CONTINUING the discussion of the positives in the Pakistani economy begun in this space several weeks ago, I come to the role of Pakistanis living abroad in the economic life of the country of their origin.

This is the fourth element in what I have called the “positives” in the Pakistani economy. Dispersed over three continents — in the Middle East, Britain and North America — there are some five to six million people of Pakistani descent closely engaged, in some way or other, with the homeland.

The reference here is not to the involvement of some members of the expatriate community in acts of terrorism such as those committed in London on July 7, 2005 that resulted in the deaths of more than 50 people, or to those who were participants in the alleged plan in which American jumbo airliners flying from London to various points in the United States were to be the targets. My concern and interest, instead, are the growing economic links between the Pakistani expatriate communities and the homeland.

However in discussing these I will have to rely on informed guesses and estimates since no serious academic, analytical or policy work has been done in recent years to develop a good and reliable picture of these communities and their economic roles. There are a number of unanswered questions. For instance, exactly how many people from Pakistan or of Pakistani origin live outside the country? My guess is that they number about five to six million. At six million, they represent more than 3.5 per cent of the Pakistani population. This makes the combined Pakistani communities living outside the country among the largest diasporas in the world.

The proportion of the Pakistani population resident abroad is somewhat less than the total for the Chinese diasporas but is perhaps more than that of India’s. As such this community has begun to attract notice, some of it not favourable. How are the people belonging to these communities dispersed in various parts of the globe; what are their numbers in the UK, the Middle East and North America? What is their total annual income and how does that compare with the homeland’s gross domestic product? I can provide some tentative answers to these questions in order to underscore one important point: in Pakistani communities abroad, the country has an important source of capital and talent available to be tapped provided public policy can be designed to facilitate these roles. Staying with the upper end of the estimate for the size of the Pakistani expatriate communities and assuming that their members earn considerably less than the national average in the Middle East, a bit less than the average for Britain, and considerably more than the average for North America, the income per head of the six million Pakistanis living abroad would be of the order of $20,000. This means a combined income of $120 billion, about the same as the revised estimate of Pakistan’s gross domestic product.

How much of their incomes do the members of the diaspora save? This is an important question since it is the amount that is being saved that creates future wealth and therefore the future economic strength of the community. It also provides a source from which investments could be made in the homeland.

Again, since no studies have been done in this area, one can only make guesses based on the experiences of other communities that have attracted serious research.

It is well known that the newly arrived immigrants save much more than host populations among which they get located. If we assume that the people of Pakistani origin save about 20 per cent of their total income, the combined saving would be of the order of about $25 billion a year, much more than Pakistan’s gross domestic savings. What have these savings been used for and how much of these could become available for investment in the homeland? Again, following the pattern of behaviour of the more-studied immigrant communities, one would imagine that the sector of housing would be the first one to attract the pool of savings. Once a roof over the head is acquired, the saver would begin to look at other investment and business opportunities.

How large is the asset base of expatriate community? In the absence of hard data, I can make some guesses about the accumulated wealth of the Pakistani community in the United States and Canada. Some 800,000 strong, this community was formed over a period of 30 years. It was only in the early 1970s that Pakistanis began to arrive in large numbers to this part of the world. The asset base began to be created a few years after the arrival of large numbers of Pakistanis — mostly professionals — who constituted the first phase of immigration into the United States.

The rate of asset accumulation continued to increase with time and should have reached $12 to $15 billion a year in the early 2000s. I would imagine that the total amount of wealth at the command of the community at this time is of the order of $200 billion. A significant proportion of this should be in housing, mostly self-occupied residences. In addition, there are perhaps $50 billion worth of income yielding assets that should produce some five billion dollars’ annual return. In other words, we should expect a steady increase in the amount of income accruing to the members of the diaspora.

It is only when there is an assured stream of income available to them that these communities normally turn towards the homeland. This pattern was followed by other expatriate communities and is beginning to happen for the Pakistanis living abroad as well. But the amount of flow remains small given the wealth and income of the community. The fact that the diasporas, for purposes of investment, have placed homeland relatively low on the list of priorities does not reflect loss of affection for the country of origin. It is a question of tolerance of risk. Diasporas were formed mostly as a result of economic difficulties at home and that means that the element of risk would continue to be paramount in determining the types of investment these communities make.

