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Monay, 23 April, 2012
News 05
raisani was made cM on my advice: Khursheed Shah KARACHI STAff RePoRT
federal Minister Khursheed Ahmed Shah has said that the brother of Lashkri Raisani was made the Balochistan chief minister on his advice. Talking to reporters, he said he would go to Balochistan to handle the situation within 10 days, adding that the situation was serious in four to five district of Balochistan. To a question, Shah said fuel should not be poured on simmering fire. “When the PPP came to power, Mengal was in jail. Our government set him free without any condition. The president sought pardon from Baloch people. for the first time in the history of the country, the ISI and army chiefs were called by parliament. We opposed army cantonments in Balochistan,” Shah said in defence of his government’s steps for Balochistan. He said he did not know why journalists were not writing the truth that employment quota of Balochistan had been doubled. Some forces were afraid that if all issues were settled, their agenda would be left incomplete. “That is why they are trying to make the situation worse,” he said.
haqqani ‘receiving threats on social networking sites’ WASHINGTON INP
former Pakistani ambassador to United States Husain Haqqani has said that some elements are threatening him on social networking websites. According to Haqqani, he received threats on facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites. The former envoy has also lodged a complaint and submitted proof in the US federal Bureau of Investigation (fBI) to track the culprits. Haqqani had to resign after Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz had claimed that he was asked by the Pakistani ambassador to deliver a memo to the former US military chief General Mike Mullen seeking US support to avert a military takeover following the killing of Osama bin Laden in May.
MuZAffARABAD: People try to pull a sports utility vehicle (SuV) out of water after it got stuck in the stream due to heavy rains in the state capital on Sunday. inP
Imran opposes unilateral troop withdrawal from Siachen g
PTI chief says PM wants to become a martyr LAHORE
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STAff RePoRT
AKISTAn Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan on Sunday said the Siachen front was costing both India and Pakistan’s a lot of resources and should be demilitarized, but opposed a unilateral troop pullout by Pakistan. Talking to reporters at Lahore airport
on his return from Quetta, the PTI chief called for the demilitarization of Siachen. commenting on the tragic air crash near Islamabad that led to the deaths of all 127 on board, Khan urged an impartial and free investigation into the incident. criticising the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government, he said anyone could do anything with the help of bribery. Imran said the prime minister was “willing to go down as a political martyr
to conceal corruption”. He said the only solution to Balochistan’s problem was political. Khan also urged President Asif Ali Zardari and nawaz Sharif to hold public gatherings in Quetta. He called his party’s public gathering in Quetta a “record rally”, claiming that they had managed to hoist the Pakistani flag where no other party had managed to do so. Khan said there would be a PTI
tsunami on one side and vested interests on the other in the next elelction. He said those calling the PTI tsunami handiwork should see their Quetta meeting, adding that a general could create the PML-n and IJI, but could bring a tsunami. Khan said the government had not implemented the Supreme court’s verdict in rental power case, adding that the person who was declared an accused had been appointed as federal minister.
French election: four ways Nicolas Sarkozy got screwed MONITORING DESK The president of france is in deep trouble, and he would like to have his countrymen think they are, too, if they do not reelect him, writes christopher Dickey in an article on the Daily Beast. As voters go to the polls today in the first round of balloting to decide whether to give nicolas Sarkozy another five-year term or simply to be rid of him, opinion surveys show he will manage to make it into the decisive runoff on May 6. He is expected to be up against socialist candidate françois Hollande. But those same opinion polls show that Sarkozy will lose that match up by a landslide. So Sarkozy, 57, is doing his best to convince the french that disaster looms if Hollande replaces him. france’s economy and europe’s are in a perilous state. Indeed, europe is “a convalescent,” Sarkozy says. Paraphrasing the ominous words attributed to Louis XV, “après moi le déluge,” Sarkozy told the right-wing daily Le figaro, “I’m not saying, ‘After me, chaos.’” But of course he was. If any president reduces the pressure to bring down deficits (read: Hollande), “we’ll be swept away,” says Sarkozy. “france does not have the right to make a mistake!” Hollande, 57, who cast his ballot this morning in the little town of Tulle deep in central france, has managed to build the momentum he has without the help of charisma or an impressive record. A protégé of the late socialist president françois Mitterrand, Hollande himself has never held a cabinet post. He constructed his political base mainly as the head of the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2008, a period when the socialist presidential candidates (including his ex-partner and the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal) fared very badly indeed. In 2002 the socialist candidate didn’t make it to the second round. In 2007 Sarkozy trounced Royal in the runoff. But Hollande got lucky. Sarkozy’s most dynamic opponent a year ago seemed sure to be former finance minister and then–International Monetary fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. But DSK suddenly flamed out in scandals in new
