Black Cloaked Justice

By Ghalib Sultan

ZoneAsia-Pk

In Pakistan the role of the Supreme Court besides being the third albeit ‘weak’ arm of the state has evolved to embrace a wide variety of complex multidimensional and crucial functions.

The ‘traditional’ role of the Supreme Court has proliferated since its inception encompassing a whole range of functions, duties, mandates and directives to uphold not only the rights, liberties and freedoms of the citizens and safeguarding the sanctity of the constitution, but also subsumes ‘untraditional’ roles through virtue of its apex courts. The scope of these ‘untraditional’ roles depends on factors ranging from a country’s geostrategic importance, to history, cultural norms, political stability and politico-economic environs. The extent to which the judiciary is involved in ‘untraditional’ roles is indicative of the country’s stability, strength and popularity of the other two ‘stronger’ arms of the state: the Legislature and Executive, and the unofficial but all powerful elbow joint that comprises the Pakistan Army.

Oscillating between democratic and military regimes since Pakistan’s establishment, the ungainly jobs of being the ‘Platonic Guardian of Democracy’ and ‘Enforcer of Values’ have been thrust on the Supreme Court in addition to everything else. The modus operandi to carry out these functions plunges the hitherto unbiased and unswayed Supreme Court into the deep murky recesses of politics where it has to, caeteris paribus, deliberate the legality and constitutionality of a certain type of regime. On paper, upholding the values of democracy and the constitution in the case of determining the legitimacy of a ruling party should be an open shut case: democratic in spirit or not? However Pakistan’s history is beset with politics holding a sway on the ruling rather than having it the other way round. Bringing to the fore another nebulous aspect of the judiciary: judicial activism.

Here the lines between ‘upholder and enforcer of constitution’ and ideologically tainted judicial review get blurred. The lawyer’s movement in 2007 which began as an organized peaceful protest to assert the independence of the judiciary was an unprecedented success for effective judicial activism. The fact that Bar Councils across the country are so well organized was used to its advantage when thousands of lawyers were mobilized simultaneously to take up the cause morphing into a mass movement when a vacuity for power and influence emerged from within the movement. The religious right was one that used this to its advantage. Islamic sloganeering is why people amassed proud in the years leading to Pakistan’s separation from India; it was used to keep Zia in power and in this case to provide approval for the fight for a completely unrelated ironic cause: restoration of the Chief Justice to uphold a constitution they don’t believe in and want to be replaced entirely with the Shariah. The fruits of the religious right’s labors emerged when lawyers around the country held mass funeral prayers for Osama bin laden and declared unanimous infatuation with Mumtaz Qadri.

The power of judicial review grants the Supreme Court the trump card to trump all other claimants to power. It recently used this card for the removal of Sohail Ahmed from the post of secretary establishment, and claimed that it had the right review the performance of the Prime minister and the Executive outfit last year. This process reviewed by a lesser bench culminated into the six points formulated and passed on to a higher bench which declared that the President and the Prime minster had indeed over stepped the boundaries of their mandate and failed to stay true to their respective oath undertaking.

The recent fracas around the Memogate issue is one contentious example. Without considering the question of why the appeals by the Parliament’s opposition were accepted in the SC without giving the Parliament sufficient time to formulate its own investigative body, the two parallel legal entities are headed for a crash collision if they come up with conflicting conclusions. Will the judiciary then deny the legislature its supremacy and over step its own boundaries or will it back track its own suo moto.

Fact of the matter is, the masses are stacked right behind the Supreme Court, the failures of the current government abound by the day and whether or not they are falling prey to another form of judicial vigilantism is a question for tomorrow not today. The President and the Prime minster might have failed to toe the line but is the Supreme Court in danger of following suit?

THE IGNORED REALITY

By: Ghalib Sultan
ZoneAsia-Pk

If there is democracy and people are the most important factor in a democracy then there is something seriously wrong.

There is a news story in Pakistan Today (11.1.12) about the travails of an ex soldier. This unfortunate man made the mistake of helping the police in thwarting a bomb attack on a shrine. In retaliation his son was kidnapped and delivered dead in a gunny bag when no one helped him. Then his other son was kidnapped and given such strong drugs that he died of blood cancer. No one helped him. Now his teenage daughter has been kidnapped since May 2011 and once again no law enforcing or investigative agency is willing to help him. The kidnappers have demanded a huge ransom. The family has hit rock bottom and dead end.

A few days ago a stampede after a musical concert caused the death of three young girls. The concert venue was over crowded with complete disregard for safety. Who is responsible for this tragedy?

