Fake encounters
IT is time our institutions acknowledged so-called police encounters as murders committed by men in uniform. A report released in January presents startling statistics — 612 accused were killed by Punjab police in the last five years with the highest score of 186 in 2021 and 124 until September 2022. Meanwhile, Sindh’s grim state is easy to assess by the record of two SSPs. As reported in this paper yesterday, extrajudicial killings saw an upswing from July 2022 — the 10-month tenure of Hyderabad SSP, Amjad Shaikh, began with the killing of four suspects and ended with 100 ‘encounters’. These numbers shot past SSP Baloch’s earlier tally of some 241 in under two years. In Pakistan, the police illicitly execute thousands annually, citing resistance or assault attempts on officers as reasons in police records. But figures of police injury are scarce, and narrate tales that belie claims of armed exchanges. The rise in this menace makes for a dispiriting state of law and order; innocents are killed to either protect feudal or political powerbrokers, curry material favours or fill record books as officers race to surpass ‘encounter’ tallies, or settle personal enmities. While rogue officers stage murders, our failed legal system cannot be absolved, as such gruesome tactics are perpetrated to bypass it. A woeful aspect is the wild applause from the public; weary of legal processes, it is forced to prefer instant justice.
Glorified by some media as super cops and others as alleged ‘encounter specialists’ — Chaudhry Aslam, Abid Boxer, Rao Anwar — police officers embark on killing sprees with impunity. It is essential that the police hierarchy, administration, and the courts beat the clock with expeditious accountability. These crimes should have definite consequences as obsolete colonial laws, which gave the police a free hand, must be abandoned. Along with a toughened criminal justice system, law enforcers should have resources, equipment, training, confidence and encouragement to nurture a climate of safety and justice.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2023
Debt management
THE finance ministry’s new three-year, medium-term debt management strategy aimed at raising long tenor foreign official and commercial loans and securing debt relief from commercial creditors is a tad optimistic, despite the agreement with the IMF on a $3bn short-term facility.
The plan seeks to meet Pakistan’s external financing needs through long tenor bonds and concessional multilateral flows as it attempts to reduce the increasing share of short-term loans in the foreign debt stock.
It emphasises efforts for fresh commercial loans in three-year or longer rollover tenures, instead of the existing one-year tenures to increase the average time to maturity of debt.
The scheme proposes debt relief from commercial creditors to slash the annual external repayment burden of $22bn-23bn. The strategy assumes that the agreement will immediately unlock held-up foreign inflows.
Indeed, the programme’s approval by the IMF board later this month will help Pakistan secure assistance from its global partners to boost liquidity and support its repayment capacity.
But expectations of international debt markets opening widely to Pakistan and giving it access to fresh long tenor debt and re-profiling its existing obligations, or multilateral and bilateral partners releasing big amounts soon, are exaggerated.
Our ability to secure the kind of liquidity we require or obtain debt relief largely hinges on a new longer-term funding programme from the IMF next year.
The success of negotiations with the IMF for its fresh, bigger loan will, however, depend on the execution of the new Stand-by Arrangement with the IMF — both in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of elections, as well as political stability.
Over the next several months, every creditor, not just the IMF, will closely monitor Pakistan to see if is diligently executing the reforms agenda and maintaining fiscal discipline to avoid another liquidity crunch in the near to medium term.
Once a new government is formed after the elections, the focus will shift to whether political stability can be restored and if the new set-up is stable enough to implement tough and unpopular economic and financial reforms.
Pakistan requires significantly large external financing to meet its monetary needs in the next few years. But unless it gets a bigger IMF programme, its ability to raise funds from its partners and commercial creditors will remain constrained no matter how meticulous the debt strategy is.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2023
Stop Islamophobia
IT is not impossible to distinguish between freedom of speech and malicious actions calculated to insult and offend. And it should be clear, especially to the Western world, that the desecration of the Holy Quran comes under the second category.
The appalling incident, where an Iraqi refugee burned a copy of the Holy Book outside a mosque in the Swedish capital, is not the first of its kind. Nor is it likely to be the last — unless Western nations go beyond the usual condemnation and pass and enforce strict laws to deter those whose hate-filled narrative against the world’s 1.8bn Muslims continues to be fanned by the lethargy of governments.
A similar incident took place in Stockholm in January, when a politician from the far-right desecrated the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy — an act for which he received a mere rap on the knuckles when the Swedish prime minister described it as “deeply disrespectful”. Preceding this description was his assertion: “But what is legal is not necessarily appropriate.”
Perhaps it is the ‘legality’ of such atrocious actions — and not only in Sweden — that needs to be questioned. Following the recent incident, condemnation has poured in from all sides. The EU has termed it “an act provocation”, saying, “manifestations of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance have no place in Europe” — which, unfortunately, has hardly proved factual, as so many anti-Islam incidents in various European countries have demonstrated.
Sweden has voiced similar criticism of the latest episode, but added that the country had a “constitutionally protected right to freedom of assembly, expression and demonstration”.
The Pope was more to the point when he said, “Freedom of speech should never be used as a means to despise others and allowing that is rejected and condemned”. The 57-member OIC, meanwhile, has called for the application of international law “which clearly prohibits any advocacy of religious hatred”.
Europe will never forget the dark days of Hitler and World War II when six million Jews were sent to their death. Images and stories from that era are etched not only on the memory of the individuals who lived through those times but also on the soul of the generations that followed. In 2005, the UN designated Jan 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Several European countries have laws that criminalise Holocaust denial. The world today is going down a similar path of hate — against ethnic and religious communities, against minorities, against the ‘other’.
It was this venom spewed on the Muslim world that led the UN to designate March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Just as Europe, and countries outside it, seek to curb anti-Semitism, they should deploy all, including legal, means to stop the march of Islamophobia before it’s too late.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2023