LAHORE: The Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) will file a case against British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the UK for harbouring Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader Altaf Hussain who “headed a fascist organisation and was living like a king there through the money sent to him from his home country.”
After chairing a party meeting here, PTI Chairman Imran Khan accused President Pervez Musharraf and Altaf Hussain of bloodshed in Karachi and called upon the opposition to unite on a one-point agenda of getting rid of Musharraf and dictatorship.
Khan said the disturbance in Karachi was not unexpected because the issue had been raised in the National Assembly session only a day earlier, but the government did nothing to prevent the bloodshed.
“Instead of taking steps for maintaining law and order in Karachi, it got the MQM rally arranged intentionally to sabotage the reception of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohamed Chaudhary which was expected to be much better than Lahore,” he said.
Khan said that Musharraf was not tired of talking about enlightened moderation on the one hand and had joined hands with “top terrorist” MQM leader Altaf Hussain on the other for remaining in power.
“The hardened criminals of MQM set at liberty by the government continued firing bullets at the people but the police and the paramilitary soldiers did not fire even a single teargas shell at them,” the PTI chief said, adding that 10 activists of his party were among those who sustained bullet injuries.
The PTI, he said, was consulting lawyers to lodge an FIR against Gen Pervez Musharraf and Altaf Husain for the Karachi killings. He said the MQM was a fascist organisation like Hitler’s Nazi Party. “Nobody dared to challenge the Nazi Party because it got its opponents eliminated. The MQM first fired bullets on the people and then tried to portray itself as a victim,” he said.
Meanwhile, the British media is wondering why Altaf Hussain, a British citizen, is being allowed by the UK government to run Karachi affairs, and that too through violent means.
“He has no plans to return to Pakistan,” said Daily Telegraph in a piece titled ‘Running Karachi from London’.
When the newspaper asked why Hussain was not deported to Pakistan before he was granted citizenship, a British diplomat said: “He has not committed a crime on British soil.”
The newspaper said supporters of Hussain, 53, were accused of playing a bloody part in clashes with opposition supporters. “The man in-charge of Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, was at his usual command-and-control post at the weekend: A sofa in north London.
“As his fiefdom descended into brutal violence, with the deaths of at least 40 people reported amid the worst political bloodshed Pakistan has witnessed in years, Altaf Hussain directed his followers by telephone from a safe place, more than 5,000 miles away.
“His headquarters, or ‘international secretariat’, is not in the Pakistani port city but housed in a red-brick office block opposite a supermarket on Edgeware High Street,” the newspaper report said.
The newspaper quoted him as saying that he had called for peace. “But as tens of thousands of his followers sat cross-legged in reverential silence as they listened to their leader’s telephonic address relayed by loudspeakers, in another street armed MQM activists fired directly into the crowds of opposition protesters.
“Hussain has lived in Britain since arriving in 1992 for a ‘kidney operation’. He has since become a British citizen, while his party governs five cities and the populous Sindh province.
“Hussain, who spent part of Sunday speaking on the telephone to Gen Musharraf, warned Pakistan’s leader not to make any deals with exiled leaders, such as his rival Benazir Bhutto, that would see the military ruler resign from the army,” it added “The situation in South Asia does not allow (General) Musharraf to take off his uniform, for without it he will have no power at all. Because of activities ... in Afghanistan as well as our own country, the Taliban (influence) is growing very strong,” Hussain told Daily Telegraph.
“He is doing his level best to fight these groups. (General) Musharraf is a very brave man. Only he can prevent the Talibanisation of Pakistan,” asserted Altaf in the interview.
“Unlike former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto, Hussain is an exile whose party has consolidated its grip. But Karachi remains tense.
“His political addresses by telephone have been known to last up to four hours, while a Western diplomat in Pakistan described the MQM as ‘something out of Chicago - nobody leaves the party’.
“While Hussain promotes the party as a ‘secular’ cause and courts the middle-class vote, his supporters are known to extort a goonda tax from Karachi businesses.
“Hussain, who once drove a taxi in Chicago for a living, micro-manages the MQM with acute attention to detail,” the report said. - Internews |
