Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said on Saturday that the government could not be toppled by rallies and making irrelevant noise, and the elections would be held on the prescribed schedule.
Addressing the Pakistani community, he said it seemed Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif had neither learnt anything from his exile nor from his sentence, as he was still far away from political maturity. “The PML-N wants to derail democracy, but the government would not let it do so,” he said, adding that if the opposition wanted change it should bring a no-confidence motion against him in parliament.
Afghan repatriation: Earlier, Gilani urged the world to help shift the three million Afghan refugees residing in Pakistan back to Afghanistan, stop illegal cross-border movement and prevent the spread of crippling polio disease in the country. “They need to go back … the relief centres have to be in Afghanistan,” Gilani said at a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
The Australian prime minister had invited a select group of heads of states and governments from the countries where polio was still prevalent or who were funding campaigns for the eradication of the crippling disease. Gilani said the world seemed to have forgotten the plight of millions of Afghans who were living in shanty make-shift homes and camps in Pakistan, years after the withdrawal of the troops of United Soviet Socialist Republic from Afghanistan.
The prime minister said it was hard for Pakistan to check the illegal movement across the over 2,000km long border with Afghanistan.Gilani said that he was pushing his country for eradicating polio. He said Pakistan had managed to eliminate the disease, but regretted that it resurfaced in the past seven years, with 132 new cases reported.
“This situation is totally unacceptable. We have launched a National Emergency Action Plan for Polio eradication and to interrupt transmission of the virus in Pakistan by the end of 2011,” he said. The Australian government meanwhile, announced a commitment of 50 million Australian dollars to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). The Nigerian government pledged an increase from 2011 of a planned $17 million to an annual contribution of $30 million starting in 2012.
The Gates Foundation pledged an additional $40 million to GPEI for the remainder of 2011.
Govt can’t be toppled by rallies: Gilani
