Last week, Ehtesab bench of the Islamabad High Court exonerated former president and PPP co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari in the infamous SGS and Cotecna corruption references, drawing sarcastic remarks from the family and others against the PML-N leadership for having initiated the cases during its previous rule. A PPP gathering in Lahore even passed a resolution demanding that "Nawaz Sharif apologise to Zardari, his family members and the PPP workers." Actually, they should thank him for being helpful.
The court acquitted Zardari in the 18-year-old case for want of incriminating evidence, saying the prosecution had failed to provide evidence, and that the documentation presented in the court was incomplete and in the form of photocopies rather than original documents. So where are the documents? Why could they not be produced before the court? The answer to the second question is easy: someone somewhere perhaps wanted to protect the accused. As to the first one, it is lost in confusion. Former deputy chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Hassan Wasim Afzal told the court back in September that he had personally brought the original record of the two references from Switzerland and submitted the same to the Lahore High Court's then Ehtesab bench.
According to NAB prosecutor Chaudhry Riaz, as quoted by a press report, if the original record was missing, the responsibility lay with the Lahore High Court's Ehtesab bench; and that efforts to retrieve it remain unsuccessful. But then the same report also said, without specifying the timeframe, the record from the LHC bench was shifted to the accountability court in Attock and from there transferred to the Rawalpindi accountability court, and onward to the Islamabad accountability court. In that case it should have been available with the IHC Ehtesab bench. But it was not there. Which leads to the questions who took it and why? It has to be someone with both the authority and the motive to save the accused from trouble in exchange for return favours. Most likely it is a case of 'muk-muka' (an unsavoury compromise) as PTI Chairman keeps alleging between the two big political players. In fact, a couple of months ago, a close confidante of the Prime Minister, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, was reported to have made a special trip to Dubai to tell the PPP leader not to worry about the case. Small wonder then that the court found the evidence produced by the prosecution was 'weak'.
Justice, as the saying goes, not only must be done, it must also be seen to be done. What we see is a travesty of justice. The court, of course, had to base its judgement on the 'weak' evidence placed before it. But what one is to make of the legal proceedings in Switzerland about the case, and more to the point, the $60 million allegedly belonging to the PPP leaders parked (until at least Zardari was president) in Swiss banks. And also, why did the Zardari government kept refusing to honour, risking two prime minister's dismissal, the Supreme Court orders to write a letter to the Swiss authorities about the money, believed to have been stolen from the people of this poor country? Unless something had to be covered up there was no need to enter into a strident confrontation with the apex court using the flimsy argument of presidential immunity to resist writing the required letter to the Swiss authorities.
So far as public perception is concerned, the case stays unresolved. It remains to be established who is the owner of that money - since relocated-and its sources. That though is not going to happen. One after the other, the former president has suddenly started receiving clean chits in various cases of wrongdoing. The only corruption reference pending now in a Rawalpindi accountability court is the "illegal asset corruption reference." It would be surprising if the outcome in this one is any different. That though is not to assume guilt in all cases, only to say that the exoneration process should look convincing enough.
Within the wider context of the state of democracy things like this have serious repercussions. One of course is that the people tend to lose trust in the system. Secondly, space is created, as is on display in Karachi, for those to act whose business it is not to hold civilians to account. For now, at least technically they have stepped back but not in reality. A way has been found to do what is deemed necessary through an indirect, seemingly legitimate, route of pliable civilian agencies to pursue an anti-corruption campaign. As a result of the enormous level of corruption, except for those affected and the legal literalists, no one is complaining.
What the soldiers think - sadly, not entirely without substance - of civilian governance is obvious from what a recently retired senior general had to say in response to a journalist's question in a TV interview about the lion's share of financial resources consumed by the military. Let Parliament pass a bill, he suggested coolly, cutting the Army's size by two divisions and use the money thus saved to build ghost schools! Others might want to add, use that money also to make bogus appointments of school teachers, as numerous complainants in Sindh have been alleging former Sindh education minister Pir Mazhar-ul-Haq did during his tenure hiring as many as 13,000 non-existent teachers! Such examples, not restricted to Sindh alone, give a bad name to politicians and damage democracy.
To state the obvious, the noises about saving democracy are of no use unless backed by good governance and the rule of law. Unfortunately, the political class has not learnt any lessons from the short and chequered political history of this country. They keep doing the same things and expecting different results, which is a vain expectation. And good-intentioned legal literalists do no service to the cause of democracy by advocating acceptance of glaring injustices as long as procedural requirements are fulfilled. They together with concerned citizens perhaps can help bring about the change we all wish for by demanding that justice should not only be done but also seen to be done.
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