Islamist Parties Prepare to Share Power in Pakistan

Pakistan's largest political parties are this week expected to agree a new coalition government including hardline Islamist clerics, ending three years of military dictatorship.

Religious parties which boast of their close links to Afghanistan's Taliban regime made surprising gains in the general election six weeks ago, and are now emerging as the strongest challenge to the country's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf.

The parliament convened at the newly refurbished national assembly building in Islamabad on Saturday for the first time since General Musharraf seized power in a coup in October 1999.

Minutes into what was supposed to be an innocuous swearing-in ceremony, dozens of the newly elected politicians, led by the clerics, began complaining about a series of crucial constitutional amendments introduced by Gen Musharraf to enhance his power as president.

The general has given himself the power to dismiss the prime minister, the cabinet and the parliament, and has created a new national security council, dominated by the armed forces, which will dictate important policy decisions. On Saturday, Gen Musharraf had himself sworn in as president for the next five years.

The largest party, a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML), is willing to accept Gen Musharraf's new powers. But the party has only 118 seats in the 342-seat assembly and for weeks has desperately tried to engineer a coalition with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of Islamist parties.

At first the religious parties wanted the post of prime minister to go to their leader, Maulana Fazl-ur Rehman, who sent hundreds of his followers into Afghanistan to back the Taliban regime. That now appears less likely.

But the clerics are still insisting that Gen Musharraf's new powers be watered down and that, crucially, he steps down from his position as head of the army early next year.

"The question of prime minister is not the stumbling block," said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest religious party and the driving force in the MMA. "The real thing is the sovereignty of the parliament and the restoration of the constitution in its original form."

He added that Gen Musharraf's amendments would need to be passed with a two-thirds parliamentary majority for them to become law. Analysts suspect the president may be forced to weaken his powers slightly, but he is unlikely to give up being chief of the army staff as this would would render him vulnerable against a combative parliament.

The clerics remain the strongest opponents of the military's plans. The Pakistan People's party (PPP), which is led from London by Benazir Bhutto, has traditionally been the leading liberal force and a sworn opponent of the army. Yet in the past month it has muted its criticism of the general, in the hope of a deal to play a role in government.

Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the head of the party in Pakistan, said: "I think there is a lot of scope to come to some kind of understanding."

If the PML and the clerics do agree a coalition this week, the man most likely to emerge as prime minister is Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a little-known politician from the western province of Baluchistan.

Mr Jamali, a portly and quietly-spoken man, said he believed his faction of the PML could form a government even without the clerics.

But he added: "To have better and smoother sailing, I think we need an agreement to have a comfortable majority. I think it will be there.

"Was the Magna Carta signed in one day? It wasn't."