Shame!
Dragged through Swiss courts, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is brought to account for corruption, writes Iffat Idris from Islamabad
The Bhutto saga took a new twist last week, with the conviction in a Swiss court of Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari on money laundering charges. While her supporters condemned the conviction as another example of political harassment, her opponents lauded it as vindication of the corrupt nature of her rule. These conflicting interpretations reflect the controversy around Bhutto and her political career.
Last Tuesday's conviction related to a case that has been running for many years, and has itself been embroiled in controversy. It involves two Swiss firms, Societe Generale de Surveillance, and Cotecna. The allegation against Pakistan's former first couple is that they awarded contracts to Swiss firms in Pakistan nine years ago in exchange for commission during Ms Bhutto's second term as prime minister.
In announcing his judgment on Tuesday, 5 August, Swiss magistrate Daniel Devaud said his enquiry had established that Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari were paid a six per cent commission, or a $12 million bribe by SGS and Cotecna for awarding them the contracts. He found the couple and their Swiss lawyer Jens Schlegelmilch guilty of laundering the money in two Swiss bank accounts. According to Devaud, $117,000 from the accounts had been used to pay for a diamond necklace in August 1997.
The Swiss court handed down suspended sentences of six months to Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari, and fined them $50,000 each. They were also ordered to repay the full $11,997,423 laundered in the Swiss accounts to the Pakistan government, as well as hand over the diamond necklace. They have two weeks to lodge an appeal.
This is the second time that Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari have been convicted in the SGC-Cotecna bribery case. The first time was in 1999, by the Lahore High Court in Pakistan. Ms Bhutto's rival Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time. The Pakistan Supreme Court dramatically threw out that conviction in 2001 and ordered a retrial. The court found that the judge in the Lahore trial had been influenced by the Sharifs.
Bhutto and her husband face a host of other corruption and mismanagement charges. Both her terms as prime minister ended with her dismissal on the grounds of corruption. During his wife's two terms in office, Asif Zardari was known as "Mr Ten Per Cent" and "Mr Thirty Per Cent" respectively, a reference to the amount he took in commissions on contracts. He is already in jail, serving a seven year sentence for receiving bribes from Pakistan Steel Mills, and awaiting trial on numerous other charges. On the same day as the Swiss verdict was announced, Zardari was also indicted in Pakistan on a murder charge.
Benazir Bhutto has always maintained that the corruption charges against her and her husband are fabricated, and a cover for the real motive of political opposition. Bhutto and her supporters argue that her attempts to bring democracy to Pakistan, and to curb religious fundamentalism as well as the power of the military, landed her in the courts. They welcomed the April 2001 Supreme Court decision as proof of a politically motivated campaign against them.
But this latest conviction by a Swiss court will be harder to dismiss as political bias. Unlike earlier guilty verdicts handed down by questionably neutral Pakistani courts, this has been passed by an independent Swiss magistrate with no involvement in Pakistani politics. As such, it has much greater credibility. Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid stated that, "The Swiss verdict proves beyond any shadow of doubt the loot and plunder of Benazir Bhutto."
Bhutto and her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) have strongly condemned the verdict, and promised to appeal. They accuse Daniel Devaud of politicking to advance his own career. They point to the fact that he announced the verdict on his last day as investigating magistrate, and attribute it to Devaud's desire to raise his profile in his next position.
Bhutto's defence also accuses Devaud of deviating from proper procedure saying, "Under Swiss law it is the general attorney who, after satisfying himself that a prima facie case exists, forwards it to a court of law where the trial takes place under normal legal procedures involving notices to the parties and cross-examination of witnesses." They claim Devaud bypassed this procedure "because he was not sure whether the general attorney would even find the case worth submitting to a court".
The controversy over the SGS-Cotecna bribery case looks set to run and run. Even if Bhutto is successful in her appeal, her reputation has been damaged by the Swiss conviction -- especially in the eyes of the international community. An invitation for her to attend a seminar in Norway, for example, was withdrawn after the verdict was announced.
The irony is that, despite the undoubted taint of corruption around Ms Bhutto and her PPP, she and the party retain a strong vote-bank within Pakistan. Ms Bhutto has been living in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since 1999. Her party fought local and national elections without her, but still did considerably well. One possible explanation for this incongruity is that Pakistani voters have no strong feelings about corruption. The other, and more plausible explanation, is that corruption among their political leaders is so endemic that it is hard to differentiate between them on these grounds.
There is no doubt that corruption is a huge problem in Pakistan. It extends across all government departments, and is part of all public dealings. To register a complaint with the police or transfer property into another name, for example, the officials involved must be paid a bribe. This is petty corruption, however; large-scale corruption happens in government. Virtually all politicians run for office expecting profit from their position if they win. Since politics is motivated by personal greed and ambition, there is little to distinguish between parties and candidates in terms of ideology or mandates. Voters therefore back candidates on the basis of promises made to them personally. This so-called "patronage politics" is endemic in Pakistan and breeds corruption, as those elected are required to "pay back" the people who helped get them there.
The other major factor promoting corruption is lack of accountability. All new governments come to power pledging to investigate and prosecute the corruption of their predecessors. The motive behind their accountability drives, though, is political opposition. General Musharraf came to power in 1999 promising to investigate the corruption of both his civilian predecessors, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, and to recover all looted wealth. He founded the National Accountability Bureau (aptly abbreviated to NAB) to carry out this task.
Three years on, critics openly accuse the military government of using NAB as a coercive tool. Those politicians who side with the military government have their corruption cases pushed to one side -- Prime Minister Jamali being a case in point. Those who oppose the military are pursued by NAB. This blatant manipulation has undermined NAB's work and rendered the much vaunted anti-corruption drive ineffective.
Corruption remains a huge problem in Pakistani politics, and Benazir Bhutto's conviction in Switzerland may serve to highlight the problem and result in a clampdown.
