| August 9, 2002 | Friday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 29,1423 |
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A dangerous propensity
A Freudian slip, perhaps
AFTER dragging its feet for over a year and incorporating a minimum number of changes, the federal cabinet has finally approved the Police Order 2002. The new law is now due to come into force from August 14. The National Reconstruction Bureau, which threw its weight behind the law’s controversial provisions — 350 in all — which the provinces, the interior ministry and the home departments strongly opposed, finally caved in and agreed to the provinces making their own amendments in the police order to suit their requirements. This means that like the district city governments earlier introduced in the four provincial metros, the police will now enjoy varying degrees of power and authority depending on how far a province allows them to do so according to the nature and peculiarities of its law and order problems.
The institution of public safety commissions at the district, provincial and federal levels to act as the watchdog of citizens’ civil rights under the new law will be a vital source of redress for public grievances against police excesses. Also, in a clear departure from the Police Act of 1861, the Police Order 2002 provides for the separation of the investigative functions of the police from the day-to-day policing of crime control and prevention. This by itself is a reform that was long overdue and would, hopefully, eliminate the use of third-degree methods, including physical torture for extracting confessions from suspects, commonly practised by the police in investigating crimes.
The government plans to spend some Rs 10 billion over a period of three to five years on better training and purchasing of modern equipment for the police force. Given the existing dire straits of the force, and the conditions under which the police live and operate, this seems too paltry a sum to make any meaningful impact. Police personnel and even officers comprising the force are generally underpaid and forced to live in conditions of hardship that inevitably promote corruption in their ranks. The existence of criminal elements within the force itself is another major problem, as apparent from frequent cases of extortion, custodial and extra-judicial killings, torture and even commission of rape by policemen. The objections raised by the provinces, the federal ministries and the rights groups to the unbridled empowerment of the police under the new law were mainly on these grounds. Thus, the proposed reforms and the money allocated to set things right should be proportionate to the multi-dimensional challenges faced by the force and society in general today.
The details of the Police Order 2002 as approved by the federal cabinet are not yet known. A fuller appreciation of the new dispensation will be possible only after these have been made. In the meantime, some thought should be given to establishing separate police forces for the big cities, as is the practice in most metropolitan areas elsewhere in the world. Big cities have their unique problems, including those of law and order, terrorism and unrest, that need specialized handling by a police force especially trained to cope with these.
THE US is rapidly moving towards a nuclear strategy so radical that it would have been unthinkable even at the height of the cold war. Policy-makers in Washington are contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against quite a few “rogue” countries, including those that do not possess nuclear weapons. According to this strategy, the US can now mount a nuclear attack against any country suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. It can also target underground bunkers that are able to withstand damage in a conventional attack. Countries can also be attacked in the event of “surprising military developments” — such as an attack on Israel by Iraq or by North Korea on South Korea. This is an alarming development that marks a radical departure from the traditional US position of not using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state unless it attacks the US in collaboration with a nuclear-armed nation. The strategy, leaked to the press in March, is now taking practical shape. The Bush administration is developing what are known as ‘mini-nukes,’ small devices which the US believes will be far more effective than conventional weapons without causing as much “collateral damage.”
However, most experts debunk such a claim, arguing that even the smallest nuclear explosion could kill large numbers of civilians and cause widespread radiation sickness, burns, blindness and genetic deformities. Alarmingly, talk of deploying small nuclear devices only serves to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons, making their use more thinkable. Behind this new doctrine lies the dangerous and growing unilateralism of the Bush administration. Acquiring small nuclear devices would allow Washington to withdraw from the CTBT, a treaty that it signed but has not ratified yet. The CTBT is the next target of the unilateralists, who have already forced the US to walk out of a number of key treaties. The hawks in Washington believe that international treaties prevent the US from using its massive power unencumbered by international law and opinion. The growing arrogance inherent in this line of thinking has paved the way for a strategy that allows a nuclear attack on any state that the US considers acting out of line. This can only make this volatile world a far more dangerous place.
THE existence of a crucial typographical error in the text of the Political Parties Order issued by the Chief Executive’s secretariat regarding the proclamation’s objectives vis-a-vis political parties could well be a classic example of a Freudian slip. According to a report, instead of “... reformation and regulation of political parties” the typo has changed the order’s intention to read “... deformation and regulation of political parties”. One would have thought that ordinances, especially of such nature, would be vetted over and over again for both language and content by the law ministry or perhaps the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) before being announced. So it is perhaps more than farcical to see that no one spotted this bloomer before making the order public.
Given our chequered history and past and current experiments with democracy, one cannot blame some of the politicians who have said that this error in fact betrays the real intentions of the military government. However, it would be fair to assume that this is a mistake and nothing more. At any rate, it might elicit a mild chuckle at the incompetence or carelessness of those who draft official documents. Unfortunately, this is not all that surprising given the general level of mediocrity on display all around us. One hopes that in future, and especially when the whole political system is to be ‘reformed’, officials handling the job will be more careful so that such Freudian howlers do not add to the growing public misgivings about what they are up to.
The government has clarified that the mistake was not in the gazette. The misprint was on the NRB website.