Current Issues:
Fall Tour of the United States
Dowmel Foundation Salem State College Pitney, Hardin, Kipp & Szuch
November 11, 1997

Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen.

I am no stranger to  America.  As many of you may know,  I spent four of the happiest years of my life as a student at Harvard College.  Those days now seem like a dream.
 
The last year has been an extraordinarily difficult period of time for me, for my family, for my party and for my country.

I am well aware that you have been exposed to information -- or should I say disinformation.

I know that you have heard a negative barrage attacking me and the record of  my two administrations as the Chief Executive of my country.

That is why I am here. I still have strength, I still have fight, especially when it comes to the truth.  I fully intend to defend myself and my record from this outrageous and sexist character assassination that is being conducted against me.

For what has happened to me, what is happening in Pakistan, may not in fact be unique, but part of a growing and disturbing trend as the world approaches the new millennium.

The attacks against me are painful and they are outright lies. But it is only a more extreme version of what seems to be a universal deterioration of civil dialogue in politics, not just in Pakistan, but all over our world.

 The search for  political consensus, the main characteristic of a democratic society, has degenerated into partisan hysteria, a rule or ruin philosophy.  The breakdown of cooperation threatens the legitimacy  of democratic values and norms in the modern, post Cold War international society.
 
 This is a new phenomenon that blemishes the body politic. Consensus, civility and comity have been replaced with pain, slander, prejudice and partisanship.

 Let me read you some thoughts that capture what I am trying to say to you today.

"Partisan politics is polluting our most important legal and ethical processes...and is damaging our political system. Proceedings, while billed as impartial, have become little more than ‘witch hunts’ designed to humiliate the opposing political party...The scandal machine that has developed bankrupts individuals, who are little more than pawns in larger political agendas.  It threatens the ability of the political system to attract  the bright, dedicated people that our nation deserves.

It undermines public confidence in government and its leaders."

These are not my words, but they could be.
 
This is not written about Pakistan, but it might as well be.

What I have quoted to you are the words of Robert Bennett, President Clinton’s lawyer, from an essay attacking the subjugation of the legal and ethical process to a blatantly partisan political agenda.

Right now, across the oceans in Asia, the Pakistan Peoples Party, which I lead, is being subjected to a political witch hunt clouded in a so called legal process.

The people of Pakistan honoured me, electing me as their Prime Minister in the only two fair, free and impartial elections held in the last ten years.

But my political opponents saw to it that both governments were removed by presidential edict and not permitted to complete their full terms.

Not a single member of my family has been spared. My father-in-law, husband and brother-in-law have all been arrested. My mother and sister-in-law are facing legal proceedings. Another sister-in-law had her house raided at midnight without a search warrant.

Another relative fled the country when he was grabbed by the shirt at the Prime Minister’s house and threatened, "you either do what we want, or end up in a death cell."

And one of our defense counselors was kidnapped by the regime for over two months, without a word of his whereabouts.

Members of the Pakistan Peoples Party and my political staff, including women, have faced similar treatment. I therefore wrote to the U.N. Secretary General highlighting the human rights abuses.

That was when the regime decided to raid my sister-in-law’s house at midnight, to harass her and me.

That was when they decided to arrest a second defense counsel charging him with the kidnapping of the first.  That was when they filed yet another murder case against my husband.

That was when they falsely claimed that eight companies belonging to me were frozen by the Swiss  authorities. I had nothing to do with those companies. But to humiliate and degrade me internationally, the regime claimed they were mine.

The amount of mud that has been thrown has been painful and hurtful. That my name is well known, makes the hurtful allegations front-line news all across the world.

I know that truth and justice will eventually triumph.  I know that  I have the will to prove, not only for myself, but for women all over, that we have the strength to stand up and defend our convictions.

But in the meantime our family life has been affected. My young children miss their father. Not only my family, but those of my relatives, political colleagues and supporters, are being bankrupted defending charges in a court of law.

Our time and energy is being depleted in reaction rather than action to fulfill the vindictive lust of a vindictive regime.

However, this politics of confrontation is not limited to Pakistan alone.  All over the world, their is a greater interest in the human side of political personalities. Human fragility enthralls us.

