THE Supreme Court took aim at the National Accountability Bureau’s clear weaknesses last week, but the message was really to another institution — the military.
The NLC scam, in which allegedly unauthorised investments were made by senior management of the company, including senior retired army officers, in the stock exchange causing a multi-billion rupee loss over a decade ago should have been fully investigated by now — especially because the military leadership publicly, and controversially, pledged to do so citing that army law is applicable to the principal suspects, even though they had long been retired from the military in 2012.
Also read: SC sees lack of cooperation by institutions as weakness of NAB
But, as the state’s lawyers told the SC this week, the army had baulked at even updating the NAB or the government and had turned away a former prosecutor general who had gone to GHQ in search of information.
The army may well have legal reasons for acting in the manner it has done in the NLC case all along — but what about a state institution’s duty to function transparently and to enforce accountability?
Consider also the wider context here. In Karachi, the military has accused the provincial leadership of corruption on a grand scale and the army-led Rangers have raided Sindh government offices in search of documents linked to alleged land grabs and sundry financial misdeeds of politicians and bureaucrats.
In doing so, the military has cast itself as a force for good battling corruption wherever it is found. Yet, when it comes to its internal investigations and disciplinary measures, the military is famously opaque.
The NLC scam is only one of many cases in which military officers, retired and serving, have been investigated by civilian authorities. In some cases, the military has even fought in civilian courts to have serious crimes being tried there against military personnel to be tried in the opaque military justice system.
Perhaps most infamously, following pressure on the political leadership of the country to create a new system of military courts, the 21st Amendment earlier this year has even allowed for civilians to be tried in military courts on terrorism-related charges.
It is rather remarkable, then, that the same institution is so set on shielding some of its own from very serious allegations of financial mismanagement. Surely, the military does not want to reinforce perceptions that one set of standards applies to everyone else and another to the military alone?
Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2015
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