The Way We Were Benazir Bhutto & Asif Zardari (Credit: Pakmag.com)This weekend saw a historic moment for Pakistan, as a democratically elected civilian government completed its full five year term for the first time ever. In the past, governments have been ousted by the military or by rivals. The moment passed relatively quietly, with a televised farewell address from the prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf on Sunday. In an understated address, he conceded that his government had not done enough during the last five years, but maintained that it had lessened the problems it had inherited. He also said that the historic completion of a full term marked the end of a “sinister chapter” of attacks on democracy. “We have strengthened the foundations of democracy to such an extent that no one will be able to harm it in future,” he said.
Many judge the government’s main achievement to be surviving at all. This was no small feat. At the beginning of the five year term, few observers thought that the leading coalition would last more than a year. Asif Ali Zardari was seen as an accidental president, who ended up in this position of power only because of the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto. While Zardari remains unpopular, he has gained a reputation as a canny politician and dealmaker, who kept an unruly coalition together against the odds, despite junior partners frequently breaking away or demanding greater concessions.
There has been a lot of focus on the negative legacy that this government has left behind. Pakistan is in the throes of an energy crisis, with power cuts plaguing large swathes of the country. (As I write this, from the capital city Islamabad, the power has gone off for the fourth time today). Terrorist violence has increased, not reduced, a trend which has not been helped by the lack of a coherent government anti-terrorism strategy. Attacks against religious minorities continue with impunity – from mob attacks against Christian communities to targeted militant violence against Shias. Economic growth is sluggish, while corruption is rife and tax bills low.
Yet on the flipside, the positives should not be overlooked. The level of media freedom enjoyed in the last five years has been unprecedented. Although there were some exceptions, in general, the political opposition and media organisations have been able to say what they want. This has resulted in a lot of mockery and criticism of the present government, to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the past. There have also been significant steps forward in the area of constitutional reform, with greater devolution of power to provincial governments and changes to improve electoral practice.
For months, rumours have circulated that the election will be delayed or cancelled altogether. While I was living in Karachi last year, practically every social gathering featured someone declaring that they knew the election wouldn’t be happening for some reason or another. This demonstrates deep-seated public disbelief that this moment would ever come to pass; a psyche borne of decades of last minute interceptions and power grabs.
The challenge is far from over. Now that the National Assembly has dissolved, the ruling parties are in the process of establishing a caretaker government which will run the country while the Election Commission gets things in order. Shoring up the security situation to reduce bloodshed from terrorist attacks during the polls will be a priority. The election schedule has not yet been announced and rumours still proliferate that the caretaker set up will be extended and elections held off for a year or even two.
The crucial point is that for all the misgivings about the present government, the Pakistani public will, for the first time ever, have the chance to express these feelings through the ballot box. The significance of that cannot be underestimated.
The most critical elections in Pakistan’s history are taking place amid an orgy of killings – minority groups, civilians and military personnel have all been targeted by a variety of extremists.
With the number of targeted assassinations of leading politicians expected to increase by the time of the elections in the second week of May, there are no signs that the government or the army are prepared for a deterioration of security.
The sense of instability is not made any better by the worsening economic crisis.
An average of 10 to 20 people a day are being killed in the major cities – Karachi, Quetta, Lahore and Peshawar – as the country is gripped by violence. On a bad day as many as 100 people can be killed by suicide or car bombs.
Intolerance unchecked
Those suffering most are the minority Shia population, who are being targeted by Sunni extremists. On 9 March, Christians were attacked and their homes ransacked in a poor locality of Lahore by a rampaging mob.
Pakistan endured one of its worst days of violence on 10 January when 115 people were killed – including 93 Shias belonging to the Hazara ethnic group in Quetta.
A month later on 16 February another 84 were killed and 200 wounded in a similar massacre in the city. For days Shia Hazaras refused to bury their dead and many prepared to leave Pakistan for ever.
The plight of some Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Ahmedis and Shias has forced many to flee the country as intolerance unchecked by the government escalates.
On 3 March another 50 Shias were killed and over 100 wounded in a massive truck bomb that exploded in a Shia locality of Karachi.
Pakistani Shia naval officers and Shia doctors have likewise been killed. Last year more than 400 Shias were killed in Pakistan by Sunni hardliners. Already more than 200 Shias have been killed in the first two months of 2013.
The killings are being carried out by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – a Sunni militant group which has already been declared a terrorist organisation.
But the government’s only reaction so far has been to place its former leader Malik Ishaq under house arrest. He has been arrested and freed several times before.
Test of democracy
It appears to many Pakistanis that the militants are more powerful than the army or the government.
The elections come as fears are rising over sectarian violence
Yet these elections are critical, for it will be the first time in Pakistan’s history that an elected government will hand over power to another elected government.
It will be the biggest test of Pakistan’s democracy, but at the same time none of the major political parties is prepared to take on the extremists.
Karachi is dissolving into chaos. It is not only besmirched by the Shia killings, but also by a vicious, multi-sided turf war between ethnic and sectarian groups, mafias and land grabbers.
Almost every day some part of the sprawling metropolis is shut down because of gunfire, murders or citizens’ protests.
On 13 March one of the country’s top aid workers – Karachi-based sanitation expert Parveen Rehman – was shot and killed in the city.
According to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), at least 2,284 people died in violence in Karachi in 2012.
Meanwhile, journalists continue to be targeted across the country – two were killed within 72 hours in early March.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province the Taliban carries on bombing civilians in Peshawar and attacking army posts in the mountains.
The militants have launched multiple suicide bombers against police stations in populated areas.
On 28 February militants in the north-western tribal areas bombed four boys’ schools in the Mohmand agency – bringing to more than 100 the number of schools they have destroyed in the tribal areas since 2011.
In Balochistan a separatist insurgency claims more lives every day.
Not surprisingly there are serious doubts as to how elections will take place in many areas where there is no law and order.
The army has made it clear that it cannot deploy at every polling station and the police appear to be demoralised and unwilling to ensure law and order in many parts of the country.
Electioneering will be muted and large gatherings will be impossible because of the fear of suicide bombings.
HRCP head IA Rehman has pointed out that half of the National Assembly seats fall in “the fear zone” where voters will be too scared to turn out in sufficient numbers or candidates may withdraw.
In other areas candidates may seek endorsement from the extremists to avoid getting killed.
Moreover, according to the constitution, the government must resign by mid-March and dissolve the national and provincial parliaments. It must nominate a caretaker government and a prime minister to oversee the elections.
But such an interim government will be weak and will not be mandated to go after the extremists.
Covert support
People are asking why the army does not do more.
Malik Ishaq has been repeatedly arrested and freed
Army chief General Pervez Kayani says the civilian law enforcement authorities controlled by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government needs to carry out its tasks more efficiently.
Gen Kayani says that the army will only act if it is requested to do so by the government – something the PPP is loathe to do because it will show abject weakness just before the elections.
The PPP-led government has over the years allowed the extremists to flourish by refusing to go after them.
Other political parties have given them refuge and covert support.
Almost all the extremist groups have a home in Punjab province, run by the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (PML). It has had no scruples about forging electoral alliances with religious groups known for extremist views.
If the PML comes to power on the back of such alliances, it will be even more unlikely to crack down on them.
Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank has warned that Pakistan faces a severe balance of payments crisis and would need to borrow at least US $9bn (£6bn) from the IMF before the year is out.
The country’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen to cover only two months of imports.
Ultimately elections will take place. So it behoves all parties – the army, the politicians, the police and the media – to ensure that violence is reduced so that the vote is as free and fair as is possible.
But even that looks like a long shot at the moment.
‘Bhuladia’ is not the name of a factory. It is a sickness of the ruling class. Somewhat different from Alzheimer’s disease, it is more selective in choosing what must be forgotten and what must be remembered. A ‘Bhuladia’ patient is predisposed to forgetting the insignificant and the ordinary while remembering the rich and the powerful. A society suffering from ‘Bhuladia’ syndrome will forget the burning alive of 300 ordinary factory workers but remember to drop the murder charges against the two rich and exploitative factory owners. The rentally compromised Raja and his capitalist minister aptly named as ‘Mandiwala’, could not have demonstrated more perfectly the signs and symptoms of the ‘Bhuladia’ disease.
