In a corner office at one of the most corrupt institutions of the Afghan government, the country’s new attorney-general has been tasked with actually delivering justice.
It is an uphill battle if there ever was one. The attorney-general, Mohammad Farid Hamidi, must contend with a powerful political elite that over the past 15 years has seen law enforcement as its private net to entangle rivals and make money. The culture of graft and impunity has been entrenched for so long that the Afghan public hardly raises a fuss about it anymore.
“When you say anti-corruption, people laugh and say good luck with that,” said Naseem Akbar, executive director of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, which evaluates anti-corruption efforts across the country. “The most corrupt speak of fighting corruption. The offices of control and monitoring at ministries have largely become known for their corruption. People lost complete faith.”
More than anything, Hamidi is up against his own institution. The attorney-general’s office, which is supposed to be the highest enforcement agency of the law, is seen as breaking it at every turn.
“You see a fancy two-storey or three-storey house, and you ask, ‘Whose is it?’ They name a prosecutor working in some corner of the attorney-general’s office here,” Masroor Lutfi, a law student in Parwan province, told Hamidi during a recent official visit to the province. “Everyone who finds out that I am studying law questions my real intentions, because the law has come under question.”
Hamidi nodded in pained agreement. When it was his turn to speak, he acknowledged that the failure of the justice system had alienated people from the government, sometimes driving them to take their grievances to the Taliban even in areas under government control.
“What is the point of controlling districts when we don’t have people’s hearts?” he said.
Hamidi, a 48-year-old father of three who has been in office for seven months, is a police academy graduate who later took to civilian life and studied law. For a decade, he served as a well-respected human rights commissioner, investigating some of the earliest injustices of the political elite that set the tone after the US invasion.
He had been working on a master’s degree at Harvard University for eight months, his only time living outside Afghanistan, when he was called home after the confirmation of his appointment by the coalition government to be attorney-general.
Bluntly, he says he has inherited an institution that he feels is in the same shape it was the morning after the Taliban government was overrun in 2001. Despite millions of dollars spent, there has been no attention to its most basic infrastructure, or to building the capacity of the staff; only one-third of its members have higher education.
Hamidi said the attorney-general’s office had been a “systematic” clearinghouse for graft by the elite, putting the stamp of legality on shady deals and corrupt syndicates while it pressed politically favourable prosecutions.
“It was extremely political — it was a political tool at the hands of those who wanted to hit their rivals, to dishonour them,” he said. “It was a place for character assassination.”
By all accounts, Hamidi has had a hard-charging first few months in office. He has targeted 30 of his office’s staff members for investigation, and has pushed others with tainted reputations to positions of less influence and authority. He has shuffled the leadership at the top and promoted a young cadre to new posts.
All of that is an implicit accusation against his predecessor, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, who served as attorney-general for around eight years and was seen as a strong ally of former President Hamid Karzai.
Reached by phone, Aloko defended his record before hanging up abruptly.
“It was a clean office. This is propaganda — do not accept it,” Aloko said about the accusations against him. “Look, corruption is in the customs. Corruption is in contracts. These are all lies.”
Interviews with officials in the justice system, lawyers and business leaders, however, portray an attorney-general’s office that profited greatly from predation.
Thousands of investigations have remained open for years, with prosecutors sending warrants every few months to call someone for questioning — another opportunity for a bribe — while the case goes nowhere.
Individuals with ties to the powerful were usually exonerated easily. Later, though, if their patrons had become a political headache for the government, their cases might suddenly resurface.
Senior officials linked to some of the most blatant cases of graft, including those accused in the near-meltdown of the Kabul Bank after $900 million (Dh3.3 billion) in fraudulent “buddy” loans, were treated with leniency, or their convictions have been effectively forgotten.
Meanwhile, names were being added left and right to the national travel ban — the list is standing at about 3,000 people, mostly business owners and contractors, Hamidi said.
One of the most problematic, but lucrative, practices the attorney-general’s office engaged in was jumping into civil disputes that it had no jurisdiction over. A subcontractor disagreeing with a contractor? Drag him to the attorney-general’s office, despite contract terms calling for arbitration, and quickly put him on the no-exit list.
To save his reputation, the businessman would pay a bribe, or seek the help of a strongman.
Kawun Kakar, who leads the Kabul-based law firm Kakar Advocates, said a large percentage of the prosecutors in the past spent their time on arbitration cases over which they had no jurisdiction.
“We see that the new attorney-general is curbing that,” Kakar said. “But my fear is that unless the loophole is closed through legislation and regulation, it will be same old business when another leadership comes.”
Hamidi said he had ordered all cases that have remained open for years to be concluded in a period of two months so that his prosecutors could focus on current problems.
“No one can put anyone on the no-exit list, no one can shut down the economic activities of a business because of a claim,” he said. “We will not interfere in civil matters at all. People’s debts have no relation to us.”
Even in the most difficult political environment, with President Ashraf Ghani’s administration facing intense challenges and missed deadlines, Hamidi insists that he has the firm support of the government’s coalition partners in his attempt to depoliticise his office.
He recounted how he had recently suspended a powerful official in western Afghanistan who had a history of breaking his friends out of police custody with impunity. The man had also served as one of Ghani’s top campaign leaders in his region during the 2014 presidential election.
But when Hamidi demanded that the official appear before prosecutors for questioning, and faced pressure for doing so, Ghani fully backed him.
Hamidi fully understands that he is making enemies. But he said he was counting on a widening base of support among the public as he started making changes.
“If you carry out the smallest action in a country where people no longer expect anything, it will bring you major support — and that support helps in lowering the political price one has to pay,” Hamidi said.
–New York Times News Service
