In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in power since 2002 and has won third parliamentary elections in a row this year. By 1990, Turkey had a high inflation rate and very bad economic conditions. Its borrowing from IMF stood at $35 billion while the political parties were busy in settling scores with each other.
The AKP understood the agony of the Turkish people that they were fed up with the political parties and military interventions. Though the AKP is a conservative Islamist party and it caused some apprehensions about its Islamic ideology in the secular Turkey, after coming into the power it has not tried to change the secular constitution of Turkey. Instead of indulging in constitution amendments and confrontational politics, its leaders concentrated on political, economic and diplomatic reforms of Turkey. During its two terms in government, the AKP has improved the living standard of its citizens by increasing four times the per capita income, and has achieved a growth rate of above 8 percent of GPD. The key to its success is to have peace with the neighbouring countries and working for the welfare of the people.
Now it has managed to roll back the influence of the Turkey’s powerful military. Unfortunately, our political parties are in short supply of visionary and competent educated leaders like those of the AKP. Our political parties’ chiefs behave like kings and use democracy to become demagogues. Due to their personal undemocratic mindset, the civilian governments in Pakistan lose public support soon after they come into power. They do promise sweet slogans during the elections but after attaining political power and right to govern, they adopt anti-people politics, corrupt practices and protect status quo. They fail to ensure good governance, rule of law or improvement in the life of the ordinary people.
This is the reason why people look to military to get rid of politicians. The question is: can our politicians learn any lesson from Turkey. The large number of politicians just wants to protect their personal interests. Our politicians, when in power instead of making policies for the welfare of the people, are more interested in implicating in false cases of corruption the opposition leaders. The recent verdict of the Swiss case in which the court has declared bureaucrats and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Mr Asif Zardari innocent from the charges of taking kickbacks is a glaring example of Mr Nawaz Sharif’s confrontational politics. Which court will take sue motto action against PML(N) Chief for spending nation’s money on pursuing this case? Even now Nawaz Sharif is ready to dislodge democratic government through judiciary-military because he considers the PPP government is not implementing court’s orders and is involved in corruption.
What about his own party workers’ attack on the Supreme Court in 1997 and his family’s cases pending in the accountability courts? What about the Ittefaq Foundries’ assets, which were handed over to the court for settling the bank loans of over rupees two billion? This case is still pending in the court and bank has to still to recover its amount.
S T HUSSAIN
Lahore