“Country risk” — the term used by the financial markets to indicate how they view the risks involved in investing in a particular market — remains high for Pakistan. This does not reflect Pakistan’s reality; it is largely an indication of the poor view the West has about the country. This view rubs on the people of Pakistani origin. In fact, some of the negative perceptions that exist about Pakistan have been created by some members of the Pakistani community abroad through newspaper columns they contribute to the western press. On September 19, 2006, on the eve of President Pervez Musharraf’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, The Wall Street Journal carried a very negative article titled ‘Musharafistan’ on its editorial page. The writer is an active player in New York’s financial markets and is of Pakistani descent.

The fact that Pakistan keeps figuring in all high profile acts of terrorism committed or alleged to be at the planning stage does not help this perception. The financial markets, therefore, don’t seem to think that they are in a position to offer a reasonable sense of security to potential investors. In changing the perception about country risk, Islamabad needs to focus a fair amount of attention on the various diasporas that have reached the stage of maturity at which homeland has begun to appear as a real alternative for placing investments.

How do these communities normally get engaged with the economies of the homeland? There is a distinct pattern. The first flow usually takes the form of what are usually referred to as “remittances”. This is the money sent to families and friends who need — sometimes desperately — whatever the earner working abroad could possibly spare. The second stage is charitable giving. This, in turn, takes two forms. Initially, expatriate communities give charities that use informal channels.

Later, as they mature and become more affluent, contributions to charitable institutions become more common. The Pakistani community has reached this stage of development in the United States at which it has begun to make sizable contributions to organised charities that are working in various sectors in the homeland. Support of education — not just primary but also university — is receiving a great deal of attention in this context.

An important positive development for Pakistan is the fact that the three large diasporas — in the Middle East, Britain and North America — are now old enough economically mature enough, and convinced enough about the economic potential of their country of origin to begin to seriously contemplate investing in Pakistan. In moving investment resources to Pakistan, this community would follow more or less the same strategy it adopted for creating an asset base in the adopted homeland. It has already begun the process by investing in Pakistan’s real estate.

This is one reason why the prices of plots and houses in cities such as Islamabad and Lahore increased sharply in 2003-2006. Diaspora money is also going into the Karachi stock market and may have been the reason for the increase in the value of capitalisation of the stocks listed in the market. Some well-to-do members of the community have taken prominent positions in the enterprises privatised by the state in the last few years. A London based businessman of Pakistani origin took a major position in the United Bank Ltd. privatised in 2004. Few private equity funds with funds raised from the members of the expatriate communities have also begun to invest in the unlisted companies in the various sectors of the economy.

A number of medical professionals working abroad have invested large amounts in building hospitals and clinics in the country. A modern hospital in Islamabad, one in Lahore and a number of clinics in Karachi were established by these professionals. Along with finance, they have also provided their skills for the benefit of the institutions they have set up.

That the expatriates’ financial resources are flowing to Pakistan is reflected in the change in the composition of the remittances the country receives. This change happened since 9/11. It was not necessarily the consequence of the strict regulatory controls imposed by the US on flows of funds from America to other countries. The events of 9/11 may have contributed to creating an environment of insecurity among the communities so much so that that they may have begun to look for alternative sources of income outside the United States.

But the structural change that occurred in the flows of money originating with the expatriates reflects a different development. It is my belief that the Pakistani community in America is now in a position to develop its relationships with its own homeland. It has begun to get seriously interested in making investments for profit in the homeland. It should be an important part of publ ic policy to sustain this interest.

THIS has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide.

Within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk — only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting “Turkishness” (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres — won the Nobel Prize for literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to maintain its innocence — the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of “civil war” — Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers — mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts.

He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army.

He testified that, when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means “little water” in Armenian), he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. “In all the history of Islam,” General Vehip wrote, “it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery.” The Armenian Holocaust, now so “unmentionable” in Turkey, was no secret to the country’s population in 1918.

Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier — a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families — and, on October 19, 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: “Let’s face it, we Turks savagely (vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians.”

Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to “proceed with your mission” as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder.

As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on November 19, 1918: “The ‘mission’ in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population... I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people...”

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for “defaming” Turkey.

I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers — of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety — should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant “martyr” for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it’s gratifying to find French President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union.

True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community. But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will “prohibit dialogue” which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia.

What is the subtext of this, I wonder. No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder “reconciliation” between Germany and the Jews of Europe? But, suddenly, recently, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled “The First Holocaust”.

I have received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it “very likely that they will be sued under Law 301” — which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk — but that, as a foreigner, I would be “out of reach”. However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial.

Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned. — (c) The Independent

THE United States constitution may be the most revered text in the nation. It is our foundational document, which our presidents pledge to preserve and protect and which our judges continue to interpret and reinterpret Talmudically more than 200 years after it was written. It is the symbol of the American democracy that we often insist is the greatest in the world.

