Ministers on the Make--
Pakistan’s Iron Fist Flattens the Peasantry
Seven peasants have died fighting for their rights in the Punjab region of Pakistan. They are up in arms against the biggest criminal syndicate imaginable: the national army.
Bashir Ahmed, 65, hobbling on crutches and unable to work his land, has paramilitary troops to thank. They were sent in to collect land-rent payments for the army but met stiff resistance from peasants like Bashir.
The slogan of the peasants on this farm is "Ownership or Death."
The military in Pakistan, under President and army chief of staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is a real estate empire “that includes horse farms, tracts of irrigated croplands and prime residential property in major cities, much of which is allotted to senior officers as part of their retirement packages.with the military since 2000.” That’s when Musharraf took over.
Pakistan needs a social revolution if it is ever going to clean up this political-military crime racket.
The Pakistani military owns a 17,000 acre farm in Punjab and has changed the status of the peasants from sharecroppers to renters--stripping from them their title to the land. Peasants formerly were able to keep half of their crops. Now they pay rent. But renters have few legal rights and they were better off as sharecroppers.
The army tortures peasants to make them pay their rent.
These state-sponsored rackets (Africa is rife with them) are more a mark of failed states than run-of-the-mill military dictatorship. Often, it is a process that starts to happen as the state self-destructs. This is not privatization nor is it loss of sovereignty to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is new and nasty.
The worst thing about a ruling elite that greedily dominates the wealth and resources of its nation’s citizens is that it makes it impossible for the mass of people to improve their own well being. Worse, in many such cases, the people are being enslaved and are unable to set aside food reserves or expand local markets--a sure-fire formula for disaster and famine.
“Fighting an Army's Empire; Pakistani Farmers' Land Battle Underscores Tension Over Military's Economic Power,” by John Lancaster, Washington Post
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Sincerely, Ross
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45902-2003Jun28.html?nav=hptoc_w Fighting an Army's Empire
Pakistani Farmers' Land Battle Underscores Tension Over Military's Economic Power
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 29, 2003; Page A19
VILLAGE 5/4-L, Pakistan -- "Ownership or death" is the slogan that farmers here have adopted in their fight for the title to land their forefathers first tilled nearly a century ago. But the farmers have a formidable foe: Their landlord is the Pakistani army.
A contractual change instituted three years ago transformed the farmers from sharecroppers to renters. Many tenants are angered by the change, which they say is intended to drive them off the land at Okara Military Farms -- a 17,000-acre grain and dairy operation that is one of numerous Pakistani businesses run by the military. The tenants are refusing to pay their rent, and have staged a number of protests, several of which have turned violent.
The army has responded by cutting off water to the fields of rebellious tenants, sending troops to surround their villages and arresting hundreds of protesting farmers, some of whom say they or their relatives have been tortured to force them to pay rent. Seven villagers have died in clashes with police or paramilitary forces since the protest erupted in 2000, leaders of the tenant movement say.
As tensions between the army and the tenants have escalated in recent months, the standoff in this fertile region of Punjab province has become a focal point for growing public anger over the military's control of prized economic assets in Pakistan, from farmland and profit-
making universities to major industries such as cement production and trucking.
Land is a potent symbol of the privileged status enjoyed by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for most of its 56-year history. The army chief of staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is also the president.
Rapid population growth, insufficient water and a legacy of feudalism have made productive farmland increasingly scarce in Pakistan, where agriculture still provides the largest source of employment. Yet the military continues to dominate -- and occasionally add to -- a real estate empire that includes horse farms, tracts of irrigated croplands and prime residential property in major cities, much of which is allotted to senior officers as part of their retirement packages.
In that light, the Okara Farms dispute is "a symbol of the resentment people feel about the army's monopolization of power and resources," said Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, a Yale-educated economist and coordinator of the People's Rights Movement, a non-profit group that has taken up the tenants' cause. "They've become such a huge corporate empire in this country, and the land-grabbing is just one part of it."
