Pakistan facing serious challenge

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): If one of India's reasons for testing nuclear weapons last May was to complete the political and economic ruin of Pakistan, then the strategists in New Delhi can congratulate themselves. But they should also thank Pakistan's own Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, without whom the country might still have a chance.

Pakistan was a mess economically long before India's nuclear tests, but nobody was predicting that it would default on its debt.

Thanks to the sanctions that were imposed on Pakistan after its copycat nuclear tests, however, the budget shortfall this year will be US$5 billion. And nobody will lend it the money to fill that hole.

India has lost at least as much income to sanctions, but India has seven times the population and an economy perhaps a dozen times as big -- so India sails serenely on while Pakistan ends up on the rocks for following its example. That prospect doubtless occurred to the Indian strategists, but they could not have foreseen how helpful Nawaz Sharif would be to them.

"Sharif has become so obsessed with survival," says Maleeha Lodhi, editor of The News, a Lahore-based national paper, "that he has taken out one insurance policy after another....Formally, he is the most powerful prime minister in our history, but in fact he is presiding over...a state that has never been weaker."

What she means by 'insurance policies' is that in only 20 months Sharif has hijacked all the institutions that used to hem in a prime minister's power. The judiciary is now under his thumb, the president's right to dismiss prime ministers for misbehavior has been removed, the army chief has been forced to retire early -- and early this month Sharif imposed 'Islamic law' on the country.

Patriotism, Sam Johnson observed two centuries ago, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. In Moslem countries nowadays, politicians in trouble often find that a sudden enthusiasm for 'Islamic law' serves as well, especially if it takes the form of a constitutional amendment giving Islamic law priority over "anything contained in the constitution, any law, or judgment of any court".

"It's not about Islam -- it's about himself," said Lahore lawyer Asma Jehangir, United Nations rapporteur on human rights for Pakistan, about Sharif's imposition of Islamic law on a country where only 5 percent of the voters backed fundamentalist parties in the last election. "It actually means a total repeal of the constitution," she explained, "to disguise his own mismanagement and to promote a fascist regime in the name of Islam."

Sharif has taken out 'insurance policies' because since the death of dictator Zia ul-Haq in 1988 every elected government in Pakistan has been removed by the president and the judiciary for corruption. His rival Benazir Bhutto was dismissed from the prime ministership twice, and he himself suffered the same fate in 1993.

Sharif doesn't want to face the same fate again -- especially because he is deeply corrupt. He only walks around a free man because he suspended the officers of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) who were looking into his finances when he won the election in 1996 -- so he cannot afford to lose office.

That's not to say that Benazir Bhutto, once hailed as the great hope of Pakistani democracy, is any better. In August, a Swiss judge froze her bank accounts in Switzerland and indicted her and her husband on money-laundering charges. They deny the charges, of course, but the evidence against them is very strong.

This gave Sharif little comfort, however, because in September the deputy head of the FIA, Rehman Malik, sent a 200-page report to the president accusing him of siphoning over $50 million into secret offshore bank accounts and London properties.

Malik, who was suspended from office on trumped-up corruption charges by Sharif in 1996 in an attempt to stop his investigation, spent a year in solitary confinement before being released by the High Court last November. He moved to England for safety after narrowly surviving a machine-gun assassination attempt in June.

Malik seems to have the goods on Sharif, including the cooperation of Pakistanis resident in Britain whose passports were borrowed by Sharif associates -- to open U.S. bank accounts that contain many millions of dollars, as they subsequently discovered.

Nawaz Sharif denies the charges as strenuously as Benazir Bhutto, but it's rather hard to explain how he and his six brothers could have amassed a fortune estimated at $800 million by legal means since he first rose to high political office in 1988.

Pakistan today is a country where the prime minister and the leader of the opposition should probably both be in jail for corruption.

It was probably that thought that made the army chief of staff, Gen, Jehangir Karamat, propose on Oct. 5 that the military should share power with the elected government in a national security council, in order to overcome the destabilizing effects of "polarization, vendettas, and insecurity-driven expedient policies." (The latter was a coded reference to Sharif's imposition of Islamic law).

Sharif faced Karamat down, and the latter resigned three days later, but the army is not happy with the way things are going. Neither is the public -- the euphoria after the May nuclear tests is long past -- and so Sharif gathers dictatorial powers on the one hand while bribing the public with cash discounts on the other.

The most recent bribe was a 30 percent cut on electricity bills, despite International Monetary Fund advice that the charges must be raised. The IMF then postponed indefinitely its planned visit to Pakistan to discuss a loan, and Pakistan's default on about $35 billion of foreign debt may follow as soon as next month.

Other imminent possibilities include a coup -- or a deliberate intensification of the military confrontation with India on the disputed Kashmir border to distract people's attention from the domestic mess. This is not exactly the situation one would want in a very big, very poor country with newly acquired nuclear weapons.