| April 14, 2003 | Monday | Safar 11, 1424 |
Amrika’s greatest hate machine
Looters in Gujarat, New York were also repressed citizens?
Set on a sacred mission
The wretched of the earth
INTENSE jockeying is going on within the PML-Q as well as among the various other smaller components of the ruling alliance for the 20 or so ministerial posts that are expected to be filled in the next phase of cabinet expansion.
Those who do not expect to get a cabinet post are being seen lobbying for the posts of parliamentary secretaries. Interviews of the decision makers are also being sought by many aspirants for the top slots available as well in various autonomous bodies, boards and corporations. All these jobs carry attractive perks and privileges.
Those having the right political clout are said to have already received the nod of approval from you-know-who. But then, final decisions in this regard are said to have been put on hold until after the obligatory joint sitting of the two houses. It is feared that if the jobs are distributed before the event, those among the ruling alliance who fail to get any would rebel and seriously undermine the government’s on-going efforts to frustrate the opposition’s plans to disrupt the joint session. Already people are talking about ‘like-minded’ PML-Q parliamentarians getting together to form a ‘forward bloc’ to frustrate the attempts of the Jat bradari to deny non-Jats a share in power and pelf.
Names of at least about 100 job aspirants from among the ruling alliance parliamentarians and friends and relatives of the rulers are floating around. But to name names at this point would be too risky because in view of the mercurial nature of the state of our politics one cannot rule out the possibility of the criteria for selection undergoing drastic changes between now and the time the list is finally approved.
However, it is becoming ever more difficult to avoid mentioning the name of Khawaja Tariq Rahim when one is discussing positions of power and privilege to be filled during the next phase of cabinet expansion. A close friend of prime minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, Tariq is said to have delivered the Patriots on a platter to the ruling alliance when it was in dire need of 10 or so additional votes to win the race for government formation. For this reason alone the government is said to be beholden to him and would like to give him a coveted job of his liking. But the ‘special’ job that he is seeking is said to have brought him in direct conflict with another ‘special’ man with the two joining in an undeclared war against each other.
There is another undeclared war going on within the government between foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri and information minister Shiekh Rashid. In fact the Shiekh of Rawalpindi is seemingly even trespassing the turf of defence minister Rao Sikander Iqbal as well.
Rashid has started verbalizing at a shrill pitch Pakistan’s foreign and defence policies on a daily basis. He does not seem to be doing this on his own. The president and the prime minister both seem to have given him the green signal to do what he is doing. He has been photographed calling on the president and the prime minister a couple of times in the last one month or so. Neither of them has held such one-to-one meetings with either the foreign minister or the defence minister even once in the immediate past.
While Rao Sikander does not seem to mind enough to protest against Shiekh Rashid’s forays into his area of operation, Kasuri’s silence on the matter appears rather ominous. When he was made the foreign minister one took it as a signal that the government was now ready to moderate and modernize Pakistan’s foreign policy. Kasuri had the right qualifications and the right personality to articulate such a policy. He took off very well. His visit to the US was seemingly a grand success. He did feel a bit flustered by the constant Indian baiting. But he kept his cool and behaved like a true diplomat while replying to India’s deliberate belligerence without giving the impression that he was in any way conceding space to his Indian counterpart.
That was perhaps not considered enough of a jingoistic response by Pakistan’s permanent establishment. So Shiekh Rashid seems to have been given a free hand in the matter. That is what perhaps the Indians had wanted all along — to get Pakistan to join in a war of words so that they could use it to further whip up hate-Pakistan sentiments among the Indian masses and win their votes in the forthcoming state elections as well as to keep the kettle boiling until the general election in October 2004.
When a nuclear weapon country threatens another nuclear weapon country with the doctrine of preemptive strike it is wrong to assume that it is doing so in the context of only conventional weapons. In fact, such a threat actually amounts to announcing the intention of that country to make the first use of its nuclear arsenal. So what the Indian foreign minister Yashwant Sinha had actually said was that India which has consistently rejected the first use option has now decided to own this option. On the other hand when Shiekh Rashid said that India was a fit case for the application of pre-emptive strike doctrine, he was only reiterating Pakistan’s known position on the matter of first use option.
