Ex-leader Sharif to let party participate in Pakistan vote

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – The party of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said Sunday night that it would participate in parliamentary elections next month. The move means neither major opposition party will boycott, even though both say they believe the polls will be rigged.

Sharif’s choice to allow his party’s candidates to run came after he tried unsuccessfully to persuade another former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, to join him in a boycott.

Sharif had argued that contesting the elections would add credibility to a process that he has said is fundamentally illegitimate.

Bhutto countered that a boycott would leave the field wide open for parties loyal to U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf to sweep the vote.

In the end, Bhutto’s argument prevailed. But the opposition remains badly divided in its strategy for challenging Musharraf.

Bhutto and Sharif had announced last week that they would not make any decision on whether to boycott until they had presented Musharraf with a “charter of demands” laying out criteria for changes in the election process. Despite marathon negotiations, Bhutto and Sharif failed to reach an agreement on what the demands should be.

The central sticking point was whether the opposition would ask for the restoration of the Supreme Court judges who were fired last month when Musharraf declared emergency rule and suspended the constitution. Sharif had said the opposition should make that a priority before the Jan. 8 elections. Bhutto has said it could wait until afterward.

The two former prime ministers are Musharraf’s chief rivals. But they are also intensely mistrustful of each other, and Musharraf’s imposition of emergency rule has not been enough to bring them together.

Ahsan Iqbal, spokesman for Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, said the party determined that boycotting without Bhutto’s support would be ineffective. Iqbal said the party planned to turn the vote into a referendum on whether the judges should be restored.

Elsewhere Sunday, a suicide bomber killed eight people by ramming his explosives-laden car into a police outpost in the scenic northern valley of Swat, where government forces have been battling to regain control of towns lost to Islamic insurgents.