| August 2, 2003 | Saturday | Jumadi-us-Sani 3, 1424 |
Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
A flawed approach
IT HAS taken decades for Turkey to finally realize how the army’s role in politics has hurt the country and how it has militated against the emergence of Turkey as a progressive, liberal and democratic country that could be a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. On Wednesday, the Turkish parliament passed a bill stripping the military-dominated National Security Council of its executive powers. From now on, the NSC will only be an advisory body not necessarily headed by a general. Until now, the army used to nominate the NSC’s secretary-general, and he was invariably a general. Under the new law, the secretary-general will be nominated by the president, and he could be a civilian as well. The bill, thus, establishes the supremacy of parliament and makes the elected government responsible to no one but the Grand National Assembly. Apparently, the bill has been passed with a view to Turkey’s entry into the European Union. The EU insists that Ankara must come up to what are called the Copenhagen criteria before negotiations for its entry could begin. These criteria include total civilian control over the nation’s affairs, besides greater cultural and political freedoms. Others of the EU’s conditions were met when the Turkish parliament passed a constitutional package which abolished the death penalty and gave greater cultural rights to the Kurdish minority. The bill passed by the Grand National Assembly on Wednesday eases curbs on anti-government rallies and asks the judiciary to hear torture cases even during the summer recess.
The bill, no doubt, has been passed basically to conform to the Copenhagen criteria to pave the way for entry negotiations that could begin in December 2004. But this is something that Turkey should have done long ago even without the EU membership considerations. As Turkey’s history shows, the army’s role in the nation’s politics has been largely negative and failed to give the country political stability. Regrettably, Turkish generals consider themselves guardians of Ataturk’s secularism, which has been the basis of the Turkish republic since its founding in 1923. On the strength of this self-appointed role, the army has repeatedly intervened in politics and overthrown elected governments in the name of protecting Ataturk’s legacy. However, the dismissal of the so-called Islamic governments, the banning of several parties not acceptable to the generals for ideological reasons, and the repeated imposition of military rule have not led to a weakening of the religious forces. Instead, last year’s elections gave a massive victory to the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The mushrooming of TV and radio channels has led to an environment of greater freedom in Turkey, and discussions of the army’s role — taboo until recently — are now quite common. Besides, the generals, too, are now keen that their country join the EU, for they know that another army intervention will block Turkey’s membership chances perhaps for many years.
For Pakistan, there are lessons to learn from the Turkish example. No ideology can be enforced and protected by generals alone. General Ziaul Haq used to say that the army was the guardian not only of Pakistan’s geographical boundaries but also of its ideological frontiers. As the Turkish experience shows, this proposition is illusory. The people alone can guard and sustain a nation’s ideological moorings or options through constitutionalism and democracy. No oligarchy, howsoever well-entrenched, can do this. In Pakistan’s case, too, repeated military interventions have left the country politically weak and unstable. Constitutional institutions have failed to strike root, the judiciary has been subject to manipulation, and the political parties have not been given the chance to grow and mature. Now that the generals are trying to institutionalize the army’s role in politics through the NSC it is time Pakistan took a closer look at the Turkish experience.
The very basis of the NSC — that the people’s representatives should be subordinated to the will of non-elected leadership — is absurd. Turkey may be an example for Pakistan in many respects, but its constitutional experimentation is not something that is worth emulating. The Turks have taken the decision to clip the powers of the NSC after having suffered the consequences of military domination for decades. The military interventions have not helped Turkey in any way. In fact, they have lowered the country’s prestige in the world, militated against the emergence of Turkey as a modern, liberal and democratic society to be admired and emulated and made its human rights status questionable. Pakistan would do well to learn from Turkey’s unhappy experiment with the NSC and the harm it has done to the Turkish nation.
THE federal government’s move to introduce a system of accountability to check the waste of resources in the health sector could not have been more timely. Given the dismal state of the public health system in the country and the deterioration in the quality of medical services available to the masses in government institutions, it is surprising that the authorities should have failed to respond to the popular demand for ending the neglect of the public health sector. The details of the mechanism of checks and balances proposed by the health minister are not known. But it appears from the report that the government’s focus will be on checking waste and inefficiency. This is of course desirable but scarcely enough to face the challenges on the health front. With the health sector malfunctioning structurally and conceptually, the need of the hour is to redefine the goals of public health policy with a view to making health care available to the poorer sections of the community as well as to those living below the poverty line. The fact is that at present the private sector accounts for nearly 77 per cent of the funds spent on health in the country. This is largely paid for by the people themselves.
For over a decade, the government has been evading its responsibility in the matter by describing the ‘public-private partnership’ as the lynchpin of its health policy. Unfortunately, this partnership has tilted heavily towards the private sector, the government having gradually disengaged itself from this area. As a result, health care has become very expensive and gone beyond the reach of a large number of people. This ill-conceived approach has been reflected in the government’s own health budget. Although in absolute terms the official allocations for health have increased over the years, they have actually gone down as a percentage of GNP from 0.8 in 1995 to 0.7 per cent today. It has stagnated at this level for the last six years even though the population has increased considerably. Most of the allocations have gone into administrative expenditures such as salaries of the staff, leaving only a fraction of the health budget for the development and expansion of the infrastructure and the financing of the services such as laboratory testing, drugs, X-rays, etc.
There is need for the government to find more resources for the public health system which largely serves the less fortunate sections of society. While the role of the private medical institutions should be acknowledged as being indispensable, on no count can the state abandon those in no position to pay the market price for medical treatment. It must increase its health spending a great deal as it devises ways and means to optimize the use of the funds allocated to this sector.