People do not go to work to be burnt alive, blown into smithereens, or trapped in death chambers. In any civilized country there are at least three ways in which employers can be held liable for harm done to employees. They owe a vicarious liability if one employee injures another, a statutory liability imposed by the law of the land and a personal duty under the common law to take reasonable care to prevent harm or injury to employees at work. How come the Islamic Republic suddenly regresses by a thousand years when it comes to the life and wellbeing of its ordinary citizens. Even five months after the tragic event, the toll continues to be vaguely and insensitively referred to as ‘about 300’ dead.
Now that the compensatory crumbs have been distributed to the poor and the rich have been protected from the problematic sections of the penal code, there seems a sense of urgency to forget the past and get on with life. After all, profit-making must not be held back for too long. Do we not need to ask ourselves if we learnt any lessons from the tragic events of 11 September 2012, or do we continue to be just as vulnerable? Even in the 11th century, William the Conqueror had the good sense to legislate fire protection measures. These required all fires to be extinguished at night using a metal cover called ‘couvre feu’ that was put over the fire to exclude the air. The word was gradually adopted as ‘curfew’ – a time beyond which an activity must cease.
So what really went wrong in the ‘Bhuladia’ Factory? The lack of fire extinguishers, the locked evacuation doors, the absence of emergency procedures, the electric wires that sparked, the chemicals that were inflammable, the workers who were not enrolled with the concerned departments, the safety inspectors who never inspected, the hazards that were never identified, the safety training that was never conducted or the safety system that was not in place.
Perhaps it is too embarrassing to admit that while Pakistan has nuclear weapons, it does not have even a basic statutory and administrative health and safety system for its workforce. The existing requirements for safety are obsolete, inadequate and for most part non-existent. The existing safety enforcement mechanisms are corrupt, incompetent and dysfunctional. Like all other civilized countries, Pakistan too needs to create, through an Act of Parliament, an autonomous Occupational Safety and Health Authority (OSHA) for establishing and enforcing Occupational Health and Safety standards throughout the country.
A national Occupational Safety and Health Authority derives its legitimacy and support from three interdependent elements. An Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) Statutory Act, OHS Operational Regulations and the supporting Reference Codes and Standards.
Take for example the Canadian Labour Code or Act (R.S.C., 1985) which is the primary statutory document for Occupational Health and Safety. It lays down requirements for OHS that must be complied by employers, employees and government functionaries. It makes it obligatory for employers to pro-actively identify hazards and institute preventive measures to eliminate or reduce risks.
The operational details of the statutory requirements in terms of application, installation, operation, maintenance, inspections and records are described in Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations (SOR/86-304). The Regulations in turn refer to Standards and Codes (such as B51-97, Boiler, Pressure Vessel, and Pressure Piping Code) that provide specifications for the correct methods and materials used in products, buildings or processes.
A reactive and compensatory approach is counterproductive in the business of OHS. Pakistan seems to show no interest or inclination towards developing its OHS statutory, regulatory and administrative infra-structure. For the uneducated and the fake degree-holding parliamentarians, this and such other serious issues are indeed Greek and totally incomprehensible. Only an absolutely callous, clueless and indifferent state could sit back and do nothing to improve these life-threatening death traps referred to as workplaces. Civil society needs to stand up for the 56 million adult and 10 million child workers who work under perilous conditions to earn their daily bread.
Can the Election Commission add a new requirement for every parliamentarian to undergo compulsory service as an industrial worker for at least one week every year?
For any system to survive, it must fulfil at least two minimum requirements. Meet the needs of its customers and have the capacity to improve itself.
The first requirement relates to the primary function and purpose of an organisation and the second to its ability to detect its own shortcomings and take actions to improve its performance.
When an organisation cannot meet both these requirements, it becomes a dead horse and a candidate for the tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians. When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
Regrettably the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is a perfect candidate for the tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians.
The ECP failed completely to deliver on its primary function.
It conducted a sham election in 2008 that included 37 million fake votes. It also looked the other way and allowed hundreds of fake degree holders, dual nationals, tax avoiders and law violators to contest elections and become our ‘illegitimate’ lawmakers.
For five long years, the sleepy ECP could not detect that 70 percent of legislators do not file their tax returns. What can explain a misdemeanour of such magnitude: incompetence, corruption, connivance, political partisanship or simple cluelessness?
Sadly, there were no traces of remorse, no one was held accountable and it was ‘business as usual’ in the corridors of the ECP.
On June 23, 2010, two citizens of Pakistan requested the Supreme Court for suo motu action against two chief election commissioners.
Against Justice (r) Qazi Muhammad Farooq for his failure to scrutinise fake degrees and other credentials of the contestants.
And against Justice (r) Hamid Mirza for his failure to scrutinise the credentials of Jamshed Dasti in the 2010 Muzzafargarh by-elections.
Mr Dasti earlier having admitted to faking his degree could not be considered righteous, honest or ‘ameen’ as required by Article 62 of the constitution.
The application for suo motu notice pleaded that the two chief election commissioners be held accountable for the enormous loss of tax payers’ money in the form of salaries and perks paid to the bogus parliamentarians.
Come 2013 and the Pakistanis once again ponder with anxiety and nervousness at the prospects of impending polls. Will the ECP repeat its past performance? Will the ECP once again impose the same or similar set of questionably bogus parliamentarians?
Has the ECP been able to create processes to detect its own shortcomings? Has the ECP taken all corrective actions to prevent future errors? Regrettably, there is no evidence that the ECP has been able reform itself.
The ECP’s vulnerability was partly acknowledged when the government recently announced that the ECP be given one month to carry out scrutiny of the nomination papers against Article 62 and 63 of the constitution.
What appears to be a new and encouraging development, is in fact yet another placebo meant to provide paper ‘relief’ to the people of Pakistan.
The law always placed upon the ECP the responsibility to scrutinise the nomination papers. If the ECP did not do this before, why will it do so now? The problem is not with the law but with its implementation.
To be fair to ECP, its helplessness is partly by choice and partly by design. The CEC, a person of rare integrity, is practically unable to handle the complex and bureaucratic processes of the ECP.
The four members of the ECP are political nominees. A large number of senior ECP staff is on ‘extension’.
The election commissioner of Sindh who was removed for performance-related complaints was not sent home but made the election commissioner of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The ECP does not have the muscle, the administrative skills and the wherewithal to harness or order numerous other departments who must directly support the ECP for performing key electoral verifications.
Our parliament has often moved at great speed to create legislation for its own benefits. Can it show only a reflection of this urgency to legislate new laws to revamp the ECP?
The CEC and its four members need not necessarily be serving or retired judges. They should all be less than 70 years of age. They should be chosen not by politicians but by a panel consisting of some of the most respected citizens, academics and other distinguished and non-controversial professionals of Pakistan.
All departments such as the FBR, FIA, NAB, Nadra, police, HEC, the State Bank of Pakistan and heads of utility companies must be legally bound to respond to the ECP’s requests to investigate and certify the relevant portions of the nomination papers.
The CEC ought to have powers to disqualify, if a violation of electoral rules is detected any time during the five year tenure of a legislator.
An ECP that can neither purge the past defaulters nor scrutinise the future offenders ought to be re-engineered, revamped and made more effective.
Can parliament legislate life and spirit into its much expressed desire for ‘free and fair’ elections?
The writer is a management systems consultant and writes on social issues.
Qadri flanked by negotiators addresses supporters (Credit: guardian.co.uk)
ISLAMABAD, Jan 18: The Tehreek-e-Minhaj-ul-Quran chief Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri late Thursday called off his mass protest in Islamabad, averting a major political crisis and reaching a deal with the government that paves the way for elections within months.
The decision, hours after the Supreme Court adjourned an alleged corruption case against Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf having earlier ordered his arrest, gives the government breathing space after three days of high tensions.
Tension had been at fever pitch since Tuesday, when the court ordered Ashraf’s arrest and Tahir-ul Qadri arrived in Islamabad with tens of thousands of supporters, denouncing politicians and praising the armed forces and judiciary.
There were few signs of any significant government concessions in the deal reached on Thursday, which stated that parliament would be dissolved at any time before March 16 so that elections can take place within 90 days.
The government had previously said parliament would dissolve on March 17.
But Qadri hailed it as victory for the protesters, estimated to number around 25,000 in the largest ever demonstration in the capital since the current government took office in 2008.
