Zardari vows to fight “witch-hunt”

ISLAMABAD, December 20 (Reuters): Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his ruling party have thrown down the gauntlet in the face of calls for him to resign, condemning what they called a witch-hunt and vowing to foil conspiracies again them. Opposition politicians have been calling for President Asif Ali Zardari to step down since the Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down an amnesty that protected him, several government ministers and thousands of others from corruption charges.
The political tension comes as the United States has intensified pressure on its nuclear-armed ally to clear out Afghan Taliban enclaves along the Afghan border while Pakistan is battling its own homegrown militants and their suicide bombers. Zardari, the widower of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, met top leaders of his Pakistan People's Party (PPP) on Saturday to draw up political strategy.
"The PPP will use democracy and constitutionalism as its weapons to fight its adversaries and foil all conspiracies against it", Zardari was later quoted as saying in a statement. The unpopular Zardari, who is close to the United States, has been dogged by accusations of graft from the 1990s when Bhutto was prime minister. He says the charges were politically motivated and was never convicted but spent 11 years in prison.
He was covered by the 2007 amnesty which the Supreme Court threw out, but cannot be prosecuted because he is protected by presidential immunity. He has dismissed calls from opposition politicians and hostile sections of the media to step down. Several of his aides and two of his top ministers -- Interior Minister Rehman Malik and Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar -- were also on a list of people protected by the amnesty, and they too are facing calls to quit.
But Zardari said his party would not be "blackmailed" into asking its ministers to resign on the basis of accusations, the president's spokesman said. "None of the accusations had been proved during more than a decade of witch-hunting and there is no reason why any one should resign until proved guilty of wrong-doing," the spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, cited Zardari as saying. The amnesty was introduced by former president Pervez Musharraf as part of a power-sharing deal brokered with Bhutto, with U.S. and British encouragement.