: Pandemonium as Nisar, Rabbani clash in Senate

Opposition rejects official numbers on drone casualties.

ISLAMABAD:

The Senate proceedings on Wednesday degenerated into pandemonium after Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar and PPP senator Mian Raza Rabbani exchanged harsh words, prompting a walkout from the upper house by the opposition.

The war of words started after Nisar presented figures of casualties from terrorist attacks, stats which were swiftly challenged by an ANP senator who called them a “pack of lies”.

Challenging the government’s statistics on causalities in the US led drone strikes in Pakistan, the lawmakers in the upper house termed the details ‘beyond comprehension’.



Defence Ministry in a written statement told the Senate that in the last five years 67 civilians and 2,160 terrorists had been killed in 317 drone strikes. The ministry was providing these details in reply to Senator Nisar Muhammad’s query, made in March earlier this year.

“No civilians were killed in 235 drone strikes in 2012 and 84 attacks in 2013 so far,” the statement claimed.

The ministry said the year 2010 witnessed the most attacks. “In 115 drone attacks, 751 terrorists were killed while only two civilians died,” it added. According to the data, the highest numbers of civilians killed were 35 in 2011 and 21 in 2008.



Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan also provided figures of the total number of deaths from terrorist activities in Pakistan since 2002. “12,404 people were killed and 26,881 during the period,” Nisar told the house.

He was replying to a question by Senator Karim Ahmed Khawaja about casualties in terrorist attacks. Nisar said 4,390 people had been killed in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) since 2002. “In Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), 3,851 people lost their lives terrorist attacks,” he added.

He added that the government had paid Rs5646.9 million in compensation to the heirs of people killed in such attacks. He said the bulk of the amount, i.e., Rs2143.3 million had gone to the K-P.

“These figures are ridiculous. It is a joke. The minister has given wrong figures here,” said Senator Zahid Khan from Awami National Party (ANP).

“The ministry or the security agencies do not collect these figures. The provincial government has provided them,” Nisar retorted.

The leader of the opposition Senator Aitzaz Ahsan contested Nisar directly. He asked the interior minister to take back the statistics and return with correct numbers. “Or else, we would walk out of the house and boycott the house’s proceedings,” Ahsan warned.

“The opposition is always looking for excuses to walk out,” this comment by Nisar’s triggered a heated altercation among the members of the two benches.

Later the combined opposition sans Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) did walk out of the house after Nisar remained unmoved in his seat. Leader of the house in Senate Raja Zafarul Haq, however, apologised for any rude attitude.

After the opposition’s walk out, the Senate Chairman Nayar Bukhari suspended the proceedings for 15 minutes and asked the treasury benches’ members to go and bring back the estranged senators from opposition. The boycotting senators, however, did not return to the house for almost an hour forcing the legislative business to a halt before the house adjourned.

Death penalties

In reply to a question, Nisar told the house that the government was not planning to convert any death penalties into life sentences. Since 2002, the minister said, 13,233 death penalties were announced while 501 of them were executed.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2013.