“I congratulate you. Today is the day of victory for the people of Pakistan. You should go home as peacefully as you came here,” Qadri told participants after signing the deal with the prime minister.
Qadri’s supporters danced and cheered in a carnival-style atmosphere despite the chilly winter night, before packing their bags, collecting up mattresses and blankets, and getting in their vehicles to leave, an AFP reporter said.
“I am very happy. I can’t explain it. We felt the cold very badly in the last few days but we’re happy that we’ve been successful in our mission and we want rights for the next generation,” said 26-year-old housewife Muqaddas Zulfiqar, holding her two-year-old son.
“If we had to stay here longer, we would have stayed.”
Qadri, cabinet ministers and members of the coalition negotiated for hours in the bullet-proof container where the cleric has been holed up since early Tuesday while his supporters have slept on the ground outside.
“I congratulate you. Today this is another victory for democracy,” Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told the crowd, standing alongside Qadri.
“This is your victory. This is Qadri’s victory. This is my victory and this is the people’s victory. This is the real face of Pakistan,” he added.
Qadri had called for parliament to be dissolved immediately and for a caretaker government to be set up in consultation with the military and judiciary to implement reforms before elections.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry adjourned until January 23 the case being heard against Ashraf and 15 others accused of corruption over power projects that date back to his time as water and energy minister.
Chairman of the National Accountability Bureau Fasih Bokhari said it would take time to find evidence to prosecute anyone despite the court ordering in March 2012 legal proceedings against Ashraf.
Political analyst Hasan Askari warned that it was only a temporary reprieve.
“Even if they come up with a solution to the present problems, they may get another crisis… So the government should announce elections now,” he said.
Jan 6, Thatta: Zulfikarabad, the dream city of the president of Pakistan, has sparked another controversy in Sindh. In spite of tooth and nail opposition, the government seems ready to proceed with its plans. The project, originally named as Jheruk, was first heard of in 2009. The scheme was later relocated to further south of Thatta district in Jati, Shah Bunder, Keti Bunder and Kharo Chaan talukas.
A meeting chaired by President Asif Zardari on 28th January 2011 was told that the project would require some 1.6 million acres of land in the four coastal talukas of Thatta district. More than 1.2 million acres of the earmarked land is presently under sea and would require huge amount of money to reclaim. Sindh Land Management and Development Company has been established to acquire land for the project.
An autonomous body, Zulfikarabad Development Authority (ZDA) has been established to steer the project. The authority enjoys rare powers of approving any scheme even without seeking approval from the provincial Planning and Development Department. A high powered Executive Committee of the Authority has been empowered to take decisions. The chief secretary of the province would be just an ordinary member of the authority, ceremonially chaired by the chief minister and practically operated by the managing director. This is probably the only development scheme of its kind, for which key decisions are taken in meetings chaired by not less than the president of Pakistan.
Coastal strip is globally considered as an enticing location for commercial investments e.g. housing, tourism, industry and trade. Most expensive residential schemes are developed along coastal towns and cities. According to some estimates, approximately three billion people on earth live within 200 kilometres of coast and 14 out of 17 biggest cities of the world are located on coastline. This development is often materialised at the cost of indigenous communities. Against this backdrop, civil society has expressed its serious reservations on social and environmental implications of this scheme. Involuntary displacement of thousands of people from coastal villages is afoot.
China has shown its keen interest in the scheme. Delegations of Chinese investors frequently meet the president to lobby for major contracts in the project. The president has also recently visited China and the two countries have signed MoU to implement the project through Chinese companies.
Such high value projects nest hefty profits and poor communities become their casualty in numerous ways. Pakistan does not have impressive track record in this context. Resettlement of few thousand people of much smaller projects like Chotiari reservoir reeked with massive embezzlements and nepotism. Plight of the would-be displaced communities of Zulfikarabad is a foregone conclusion.
Key reason for Sindhis to oppose this project is lurking fear of being turned into a numeric minority in their own province. According to the 1998 census, Sindhi speaking population was 60 per cent. Sindhi speaking population in urban areas was 25.8 per cent against 78.75% Punjabi speaking in urban Punjab and 73.55% Pashto speaking in Urban KP. Demography of Karachi was even worse with Sindhi speaking population standing at 7.7%. Against this backdrop, any new city of expected population of 10 million would easily convert Sindhis into a minority within a decade. Nationalist parties in Sindh consider Zulfikarabad a tool of demographic genocide of Sindhis.
The project is also impregnated with environmental risks. Indus Delta is jewel in the crown of Pakistan’s ecological heritage. For its rich biodiversity, the Delta is declared as a Ramsar site and attains great environmental significance. According to WWF Pakistan, the area where the city is proposed houses about 50 per cent of the country’s remaining mangroves cover most of which is declared as ‘protected’ since 1950s.
Recent studies on the existing land use of the location indicate that mangrove forests, wet mudflats and seawater in various major and minor creeks cover 7.2, 40.2 and 20 per cent of the total area of the site, respectively (WWF Pakistan). The remaining one third is the inland area which comprises agriculture and inland vegetation on about 9 per cent and uncultivated agricultural land and residential areas on 24 per cent of the total area of proposed Zulfikarabad site. More than 50,000 hectors of the proposed site are covered with mangroves forests, most of which are under the administrative jurisdictions of Sindh Forest Departments. Pakistan’s Environmental Protection Act requires an Environmental Impact Assessment (to which Social Impact Assessment is a component) of such projects. Considering the scope of the project, ideally a Strategic Impact Assessment should be conducted. However, all these requirements have been violated flagrantly.
Coastal cities are no more considered salubrious locations. Environmental hazards and coastal disasters have made such cities more vulnerable. Tsunamis of East-Asian coast in 2004 and of Japan in 2011 provide ample evidence of alarming vulnerability of coastal cities. Tourism, industry, shipping and aqua-culture are some of the prime areas of interest for investors. Natural ecosystem is gradually encroached and eventually replaced by concrete and steel in such areas.
Tsunami hit East-Asian countries developed shrimp farming into a $9 billion industry by erasing mangroves forests in vast swathes. The massive wave of destruction caused by the 2004 tsunami dwarfed all economic gain that the shrimp industry claimed. According to some reports, Sindh coast witnessed an average of four cyclones in a century. However, the frequency and intensity has increased manifold and the period of 1971-2001 records 14 cyclones. From 2001 to 2010, two high intensity cyclones i.e. cyclone Yemyin and cyclone Phet narrowly missed Sindh coast. Thus, Zulfikarabad would be exposed to serious potential hazards.
The proposed city is located in an active seismic zone, where exists Allah Band Fault, a potential threat of severe earthquake. In its southeast lies Gujarat Seismic Zone (GSZ) and in north-west Makran Subduction Zone (MSZ) that pose serious threat to the proposed city. Bhuj earthquake of 2001 caused devastation in the adjoining areas across the border.
Looking at shambolic infrastructure and substandard quality of services in Sindh, one wonders why these resources cannot be veered to improve the existing system. Most of the province is devoid of vehicle-worthy highways, link roads and basic infrastructure in secondary cities. Housing, drinking water and sanitation facilities are not available in large parts of big cities and secondary towns of Sindh. Thousands of schools and health facilities are without basic facilities. According to official data, 10,722 schools are without building and 24,559 are without drinking water facility in the province (Sindh Economic Survey 2009-2011). The same document acknowledges that provision of health facilities in Sindh is grossly inadequate. The province has only 3.5 doctors per 10,000 people and only 1.1 nurses against the same number of people. Against this backdrop, the decision to pour billions of dollars to build another big city lacks prescience.
President Zardari with son Bilawal (Credit: bbc.co.uk)
He stood yards from the tomb of his mother, a two-time prime minister killed by Islamic militants exactly five years before, and that of his grandfather, a prime minister and president ousted in a military coup and hanged by a dictator, and told the huge crowd filling the open ground in front of the white domed mausoleum that there were “two powers” in his homeland, “those on the right path and those on the path of lies”.
On Thursday Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 24-year-old only son of Benazir Bhutto and the heir to one of the most powerful, famous and controversial political dynasties in the world, made his formal debut in the turbulent and often lethal world of Pakistani politics at an emotional rally in a small village which is his family’s ancestral home in the south of the country.
“Bilawal has arrived. This was a huge step. It was make or break for him,” said Nadeem F Paracha, a well-known columnist with Dawn newspaper after the speech.
