Neighbours: Pakistan; Legal Noose


	August 07, 2000

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PAKISTAN
Legal Noose

With Sharif trapped in a maze of cases, the battle to succeed him hots up in his party even as Musharraf continues to walk the political tightrope.

By Rory McArthy in Islamabad

India Today issue dated August 07, 2000 Barely a flicker of reaction passed across his pale face as the brief judgement was delivered. Nawaz Sharif, once the most powerful man in Pakistan, must be getting used to standing in the dock of his country's courts. Now the military's investigators have a string of corruption cases lined up against him.

Last week an accountability court judge sitting in a whitewashed courtroom at the 16th-century Attock Fort convicted Sharif in the first of several corruption cases. Judge Farrukh Latif sentenced the deposed prime minister to 14 years' "rigorous imprisonment" and fined him Rs (Pakistan) 20 million.

Sharif was also banned from holding public office for 21 years, a move that may spell the beginning of an inglorious end to the political career of the man who made Pakistan a nuclear weapons power.

The candles burn late in the windows of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the new, powerful anti-corruption taskforce. The NAB has ironically set up camp in Sharif's former official residence, an outlandish, red-brick Mughal-style fort in central Islamabad, and one of the clearest symbols of the former prime minister's extravagance.

IN THE BALANCE

Nawaz Sharif may now be the least of Pervez Musharraf's worries. But even before the court's verdict, Pakistan's chief executive was beginning to get an unwelcome taste of just how difficult it is to run his country. The previous week, under mounting pressure from hardline Islamic leaders, the general revived the Islamic injunctions enshrined in the Constitution which had been put on hold since the October 12 coup. The injunctions define who are Muslims and who are not and ensure all laws meet Islamic principles. Although little will change due to the amendment, it does reinforce Pakistan's commitment to an Islamic society and reveals just how much Musharraf feels the need to appease the religious right which now seems to be setting the political agenda.

Many fear that Musharraf's preoccupation with this issue may delay broader reforms on the economy and corruption fronts. On the other hand, Islamic leaders have become more critical of the Government in recent weeks, angered by what they see as his secularism: his attempts to introduce a minor procedural change to the long-criticised blasphemy law and his efforts to create a market for cable TV.

Other attempts at reforms have met a similar fate. Shopkeepers have come out on strike in a bitter dispute over Musharraf's plans to survey their businesses and introduce a general sales tax on retail goods. International lenders have refused to open their credit lines with Islamabad while tax reforms remain in dispute. The general's frustration over the impasse is showing. "There are hundreds, maybe thousands of things to be done but we have to be focused," he said in a recent interview with Associated Press.

Islamic clerics are now resisting Government attempts to modernise their madarsas. It was from the madarsas on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan that the hardline Taliban militia rose to conquer Kabul and impose their brutal interpretation of Islamic law. Next on their list is the shifting of the weekly holiday back from Sunday to Friday, as it was during the time of General Zia-ul-Haq, who was more a hardline Muslim than Musharraf.

Hanging over the general's head is a Supreme Court ruling which has ordered him to return Pakistan to democracy within three years of the coup. Bringing on board politicians might help ease the international pressure against his military regime.

But some observers are not satisfied that enough is being done to change Pakistan. "There is clearly a leadership crisis in Pakistan. There is simply nobody around with the credibility, the stature and the will to lead people," said Najum Mushtaq, a columnist with The News, a leading English-language daily.

Now Musharraf must balance the demands of the mullahs and angry shopkeepers with his image as a moderate military leader who has promised to bring back democracy. Meanwhile, Kulsoom and the Pakistan Muslim League will continue to pull at his shirt-tails. "Musharraf is riding a tiger," said Mushtaq. "Now let's see how he gets off it."

Another three corruption cases have already been filed against Sharif. Investigators are poring over sheaves of documents relating to 10 other cases based on allegations that he stole hundreds of millions of dollars while in power. Sharif is already serving two life terms for hijacking and terrorism connected to the night of the military takeover on October 12, when army chief General Pervez Musharraf seized power shortly after Sharif tried to sack him. A team from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is due in Islamabad next month to help train the NAB in tackling white-collar crime.

The focus in the Sharif cases will be the wild discrepancy between his family's luxurious standard of living and his declared income and tax returns.

In last week's case he was found guilty of failing to pay tax on a $1 million Russian Mi-8 helicopter he leased and then bought in October 1993 to use for electioneering at the end of his first term in office. Although his lawyers boycotted the trial, Sharif claimed afterwards that the helicopter had crashed before his tax returns were due and so its cost was not included. "There was no corruption, no kickbacks, no public funds misappropriated, no embezzlement," he said. "There is only one target in this country and that is Nawaz Sharif."

