Now since Benazir Bhutto have made a deal with government and express her intention to return to Pakistan. There are more than a few reasons to question – and if you are Pakistani, be fearful of – Ms. Bhutto’s return to Pakistan.
William Dalrymple, noted expert on Pakistan, didn’t have much favorable to say about Ms. Bhutto in the Guardian:
Few would argue with the proposition that democracy is almost always preferable to dictatorship; but it is often forgotten the degree to which Bhutto is the person who has done more than anything to bring Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy – really a form of elective feudalism – into disrepute. During her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto’s premiership was also distinguished by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari – widely known as “Mr 10%” – faced allegations of plundering the country.
Those Amnesty International reports form the mid 90’s are worth taking a close look at. Here is one from 1997, which contains some nuggets that Ms. Bhutto fails to disclose in her fuzzy-warm piece.[…]
Extra-judicial killings perpetrated by the police, disappearances carried out by the secret services, suppression of human rights critics and journalists – the reports describe a state of utter anarchy brought out about by the country’s police. The report also discusses the killing of Bhutto’s own brother who had become a thorn in her side for speaking out against her corruption:
Dozens of political activists were held incommunicado and in unacknowledged places of detention. Dr Rahim Solangi and Punhal Sario of the Sindh Taraqqi Passand Party were arrested on criminal charges in late June in Hyderabad, Sindh Province. After their remand lapsed, their whereabouts became unknown. Acting on a habeas corpus petition, a high court bailiff found them on 28 August in private police quarters in Tando Allayar, along with 23 other detainees. Their detention had not been recorded. Police claimed that they had been arrested the previous day. Before they could be released, they were transferred to Jamshoro police station on a “blind” First Information Report (a criminal complaint which does not name any suspect). They were later remanded on a series of “blind” First Information Reports to other police stations in Sindh, and in October were again remanded to Hyderabad Central Jail. No action was taken against those responsible for their arbitrary and unacknowledged detention witnessed by high court staff.
Criminal charges, intended to punish or intimidate, were arbitrarily brought against political opponents and journalists who exposed human rights violations. M.H. Khan of the daily newspaper Dawn reported that prisoners in Hyderabad Central Jail were unlawfully held in iron bar fetters. The authorities first denied the allegations, then filed charges of “forgery and cheating” against the journalist. Following an inquiry, the jail superintendent was suspended, but charges against M.H. Khan were not withdrawn. Sedition charges against journalist Zafaryab Ahmed (see Amnesty International Report 1996) were also still pending.
Retired government servant Zameer Ansari, his wife and two children “disappeared” from their home in Islamabad in May. They were allegedly arrested by an intelligence agency.
Over one hundred people were killed, many of whom may have been victims of extrajudicial executions. Most were claimed by the authorities to be the result of deaths in “encounters” with police. In June, police opened fire on a demonstration by members of Jamaat-i-Islami, Society of Islam, in Rawalpindi, apparently deliberately killing three demonstrators. An inquiry was set up but its results were not made public. In March, Mohammad Naeem, a member of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement, Refugees National Movement, and his associate, Amjad Beg, were shot dead by paramilitary Rangers in Amjad Beg’s house in Karachi. The Rangers claimed they had fired in self-defence, but members of the Beg family who were present at the time said that Mohammad Naeem had hidden behind a cabinet and was shot dead at point-blank range, and that Amjad Beg was arrested and then shot dead outside the house. The federal cabinet reportedly expressed its “satisfaction” with the death of the two men.
Mir Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir’s brother), leader of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (Shaheed Bhutto) and brother of Benazir Bhutto, and seven associates were apparently extrajudicially executed by police in Karachi in September. Police stated that they had fired in self-defence but Murtaza Bhutto and Ashiq Jatoi were reportedly unarmed when shot dead in their car. Two police officers were slightly injured and one of the injuries was later found to be self-inflicted. A judicial inquiry under a Supreme Court judge began investigating the deaths, but it had not concluded by the end of the year.
The perpetrators of human rights violations enjoyed a high degree of impunity. In August, Minister for Human Rights Iqbal Haider said that 136 alleged extrajudicial killings in Karachi were under investigation and that some 500 Karachi police officers had been dismissed and a few had been prosecuted for “misconduct”. However, criminal charges were rarely brought and no law enforcement personnel were known to have been convicted. Inquiries rarely concluded, or if they did, their findings were not made public.
Bhutto also fails to disclose that the two times she was popularly elected as Pakistan’s leader, she was removed on charges of corruption by individuals she herself appointed.
She fails to disclose the vast amount of international corruption she and her husband perpetrated. It was corruption so blatant that even those neutral Swiss wanted her charged.
Swiss investigating reports amassing enough evidence, including purchase of diamond necklace, to indict former Prime Min Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan on money-laundering charges tied to contracts with Geneva-based companies, Societe Generale de Surveillance Holding SA and Cotecna Inspection SA; asks Pakistani authorities to indict her since she is unable to leave country, where she faces similar charges of corruption; has been conducting wide-ranging inquiry to account for more than $13.7 million frozen by Swiss authorities in 1997 that was allegedly stashed in banks by Bhutto and husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom he also asks Pakistan to indict; Pakistan Govt recently filed first criminal charges against Bhutto in efforts to track down estimated $1.5 billion she and husband received in kickbacks and commissions in variety of enterprises…
Her husband, whom she paints in her piece as a political prisoner, was a primary movant in her corruption circus:
ISLAMABAD, MAY 6: Pakistan said today that Poland had handed over documents proving former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, took big bribes in exchange for a 1997 tractor purchase deal.