Less than three years ago, Bhutto junior was studying history and politics at Christ Church college, Oxford, a target for tabloid journalists but few others. Now he is probably the most high-profile target in a country hit by wave after wave of extremist violence.
Bhutto spoke of the sacrifices made by members of his family, workers of the Pakistan People’s party (PPP), and others such as Shia Muslims shot dead in ongoing sectarian violence and Malala Yusafzai, the 15-year-old schoolgirl and activist for girls’ education who was shot and badly injured by militants in October and is now recovering in a British hospital.
“How long you will go on killing innocent people? … if one Malala will be killed, thousands will replace her. One Benazir was killed; thousands have replaced her,” Bhutto told the crowds.
Observers noted that Bhutto’s Urdu, the national language which he has had to hastily learn since his return to Pakistan to take up his political heritage, was, if still accented, much improved.
“He does not believe in being the anointed prince. He wants to earn the respect of the party workers and of the people of Pakistan,” said Farnahaz Ispahani, a former PPP member of parliament and a confidant of the Bhutto family.
More than 5,000 police had been deployed to protect the event. Helicopters hovered overhead.
Parliamentary elections due this spring are likely to test the ruling PPP-led coalition, hit by an ailing economy, rising prices for basic foodstuffs, continuing violence, anger at endemic graft and an ongoing power crisis that brings daily electricity cuts.
Bhutto’s father, Asif Ali Zardari, has been the president of Pakistan since 2008. A controversial figure who was jailed on corruption charges that he has said were politically motivated from 1996 to 2000 but who has proved a skilful tactical politician, Zardari has been described as a “transitional leader” for the PPP.
Though only able to contest elections in September after his 25th birthday, Bhutto’s presence will nonetheless be a powerful boost in campaigning over the coming months.
“Bilawal grew up with his mother as his father was in jail for a long time. He went with her to rallies and was with her in top-level meetings. His beliefs – in pluralism, democracy, human rights – mirror hers,” said Ispahani.
However, doubts remain over Bhutto’s appeal to new, younger, urbanised and often more religiously minded voters. Osama Siddique, a professor at Lahore University of Management Science, said it was hard to “visualise Bilawal” in a key position in the immediate future.
“Putting Benazir’s son on a stage makes political sense. It’s a very poignant and emotional moment still for many people,” he said.
Cyril Almeida, analyst and editorialist in the southern city of Karachi, said that though Bhutto’s personal courage was unquestionable it was less certain that a political novice could “solve the problems faced by the country … whatever his last name”.
Benazir Bhutto died when leaving a political rally in the northern city of Rawalpindi while campaigning for elections in 2007 after nearly 10 years in exile. Her killers have never been conclusively identified, though most experts and intelligence services believe Islamic extremists were responsible. The PPP won the postponed polls held after her assassination to gain power.
Party officials told the Guardian on Thursday that Bilawal, who was educated at private English-medium schools in Pakistan and in Dubai after his mother went into self-imposed exile in 1999, would contest his mother’s parliamentary seat when he was old enough.
Last year Fauzia Wahab, a presidential aide and Bhutto family friend, said Bilawal carried “a heavy burden” as he “had the Bhutto genes”.
Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfiqar, rode to power on an anti-poverty platform before being deposed and eventually executed in prison by the military dictator Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq in 1979. Both he and his daughter are routinely referred to as “shaheed” or “martyred” in Pakistan.
Bhutto told the crowd on Thursday that the PPP stood for “food, clothes and shelter” for the common man, purposefully using a slogan from his grandfather’s campaigns. Bhutto, who friends say reads history avidly, also appeared well aware of the potential cost of his new role.
“The PPP is not just a political party. This is our life,” he said.
Dynastic politics
In an uncertain south Asia, it is always nice to have something you can rely on. In Pakistan it is that a Bhutto will be either in power or leading the opposition. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto dominated the early 1970s with his brand of populist, leftwing, nationalist and increasingly autocratic politics. His daughter was prime minister twice. Now it’s her son’s turn to enter the fray.
In India, the great local democracy, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is as dominant as it has ever been with Rahul Gandhi, 42, hoping to become a fourth-generation prime minister, or at least principal candidate, and his mother, Sonia, currently the president of the ruling Congress party.
In Bangladesh, the decades-old rivalry between Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wajed for control of the country continues that between the late husband of one and the father of the other. Bhutan is still a monarchy.
In Burma, the Nobel-prize-winning democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the assassinated nationalist leader and effective founder of the modern country Aung San, is leader of the opposition and spoken of as a potential president in the future.
In Sri Lanka, the son of the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, himself the son of a prominent politician, has won a seat in the family fief of Hambantota and significant numbers of family members fill posts across the country’s administration.
At state or provincial level in all these countries, similar dynamics are at work. Why are dynastic politics so tenacious on the subcontinent? In an often mercenary world, there is the obvious need for any successful politician to bolster his or her hold on power by recruiting loyal retainers who will not defect for material gain. This means family first. Then there is simple inheritance of power, influence, money and, especially in India and Pakistan, land. A key factor is the importance of personalities in contests largely stripped of ideological content. Finally there are the high levels of illiteracy, which make a famous name a determining factor for tens of millions of voters.
One common strand uniting the dynasties is that most of them speak English as a first language. Along with railways and a swollen bureaucracy, it may be that British rule bequeathed something else too: a taste for hereditary power and deference. There are one or two exceptions to the rule. The Maldives has all sorts of political woes but dynastic rule is not one of them. Nepal has recently done away with its kings, though it is hardly a model of stability either. As for Afghanistan, a relative replacing the president, Hamid Karzai, as a candidate, possibly a successful one too, in coming polls is far from impossible. After all, in south Asia, politics is a family affair.
LONDON, Dec 7: The Scotland Yard raided offices located on Edgware road in London on Thursday in connection with the murder of Dr Imran Farooq, Express News reported.
Express News correspondent Naseem Siddiqui said that the London Metropolitan police raided an office on Thursday morning. Officials questioned those present in the office and also reportedly confiscated some records.
No one was arrested though.
Earlier in September, the police hinted that slain high-profile Muttahida Qaumi Movement leader, Dr Imran Farooq’s wish to actively participate in politics by pursuing his political career independently might have led to his murder.
The Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, said that he was killed because his murderers did not want him to do so.
Appealing for an investigation, the Metropolitan police also announced a £20,000 reward for providing any information linked to his assassination.
In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007:
I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail … The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.
Akhtar’s story reveals much about modern Pakistan. Born in 1959, he spent two years of his boyhood learning the Quran by heart and left home at the age of 18, moving to the radical Jamia Binoria madrassah in Karachi. In 1980, he went on jihad, fighting first the Soviets in Afghanistan and later the Indians in Kashmir. In both conflicts he came into contact with Pakistani intelligence agents, who were there trying to find out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing about’.
In 1995, Akhtar committed a crime that in many countries would have earned him a death sentence: he procured a cache of weapons to be used in a coup. Putsches in Pakistan generally take the form of the army chief moving against an elected government. This one was an attempt by disaffected Islamist officers to overthrow not only Bhutto’s government but also the army leadership.
The plot’s leader was Major General Zahir ul Islam Abbasi. In 1988, as Pakistan’s military attaché in Delhi, he acquired some sensitive security documents from an Indian contact. When the Indians found out, they beat him up and expelled him. He returned to Pakistan a national hero. Seven years later, disenchanted by the secularist tendencies of both Bhutto and the army leadership, he devised a plot to storm the GHQ and impose sharia. Akhtar’s role was to supply the weapons. He travelled to the town of Dera Adam Khel near Peshawar, a well-known centre for the production and sale of cheap weapons, and bought 15 Kalashnikovs, two rocket launchers and five pistols.
He was caught red-handed moving the weapons to Rawalpindi. No doubt cajoled by his intelligence agency handlers from Afghanistan and Kashmir, Akhtar decided to give evidence against his fellow plotters. At a stroke he was transformed from a typical jihadi into a highly trusted informant; he has been playing on his supposed loyalty to the intelligence services ever since. Many of those accused of major jihadi outrages in Pakistan have at some stage been released from detention; after Akhtar had spent just five months in prison in 1995, the chief justice set him free.
