| December 1, 2001 | Saturday | Ramazan 15, 1422 |
Reporting from the war zone: TV REVIEW
RAWALPINDI-born Muniruddin Ahmad went to Germany after graduating from the Punjab and obtained a DPhil from the Hamburg University. In 1960, he joined the German Orient Institut in the same city as a research scholar. Later, he was appointed a professor of Islamic history at Hamburg University from where he retired in 1999. He continues to live in that country.
He is the author and translator of several books including two research works in English and Persian and one on Pakistani literature in German. He also writes short stories in Urdu and has four published collections to date, including Zard Sitara, Shajar-i-Mamnua and Bint-i-Haram. His stories are based on life in Germany. In weaving a story he follows the German pattern which is different from what we have copied from English. In 1966, Maqsood Hasni wrote a full book to make a critical appraisal of Muniruddin Ahmad’s stories.
The Urdu translation done by Muniruddin Ahmad of Peter Bichsel’s German short stories was published a long time ago by Siddiqa Begum in her monthly Adab-i-Latif. She has now devoted a full issue of her magazine to Urdu translations of Erich Fried’s poems who died in 1988. He was a personal friend of Muniruddin Ahmad’s and a disciple of the famous German dramatist and poet, Bertolt Brecht (d. 1956), who sought to develop a Marxist ‘epic theatre’. Although living in England, Fried had the courage to condemn the ills prevalent in the Western system and its harmful effects on the world around. He did not even spare the high-ups of his native government. He served on the staff of the BBC for broadcast to East Germany and gradually developed a liking for socialism. This led to his writing a book on Vietnam which was published in 1966. It was welcomed by the students of German universities who were leading an anti-establishment movement. Those days his poems against the US were on the lips of everyone.
To give a feel of Erich Fried’s poetry, I reproduce an English translation of one of his poems:
The democracy Where no one is allowed to sayit is not true democracy Can it be worthy of being called a democracy
It may sound strange, but Fried’s work has not been translated into English and probably remains unknown to non-Germans. I understand that Fried has left behind 25 volumes. The Urdu translations by Muniruddin Ahmad, are in seven volumes. It was in 1995 that the Adab-i-Latif selected 100 poems out of these translations and published them in book form under the title, Jeevan Sa‘ey. Since Siddiqa Begum thinks that the book did not reach all those who wanted it, she has thought it fit to reproduce the poems in an issue of her magazine instead of producing a second edition of Jeevan Sa‘ey.
ONE good thing I have noted about the monthly, Adab Dost, edited by A G Josh is the regularity of its publication. The November issue reached me just as the calendar showed me the advent of the new month. Full of good reading material, the issue is quite informative. For one, it has informed me that my friend Absar Abdul Ali has moved over to the United States. He has stated this in a letter published in the issue as also a poem which shows that he is already feeling homesick. What else can one deduce from the following verse:
Yeh jo charon taraf bheer hi bheer heh
Is mein koi nahin heh kisi ke liye
It is the month of Ramazan, no doubt, but AG Josh seems to have a strange type of thirst. Says he:
Jaam chhor aiy saqia ab to surahi la idhar
Jaam se bhi ma-siva kuch tishnagi heh aajkal
The poetry section carries some other choice poems as well, especially those by Karamat Bukhari and Zahida Siddiqi whom I have seen on the pages of this magazine for the first time.
The prose section carries three good articles. One is by Dr Khwaja Zakariya about the late Aftab Naqvi, well known for his na‘ats, who was unfortunately shot dead by a religious fanatic. Another is by Anwaar Feroz, about the late Qateel Shifai and the third by Aizaz Ahmad Azar, about the almost forgotten Tanvir Naqvi who has not yet been surpassed by any film song writer.
ONE of the editors of the Government College, Lahore, magazine, Ravi, has reacted, rather angrily, to the comment I made about that publication in my last column (Nov 24). Although he has been editing the Urdu/Punjabi section of the magazine, he has written to me in English.
In my column, I had objected (not exactly) to the articles carried in the magazine by some of those who were not even old students of the college. The young editor, in his letter says, that it is a “Xenophobic approach” on my part. I may clarify that I am not a victim of Xenophobia as all the outsiders appearing in his magazine have always been appreciated by me for their literary prowess, both orally and in writing. All that irked me was that their appearance in a college magazine gave it the look of a non-college magazine. Rather than the names of acknowledged writers under the articles I would have liked to see the bylines of Ist, IInd, IIIrd, and IVth year students.
A LOT of people must be wondering why there are no Pakistani correspondents reporting from Kabul, Kandahar or Mazar-i-Sharif, especially given that they would have a language advantage and would probably know the area and background better than foreign correspondents. So while the CNN, the BBC, Fox and Al Jazeera (the main news channels available in Pakistan), and British and American papers all have people reporting from Afghanistan you will hardly find any Pakistani media source which has its people there.
The reasons are quite a few. One is that it’s quite expensive to get life insurance for journalists who want to report from a war zone and news organizations can always make that as an excuse. The other, and probably more plausible in this case, is that with the Northern Alliance seeing its fortunes rising, being a Pakistani journalist in Kabul might end up attracting a lot of hostility.
Having said that, the irony that most Pakistani news organizations do not have correspondents in Afghanistan should not be lost especially when most Pakistanis also feel - and perhaps with some justification - that most of the reporting coming out of Afghanistan, or even Pakistan for that matter, is biased, inaccurate, too sensational and so on. Pakistani newspapers have carried stories by their correspondents saying that there is only so much that the media can report, and because competition is so fierce, foreign correspondents will sometimes pass off anything they can get their hands on as a news story. Quite understandably, this tendency to pass off unreliable information gained perhaps from hearsay or rumour, to millions of viewers abroad angers many Pakistanis, including the government.
The most recent example is of what happened at Kunduz and the Qala-i-Jangi in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Americans, the British and the Northern Alliance say that the prisoners were killed when they revolted. The question is then how did they manage to get the weapons to stage this revolt? The answer coming up in most news dispatches is that they were smuggled in or stolen from guards. But how could they be smuggled in and how exactly were the guards disarmed? Isn’t this all a bit too convenient for the Northern Alliance and the Americans? Surely, Gen Abdur Rashid Dostum’s troops - they were apparently in charge of the prisoners - have been fighting long enough to know just how to disarm a large group of prisoners. Then, there are reports that once the ‘revolt’ began, US aeroplanes were called in and a total of 30 bombing runs were carried out on the fort where the prisoners were holed up. Thirty bombing runs on a single building! It shouldn’t be surprising that no American or British news organizations have raised issue with this clearly disproportionate response from the Americans. Apparently, whatever the Pentagon says in its daily briefings is being bought hook, line and sinker. What happened at Kunduz and Mazar massacre should also be seen in the context of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s recent remarks insinuating that the US would hardly be expected to let go so many Al Qaeda or hardened Taliban fighters. —OMAR R QURESHI