Pakistan: ''Case closed''

THE president has immunity against criminal prosecution under the Pakistani constitution — thus has declared the Swiss attorney general, according to the law ministry here. Has the long-running and vexing so-called Swiss letter saga finally come to an end? It would appear so, though never say never in Pakistan. After all, anything is possible, as Prime Minister Ashraf discovered in the rental power case, where the Supreme Court caught the country by surprise and seemingly ordered the arrest of the prime minister as Tahirul Qadri’s thousands were staging a sit-in near parliament last month. But with matters now in the hands of the Swiss authorities, who are presumably less unpredictable than their Pakistani counterparts, it would appear that at least as far as the millions of dollars once upon a time lodged in Swiss accounts and allegedly belonging to President Zardari are concerned, the file can be considered shut. In a better world, there would be hard lessons learned. Article 248(2) of the constitution has always read: “No criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President or a Governor in any court during his term of office.” While an argument could be made that the Swiss letter only sought to reinstate Pakistan’s role as a civilian party laying claim to the allegedly ill-gotten gains lying in Swiss accounts, it was always a stretch that the Swiss legal system would dance to the tune of Pakistani indecision: prosecution under Nawaz Sharif and then Gen Musharraf; then withdrawal of the cases under the latter after political realities at home had changed; and then the attempted reinstatement of the withdrawn cases at the behest of the superior judiciary. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss probably are not very interested in having their legal system used as a pawn in Pakistani political games. Should the court here have known better? Yes. Should it have acted differently? Yes. Will it absorb the right lessons from this episode? We don’t know. As for the PPP, will it learn that there is a different way to approach challenges than always as a zero-sum political game? Farooq Naek was the law minister when the NRO-related matter first erupted and he was the law minister again when the Swiss letter was finally dispatched — how much time and energy could have been saved had calmer, more reasoned counsel been listened to earlier? And for the public at large, a more fundamental challenge: to argue Mr Zardari has immunity and the democratic transition needed to be kept on track is not to deny Pakistan has a serious corruption problem; how does it build pressure to have cleaner representatives without bringing the democratic system itself down?