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Nasrullah Khan Buried
Agencies, Arab News
ISLAMABAD, 29 September 2003 — Veteran Pakistani opposition leader Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, who spearheaded a campaign against President General Pervez Musharraf, was laid to rest in his native town yesterday.
Khan, who was 85 and head of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), suffered a heart attack early this week. He passed away in the early hours of Saturday.
Thousands attended his funeral at Khan Garh in Muzaffargarh district of Punjab province, some 380 km (236 miles) southwest of Islamabad.
More than 15,000 people, including government leaders and colleagues from the country’s main opposition alliance, attended the funeral.
“Pakistan has lost a statesman,” chief of right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmed told reporters after burial.
“Democracy in Pakistan has become an orphan with Khan’s death,” leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) Maulana Fazlur Rehman said. “We will try to follow in the footsteps of Khan and complete his mission to restore democracy in Pakistan,” President of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) told reporters.
In his long career Khan was known for cobbling together political alliances against Pakistan’s various civilian and military governments. He played a key role in bringing together the parties of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in early 2000 to wage a joint struggle against the Musharraf-led military regime.
Khan was a staunch opponent of Musharraf and was waging a campaign against the changes he made into Pakistan’s constitution giving himself powers to dissolve Parliament just before general elections last year.
Musharraf, Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali and government ministers expressed condolences on the death of the politician in separate messages to the bereaved family.
Bhutto and Sharif, who are both living abroad in exile, also sent messages to the family and paid tribute to Khan’s services to the cause of democracy in Pakistan.
Musharraf, who received the news of his death while flying back home from visits to the United States and Canada, lauded “the services rendered by the late leader”, the official news agency reported.
Throughout his political career, Khan remained in the opposition and earned the title of “Baba-e-Jamhooriat” (grand old man of democracy) for fighting for democracy against civil and military dictators.
“After fighting out every dictator in the last five decades, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, has left behind an unfinished agenda of the revival of democracy and restoration of the will of the people,” wrote columnist Imtiaz Alam in the national daily The News.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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