Yousef Raza Gilani

Yousuf Raza Gilani (1952-) is the civilian Prime Minister of Pakistan, who took office on March 24, 2008. He was a political opponent of the military government of President Pervez Musharraf, and a leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). While the PPP is the majority party, he governs in a cooperative coalition, the largest opposition party being the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is Head of State and the two seem to have a cooperative relationship. It has been suggested that his demonstrated party loyalty is such that he will step aside should Zardari want to be Prime Minister. Gilani reminded the Council on Foreign Relations that Pakistan uses the Westminster System, in which the Prime Minister is head of government.

He apparently tries for a conciliatory position in the coalition, asking a governor in his own party to stop attacking the opposition PML-N.

In May 2009, he called for an all-parties conference to deal with the security threat from the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Response was mixed; one government ally who had been a Taliban supporter in the past, Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) party, walked out. He described military action as a last step against a "parallel government", but not all parties would agree; some would go only so far as to describe the security forces as "positive". The main opposition party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaf (PML-N), would not agree to the resolution. The religious Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP) agreed to cooperate.

Early life

He is from a prominent Punjabi political family; his grandfather and great-uncles were members of All India Muslim league and signed the 1940 resolution that led to partition of Pakistan from India. His father was a provincial minister.

A graduate in journalism from the University of Punjab, he joined the Pakistan Muslim League, which was later to break into several factions, and had his first public job under General Zia-ul-Haq, who had overthrown Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a 1977 coup.

Elected as the chairman of the party council in 1983, he joined the Parliament in 1985, but disagreed with then Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Junejo and his party.

Pakistan People's Party

He met with Benazir Bhutto, then out of power, and offered to join her PPP. "Ms Bhutto said to me, 'There is nothing I can offer you, why have you come?'" "I said to her, there are three types of people in this world - lovers of honour, of wisdom and of wealth. I am of the first type, and that is all I want."

He was speaker of the Pakistani parliament from 1993 to 1996. In 1995, when the Interior Ministry refused to release PPP members, he put the matter on record, which was unprecedented. This and other actions where he challenged Musharraf made him popular in the party.

Musharraf's anti-corruption court jailed him for five years in 2001, serving five years following a conviction over illegal government appointments. Musharraf said this was a means of cleansing politics; Musharraf's opponents described it as a means of coercing politicians into the Musharraf government. Gilani, in an interview with the newspaper Dawn, called it "concocted and were fabricated to pressurise him to leave the PPP...Since I am unable to oblige them, they decided to convict me so that I could be disqualified and an example set for other political leaders who may learn to behave as good boys,"

Security situation

"In 1996, after the PPP's government was overthrown, the Taliban immediately seized Kabul. They invited al Qaeda into Afghanistan to raise, recruit and train disaffected Muslims youth from various countries. The West's untimely exit from Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat in 1989 created a power vacuum which the fanatics were only too eager and ready to fill.

The Pakistani government has long had a complex relationship with Inter-Services Intelligence, which had long supported the Taliban. President Pervez Musharraf gradually changed the leadership. Insurgents linked to al-Qaeda attacked the Punjabi headquarters of ISI in Lahore, and attempted to attack the national headquarters in Islamabad.

The situation has gotten worse; he called an all-parties conference in May 2009. He described military action as a last step against a "parallel government", but not all parties would agree; some would go only so far as to describe the security forces as "positive". The main opposition party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaf, would not agree to the resolution., The Taliban threatened the PPP leadership if it continued operations.