Pakistani farmers fight Army’s expanding empire

The standoff in this fertile region of Punjab province has become a focal point for public anger over the military’s control of economic assets in Pakistan, from farmland and profit-making universities to industries such as cement production and trucking.

The military’s assets in the real estate empire include 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.

‘‘They’ve become such a huge corporate empire in this country, and the land-grabbing is just one part of it,’’ said Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, a Yale-educated economist and coordinator of the People’s Rights Movement, a nonprofit group that’s taken up the tenants’ cause. Army officials accuse groups such as Akhtar’s of exploiting the Okara Farms tenants to further a leftist political agenda. ‘‘This is a law-and-order situation,’’ said Maj Gen Mahmud Shah, DG Remount. In 2001, the Lahore High Court ruled that the farmers were ‘‘in illegal occupation”.

But the army’s claim to the land is also open to question, 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. Under the old sharecropping system which dates to 1913, the army supplied seed and fertilizer to the tenants, who gave the army half of their crop. Three years ago, concluding that civilian managers were stealing some of the army’s share, officials instituted the system.

Among the 4,000 residents of Village 5/4-L was Bashir Ahmed, 65, who hobbled over on crutches to display the scar from a leg wound he suffered when Rangers opened fire last summer. As he lay in hospital, Rangers ‘‘forcibly’’ inked his thumb impression on a rental agreement. (LAT-WP)