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Afghanistan: 'Corruption is endemic and hurts poorest most'
"Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic, it hurts the poorest people disproportionately, pushes people away from the state and undermines our joint efforts to build peace, stability and progress for Afghanistan's peoples," the Secretary-General's Special Representative, Kai Eide, conceded in Kabul on August 20. While Eide was applauding official anti-corruption moves, there's evidence that corruption still goes all the way to the top in this impoverished and war-torn nation.
With a booming opium trade with powerful drug lords evading justice by simply making a telephone call to friends in high places, another UN official was cited in a July 20, 2008 Reuters report.
Warlords
An August 22 Pajhwok Afghan News Network (PAN) report told how local warlords and local officials forcibly collected money by different names and forms from the farmers in northern Afghanistan.
Farmers complained they would be tortured and expelled from that area if they resisted these demands.
Ali Gul a resident of Chardeh district of northern Konduz province complained: "When we take our sheep to graze in Darwaz district of Badakhshan armed men come and forcibly take away our sheep."
Ali, who owns 500 sheep, claimed that upon reaching to Darwaz a local warlord took a dozen of his sheep under the name of charity or Zakat.
He had several times complained the issue to Badakhshan government officials to no avail. An official admitted that local warlords usually took ten out of 500 sheep from farmers or 5000 afghanis instead, in these illegal tax or extortion.
$100-$250 million paid in bribes every year
According to a recent survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the average Afghan household pays an estimated US$100 in petty bribes every year – this in a nation where around 70% of the population survives on less than US$1 per day. A staggering US$100-$250 million is paid in bribes every year. This is equivalent to half the national development budget for 2006.
Last year Transparency International ranked Afghanistan 172 out of 180 countries surveyed for its Corruption Perceptions Index.
According to an article in the July 27, 2008 New York Times Magazine by Thomas Schweich, a former senior counternarcotics official, the Western backed regime of President Hamid Karzai was implicated in protecting an opium industry that now produces an estimated 70-93% of the world's opium crop.
Heroin dealer made anti-corruption chief
While the UN Special Rep congratulated the Karzai government for by becoming a state party to the UN Convention Against Corruption, adopting new anti-corruption legislation and establishing a new anti-corruption body, according to Schweich, back in January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anti-corruption commission, General Independent Administration of Anti-Corruption. Ironically, in April 3, 2008 interview with Time magazine, Wasifi complained: "What do you expect, when we pay a [policeman] $60 a month, give him a gun, and tell him to stand up against terrorists and narcotics smugglers, when everyone around him is corrupt? We pay him nothing and expect him to act like an angel and go home and feed his family what — dust, rocks?"
Karzai's brother an alleged druglord
Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade.
"Justice in Afghanistan was administered unevenly by tribes, religious leaders and poorly paid, highly corruptible judges”, Schweich added.
“In the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked out the back door. We received dozens of reports to this effect...
“A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July 16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his candidacy for president. Karzai’s office said Sabit’s candidacy violated laws against political activity by officials. Sabit told a press conference that Karzai 'has never been able to tolerate rivals.')”.
Even Karzi admitted earlier this month (August 2008) in an interview with Associated Press that corruption was rampant in Afghanistan and a major problem for his administration.
"With regard to corruption it's a deeper problem, it's an Afghan problem," he said. "It's the problem of an inefficient government machinery, it's a problem of economy, procedures. It's a problem of so much money coming into Afghanistan, it's a problem of the international presence."
The Karzai government recently authorised a new anti-corruption body reporting directly to the president, a special prosecutor of corruption and a dedicated court.
Source: RAWA News, Reliefweb, NYT Magazine