| November 21, 2001 | Wednesday | Ramazan 5, 1422 |
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Journalists’ murder
Curbing vehicle theft
ONE wishes American leaders were always as candid with Israel as Colin Powell was on Monday when he asked Tel Aviv to pull out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and accept a viable Palestinian state. Speaking at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, the secretary of state referred to the relevant UN resolutions and to the Madrid land-for-peace formula and said they served to emphasize the existence of two states in Palestine. At the same time, to signal a more vigorous American interest in the Arab-Israeli issue, Powell said he was asking William Burns to return to the Middle East to begin consultations with both sides. He also asked Anthony Zinni, a retried general with Middle East experience, to return to the region to work for a ceasefire. While these are laudable moves, one can hardly express optimism, given the fate of similar initiatives in the past.
Ever since the intifada started in September 2000, the peace process has come to a grinding halt. Sharon was the man who ignited the intifada by visiting the Islamic holy sites despite advice to the contrary, and Sharon is the man who today refuses to end the bloodshed. Compared with him, his two predecessors — Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu — appear to be reasonable men by Israeli standards. Both had, of course, reneged on international treaties and, by virtue of the Zionist lobby’s clout, forced a renegotiation of the Oslo accords. Even though they did not fully implement these revised treaties, the peace process did inch forward, even if at a snail’s pace. Often, when there was a deadlock, Bill Clinton managed to get Yasser Arafat and Netanyahu or Barak together at the innumerable summit talks held at Wye, Camp David, Sharm el-Sheikh and Cairo to keep the prospects for peace alive. However, ever since this war criminal came to power, the peace process has stood frozen. Instead, he used last year’s American preoccupation with the presidential election to speed up the settlements activity. More perversely, he has allowed the local commanders to use force on their own and enter areas which are under full control of the Palestinian Authority. Side by side, he feels no qualms of conscience about pursuing an unabashedly criminal policy in the form of the assassination of Palestinian leaders.
It now remains to be seen whether Secretary Powell’s plain talk is based on principle or is guided merely by expediency. Today, the Bush administration is in the midst of a war against terrorism, for whose successful completion it needs the continued support of the Muslim world. However, disinterested observers, not necessarily Muslim, have pointed out the glaring flaw in American policy: if it is terrorism America is after, why is the US indifferent to state terrorism by countries like Israel? If America wanted, it could have made Israel behave. That it chose not to is odd for two reasons: one, backing Israel is immoral, because Tel Aviv has usurped other people’s land in violation of international law; two, the US has failed to revive a peace process one of whose co-sponsors was America itself. Not only that: the accords were signed on the lawns of the White House. The world knows that America has enormous leeway with Israel and that if it really were serious it could rein in Sharon. Unless, the US administration puts pressure on Sharon and revives the peace process, the public opinion in the Muslim world would regard Powell’s statement as just one of those fake warnings Israel takes no notice of.
PARTS of Afghanistan are becoming increasingly dangerous for journalists following the fall of the Taliban, with large swathes in the south of the country falling into the hands of maurauding local warlords. One tragic reflection of this trend is the brutal killing of four journalists on the road linking Jalalabad to Kabul. The three men and a woman — a photographer and a cameraman working for a news agency and two war correspondents for leading European newspapers — were ambushed by armed gunmen on Monday and shot dead. Whether the motive was robbery or xenophobia is still unclear. A week earlier, three foreign journalists travelling with a group of Northern Alliance soldiers were waylaid and killed in northern Afghanistan, allegedly by members of the retreating Taliban militia. In the south, meanwhile, there have been reports of widespread looting on the Kabul-Jalalabad road which has become a happy hunting ground for all kinds of armed desperadoes. In recent days, at least two groups of journalists, travelling to Kabul to report on the post-Taliban situation in the city, have been ambushed and robbed. They were lucky to escape with their lives. In the past, a number of journalists have been captured by the Taliban inside Afghanistan and accused of spying. However, all of them were eventually released.
While war reporting has always been a perilous profession, the current anarchic post-Taliban situation in Afghanistan has made the job of journalists fraught with even greater risks. Making matters worse is the global demand for pictures and stories from battle zones and the growing competition between rival media groups for coverage. The result is that journalists are forced to take greater risks in what is an increasingly competitive field. Given this backdrop, it is incumbent on editors to prevent correspondents from taking undue risks while pursuing stories from war zones. There is another lesson one can draw from tragedies such as Monday’s killings. The vacuum created by the Taliban’s withdrawal from southern Afghanistan is likely to be filled by lawless and undisciplined warlords. If a political settlement is not urgently thrashed out, the bandits will have Afghanistan all for themselves.
KARACHI must surely come close to qualifying as the world’s car theft capital, if recent statistics are anything to go by. On Monday, according to figures from the police and the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), 56 vehicles — 28 cars and 28 motorcycles — were stolen. Earlier it was reported, using CPLC figures, that compared to last year around 16 per cent more vehicles were stolen this October. Unfortunately, instead of taking any substantial steps to tackle this very serious matter, the police seem more concerned in trying to disprove the magnitude of the problem. During the course of this year, a couple of measures were taken that included setting aside a police station for dealing exclusively with car thefts and establishing a specialized motorcycle-based anti-car lifting force. Going by these and other recent figures, it would be fair to say that both measures came to nought.
Such ad-hoc and half-hearted measures seldom work. The Sindh government should coordinate with its provincial counterparts because everyone knows that most stolen vehicles make it to the other provinces. Moreover, the scale on which all this happens would necessarily mean that corrupt officials in Sindh and other provinces — both in law-enforcement and in the provincial bureaucracies — are letting it happen, even encouraging it. Catching low-level operatives is hardly going to have any major impact. However, what could make a difference to the situation is to take the fight right to the brains behind the car-theft mafia. Given its intelligence network and internal mechanisms for monitoring its employees, and given that reports naming certain people in this racket have appeared in the media in the past, this is not something the government cannot do. What is important is that it have the will and the determination to take the real players in this huge racket head on.