Top City 1: The suburban real estate development that brought down former ISI chief Faiz Hameed

This is not the first time a high-ranking military official has faced a very public court martial, through retired Lt Gen Faiz Hameed’s court martial proceedings are certainly unusual. 

It was only five years ago that Lt Gen Javed Iqbal Awan was sentenced by the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) to 14 years in prison for espionage.

In the 1990s, Maj General Zaheer ul Islam Abbasi and 38 other officers were court martialed on charges of plotting to storm a corps commanders’ meeting, assassinating Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Army Chief General Waheed Kakar, and taking over the country in a coup d'etat. In more recent times, Brigadier Ali Khan along with four majors was arrested, court martialed, and sentenced over links with the banned Islamist organisation Hizb ut Tahrir in 2011.

Like most militaries in the world, the Pakistan Army has an internal justice system to deal with the wrongdoings of its officers internally. The Army Act of 1952 regulates the legal code within the military, mainly for prosecuting military personnel and associated civilians. The act gives the military relative freedom to prosecute and deal with its officers as it sees fit. And while the more famous examples of court martials have to do with espionage, the military has also used it to prosecute financial misdealings. 

There is no set precedent for how the military deals with these matters. Perhaps the most significant financial scandal involving the Pakistan military was the August Submarine Scandal, in which retired Admiral Mansur ul Haq, a former Chief of Naval Staff, was fined $7.5 million for taking bribes and stripped of his rank (although it would later be restored by the Sindh High Court). But the case was heard and decided by an accountability court instead of a military one. 

In 2009, when the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee found irregularities worth billions of rupees during an inquiry into the National Logistics Cell, Army Chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani decided to court martial two retired Army lieutenant generals, Khalid Munir Khan and Afzal Muzaffar, instead of referring the matter to an accountability court.

As retired Lt Gen Faiz Hameed prepares his defence for his own court martial, he might be considering the precedent that exists already. What he might also realise, however, is that his court martial is a little unique. Up until this point, the military has only really used the Army Act of 1952 to prosecute officers involved in internal affairs, whether those are financial or administrative. In the case of General Faiz, his court martial has to do with a housing society that does not have anything to do with the Army, at least not directly. 

The retired lieutenant general is charged with misusing his position to extort money from a private housing society by the name of Top City. This is an entirely private housing society and the case against the former spymaster first went to the Supreme Court. The decision to initiate the court martial was actually made in compliance with the direction of the Supreme Court. As this publication’s parent paper pointed out in a recent editorial, the response from the Pakistan Army has been measured, professional, entirely appropriate, and in line with the Supreme Court’s rulings. But why did it come to this?   

What exactly is this case surrounding a real estate project that has brought one of Pakistan’s most powerful military officials to the point of a court martial? To understand the full scale of the story, we must take a jump back exactly two decades ago.