The New Nation - Internet Edition

Internet

With crucial elections just around the corner, Pakistan is gripped with an air of expectancy following the decision of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to return to the country on Monday, ending a seven-year-long exile.

Sharif is returning to face a ruler whose grip on the country has been slipping due to growing public unrest and an increasingly independent judiciary.

Nawaz Sharif, who has vowed to return home along with his brother on September 10 after a seven-year exile, would be detained after his arrival here and "deported" to either Britain or Saudi Arabia, a Pakistani minister has said. After his detention, "Sharif might be kept in jail for a day or so and then he will be deported to London, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere," Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad was quoted by 'Dawn' as saying. The government wanted to ensure that Sharif was not provided an opportunity to become a hero in a day, he said.

However, some reports here also said the government planned to divert to Queta, the capital of Balochistan, the plane bringing Sharif and his brother Shahbaz to Islamabad.

Sharif insisted Saturday that he will return to Pakistan to campaign against its military ruler, defying last-minute pressure from Saudi Arabia to honor an agreement to remain in exile.

The two-time premier plans to fly to Islamabad from London on Monday in defiance of veiled threats to arrest him from allies of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Sharif was toppled in Musharraf's 1999 coup, convicted of hijacking and terrorism, and sentenced to life imprisonment before being released into exile in Saudi Arabia. After a meeting with Musharraf and Lebanese lawmaker Saad Hariri on Saturday, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief said Sharif should respect the accord made with Saudi authorities that he stay out of Pakistan for a decade.

"We are sincerely hoping that his excellency Nawaz Sharif honors that agreement," Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud told reporters outside Musharraf's office.

The Sharifs have also turned down a plea by Saad Hariri, son of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, to delay their return to Pakistan and pledged to come back Monday as scheduled, according to a close aide of the deposed Premier.

Gen Musharraf's atempt to sack the chief justice of the country in March sparked a nation-wide protest campaign by lawyers, civil society groups and the opposition parties, puting the government on the defensive.

The president's moral standing suffered when the Supreme Court, in a popular move, reinstated the chief justice in July.

Last month, the court upheld a petition by Sharif seeking his return to the country.

Just four days before his expected arrival, the lawyers have kick-started what they call the "second phase" of their movement, aimed at preventing Gen Musharraf from running for another presidential term.

The PML(N) itself has indicated that it plans a big reception for Sharif in Islamabad, the country's capital, where he will land, and all along the 280-km route to his native Lahore city where he will travel in a land procession.

Opposition parties in the newly formed APDM alliance have expressed full support for these plans.

When asked why the Sharifs' PML-N party was keeping the name of the airline by which they would come back and its timing a secret, he said that under normal circumstances it would have made a public announcement well in advance.

"But these are not normal days for us, and we would like to give Musharraf as litle time as possible to plot how best to thwart the Sharifs homeward journey."

There are only two flights to Islamabad from Heathrow on Monday by British Airways and PIA. The Sharifs could also take the Thai airline and go back home via Bangkok.

The worst that is expected to happen to the pair on landing is that they would be picked up at the airport and put under house arrest at their Rawalpindi residence "because the courts in their assertive mood would not allow Musharraf to harass them with concocted cases," the paper quoted an unnamed close aide of Sharif as saying.

The government has banned gathering of five or more people in Rawalpindi where the airport is located. Hundreds of Sharif's party workers have already been taken into preventive custody across the country.

Meanwhile, leaders of the All Party Democratic Movement (APDM) led by PML-N have said they would go to airport Monday to receive the Sharif brothers.

"If the government does anything, they would be playing against the sentiments of people of Pakistan and they (the government) will accelerate their own process of demise by doing this," PML-N Chairman, Raza Zafarul Haq, told the media here after a meeting of APDM.

The PML-N has issued instructions to its workers across the country to reach the airport in disguise and not to stay in hotels and guest houses to avoid arrests.

Musharraf's allies have been piling pressure on Sharif to back out of his pledge to make a comeback which could upset the U.S.-allied military leader's troubled effort to retain power. The government has reopened corruption cases against Sharif and his family, and a court in the eastern city of Lahore on Friday issued an arrest warrant for his younger brother in connection with a murder case.

Musharraf has denounced both Sharif and Benazir Bhuto, another exile former premier seeking a comeback, as corrupt and incompetent and blamed them for Pakistan's near-bankruptcy in the 1990s. Information Minister Mohammed Ali Durrani said Saturday that Sharif should "honor his word" to Saudi Arabia. "He should not come (back)," Durrani told AP.

However, the Supreme Court ruled last month that the Sharifs were free to enter Pakistan - and warned that their return should not be obstructed.

While the government has accepted the ruling, authorities appear determined to disrupt the opposition's plans to afford Sharif a rousing welcome.