| February 6, 2002 | Wednesday | Ziqa’ad 22, 1422 |
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The forgotten prisoners
Cattle resettlement
LET us face it: the Middle East peace process is dead, and it cannot be revived so long as Ariel Sharon is in power. The timing of the murder of five Palestinians in Gaza on Monday is significant. The Israeli prime minister is scheduled to meet President Bush in a couple of days, and the crime in Gaza is his message to Washington that Israel has no intention of talking peace. Not that Mr Bush is interested in reining in America’s protege and proconsul in the Middle East. Far from it. In fact, ever since the Republican administration came to power it has more or less given up a pro-active role in the region. Mr Bush, incidentally, is going to meet Mr Sharon for the third time, while he is yet to meet Mr Arafat even once.
All along the second intifada beginning in September 2000, the US has done nothing to rap Tel Aviv on the knuckles for its hard-line policy that has so far resulted in the death of more than a thousand people, mostly Palestinians. Also, one hears no more of the Mitchell Commission’s report or the Tenet plan which had visualized a period of “one hundred per cent peace” followed by a cooling-off period before negotiations would begin. Mr Sharon never accepted that Mr Arafat had ensured a degree of peace by reining in the Palestinian militants. At the moment, too, Tel Aviv and Washington continue to blame the PA chairman for violence, forgetting that Mr Arafat is virtually under house arrest in Ramallah and is not in a position to control the extremists.
One result of Washington’s blanket support for Mr Sharon is a further hardening of his policies. Recently, he unabashedly expressed his regret for not having murdered Mr Arafat in Lebanon in 1982. Now there are reports that the Israeli military is planning an invasion of the West Bank. The aim obviously is not just the liquidation of Mr Arafat and the Palestinian Authority leadership, but the final renunciation of the Oslo peace accords. While the world possibly will not allow Mr Sharon to annex the West Bank, he could go in for the territory’s indefinite occupation, the purpose being to alter its demographic character. Reportedly, Israel wants a million more Jewish immigrants to be settled there. At present, there are 140 Jewish settlements in the West Bank with a population of 400,000. Adding a million to them would alter the West Bank’s Arab-Islamic character — in clear violation of the UN resolutions on Palestine.
Clearly, Mr Sharon feels emboldened by the unqualified support he gets from the US. For Washington, too, rights and wrongs do not matter when it comes to Israel. While one hears so much rhetoric from American leaders about freedom and human rights, they seal their lips on a mention of freedom and human rights for the persecuted Palestinians. What matters to them is electoral politics and its manipulation by the Israeli lobby. Invariably, a re-election is more important for the American president than the morality of the Arab-Israeli issue. But it would be the height of unwisdom for President Bush to underestimate the immediate and longer-term implications of leaving Mr Sharon free to pursue his policy of brutal suppression of the Palestinians in the Middle East.
DISCLOSURES by a Malakand resident released from a jail in Northern Afghanistan after paying his captors ransom speak of the plight of Pakistani prisoners in that country. This follows revelations last week by a US-based rights groups, Physicians for Human Rights, that “many, many, many” prisoners had died. The group also said that it had documentary evidence showing starving, malnourished men languishing in a squalid jail with no protection against the harsh Afghan winter. A Harvard University professor who has visited the jail corroborated this saying that up to 3,500 men were crammed inside it and that dysentery and jaundice were rampant. She also said that an increase from three dollars to six dollars a day being spent on the treatment and food of the prisoners could mean the difference between life and death for the inmates.
The controversy surrounding the treatment and classification of 158 ‘detainees’ at Camp X-ray at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has perhaps diverted the world’s attention from the plight of other prisoners still being held in northern Afghanistan, especially in places like Shebargan. Much has been said and written on the thousands of Pakistanis who were misled and taken to northern Afghanistan by self-styled messiahs and religious leaders. A few hundred of these volunteers have managed to come back but only after paying, in most cases, hefty ransoms to their Afghan captors. Many, however, were either killed or remain in prison.
America has said of late that it intended to hand over some of these prisoners to Pakistan provided they had no links to Al Qaeda. However, conflicting statements by senior Afghan officials, including one who said that he would like to make an example of the Pakistanis, have not helped clear the confusion. Two things need to be done by Kabul and its allies. The conditions in which all prisoners — whether or not they happen to be members of Al Qaeda — are being kept must be improved so that no further deaths occur. Also, all Pakistan prisoners being held in Afghanistan for one reason or another must be repatriated without unnecessary delay.
FAILURE of the municipal authorities to impose their writ over dairy cattle owners in Rawalpindi city has led to a long-drawn tussle between them over the re-settling of cattle owners and their herds on the outskirts of the city. Last year, the former Rawalpindi Municipal Corporation had failed to shift the buffaloes, said to number at least 20,000, even after the cattle owners lost their case in the Lahore High Court. Most of the animals were soon brought back into Rawalpindi city and, worse still, some of them even strayed into neighbouring Islamabad. It remains to be seen now whether the new Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) will be more successful than its predecessor in persuading the cattle owners to shift their animals after their case was rejected by the Supreme Court this time.
No doubt the cattle owners and their herd need to be re-settled. That their presence within the populated areas of Rawalpindi city has been posing serious health and environmental problems is well known. Re-settlement, however, is a tricky operation, especially when those to be shifted are not treated with the sensitivity and respect that they deserve. Success, or failure again, in the effort to re-settle depends a great deal on the attitude of the TMA and the Rawalpindi district administration. For smooth re-settlement, proper transport arrangements should be made for the cattle owners to shift their animals and, more importantly, proper facilities for the cattle owners and their animals in the new sites, like easy access to water, veterinary hospital and link road. This process of shifting should serve as a test case for the newly elected local government in proving its ability to solve problems of the people.