Bypassing the real issue

IT is obvious now that a Middle East peace conference in July is out of the question, thanks to the combined US-Israeli opposition to the idea. Ariel Sharon does not want it, so George Bush does not want it. This became clear after the recent visits to Washington by the Israeli prime minister and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. As always, Sharon had his way, President Mubarak returned frustrated because President Bush did not seem to agree with his scheme of priorities. Mubarak wanted the US president to lay down a timetable for convening a peace conference and announce a date by which a Palestinian state would come into being. Bush would do neither, because such a move would commit him to a revival of the peace process. Any new move for an Arab-Israeli settlement is anathema to the Israeli prime minister who is merely interested in the continued occupation of the West Bank and the building and expansion of Jewish settlements.

With this about-face, the real issue in the Middle East is being sidelined. The issue now being talked about by American leaders, including President Bush, is the capability of Yasser Arafat to deliver on the promises and commitments he makes and the purported need for a reform of the Palestinian Authority. The real issue, the world is told, is not the Palestinian people’s right to freedom, nor even the overriding legal and moral necessity for ending Israel’s 35-year illegal occupation of Palestine territories. Instead, the issue on which Americans agree with the Israelis is that the Palestinian Authority needs to be reformed and restructured to make it more credible.

Granted that the PA needs reform. But that is an internal Palestinian issue. What kind of reforms the PA needs and who would head it is for the Palestinian people — not outsiders — to decide. Arafat is the Palestinian people’s recognized leader who has waged a ceaseless struggle for the emancipation of his people from alien occupation. He may have made many mistakes — as perhaps anyone in his kind of complex political and military situation would. But the outstanding fact is that the world has recognized him as the Palestinian people’s undisputed leader and dealt with him as such. It was in that capacity that Arafat was present on the White House lawns in September 1993 to sign the peace accords and lead his people to independence. Now suddenly for the US to say that it would not negotiate with Arafat amounts to blindly endorsing the Sharon line. Besides, there is no knowing what kind of leadership will be there once Arafat is out of the picture. There could even be chaos, in which case peace and security in the Middle East will be at a far greater premium than now.

The real issue is not reform, nor Arafat’s supposed loosening grip on power and authority. The real issue is the freedom of the Palestinian people. In specific terms, this means reviving the peace process which three successive Israeli prime ministers, including Sharon, have sabotaged. This means going back to the Oslo accords, which, for all their shortcomings, provide a reasonable basis for a just and durable settlement between the Arabs and the Israelis.

Shocking beyond belief

THE killing of a blasphemy-case convict, Mohammad Yousaf, by a convicted prisoner in a Lahore jail on Tuesday is yet another reminder of how utter lawlessness has come to prevail in many of the country’s prisons. More astonishing is the fact that the Sipah-i-Sahaba activist who killed the fellow prisoner found it possible to keep a pistol with him inside the jail for the last four months as revealed by police sources to the media. This obvious breach of the jail rules should not be dismissed as a minor aberration and the jail authorities must be held to account for the fatal lapse. Indeed, a full-scale inquiry into the incident must be held to determine why and how the murder weapon remained undetected for so long.

That said, the killing in question is also a reflection on how the Blasphemy Law has added to the frequency of such acts of violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Once some one is accused of blasphemy under the existing law, he becomes a vermin or worse in the public eye regardless of the truth or otherwise of the allegation against him. Seldom is a person so accused given a fair chance to defend himself. The defence comes under immense public pressure with the mob mentality taking over the reins of justice and pressing for a conviction. There have been cases where the court acquitted certain defendants of the charge of blasphemy, and yet they were not able to escape the wrath of the self-styled defenders of faith. It is time the government reviewed the provisions of this law so as to put an end to its widespread abuse as an instrument of harassment, persecution and score-settling.

Before it gets any worse

THE storming of two factories in Gujranwala by residents fed up with the pollution caused by them shows the changing public attitude to the worsening problem of air and environmental contamination in the country and the lack of official action to tackle it. Hundreds of people, including women and children, broke into the two paper factories and dragged out the owner after he ignored earlier requests to control smoke emissions affecting people’s health in the neighbourhood. Leaving aside the legal and social aspects of such protests, the question to ask is whether such reactions can be treated as wholly unnatural or unexpected, particularly in the absence of concrete and visible steps necessary to prevent and control pollution.

While industrial pollution is thought to be more prevalent in cities, over the years it has gradually come to affect wide swathes of the countryside. The problem is especially acute in Punjab where small-scale manufacturing units — like the ones that incurred the wrath of the people in Gujranwala — are more widely dispersed. Not long ago the case of fluoride poisoning came to light in Manga Mandi just outside Lahore when it became known that hundreds of children had suffered bone deformities as a result of untreated effluent from a nearby factory contaminating their groundwater supply. The government should realize that anti-pollution measures are no longer just desirable but an urgent necessity for reasons of people’s health and well-being. This calls for the federal and provincial environmental protection agencies to strictly enforce existing legislation which provides for polluting factories to be set up at a safe distance from residential areas and for fines and other penalties to be imposed on units that persistently pollute.