BY LINDA WALDRON
LAHORE — More than 200 activists of the Labour Party Pakistan (LPP) activists, members of other opposition parties, community activists and unionists packed the Lahore Press Club here on April 2 to welcome LPP general secretary Farooq Tariq on his release from prison.
Tariq and 19 other leaders of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy were arrested on March 21 as they were preparing for a March 23 demonstration against the military rule of General Pervaiz Musharraf.
"The regime claimed to be opposing corrupt politicians and capitalists but were actually against the workers", Tariq told the meeting. "The military regime is introducing IMF restructuring, such as imposition of a goods and services tax, that the previous government was unable to do".
According to Tariq, the arrests, the banning of the rally and the brutal repression of the LPP activists who sought to get through military barricades to the rally site were not a defeat but a victory for the ARD, because of the enormous publicity and sympathy they generated and because of the fear it had caused within the regime.
"In the ARD are different political parties with different programmes. The LPP believes in socialism, but others don't. We all agree on one thing — that the military regime must go", Tariq told the crowd.
Tariq insisted that a new movement against the military government must begin on May 1 and committed the LPP to demonstrations at the Lahore stock exchange on that day.
"We were arrested at the starting point of the movement, not its end", Tariq assured the meeting.
Ihsan Wain, the senior vice-president of the People's National Party, and Manzoor Gilani, the president of the Istiqlal Party, endorsed the LPP's call for action on May 1 and resolved to support a proposal for the ARD to take up the action. The ARD is due to take a decision on the proposal at its next meeting on April 8.
Shah Taj Qazal Bash of the Joint Action Committee for People's Rights said that the struggle was not just for the restoration of democracy. "After democracy is restored we must keep an eye on political parties that are doing wrong", she told the audience.