Pakistan: A Hard Country (19 page)

This goes up to the very top. Thus in 2009 I was sitting in the office of the inspector-general of police in one of Pakistan’s provinces, when a cal came through from the province’s chief minister – who was roaring so loudly that I could hear him through the receiver from several feet away. He was complaining that a superintendent of police had arrested a dacoit (bandit) leader at the rural mansion of one of his party’s provincial deputies.

The unfortunate inspector had to promise an inquiry, the dacoit’s immediate release and the immediate transfer of the offending police officer to another province. And this chief minister, by the way, has a personal reputation for efficiency, hard work and relative honesty. A senior officer in Punjab told me that around half of the 648 station house officers (chiefs of local police stations) in the province are chosen by local politicians through influence on the Punjab government, to serve their local interests.

Furthermore, the state judicial system is not merely political y reactive, but is also regularly used as an active weapon. A great many artificial cases are brought deliberately by politicians to attack rivals, and by governments against their opponents. The manipulation of such cases and their outcomes is also a key tactic of the ISI (Inter-Services Intel igence) in managing elections by forcing particular candidates to withdraw or to change sides.

A situation of nearly universal mendacity and political pressure concerning their work would place an intolerable burden on even the best-equipped, best-trained, best-paid and best-motivated police force in the world – and the Pakistani police (like the Indian) are very, very far from being any of these things.

The miserable conditions in which ordinary policemen work was brought home to me by a visit to a station house in the suburbs of Peshawar in August 2008 (responsible for an area where there had been eighteen murders so far in 2008). I spoke with the sub-inspector in charge of the investigation unit in the room where he and the other officers sleep and eat during the day and night that they spend at a time on duty. It was a slum, with bare concrete wal s, stained with damp from the leaking roof. My visit was during a power cut – the ordinary police of course have no generators – and in the monsoon the whole station was a hot fug of rot and sweat. The officers’ clothes hung on pegs, and there was a mirror for shaving. That, with their charpoys (string beds) and a couple of chairs, was al the furniture.

The sub-inspector is a big, very tough-looking middle-aged man with enormous fists – not a good person to be interrogated by. I asked him what the police in the NWFP need most. He gave a harsh laugh.

Where to begin? First, we need better pay and incentives. Look at the motorway police. Everyone says how honest and hard-working they are – wel , that’s easy, they are paid twice what we get. We need better accommodation – look at this place. We need better vehicles, better radios, better arms, bul et-proof vests. Tel me, could any police force in the world work wel given what we have to rely on? Would you risk your life fighting the Taleban for the pay we get?

He told me that at that time there was one fingerprinting machine for the whole of the NWFP; and, as his seniors candidly admitted, it was almost completely useless, both because of the inadequacy of the archiving system and because the ordinary police have no training in taking fingerprints. This is also true for the greater part of Punjab and the whole of interior Sindh. And indeed, al this is irrelevant, since the police have no training in how not to ruin al evidence by trampling over a crime scene. This is general y the case even of the Interior Ministry’s special service, the Intel igence Bureau. It helps explain the shambolic nature of the investigation into Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, which has generated so many conspiracy theories.

To lack of equipment and lack of training can be added lack of numbers. Visitors to Pakistan who see large numbers of police guarding official buildings or accompanying politicians may think this is a heavily policed society. In the main cities, large numbers of police can indeed be cal ed upon if required; but in the Punjab countryside, there is one police station for approximately every fifty vil ages (incidental y, the figures in much of rural India are even worse). Most policemen with whom I spoke had no real idea how many people there were in their areas – or even, very often, how many serious crimes had been committed there over the past year.

The result of al this, as wel as of lack of incentives – and a certain doziness, exacerbated by the heat – is that most of the time the police are purely reactive. You never see a speeding police car in Pakistan (whereas you do occasional y see speeding ambulances and fire engines) unless, once again, it is accompanying a senior politician.

The police wait in their stations for cases to be lodged with them, and, in the case of murder, for bodies to be brought to them – which natural y makes any forensic examination of the crime scene out of the question, even if the police had the training or equipment to carry it out.

Since the population is mostly il iterate, the police can often write down whatever they like on the FIR, and get the witnesses to sign it. Unless the police see some money in it for them, this often means that cases are simply never registered at al .

A standard part of the police investigation technique is the torture of suspects, relatives of the suspects, and witnesses. Most police officers are completely candid about this in private. A senior officer in Punjab told me:

I am trying to introduce fingerprinting, forensic examination and so on, but there is a cultural problem. The response of the ordinary SHOs [Station House Officers] is, ‘Oh, this is just another hobby-horse of our overeducated senior officers. I prefer the reliable method: put the suspect on the mat and give him a good kicking. Then he’l tel us everything.’

The investigating officer I spoke with in Peshawar described a recent carjacking case in which the suspect had absconded to the Mohmand Agency with the vehicle.

So we arrested his father, and put pressure on him to get the car back. If he had been a young man, natural y we would have beaten him til he told us where it was, but, since he was old, we didn’t torture him. We just threatened him in other ways, with cases against other people in his family – everyone in this society is guilty of something. We told him that we would talk to the Political Agent in Mohmand and get his family home there demolished if he didn’t help us. So in the end he sent someone to bring the car back.

Together with the general police tendency to take bribes in return for every service, it is hardly surprising therefore that people avoid the police as much as possible, and try to resolve crimes in informal ways.

