Musharraf wanted ‘deal’ to form joint govt: Sharif

Islamabad, March 22

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said former dictator Pervez Musharraf had offered him a “secret deal” to return to the country from exile in Saudi Arabia to form a joint government in 2008.

At a meeting of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz parliamentary committee yesterday, Sharif said, “Musharraf wanted a secret deal with me in 2007,” according to a report in Dawn.

“Musharraf offered me the deal directly, but I turned it down,” he said.

Sharif said Gen Musharraf was willing to meet him and made several attempts to do so in the past. “But I declined.” The revelation about the goings-on in Pakistan’s polity in 2007 has come for the first time from Sharif, who at the time was living in Saudi Arabia after his government was toppled by General Musharraf in a coup in 1999.

Many members of the Sharif family too had to live in the Gulf nation after the coup until their return to Pakistan in November 2007.

“We left the country in a miserable condition and were not allowed to return for a long time,” Sharif said, and made it clear he would do the same to Musharraf, who left last year for Dubai ostensibly for medical treatment. — PTI

It was other way around: General’s ex-aide 

• General Pervez Musharraf’s former aide Ahmed Raza Kasur said Nawaz Sharif went abroad under an agreement for 10 years and there could be no question that Musharraf offered him a deal to form a joint government
• “It was, in fact, Nawaz Sharif who was begging to return to the country in 2007,” he said