York and france before he ever had a chance to announce he intended to run. And once Hollande got the nomination, he made what now appears to have been the wise decision to present himself as the candidate of “normal.” even his campaign T-shirts proclaim that bland virtue. Hollande can have a sharp tongue on the podium, and he has adopted some predictable lefty stances in the campaign (the kinds of positions that Sarkozy threatens will bring on the deluge). Hollande wants to keep government jobs, not cut them. He calls big financial interests the “adversary.” He talks about taxing marginal income over €1 million ($1.32 million) a year at a rate of 75 percent. He (along with nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman and IMf chief economist Olivier Blanchard, among others) questions the relentless austerity pressed on the continent by Germany. But Hollande famously told British financial interests, in english, “I am not dangerous.” Hollande’s greatest virtue in the minds of the french, in fact, is essentially negative. More than half of those who’ve told pollsters they’ll vote for Hollande in the second round have said they’ll do so because he’s not the incumbent. So, how did Sarko—arguably one of the most brilliant political tacticians in french history—get so screwed? four overlapping factors seem to have played key roles. first of all, as the dinner-table cliché goes, “it’s not what he does, it’s who he is” that so many french find hard to stomach. Short and pugnacious, intense and vulgar, Sarkozy is not the kind of man with whom many french want to raise a glass of wine. In fact he drinks little or none at all. And neither is he one whom they naturally look up to. He never made it to the top of the elite schools that groomed most of the country’s leaders (including Hollande), and early in his presidency he gave the impression that big money with bad taste, or, as the french press would have it, “bling,” impressed the hell out of him. In the first few months of Sarkozy’s first term he partied at the glitzy champs-Élysées restaurant fouquet’s on election night and then celebrated further
on a friend’s yacht. His wife and adviser, cécilia, dumped him rather than endure as his first lady. So, months later, Sarkozy remarried former supermodel carla Bruni. There was a vaguely Kardashian quality to the Sarkozy household in those days, even before anyone in france knew who the Kardashians were, and right up until this last week Sarkozy has been apologizing for his behavior back then. (He blames his unhappiness with cécilia for his erratic behavior at the time.) neither classy nor notable for a common touch, Sarkozy’s slightest gesture can leave audiences uncomfortable. Recently he stripped an expensive watch off his wrist just before diving into a sea of well-wishers who wanted to shake his hand. Was he afraid they’d see it? Or steal it? Secondly, Sarkozy had the extraordinary bad luck to be a president who came to office embracing the global economy when, a year later, the global economy tanked. He had promised more money for more work, and in boom times young voters, especially, found that an alluring idea. But he’s been stuck since 2008 with unemployment hovering around 10 percent, which means for many people no work at any price. could he have handled the crisis better? There has been endless second guessing, and it’s not unreasonable for him to think, as he does, that he should get points for helping to keep europe from flatlining. But it’s hard to make bragging rights out of that word he uses for europe’s present condition: “convalescent.” Thirdly, after three years trying to present himself as a centrist open to all political currents and leftist celebrities, including several socialist stalwarts he brought into senior government positions, Sarkozy decided in 2010 to ditch that whole approach. In regional elections the socialists had wiped his party off the map. So Sarkozy decided to go back to his roots—the tough-guy “top cop” right-wing posturing that had helped him ascend from the Interior Ministry to the presidency in 2007. In that election he’d used carefully calculated anti-immigrant rhetoric to siphon off a huge amount of support from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the fiery curmudgeon of the ul-
traright. But over the last two years Jean-Marie has handed over the reins of the far right to his daughter Marine Le Pen, who took full advantage of the fact that Sarkozy’s stands on immigration and citizenship started to make her look moderate. fourthly, and finally, as the pressure has mounted on Sarkozy, his behavior has become more erratic, not less. And this just at the moment he’d like to present himself as a leader with a steady hand. One can understand his frustration. Over the last year, nothing he could do had much of an impact on his abysmal approval rating. He led a successful war to oust Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and that accomplishment barely made a blip in the public’s appreciation. More recently, and much to his embarrassment, he has been at pains to deny what was known as a fact: that he tried like hell to sell Gaddafi a nuclear reactor back in 2007. Sarkozy and carla had a baby girl, but even this foray into late-in-life fatherhood did not soften the harsh impression the president left on the public. Sarkozy already has three sons from his two previous marriages; carla had one from another liaison. neither the president nor the first lady make convincing homebodies. In the closing weeks before today’s vote, Sarkozy started grabbing at policies like a man who’s besieged, looking frantically in the closet for a weapon he could shoot, or swing, or maybe just throw. Suddenly he started adopting some of Hollande’s positions: among them a call for the european central Bank to play a bigger role in relaunching the european economy (which would contradict its charter), rent control for french apartments, and so on. To such an extent has Sarkozy suddenly embraced policies he previously rejected that the satirical and investigative weekly Le canard enchaîné dubbed him Mr chameleon. Maybe this sort of behavior suddenly will be portrayed as sweet reason, or at least reasonable pragmatism, in the debates and speeches before the final vote on May 6. But unless Sarkozy can quit running against himself, it’s Hollande who will walk away with the french presidency next month.