Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf will quit as army chief if he is re-elected and will be sworn in as a civilian, his lawyer said yesterday, in a move that would end eight years of military rule.
Musharraf, a key US ally who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, is due to seek a second five-year mandate as president in a vote by the outgoing parliament that is due before Oct. 15.
"If elected for a second term as president, General Pervez Musharraf shall relinquish charge of [the post of chief of army staff soon after elections and before taking the oath of president for the second term," lawyer Sharfuddin Pirzada told the Supreme Court.
The lawyer was speaking during a hearing into opposition challenges to the Pakistani leader's rule.
If Musharraf wins, he is expected to take the oath within one month of the poll, as the government has said his current term in office ends on Nov. 15.
The move was confirmed by the deputy information minister, Tariq Azeem.
"The time has come for Musharraf to shed his military uniform," he said.
"Legally he has to doff his uniform by Nov. 15. He will have to hang up his uniform before starting his next term, it is a matter of days and not weeks now," he said.
Musharraf has run into a political and legal minefield over his plans to be re-elected as president-in-uniform, with opposition parties calling on him to resign from the army or to quit altogether.
He has been beset by crises since his botched attempt in March to sack Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, which sparked nationwide protests and a spate of judicial activism.
Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has said a proposed power-sharing deal with Musharraf that has been the subject of months of negotiations depended on whether he would quit his military role.
Bhutto, who has been living in Dubai and London to avoid corruption charges in her homeland, announced on Friday that she intends to return to Pakistan on Oct. 18, with or without a deal.
Pakistani authorities a week ago expelled another ex-premier, Nawaz Sharif, when he tried to fly home to challenge Musharraf, the man who ousted him eight years ago.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing petitions by the country's leading fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan and an association of pro-democracy lawyers.
The appeals argue that Musharraf should not be allowed to hold his military and civilian offices at the same time.
But they also oppose his aim for re-election by the outgoing parliament and provincial assemblies, saying that there should be a general election first to reflect the changing political landscape.
General elections are due by early next year.
Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party rejected Musharraf's pledge to quit as army chief.
"We are challenging Musharraf's eligibility as a candidate for president in uniform. He cannot file his nomination, he is not a valid candidate," senior party member Raja Zafar ul-Haq, a former law minister, said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the