| December 20, 2002 | Friday | Shawwal 15, 1423 |
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Power relief
Panchayat ‘justice’ again
CONTROVERSY seems to surround the edited version of the Iraqi weapons dossier. The original document consisted of 12,000 pages. Divided into five binders, the Iraqi declaration was snatched away by the US before the other members of the UN Security Council could have a look at it. They later got copies of it. Now all the permanent and rotating members have received an abridged and edited version consisting of 3,500 pages. It should obviously take some time for a close study of the original dossier and, later, to see if the edited version truthfully conforms to the original document. However, diplomats who would not want to be identified have cast doubts on the 709-page edited version. For instance, on Iraq’s missile programmes it seems to have omitted awkward facts: it does contain names of Swiss and German firms that helped the Iraqi military, but no American company has been mentioned. There were times when President Saddam Hussein was in Washington’s good books — like when he attacked Iran with full American encouragement and backing. US firms were then doing roaring business with Iraq in sensitive technology, but the abridged version — as claimed by diplomats — does not contain any American names. They think that to avoid accusations of collusion in the past in sensitive areas of security and weaponization, the names of some foreign companies and individuals, including Iraqis, have been carefully excluded. The Iraqi declaration also denies that Baghdad possesses any weapons of mass destruction. However, the edited version does not contain this vital point. This makes one wonder whether the Iraqi declaration as circulated to the Security Council members has merely been edited for clarity’s sake or doctored. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself said that “the actual analysis” will take some time.
The truth seems to be that America has already made up its mind to attack Iraq. In fact, if China, France and Russia had not stood in the way, the Security Council might have given Washington some form of war authorization. Now, press reports say that the Bush administration thinks that the Iraqi declaration is in violation of UN Resolution 1441. This means that the US will go to the UN Council again, only to accuse Baghdad of being in “material breach” of the UN resolution and demand a war authorization. All indications are that the Bush administration will this time get what it wants. If a rejection of the Iraqi declaration were to be the casus belli, one wonders what was the point of sending UN monitors to Iraq. Resolution 1441 sent the inspectors to Iraq with enhanced powers and asked Baghdad to provide unhindered access to every site the monitors wanted to inspect. As for the time schedule, it asked the UN inspectors to begin their work within 45 days of the passage of the resolution (on Nov 8) and then report back to the Council in 60 days that time-frame is not over yet, but the Bush administration is beginning to prepare for war. This hawkish and unilateral stance is in keeping with the contempt which the Republican administration has of late been showing for the UN. Hans Blix, chief of Unmovic, is scheduled to give an initial report to the Security Council, but a final report is nowhere on the cards yet. How then can the American government prejudge the issue? Faced with this situation, it is for the Security Council and the world community at large to stand firm by their own rules and principles or become helpless drum-beaters of American “unilateralism”.
THE cut in electricity tariff of 12 paisa per unit which was announced a few days ago as part of a special relief package by the new government has been effected under the automatic fuel adjustment formula that has been long in operation. The formalization of the government’s decision has been announced by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra), which has said the reduction will range from 12 paisa to 19 paisa per unit. It comes as a consequence of a decline in price of furnace oil during the last quarter up to December 15. The cut could have been higher, it is pointed out, if there was no spurt in furnace oil price on the last day of the second week of December. Nepra has said that for domestic consumers, the cut will be 12 paisa per unit, excluding lifeline consumers’ who neither benefit from decreases nor suffer from increases. Other categories of consumers have received higher relief — industrial and bulk consumers of 16 paisa per unit and commercial consumers of 19 paisa per unit.
Making this normal cut part of what was billed as a special relief package had caused it to be seen as a mere populist gimmick and drawn adverse comments about ad-hocism in economic matters, and that too in respect of utilities, which are financially in a bad shape. Now Nepra has removed the confusion and the relief is shown to be economically viable. There is certainly much scope for further cuts in the electricity tariff which Water and Power Minister Aftab Sherpao seems determined to do. If line losses, which are very high, are reduced and arrears are recovered, the two utilities — Wapda and the KESC — would certainly be in a position to bring down the tariff substantially and not as token gestures.
THIS time it is Mumtaz Mai, mother of four from a Mailsi village, who becomes the latest victim of antediluvian panchayat justice. Accused of adultery, she was subjected to public humiliation carried out under orders from the village panchayat in the hideous form of shaving off of her head and eyebrows. Not only that, in a bid to grant ‘relief’ to her husband and to humiliate her co-accused, Ghulam Mustafa, Mumtaz Mai’s four-year-old son was married off to Ghulam Mustafa’s three-year-old daughter, a maulvi solemnizing the minors’ illegal nikah. The incident again underlines how tribal customs and practices have come to dominate the lives and morals of large sections of the rural populace in total supercession of the law and many of the accepted norms and values. The police, for their part, conveniently arrived on the scene after the panchayat’s ruling had been carried out in full, and booked Mumtaz Mai and Ghulam Mustafa under the Hudood Ordinances.
This is not the first time a parallel justice system having no legal sanction asserted itself with complete impunity, and in defiance of the writ of the state. In the past six months, there have been at least four such cases where rural panchayats and village priests have dispensed different variants of rough justice in utter disregard of the law of the land. The Meerwala Jatoi gang-rape case, the wani case in Mianwali district where minor girls were offered in forced marriages as a recompense to the ‘aggrieved’ party, and the Chak Jhumra village case where a young man was lynched, are other recent examples of different forms of primal justice being at work. That this parallel system is allowed to exist and operate in violation of all norms of civil society is a shocking commentary on how the administration has taken a back seat in large parts of the country’s rural and tribal hinterland. It is time the government put a law in place, whereby seeking redress or dispensing ‘justice’ through all informal channels, which are in total derogation of the fundamental rights of the citizens, is made a punishable offence. Until that happens, the self-appointed dispensers of justice, like Mumtaz Mai’s tormentors, must be brought to book and held answerable.