Pakistan
Why Sharif took on the army
Farooq Suleheria of the Labour Party of Pakistan, explains some of the issues behind the recent coup in Pakistan.
The economic crisis in Pakistan is part of the world economic crisis. Pakistan depends a lot on foreign assistance, especially aid from the IMF and World Bank. During the Cold War it was getting a lot of aid especially during the 80s.
But now the Cold War has ended, aid has been seriously reduced. Worse now the IMF and World Bank want debt repayments. It is this issue of debt repayments that are the major pressure on the Pakistani government.
The other issue is that the army is the most powerful institution in Pakistan, the most organised and as a social force it is the most important power to be reckoned with.
It is the biggest industrial group, it has a strength of half a million – if you include the different militias it is 1 million. It has generals who have become feudal landlords, who get huge feudal estates on their retirement. So it’s a hugely important social force.
But since the early 90’s US imperialism does not need the Pakistan army in the way it did during the Cold War and according to their new priorities they want to see a reduced defence budget for Pakistan.
Of course they still need the Pakistan army – they do not want to abolish it all together. They needed it in Bosnia and in Somalia where there were Pakistani soldiers who were killed and there may be other cases where they need it in the future.
Pakistan has a strategic importance for the US because of its borders with India, China, Iraq and Afghanistan .
So Nawaz Shariff was asked to reduce the budget deficit to end subsidies, to carry out major privatisations, to lay off many staff in the public sector – and another important thing in the political agenda, which was linked with the economic agenda, was normalisation of relations with India.
The mass of the people had big illusions in Nawaz Sharrif, especially in the Punjab because this is where he is from..
During his first period in office from 1990-3 he had carried out some major projects like building a motorway other schemes that were big opportunities for jobless youth and people thought that there would be more of the same this time, especially given the size of his majority.
But this time the situation was very different because he was not getting IMF/World Bank funds like before and was instead under pressure to repay the loans. So he was increasingly cutting subsidies and this led to a big crisis for the agro-economy.
The Pakistan economy mainly depends on cotton and sugar cane – which are cash crops. It is a common saying in Pakistan that if you will have good cotton, you will have good budget.
So the cut in subsidies for these crops led to an increase in prices and this created a whole cycle of crisis with growers refusing to plant and a decline in exports etc etc
The other pressure was the reduction in tariffs which made the trade gap very big . It could have been bigger still but there was a fall in export of these big machines because lots of small firms – especially those linked to the ago-industry – closed down because of the cuts in subsidy and the reduction in tariffs.
So there is a whole cycle of economic crisis which led to a political crisis. Then at the same time, there was the down-sizing of the army is also going on for the last few years.
Recruitment was frozen, and the size of army has shrunk. But the army manoeuvred to have people moved to work in different government departments so they do not loose their job all together. So for example thousands of troops were sent to work in the Power department supposedly to chase up unpaid bills.
At present many major departments are being run by either retired Generals or serving Generals.
So for example there are serving Generals running the electric department in Karachi. and also the |Vice Chancellor of the biggest University in Pakistan, Punjab University has a retired General as Vice Chancellor.
And there was a strike by the teachers in protest over this because he knew nothing about Education but still got this job.
When Nawaz came to power in 1997 he tried to implement this IMF agenda, to implement a cut in the army budgets.
After he had been in power 8 months there was a big political crisis in Pakistan because they was an attempt by the army to face him down through the courts. They used the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Pakistan to agree some verdicts to remove Nawaz from office.
Initially perhaps they did not want to remove him – they just wanted to scare him but the fight went too far and then it was either Nawaz Sharrif or the army.
And then because of international pressure there was a compromise and Nawaz backed down in terms of the IMF agenda on defence and the President and Chief Justice who had been supporting the army were removed.
So then Nawaz was in a cleft stick between the army and the IMF so this meant that in order to carry out the austerity ordered by the IMF, he had to put the whole burden on the masses.
Petrol prices doubled during the two and a half years he was in office, utility bills went up massively, over 200,000 people lost their jobs in the public sector .
Whole sectors of what had previously been in the public sector were completely shut down and abandoned, particularly in transport. There were also significant redundancies in Banking, power and Telecommunications.
So there was a massive disillusionment and hatred against Nawaz Sharif. He was able to recoup some of this for a brief time in May 1998 when he made the nuclear explosion – but this rise in popularity was very short lived because the economic situation was completely unrelenting. Then towards the end of last year the Lahore process started which was aimed at normalising relations with India and this was to be another important factor in the removal of Nawaz Shariff because it led to the Kargil crisis because the army is completely opposed to normalisation of relations with India. They are also opposed to any supposed " solution" on the question of Kashmir and that is why they took action to provoke the war over Kashmir that we saw this summer.
But all of this was strongly influenced by the economic situation – the army needed to prove its usefulness by showing that Kashmir was still in dispute, by showing their could be no normalisation with India because they don’t want to lose their jobs – which are under threat because of the IMF and the World Bank.