The Poor Farmers
of Okara vs a Formidable Foe -- the Army
By
John Lancaster
OKARA,
Pakistan: "Ownership or death" is the slogan that farmers
here have adopted in their fight for the title to land their forefathers
first tilled nearly a century ago. But the farmers have a formidable
foe: Their landlord is the Pakistani Army.
A
contractual change instituted three years ago transformed the
farmers from sharecroppers to renters. Many tenants are angered
by the change, which they say is intended to drive them off the
land at Okara Military Farms -- a 17,000-acre grain and dairy
operation that is one of numerous Pakistani businesses run by
the military. The tenants are refusing to pay their rent, and
have staged a number of protests, several of which have turned
violent.
The
army has responded by cutting off water to the fields of rebellious
tenants, sending troops to surround their villages and arresting
hundreds of protesting farmers, some of whom say they or their
relatives have been tortured to force them to pay rent. Seven
villagers have died in clashes with police or paramilitary forces
since the protest erupted in 2000, leaders of the tenant movement
say.
As
tensions between the army and the tenants have escalated in recent
months, the standoff in this fertile region of Punjab province
has become a focal point for growing public anger over the military's
control of prized economic assets in Pakistan, from farmland and
profit-making universities to major industries such as cement
production and trucking.
Land
is a potent symbol of the privileged status enjoyed by the military,
which has ruled Pakistan for most of its 56-year history. The
army chief of staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is also the president.
Rapid
population growth, insufficient water and a legacy of feudalism
have made productive farmland increasingly scarce in Pakistan,
where agriculture still provides the largest source of employment.
Yet the military continues to dominate -- and occasionally add
to -- a real estate empire that includes horse farms, tracts of
irrigated croplands and prime residential property in major cities,
much of which is allotted to senior officers as part of their
retirement packages.
In
that light, the Okara Farms dispute is "a symbol of the resentment
people feel about the army's monopolization of power and resources,"
said Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, a Yale-educated economist and coordinator
of the People's Rights Movement, a non-profit group that has taken
up the tenants' cause. "They've become such a huge corporate
empire in this country, and the land-grabbing is just one part
of it."
Army
officials accuse groups such as Akhtar's of exploiting the Okara
Farms tenants to further a leftist political agenda that has nothing
to do with the facts of the dispute. They say they are charging
the farmers below-market rents and deny efforts to drive them
off the land. The contractual change, they say, is intended to
improve the efficiency of a farming operation originally set up
by the British in 1913 to feed their colonial Indian army troops
and horses -- similar to the purpose it now serves for Pakistan's
military.
"This
is not an issue of human rights," said Maj. Gen. Mahmud Shah,
director general of the Remount, Veterinary and Farms Corps, which
oversees Okara and 23 other military farms. "This is a law-and-order
situation."
The
courts have supported that claim. In 2001, the high court in the
provincial capital of Lahore ruled that in refusing to pay rent
to the army, the farmers were "in possession of the property
without any lawful basis."
"Legally
they can't succeed," Hasan Rizvi, a former visiting professor
at Columbia University in New York who has written several books
on civil-military relations in Pakistan, said of the tenants'
campaign. "To me, the villagers are being used."
But
the army's assertion of ultimate authority over the land is also
open to question, military experts say, because the actual owner
of the land is the Punjab provincial government. The army pays
a token fee to use the land, and two years ago the province refused
an army request to transfer title to the property free of cost,
according to a copy of an April 2001 letter from the Punjab Board
of Revenue.
"The
issue is there are two parties fighting over land which doesn't
even belong to them," said Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, an Islamabad-based
military analyst for Jane's Information Group. Siddiqa-Agha worked
in the late 1990s as deputy director of defense auditing under
Pakistan's auditor general, the government's chief spending watchdog.
Army
officials say Okara Farms provides the military with milk products
as well as fodder for pack mules -- used to haul army supplies
over rugged mountain passes -- and thoroughbred race horses and
polo ponies that the army raises for sporting use.
Under
the old sharecropping system, which dates to the farm's inception
in 1913, the army supplied seed and fertilizer to the tenants,
who then gave the army half of their crop. But three years ago,
after concluding that corrupt civilian managers were stealing
some of the army's share, military officials instituted a rent
system, Shah said.
Because
Pakistan's legal code provides fewer protections for renters than
sharecroppers, the move sparked a rebellion from villagers, many
of whose families had worked the same land for generations and
saw the change as a first step toward transferring ownership to
military officers and private corporations.
Last
year, the army called in the Ranger paramilitary force to quell
the protests and force the villagers to adhere to the new system.
But the situation has only grown more tense. While some tenants
have begun paying rent, many still refuse. As a result, Rangers
are preventing movement in and out of several villages, including
this one, to pressure protesters.
Last
week, a foreigner paid a visit to Village 5/4-L -- the numerical
designation is a legacy of British rule -- avoiding military roadblocks
by means of a dirt track that bounced through dry fields. Situated
on a flat plain crisscrossed with irrigation canals about 100
miles southwest of Lahore, the mud-brick village is home to about
4,000 people, many of whom appeared fully engaged with the protest.
Among
them was Bashir Ahmed, 65, who hobbled over on crutches to display
the scar from a leg wound he said he suffered when Rangers opened
fire on protesters in a neighboring village last summer. "I'm
a poor man, and I can't pay the contract fee," said Ahmed,
gaunt with a graying mustache. "They shot us because we were
protesting for our rights."
As
he lay in his hospital bed after he was wounded, Ahmed said, Rangers
"forcibly" inked his thumb and made an impression on
a rental agreement, which he has subsequently refused to honor.
Ghulam
Nabi Chaudhry, 22, said he was arrested on May 9 as a means of
putting pressure on several of his brothers, who work as tenant
farmers and had refused to pay rent. Chaudhry, a locksmith who
says he suffers from a heart condition, said he was beaten on
the buttocks with leather shoes and a piece of a tire, and at
one point was made to stoop over for 10 minutes while a heavy
load of bricks was piled on his back.
"They
told me, 'Your brothers are not paying us contract money and that
is why you are behind bars,' " he said. After three days,
he said, he was released when one of his brothers forked over
15,000 rupees -- about $260 -- in back rent.
Army
officials say the Rangers have acted with restraint, and that
in several cases villagers have been killed by gunfire from protesters'
weapons. They deny the stories of coercion and torture. "This
is all fabrication," Shah said. - Courtesy The Washington
Post, Sunday, June 29, 2003; Page A19