Human fragility and the interest in the person, rather than the politician, also makes it easier to hurl charges, which will transfix friend and foe together, and leave the truth to another day in a small corner of some paper as one scandal replaces another to transfix public opinion.

This new politics of distortion and destabilization has paralyzed constructive dialogue. It has confused the public. It has led to cynicism about public leaders.

It has frozen the search for consensus solutions to the still enormous problems faced by governments all over the world.  In time, in talent, and in tenor, democracy has paid a terrible price.

The new dissensus has choked creativity, experimentation and innovation. It has been a polarizing, divisive force especially dangerous in vast regions of the world where democracy is still new and fragile.

And it is a trend that is intensifying, not diminishing.
 
In the United States, even a discussion of the ratification of a ban on chemical weapons takes on the character of a street gang rumble.

Congress – both the House and the Senate -- are spending enormous amounts of  finite resources, both time and money, on investigations of the Executive, while the President and Congress seem to be making little progress on a national consensus on the fundamental campaign law loopholes which triggered the crisis.

And while both the House and Senate spend millions upon millions of dollars in repetitive and redundant hearings whose aim would seem to be more political than programmatic, no progress at all seems to be made on the entitlement crisis that  threatens America’s fiscal standing in the world in the new century.
 
A ruling political party that once thrived on the prerogatives of the special prosecutor during the Reagan era, now denounces exactly the same application to the Clinton era.

Another party,  which decried the powers of the special prosecutor in the eighties, demands more and more of such appointments to investigate the opposition  in the nineties.

Rule or ruin.

The situation has degenerated so badly in Washington, that it was thought necessary for a "civility retreat" to be recently convened, basically to remind members of the Congress of the United States of America the rules of common courtesy and civil dialogue. This my friends, is in the greatest and oldest democracy on earth!

On the campaign money scandal,  those who control congress accuse the President of skirting the law, while legislation that would close the loophole and ban soft money is delayed through filibustering.

The Democrats are denounced by the Republicans for having used soft money issue advocacy ads  to skirt the law in 1996, while the Republican Congressional Committee is doing exactly the same thing in a congressional race in Staten Island, New York in 1997.
 
Political expediency has replaced political idealism. And political expediency has no bounds, no limits and no taste.
 
This trend is consistent across the continents.

Four Indian Prime Ministers within one calendar year have changed, governments disintegrating not over policy, but over politics, not over program but over power.

Just last month in India’s largest state, a riot erupted on the floor in of the assembly  -- legislators hitting each other over the heads with furniture, inkwells propelled across the chamber, 14 parliamentarians injured.  This in what is often called the largest democracy on Earth!

A peace process in the Middle East is allowed to be frozen and come precipitously close to unraveling, with  substance often overshadowed by whispered innuendo. A decade’s progress hanging in the balance.

In Bangladesh, the ruling party and the opposition interchanges almost identical strategies of parliamentary boycotts and street disruptions, as power shifts from one party to another.
 
In Bosnia, leaders pledged to a multiethnic state are defeated by ethno-nationalists, threatening the very existence of the Dayton accords.

In Pakistan, the new government almost collapses as it assaults judicial independence and starts undermining the judiciary itself simply because the judiciary has admitted corruption charges against the Prime Minister filed by my Party.

In Turkey, governments fall.  In Italy, governments fall.  In the Republics of the former Soviet Union, governments fall.  In Africa, three military take-overs this calendar year alone.

All over the world, recriminations, finger-pointing and partisan condemnations are the modus operandi of the new political order.  Hardly the quiet pax-Americana that many had predicted.

It is in this context  --  the emerging politics of partisan confrontation, nihilism and character assassination  --  that I assess events in Pakistan.

I want to tell you what has been happening in Pakistan over the last decade, what we have accomplished in my two terms as Prime Minister, and my thoughts on the broader trends that will shape the third millennium we are about to enter.

In 1977, a freely and fairly elected democratic government, headed by my father Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, was toppled in a military coup and a brutal martial law was instituted.  Less than two years later my father was murdered.  For a decade martial law ruled Pakistan like an iron fist. My party was targeted.  Our leaders were murdered, tortured, imprisoned.  The lucky ones went into exile.

