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| Bhutto to return to Pakistan despite no deal yet with Musharraf | | |
LONDON: Former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto and President Gen Pervez Musharraf appeared to suffer a major setback in their efforts to reach a deal that would shore up his fraught re-election bid and allow her to return to Pakistan to contest parliamentary elections.
Bhutto held a news conference in London to blame Pakistan's ruling party for the stand-still in the power-sharing talks and to announce that she plans to return to Pakistan from exile soon, even without an agreement.
In Pakistan, ruling-party officials blamed Bhutto for the failure of the talks, and one official said it would not let "a corrupt politician like her" return and take part in the nation's politics.
Bhutto said talks between her party and Musharraf's envoys had been 80 per cent successful before stalling and that a Musharraf delegation had returned to Pakistan for consultations.
She provided few details, but in an interview on Saturday she blamed differences over increasing the sovereignty of Pakistan's Parliament and the holding of the next presidential and legislative elections.
She has yet to win a public commitment from Musharraf on two critical points, that he will step down as army chief and give up the power to dismiss the Pakistani government and parliament.
"We understand that there is severe reaction within the present ruling party to any understanding with the Pakistan People's Party," Bhutto said, in reference to her own party.
"Due to that reaction, no understanding has been arrived at and we are making our own plans to return to the country."
She said, "We've taken the decision to announce on September 14 the date of my return because we feel my return would be a factor for the stability of Pakistan." She said that announcement would be made in Pakistan.
"I will be going back to Pakistan very soon. I feel the stage is set for the restoration of democracy and I hope to go back to play my part."
Any collapse of the Bhutto-Musharraf talks would likely alarm Pakistan's Western backers, including the United States, which is hoping the next government will maintain Pakistan's efforts against the Taliban and Al-Qaida.
Pakistan is now facing the risk of instability and turmoil as Bhutto and another former Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, prepare to return home.
Musharraf hopes elections expected this autumn will win him another five-year term as president.
But with the general's popularity plummeting and challenges to his rule growing, he has turned to Bhutto for help to broaden his public support.
On Wednesday, Bhutto said Musharraf had agreed to resign from the military before running for re-election as part of their negotiations. On Thursday, government officials said he had made no such deal.
Musharraf, who has governed Pakistan virtually unchallenged for eight years after seizing power in 1999, and Bhutto, who has led the opposition Pakistan People's Party from exile, both need each other's support.
According to Pakistani law, Musharraf must stand for re-election by the national and provincial assemblies between September 15 and October 15, and parliamentary elections have to be held by mid-January.
After serving as prime minister in the 1990s, Bhutto's government collapsed amid allegations of corruption and misrule, and she left Pakistan in 1999 to avoid arrest. She is still facing charges and wants them to be dropped to smooth her return to Pakistan.
In return, her party would abstain from, but not disrupt, the presidential election, then take part in the parliamentary ballot.
She also wants Pakistan's ban on prime ministers serving for a third time to be lifted, which would allow her, as well as Sharif, to run again for prime minister.
In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, Musharraf's spokesman declined to comment about Bhutto's news conference Saturday.
But Azim Chaudhry, a senior member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q party's central executive council, blamed Bhutto for the failure of the talks, saying ``she was asking too many concessions.''
"Our party was not ready to allow a corrupt politician like her to return to Pakistan and take part in politics against us," he said.
"She wanted that the president should not have the power to dissolve the Parliament. She wanted that we should scrap corruption cases against her, and this is what we didn't accept."
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