DHAKA, Bangladesh --
For five of the past six years, Bangladesh's people have ranked their
nation the most corrupt on Earth on an international graft watchdog list. It
isn't hard to see why.
Economists estimate that thieving politicians, including the families and
cronies of the country's two feuding political dynasties, have pocketed more
than $5 billion a year by taking a cut of nearly everything sold in the
country. About $40 billion in foreign aid has been misappropriated over 35
years in this poor and densely populated delta nation, analysts say.
In Bangladesh, judges throw cases for cash, bureaucrats sell jobs,
businessmen run strong-arm cartels and, until recently, outgoing Prime
Minister Khaleda Zia's eldest son, Tarique Rahman, was known as "Mr. Ten
Percent" for his rapacious skimming.
But this month, Mr. Ten Percent is in jailed awaiting trial, along with a
few dozen of the country's other top politicians. His powerful mother is
expected to head to exile in Saudi Arabia within days, rather than face
corruption charges. And her longtime political rival, Sheikh Hasina, has been
told that if she returns Monday as planned from an extended holiday abroad,
she faces prosecution on corruption and murder charges.
In surely one of the strangest political turnarounds in the world, this
South Asian kleptocracy now finds itself run by a military-backed government
took power three months ago intent on restoring democracy by prosecuting or
exiling the nation's most powerful politicians as part of an unprecedented war
on corruption.
That the top two targets are women -- usually seen in aid circles as the
less corruptible sex -- only adds to the oddness of the whole affair.
"It's definitely surreal," said Iftekhar Zaman, executive director of the
Bangladesh branch of Transparency International, the leading international
anti-corruption watchdog that releases corruption rankings each year. "But
this country was left with no options."
'Unprecedented' turnaround
In January, Bangladesh's military declared a state of emergency in the
moderate Muslim nation and installed a caretaker government after efforts to
hold elections failed following violent street protests between supporters of
the two political parties that for 15 years have battled for Bangladesh's
political spoils.
Since then, with enthusiastic backing from the country's fed-up population
of 140 million, Bangladesh's new rulers have launched a campaign to root out
political corruption as a prerequisite for holding new democratic elections
next year.
Poor, crowded and set on a vast flood-prone delta, Bangladesh is best-known
for huge death tolls from seasonal cyclones and monsoons. But in recent
decades the Iowa-sized country of rice paddies and shrimp farms has emerged as
a perfect cauldron for graft as plundering politicians, greedy bureaucrats,
bribe-proffering businessmen and the least savory of the nation's many
non-profit aid groups look for a way to make an unearned buck, sometimes by
tapping into billions in aid money passing through each year.
The new government says it now hopes to change that. After years of
foot-dragging, the country signed a United Nations anti-corruption charter
that will help its leaders recover illicit funds stashed abroad. It has
reinvigorated an ineffective anti-graft commission, demanded financial
statements from top politicians and is strengthening laws barring politicians
convicted of corruption from office.
"There's never been an example of this kind of turnaround. This is
unprecedented," said Zaman, whose organization finds itself in the odd
position of consulting closely with an unelected, military-supported
government to promote democracy. "It's not the process we wanted. We wanted
this done by political leadership. But since they miserably failed to deliver,
it has come to this."
Turning around Bangladesh's culture of political corruption will not be
easy. Most of the investigators charged with tracking down the real estate
records, bank statements and other documents needed to prosecute those now
jailed have never done the work before and may be a little anxious about
trying to put their former, and potentially future, bosses in prison.
Those arrested have powerful friends and the money to hire the best lawyers
in the country, and the country's prosecutors have never prosecuted corruption
cases before. In some cases, caretaker officials may be faced with having to
prosecute colleagues, friends and neighbors.
In a country where court cases typically drag on for decades, the
government has limited trials to 60 days, with adjournments -- a favored
stalling tactic -- limited to three days. It has also hired private attorneys
as prosecutors and dangled offers of incentive pay for investigators who find
evidence that helps win convictions.
But with limited resources "we're going mad trying to investigate all these
high-profile cases at once," admitted Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury, chairman of the
country's new independent Anti-Corruption Commission.
The fear, said Ataur Rahman, a political corruption expert at the
University of Dhaka, is that "if you can't get convictions, the message will
be that nothing has changed."
The anti-corruption commission and caretaker government also are trying to
revamp key institutions, from removing executive influence in the judiciary to
rebuilding the electoral commission, in an effort to stifle future pilferers.
One of the keys, officials agree, is making sure Bangladesh's two political
leading ladies exit politics for good. To that end, the government is willing
to let them, and perhaps their families, avoid prosecution as long as they
agree to leave Bangladesh permanently.