It is commonplace for the Pakistani intelligence agencies to cut deals with jihadis. In Akhtar they struck gold. While most Pakistanis never escape the class into which they are born, radical Islamists enjoy considerable social mobility. He had left his Karachi seminary in 1979 with a dream of fighting jihad; by the mid-1990s he was the leader of the HUJI and had a close relationship with Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader and de facto head of state. Indeed, he was seen as one of the few people who might have been able to bridge the growing gap between the Taliban and al-Qaida. Not only that, he expanded the HUJI’s operations to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, China and Chechnya.
Everything changed with the collapse of the Taliban regime after 9/11. According to one account, Akhtar and Mullah Omar shared the same motorbike as they fled for sanctuary with Akhtar’s old intelligence contacts in Pakistan. He told his men to keep a low profile – the US was picking up jihadis and sending them to Guantánamo – and himself headed to the UAE, a hub for Islamists as well as Western businessmen. By 2004 he had overstretched even the UAE’s relaxed hospitality. He was arrested on charges of plotting the assassination attempt on General Musharraf in December 2003 and handed over to Pakistan.
One might think that this time his luck had run out. But that would be to misapprehend the convoluted logic of what has been described as the ‘deep state’ in Pakistan. Akhtar, and others like him, were seen not as a clear and present threat, but as powerful, not very well educated men who simply needed to be pointed in the right direction. If they could be persuaded to aim their guns not at domestic targets but at the Americans in Afghanistan or at India they could still be useful.
Akhtar would enjoy another rehabilitation because of a growing row between Musharraf and the Supreme Court. In early 2007, the court, seeking a popular issue with which it could undermine Musharraf, started inquiring about the many prisoners being held without charge. On 5 May 2007, it was told that Akhtar was not in government custody. His relatives insisted he was. Three weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi activities somewhere in Punjab’.
Why had the Pakistani authorities held Akhtar for so long only to release him? In part in the hope of bending him to their will. But also because he knew too much about the true nature of the deep state’s relationship with radical Islamists. His lawyer, Hashmat Habib, told the Supreme Court that intelligence officials had explained to Akhtar that had he not been detained there was a strong possibility he would have ended up being interrogated by the FBI.
The publication of Reconciliation left the authorities little choice but to detain Akhtar yet again, but in June 2008, after three months of half-hearted questioning, he was released without charge. He went straight back to fighting jihad according to his own rules rather than those suggested by his intelligence handlers. Later that year, he was accused by the Pakistani press of being involved in the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and in 2009 was named as the key contact of five American jihadis who travelled to Pakistan with the idea of attacking a nuclear power plant. But still the ISI kept faith. In August 2010, after he was reportedly injured in a drone attack, he was taken into protective custody, given treatment in Peshawar, moved to Lahore and freed. The man formally responsible for his release, the Punjab home minister, Rana Sanaullah, told reporters in Lahore that Akhtar ‘cannot be termed a terrorist’.
Akhtar’s case is by no means unique. In a conversation with Amir Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has since tried to investigate Bhutto’s murder, Bhutto claimed that Akhtar had instructed one of his HUJI underlings, Abdul Rehman Sindhi, to organise certain aspects of the Karachi attack.[*] Like Akhtar, Sindhi had been held by the authorities for militant activity but was released without explanation. In 2012, the UN named him as an al-Qaida facilitator. We can only assume that Bhutto was given the names of Akhtar and Sindhi by a sympathiser in the deep state; their role in her death has not been established. But it is clear the state wants Akhtar’s secrets to remain secret. Despairing of Pakistan’s decline into lawlessness, the intelligence agencies cling to the hope that Islam will provide some answers. More practically, they also point to their success in controlling some militant groups, including the largest of them, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the ISI’s model of how a militant group should behave – attacking Indian forces in Kashmir, Delhi and Mumbai but causing no trouble at home. Like Akhtar, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed is a man often detained and often released.
Although generally feared as one of the most powerful institutions in the country, the ISI feels itself to be weak: militants have attacked its personnel with impunity. Significant amounts of Pakistani territory are now either controlled or fiercely contested by militant groups in the North-West. The army has tried military solutions but they have cost thousands of soldiers’ lives and met with only limited success. How much easier to have a word with friends from the good old days of the anti-Soviet and Kashmir struggles in an attempt to persuade them to unify their forces and to keep them under control. Even if it won’t work in the long term it does occasionally bring temporary relief – the ceasefires that were briefly established in the Swat Valley are an example.
On 27 December 2007, with ten days to go until parliamentary elections, Benazir Bhutto addressed more than ten thousand supporters in Liaquat Park, Rawalpindi. She told them democracy was returning to Pakistan. ‘Long live Bhutto!’ they roared back. ‘Benazir, Prime Minister!’ The speech over, she moved to an armour-plated Toyota Land Cruiser built to her specifications in the UAE. Its roof had an escape hatch that, much to the annoyance of her security advisers, Bhutto used for waving to her followers. As the Toyota pulled away from Liaquat Park her supporters surrounded it. ‘I should stand up,’ Bhutto said, clambering up as one of her fellow passengers pulled the mechanism that opened the hatch. She stood on the back seat, her head and shoulders sticking out above the Toyota’s roof.
There were so many people by now that the car was almost at a standstill. Two of Bhutto’s guards climbed onto the rear bumper while others went to the front and the sides. But an assassin was waiting and saw his chance. Wearing a dark jacket and sunglasses, a Pashtun called Bilal, who also went by the alias Saeed, first made his way towards the front of the car. Then he moved to the side, where there were fewer people. He took out a black automatic and pointed it at Bhutto’s head. One of the guards clawed at the young man’s arm but was too far away to get a firm grip. Bilal fired three shots in less than a second. If you search for ‘new angle of Bhutto assassination’ on YouTube you can see what happened. As the second shot rang out Bhutto’s headscarf or dupatta moved away from her face. She then fell like a stone, through the escape hatch, into the vehicle. But the gunman wasn’t finished. He looked down at the ground, prepared himself for death, and set off his suicide bomb. Much of the press reported him as clean-shaven. In fact, he had probably never shaved at all. British scientists who later analysed what was left of his body estimated his age at 15 and a half.
Pakistan’s suicide bomb factories, located in the tribal areas, rely on child recruits for a practical reason: they are more impressionable. Recruits for suicide attacks are given immaculate white clothes, copious amounts of food, above average accommodation and hours of gently imparted one on one indoctrination. The other students are forbidden to talk to them and are instructed instead to bow with respect every time a recruit walks by. With such a regime it can take a few months to persuade an 18-year-old young man to mount a suicide attack; but a 15-year-old can be persuaded to do it in six weeks.
Liaquat Park was named after the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated there in 1951. In what many believe was a cover-up, the police shot his killer on the spot. One of the doctors who tried to revive him at Rawalpindi General Hospital was a certain Dr Khan. Fifty-six years later, Dr Khan’s son Mussadiq was one of the doctors trying to revive Benazir Bhutto at the same hospital. He was equally unsuccessful. On the announcement of her death, the vast majority of Pakistanis assumed that the people who ordered her assassination were senior state officials and that they would never be identified.
There are, broadly speaking, two views about what happened that day. Bhutto’s supporters maintain she was shot and that there were multiple attackers. The Pakistani authorities say the explosion knocked her head against the lever of the escape hatch. Bhutto’s supporters want to establish that there was a sophisticated, officially sponsored conspiracy; the state prefers the idea of a crude but unpreventable attack by Islamic militants.
Certainly, when Bhutto died, there were shots followed by an explosion. The pictures suggest that a bullet hit her and that she fell into the vehicle before the bomb went off. It wasn’t just that her headscarf moved after the second shot. Her movements weren’t consistent with someone ducking a bullet: it looks as if she was already dead, or at least seriously injured, when she fell. The doctors who tried to revive her failed to resolve the issue. They have given various accounts but their evidence is of limited use because they didn’t perform a proper autopsy. There were questions and conspiracy theories about the lack of a post-mortem, but the issue subsided in political terms when her husband, Asif Zardari, was offered one, but said it wouldn’t be necessary.