Power outages and gas shut downs are causing unimaginable suffering to the common man. No one has an answer. Long lines of cars wait patiently for CNG at gas stations. Businesses are shutting down. Industry is closed. Unemployment is rampant. Trains run erratically if at all and the service is abominable. The national airline is a laughing stock. Poverty stalks the land. No one has any pride left-not in their work, not in themselves and not in the country.

The masses watch helplessly as trivia like the ‘memo’ and NRO take up all the time of the institutions that should be giving them governance, security and justice. No one watches the useless debates on TV—everyone is hooked on the plays even if their themes are depressing. Anything to escape reality.

Drone attacks have restarted with this years first one on January 10th– as have bomb blasts. The horrifying details of 10 soldiers mutilated, beheaded and thrown callously in a ravine did not even make it to the headlines. Bomb blasts are back with 30 killed in Jamrud in just one attack and several injured in other attacks. Surely these events are more important than the shenanigans of those jockeying for power or those trying to survive.

Democracy without the rule of law is chaos. The people matter more than anything else. The reality on the street cannot be ignored any longer. Its time to focus on real democracy and that means addressing the grievances of the people-the sooner this happens the better. The Arab Spring came when the people were driven to the street and were fed up of being ignored.

How PTI will tackle the Education Crisis

Recently, Imran Khan’s Q&A with students in Karachi was telecast in To the point on the Express channel. There were some good questions and some not-so-well-left dodges. To two questions in particular, on refusing to be critical of MQM and on articulating a succession plan for PTI, Mr Khan avoided any direct response. In the case of the latter, in fact, he digressed into the sher and geedar metaphor that he is so fond of. Mr Khan has begun to avoid assigning blame to the MQM in Karachi. He always refrained from blaming the Taliban and militant groups for the deaths of countless Pakistanis. And in spite of his apology to the Baloch in his Karachi rally, he has also shied away from questioning the role of the security agencies in violating the rights of the Baloch.

I find it curious that the PTI has been in existence for 15 years and consistently it has insisted that, unlike other parties, it draws on the expertise of professionals to formulate policy. Yet when pressed for policy prescriptions, Mr Khan gives only brief populist responses, followed by the refrain that think-tanks are working on it. If the full policy has not been unveiled in the last 15 years, what will change in the next year or so to make this possible?

Mr Khan appears sure of one thing. There is to be one system of education across Pakistan. But he has never clearly articulated which system this will be. Will the medium of instruction be Urdu or English? It would be unwise to do away with English and opt for Urdu as not only is professional education primarily available in English, but English is also rapidly becoming the lingua franca of our world. Even countries like Germany, that have advanced education available in their native tongue and are particularly renowned for their engineering, are now aggressively making English classes more readily available to their population. This would leave us with the conclusion that if we are to have one system, then the medium of instruction in our schools should be English.

There is a problem with this however. How will we ensure English-speaking teachers in rural areas far removed from the cities? Often, it is difficult to find teachers in those areas who are fluent in Urdu as Urdu is only the native tongue of a fraction of our population. Nevertheless, it is still far more possible to hire teachers who are competent in Urdu than in English. A few years ago, I visited some government schools in Sheikhupura, just an hour outside Lahore. The schools were being resuscitated by a joint collaboration between the NGOs ‘DIL’ and ‘CARE’.

Not only do we have an Urdu/English divide but we also have a Matric/GCSE divide. It will be next to impossible to find teachers for every district in Pakistan that could teach GCSE-level English and equally impossible to deny those who can afford this elite education for their children. Hence the divide will remain. Mr Khan would be wise therefore to talk about the uplift of the current education system but he is hoodwinking the people if he claims he can enforce one system of education in Pakistan.

Add to this the complication of the growing chain of madrassas which have introduced yet another system and enhanced divides among our population. Will it be possible for Mr Khan to convince the proponents of the madrassa system to dispense with their curriculum and priorities and follow those of the state? What will he do if they refuse?

Finally, Mr Khan also stated that he will double the education budget if he comes to power. This is great news but doubling the education budget means cutting down on something else as there are only so many pieces of the pie. Given that we have one of the lowest allocations to education in the world and have one of the highest allocations to defence as a percentage of our budget, it would make sense if the shortfall came out of the defence allocation. But does he have a green light from the establishment that seems close to him to go ahead with this very welcome change? If not, what prescription does he have to double the education budget? Surely, taxes must be raised on the rich and more people added to the tax net, but the effects of that will take a few years to materialise. It would be good for PTI to think through these tough questions and understand that if they make very tall claims, it will be very difficult to follow through on them.

Chinese Communist party leaders and their high end cars

By: Barbara Demick

Even the police are driving Porsches.

