Bhutto’s Case Putting the Record Straight
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan – August 8, 2003
The man who is more popular by his nickname “Sheda Tully” than his own or his high public office and who as a Pakistani is still remembered for his semi-nude romp after the escort girls in a posh Park Lane hotel in London denying him the pleasure of both their flesh and their whips-on being refused to be paid properly for “services” to satisfy his kinky needs, has been waging his poisoned tongue incessantly in his effort to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
Islamabad government and its Information Minister seem to have discovered a new life for the dying 6-year long character-assassination campaign against Benazir Bhutto launched by Shaikh Rashid’s former boss and revived by his present mentor. He is behaving like a child who when getting a new toy-boastfully shows it to all.
Jamali’s loud mouth propaganda goebbels has been abusing the media by misleadingly describing a one-sided finding of an FIA-like probe carried out by an investigating Swiss magistrate as a judicial conviction of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister still better known internationally than all other Pakistani leaders including President Musharraf put together in a basket. With governmental perks and benefits including more advertisements, he has also managed to pick a section of Pakistani media onto his bandwagon for a rejuvenated anti-Bhutto propaganda joy ride.
The following facts need to be put on record to clear those doubts that are being deliberately generated to convince the Pakistani people that character-assassination campaign against Benazir Bhutto futilely waged against her since November 1996 by successive governments after all was not entirely fabricated as some iota otherwise has been allegedly disclosed in the one-sided finding of Swiss Investigating Officer Daniel Devoud. This finding-it may be mentioned is not final, it has to go through a judicial process of appeal and there are more chances of its quashment at the Attorney General’s level rather than it been sent for further action.
It is an effort-deliberately to misguide the Pakistani masses-to make them believe that Daniel Devaud has passed a sentence convicting Bhutto and her spouse of corruption. In fact, Devoud’s is a finding of an investigation, which is a totally different matter than a normal judicial process. On government of Pakistan’s represenation Devaud was assigned to investigate to see if there is a prima facie case. For six years he investigated the matter and just when he was to retire from his office (to be exact on July 31), he mysteriously reached the conclusion.
His investigation kept getting repeated every few years–1997, 1998, 2002 and now 2003. More often than once, government of Pakistan had Bhutto baselessly indicted by him to keep Pakistani public’s interest alive in the case. Through out Daniel Devoud’s investigations were one sided and defendants had no right to his investigative papers.
Since the conduct of his is one sided, defendants have the right to reject his finding within two weeks and seek further Swiss judicial redress. Besides that, it is the legal and inherent right of a defendant to get notice of presence at the time when Devoud was to release his findings. Devaud passed the order on July 31 and did not inform either Senator Asif Ali Zardari or Benazir Bhutto.
What makes it very intriguing in the eyes of independent analysts is that it was announced just a few weeks after Musharraf’s return from his Europe and American yatras. Many believe that it could be a quid pro quo secretly agreed to by Musharraf to send a division of Pakistani soldiers to kill Iraqi Muslim bothers to protect American occupationary forces and US interests in the occupied Iraq for the price of getting Devoud release his ‘findings’ with last minute changes just when he was to leave his office.
The other view is related to Swiss domestic politics. Devaud-a socialist-in an elected office, had come under immense flak for his out of the way playing into the hands of Pakistani government during the course of his investigations. Swiss and French press had raised their doubts about the veracity of the course he had adopted. Analysts said that while quitting office Devaud was driven by political motivations to gain international media publicity as Bhutto, is an internationally recognized celebrity. Moreover, he had to justify the six-year investigation as well.
It is believed that the government of Pakistan-since 1997-has spent over a 100 million dollars in hiring Swiss lawyers, investigators, wire-pullers, agents, detectives and sending its own teams frequently more so on pleasure trips, to conjure up an acceptable case against Bhutto and Zardari. Devoud’s investigation have also cost in expenses a great deal to the Swiss authorities. During last six years he spent most of his time searching a black cat in a dark room with doors wide open and now when he was going out to another assignment, in order to prove that his was not an exercise in futility, he passed a 6- month suspended sentence and fined 50,000 US dollars each without telling the world that he had failed to find billions of dollars that Bhutto and Zardari had piled up through alleged corruption and stacked up in Switzerland. His failure to find those billions in a six-year long search is a vindication of Bhutto as innocent and is a censure of the two successive governments that had tried their level best-spent millions of dollars-to damage Bhutto’s international and domestic credibility.
Bhutto-Zardari lawyer-Senator Farooq Naek is absolutely right describing Devoud’s decision as a major set back to the anti PPP forces since the investigating officer Devaud has failed to find “billions of dollars stolen from Pakistan” as claimed by the anti PPP forces. In fact, his finding was that if wrong doing is proved, it would amount to a minor suspended sentence of six months and a fine of 50, 000 dollars each in the pre-shipment inspection case.