Under pressure because so many people assumed he had ordered the murder, Musharraf asked Scotland Yard to assist the investigators, though he restricted the terms of reference to the ‘cause and circumstances of Ms Bhutto’s death’, frustrating any hope that the British police would try to identify who was responsible. In 2008, Scotland Yard published an executive summary of its findings which backed the government’s view, failing even to discuss the mobile-phone images that suggested she had been shot. Few believed it. The full report has never been published; there it is explained that a senior radiologist from Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge who was shown the X-rays of Bhutto’s skull concluded that the explosion had forced her head down onto the escape hatch mechanism. In fact, although the precise cause of Bhutto’s death remains one of the most strongly contested issues in the case, it is largely irrelevant. The important questions are: who was the child-assassin and who persuaded him to do it?
Some of the YouTube films of the Rawalpindi rally (look for ‘Shahenshah Bhutto’) point to another controversy. While Bhutto was speaking at the rally her chief bodyguard, Khalid Shahenshah, can be seen a few feet away running his fingers along his neck while raising his eyes towards her. In July 2008, after much internet speculation about these decidedly strange movements, Shahenshah was murdered outside his home in Karachi. His conduct and his death have never been explained.
Bhutto was participating in the election campaign only because of a deal she had struck with Musharraf. It was always an awkward arrangement. Bhutto saw Musharraf as the latest incarnation of the military that had hanged her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Musharraf, for his part, saw Bhutto as a child of privilege who went on corruptly to enrich herself. After his coup in 1999, Musharraf had declared that no longer would the country’s richest families and biggest landowners be able to dominate politics. And Bhutto, he declared, would never hold power again.
The general may have led a coup against a democratically elected government but his message resonated throughout Pakistan. The good mood didn’t last, however. As each month passed, his popularity drained away and his ambitions shrank. By 2007, eight years after his coup, he was older, wiser and politically weaker. Like many Pakistanis, he had no doubt that the corruption allegations against Bhutto and Zardari were valid. But in 2007 he also had to accept that Bhutto had a rock solid popular base and that if he wanted to remain in power he needed her support. Swallowing his pride, he agreed to an MI6 suggestion that he attend a secret meeting with Bhutto in Abu Dhabi in July 2007. The encounter kicked off a series of meetings which, as they became more serious and focused, were taken over by the CIA. The basic proposition was simple enough: if Musharraf dropped all the corruption charges against Bhutto and Zardari and allowed her to return from exile to contest elections, she would not oppose his remaining president. To the Americans it looked like a dream ticket: military muscle combined with democratic legitimacy. It could never have worked. ‘I don’t believe in trust,’ Bhutto said at the time. ‘People just have interests that sometimes coincide.’ Nevertheless, the deal was done and she returned to Pakistan, flying from Dubai to Karachi on 18 October 2007. She was greeted by a triumph on an imperial Roman scale. There comes a point when a crowd is so big it’s impossible to count it. Many reckon that more than a million Pakistanis were there to welcome her home.
For eight hours she progressed in a massive, armour-plated truck from Karachi’s International Airport to the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she was due to give a speech. She stood on a deck on the top of the truck acknowledging the cheers of the crowds lining the road. The police deployed no fewer than nine thousand men to protect her but even so Zardari wasn’t satisfied. He organised a human shield consisting of more than two thousand volunteers known as the Jaan Nisarane Benazir, those willing to die for Benazir. Many were Zardari’s former jail mates; they surrounded her vehicle and kept pace with the procession.
After several hours standing on the truck, Bhutto’s ankles were swelling and she decided to sit down for a few minutes. She made her way down some steps to a secure cubicle located behind the driver’s seat. It was then the attack began: two bombs went off in rapid succession. The first killed, among others, three policemen and opened up a path through which the second bomber was able to move. The attack left 149 people dead and 402 wounded. But it missed its mark. As rescuers worked by the light of the flames, dragging bodies from the twisted wreckage, Bhutto stepped out of the vehicle without a scratch.
As soon as the smoke had cleared people were asking whether the first bomb had been remote-controlled. The issue was significant because the police had supposedly provided the convoy with two jammers to block any radio signals intended to detonate a bomb. Activists from Bhutto’s party claimed the jammers either hadn’t been provided or had been switched off. Both the Karachi and Rawalpindi attacks were investigated by Joint Investigation Teams (JITs) that brought together various police departments. The JIT report into the Karachi attack concedes that the Turkish-made jammers were not functioning at the time of the attack. According to a Sindh Special Branch memo, they failed because their batteries had been drained over the long course of the procession. It was a moot point. Perhaps anticipating that jammers would be deployed, the bombers had anyway decided against remote detonation: it was a double suicide attack.
Pakistan lacks skilled forensic pathologists but there have been so many suicide attacks now that even the most junior policeman knows that the first thing to look for is the ‘facemask’. For some reason, related to the way the shockwave moves from the bomb-laden waistcoat, the bombers’ faces – though very little of the head behind them – often survive intact. On this occasion, the JIT report states, one facemask was found 26.6 feet away from the point of detonation and another 78 feet away. To whom did they belong?
The Pakistani police rarely know whether their political masters want an investigation to be thorough or not. As a general rule they assume the politicians are hoping for a cover-up and actively investigate only when specifically ordered to do so. That would explain why the JIT Karachi report is such a remarkably poor piece of work: 138 pages long, it contains virtually no useful facts and plenty of contradictions. Page after page of police reporting from the scene establishes only that some vehicles were destroyed and that a lot of body parts were strewn about. Some of these were gathered and sent to the morgue while others (no explanation isgiven as to why) went to a DNA specialist, who concluded that the parts he had were from different people. The finding had no discernible significance. Basic, easily discoverable facts were not gathered. The various police documents give the time gap between the first and second explosions as between 30 and 50 seconds (Inspector General of the CID); under a minute (the Federal Investigation Agency); one minute exactly (an army explosives expert); and between one and two minutes (the bomb disposal unit travelling with the convoy). Some of the documents in the JIT report – presumably those from the intelligence agencies – are unattributed. Others, such as doctors’ handwritten notes on the death of a few, apparently randomly selected victims, are irrelevant. Indeed, the whole report has only two findings of any significance.
The first concerns the devices called ‘strikers’ that most suicide bombers in Pakistan rely on to detonate their explosives. Although its lot number was illegible, the striker sleeve found at the epicentre of the Karachi blast was marked MUV-2. The suicide attack in Karachi was the 28th to occur in Pakistan in 2007. MUV-2 striker sleeves had been used on 11 of those occasions, including bombings in Quetta, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and other smaller cities in North-West Pakistan. The targets in these 11 cases were all consistent with the Taliban having been responsible and included the police, politicians who had opposed jihadis and the Frontier Corps, which had done much of the fighting against the Taliban.
The second interesting entry was a summary of the interrogation of the man Bhutto had named, Qari Saifullah Akhtar. But the document had been doctored. After describing his childhood and his long jihadi career, the story came to an abrupt end in August 2007. It resumed in January 2008, after Bhutto’s murder had been carried out. It was a clumsy effort: the edited page is in one font, the rest of the document in another.
The JIT may have provided few answers, but it did inadvertently hint at the reason some in the deep state were so anxious about Bhutto. The report includes newspaper articles providing possible motivations for an attack on Bhutto. One quotes her as saying that if the US identified the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden on Pakistan soil she would consider co-operating with Washington in having him detained. That in itself might have provided enough motive for an attack. But there was something else. As part of her effort to win American support, Bhutto said that she would be willing to hand over the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan for questioning by the IAEA. At the time, Khan had accepted personal responsibility for the export of nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, although his live TV confession of his activities was always considered suspect by the IAEA and the US, both of which believed that no single individual could have exported planeloads of nuclear material without the army’s knowledge. To this date, the military, despite insistent requests, has refused to allow foreigners to talk to Khan. Bhutto’s offer to the IAEA was seen as a real threat to Pakistan’s nuclear status.
Despite their apparent lack of interest in the failed assassination attempt, the Karachi police did eventually arrest someone. In June 2010, they raided the home of Azmatullah Mehsud, seized a pistol and accused him and his brother Abdul Wahab Mehsud (who remained at large) of involvement in the attack. As so often, the motivation of the police was unclear. It seemed Azmatullah had been arrested not so much as a result of the Bhutto case but because the police thought he was going to attack one of their own officers. The senior superintendent of the Karachi CID, Umar Shahid, told a local paper: ‘We have recorded his telephonic conversation with his brother, who directed him to attack me.’
