Police clamp down on Pakistan lawyer protest

Clashes broke out between police and protesters in Pakistan yesterday as authorities extended their clampdown on demonstrators seeking to march to the capital.

In a move that highlighted the government's determination to prevent thousands of lawyers and political opponents from gathering in Islamabad, police in Karachi detained a number of senior figures. Having initially allowed several hundred lawyers to begin their march from the centre of the city, they then prevented them from entering the main highway.

Earlier, outside the city's high court, police clashed with lawyers and members of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, which has backed the campaign. Police and paramilitaries used batons to break up a crowd of protesters.

The lawyers are determined to force the reinstatement of the country's former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was ousted in 2007 by the then president Pervez Musharraf. But the dispute over the march is increasingly becoming a conflict between the new government, headed by the President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the rival Pakistan Muslim League-N, (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif.

In the aftermath of elections last year, the parties of Mr Sharif and Mr Zardari joined forces to create a coalition government. But Mr Sharif, a former prime minister, resigned after Mr Zardari appeared to renege on an undertaking to reinstate Mr Chaudhry. Mr Sharif has since been banned from standing for elected office by the Supreme Court, while his brother, Shahbaz, was forced to stand down as chief minister of the country's largest province, Punjab.

Yesterday, as foreign diplomats and the leaders of other parties shuttled between meetings with the PPP and PML-N, it was reported that Mr Zardari was considering offering some sort of compromise to Mr Sharif. Among those said to be in contact with the president was the Obama administration's regional envoy, Richard Holbrooke.