According to Senator Naek: “His order on the last day of office was to justify an inquiry that failed to find billions of corrupt dollars despite international publicity. The order diverts public attention from a politically motivated inquiry that could have resulted in a possible civil suit from the defendants who were wrongly alleged to have collected billions of dollars from corrupt practices.
The Geneva Canton, investigating the Pakistani charges, claimed in 1997 that it had frozen Bhutto accounts. She has rejected the finding and cited the letter given to her by a Swiss law officer that the disputed accounts were unrelated to her. In a communication to Peter Hafter, Mrs Carla Del Ponte, the then Swiss Federal Attorney, had confirmed that those alleged funds had nothing to do with Bhutto and she reiterated that she had no information which could be used against Bhutto personally and that she was not aware of any assets of Bhutto in Switzerland. Following this admission by the Swiss Attorney General, Bhutto disassociated from the inquiry.
As regards much orchestrated diamond necklace is concerned both Devoud and Supreme Court of Pakistan have an affidavit on record submitted to them by Chattila Jewellers of London’s Old Bond Street, certifying that “as per our record the purchase invoice marked “Initial-1”: for the piece of jewellery marked “Initial-2” is not in the name of Ms Benazir Bhutto whose passport copy is marked “Initial-3”.
Independent observers add yet another dimension to Bhutto story-they relate it to an international conspiracy to teach her a lesson-as had been the case with her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was made a horrible example for making Pakistan a nuclear power. Benazir Bhutto was told not to seek help from China and North Korea and not to fund Pakistan’s programme for the development of long-range missile technology. Like her father she also defied that international pressure not realising that that very institution that she helped at the cost of her career, to develop nuclear warhead carriers, would stab her in the back. Pakistan has a Praetorian history full of Mir Jaffers and Sadiqs.
Instead of honouring its leaders who have made Pakistan’s defence impregnable fortress, the lengths to which powers that be went were proven when judges were blackmailed into rubber-stamping a judgement written by the Law Ministry against Bhutto and Zardari in 1999. The Supreme Court set the judgement aside when video tapes of telephonic conversations surfaced proving the perversion of justice through collusion of the judges, the Law Ministry and the NAB.
Bhutto has every justification now to demand release of all correspondence between Devaud and the Pakistani regime claiming this will show that a Swiss elected official was drawn into a politically motivated campaign against her.
The battle for justice is far from over. In the meanwhile, however, Islamabad’s dirty trick operators have gone in full swing to create a perception that the Swiss action still to be appealed against, has put the last nail in Bhutto’s political career. A case of wishful, opitiated and heavily perverted thinking, they need to learn a lesson from the past so that they do not make the same mistakes again and again.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto-after he posed a serious political threat to Field Marshal Ayub Khan-was subjected to most vicious and dirty character-assassination campaign headed by his goebbels Altaf Gauhar. And yet when elections were held in 1970 he won the majority of seats in West Pakistan. When the powers that be decided to over throw him in July 1977- night of fourth and fifth– after American Independence day–not only he was made to face an opposition campaign but also there was a western propaganda against him that he had sold Gawadar Port to the Soviet Union.
When Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan to a mammoth welcome hitherto unknown in our history, she and her mother Begum Bhutto were subjected to bitter character assassination. The more Ziaist tried to vilify her and lower her prestige in the eyes of the people, the higher it went and esteem, respect and the love of masses for her new no bounds. In 1988 General Hameed Gul and ISI in order to stop her landslide victory, not only conjured up IJI but also subjected her to most vulgar mud slinging. In 1990 it was ISI under General Asad Durrani that tried to repeat history and erected tin-pot politicians, funded them from ISI sources to stop Bhutto. Their conspiracy succeeded then but it failed in 1993.
Having used an ungrateful Farooq Leghari who saw fulfillment of his own political ambitions after she was sacked by him in November 1996, the revived exercise has been to ensure that she does not return to Pakistan or to power. Her husband has been held as a hostage to her political career. But despite all the dirty trick operations, pre-rigging, and result manipulations, the powers that be did not succeed in dissuading the majority of voters to vote for Bhutto and her party in October 2002 elections. If Musharraf and his Al-Qaed Muslim League think that the so-called Swiss verdict has done her in, then Musharraf should take off his uniform, call for free and fair elections, let her contest them and see where the popular vote goes. That would be the verdict at the bar of the people of Pakistan and not by pliable foreign investigative officers or the Pakistani judiciary eating out of the hands of Prime Minister Jamali’s boss.