I myself spent nearly six years in prison or solitary confinement,  on the edges of illness and despair.  Finally, released by the power of world opinion, I  devoted my life to mobilizing the cause of Pakistani democracy around the world, and keeping the flame of hope burning within my battered homeland.

In November of 1988 my party was swept into office and I was sworn in as the first Muslim woman to head a government anywhere in the world.  I was 35 years old.

We immediately embarked on an ambitious program of political liberalization, an end to press censorship, legalization of trade unions, a commitment to the long neglected social sector with emphasis on education, health delivery and women’s rights, and macroeconomic reform.

We were not vindictive to those who drained our country of our blood, of our character, of our values.

As I said at the time, "democracy is the best revenge."
 
But after just 20 months, the entrenched Establishment that had supported the dictatorship, that had refused to bow to the people’s will, toppled my government, acting under the cover and distraction of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

The allegation, as they always are in Pakistan and in South Asia, was governmental corruption.

Six cases were brought against me, even more against my husband.

But even under a judicial system dominated by the entrenched autocratic Establishment, we were exonerated of all charges.

The allegations against us were a mere illusion, a transparent smoke screen to undermine the movement toward democracy.

For three years we sat in Opposition in the National Assembly, trying to reach consensus with the Pakistan Muslim League on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues confronting our Nation.

As the economy and social structure of Pakistan deteriorated,  and human and civil rights were cast aside by a repressive regime, Pakistan edged close to anarchy.

In elections held in October 1993, my Pakistan People’s Party was soundly reelected to a second term.

When we began our second term, we were pitted against a precarious economic scenario.  The country was on the verge of bankruptcy.

We moved urgently, made difficult decisions, sometimes unpopular decisions, to restore solvency and create a macroeconomic framework that would allow Pakistan to compete in the world and attract foreign investment to help jump-start our moribund economy.

Increasing tax collection, imposing new taxes on critical segments of our economy, including the politically potent agricultural feudal landowners, was good policy.  But it was not very good politics.

As in Eastern and Central Europe, the bitter pills necessary to put the economy on sound footing called for by the World Bank and IMF caused real pain to the people of my country.
 
Despite the political costs incurred, our restoration of macroeconomic stability was an outstanding achievement by any yardstick.  It was the impetus for insuring the confidence of businessmen and women throughout the world in the economic potential of Pakistan.

As a measure of the success of our program, foreign investment in Pakistan during my second tenure as Prime Minister was more than $25 billion in three years, over $10 billion from the United States alone.

This represents, ladies and gentlemen, over five times the aggregate foreign investment in Pakistan in the previous 25 years of our Nation’s history.  That is a record for which I am extremely proud.

During my visit to Washington, the President of the EXIM Bank expressed his pleasure at our policies.

The losing firm in a privatization project wrote praising the transparency of our privatization process. We paid off $1 billion of our debt and reduced it to 40% of GDP.

We determined as one of our highest priorities that we had to rebuild the infrastructure of our nation if we were to become an economic leader of our region and of the world in the new century.

In providing a big-push to infrastructure development, our primary target was the energy sector.
The World Bank called our energy infrastructure program a model to the entire developing world.

We were so successful in our power program that after two years in government, we shifted our resources from power generation to power delivery  --  building pipelines, powerlines, transportation and communications infrastructure, ports and support facilities.

And we brought our energy revolution directly to the people of Pakistan by electrifying over 21,000 villages in our rural areas.

By the end of this decade, if our program is fully implemented, every village in Pakistan will be electrified, an outstanding achievement for a vast developing country.

Our government built ten thousand kilometers of roads over the past three years.

We built 100,000 houses per year for the needy and deserving. Additionally, our government distributed more than 500,000 plots of land in rural areas, and 1.22 million plots in urban areas.

We provided proper sewage facilities to 95% of our urban population and seventy percent of our rural population.

And it is the social sector that our accomplishments have the most special meaning to me.

I wanted a new education system for Pakistan, an education system for the new technology and the new century.

We constructed over 30,400 new primary and secondary schools, and renovated an additional 9,800 existing ones.

