Accountability in open kutchery

PUNJAB Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has publicly pledged to recover every penny looted by his predecessor in office, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi.

He must proceed further and not let it rest as an empty threat or just a brag. However, to be on an even footing he must also throw open the accounts of his own first term as chief minister to enable Pervaiz Elahi to look for looted pennies.

A lot is said about the accountability of the politicians in power but it hasn’t ever really taken place. Any action whenever initiated, more in revenge than in public interest, invariably got stuck somewhere along the way or succumbed to a deal. The worst example is Musharraf’s National Reconciliation Ordinance issued last year which, in essence, has closed all cases instituted against politicians for “political reasons” between January 1986 (when Mohammad Khan Junejo took over as prime minister in Ziaul Haq’s regime) and October 1999 (advent of Gen Musharraf). The ordinance has thus enabled even criminals to get away if they happened to be in politics.

This extraordinary ordinance, unprecedented in the country’s legal history, was issued purportedly to “foster mutual trust and confidence amongst the holders of public office”. Ironically, the reverse has happened. Mistrust never ran deeper. A nervous country is bracing for the outcome of the deceitful manoeuvres in progress and the presidential (or military) and judicial interventions that must inevitably follow.

The ongoing activity may lead to the impeachment of the president or he may pre-empt it by dissolving the National Assembly or the Supreme Court may intervene to stall it altogether. But surely no other public representative — ministers, nazims and the rest — will be called to account for his misconduct and for wasting or embezzling public funds. Indeed, hardly ever has anyone been held accountable in the past. The leaders who are now about to embark on a life and death struggle at the top would rather pamper than prosecute them. After all they need their votes.

In Shahbaz Sharif’s determined effort to hold Pervaiz Elahi to account, and if he also agrees to be held accountable likewise, one can see the beginning of a speedy and just era of accountability of the holders of public office. Formal and long-winded accountability under the law, as the 2007 NRO concedes, results only in the institution of false cases against rivals to victimise them or to induce them to switch loyalties.

The normal methods of investigation and judicial determination fail to work where the offenders have been in power and expect to be in power again one day. The futility of this course of action and the cost it exacts is amply demonstrated in the cases started by Musharraf’s National Accountability Bureau and pursued for seven years at home and abroad. The process has, by and large, ended only in legalising the assets that were alleged to have been illegally acquired by abusing public trust. And, to boot, London and Dubai have become alternative homes for our politicians for recreation or convalescence and also for refuge when the need arises which, inevitably, will one day.

It should be a source of concern to a society that is rooted in Islamic faith and has inherited legislative and judicial institutions from Westminster (where democracy and rule of law have found their finest expression in modern times) not to have ever held its elected representatives accountable for their corruption and maladministration. It has been left to the army commanders to intervene at intervals to institute enquiries which in course of time also trail into greater corruption.

Since no accountability whether conducted by judges under the normal laws or by generals under the military regulations has worked, parliament together with civil society (NGOs like the Human Rights Commission) should devise a less formal but speedier and fairer system to keep the conduct of the holders of important offices — governors, ministers, judges, civil servants, military commanders — under constant public surveillance. This system should require their personal and family assets to be published at the time they assume office and subsequent additions should also be open to public scrutiny. So should be their tax statements.

The whole process should be supervised by a board of venerable citizens who are no longer involved in public life nor intend to come back. Wherever they observe or suspect, on their own or on complaint, dishonesty, extravagance or impropriety of behaviour they should examine it in an open kutchery. Surely it would serve as a greater deterrent to malpractices than the possibility of prosecution in a court of law which is always remote and seldom succeeds.

Not as a proposal but just as a thought, the first board could comprise the three old but alert former chiefs of the Pakistan Air Force — Asghar Khan, Nur Khan and Zafar Chaudhry. Their first clients should be Shahbaz Sharif and Pervaiz Elahi for the scrutiny of their conduct and assets at the start and at the end of their past terms as chief ministers.

A word here on the accountability of President Musharraf should be in order. The parties in the coalition possibly could muster the parliamentary majority required for impeachment but they have to be wary of the constitutional position. The president can be impeached if he is found to be “unfit to hold the office due to incapacity or is guilty of violating the Constitution or of gross misconduct”.

Musharraf’s capacity can be hardly called into question. His coup and emergencies stand validated by the Supreme Court. Parliament will be hard put to proving gross misconduct on his part. Though the parties launching the impeachment have the benefit of legal advice, their motivation is obviously political. If the Supreme Court holds the impeachment proceedings unconstitutional, the president will have a reason to dissolve the assembly and instantly call for fresh elections.

