Word: zia
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...Israel ponder retaliation for the airport massacres 26 Libya's Gaddafi vows defiance as Washington and Jerusalem agonize over how to hit back for the Rome and Vienna attacks. Meanwhile, the shadowy figure suspected of masterminding those terrorist acts and many others remains on the loose. Pakistan's Zia ends martial law and a 20-year state of emergency. The new year gets off to a bloody start in South Africa...
...announcement was expected, but it came with an unanticipated bonus. In a nationally televised session of Parliament, President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, standing before a portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, proclaimed an end last week to 8½ years of martial law. As legislators banged their desks in approval, Zia concluded his speech with the rallying cry "Long live the era of democracy!" Opposition politicians, expecting the move, had already labeled Zia's latest steps toward democracy a "fraud." Perhaps in anticipation of so skeptical a response, the wily soldier-politician sprang a surprise: he ended...
Instead of trumpeting the return of such freedoms, Zia spoke in cautionary terms. "No radical change of the system should be anticipated," he told Parliament. The message: Zia fully intends to retain control over Pakistan's emerging democracy. Perhaps the best demonstration of that intention is a new Political Parties Act, which requires political organizations, banned by Zia in 1979, to be licensed by a government-controlled commission. Even so, some of the liberalization moves are significant. Civil courts have replaced martial law tribunals, and civilians have been named to take over from military governors in three of the country...
...state of emergency should mean that freedom of speech and assembly are restored. But Zia will probably extend those rights selectively, using the Political Parties Act to weed out undesirable opposition groups. In what may have been a sobering harbinger of the future, police arrested about 200 people two weeks ago when the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, a coalition of eleven banned parties calling for Zia's immediate resignation, tried to stage a demonstration in Lahore...
...response among opposition politicians to Zia's initiative was mixed. Hamida Khuhro, a Sindhi nationalist leader, said the end of martial law "was a welcome first step." Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the executed former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and self-exiled leader of the Pakistan People's Party, the largest opposition party, denounced the move. "An act of political camouflage," she called it in a statement from her home in southern France. But other M.R.D. leaders, apparently caught off guard by the lifting of the state of emergency, had no public reaction to Zia's speech...