CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN PAKISTAN By Eric S. Margolis 9 April 2000 Pakistan's former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was sentenced to life in prison last Thursday for refusing to allow a circling airliner, with 198 passengers, including 60 children aboard- which had only seven minutes fuel left - to land at Karachi on 12 October, 1999. Nawaz had just dismissed Pakistan's respected head of the armed forces, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was returning from Sri Lanka aboard the civilian airliner. Had not three leading generals - Ifthakar, Aziz, and Mahmud - seized the airport and bloodlessly deposed Sharif, the aircraft would have run out of fuel and crashed. Gen. Musharraf was named Pakistan's new leader. This near-disaster came soon after Nawaz had fired the previous armed forces chief, Gen. Karamat, and the Supreme Court chief justice. Nawaz intended to set himself up as a civilian dictator by taking personal control of Pakistan's governmental institutions. He, his relatives and cronies looted hundreds of millions of dollars from banks, industry, and government coffers. Opponents and media critics were beaten, intimidated, or jailed. Few Pakistani shed tears for the widely despised Nawaz. After interviewing him at length, I could never understand how such an intellectually limited and dangerously impulsive man had become Pakistan's leader. He was plucked from relative obscurity by the military regime of the late Gen. Zia ul-Haq, and used as a civilian figurehead. After Zia's assassination in 1988, Nawaz steadily assembled power, becoming both ruthless and deeply corrupt. Nawaz didn't deserve a death sentence for his criminal stupidity at Karachi airport, but he certainly merited severe punishment - and even more so for massive corruption and misrule. His life sentence means 25 years maximum, though five years or even less seems far more likely. In the topsy-turvy world of Pakistani politics, today's cellblock inmate can easily become tomorrow's prime minister. Like former Pakistani civilian rulers, Nawaz treated the nation as his personal bank. Corruption has always been pervasive and endemic, but under the Bhutto and Nawaz governments, which each held power twice, things went from terrible to intolerable. Pakistan's military, the last uncorrupted and only respected national institution, vowed to root out malfeasance at every level of society, starting at the top. Gen. Musharraf detailed to me how the army was setting up a grass roots electoral system at the village level -where none previously existed - as the foundation for a genuine democratic system. In the past, seats in parliament were bought and sold by the Pakistan's hugely rich feudal landowners, who paid no taxes whatsoever, rigged elections, and hid their money abroad. According to Gen. Musharraf, his government will focus anti-corruption efforts on the biggest crooks who stole tens of millions or more, and then work down the theft chain to smaller crooks. Nawaz, his brother, and cronies browbeat banks to give them multi-million dollar loans that were never repaid. Most big businessmen and politicians also evaded taxes. As a result, Pakistan is almost bankrupt, with almost half its income going to debt repayment, and the rest to defense. But where to begin the anti-corruption crusade begin? Corruption in Pakistan - and, indeed, across the Third World - is everywhere. A tax collector comes and says you owe 500,000 rupees?but if you pay him 100,000 he will report you owe nothing. The electric meter man does a reading. Pay him 50% of what you owe the electric company, and he will report a minimal reading. And so it goes at all levels. As a result, the government gets very little income from taxes. Benazir Bhutto explains that Pakistanis are not accustomed to taxes: in the past, aid from the US covered the cost of government. Since the US cut off all aid a decade ago, Pakistanis have been asked to ante up for governments that have been corrupt, inept, and unresponsive. Ironically, one of the few groups in Pakistan that did pay full taxes was the military. Soldiers had withholding taxes deducted at source. They struggled for years to get by on poor salaries that were sapped by inflation, while the elite pillaged Pakistan and sneered at the military, who came mostly from the lower and middle classes. As a final, last-straw act of arrogance, the bankrupt governments of both Benazir and Nawaz spent a maharaja's ransom building a new prime minister's office block in Islamabad, a huge, cheesy domed palace of inlaid marble that should be called the Pak Mahal. When I listened to Gen. Musharraf, and his chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, speak passionately of their plans to attack corruption and rebuild Pakistan, they sounded more like social revolutionaries than old-style military putschists. Pakistan 's entrenched feudal and political classes must be ousted from political power, corruption attacked, and institutions rebuilt. Whether the army can achieve this goal is uncertain: two previous military regimes did not. In Egypt, Col. Nasser failed to uproot corruption; so did military leaders Ataturk in Turkey, and Sukarno in Indonesia. Armies are instruments of war, not peace. Sadly, there is no one else in Pakistan to do the job. In Russia, another nation scourged by rampant corruption, industrial-scale criminality, and inability to collect tax, the new president, Vladimir Putin, vows to unleash the KGB's secret policemen to root out corruption. Few believe this housecleaning campaign will work. Back in Pakistan, Nawaz seems headed for a well-deserved jail term. Most thoughtful Pakistanis are ashamed their nation, created to be an ideal Islamic state, has become a cesspool of crime and corruption - exhibit A being the brutal former prime minister Nawaz, who nearly killed 198 innocent people. Copyright eric s margolis 2000 Eric Margolis' new book, `War at the Top of the World- The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet' is receiving national attention in the US, where it was cited in Congressional testimony last week. The book is available online through Amazon.com and through Borders and Barnes & Noble. In Canada, through Chapters and Indigo. To UNSUBSCRIBE to this list click the following link and enter the words UNSUBSCRIBE FOREIGNC in the body of the email. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