Army officials accuse groups such as Akhtar's of exploiting the Okara Farms tenants to further a leftist political agenda that has nothing to do with the facts of the dispute. They say they are charging the farmers below-market rents and deny efforts to drive them off the land. The contractual change, they say, is intended to improve the efficiency of a farming operation originally set up by the British in 1913 to feed their colonial Indian army troops and horses -- similar to the purpose it now serves for Pakistan's military.
"This is not an issue of human rights," said Maj. Gen. Mahmud Shah, director general of the Remount, Veterinary and Farms Corps, which oversees Okara and 23 other military farms. "This is a law-and-order situation."
The courts have supported that claim. In 2001, the high court in the provincial capital of Lahore ruled that in refusing to pay rent to the army, the farmers were "in possession of the property without any lawful basis."
"Legally they can't succeed," Hasan Rizvi, a former visiting professor at Columbia University in New York who has written several books on civil-military relations in Pakistan, said of the tenants' campaign. "To me, the villagers are being used."
But the army's assertion of ultimate authority over the land is also open to question, military experts say, because the actual owner of the land is the Punjab provincial government. The army pays a token fee to use the land, and two years ago the province refused an army request to transfer title to the property free of cost, according to a copy of an April 2001 letter from the Punjab Board of Revenue.
"The issue is there are two parties fighting over land which doesn't even belong to them," said Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, an Islamabad-based military analyst for Jane's Information Group. Siddiqa-Agha worked in the late 1990s as deputy director of defense auditing under Pakistan's auditor general, the government's chief spending watchdog.
Army officials say Okara Farms provides the military with milk products as well as fodder for pack mules -- used to haul army supplies over rugged mountain passes -- and thoroughbred race horses and polo ponies that the army raises for sporting use.
Under the old sharecropping system, which dates to the farm's inception in 1913, the army supplied seed and fertilizer to the tenants, who then gave the army half of their crop. But three years ago, after concluding that corrupt civilian managers were stealing some of the army's share, military officials instituted a rent system, Shah said.
Because Pakistan's legal code provides fewer protections for renters than sharecroppers, the move sparked a rebellion from villagers, many of whose families had worked the same land for generations and saw the change as a first step toward transferring ownership to military officers and private corporations.
Last year, the army called in the Ranger paramilitary force to quell the protests and force the villagers to adhere to the new system. But the situation has only grown more tense. While some tenants have begun paying rent, many still refuse. As a result, Rangers are preventing movement in and out of several villages, including this one, to pressure protesters.
Last week, a foreigner paid a visit to Village 5/4-L -- the numerical designation is a legacy of British rule -- avoiding military roadblocks by means of a dirt track that bounced through dry fields. Situated on a flat plain crisscrossed with irrigation canals about 100 miles southwest of Lahore, the mud-brick village is home to about 4,000 people, many of whom appeared fully engaged with the protest.
Among them was Bashir Ahmed, 65, who hobbled over on crutches to display the scar from a leg wound he said he suffered when Rangers opened fire on protesters in a neighboring village last summer. "I'm a poor man, and I can't pay the contract fee," said Ahmed, gaunt with a graying mustache. "They shot us because we were protesting for our rights."
As he lay in his hospital bed after he was wounded, Ahmed said, Rangers "forcibly" inked his thumb and made an impression on a rental agreement, which he has subsequently refused to honor.
Ghulam Nabi Chaudhry, 22, said he was arrested on May 9 as a means of putting pressure on several of his brothers, who work as tenant farmers and had refused to pay rent. Chaudhry, a locksmith who says he suffers from a heart condition, said he was beaten on the buttocks with leather shoes and a piece of a tire, and at one point was made to stoop over for 10 minutes while a heavy load of bricks was piled on his back.
"They told me, 'Your brothers are not paying us contract money and that is why you are behind bars,' " he said. After three days, he said, he was released when one of his brothers forked over 15,000 rupees -- about $260 -- in back rent.
Army officials say the Rangers have acted with restraint, and that in several cases villagers have been killed by gunfire from protesters' weapons. They deny the stories of coercion and torture. "This is all fabrication," Shah said.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company