JUST when we thought the news couldn’t get any more sensational, with reports that two senior Australian government ministers must face that countries official inquiry, the scandal haws come to life elsewhere.
Well more or less, with Russia, that that paragon of probity and transparency, declaring: The UN commission has failed to prove that Russian companies were involved in the oil-for-food corruption scandal in Iraq…
And Pakistan revealing damning evidence of Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s alleged involvement in the scandal.
FIRST things first… We, at Talk about Corruption (TAC), have reported evidence from the outset alleging the involvement of Australian government ministers in that country’s infamous kickbacks to Saddam.
It is inconceivable that the country’s monopoly wheat exporter, AWB could have operated their illicit scheme without government’s tacit approval, either by omission or commission.
So now we wait breathlessly for the foreshadowed appearance of Foreign Minister Downer and Deputy Prime Minister Vaile, before the Cole Inquiry in Sydney. Downer should fair pretty well under scrutiny of the lawyers, he is a practiced liar. Less secure is the country’s bumbling 2IC and Trade Minister. Vaile has already had his badly scorched cojones pulled from the fire more than once in this episode.
To Pakistan and the new woes for the old PM…
WE at TAC have a little more difficulty with Pakistan’s charges against BB. It could be fond memories of her late father, Ali Bhutto, or just that we have a sneaking regard for this former leader, but there is also an element of political intrigue which raises doubt.
“Bhutto is the eldest child of a famous political family that has often been compared, in both power and tragedy, to the Kennedys and the Nehrus.
Benazir (the name means "one without equal") was raised in a Karachi mansion by a British nanny, dressed in clothes from Saks and educated abroad.
In 1977 her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first democratically elected prime minister, was deposed by General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who is now president.
Two years later, despite appeals from President Jimmy Carter and Pope Paul II, Bhutto was hanged on a disputed murder charge. Benazir spent her subsequent years in prison planning her vengeance against Zia through her own rise to power.
As Peter Galbraith, a college friend who is now an Asia expert with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, puts it, "Benazir got her B.A. from Radcliffe, her M.A. from Oxford and her Ph.D. from Sukkur jail." Writer Anne Fadiman October 1986
Successive Pakistani regimes have tried everything to date, short of another murder, to wipe Bhutto from their political landscape.
We will not dispute hard evidence against Bhutto if it supported, but at this stage it screams of the ‘boy who called wolf!’
Meantime Pakistan has not produced very much to support any real determination to address their country’s role in this scandal.
THEN there is dear old Russia. Not us, they cried, we had no involvement in the corrupt activities. That proposition is as difficult to swallow as Pakistan’s charges.
With Russia’s current reputation for rampant corruption at every level, and their comfortable involvement with Saddam’s regime, the word bullshit comes to mind.
But, treasuring my quiet life in the country, with all limbs and faculties intact, I will refrain from uttering it.
There is something about Russia which has always fascinated me. Not the various governments, I might add. Regardless of what they have been called, their supposed philosophies, they are steeped in heavy handed subjugation of the people.
Given a little freedom, it seems the people are more than ready to play the rules, as their rulers have so able demonstrated over millennia. Corruption and worse is ubiquitous in heartbreak old mother Russia.
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