|
| July 28, 2007 | Saturday | Rajab 12, 1428 |
Defections to PPP
Plight of undertrials
The lengthening shadow of Lal Masjid
A timely victory in Turkey
ARE the nation and the armed forces drifting apart in a hostile mode? Could the two, proverbially like two hearts in one body, be viewed as approaching a state where harmonious coexistence within the bounds of the Constitution and the law might be becoming increasingly difficult — each with a different heartbeat and pulse rate?
REPORTS on the deliberations of the round-table workshop on good corporate governance held in Karachi on Thursday leave one with the impression that the country’s business community has not fully grasped the importance of best corporate practices for improved performance in a competitive global market or for forging business relationships with foreign peers. According to an official of the Pakistan Institute of Corporate Governance (PICG), only 22 per cent of the companies cared to respond to a questionnaire intended to assess their awareness of good governance. The quality of the response is also stated to have lacked vision. The attendance at the workshop — co-sponsored by the International Finance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, the Association of Chartered Accountants and PICG — showed that interest in such a vital subject was mainly confined to the professional class. But these happenings do not depict a full picture. It was more than five years ago, in March 2002, that the Code of Corporate Governance was made mandatory for all companies listed on the stock exchanges by amending the Securities and Exchange Ordinance 1969. The balance sheets of listed companies now give much more information and their financial performance is more transparent than before the code was adopted.
Improved corporate governance has helped stimulate local and foreign investment and reduce the country’s vulnerabilities to financial risks. The problem lies with family-owned and -managed companies, particularly in the textile sector, which are accused of inefficiency in planning and management. The Code of Corporate Governance applies to only 650 companies listed on the stock exchange and about 50,000 firms are not covered by it. While enforcing the code, the government decided to withdraw the tax incentive for non-listed companies which encouraged them to go public. Very few companies opt for listing on the stock exchanges. As mandatory compliance with the Code of Corporate Governance is difficult because of the costs and hassles involved for small family businesses and venture capitalists, the Center for International Private Enterprise, a US-based outfit, is now evolving corporate governance guidelines for non-listed companies. While the move would be welcome, the government needs to encourage more companies to go public. It can also take the initiative to get more state-owned enterprises listed at the stock exchanges through initial public offerings (IPOs). In doing so, it would place these companies under the code of governance to improve their financial performance. The IPOs can also obviate the need for privatisation of strategic assets.
Good corporate governance is based on four principles — fairness, transparency, accountability and responsibility. It has been proved that these basic principles help improve company performance and competitiveness and strengthen market forces. In the budget for fiscal year 2008, the government has slashed tax on private equity from 35 to 10 per cent without any known steps to ensure accountability and transparency when there is worldwide concern about alleged asset-stripping. It is in the interest of both small and big companies to adopt the best international business practices to survive in a competitive world and to undertake new social responsibilities offered by government’s shrinking role in the economy and society. But the regulators should step in to curb unethical business practices, wherever and whenever they occur.
IT is perhaps impossible to aptly translate that line from Urdu poetry which so succinctly portrays someone as having the best of both worlds: the non-believer who has heaven in his grasp (Rind kay rind rahe, haath say jannat na gayee). The line flashes across the mind as the Pakistan People’s Party — the so-called antithesis to the group currently in power — celebrates its latest catch in Punjab. The PPP, which is at its most accommodating these days, is now richer by a certain Dr Firdaus. A Pakistan Muslim League member of the National Assembly, Dr Firdaus Ashiq Awan ‘was’ the parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Division. She distinguished herself in the current Punjab race to join the PPP by announcing her decision in London, on July 25, after a reported meeting with Ms Benazir Bhutto. Many of the Leaguers who have preceded her into the PPP fold in recent weeks have had to be content with a joining ceremony in Lahore. The defectors include former ministers, sitting nazims and well-known figures belonging to various parts of the province. The PPP’s Punjab president, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, has been credited with delivering them to the party. He has been travelling around in an effort to strengthen and prepare the PPP for the next general election, aided by projections that his party will be a major shareholder in the post-poll government. The PPP office-bearers choose to ignore ideological questions as they score these mini victories over the party in power.
Dr Firdaus Ashiq Awan is said to be a fierce opponent of National Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain and may emerge as a tough challenger to him in his Sialkot constituency. The earlier defection of former minister Chaudhry Abdul Ghafoor to the PPP was also put down to factional and biradari politics prevailing in his area (Bahawalnagar). Locally inspired or not, there is no denying that these desertions from the ranks of the PML-Q are worrying the official camp. Surely, the other side in time will also resort to similar steps to counter the PPP. This is how it has always been. There are no signs of change.
