Amid Pakistani Poverty, Opulent Palace of Ex-Premier
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By CELIA W. DUGGER
RAIWIND, Pakistan -- The Mogul emperor Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal. Louis XIV had Versailles. And Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was going to have Jati Umrah -- until the Pakistani Army unceremoniously booted him out of power this month, impounding his palatial home.
At the time, Sharif was tantalizingly close to moving into the lavish new 22-room mansion that had come to symbolize a man who talked like a populist but lived like a king in a land of paupers.
The military has doubtless been sorely tempted to make the Sharifs sprawling estate Exhibit A in its campaign to portray him as a grasping, power-mad politician who plundered the
public treasury to build an empire but they have been wary of allowing anyone inside.
Sharif, an industrialist whose family made an even bigger fortune after he went into politics, has not been seen or heard from since the Oct. 12 coup, though the military says he is safe.
Badgered by a press hungry for a peek, army officers on Saturday took a reporter into the compound, down the poplar-lined lanes and through farmland amassed by the Sharifs.
Inside the heavily guarded compound, a watchman was present at Sharif's imposing new Mediterranean-style villa, and a back door that led into a huge and stunning kitchen was open.
"Rather difficult to comprehend for a third world country," said an army officer, shaking his head
in amazement as he stood in the kitchen of stainless steel and freshly varnished wood that was big enough to hold four mud huts of the poor. "There is no money like new money."
On display inside the house was the kind of gaudy, eye-popping, nouveau riche opulence that would make Donald Trump smile. There were, it seemed, acres of floors in every hue of marble dusky pink and forest green and porcelain blue. There were ceilings adorned with friezes of roses hand-painted shades of apricot and mint. There were inlaid oak floors, walls paneled in silken fabrics and rococo chairs laden with so much gold leaf they looked like they belonged in the court of Louis XIV or a bordello.
In a central hall with a soaring, sky-lighted atrium, two stuffed lions real lions?appeared to be stalking their prey from the small platforms where they were mounted.
And all along the edges of a swirling marble staircase that swept up to the second floor, where the private rooms were locked, there were plastic bouquets of flowers in blue, red and pink affixed as ornamentation.
Just across the magically smooth, four-lane highway mostly empty? that leads to the Sharif family compound is the Sharif family hospital, an immaculate state-of-the-art white elephant said to have cost $15 million and never to have had more than 50 patients in its 300 beds since it opened in December 1997.
The patriarch of the family, Mian Muhammad Sharif, had 2,885 workmen labor around the clock to finish the hospital in a year. He is widely believed to be a domineering force in the lives of his sons Nawaz, the former Prime Minister, and Shahbaz, the former Chief Minister of the state of Punjab, who are both now under house arrest.
Saturday there were only 15 patients for 40 doctors, 60 nurses and almost 300 other staff members to care for. The white marble corridors were deserted and the rooms filled with empty, tautly made-up beds? this in a country where almost half the 150 million people have no access to health care.
Dr. Rafique Anwar, who runs the hospital for the family, conceded that it was a little off the beaten path here in Raiwind, about 12 miles from Lahore. But those concerns were dismissed by the Sharif patriarch.
"The chairman overruled everything," Dr. Anwar said. "He said if you make a quality hospital, patients will come."
The Sharifs' Raiwind ventures seem to have attracted more interest from investigative reporters and opposition politicians than from the sick and lame.
In June of last year, the monthly magazine Newsline and the weekly newspaper Friday Times published articles about the Sharifs' accumulation of hundreds of acres of valuable farmland and use of public funds to develop their estate, named Jati Umra after their ancestral Punjabi village.
That same month, after the United States imposed economic sanctions on Pakistan following its nuclear tests, the Prime Minister called on the people to drink less tea and scrimp on cooking oiland promised to confiscate more than a million acres of farmland from feudal landlords for redistribution to peasants.
The seeming hypocrisy of a man who was a self-made feudal lord preaching sacrifice and land reform was irresistible to Sharif's rivals, who pounced gleefully.
"He wanted to live like a king," said Ameer-ul-Azim, spokesman for Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's main religious political party. "It is the family's ambitiousness. They are very much inspired by the Moguls."
Sharif was apparently outraged by the criticism, and his Government began striking out at the journalists who had dared write and print such articles.
Amir Mir, who wrote the Newsline article, said he had been harassed by the police and subjected to threatening phone calls from men who promised to break his legs. He fled the country in July.
Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times, was abducted in the wee hours from his Lahore home by Punjab state policemen and held incommunicado for more than a month before he was released.
But the questions raised by Jati Umrah refused to die. Pakistan?s military rulers are now saying corruption charges may be brought against the former Prime Minister. And the Sharifs? Raiwind estate is now back exactly where they did not want it to bein the news. |