The common man, already disenchanted with a parliament that has failed to function and a government that remains involved in its own squabbles while lawlessness spreads and the economic crisis deepens, is then more likely to opt for electioneering than for agitation.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

The ISI debacle

ON July 26, 2008 a Cabinet Division notification announced that the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate had been taken out of the prime minister’s establishment and placed under the interior ministry.

This decision was rescinded the following day. Ten days later it was brought back to life but only to be held in abeyance.

The initial move may have been made to cause the impression that the ISI would henceforth be under stricter control, and this to allay the oft-repeated American concern that elements within the agency were giving aid and comfort to certain militant groups. It is not known why the interior ministry should have been thought to be more capable of controlling the ISI than the prime minister’s office had been.

It is more likely that the move was made to appease a certain individual’s appetite for power; that individual being Abdul Rehman Malik who is in effect the interior minister. His rise to eminence, like that of several others in the present regime, is puzzling. Once a middle-ranking police officer, he left Pakistan under a cloud in 1998, lived in London, then returned to Pakistan in 2007 with Benazir Bhutto as her chief security officer. He failed her in that role both when a hostile mob surrounded her upon her arrival in Karachi in October, and again in Rawalpindi where she was assassinated on Dec 27. A few months after her death, Mr Zardari made Mr Malik the guardian of law and order in Pakistan as head of the interior ministry.

Needless to say, he would have become immensely powerful had he been able to direct the ISI. But his ambition in this regard was to be in vain partly because, as we will see shortly, the ISI is not all that amenable to external control. The attempt to place it under the interior ministry failed also because it met intense opposition from the chiefs of the armed services, who had not been consulted before the notification of July 26 was issued. The ISI is their agency, not a civilian organisation.

That in a democracy the military should be under ultimate civilian control is indisputable. The same holds for the ISI. Since its inception in 1948 it has reported to the prime minister or the president. It may then be said to have been under the prime minister’s control, which is civilian enough. But control in this context does not denote the supervising authority’s permission for every action that the agency is taking. It is limited to a broadly defined charter of its missions. Intelligence agencies — such as the ISI, the CIA in America, MI6 and MI5 in Britain, RAW in India — will work within the requisites of the mission assigned to them, but they are not receptive to external direction of their specific operations.

The ISI was established to collect and analyse information concerning foreign governments, corporations and politically significant individuals, with special reference to India. President Ayub Khan extended its mission to include the opponents of his regime. The agency joined hands with those who engineered his victory and Fatima Jinnah’s defeat in the presidential election of 1965.

Since then it has routinely intervened in domestic politics. It keeps an eye on opposition politicians and also those in power. It has sponsored the formation and disruption of political parties and alliances. It has funded individuals and parties of its choosing in elections. It has given money and weapons to certain groups to fight other groups.

ISI operatives are posted in Pakistani embassies abroad as attachés, usually military or commercial. They watch Pakistani officials serving out there, and their colleagues at home watch foreign diplomats, businessmen and important individuals working in Pakistan. ISI agents abroad are expected to gather intelligence and, when appropriate, undertake covert operations.

Some observers believe the ISI is not performing these functions well. Even with regard to India, which is its principal concern, its knowledge of that country’s military capabilities, planning and dispositions, its political and social dynamics, and its industry and technology is said to be inadequate. Its information concerning Pakistan’s domestic politics, and its covert operations in that area, may be more newsworthy than its accomplishments abroad.

The ISI is a huge organisation. It employs nearly 10,000 persons, including hundreds of serving and former military and police officers, a number of researchers and analysts, administrators, and even some scientists and technologists. Its financial resources and its expenditures remain unpublished for the most part but one may be sure that they are far greater than those shown in its official budget.

What kind of control can the prime minister, or even the army chief, exercise over an agency so large and powerful, so abundantly resourceful? Let us take a quick look at its American counterpart the CIA, established in July 1947, employing twice as many persons as the ISI does (reportedly about 20,000), and doing the same kind of work: intelligence gathering, espionage, aiding or destabilising foreign governments, and other covert operations including ‘termination’ of an undesirable ruler or politician (albeit none of this within the United States).

The CIA, along with 15 other intelligence agencies, reports in the first instance to the director of national intelligence, but as and when necessary its director may report directly to the president. The president — aided by his national security adviser, defence secretary and occasionally the secretary of state — gives the CIA its mission set forth in broad terms for the world generally and, when necessary, with reference to specific countries. Within this general framework the CIA director, his deputies and officers in charge of various country sections make their own determinations of the actions to be taken from day to day. They do not seek the president’s permission for each operation they intend to undertake and they do not report all of their doings to him. Nor does he want to know all of what they do.

