| November 22, 2001 | Thursday | Ramazan 6, 1422 |
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Kabul TV back on air
Playing with fire
FINALLY, a venue has been selected for talks among Afghan factions to move towards giving Afghanistan a post-Taliban government. The confirmation of the venue and date has come from both the UN and Germany, the host. After talking to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer confirmed that the talks will begin in Berlin on Monday. That the Northern Alliance will be there at Berlin was confirmed by Francesc Vendrell, the UN’s special representative. He told a news conference in Kabul that the NA leadership had accepted Kofi Annan’s invitation to be there at Berlin. This removes one of the major hurdles in the way of holding an all-Afghan moot.
The big question that now confronts the Berlin conference is that of Pakhtoon representation. So much has happened in Afghanistan: the Taliban regime has all but disappeared, the Northern Alliance controls most of the country, and negotiations are afoot for securing the surrender of the Taliban’s pockets of resistance in Kunduz and Kandahar. But there is no sign yet of any Pakhtoon group or groups emerging as authentic representatives of Afghanistan’s Pakhtoon community. While defections from the Taliban ranks have indeed taken place, those defecting have not really played a major part in the Taliban’s defeat, nor are they so well known as to command international recognition. Ex-commander Abdul Haq went too prematurely into Afghanistan and was hanged by the Taliban. The Peshawar moot called by Syed Ahmad Gilani was a flop, because he failed even to get a representative from Zahir Shah to attend it. That leaves us only with Hamid Karzai, who is at the moment inside Afghanistan and negotiating the Taliban’s surrender in Kandahar. Also operating on their own are various local chieftains without any specific agendas. What the situation on the ground will be when the Taliban surrender in Kandahar no one can really tell. There is every possibility that, in the absence of any interim agreement among the non-Taliban Pakhtoon elements, areas not controlled by the Northern Alliance could plunge into anarchy.
It now remains to be seen whether all Pakhtoon tribal chiefs will accept Zahir Shah as the future head of state. On Monday, Vendrell confirmed that a representative of the former monarch will be attending the Berlin conference. While no Pakhtoon groups have opposed Zahir Shah as head of the future set-up, no one has been enthusiastic either. Nevertheless, all said and done, Zahir Shah still remains the most well-recognized Pakhtoon figure who symbolizes the unity of Afghanistan. Surprisingly, Pakistan, which does not have a very fond memory of the ex-king, has shown a willingness to accept him as Afghan head. The big question is whether the Northern Alliance will accept him.
Since Zahir Shah’s overthrow, Afghanistan has been a republic. Whether all Pakhtoon leaders and the Northern Alliance will agree to a touch of the royalty in the post-Taliban dispensation is indeed a moot point. The situation demands a unified Pakhtoon stand at Berlin. As Afghanistan’s largest community, the Pakhtoons will carry weight only if they agree among themselves. Without their unity it is unlikely that the Berlin conference will agree on the composition of a representative provisional council that will rule for two years before a final settlement is in place.
SOME emotive signs of social change are emerging from Afghan cities following the fall of the Taliban regime. Images of Afghan men dancing in the streets of Herat were flashed around the world on the international media, courtesy Kabul TV, which went back on air after a closure of five years. One of Kabul’s 17 movie theatres that had been forced to close shop by the Taliban in 1996 also opened its doors to an audience comprising hundreds of youths. On the Afghan state television, female newscasters appeared wearing the traditional headscarf and dress conforming to the cultural norms of a Muslim society. Which made one wonder why the Taliban had banned the television in the first place. There has been no public display of profanity in Afghanistan since the lifting of the ban on TV, radio and cinema, and on women’s right to work or be seen at public places — rights that women enjoy across the Muslim world.
TV and radio are not banned even in a country like Saudi Arabia, where the Shari’a is the supreme law of the land. Clearly, the Taliban’s obsessive moral policing of the Afghan people had less to do with enforcing the precepts of Islam and more with their ignorance of the spirit behind these precepts. In fact, it seemed the Taliban saw and practised religion more as a tool of political oppression, subscribing to a minoritarian narrow interpretation that could only be sanctified by primordial tribal customs rather than by any informed religious scholarship. Thus, the lifting of these senseless restrictions in the Northern Alliance-controlled territories is a welcome step. However, some western media commentators, who continue to complain that the Afghan women are not yet fully ‘liberated’, need to be circumspect: Afghan women will remain Afghan and will refuse to fit the cultural and political moulds cast for them by foreigners.
IT is a miracle that no one was injured in the blaze on Tuesday in a six-storey building in Karachi’s central commercial district of Saddar. Around 175 shops were completely or partially burnt, when a fire broke out in a room containing the building’s electricity meters. Several thousand people who either work in this building or own shops — mostly selling cloth — will have to bear considerable losses. Many of those affected are women who would work on daily wages in the garments shops. Like thousands of other structures in the city, this one too is a good example of how not to construct and maintain a commercial building. According to reports, shop owners whose property was gutted have blamed the KESC for ignoring the poor craftsmanship that went into wiring and the placements of meters. Obviously, basic rules and standards governing electrification in such buildings were ignored.
The Karachi Building Control Authority (KBCA) has also been rightly accused of not doing its job. Over the years, and with a fair amount of justification, the KBCA has become yet another symbol of the civic agencies’ inability to enforce rules and regulations and drive some sense into Karachi’s maddening pace of commercial growth. Some of the violations in the case of this building were obvious and would have been detected had a proper inspection been conducted. Having said that, it would be unfair to place the entire blame on the regulatory agencies. After all, no one forced the businesses to open shop in a building that everyone knew contained various building code violations and where the electricity meters were placed in such a way that it was a complete fire hazard. Unfortunately, such buildings are the norm in Karachi, and indeed in other urban centres. Unless the regulatory bodies do their job properly — and a pre-requisite for this is a crackdown on official corruption — incidents like this will continue to happen.