Chinese officials love their cars – big, fancy, expensive cars. A chocolate-colored Bentley worth $560,000 is cruising the streets of Beijing with license plates indicating it is registered to Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party headquarters. The armed police, who handle riots and crowd control, have the same model of Bentley in blue.

BMW 5 Series police cars are shown off at a delivery in Shanghai, China, in March 2010, in time for use during the World Expo.

And just in case it needs to go racing off to war, the Chinese army has a black Maserati that sells in China for $330,000.

“Corruption on wheels is an accurate description of this problem,” said Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, who has been advocating restrictions on officials’ cars for years.

A remnant of a decades-old party perks system, the luxe wheels are a conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the elite.

Armed with cellphone cameras, angry Chinese have started posting photographs of the expensive government cars – identifiable by their license plates – on a microblog site called Anti-Official Cars Extravagance that was set up in August. (Government censors shut down an earlier version of the same site.)

The Chinese government doesn’t release figures, but automobile industry analysts here say that spending for cars tops $15 billion annually, while some scholars believe the figure is many times that amount.

Even at more conservative estimates, the figure is greater than that allocated for low-income housing or for scientific research and development.

Not to speak of the funding for school buses.

Anger over fancy government cars has been piqued by a spate of tragic accidents in recent months involving overloaded school buses. In the worst of them, 21 kindergartners were killed in Gansu province in November in a van that was designed for nine passengers but was carrying 62 children.

“Every time I see a school bus accident and think about the great many government Audi A6s on the street, I shake my head and sigh,” one microblogger who uses the name Minxingdie wrote after the accident.

The Audi A6 is the semiofficial car of the Chinese Communist Party; the German automaker’s parent, Volkswagen, was an early entry in the 1980s into the Chinese market. According to industry analysts, there are more than 100,000 A6s in China, about 20% of them owned by the government. Each car costs $50,000 to $100,000, depending on engine size.

For the cops, luxury SUVs are all the rage. In the southern city of Guangzhou, police were photographed driving a Mercedes-Benz SUV, while those in the northeastern province of Jilin have another deluxe SUV, the Porsche Cayenne.

“No wonder there’s no money left for school buses!” remarked one contributor to the car-outrage website. The commentators were particularly scathing about the expensive cars with military plates. “Why does the military need sports cars? Will it help them run faster when there’s a war?”

Photographs also showed cars with government, police and military plates clearly being used on personal business: dropping off children at school, at a shopping mall, on a family vacation.

“You can’t get evidence about other kinds of corruption, such as people accepting envelopes of cash, but this you easily see for yourself,” explained the Guangzhou-based activist who started the website in response to emailed questions. He did not wish to be identified.

The high spending on cars, said Ren Jianmin, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is the result of a system set up by the Communist Party in the 1940s to allocate perks to ranking members.

“The system dictates that once an official reaches a certain level, he must be equipped with certain things, such as cars and, in the past, houses,” Ren said. “This system led to a huge number of government cars. “

Although in theory a government car is for official business, most bureaucrats treat the car as their own to do with as they wish. Regulations that limit the use of the car to working hours are widely disregarded.

“The Chinese officials don’t distinguish between business and personal use,” Ren said.

In addition, use of the car engenders more opportunities for corruption. Once they have a car, officials will hire a chauffeur and run up large bills for gasoline and so-called repairs.

“Somebody could go to the repair shop and buy a TV for himself and get reimbursed from the government” for repairs, Ren said. “Many pay little, but they get reimbursed a lot. There are a lot of secrets in the receipts.”

Nervous about heightened sensitivity to corruption, the government is trying to rein in the most extravagant cars. New regulations being drafted this year are supposed to limit the base price of cars to $11,000 for most bureaucrats, and restrict the engine size of government cars and the ranks of those entitled to a private vehicle and driver.

“Below the rank of minister or deputy minister, they won’t be entitled to an exclusive car and will have to use a car from the fleet,” said Zhang Yu, managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai industry consulting firm.

But this isn’t the first initiative to limit government car purchases.

In 2004, municipal governments in the cities of Chengdu, Nanjing and Hangzhou sold off many of their official cars, telling bureaucrats that they could apply for reimbursements for rentals when needed. Nevertheless, spending on government cars has enjoyed double-digit growth since then.

“They have been trying to tackle this problem since the 1980s, but it never goes away,” said Wang, of the Academy of Governance.

Government officials have proved ingenious, however, at getting around the regulations. One trick is to change the metal emblems on the cars to make them look cheaper than they actually are.

“Whenever a new regulation comes out, we get customers from the government,” said Han Chao, who runs a small storefront shop selling Audi parts in a market in the south of Beijing.

Recently, he said, he sold 100 emblems for the Audi A6 2.0L (the smallest engine for the popular model) to officials from the city of Zhangbei, northwest of Beijing, so they could disguise the fact that their engines were larger than permitted.

