KARACHI, 5 August — Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto has demanded reforms in the military to make it a 21st century force. She said in a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, on Friday that army generals who had ruled her country for best part of its existence, needed to be shown mirror as to whether the politicians or the generals themselves had been responsible for the malaise her country has been suffering from.
According to a press release issued in Karachi yesterday, she expressed concern over the failure of the military regime to enforce sanctions which “has led to the physical presence of UN monitoring team in Pakistan.”
Benazir said that she believed her leadership could make a difference and was promoting fair elections even though it meant that her three-year-old daughter turned eight while her husband was kept hostage. She recalled that she visited Scotland 17 years ago when there was martial law under Gen. Zia-ul Haq and now “in 21st century, Pakistan is still under military dictatorship.” Benazir said the whole world is moving forward and it saddened her that Pakistan is still caught in the past due to few generals. She said martial law situation was giving bad name to the country which was founded by Quaid-e-Azam who wanted a democratic country so that “people could enjoy political, economic and religious freedom.”
The PPP leader pointed out that for five decades generals seized power and blamed the politicians for the malaise. She said after four military dictatorships the ruling generals should look in the mirror and ask themselves whether something was wrong with the politicians or the setup.
Noting that after payment of debt, the military took 90 percent of the budget; she said it was strange that those who took ten percent of the budget were blamed for all ills but those who took 90 percent were not investigated. She said parliamentarians had stopped taking plots since 1993 and now generals should also stop taking plots, plazas, commercial and agricultural properties.
She said that there were 90,000 batmen, or valets, and 27 corps commanders although Pakistan Army had only nine corps. She said such palatial living was the reason that military reform was needed to make the army a 21st century army. She regretted that politicians were systematically undermined by some generals which had led to humiliation through Tashkent declaration, loss of East Pakistan, Siachen Glacier, the withdrawal from Kargil and the collapse of the economy.
