Pakistan Is Booming Since 9/11, at Least for the Well-Off

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Pakistan Is Booming Since 9/11, at Least for the Well-Off

 

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

 

Published: March 23, 2005

 

 

KARACHI, Pakistan - Umar Sheikh, 31, British-born, New York-trained and married to a woman from New Jersey, long dreamed of running his own restaurant. London was too expensive. New York was too risky. Karachi seemed just right.

 

His gamble, in this restive port city better known for its religious radicals than its ravioli, has worked so far. Limoncello, Mr. Sheikh's cozy Italian-inspired fine dining spot with lemon-colored walls and a kebab-free menu that features arugula and Norwegian salmon, is thriving.

 

Its success reflects an unexpected post-Sept. 11 boon: prompted by a mix of government policy, serendipity and changing global tides brought on by the American campaign against terrorism, Pakistan's economy is booming. The well-off, at least, are living extremely well.

 

In its first two months, Limoncello has brought in revenue that Mr. Sheikh did not expect for several more. Already, three investors have offered to pitch in on his next venture.

 

One recent Friday night, nearly all of the tables were occupied. Dinner for four - not including wine, since alcohol is banned at public accommodations - came to $70, substantially more than a Karachi housemaid's monthly salary.

 

"I'm getting a lot of corporate heads, a lot of nouveau riche, people who come from abroad who are not necessarily wealthy but are educated about cuisine," said Mr. Sheikh, the son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain. "People want high-end products."

 

The country's economy grew 6.4 percent during the last fiscal year, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibank executive, projects 8 percent annual growth in two years' time.

 

"Pakistan is a country today that has gone through a very intensive five-year reform," Mr. Aziz said in an interview in the capital, Islamabad. "We are seeing the results."

 

There are many factors behind the boom. Remittances that Pakistani expatriates once sent home through informal banking channels are now landing in the banks, lifting the country's foreign reserves to $12.7 billion a year, compared with $1 billion in 2001.

 

As an important ally of the United States, Pakistan has been able to slash its external debts. In the last five years, export earnings have doubled to more than $13 billion, mostly from textiles, according to the State Bank of Pakistan. "There's a lot of confidence in Pakistan's economy," said Ishrat Husain, the state bank chief.

 

Wealthy expatriates jittery about their futures in the United States and Europe since Sept. 11, 2001, have set aside nest eggs back home or returned. The Karachi stock market has soared. The real estate market has exploded. A residential plot that Mr. Sheikh bought two years ago in his mother's native Lahore has tripled in value.

 

"People are feeling more optimistic," Muhammad Yasin Lakhani, chairman of the Karachi Stock Exchange, said in a recent interview. "People want to put their money in a growing economy any day rather than in a developed economy."

 

Mr. Lakhani had cause for optimism. That morning, the stock exchange had jumped a record 295 points. Its market capitalization had reached $40 billion, up from $5 billion in 1998. Much of the stock market's rise, analysts say, is a result of the government's moves to privatize state-owned assets.

 

The big question now is whether such impressive growth can lift a majority of Pakistanis. Poverty grew steadily in the late 1990's, according to the last government study, conducted four years ago. In 2001, 32 percent of Pakistanis lived below the poverty line. That remains the most widely cited and reliable barometer of poverty.

 

A smaller survey done in 2004, Prime Minister Aziz said, showed a decline in poverty, but people outside the government noted that the survey was smaller in scale and therefore not comparable to the earlier studies. "The trickle-down effect has not really taken place," Mr. Lakhani said.

 

In a working-class enclave pressed against one of Karachi's high-toned neighborhoods, small girls filled up big buckets of water from a neighbor's tap and heaved it home on their shoulders. Only some houses here are connected to the city water supply. Those who can get water from their neighbors do so; others pay to have it trucked in.

[Wiilo]

The Politics of Ibrahim Parlak

 

Published: March 20, 2005

 

 

(Page 3 of 11)

 

Parlak's father sent him to the nearby city, Gaziantep, for high school, and it's here that Parlak's asylum testimony picks up. Parlak told the immigration officer that it was in Gaziantep that he became involved with the burgeoning Kurdish rights movement, attending meetings and political protests. At one rally, where he was distributing leaflets and hanging posters, the police arrested him. He was held for three months -- without ever appearing in front of a judge -- before being released. He was 16. Realizing the danger of his involvement in Kurdish affairs, Parlak left for the safety of Germany, where he lived for the next seven years.

 

During that time, the mid-1980's, the Kurdish Workers' Party, or P.K.K., emerged as the leading force for Kurdish rights. It was a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group (though with no ties to Moscow) that advocated an independent Kurdish state and was led by Abdullah Ocalan, who would eventually earn a reputation for his zealotry and brutality (including against P.K.K. members when he lost trust in them). The P.K.K. conducted guerrilla raids in southeast Turkey, killing soldiers and police officers as well as civilians who sympathized with the Turkish authorities. In Europe, Parlak became active in the P.K.K.'s political arm and organized Kurdish cultural festivals throughout the continent. They had a dual purpose: to fuel a sense of Kurdish identity as well as to raise money for P.K.K. activities. Parlak used a pseudonym, Ayhan.

 

Parlak missed his family, and he carried around their photographs, trying to memorize their faces so that he wouldn't forget them. He couldn't call them because his parents' village didn't have telephones. After seven years in Europe, Parlak decided to return home, with the assistance of the P.K.K. He thought he could be more effective advocating Kurdish rights in Turkey than he could from afar.

