ISLAMABAD: Senator Mian Raza Rabbani alleged on Tuesday that the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) had released a tailor-made advertisement to hire a permanent chief executive officer apparently to accommodate the incumbent CEO.

Speaking during the question hour in the Senate, he said the qualifications required for the position included irrelevant areas like war studies and military operations. Referring to the written reply to a question which disclosed that all the 11 officials working on deputation with the PIA, including the acting CEO, belonged to the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), he said that seemingly efforts were afoot to adjust him as a regular CEO.

He expressed concern over what he called militarisation of the PIA and read out the names of the officials on deputation from the PAF. The list contains the names of Air Marshal Arshad Malik, CEO; Air Vice Marshal Soban Nazir Syed, director (precision engineering complex); Air Vice Marshal Noor Abbas, adviser to CEO; Air Commodore Khalid-ur-Rahman (information technology), Air Commodore Jibran Saleem Butt (procurement and logistics), Air Commodore Jawad Zafar Chaudhry (budgeting), Air Commodore Shahid Qadir ((food services), Wing Commander Hafiz Tahir Mehmood, manager project, PEC; Wing Commander Muhammad Asim Khan (finance), Wing Commander Kamran Anjum (human resources and administration) and Flight Lieutenant Tahir Farooq (ADC).

Ex-chairman calls for discussion by Senate committee of the whole on extrajudicial killings

Another list shared with the house showed that as many as 15 officials had been repatriated from the PIA to their parent departments between Aug 8, 2016 and March 8, 2018 and 14 of them were from the PAF.

Later, speaking on a point of public importance, Senator Rabbani called for an early meeting of the Senate Committee of the Whole House to discuss unabated extrajudicial killings in the country and suggest measures to bring the practice to an end.

Referring to the assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti, he alleged that the state under a pre-conceived plan had given law enforces the “license to kill”.

Referring to the recent Sahiwal tragedy, he lamented that parents were killed in front of their children. Terming children future of Pakistan, he said the state, which was supposed to bring smiles to their faces, had done the exact opposite.

“In which direction are we heading? Which system is this?” the former chairman of the Senate asked and said: “Even our civil law has four different applications.”

Military courts had been established but even then extrajudicial killings did not stop, he said and warned that this situation would persist unless there was the rule of law.

He said that then matter had not stopped at enforced disappearances, and asked whether journalists were not being picked up and whether owners of media organisations were not facing pressure to lay off those journalists who did not toe the line of the state.

In such a situation, he stressed, it was the responsibility of parliament to take the lead. And if parliament failed to stop all this, history would place it in the category of the criminals, he concluded.

Earlier, taking part in a discussion on the presidential address, National Party Senator Mir Kabir suggested that the constitutional provision requiring discussion on the president’s address should be done away with. He was of the view that it would prevent waste of time of both houses of parliament.

Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2019