By IANS
New Delhi : As she readies to return to her country after seven years in exile, Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has denied any power-sharing deal with President Pervez Musharraf and stressed that he is not eligible to contest the elections expected later this year.
“The question is if Musharraf is eligible to contest another term in office. According to the constitution, as a former army chief, there’s a two-year bar on a government servant to contest. So, this issue will end up in courts,” Bhutto told Prabhu Chawla, group editor of India Today group, in an interview which will be telecast Sunday on Aaj Tak and Headlines Today TV channels.
Bhutto denied that she had cut a deal with the Pakistan president that would give her a share in power. However, she neither confirmed nor denied that she and Musharraf had met in Abu Dhabi a few months ago.
The chief of the Pakistan People’s Party said that although she was “excited” about returning to her country after seven years, she was not sure what fate awaited her in “an uncertain environment”.
Bhutto also said she would not meet the same fate as her political rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose democratically elected government was overthrown by Musharraf in 1999 and who was sent back to Saudi Arabia within hours of his arriving at Islamabad airport early this week.
“I don’t know how I will be received, but I am not in the same boat as him. He has been convicted by the court of law and sentenced for treason and tax evasion,” she said.
“He had traded his imprisonment for a 10-year exile in Saudi Arabia with his family and this involved foreign guarantees. I was given the same offer. But I refused. So unlike Nawaz Sharif, I cannot be put on a plane and sent out.”
“The corruption charges against me have not been withdrawn. As far as I am concerned, I am out on bail and should not be arrested. I stayed out so I would not lose my freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and association.”
Bhutto said her sole mission in going back to Pakistan was to restore democracy and not to enter into any power-sharing deal with the present dispensation. “For me, the right of the people to choose their leaders is most important,” she stressed.