IT is tragic that so many undertrial prisoners in the country keep missing their hearings because there are not enough vehicles to transport them to court. Imagine their frustration in Sindh where officials made it known from time to time that more vans would be allocated for this purpose but have not kept their promise. There are 16 police vans in Karachi to transport over 800 UTPs every day. As a result, 60 or so UTPs are stuffed into vans that can hold only 35 persons. There are not enough magistrates to hear cases, all of which make access to justice so difficult, particularly for the poor who have to rely on public defenders who often seek adjournments so as to accommodate paying clients. Such delays in the judicial process also explain why prisons are so overcrowded; Karachi’s jails can accommodate 6,000 prisoners but hold around 20,000. What makes it worse is that many UTPs end up spending more time in prison awaiting court verdicts than would have been the case had they been found guilty and sentenced. That the conviction rate is as low as 11 per cent is proof enough of gross miscarriage of justice taking place. Funds for the Access to Justice Programme were meant to minimise these problems but they seem to have met with few results given that the problems still exist.
Last year the Sindh High Court ordered that the detention of any UTPs not produced before the courts would be considered illegal after Mar 31 this year. This must have provided much relief to those languishing in jail but there are many more still in limbo. One hopes that the courts can continue applying pressure on prosecutors to expedite cases, especially since it seems that a majority of UTPs are not even guilty of the crimes they are accused of.
Does the Lal Masjid crackdown, in any way, epitomise the widening divide between the army and the nation and a bridge too far linking them? Would it be hard to deny that the army and its sartorial armour, the uniform, never showed so many chinks as to become a target of public protest and anger?
I was shocked beyond belief to read a boxed item in an English daily headlined: ‘No uniform in public’. The text ran as follows:
“President Musharraf directs armed forces personnel not to wear their uniform in public in the NWFP for fear of a backlash from the Lal Masjid operation.”
I remember painfully a similar order or advice issued in 1971 to the Dhaka-based troops not to wear uniform outside the limits of Fortress Kurmitola or our Forward Defended Locality (FDL) in army jargon.
The NWFP, the land of the proud Pathans, accounts for no less than 35 to 40 per cent of our regular forces plus an estimated 100,000 of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, officered entirely by the Pakistan army, both at the commissioned and the junior-commissioned (JCO) levels.
Besides, the province is home to a large number of our celebrated infantry regimental centres — the Punjab, Frontier Force and the Baloch regiments. Risalpur and Kakul (Abbottabad) are home respectively to the PAF Academy and the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA). The Nowshera cantonment is home to the armour and artillery schools besides several other training centres, including the Army Service Corps (ASC) Centre — the largest of its kind as the main hub of logistics.
That is as far as the settled districts are concerned. As for the tribal areas, Razmak and Wana, both in Waziristan, are rated as two of the best cantonments in the NWFP. In a reversal of the British forward policy, both were vacated by the regular troops under the orders of the Quaid-i-Azam early in 1948.
The province as a whole has been historically the hub of the military forces and the centre of recruitment. The very air across the land breathes of a soldierly process and tradition.
That the uniform, a Pathan’s badge of honour, should become anathema and a source of personal insecurity in his own home province must engage serious attention of the military high command. The assault on the Lal Masjid, in the heart of the capital, could not but have deeply upset the ordinary soldier, mentally and emotionally.
While the Lal Masjid episode bears no comparison to the Indian army crackdown on Amristar’s Golden Temple, certain similarities cannot be overlooked. Both had been the target of concentrated military operations killing the ring leaders, the Sikh zealot Jurnail Singh Bhindaranwalla in the Golden Temple and Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Lal Masjid.Both added a chapter to the annals of martyrology — relatively less in the case of one belonging to a secular Indian state than to the Islamic (and increasingly jihadi) Republic of Pakistan.
Operation Blue Star was launched on June 6, 1984, under the command of Lt. Gen (General and Indian army chief) Sunderji, General Officer commanding-in-chief (GOC-in-C of the Western Command). However, interestingly, the man who actually led the assault on the temple was said to be one Lt. Col Asrar Mohammad Khan, brother of the late Lt. Col Ahsan Mohammad Khan of the Pakistan army.
Holed up in the temple like Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Lal Masjid, Bhindaranwalla was killed exactly in the same way as the latter would be 23 years later in Islamabad.
The storming of the temple by the Indian army regulars touched off a wave of Sikh fury and militancy throughout Indian Punjab and much of the rest of the country. Bhindaranwalla, said to be a protégé of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself as her man to control Sikh
irridentism, turned into a Sikh martyr and became in death a living symbol of the Sikh revenge against a Hindu prime minister.
