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Pak police detain 6,000, opposition calls for strike

Ovais Subhani in Karachi

Pakistani police today detained thousands of political activists, preventing an anti-government rally and sparking an opposition call for a general strike.

The strike will begin tomorrow in the southern Sindh province and last through Monday, opposition leaders said.

"The combined opposition has appealed for a strike against the arrest of opposition leaders and workers," Senator Iqbal Hyder of the Pakistan Peoples Party told reporters.

Hyder said the strike call was backed by all opposition groups in a newly formed alliance against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief's government.

It was the latest in a wave of opposition-engineered strikes and rallies, but Sharief says the protests are minor and pose no threat to his two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

Opposition parties said police detained about 6,000 activists today, blocking an anti-government rally in Karachi, the main city of Sindh and Pakistan's principal port and commercial capital.

Witnesses said hundreds of police used tear-gas and baton charges to block access to the site of the rally in the southern part of the city to coincide with the 51st anniversary of the death of Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

"The government is now acting as a military dictatorship. Nawaz Sharief and his cronies have decided to tear off the mask of democracy that they had been wearing," said Pakistan Awami Ittehad Alliance spokesman Hussain Haqqani.

"Since the days of martial law, such measures have not been taken and never has a peaceful opposition been stopped from non-violent protest in this manner," he said.

Haqqani said 6,000 opposition activists were detained in Sindh, mostly in Karachi.

He said most of the detainees were from the PPP, whose leader, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, is in exile after being convicted of corruption by a Pakistani court.

Bhutto and other opposition parties have called on Sharief to step down in the face of mounting economic problems and allegations that he mishandled the occupation of India's Kargil heights by Pakistan-backed infiltrators in May-July.

Sharief says the episode, which brought the arch rivals to the brink of a fourth war, has internationalised the 52-year-old Kashmir dispute. His critics say Sharief made a humiliating climbdown in calling for the withdrawal of the infiltrators.

Police were also accused of raiding the Karachi headquarters of the Muttahid Qaumi Movement, the most powerful party in the port city.

The MQM, along with other parties, had planned the rally to protest against what it calls "political victimisation" by Sharief's government.

The rally was to follow a partially successful general strike in Sindh on Thursday and a September 4 countrywide strike by traders, which was backed by several opposition groups.

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