The police have leaked a few snippets of information about Azmatullah to the press. They have said he raised funds for the Taliban and provided hideouts and medical treatment to injured militants. They also said he had links to Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and the very violent anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Azmatullah was released the next month. But if some elements of the state wanted him free, others did not. A day later, a Sindh police anti-extremism cell re-arrested him. ‘Due to a shortage of evidence, the courts released several suspects on bail but he has been detained for further investigation,’ a police official said. His current whereabouts are not known.
The JIT report on the assassination, at under forty pages including all annexes, is slightly more conscientious than the Karachi document, though hardly what you would expect of the definitive police record on such a major crime. It did at least try to identify some culprits. The report relied on two types of evidence: confessions of arrested suspects and phone intercepts. The first breakthrough came a month after Bhutto’s death, when police in the city of Dera Ismail Khan arrested a 15-year-old boy, Aitzaz Shah, suspected of planning an attack on a Shia procession there. Shah had run away from the Jamia Binoria madrassah, where he had been placed for free religious education, and made his way to Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan, with the idea of joining the Taliban. In his confession, he said that he had been taught how to drive and persuaded to carry out a suicide attack, and was told by his trainers in October 2007 that his target would be Benazir Bhutto. He said he had met Baitullah Mehsud four times. His confession led to other arrests and helped the police put together a picture of how Bilal alias Saeed came to be in a position to kill Bhutto.
Originally from South Waziristan, Bilal’s father was a labourer in Karachi, who later said his son had left home and not been in touch for a year. One of Bilal’s accomplices, Ikram Ullah, who was near him at the time of the attack, walked away from the crime scene unscathed and his whereabouts have never been established. There were three others in Rawalpindi that day. Husnain Gul was a madrassah student who in 2005 had received small-arms training at a camp in North-West Pakistan. The JIT report says that when he was arrested he had a hand grenade and clothes belonging to Bilal. In his confession, Gul described how a friend of his had been killed when Musharraf ordered an assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007. The attack on the jihadis who had seized the mosque was a turning point in modern Pakistani history, persuading many Islamists that the Pakistani state was not their friend but an enemy that must be attacked. Gul decided to avenge his friend’s death and persuaded his cousin, Muhammad Rafaqat, to join him.
In 2007, the pair travelled to Waziristan in the hope of finding a militant outfit to work for. They told the police it was there that they were instructed to join the group trying to kill Bhutto. Gul had actually tried to assassinate her once before at an earlier election rally in Peshawar but was thwarted by the tight security. Together with Rafaqat he then travelled to Rawalpindi. Gul carried out a recce of Liaquat Park, then went to the bus station to meet the two designated suicide bombers, Bilal and Ikram Ullah. They had travelled with a third person, Nasrullah alias Ahmed. The morning Bhutto was due to give her speech, Rafaqat and Nasrullah took another look at Liaquat Park while Gul gave Bilal and Ikram Ullah suicide jackets, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades. The plan was simple. Bilal would stand by the exit gate and try to kill Bhutto. If he failed, Ikram Ullah would try to kill her instead.
The confessions repeatedly referred to two others as having played a leading role in the plot, one of whom, Nadir Khan, otherwise known as Qari Ismail, had been given money by Baitullah Mehsud to cover the costs. His arrest would have provided the police with a vital link to the Taliban leader. But the JIT report contains a memo which states that on 15 January 2008, just 19 days after the assassination, Nasrullah and Nadir Khan had been in a car approaching a checkpoint in the Mohmand tribal agency in North-West Pakistan. For some reason not stated in the memo the two men are said to have run away from the car. Security personnel killed both of them.
For Pakistanis it is a familiar story. The euphemism ‘encounter’ is used to refer to the phenomenon of crime suspects’ being killed as they try to flee checkpoints: the understanding is that the authorities, when they want someone dead, stage a clash in which the victims are said to have been shot while trying to escape.
Although the deaths of Nasrullah and Nadir Khan left the trail conveniently cold, the confessions of their colleagues gave a hint as to how the plot had been organised. The suspects repeatedly mentioned a particular madrassah, the Darul Uloom Haqqania, located at Akora Khattak on the road from Islamabad to Peshawar. Gul first met Nasrullah there; Nadir lived there; and it was at the madrassah that the team of assassins was briefed. The accounts even included details such as in which rooms key planning meetings had taken place.
The Darul Uloom Haqqania is run by the 75-year-old former Pakistani senator, Sami ul Haq: a man generally referred to either as Father of the Taliban or as Mullah Sandwich. In 1990, when an Islamabad brothel owner, Madam Tahira, had her business broken up by the authorities, she took revenge by naming some of her clients. One of her more memorable claims was that the pious Senator Haq, who has repeatedly demanded the introduction of sharia law, particularly enjoyed the company of two women at once, one below and the other above. Ever afterwards, the senator couldn’t make a speech in parliament without his liberal detractors heckling with cries of ‘Sandwich!’
The maulana would doubtless rather be known for his role in founding the Taliban, much of whose leadership was educated at the Darul Uloom Haqqania, the only educational establishment to have awarded Mullah Omar an honorary degree. Whenever the Taliban suffered setbacks in its military campaign to take over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, it only had to ask Sami ul Haq for help and he would close the madrassah and tell his students to go and fight instead. On the one occasion I visited, an Afghan Taliban official (they were still in power at the time) was there too and Sami ul Haq explained that he was a former student turned Taliban minister who had returned for a refresher course.
Like Akhtar, Sami ul Haq has long had a cosy relationship with the Pakistani state. Of the 12 people so far named by the authorities as part of the plot to kill Bhutto, he now accepts that four had been his students. All this strongly suggests Taliban involvement. But the state believed it had harder evidence too. Shortly after Bhutto’s death, the government put online what it claimed was a phone conversation, secretly recorded hours after the assassination, between an unidentified mullah and Baitullah Mehsud. This is the transcript of the tape.
Mullah: Asalaam Aleikum.
Baitullah Mehsud: Waaleikum Asalaam.
M: Chief, how are you?
BM: I am fine.
M: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.
BM: Congratulations to you, were they our men?
M: Yes they were ours.
BM: Who were they?
M: There was Saeed; there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.
BM: The three of them did it?
M: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.
BM: Then congratulations.
M: Where are you? I want to meet you.
BM: I am at Makeen [a town in the south Waziristan tribal area], come over, I am at Anwar Shah’s house.
M: OK, I’ll come.
BM: Don’t inform their house for the time being.
M: OK.
BM: It was a tremendous effort. They were really brave boys who killed her.
M: Mashallah. When I come I will give you all the details.
BM: I will wait for you. Congratulations, once again congratulations.
M: Congratulations to you.
BM: Anything I can do for you?
M: Thank you very much.
BM: Asalaam Aleikum.
M: Waaleikum Asalaam.
People who had met and spoken with Baitullah Mehsud confirmed that the voice on the tape was his. The fact that Bhutto’s name is not mentioned has led some to believe it’s a fake, but if the Pakistan intelligence agencies were trying to frame Baitullah Mehsud they would surely have made sure his name was mentioned on the tape.
There is one further reason for suspecting Taliban involvement in the murder. In February 2008 the Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan was kidnapped in the Khyber tribal agency. The Taliban militants holding him had one demand: the release of Aitzaz Shah, Husnain Gul and Muhammad Rafaqat.
The outpouring of sympathy that followed Bhutto’s murder propelled Zardari to power. Privately, many of Bhutto’s friends were unhappy that the man who they believed had corrupted Bhutto had secured the presidency. But they had one consolation: guided by his Sindhi honour code, which sets a high value on revenge, and with the full power of the state at his disposal, Zardari would be able to bring her killers to justice. The assassinations of Liaquat Ali Khan and President Zia ul Haq had never been solved. This time it would be different. But it wasn’t. Zardari failed to make any significant progress in the investigation. Privately, he said that the murder was part of history, another chapter in the Bhutto family story: Benazir had played her sacrificial role and there was no point in looking back. Publicly, he argued that any Pakistani investigation would lack credibility so the UN should do it instead. Yet the UN’s limited terms of reference (they were to carry out a fact-finding not a criminal inquiry) and history of political caution suggested it would be unlikely to solve the case. Furthermore, the UN was blocked. In its published report it described as mystifying ‘the efforts of certain Pakistani government authorities to obstruct access to military and intelligence sources’.
