Word: bribes
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...Every Afghan has a story about corruption. The electronics store owner in my old neighborhood in the capital, Kabul, hasn't had electricity for the past year, because he refuses to pay the $400 bribe required to secure a connection to the electrical grid. The scarcity of so many basic necessities allows petty corruption to flourish in many corners of the world without necessarily feeding an insurgency. But Afghanistan's corruption is intimately linked to a culture of violence. The driver of an Afghan friend was picked up one day by the police, beaten, stripped naked and left outside...
...also money. According to Afghans, judges routinely accept bribes for favorable verdicts. Mohammad Mumtaz, an Afghan businessman visiting from the U.S., tells the story of a cousin's property dispute gone bad. His opponent paid a higher bribe to the court, and his cousin landed in jail for trying to get a squatter off his land. But it turned out OK, says Mumtaz. The cousin went through a broker who was a friend of the judge, paid $6500, and was released a month early. Such stories take on a more somber note when criminals and alleged members of the Taliban...
...that touched Telpuk's life came last August, in the form of a suitcase crammed with three quarters of a million dollars. Not that she kept the money - on the contrary, it's the fact that she chose to blow the whistle on its owner rather than seek a bribe to remain silent that made her something of a folk heroine...
...Telpuk, it was simply a case of doing her job. "I still don't understand what Antonini Wilson expected to happen when he opened that suitcase," she says. "Maybe he thought I would ask for a bribe and that would be the end of it." That may have been a fair assumption, on his part, given the notorious corruption among Argentine customs agents. But among her fellow agents, Telpuk had a reputation for naive honesty. "Once a passenger dropped a huge wad of dollar bills on my counter and didn't notice, I chased after him down the runway waving...
...country where corruption is considered a dreary fact of life, Telpuk's simple decision to do her job rather than taking a bribe struck a popular chord. "I'm not unlike millions of other women who just do their job," she says...