The likelihood is that the ISI’s modus operandi in Pakistan is pretty much the same as that of the CIA in the United States. The ISI, like the CIA, is a ‘state within a state’, an ‘invisible government’ and a ‘law unto itself’. That elements in the ISI are supportive of the militants means either that the government doesn’t really object to their activities, or that the Zardari-Gilani combination is too fragile to control them.

anwarsyed@cox.net

Show that made China’s point

FROM the nation which brought you the 8,000 buried terracotta warriors of Xian in 210 BC and the 7,500-mile Long March in 1934, you would anticipate nothing less than a spectacle. The ceremony that opened the 29th Olympic games Friday outdid all of its predecessors in numbers, colour, noise and expense, demonstrating to the world that the new China intends to make its presence felt.

Fireworks — essentially a byproduct of gunpowder, one of several Chinese inventions celebrated during the course of the evening — filled the sky over Beijing, first in the form of a countdown to the ceremony as giant golden footprints traced an airborne path towards the new national stadium. There followed an hour-long display that replayed Chinese history and gave elaborate expression to the country’s national pride.

Around 14,000 performers came and went across the floor of the Bird’s Nest stadium, acting out pageants devised by a cadre of designers, choreographers and composers under the supervision of Zhang Yimou, the great film director. Now 56, Zhang Yimou embodies much of China’s recent history. The son of a major in Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army, he was forced to leave his studies during the Cultural Revolution of 1966. Allowed into Beijing once the winds of change had died down, he studied cinematography and became a member of the celebrated Fifth Generation of film-makers. Called on to pull out all the stops, he certainly produced a show to match the scale of its surroundings.

Beijing’s Olympic facilities have been built to the most lavish of specifications and regardless of expense. They are intended to show that China is a modern country built on ancient foundations, and Zhang’s show mirrored that desire. As is the way in China today, Mao Zedong was evident neither in word nor image; the only time you see him is when you pull out a banknote.

Eighty heads of state sat alongside Hu Jintao, the president of the People’s Republic, and Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee: Putin of Russia and Bush of the United States in adjacent seats; Fukuda of Japan and Sarkozy of France; and many, many more, the most notable absentees being Merkel of Germany and Brown of Britain, the latter’s decision to stay away underscored by the presence of his predecessor, the man who saddled him with the job of following this in four years’ time.

The scale of Friday night’s endeavour was, of course, astonishing. These Olympics are being staged virtually without limits. When darkness had fallen the show began at precisely 8 o’clock with a clap of thunder from 2,008 tightly ranked drums. These traditional instruments, the shape and size of laundry baskets, were lit from inside, the lights sequenced by computer, and played by robed dancer-drummers flailing illuminated sticks.

The Olympic rings were formed in light and the Chinese flag was carried in by 56 children who handed it to an octet of goose-stepping soldiers before Zhang Yimou and his collaborators gave us elaborate representations of China’s scroll paintings, its invention of moveable type (roll over, Jo Gutenberg, and tell William Caxton the news), and the merchants of the Silk Road.

The pianist Lang Lang shared a keyboard with five-year-old Li Muzi, one of 23 million Chinese children said to be learning the instrument. In the most tooth-rottingly sentimental passage, a group of infants sang a little number in praise of the earth: “We plant trees, we sow seeds, the land turns green,” they chanted, in the midst of one of the world’s most polluted cities.

And then it was time for the entry of the athletes of the 204 participating nations, that quadrennial amalgam of Jeux Sans Frontieres and the Eurovision Song Contest. Iraq and Iran came in consecutively and quietly, while Bush waved at his immense contingent of compatriots. The only visible banner was carried by a Senegalese athlete. “Amitie d’abord, competition ensuite,” it read. Friendship first, then let battle commence.

Last of all, after a pause to allow the drama to build, came the Chinese, a river of red and yellow flowing around the stadium, each athlete waving a flag. Hu beamed his approval as the 7ft 6in basketball star Yao Ming carried the flag and, a little later, as the Olympic torch was lit on the stadium’s rim by the gymnast Li Ning, the last man in the trouble-strewn torch relay which drew protests around the world.

Also beaming at the wonder of it all was the 14-year-old Tom Daley, the object of international interest at the British diving squad’s press conference earlier in the day. “Amazing,” he had said, time and again, when invited to give his first impressions. Last night’s show would have done little to diminish his sense of awe.

— The Guardian, London