Yet in reality, the constitution is so far from perfect that it threatens our ability to resolve the daunting problems facing our society. It has created a political order that suffers from a “democratic deficit,” a term often applied to the European Union but, alas, ever more accurate with regard to our own society.

This is not a mere theoretical failing. At the moment, for instance, more than half the country strongly disapproves of Congress and the president. Almost three-quarters of those polled believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. These are not the responses of an electorate that is fundamentally satisfied with the status quo.

One might argue that this is transitory, a matter of momentary antipathy toward today’s incumbents — and that a turnover in next month’s elections will bring renewed joy to the discontented. But that would be a mistake. It is a grim reality that our constitution itself ensures that the results will be of far less significance than one might hope.

Begin with the fact that, whatever happens, George W. Bush will continue to occupy the White House until Jan. 20, 2009, despite the fact that about 60 per cent of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing. Most political systems around the world have mechanisms by which leaders who lose the public’s confidence can be removed.

A model in this regard is Britain, where the Tories unceremoniously dispatched Margaret Thatcher when she was no longer found suitable as their leader, and where the Labour Party is in the process of doing the same with Tony Blair. Under our Constitution, although criminals can be removed, mere incompetents are protected. One need not adopt a parliamentary system in order to construct a system by which Congress could declare “no confidence” in the president and force a replacement.

For now, then, Bush retains his powers including the power to veto legislation. This is another extraordinarily undemocratic element of the US system. It allows one man to override the wishes of strong majorities and, in effect, become an independent third house of an already cumbersome legislative process. This “three-house” aspect of our legislative process is one explanation for the difficulty often, the impossibility of passing innovative legislation and having it signed into law.

Californians have a particularly overwhelming reason to disrespect the Constitution: Although 35 million people live within its borders, it has the same vote in the US Senate as does Wyoming, which has roughly 500,000 people.

How can you defend a system under which Barbara Boxer was returned to the Senate in 2004 with about 6.5 million votes at the same time that Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski won the exact same job and power with about 150,000 votes? No greater deviation can be imagined from what we like to believe is a national commitment to “one person/one vote.”

Again, this is not merely a theoretical problem. Research has demonstrated that the control of 25 per cent of the Senate’s votes by states with only five per cent of the national population has led to a remarkable flow of federal dollars from highly populated states such as California and New York to thinly populated but politically advantaged states. Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” is all too emblematic of this reality.

In a real sense, California has even less power in the Senate than do small states, given the way that effective power is distributed. The Democrats, for example, draw their leadership almost exclusively from small states. Over the last 30 years, that party’s leadership has come from Montana (Mike Mansfield), West Virginia (Robert Byrd), Maine (George Mitchell), South Dakota (Tom Daschle) and Nevada (Harry Reid). In the same period, Republican leaders came from Tennessee (Howard Baker and Bill Frist), Kansas (Bob Dole) and Mississippi (Trent Lott).

Nor does California benefit as much as one might believe from its having by far the largest number of electoral votes in the country. The reasons are simple: First, small states, guaranteed at least three electoral votes, have disproportionate voting power in the electoral college. Second, the structure of the electoral college has created a system whereby presidential candidates focus only on “battleground states” in which the electorate is closely divided.

California has not been such a battleground for many years. Thus, no candidate seeking to put together a winning coalition in the electoral college will pay much attention to California. One candidate (the Democrat) takes California for granted; the other often disdains the state. Were the United States a modern democracy in which the president was elected by a popular majority, Californians would be wooed instead of sidelined while candidates pander to ironworkers in Ohio and Cuban Americans in Miami.

These are just some of the problems with our Constitution. There’s also the fact that the electoral college has put five men in the White House since World War II Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who did not win a majority (and in at least one case, not even a plurality) of the popular vote. Nor are we well served by the extended period between election day and the inauguration more than two months later, during which repudiated lame-duck presidents — think of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — retain full authority to make controversial decisions.

Or by the fact that Supreme Court justices often serve for ludicrously long periods — a quarter-century has become the norm — and the appointment of youngsters such as Clarence Thomas, 42, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., 50, makes service of 30 or 40 years all too likely. What’s more, they are then able to time their resignations to ensure that their successors are chosen by presidents who share their political ideology.

To believe that our Constitution is perfect — or even truly adequate to the world we live in — is equivalent to believing that it is safe to continue driving a car with bad brakes and dangerously worn tires. Even if we have been able to make trips safely in the past, we are criminally negligent in believing that we can continue to do so.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times

The writer is a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.