As to the idea that it makes any difference in this regard whether Pakistan is ruled by a civilian or military government, the Peshawar investigator answered that question categorical y. I visited his station house the day after Musharraf’s resignation as president. I asked him if his use of torture would change now that Pakistan was a ‘democracy’

again. If I had turned into a purple elephant his look could not have been more blank with amazement. I had asked not just a meaningless question, but one with no connection whatsoever to any reality he knew.

None of this however is necessarily timeless or set in stone. Some dedicated and intel igent senior officers are working hard to improve things, and the national motorway police, mentioned by the sub-inspector, are an example of what the Pakistani police can be when the circumstances and conditions are right. Their high pay makes them resistant to bribes, and because they are commanded from Islamabad they are immune to local political pressure. Perhaps equal y importantly, they work in a context – that of Pakistan’s splendid modern motorways, with their gleaming service stations and roadside cafés – which gives them legitimate pride in their country and their service.

In consequence, they are amazingly honest and efficient. My driver was given a ticket for speeding on the way from Islamabad to Lahore – with no suggestion that he could be let off in return for a bribe – and I heard numerous members of the elite complain with astonishment that the same thing had happened to them. Then again, Pakistan’s motorways often seem in a way to float over the country without being connected to it, so it is natural that their police should be the same.

THE COURTS

Suspects in Pakistan who survive investigation by the police find themselves before the courts – and may the Lord have mercy on their souls. ‘May God save even my worst enemy from disease and a court case,’ as a Punjabi saying has it. At least as bad as the problem of corruption is that of delay. Indeed, if there is a classical legal phrase that ought to be nailed above every Pakistani (and Indian) courtroom, and perhaps to the foreheads of South Asian judges and lawyers, it is ‘Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.’ When I visited the city courts in Quetta, Balochistan, a majority of the people with whom I spoke outside had cases which had been pending for more than five years, and had spent more than Rs200,000 on legal fees and bribes – a colossal sum for a poor man in Pakistan.

These problems do not apply only to court cases. One old man had had to come every day for six days, despite paying several bribes, simply in order to get a property transfer registered. This means that a great many people, especial y in the countryside, prefer to arrange al such transfers and inheritance arrangements informal y – which means that there can then be no recourse to official law if things go wrong.

The inordinate length of time taken by South Asian legal cases is in part related to corruption, but also to a host of other factors in which local influence and intimidation, lack of staff, a grossly overloaded system, cynical manoeuvres by lawyers, and sheer laxness, laziness and incompetence on the part of both the judiciary and the police al play a part.

Moreover, of course, delay breeds overloading and overloading breeds more delay, in a sort of horrible legal combination of circulus vitiosus and perpetuum mobile (to use two Latin phrases that might useful y replace those legal ones so beloved of South Asian lawyers).

As of May 2009, there were more than 100,000 cases pending before the Karachi city courts alone, with 110 judges to try them (in a city of some 17 mil ion people) – which makes for an easy enough calculation. Some of the courts are supposed on paper to attend to more than 100 cases a day. Every day, around 1,200 prisoners should be delivered to the courts in Karachi, but there are only vehicles and holding cel s for 500.

To deal with the issue of Pakistani delays in the way that the English legal system (belatedly and in part) improved the almost equal y dreadful state of the law in early nineteenth-century England would require the isolation of particular causes. That is hard to do, because there are so many causes, and the legitimate (or at least unavoidable) and the il egitimate are so mixed up together. A central problem is the scandalous number of adjournments, of which it is not at al uncommon to encounter several dozen in one single case.

An adjournment may be given for any number of reasons, including it seems for no reason at al except that one or other lawyer asks for it.

And these reasons may be legitimate (for example, there real y is an acute shortage of vehicles to bring prisoners from jail to court) or may be the product of corruption, influence, intimidation, personal friendship or just the easygoing attitude to members of their own class that characterizes most of South Asian officialdom. As a retired judge told me:

It doesn’t do for a judge to be too hard with the lawyers. We al know each other and there is a sort of family feeling in the legal profession. And a judge who makes himself real y unpopular with the lawyers wil find his promotion blocked by rumours and whispers, or may even be accused of corruption, rightly or wrongly. So many judges take a live-and-let-live attitude when they real y ought to be pul ing a lot of lawyers up very hard indeed, especial y when it comes to non-attendance and requests for adjournments for specious reasons ... Though it is also true that the system is so terribly overloaded that it simply couldn’t work properly even if everyone did their duty.

Central to the near-paralysis of the judicial system are the embittered relations between the judiciary and the police. Of course, this exists to some extent in al societies, but in Pakistan it has reached a level which, as wil be seen, can become literal y violent. It should be obvious from this chapter why the judiciary have good reason to distrust cases brought by the police. Equal y, the police can point to numerous instances where they have final y prosecuted wel -

known murderers and gang leaders, who have then been acquitted by the courts on specious grounds, or whose cases have dragged on for years with no result.

As a result, as many policemen told me: ‘If you real y want to deal with a powerful miscreant in this country, you have to kil him.’ This has contributed to the taste of the Pakistani and Indian police – urged on by provincial governments with a particular commitment to tackle crime – for ‘encounter kil ings’ (extrajudicial executions by the police under the pretence of armed clashes). The inability of the courts to get convictions has been particularly disastrous when it comes to tackling Islamist extremists, who, even when proceeded against by the state, are often released for lack of evidence.