Approximately seventy percent of the schools we built were for girls.

We recruited approximately 53,000 teachers, of whom 35,000 were women.

We started a computer literacy programme to bring our people into the computer age.

We introduced the internet and e-mail to Pakistan.

As a woman and mother, I was particularly concerned about the conditions of health for the children of Pakistan.

Approximately 50 million child deaths are predicted in South Asia over the next decade.

Of that astounding number, 30 million are avoidable if the countries of the region embark on serious health education and health delivery programs.  In order to promote mother and child health care, primary health care and nutrition, 50,000 village health and family planning workers were trained to provide services specifically geared to the needs of women and children.

Included in their responsibilities was providing family planning information and material to deal with Pakistan’s population growth.  Our work in family planning alone was responsible for a dramatic drop in Pakistani fertility rates during my tenure as Prime Minister.  The Vice President of the United States said my speech to the U.N. Conference in Cairo was the catalyst for the world community finally coming together on family planning issues.

Further in the child health area, my government embarked an ambitious and comprehensive effort to immunize the children of Pakistan from a host of child hood diseases that have been brought under control in other parts of the world.

I wondered, "how many potential Nobel prize winners will be among the 30 million avoidable deaths?

How many great authors will never live to write their novels and poetry?  How many prospective great scientists, women and men who might go on to cure AIDS, to conquer cancer, to prevent strokes, will be among the thirty million children who could very well die if we do not act now?"

My government increased health expenditures by 60%. The World Health Organization gave me a gold medal (the only Pakistani leader to receive one) in recognition of my government’s services in health.

In order to reduce population growth and infant mortality growth rates, 43,000 health workers were recruited and trained.  As a result, population growth rate came down from 3.1% to 2.9% and was targeted to go down to 2.6%.

When I became Prime Minister in 1993, one in five children born with polio in the world was in Pakistan.  We were determined to end this dreadful statistic and launched our anti-polio campaign.

My own one year old daughter was at the heart of the campaign as I fed her and other children polio drops twice yearly to launch the campaign. The campaign was assisted yearly by 100,000 volunteers, and by the year 1998, we will have eliminated polio from Pakistan forever.

Intensely concerned about the problem of child labour in certain areas of our economy, most notably in the production of carpets and soccer balls, we cracked down on child labour.

Despite the fact that children in the work force is a deeply personal family issue in Pakistan  -- sometimes compared to the practice of  children working on farms during harvest in the fall is in the American midwest  --
we did not hesitate to act and my government cracked down on child labor.

We made education compulsory, knowing that if children are in schools, they cannot be in factories.

We ordered local authorities to raid businesses employing children.

Over 7000 such raids we conducted between January 1995 and March 1996 alone.

Over 2,500 employers were prosecuted and many convicted, fined and imprisoned for violating child labor laws.

To protect women in society, we established special women’s police forces and women’s courts, to hear with understanding and sympathy cases of domestic violence and domestic abuse.  Courts and police forces for women, staffed by women.

Our television ran a government sponsored program against domestic violence, and we took the step of signing the CEDAW, the Convention for the elimination of discrimination against women.

We established women’s banks designed to help women start small businesses.
 

All through this intense  period of macroeconomic reform, privatisation, infrastructure renewal, and an enormous commitment to the education, health and labour social sectors of Pakistan, I was guided by the philosophy and the words of an American President  --  Abraham Lincoln  --  who said 100 years before I was born:

"The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all or cannot do so well, for themselves  --  in their separate and individual capacities.
In all that the people can do for themselves, government ought not to interfere."

Through creative government and the involvement of the international business community, we were able to establish in Pakistan a modern infrastructure with high technology communications and information systems.
 
Our government instituted Pakistan’s first system of fax transmission.  We brought CNN to our people’s homes. We initiated fiber optic telephones and cell phones.  And when you went on-line, we went on-line with you, making the remarkable information revolution in reach of every Pakistani schoolchild and businessman and woman.

It was a miraculous transformation of a society, a transformation that cannot be negated by disinformation and personal attacks on me. What we accomplished  --  concretely and specifically  --  is my legacy to the people of Pakistan.