The first sign that the state would not be making any effort to establish the facts came within two hours of the assassination, when fire engines were called in to wash down the crime scene. The deputy inspector general of the Rawalpindi police, Saud Aziz, who ordered the clean-up, has claimed police officers at the bomb scene told him the atmosphere had became so hysterical that her supporters were daubing themselves in Bhutto’s blood. Fearing a total breakdown of law and order, he called in high-pressure hoses. Anyone familiar with Pakistan’s political realities will find this account unconvincing. No mid-ranking or even senior police offer would take such a decision on his own initiative. It came as no surprise that two anonymous sources told the UN inquiry that Saud Aziz received a call from a senior army officer ordering him to wash down the crime scene. The car in which Bhutto died was also cleaned even though the police had secured it.
Also suspicious is the failure to make progress with the trials of the low-level operatives who have been arrested. It took a year even to charge Aitzaz Shah. Every time the court meets there is a new reason for postponement. Excuses have ranged from the unavailability of judges to the possible future availability of new evidence. The intelligence agencies have been just as inactive. While the ISI is Pakistan’s best-known spy agency, there are many others, including the 100,000-strong Intelligence Bureau or IB. In early 2008, the IB, which had a new leadership appointed by Zardari, asked the Interior Ministry to pass on any material it had about the assassination. The IB thought they were pushing on an open door: after all, the new minister of the interior, Rehman Malik, had been Bhutto’s closest confidant during the years of exile. But Malik decreed that the files should not be handed over.
Malik’s behaviour has been mysterious in other respects too. When Bhutto left the Liaquat Park rally, Malik’s bullet-proof black Mercedes was the designated back-up car in the event that Bhutto needed to be evacuated. Despite having overall responsibility for her security (something he has subsequently tried to deny), Malik reacted to the explosion by ordering his driver to leave the area and head for Islamabad. Once he got there (a 25-minute drive) he started a series of TV interviews in which he gave contradictory accounts of how he had reacted to the attack and why. His version changed from ‘I was about four feet away and I turned around and Mohtarma’s [Bhutto’s] car was trying to get out and we led that car and got away and went to the hospital and I was present in the hospital’ to ‘when the bomb blast happened there was a distance of no more than eight feet between my car and Mohtarma’s car. So I said let’s head towards Islamabad – in the meantime we called the hospital.’ His decision to flee the scene has never been explained.
Before her murder, Bhutto had written a number of emails naming people whom she believed wanted to kill her. Seemingly anticipating the story that would be constructed after her death, she said she wanted to make it clear that if she were killed the blame should be ascribed not to the Taliban or al-Qaida but to her enemies in the Pakistani establishment. And in a letter to Musharraf she accused three men: a senior opposition politician, a former head of the ISI known for his Islamist views, and the IB chief at the time of the assassination, Ejaz Shah, who had jihadi links. Omar Sheikh, the man accused of murdering the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is said to have fled to Shah’s house when he was on the run; for a ‘missing week’ Shah let Sheikh stay hidden away. Eventually, though, the case took on such a high profile that Shah was forced to arrange Sheikh’s surrender. There have been claims in the Pakistani press that Shah also had a connection with Akhtar. Neither of the police investigations dared ask questions of Shah or the others Bhutto named. All have publicly denied her accusations.
And yet despite all this conspicuous inactivity, in February 2011, more than three years after the murder, the government announced it had a new suspect. General Musharraf would be charged with her murder. So what new evidence had been uncovered? None at all. Citing ‘motive’ and ‘circumstantial evidence’ the charge sheet stated: ‘It is prima facie established that Musharraf is equally responsible with criminal “mens rea” for facilitation and abetment of assassinating Benazir Bhutto through his government’s unjustified failure in providing her with the requisite security protection her status deserved as twice prime minister.’
Although the charges made international headlines, few in Pakistan paid any attention. While it has long been accepted that Musharraf failed to give Bhutto adequate protection, the timing of the charges told its own story. They came just as he was trying to revive his political career by returning from a self-imposed exile in the UK to start a new political party in Pakistan. And it worked: he cancelled his plans.
In the weeks before her assassination, Bhutto had every reason to believe she would be killed. The failed attempt in Karachi made it clear that the jihadi leadership was willing and able to deploy its most powerful weapon – suicide bombers – against her. I and a couple of other journalists met her a few hours after that attack: the conversation was maudlin and filled with the thought that she couldn’t go on being so lucky. She fully understood her situation but accepted it. Partly she seemed to consider it a matter of fate, but perhaps she was also trying to atone for her sins. Her Swiss bank accounts were filled with millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains made during her two governments.
As for Zardari, he has said that the Taliban murdered his wife but that he is not sure who commissioned them. It’s a reasonable conclusion. But his attitude leaves many questions unanswered. Why did he allow the investigation to be blocked? Why has he not pressed his interior minister to clear up the obvious inconsistencies in his account? Why has he not objected to Akhtar’s release? And why hasn’t he moved against Sami ul Haq’s madrassah, where the murder was planned? That there are no answers to these questions doesn’t necessarily implicate Zardari any more than the clear evidence that the investigation was deliberately frustrated does. He may well fear suffering the same fate as his wife. But it does mean that there isn’t the slightest reason to believe that the people who tasked the Taliban with Bhutto’s murder will ever face justice.
ISLAMABAD: The bad news about Pakistan’s weak tax system never stops coming. The latest revelation emanating from the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) is that nearly 600,000 taxpayers have ‘mysteriously disappeared’ from the tax net in the past one year.
If official documents that reveal this astonishing figure are to be believed, it simply highlights incompetence and mismanagement of the country’s top tax machinery.
So while the FBR has been claiming happily that it has in its net 1.44 million people who regularly file tax returns, it turns out that there are only 856,987 taxpayers in the country that the bureau can trace to their homes or workplaces. Does this mean that the missing numbers — 583,013 — are imaginary tax payers?
This discrepancy has emerged from the data of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) when it was compared with the figures compiled and maintained by Pakistan Revenue Automation (PRAL), a subsidiary of the FBR.
The comparison was carried out recently after a request by the FBR and it was revealed that just 856,987 tax payers were there, and even among them 51,522 did not pay any taxes last year.
This lower figure emerged once discrepancy and errors in data compilation were identified and corrected.
For instance, one mistake emerged when lists of tax return filers were compared with the names submitted by employers.
As many as 676,367 people have filed income tax returns in the tax-year 2011, while 549,369 statements were submitted by employers on behalf of their employees, taking the total number of taxpayers to 1.22 million.
The data revealed that out of 1.22 million, 204,069 people overlapped — their names were present in both the list of those who filed tax returns and in the list of employees whose names were submitted by the employers.
Critics are of the opinion that the names were deliberately counted twice to present a rosier picture than the reality.
Once this discrepancy was removed, the number of taxpayers stood at a mere 1.021 million for 2011. However, further miscalculations were removed that had added an extra 164,684 to the taxpayers’ number. Eventually, the tax officials were left with the miserly 805,465 tax payers in a population of 180 million people.
The total revenue contributed by these taxpayers stood at Rs80 billion in 2011. If official figures are to be believed, out of Pakistan’s 805,465 taxpayers, each pays about Rs13, 673 as income tax every year.
The Nadra data, which has forced the FBR to accept a harsh reality, has sent its officials scurrying. A senior tax official confirmed that around 600,000 taxpayers were missing and that the FBR was clueless.
Requesting anonymity, he said the FBR was trying to locate the missing taxpayers.
Whether or not the FBR will unearth a more palatable number remains to be seen.
However, this latest revelation has driven home the low compliance of Pakistan to income tax rules.
TAX AND AID: This scandal is likely to encourage international donors who want the country to widen its tax base before asking for more aid.
Only 0.6 per cent of the population pays taxes in Pakistan, as against 4.7 per cent in India, 58 per cent in France and 80 per cent in Canada.
This is despite the fact that the government has doubled salaries of tax officials in the hope that it will improve the compliance level, but to no avail.
Pakistan continues to have the lowest number of active taxpayers per tax administrator in South Asia — 64. In India, taxpayers per tax administrator share stands at 537, in Sri Lanka 232, in the United States 1,990 and Switzerland 3,182.
According to the tax official, the FBR has already launched the system audit of PRAL to assess its performance. He said that PRAL had purchased costly software but these had not been used effectively. “We will fix the responsibility regarding the
missing taxpayers etc,” the official added.
