| February 28, 2002 | Thursday | Zilhaj 15, 1422 |
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Massacre in Rawalpindi
Pentagon gets it right
EVEN though Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace plan for Palestine has not yet been officially confirmed, it is understandably getting wide diplomatic attention and support from western and Arab quarters. Positive reaction has come from Presidents George Bush and Yasser Arafat, while Israeli Defence Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer found “new elements it.” Officially, Sharon himself has not reacted to the plan. But European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Sharon was prepared to meet anyone from Saudi Arabia “formally, informally, publicly, discreetly.”
Revealed first by the New York Times on Feb 17, the Abdullah plan envisages Israel’s full withdrawal to its 1967 borders in exchange for its recognition by the Arab world. The prince was himself to spell out his plan in a speech at next month’s Arab summit in Beirut but shelved it because of Ariel Sharon’s hard-line policies. However, the prince seemed to be confirming the NYT story by saying he was still open to reviving it. So far, Saudi Arabia has taken a hard line against Israel’s recognition by Arab states. For instance, Riyadh refused to attend an Islamic summit conference in Doha in Nov 2000 unless Qatar closed the Israeli trade office there. That Riyadh should now come up with this proposal by a man who virtually runs the country because of King Fahd’s bad health shows the change in Saudi thinking.
Of the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war, it has withdrawn only from the Sinai as part of the Camp David accord in exchange for full diplomatic relations with Egypt. It has also withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, though Israeli presence is very much there in the form of the settlements. In the West Bank it has made a mockery of the Oslo accords. The Golan Heights, of course, remain under full Israeli occupation, with the local Arab population having been wiped out and replaced by Jewish settlers. Syria, incidentally, has not reacted to the Abdullah plan at all.
The details of the Saudi proposal are not known. But the Jewish settlements will present a hurdle in its acceptance by Israel. There are 140 settlements with a population of 400,000, and they continue to expand. Will the lunatic fringe in Israel agree to withdraw from a land whose usurpation it considers its divine right? More important is the question of the end of the Palestinian diaspora and the return of the Arabs to their homeland. Such a move will obviously conflict with Israel’s determined bid, spread over decades, to “create facts” and turn entire Palestine, as it existed at the time of the Balfour Declaration, into a Jewish majority area.
Given the fate of several such plans in the past, and the shreds to which Israel has reduced the Oslo accord, one should keep one’s fingers crossed. Nevertheless, the plan is a bold one, coming perhaps from the most important Arab country. If implemented in its entirety, Israel stands to gain more than the Arabs. By withdrawing from the occupied territories, Israel has the opportunity to live as a law-abiding state at peace with its neighbours instead of being a state surviving through sheer brutality and terror. For the Palestinians, of course, the Abdullah plan amounts to throwing what the Saudi daily Al Madinah called “a lifebuoy”.
THE cold-blooded murder of 10 worshippers at a Rawalpindi mosque on Tuesday is a terrible reminder that the forces of religious extremism and bigotry are still capable of shedding blood, despite the current crackdown against them. The gunmen behind the attack were brazen enough to ride undisguised to the scene of the crime on a motorcycle. As one of the men stood guard at the entrance, his two accomplices entered the prayer chamber, locked the door of the mosque behind them and opened fire on those offering their maghrib prayers. The scene of the massacre was a Shia mosque, strongly suggesting that the incident was motivated by sectarian hatred. Barring a few isolated cases of sectarian killings in Karachi, this was the first major incident of this nature since President Pervez Musharraf’s seminal speech of Jan 12, in which he had strongly denounced religious extremism and announced a ban on five militant organizations, including two sectarian groups, the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan and Tehrik-i-Jafria Pakistan. Earlier, the government had banned two other sectarian organizations, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Sipah-i-Muhammad, following the murder of a highly respected oil company executive in Karachi. On January 12, Musharraf had minced no words in condemning such extremists and had cited the murder of innocent people in mosques as one of the reasons for the crackdown.
As the Rawalpindi incident tragically shows, the government has a long way to go before it can tame sectarian terrorists. For one, it suggests that banning extremist organizations does not, by itself, prevent them from committing acts of terror. The incident also suggests that the extremists may have simply been biding their time in the face of the current crackdown and are still capable of striking at will where and when they choose. There is obviously a need for greater security and vigilance at sensitive places of worship and for more effective intelligence gathering. Incidents of this nature reflect poorly on the performance of the various intelligence agencies in the field which have miserably failed to penetrate extremist organizations and pre-empt such deadly attacks.
THE US administration has rightly shelved a basically immoral plan that would have tried to influence international opinion on the war against terrorism by planting, if necessary, false and misleading stories. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks on Tuesday that the “Office of Strategic Influence” — created in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks — would be closed down is a sign that for once the Pentagon has got it right. However, part of the credit must go to the relentless criticism the plan received in the media, including extensive debate on the possibilities of this misinformation finding its way into the American media through foreign wire services. The plan was also deemed illegal by media watchdogs, who said that it would violate a US law forbidding the Pentagon and the CIA from carrying out propaganda activities inside America.
Manipulation and covering up critical information, and obfuscating the