We opened up education, and we opened up markets

We opened up opportunity and we opened up foreign investment.  We opened economic development and opened up our rural villages.  Above all, we opened minds.  We opened up individual choice.

Although the forces of the past once again conspired to bring down our elected government two years before our term was complete, history will be the final judge.

Already, the camouflage of corruption used against my government on November 5th, 1996, while the world was once again distracted  --  this time by the American presidential election  -- has been exposed.

Not one case of corruption has been filed against my family or myself in the year since the President ordered the military to surround the Prime Minister’s House and ordered them to arrest and my family and associates.

Not a single case to substantiate their unilateral assault on democracy.

My husband is held prisoner, a hostage to my political career.

People clearly involved in a conspiracy to kill my brother Murtaza have the audacity to accuse my husband of this heinous crime.

If my brother’s death is not horrible enough, I have to endure his murderers trying to frame my husband.

The current regime in Pakistan blatantly violates the law, openly attacks the Supreme Court, refuses to allow dissidents to speak openly and freely, and beats, tortures, and imprisons its opponents.

The goal of the regime is quite obvious  --  to establish a one-party dictatorship in Pakistan.  They stand perilously close.  Only I and others in the opposition stand in their way. If the goals of those in power, those who supported military dictatorship in the past, is to keep my party out of politics, to keep us from speaking out on issues that we care strongly about, no amount of intimidation or coercion can shake our commitment to democracy and to our country.  My husband shares my decision.

The new fascist regime has already banned popular music on television in Pakistan, calling it decadent. It has made it compulsory for all girl students in the Punjab to wear the veil. And there is more.

Under the new fascist regime in Pakistan, two judges have already been murdered; two parliamentary candidates,

former members of the National Assembly, have been brutally killed in the streets.

In the past we had land grabbing. Now, we have commercial and industrial grabbing. The regime targets industries, concocts cases, and then blackmails the owners into selling the businesses to its cronies. The case of Shon Bank is but one example – the pressure on the Ansari Sugar Mills another.

And while the regime concentrates on political vendetta, the country heads toward economic collapse.

Since I left office, the growth rate has halved, the deficit has risen by 40%, debt has increased by 16.6%, inflation has risen to 13%, and the rupee has been shrinking in value.

Nearly 70,000 people have lost their jobs. In just six months, in just one province, 86 people committed suicide because of hunger and lack of employment. Tragically, one mother killed herself and two of her children because she could not feed them.

The situation is worsening every minute.

I have not lived through what I have lived through  -- my father’s murder, my two brothers’ murders, the years in prison, the sacking of our two democratic governments  --  to be intimidated into silence.  We did not come this far to be silent.  We did not come to this far to fail.

And that is why, despite the persecution, I am determined not to let down those who believe in a democratic, modern, moderate, Muslim State.

Ladies and gentlemen, our generation stands at the door way of history. Not only the door way of a new century, but the doorway of a new millennium.

And as we prepare ourselves to meet this century, this new millennium,  I believe we need to clearly understand the challenges that still await us and await the century.

I believe there are four simultaneous challenges the world faces today.

First, the rise of ethnic and religious hatred, prejudice and intolerance.

Second, the gulf of wealth and health emerging between the developed and developing world.

Third, the growing sense of ennui and alienation by the people, in a complex and fast moving world, in the ability of governments to resolve the multi-faceted problems the new technological era faces.

And fourth, the continuing gender inequity in all societies, west as well as east, that creates social division in the society as we move into the new century and third millennium.

The only good thing I can say for the forty years of the Cold War is that its bipolar competition managed to suppress the ethnic and religious antagonisms that dominated the first half of this century.

The simplistic dichotomy between the West and East blocs compartmentalized and clarified the world order.

But this also had negative consequences.

During the superpower confrontation, containing communism was paramount – even at the cost of democracy. Countries like Pakistan saw long periods of dictatorship. Decades when freedom was suppressed, the press censored and billions of dollars in military and economic assistance siphoned.

Similar patterns existed in South and Central America, in Portugal and Spain, in Greece, in South Korea, and in large parts of the African continent.

The dawn of the new Information Age helped change the destiny of nations caught in the grip of dictatorship, in the grip of authoritarianism.