“Most people want to buy logos to upgrade so they can save face,” Han said. “Only the government people buy emblems to downgrade the cars.”

The emblems, Han noted, cost 20 yuan each, about $3. But the officials, he said, demanded receipts saying they’d paid 120 yuan.

Pakistan Customs arrests 2 men involved in smuggling 17 kilograms of heroin to Nigeria

The Drug Enforcement Cell of Pakistan Customs claimed to have seized 17 kilograms of fine quality heroin concealed in a garment consignment booked for Nigeria and arrested two men.

According to a Customs press release, staff posted at the Export Cargo Complex, air freight unit, Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, acting on a tip-off, intercepted a consignment comprising 80 cartons, all containing bulk quantity of T-shirts being exported to a consignee in Lagos (Nigeria) by a Karachi-based exporter, Seven ‘M’ Corporation.

A detailed examination of the consignment led to the recovery of 17 kilos of fine quality heroin powder that was packed in 30 polythene packets wrapped in T-shirts in two of the 80 cartons, the press statement added.

Consequent upon the recovery and seizure of contraband narcotics, two suspects – Mehmood Ahmad and Ashraf Abbas – representing the clearing agents and the exporter, respectively, were arrested and a case under the Control of Narcotics Substances Act, 1997 was registered against them.

Earlier this month, the DEC staff had apprehended a Pakistani couple for smuggling 800 grams of heroin.

Now that Libya has ‘Revolutionized’, what next?

Oh Sweet Arabia

With the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year dictatorship in Libya, the year of Arab revolutions has taken a game-changing turn, not just for the peoples of the region seeking systematic and large-scale political change – but for geopolitics at a global level. As Libya now joins Egypt and Tunsia helping their fellow sisters Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Palestine overthrow their dictators.

Regardless of the outcome of the Libyan Revolution, their are still important aspects and factors that need to be considered and are questionable.
Will their be a New Libya?

Will the Libyans finally achieve what they longed for?
Will the Western World involve itself and control Libya?
And Are the deaths of many really worth it?

It is time for the Libyan people to celebrate the end of a four-decade dictatorship. Once they sober up from the jubilations of their well-deserved victory, however, they will discover this is only the beginning.

Gaddafi has undermined, marginalised or obliterated many of the state institutions, including the military, and destroyed the political parties – indeed, political life in the country. There is much to restore and more to build from scratch. Security, reconstruction and political transition are only a few of the challenges they will face sooner rather than later. More importantly, they will need to manage expectations of those who have given their all for liberty, freedom and prosperity.

And judging from what we have seen over the past 10 or so months, there is much to celebrate in terms of building a steering council and creating locally based revolutionary groups from the bottom up that have been well coordinated and largely disciplined. Having said that, there is no need for alarm. Not yet any way. It’s easy, even clichéd, to be pessimistic, even negative, about the post-revolutionary challenge. What is needed is optimism anchored in reality.Western leaders need to wipe that smug look from their faces and make sure not to gloat about doing the Arabs any favours.

Western powers have much to make up for: They inserted themselves in the Libyan revolution after Gaddafi made genocidal threats against his people, but their interference was not necessarily motivated by humanitarian ends, rather more of the same geopolitics that led to befriending Gaddafi, Ben Ali and Mubarak in the first place.I believe the western world, especially America do not really care about the people, they care about the oil. Once they get their hands on Libyan oil. The rest is history. Certainly the NATO aerial bombardment did help, but this was a revolutionaries’ victory par excellence. The battle was won first and foremost in the hearts of the Libyans, just as with the Egyptians and Tunisians before them.

The World had set their eyes on the Libyans, and watched how they took city by city finally advancing into Tripoli and making History, that had shocked the world. Although I saw it coming. In my opinion Gaddafi was hopeless, even from the beginning. Once the Rebels had set their eyes on over throwing their dictator, I knew it would happen. Arresting three of Gaddafi’s sons as Libyan citizens broke into Gaddafi’s home and taking his possessions. A man was seen wearing Gaddafi’s necklace as others were climbing on buildings waving the Libyan Flag all over Libya. A rich patriotic them running through the whole country, and the Arab World.

As the Libyan Rebels had taken over Tripoli, the Yemenis were in celebration, waving the Libyan Flag and chanting slogans “Yes Libya, you have done it” in Arabic, and Libyans chanting slogans such as “Syria we will help you” and “Bashar your next”

The Arab Revolutions is slowly bringing the Arabs together. And when the Arabs stand together, nothing can stop them. The Western World still exists in countries such as Saudi Arabia & Bahrain, but only time will tell, and the outcome, is pretty evident.