The (great-grand) mother of drug visas – II

By Kamran Shafi

AS I slowly reveal the twin cases of ‘The FO That Doesn’t Give a Damn’ and the ‘Equatoguinean Shyster and Crook Who Made Monkeys of the FO (Or Did He?)’, our most honourable senators will realise what a very big crime it is not to read the papers every morning. For these two cases have been written about for years now. By none other than I.

Here are this week’s titillations then: The drug smuggler, Santos Pascual Bikomo Nanguande, who made a monkey of the FO and its many ‘core-professionals’ and Mandarins (Or Did He?) and got nine years in a Spanish jail for his pains, was given the status of ‘official guest’ because, in the words of our then ambassador to Spain he was “accompanied by Alogo (no first name, no family name, just Alogo, please note senators) who was known to have visited Pakistan earlier in an official capacity”!

I ask you.

But who in heaven’s name was Alogo, Nanguande’s referrer to the Pakistan Embassy? He was none other than Joaquín María Alogo de Ondo Edu, the son-in-law of the president of Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema! Alogo too was arrested as Spanish investigations into Bikomo’s activities widened in 1997, but was later released. In September 1998, his body turned up in Medellín, Colombia. (courtesy: Global Witness).

Shortly before his death, however, Alogo wrote a confession, subsequently passed to Global Witness, in which he claimed that his “luxury house in Madrid was used as a base for drug trafficking, document forgery and trafficking in Equatoguinean passports!” Quite a beauty, what, this Alogo?

So there you are, sirs, Nanguande’s referrer to the Pakistan Embassy, Madrid, and who himself had once enjoyed ‘official guest’ status to the Citadel of Islam, was a character vile enough to not only be arrested and investigated for drug dealing himself, but who was later bumped off in the world capital of drug smuggling, Medellin, Colombia. Fine company our FO keeps, what?

Nanguande too made a written statement while in jail, effectively nailing his own country’s name to the mast of iniquity and impropriety and the worst possible criminality imaginable. He said that EG was a ‘plaque tournante’ (a revolving door) in a narcotics trafficking network that was based around its foreign missions and use of their diplomatic bag to transport drugs. He also named senior regime figures who, he said, headed and ran the trafficking network. (courtesy: Global Witness).

As if all of this were not enough, a short look at EG’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, in his own words: “I am the one who arranges things in this country because in Africa there are a lot of problems of corruption, the diversion of money. If there is corruption, diversion of funds, then I’m responsible.

“That’s why I’m a hundred per cent sure of all the revenue because the one who signs is me … I find myself forced to personally assume full responsibility as Sole National Paymaster General — even though many people are against this — in order to exercise the necessary control, since as president of the republic, the constitution holds me responsible for the proper functioning of all state institutions.” I ask you.

Incidentally, President Obiang is the nephew of the nation’s first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, whose oppressive regime is estimated to have exterminated or exiled one-third of the country’s population during his 11-year rule and who was tried and executed by his own nephew. They are all beauties are they not?

More juicy bits in the coming weeks, Excellencies, especially on EG the country which is a criminal enterprise if ever there was one. Proving the point that it was, indeed, the Great-Grandmother of All Drug Visas.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the despair I had spoken about last week has turned into hope as we Pakistanis ride, courtesy the Commando, a rickety roller coaster that can go off the rails any time, hurling us to our respective fates. This time the good vibes one felt during the prime minister’s visit to Mr Nawaz Sharif and the Punjab chief minister’s interview with Talat Hussain make one hopeful about the future. The body language of Yousuf Raza Gilani and Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif was perfect; the things they said in the press conference were what one was waiting to hear.

CM Dost Mohammad Khosa impressed one no end. He was clear-headed, well-spoken and frank, looked his interviewer in the eye, and said all the right things. He was especially good when he defended his party leadership’s input in decision-making and when he repeatedly referred to his and the federal government as ‘coalition governments’. Very well done, young man, and may God keep you in His care.

And now, many felicitations and mubarak to the Sindh government and the federal government, respectively for returning the Hindu Gymkhana to the Hindu community, and considering to convert the death sentences imposed on prisoners to life imprisonment. In the first case, the building should never have been taken over; and in the second this country’s police investigations are just too unfair, too archaic, and one in which money talks too loudly.

Might one say here that Sarabjeet Singh too should be spared the death penalty as just another inmate on death row — his being an Indian national should make no difference. It is no good to leave his fate in the hands of an evidently bamboozled Commando.

In the end, may I once again urge the government to reconsider the appointment of General Mahmud Durrani as adviser to the prime minister on national security? If he must be appointed to a cabinet post for reasons that escape most of us, let him be adviser to the Commando on whatever. Why should someone who is so evidently in the American camp — one who has referred to the well-known American neo-con Shireen Taherkheli as the ‘mother-hen’ who made and then inducted him into the ‘Balusa Group’, an American-funded think-tank — be privy to what the prime minister says to, say, the Chinese or the Russians?

If there has to be an adviser on national security, why not the tried and tested General Naseerullah Babar who knows the tribal area and its norms and customs and sensitivities, and the people who live there, more than he knows the back of his hand? (Please, I have not met the general, nor spoken to him, in at least eight years, even 10).