CNN, the first jewel in the crown of the Information Age, had a significant role to play in bringing about the end of communism.  People in Eastern and Central Europe saw the beauty of freedom, the consumer choices that were available all over the world, and they asked a simple question:  "why not here?"

People in South Asia and South America  saw free people making free choices not only in elections, but in professional and career choices, and they asked a simple question:  "why not here?" With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, many in the world believed that our forty five year thermonuclear nightmare was over, and a peace dividend could spread across the world. But as T.S. Eliot once observed, "between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow."

The twilight of the century has become Eliot’s shadow.  The idea, that Platonic cave of peace that we prayed for, has eluded us.

Its elusion has left people impatient, frustrated, angry.

Those who believed democracy meant automatic financial progress, a better standard of living, have lost faith in governmental systems. Ladies and gentlemen,  the frustration of newly empowered electorates combined with the regeneration of long suppressed ethnic and religious tensions, creates a dangerous situation for the world as we approach the new millennium.

The United States, in it’s extraordinary moment of international predominance, has an obligation to act as a catalyst to promote democratic values, to insure self-determination, to enforce United Nations Resolutions, and to defuse potential international conflicts before they might engulf the world.

One of these long simmering tensions is related to the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir. The valley of Kashmir has been occupied by India and denied the basic right of self-determination.  Tens of thousands of men, women and children have lost their lives in the quest for freedom.

It is time now, consistent with President Clinton’s stated policy of preemptive crisis management, to facilitate an agreement between India and Pakistan so that the people of Kashmir and Jammu are finally allowed to determine their own political futures.

 And, ladies and gentlemen, this is an era with increasing focus on Islam and the West. The entire world community, and specifically the United States, has a fundamental strategic interest in events in the Muslim World. All across the world, in the Middle East, in Southwest Asia, in Southeast Asia, in Africa, one billion Muslims are at the cross-roads.

They must choose between progressivism and extremism.

They must choose between education and ignorance.

They must choose between the force of the new technologies and the forces of the old repression.

Thus, one billion Muslims must choose between past and future.

The United States must do everything within its power to insure that progressive, pluralistic Muslim countries like Pakistan are in a position to serve as models to the entire Islamic world.

And Pakistan is also an important Asian country, at the crossroads to the strategic oil reserves of the Gulf and Central Asia, and to the markets of South and East Asia.

In terms of demographics, in terms of production, in terms of consumption, in terms of markets, in terms of an expanding capitol intensive middle class, the Asian continent will set the tone, set the pace, and dominate the economic and geopolitical exigencies of the coming era.

It is up to us  --  all of us  --  to determine the moral parameters of that new era  --  the coming decade, the coming century, the coming millennium.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In less than 700 days, we will witness only for the third time in recorded history the momentous turning of the millennium.

Where and what will we be, at that extraordinary moment, when the huge ball drops and the year 2000 lights up the winter sky?

Will we be prisoners of the mind-set of the past, or will we be liberated to the endless possibilities of an historic future?

Our generation, the first in recorded history, is fundamentally empowered with the control of its own destiny.

The chains of the past -- colonialism, ignorance, dictatorship and sexism  --  are broken.

The world has finally accepted, in the words of Robert Browning, that "ignorance is not innocence, but sin."

I see a Third Millennium where the gap between rich and poor states evaporates, where illiteracy and hunger and malnutrition are conquered.

I see a Third Millennium where human rights are universal, and self-determination unabridged anywhere on the planet.  I see a Third Millennium where civil dialogue is restored, where consensus and comity once again guide the national and international debate.

I see a Third Millennium where people’s trust in government is restored, and government gets on with the business of addressing the pressing needs of the people.

I see a Third Millennium where every child is planned, wanted, nurture and supported.

I see a Third Millennium of tolerance and pluralism, where religions respect other religions.

I see a Third Millennium where the birth a girl child is welcomed with the same joy as the birth of a boy.

This is the Third Millennium I see for my country  --  and for yours.  For my children, and for yours.

If we fail, we will have only ourselves to blame.

For the crutches of history are gone.  We walk on our own.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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