“The incontrovertible evidence proves that the previous government committed a big fraud on the people of Pakistan,” the official APP news agency said.
It said the documents were given to the Pakistani ambassador in Warsaw and then relayed to the ministry of foreign affairs in Islamabad, which passed them on to the investigating authorities.
The report was published while Bhutto was in Dubai pending an appeal to the Supreme Court against five-year jail terms and an $8.6 million dollar fine handed down to the couple for corruption on April 15. No date for the appeal has been set.
Zardari, a former minister in his wife’s cabinet, is already in jail on other corruption charges but is periodically released to attend sessions of the senate, of which he is a member.
APP said Zardari and Bhutto,twice elected Prime Minister and twice fired for alleged corruption, “skimmed” Rs 103 mn rupees ($ 2.0 mn) from a scheme to make available inexpensive Polish tractors in a bid to boost farming output.
Through all of these investigations Bhutto has consistently maintained that she is being undermined by her political opposition. Yet the fact is, that is how democracy functions. One’s political opponents bring out the skeletons in one’s closet. But it isn’t just her political enemies who have exposed her corruption. New York Times journalist John Burns wrote a multi-part series on Bhutto’s significant and blatant betrayal of Pakistan, and the methods that Bhutto and her husband used to completely take apart Pakistan’s domestic programs.
The investigators say that Zardari and associates he brought into the government, some of them old school friends, began reviewing state programs for opportunities to make money. It was these broader activities, the investigators assert, more than the relatively small number of foreign deals revealed in the documents taken from the Swiss lawyer, that netted the largest sums for the Bhutto family.
Among the transactions Zardari exploited, according to these officials: defense contracts; power plant projects; the privatization of state-owned industries; the awarding of broadcast licenses; the granting of an export monopoly for the country’s huge rice harvest; the purchase of planes for Pakistan International Airlines; the assignment of textile export quotas; the granting of oil and gas permits; authorizations to build sugar mills, and the sale of government lands.
The officials have said that Bhutto and Zardari took pains to avoid creating a documentary record of their role in hundreds of deals. How this was done was explained by Najam Sethi, a former Bhutto loyalist who became the editor of Pakistan’s most popular political weekly, Friday Times, then was drafted to help oversee a corruption inquiry undertaken by the caretaker government that ruled for three months after Bhutto’s dismissal in 1996.
Sethi said Bhutto and Zardari adopted a system under which they assigned favors by writing orders on yellow Post-It notes and attaching them to official files. After the deals were completed, Sethi said, the notes were removed, destroying all trace of involvement.
The article also contains an interesting discussion of how Bhutto and her husband gave a monopoly to a gold smugger, and then reaped the benefits.
Shortly after Bhutto returned as prime minister in 1993, a Pakistani bullion trader in Dubai, Abdul Razzak Yaqub, proposed a deal: In return for the exclusive right to import gold, Razzak would help the government regularize the trade.
In January 1994, weeks after Bhutto began her second term, Schlegelmilch established a British Virgin Island company known as Capricorn Trading, SA, with Zardari as its principal owner. Nine months later, on Oct. 5, 1994, an account was opened at the Dubai offices of Citibank in the name of Capricorn Trading. The same day, a Citibank deposit slip for the account shows a deposit of $5 million by Razzak’s company, ARY Traders. Two weeks later, another Citibank deposit slip showed that ARY had paid a further $5 million.
In Nov. 1994, Pakistan’s Commerce Ministry wrote to Razzak informing him that he had been granted a license that made him, for at least the next two years, Pakistan’s sole authorized gold importer. In an interview in his office in Dubai, Razzak acknowledged that he had used the license to import more than $500 million in gold into Pakistan, and that he had traveled to Islamabad several times to meet with Bhutto and Zardari. But he denied that there had been any secret deal. “I have not paid a single cent to Zardari,” he said.
Razzak offered an unusual explanation for the Citibank documents that showed his company paying the $10 million to Zardari, suggesting that someone in Pakistan who wished to destroy his reputation had contrived to have his company wrongly identified as the depositor. “Somebody in the bank has cooperated with my enemies to make false documents,” he said.
Most of the Western audience Bhutto has been targeting in her media blitz – a blitz that somehow panders equally well to the Western left-wing and right wing – is unaware of Bhutto’s vast legacy of mayhem, corruption, criminality, and violence. She is counting on a political opportune moment in the US to return to a country which she single-handedly help turn into her own feudal fiefdom. The reality is that both of the exiled former prime ministers of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif (the other party Musharraf is negotiating with), are really nothing more than civilian-dictators. If Pakistani democracy has a future, it is with the silenced and sidelined democrats within Pakistan, not the ones sitting in London and New York.
I kindly ask Ms. Bhutto to stay in New York and take her kid to college. Pakistan has little use for her, especially because she doesn’t like to pay taxes. Just one more time from the New York Times story:
The tax returns filed by Bhutto and her husband in her years in office give no hint of the wealth uncovered by the Pakistani inquiry. Bhutto, Zardari and Nusrat Bhutto declared assets totaling $1.2 million in 1996 and never told Pakistani authorities of any foreign bank accounts or properties, as required by law in Pakistan. Zardari declared no net assets at all in 1990, the year Bhutto’s first term ended, and only $402,000 in 1996.
The family’s income tax declarations were similarly modest. The highest income Bhutto declared was $42,200 in 1996, with $5,110 in tax. In two of her years as prime minister, 1993 and 1994, she paid no income tax at all. Zardari’s highest declared income was $13,100, also in 1996, when interest on bank deposits he controlled in Switzerland exceeded that much every week.