 

He told the immigration officer in Chicago that he left Germany for eastern Lebanon, where he trained at a P.K.K. camp for eight months and where he learned skills to survive in the mountains. He led a group of five Kurds, and with Syrian smugglers as guides, crossed the border from Syria into Turkey. A Turkish patrol discovered them, and a firefight ensued. In recounting this story for the asylum officer, Parlak -- with the businessman who accompanied him translating -- told her: ''We were shot at with automatic guns. Three of my friends were injured, and we returned the gunfire.'' He didn't mention that in the skirmish two Turkish soldiers were killed. He did, however, submit a Turkish newspaper article that recounted the incident. The businessman translated the article and left out mention of the soldiers' deaths. This omission, which Parlak said he didn't know about at the time, would become important to the government's case against Parlak.

 

Parlak evaded capture, and a couple of weeks later, he crossed into Turkey successfully, spending the next six months hiding in the mountains by day and traveling by night. Parlak has always maintained that he was there doing political work, visiting villages to talk about Kurdish rights and Kurdish culture and to put families of prisoners in touch with support groups in Europe. (Turkey has never accused him of being involved in any combat outside of the border skirmish.) On the afternoon of Oct. 29, 1988, as he sat in a small hole he had dug into the side of a mountain eating a late lunch of macaroni, he was surrounded by the local police and Turkish soldiers. For a brief moment, Parlak considered fighting his way out, but thought better of it, and instead hastily tried -- unsuccessfully -- to burn a journal and some photographs. Parlak was arrested, and over the next four weeks was continually tortured. He didn't go into details with the asylum officer, though he told her that he still had the scars.

 

Parlak was put on trial in the State Security Courts, a separate judicial system the Turkish government had established to try leftists and Kurdish separatists. He was tried along with 57 other suspected militants; he faced the death penalty for his association with the P.K.K. and for his involvement in the deaths of the two soldiers (though the court concluded he had not shot them). But his sentence was reduced because he directed the Turkish police to a buried munitions cache and promised to end his involvement in Kurdish causes. He was released after serving 16 months in prison.

 

Read more http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20PRISON.html?pagewanted=3

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QUESTIONS FOR JEFF GANNON

Blogged Downn

 

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

 

Published: March 20, 2005

 

 

David Burnett

 

 

Q Should I call you Jim Guckert or Jeff Gannon?

 

My Amex card still comes in the name of James Guckert, but I want to be called Jeff Gannon. That is who I am.

 

Or rather it is the pseudonym under which you gained access to White House press briefings for two years, until your identity was revealed. Why do you think they let you in?

 

I don't know the answer to that. I don't know the criteria they use. I asked to be let in, and they allowed me to come. I was very fond of all the people in the press office. They treated me well. They probably treated me better than I deserved.

 

Are you suggesting that Bobby Eberle, the Republican operative who hired you to shill for his Gopusa under the guise of his Talon News service, has special access at the White House?

 

I just don't know the answer to that question.

 

Scott McClellan, the press secretary to President Bush, called on you and allowed you to ask questions on a nearly daily basis. What, exactly, is your relationship with him?

 

I was just another guy in the press room. Did I try to curry favor with him? Sure. When he got married, I left a wedding card for him in the press office. People are saying this proves there is some link. But as Einstein said, "Sometimes a wedding card is just a wedding card.''

 

You mean like "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar''? That wasn't Einstein. That was Freud.

 

Oh, Freud. O.K. I got my old Jewish men confused.

 

You should learn the difference between them if you want to work in journalism.

 

I'd like to get back into journalism. I'm hoping someone will offer me a job as a commentator or one of those political analysts that you see on the news shows all the time.

 

What are we supposed to make of the fact that before reporting for Talon News, you had never had a job in journalism and apparently earned your living running a gay escort service?

 

Don't let that confuse the issue. We have driven so many good people from public service through the politics of personal destruction. People on the left who disagreed with me decided that I needed to be punished by any means necessary.

 

How did you get your job at Talon News?

 

I had submitted some opinion pieces to Gopusa. I believe they were picking up wire feeds, and Bobby Eberle wanted to supplement that with original reporting. He came to Washington for some business, and he called me. It was a breakfast meeting.

 

Were you paid for your pieces?

 

Yes. I received a kind of stipend.

 

I assume Eberle fired you after you asked that now-famous question of President Bush at a press conference in January, suggesting that Democrats had "divorced themselves from reality.''

 

I wasn't fired. I resigned. I made the decision by myself after I learned that my family had received threatening phone calls. I decided this is what had to be done to try to make that stop.

 

What do you mean by your family?

 

My mother. She is 72. I am a big boy. I can take this. But it's so hard on my mother. She has to reconcile all of these things, and it's difficult.

 

Do you find it hard to be a gay conservative in this country in light of the right-wing hostility to gay rights?

 

I prefer that to be a private issue. I am more interested in national defense, taxation and immigration than in personal issues. I would like people's personal lives to be behind the barrier once again, like they used to be.

 

Still, it seems fair to ask about your position on gay marriage.

 

My position is that I can't imagine that gay marriage would be something that I would be interested in in the first place. I actually like being alone. I have decided that is how I want to live. I have a dog named Winston. I am still the same to Winston, no matter what, and there is comfort in that. Winston doesn't watch the news.

 

But for those of us who do watch the news, are you interested in defending one's right to pose in the buff, as photographs on the Internet indicate you have done?

 

We do have tremendous freedoms in this country, and one of the drawbacks of that is that people are free to take images of me and manipulate them however they want. At some point in the future, everyone is going to have a picture on the Internet that they are unhappy about.

 

So facinated with these stories,,,,

 

 

Salaama Ka Dheh:.............