Barely four months later, on October 31, 1984, Mrs Gandhi’s personal bodyguard, a Sikh, in her own home, killed her in cold blood to assuage Sikh fury and redeem the community’s vow of revenge against the desecration of the Golden Temple.
Operation Blue Star is history, and one only hopes it does not repeat itself. However, it would be hard to deny Lal Masjid its place in the pantheon of Masjid Shaheed Ganj and the Babri mosque to name just two.
In Pakistan, any form of violence against a mosque, for whatever reason, amounts to sacrilege. The reality, no matter how unseemly, must be faced by the government of the day and those to follow. The hard question for the authorities to consider as an essential part of the postmortem procedure should relate to the following aspects of the July 10 assault.
First, the use of maximum force after the failure of a haphazardly conducted negotiating process, more minatory than persuasive in tone and substance — the message being surrender or face the bullet.
Second, the apparently dismal failure of the intelligence services — civil, military and joint services — under their very nose and within their visual range. How did such an enormous amount and range of arms like anti-personnel, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s etc. with ammunition find their way — over several weeks or months — into the mosque undetected and unaccounted for?
Third, the massive building activity going on with the construction of as many as 175 rooms (official figure) inside the Hafsa building and in its basement without a trace of this being detected.
Fourth, the PR (PTV) side of the burqa-clad Maulana Abdul Aziz, the pesh imam of the mosque, facing the camera after his surrender. The grilling interview the maulana was put through by an interviewer with written questions in full view outraged his younger brother, Abdul Rashid, and prompted him to refuse to surrender.
Fifth, PTV’s coverage of the cache of arms found inside the mosque and the Hafsa building, arranged and polished as neatly as during an inspection of the quarter guard or a unit armoury.
Sixth, the effort to draw a line between the regulars and paramilitaries used in the military operation launched to control the violence across the NWFP following the Lal Masjid incident. The effort (that was largely counter-productive) to save the image of the military at the cost of the paramilitaries, mainly the Frontier Corps, proved in vain. In the public perception, anybody in military uniform belongs to the Pakistan Army regardless of his exact status as a regular or paramilitary personnel.
The question to resolve, in the first place, concerns the dignity and the status of the army as a national institution and its principal security shield. Secondly, and more importantly, is the seminal problem relating to the civil-military equation and the nature of the working relationship between the two.
Besides, shouldn’t the Lal Masjid operation have been planned and carried out by the GHQ alone — without any reference to the parliament if only to meet a constitutional requirement? This could, perhaps, be overlooked in the case of the on-going anti-terror operations across the tribal area, but certainly not in the case of a mosque in the heart of the national capital.
Last but not least is the point relating to the devastating impact of the weeklong stand-off and the eventual storming of the mosque on the minds of a thickly-populated residential area in the centre of the national capital. The stench of the dead bodies alone pervading the area was said to be enough to make one feel sick.
The writer is a retired brigadier.
THE causes of Middle East democracy and moderate Islam should get a badly needed boost from the recent parliamentary elections in Turkey. The ruling Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, which is led by the religious, liberal and pro-western Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won a convincing victory, dealing a rebuff not only to leftist and nationalist opponents but also to the Turkish military. The militantly secular army effectively forced the election by threatening to intervene in the political system in April; the election results showed that Turks do not share the army's fear of the AK Party and that they rejected its meddling.
Turkey is different from its Arab neighbours, including Iraq. But the success of the AK Party both in government and at the polls is demonstrating that political parties grounded in Islam can not only thrive within a democratic political system but also help to strengthen it. Mr Erdogan, like many Turks from the country's sprawling interior, is a devout Muslim, but he has made no move during five years in office to Islamicise Turkish government or curb the rights of secular Turks.
On the contrary, he has pushed through liberalising reforms, including greater rights for women; presided over an economic boom driven by foreign trade and investment; and pressed for Turkish entry into the European Union.
With parliament due to elect a new president this year, Mr Erdogan characteristically sought to avoid antagonising his opponents and the military by refraining from seeking the office himself. Instead, he nominated his capable foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, another pro-western moderate. The army nevertheless responded by posting a threatening message on its web site; this "e-coup," as Turks called it, was followed by a parliamentary impasse over the election.
Though vindicated by the resulting election, Mr Erdogan can best follow up on his success with more restraint. He has already suggested that he will look for a compromise candidate for the presidency. But he will also have to hold back the hardliners in the military and new parliament who will be pressing for a Turkish military intervention in northern Iraq. Turks need still more economic reforms, foreign investment and integration with Europe, something that can happen only if the country’s leaders avoid succumbing either to nationalist or Islamist agendas. If Mr Erdogan can steer that tricky course, he will benefit not only his country but also the troubled region around it.