Bushism of the week: “Let me start off by saying that in 2000 I said, ‘Vote for me. I’m an agent of change.’ In 2004, I said, ‘I’m not interested in change — I want to continue as president. Every candidate has got to say ‘change.’ That’s what the American people expect,” — President George W. Bush; Washington, D.C., March 5, 2008. n

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk

The (grand) mother of drug visas

By Kamran Shafi

OUR senators have been much incensed at the Pakistani mission in Nigeria particularly, for issuing what they call ‘drug visas’ to spurious businessmen and women who come to this country to become carriers of drugs, even heroin.

This contraband they then attempt to carry to other countries, obviously on behalf of drug lords, some of them getting through and making unbelievable wages, some indeed getting caught in countries such as Saudi Arabia which has a zero tolerance policy on drugs and getting their heads lopped off.

The honourable senators have been going blue in the face trying to get the Foreign Office ‘core-professionals’ to admit wrong; the ‘core-professionals’ have as usual parcelled the blame elsewhere, an ingenious babu even putting most of it upon a now deceased counsellor.

Indeed, the senators are so riled and exasperated that one of them, Enver Baig of the People’s Party, is reported to have beseeched the FO with folded hands to desist from aiding and abetting drug smugglers because it gives such a very bad name to the country.

But this lot of Nigerians they talk about are small fry, little people who get visas by hook or by crook (if American consular officers in the Land of the Pure can issue visas to Amreeka Bahadur after extorting bribes, why can’t Pakistani consular officers in Nigeria?) and then attempt to smuggle small amounts of heroin in their stomachs or other parts of their anatomy. I am surprised that the senators do not know about the Mother of All Drug Visas.

Sometime in the fourth week of June 1997, a fellow called Santos Pascual Bikomo Nanguande, then said to be the information minister of Equatorial Guinea, turned up on the doorstep of the Pakistan Embassy in Madrid, Spain, accompanied by a man called, simply Alogo.

Lo and behold, and before you could say ‘Charlie’s Aunt’ Nanguande was not only issued a visa to visit the Citadel of Islam but was also anointed as an ‘official guest’ of the government of Pakistan, may God bless her and all who sail in her. Kindly note immediately please, that whilst Pakistan did not have an embassy in EG, our mission to Nigeria was accredited to it. The Pakistan Embassy in Spain had nothing whatever to do with EG.

From June 28 to July 6, 1997, Nanguande was feted right royally by the GOP, calling on then President Farooq Khan Leghari, Information Minister Mushahid ‘Mandela’ Hussain, Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz, the presidents of certain Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and sundry mandarins of the ministries of foreign affairs, commerce, finance, et al.

On July 7, 1997, the shyster and crook was arrested at Madrid airport carrying high-grade heroin worth $13m in his briefcase. It is reported that a Pakistan Embassy car was at the airport to meet the flight but the official who was to receive him made tracks as soon as he saw the man being led off by the police.

Note also that when questioned why Master Nanguande was raised to ‘Official Guest’ status, one of the answers was that when he applied for the visa, he was accompanied by the Alogo chappie who too had once been an ‘Official Guest’ of the GOP! I ask you, senators!

Note too that when the scandal broke, the government of EG announced that Nanguande had been dismissed as the minister of information a few days before he approached the Pakistan Embassy in Madrid for a visa, and that the Note Verbale that he carried with him was fake too!

If the senators who have been investigating scams to do with smuggling drugs out of our country are even halfway serious, they should ask the FO the following questions:

* Why did the Pakistan Embassy in Madrid take it upon itself to step onto another mission’s turf anyway?

* Why did the Pakistani Embassy in Madrid not get clearance from our high commission in Nigeria before issuing the smuggler a visa?

* If indeed it was imperative that the crook simply had to be issued a visa because of great affairs of state, why did the Pakistani mission in Madrid not ask the EG embassy in Madrid if the man was for real?

* Why did the Pakistani mission in Madrid make a recommendation to the GOP to give Nanguande ‘Official Guest’ status?

* Who approved this recommendation within the FO?

* How could Nanguande make contact with heroin drug lords during his stay in the country as an ‘Official Guest’ of the GOP? Did he go about unescorted?

* Since the FO was the driving force behind anointing the crook with ‘Official Guest’ status, was an FO official deputed to be his conducting officer? And if not, why not?

* Who saw him off at Islamabad airport at the end of his ‘Official Visit”? And even if he used the VIP lounge, why did customs/ANF anti-drug smuggling controls not come into play?

Ask these questions, senators, if you really want to get to the bottom of this whole racket.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, hope has given way to despair mainly because too many people are saying too many things, the People’s Party third-tier leadership in particular saying very bad things indeed.

There is no ambiguity whatsoever in the wording of the Murree/Bhurban declaration. “Thirty days after the formation of the federal government” is not a very difficult passage in very easy English. I mean it is not as if we were trying to decipher Chaucer, that we need Sherry Rehman to explain what exactly he meant in a certain context, or in the mealy-mouthed words of our FO what the nuances of a certain verse really were: 30 days is 30 days.

Keep things simple is my advice to the PPP. And please put several halters (and reins) on Babar Awan, Khosa and Naek, in that order. The more they open their mouths the more they land the party in trouble. Remember too that the people who put you where you are, are getting restless; more than anything else remember that they have rejected the Commando out of hand. So please understand that this is no time for being cute.

In the end, kudos to Nawaz Sharif for standing firm as a rock.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk