Benazir asks her candidates to file nomination papers: opposition facing tough boycott choice

Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto told party workers on Thursday to start campaigning for upcoming general elections but warned she might still order a boycott of the vote.
In a sign of the splits within the fractious opposition, she gave the green light for her Pakistan People's Party candidates to file nomination papers by Monday's deadline despite the state of emergency. However she protested at what she said were government attempts to rig the January 8 parliamentary elections and cautioned that her party may still pull out.
"We are submitting nomination papers for the election under protest," she told reporters in her stronghold of Karachi. "We don't want to give a walkover to our opponents." At the same time, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz of another former premier, Nawaz Sharif, announced it planned to boycott the vote and urged other parties to follow suit. A loose umbrella grouping of more than a dozen parties is due to meet here on Saturday to make a final joint decision on an election boycott.
Bhutto accused President Pervez Musharraf's government of plotting to fix the election, saying ruling party candidates had already been delivered blank ballot papers.
Her spokesman Farhatullah Babar told AFP that the party would make a final decision on whether to contest the election after consulting other opposition groups. "If all the parties decided to boycott, the PPP candidates will withdraw their nominations," Babar said.
The choice facing Bhutto is whether to take part in a disputed election or withdraw her party - the country's largest opposition group - and surrender its seats. When her party last boycotted elections in 1985, it led to the emergence on the political scene of Nawaz Sharif, who five years later succeeded Bhutto as premier.
Aides said the PPP's central committee was broadly in favour of taking part but some key figures were arguing it would lose them credibility. Javed Hashmi, the stand-in leader of Sharif's party while he is in exile in Saudi Arabia, said Musharraf wanted a "slave" parliament.
Urging a boycott, he said the military ruler "wants to muster a fictitious two-thirds majority (in parliament) so that the extra-constitutional steps he has taken are endorsed by the parliament." "We will form an alliance of all political parties and launch a combined movement to rid the country of dictatorship," he told a crowd in the central city of Multan. Sharif and Bhutto are both two-time former premiers, and observers believe neither will want to cede electoral advantage to the other.
Cricket legend Imran Khan also called for a boycott, saying anything else would legitimise Musharraf's emergency rule. "We cannot have free and fair elections under Musharraf without independent judiciary and free media," Khan told reporters a day after being freed from prison for protesting against emergency rule.
He offered to cooperate with Bhutto if she boycotted the vote. Of the other groups, the six-party Islamic fundamentalist MMA alliance is also deeply split. Its biggest party, the Jamiat-ulema-Islam, wants to contest the elections, and has been more or less backing Musharraf's government during the past few years. However, the other main Islamic party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, has called for a boycott. Other opposition parties are seen as too small to make a real difference.