Despite being one of Pakistan's richest men Sharif paid no income tax for three separate years in the past decade, claiming that all his income came from agriculture, which until now has never been taxed in Pakistan. Prosecutors this month charged him with tax evasion for failing to declare the money he used to buy and develop his lavish $4.6 million, 100-acre family estate in Raiwind, near Lahore. The estate was purchased under the name of his mother, Shamim Akhter, who together with Sharif's powerful father Mian Mohammed Sharif, is also named in the charges.

Sharif has also been charged with defaulting on bank loans given to two of his companies -- one for $13.8 million to the Ittefaq foundry and the other for $22.7 million to the Hudaibya Paper Mill. He has been questioned over how he was able to buy four apartments in London's exclusive Park Lane that are registered to two offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands. Apparently unruffled, Sharif calmly denies the allegations and insists he is being victimised by the military regime. It is not yet clear if he will appeal this latest corruption conviction. He has already begun an appeal against the hijacking and terrorism conviction, but the military government is also appealing the sentence, saying Sharif got off lightly and deserves the death penalty.

"His personal political career is over unless and until the situation dramatically changes and there is a large protest movement or the military withdraws," said Rifaat Hussein, political scientist at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University. He adds, "His hold over the leadership of the party has severely weakened. There are a lot of loyal Muslim Leaguers who feel that Nawaz Sharif is responsible for the declining fortunes of the party."

Now the former prime minister is losing friends fast. Many in his Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and now even his brother Shahbaz, who faces his own corruption cases, say they would rather go along with the army than risk confronting it. Shahbaz has been named in two charges of loan default to the Ittefaq foundry and the Hudaibya Paper Mill and is likely to face other charges alongside his brother. Interestingly, he was once being tipped as a possible contender to the party leadership and he has been trying to distance himself gently from Sharif's outright opposition to the military.

Perhaps more by default than design, Sharif's wife Kulsoom has risen to become the lone voice of opposition to the military rule. In a bungled police operation -- which no doubt boosted her credibility -- she was held for 10 hours in a standoff in her car earlier this month after she tried to lead a protest rally from her home in Lahore. "I have to continue, I don't have a choice. I have to tell the world that General Musharraf is vindictive," she said. The PML is close to a damaging split between Kulsoom's allies and the majority which hopes for some role in government under the military. "I don't mind if they don't give me any support, I am not going to stop," she said.

Few political observers credit Kulsoom as a genuine challenge to the military but she has managed to shake the establishment and her popularity appears to have grown. "She is not a threat, more of an irritant," argues Husain Haqqani, a political commentator and former high commissioner to Sri Lanka. But he points out that the botched attempt to arrest her has "taken some lustre off the Government's image". Musharraf's regime clearly lacks political skills and it is possibly the first time that the military is leading Pakistan without turning to either politicians or civilians of some repute to run the Government.

In a bid to build an alternative political set-up, Musharraf has already met senior leaders from the PML as well as one from the rival Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and several senior Islamic clerics. From the PML, Pakistan's chief executive met Raja Zafarul Haq, vice-president of the party and Mian Mohammad Azhar, convener of its co-ordination committee. Both of them lead two of the main factions of the party -- the third being Kulsoom's faction. Musharraf met Ijaz-ul-Haq, another senior PML leader and son of the last military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. Ijaz-ul-Haq is an ally of Mian Mohammad Azhar, who has always been an aspirant to the top post. Some reports say the military may soon bring these men into the Government as advisers. The move already appears to be pitting the different PML factions against each other.

It is an attempt to look beyond Nawaz Sharif and find an alternative for PML leadership and to use that as a balance against the PPP," said Hussein, the Quaid-i-Azam political scientist. PPP leader Benazir Bhutto still commands considerable support in her party although she now lives in London. Last year she too was convicted of corruption and sentenced in her absence to five years in jail and fined $8.6 million. However unlikely it seems, many do not rule out the return of the charismatic Bhutto, the self-styled "daughter of the East".

For now Musharraf and his Government must still wrestle with the problem of Pakistan's woeful economy. Foreign reserves are desperately low, there is little foreign investment and the International Monetary Fund is now thought unlikely to unlock its credit lines until November this year. Solving Pakistan's economic woes would clear the deck of any threat of wide-scale protest. Thus Musharraf has been trying hard to appease the religious right, fearful of antagonising the Islamic clerics and allowing a united front to emerge against the military Government. It is still tough days ahead for Pakistan's beleaguered military boss.

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