ME’s macabre drama

THE macabre drama continues to be played out. Fifteen people, most of them non-Israelis, were killed in a suicide bomb attack at an Israeli-owned tourist hotel in Mombassa, Kenya, on Thursday. On the same day, six Israeli civilians, among those queuing up to vote for Likud elections, were shot dead in an attack on the party’s headquarters in north Israel. Mercifully, two missiles fired at an Israeli charter plane taking off from Mombassa missed their target: it had 261 passengers on board. A hitherto unknown group calling itself the Army of Palestine has claimed authorship of the apparently coordinated attacks, which came on the eve of Friday’s observance of the International Day for Solidarity with Palestine. But authorities in Beirut, where the group says it is based, have dismissed the claim, saying it is a fictional organization. The German defence minister has said he has reason to believe that Al Qaeda was involved. A leading Palestine Authority official has also discounted the possibility of a Palestinian hand in the attack in Kenya.

Irrespective of the identity of the perpetrators, the attacks inevitably focus attention on the unending cycle of violence in the Middle East and again raise the question as to whether the world is prepared to permit Israel, armed with sophisticated weaponry, provided mainly by the United States, to persist in wiping out Palestine and Palestinians from the face of the earth? It was Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, who had said in 1970 that there were no Palestinians; they did not exist. The same contempt continues to mark Israeli attitudes three decades later. Without arms and an army, powerless Palestinians blow themselves up to prove that they exist. When this happens, it is described as terrorism. When Israel attacks with planes and tanks, it is called acting in self-defence. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, planned and executed by Ariel Sharon, had killed more than 15,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians. Is that event ever recalled when Mr Sharon is feted at the White House? Israel feels even more bloated with self-importance now as the US readies plans to invade Iraq.

The killing of innocent people — whether Israelis or Palestinians or others — unwittingly caught up in the mayhem, is morally indefensible and politically self-defeating. But the blood being spilled over the Middle East cries out for the West to abandon its double standards. It cannot condone Israel’s state terrorism and Zionism’s oppressive colonial practices and condemn the Palestinian resistance’s resort to violence to protest against their dispossession and deprivation. Israel is at the root of the terrorism that haunts countries from east to west and north to south. The international community must realize the threat of greater destabilization if Israel is not forced to learn to live in peace and justice with its Palestinian and Arab neighbours. The old Oslo-type models have been rendered useless by Israeli refusal to countenance even a semblance of independent Palestinian rights. A new initiative is needed — and urgently — in view of the US intentions with regard to Iraq, which promise only further disorder. The ‘quartet’ of the UN, the US, the European Union and Russia must force Israel to dismantle its illegal settlements and accept a Palestinian state with safe and secure borders.

Tackling rural migration

ACCORDING to a recently released report by the Planning Division, one-third of the country’s population now lives in the cities. Titled the ‘Human Condition Report 2002’, the document says that Pakistan’s urban population has seen a growth of 605 per cent as compared to the rural population which has seen a growth of 217 per cent from 1951, when the first national census was held, to 1998, the year the last census took place. There are now 23 cities in Pakistan with a population exceeding 200,000, while seven cities have a population of over one million each. The annual population growth rate is 3.5 per cent for urban and 2.6 per cent for rural areas. The trend shows that there is a rush towards the cities because of an uneven development pattern that has been the rule over the past five decades.

Except for a number of areas which the planners now call “ribbons of development” along the national highways, there has been little trickling down of modernization that has taken place in recent years to the rural areas. Mechanized farming from the 1960s onwards has reduced the agricultural work force, and the absence of any significant industrial development in rural areas has been a key factor in the migration of rural population to the cities. This in turn has given rise to a number of problems related primarily to the heightened pace of urban growth. Inadequate civic amenities, worsening law and order, acute shortage of housing and educational and health facilities and paucity of employment opportunities for the endless streams of rural migrants coming to urban centres in search of a livelihood, are some of the challenges our cities face today.

Obviously, the government alone cannot provide instant solutions to these multi-dimensional problems. It will have to work closely with the private sector, which is increasingly becoming a major stakeholder in the socio-economic development of the country. It is therefore important for policymakers to involve the private sector when they sit down to deliberate on evolving long-term development strategies for the rural and urban sectors instead of working in a traditional bureaucratic way, and in isolation. Of particular importance is the need to develop a comprehensive programme of rural uplift, including the provision for setting up cottage and medium-size industries, aimed at creating jobs for the growing number of rural unemployed.

Textbook distortions

ONE could not agree more with what a prominent academic said to an audience at the National College of Art in Lahore the other day. He said that many of our school textbooks are full of hatred and contain material that breeds intolerance. Hence, it is no wonder that society is increasingly becoming narrow-minded and prejudiced, and people are not willing even to listen to a viewpoint or philosophy different from their own. The academic also pointed out that the separate systems of Urdu- and English-medium education and the wide divergence between state-owned and private institutions was leading to a situation where social divisions were being deepened. This in turn is reflected in political attitudes: one stream is taught a curriculum that promotes questioning and the other is conditioned to a narrow-minded and jingoistic approach.

Pakistan Studies textbooks used by matric students are replete with propaganda that tells students to view Hindus as untrustworthy and enemies, quite conveniently forgetting the fact that over a million Hindus are bona fide Pakistani citizens. Many other examples abound, and even the political history of Pakistan is presented in a distorted manner that papers over the effects of long periods of dictatorial rule in the country. If education is meant to open minds, the textbooks in use in Urdu-medium schools particularly have exactly the opposite effect on impressionable young minds. A merger of the Urdu- and English-medium systems may not be an immediate practical proposition, but textbooks prescribed for the two systems of education can surely be modified so that they can help in laying the foundations of rational thinking and a humane outlook among our youth.