The goods and bads of Bhutto's family

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "If you know a good screenplay writer, I'd love to meet them," said Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto recently, pondering the swings of fortune that have all but destroyed the first family of the world's second-biggest Muslim state. But it's not clear whether the film would be a tragedy or a farce.

As a young woman, Benazir saw her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, elected prime minister, and then hanged by the military regime that overthrew him. She herself has been twice elected prime minister, and twice judicially removed. Both her brothers have died violently in mysterious circumstances. Now she and her husband face corruption charges that could put them in prison for seven years.

It is a sad final act for a family that once embodied popular hopes that Pakistan could change from a corrupt feudal state where only the soldiers and the rich have a voice into a prosperous, modern, democratic country. And as the family faces ruin, so does the country itself.

Bhutto is deeply unhappy about it. "In some ways we resemble the Soviet Union in its final years, where a military superpower, with all its airplanes and missiles and bombs, was collapsing because it could not sustain that empire," she said recently. "Our economy and our social basis can no longer sustain our desire to have an ambitious agenda."

But the analogy with the Soviet Union goes further than that, for like Pakistan, it was made up of different provinces ("republics") speaking different languages. When the money finally ran out, it broke up into its component parts -- and in Pakistan, the money has definitely run out.

Only three months after Pakistanis rejoiced as Islamabad answered India's five nuclear tests with six of their own, the Pakistani rupee has fallen 15 percent against the dollar. There are fears that the country will soon default on its $30 billion foreign debt: $600 million is due to be repaid in September, and Pakistan has only $500 million left in its foreign reserves. Its credit rating has been downgraded to "B3", making it (with Indonesia) the lowest-rated country in the world.

"The feeling is that this is a moment of silence before the execution," said a stockbroker in Karachi, the country's biggest city. "Unless a fairy godmother turns up, we simply do not have the money to pay our debts."

Although the fairy godmother has turned up repeatedly in the past -- in the form of loans from the International Monetary Fund or injections of cash by oil-rich Gulf states -- it looks like this time she isn't coming. The steep fall in oil prices has left the Gulf with no money to spare, and the IMF is barred from handing over any more money to Pakistan because of the U.S. sanctions imposed after the country's May nuclear tests.

Indeed, it's hard to resist the speculation that one of India's secret motives for conducting its nuclear tests, knowing that Pakistan's government would face irresistible political pressure to reply in kind, was precisely to drive Pakistan into bankruptcy. Both nations would obviously face economic sanctions afterwards, but India's economy, richer and far bigger, could ride them out, whereas deeply indebted Pakistan's could not.

If Pakistan's economy does crash, it will have less impact on the global economy than Indonesia's collapse last year, for Pakistan is a far poorer country. But the political turmoil that follows may be hair-raising stuff, for this is a country with a few dozen highly vulnerable nuclear weapons -- and almost daily fighting along its disputed border with India in Kashmir.

Even at the best of times Pakistan has highly unstable politics: three elected governments have been removed for corruption and financial incompetence in the past ten years. In this political atmosphere, little attention gets paid to development -- so only 34 percent of Pakistan's 140 million people can read and write, and fewer than half even have electricity.

Politics in Pakistan is chronically unstable because the politicians are mostly drawn from the wealthy feudal families. They have little by way of political principles and programs; their main agenda is safeguarding their wealth, and even adding to it while they are in power. So politics is monumentally corrupt, and only about one percent of the population pays taxes.

A disheartening example of this is Benazir Bhutto herself, once seen as the woman who could break that cycle. The Bhutto family's feudal estates in Sindh are so large that she doesn't even know how many peasants work on them -- yet she paid only 14,000 rupees (about $350) in income tax last year. She also failed to declare any foreign assets, though it now appears that she and her husband have up to 36 bank accounts in Switzerland, Britain, France and the United States.

There is a popular theory that the rich make more honest politicians because they don't need to steal, but it rarely works in practice because rich people have trouble grasping the concept of "enough". Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari (who was known as 'Mr Ten Percent' when he was investment minister in her government), claim that all the charges of corruption against them are politically motivated, but the evidence is piling up.

The Swiss authorities, who had already frozen $13.8 million in the couple's secret bank accounts there and asked Pakistan to bring money-laundering charges against Benazir's husband, formally asked Islamabad to bring the same charges against Benazir herself on Aug. 19. Estimates of the amount by which her wealth grew during her time in office range from $300 million to $1 billion.

For over thirty years the fate of the Bhutto family and the Pakistani state have been intimately intertwined. Now the family is going under, undone by its own corruption -- and the state will be lucky if it does not meet the same fate for the same reason.