But this is dangerous talk. Nuclear capable countries should never be talking to each other in such language. If talks by information ministers had won wars for their countries, the Iraqi information minister’s daily diatribe against the US and UK would have won the war for his country many times over.
So, it would be only prudent to pull out the Shiekh from the font-lines immediately and let the foreign ministry and its minister in-charge take charge of the situation. It is only the weak who gets provoked quickly. Trap India into talks rather than getting trapped into a verbal war which enables India to keep refusing to talk. — Onlooker
REDUCE everything around Israel to rubble. Expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Annex occupied territories and allow the Zionists to expand in every direction until they control all of the natural resources in the Middle East and probably beyond. In a few years from now, present the world with a fait accompli. A generation from now everyone will forget whether Iraq existed or Syria or perhaps even Iran.
That is the general idea. The Great American idea. The United States was itself founded on the blood and bones of a vanquished civilization. Who remembers the Indians now? The United Nations? The dozens of human rights organizations across the world? George W. Bush does not matter. It is the American scheme of things. Any other president in his place would have done the same or been shot through the neck.
I have a simple plan for national survival. Let us surrender to the vital interests of the United States in the region and elsewhere. Let us write to Secretary Powell. “Please, sir, let us know what we are expected to do here and also please, sir, send us a list of things we must not do. We have little or no oil but we have plenty of slaves we can send to your beautiful land to do the menial work for you.”
I am not being overly cynical. This is how it has always been and this is how it shall always be. You see, I read Saadi at school and this is precisely what he had advised his readers. “Don’t fool around with the high and mighty. Wait till they are down and out and then bash their brains in.”
I don’t write these lines in slavish surrender. I still think that George W. Bush and his black and white collaborators will burn in hell for what they have done in the Middle East and for what they plan to do in the future. I will not be around when the great American dream turns sour.
P.S: You remember the old song? Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine? If you ask me, George W is Amrika’s greatest hate machine. When he talks of democracy I feel like throwing up. Why doesn’t someone ask him to spell the word?
I never knew that I would lose Alys Faiz and Abdullah Malik so soon. They went within weeks of each other this spring or early summer, if you like. Malik loved me and Alys was really rather fond of me. That is more than many Lahoris can claim today. While Faiz lived Alys of course, was the queen. When he went in 1984, she became the queen mother quite naturally. Of her two daughters Salima and Muneeza I can’t say whether she preferred one to the other. However, she spent her last days at Salima’s place in G-Block in Model Town. Although she lived in the sub-continent almost all her life, she could never really adjust herself to life here, especially Lahore. She lived almost twenty years of her life without Faiz which must have been the most difficult phase of her years on earth.
I worked with her at Viewpoint, the weekly magazine which was brought out by the late Mr Mazhar Ali Khan until it closed down a few months before Mr Khan’s death in 1993. The last issue of the magazine was devoted to Pakistan’s World Cup victory in 1992. Not that Alys was particularly fond of the games. Perhaps that is why she found my joy at the Cup victory a little difficult to appreciate.
Alys tried her hand at teaching at a private school in Model Town. The school belonged to Mrs Mansur. Shami Play Centre, the place was called and it produced many students who later made good.
I recall a wonderful November morning in 1984. I think it was the first Friday of the month. Early in the morning, Syed Abid Ali Shah, that great friend of friends came to my place and asked me to accompany him to the Faiz house in H-Block. So the two of us went and found Faiz Sahib reclining in a chair in the small veranda. After the usual greetings, Faiz Sahib asked me, “Will you have a spot of something or the other?” When I said ‘yes’, Faiz called Alys and asked: “I say, is there any thing in the house?” “Not a thing, Faiz, “Alys replied more angrily than was absolutely warranted. “What about that thing Abdullah Malik brought last night?”
Without a word Alys stomped in an presently came back with an extra large bottle of sherbet.
“Bring three glasses” Faiz asked Alys.
“But Faiz, the doctors have.....”
“Forget the doctors and do as I tell you” Faiz was almost angry. Again, Alys went in, brought the glasses and banged them on the table Faiz Sahib poured just a couple of drops and tasted them.
“Bhai this is Chinese stuff” when Syed Abid Ali Shah and myself agreed to partake of the concoction, Faiz Sahib poured out two generous measures for us. It went on till about 2:30 in the afternoon at which point Faiz Sahib said he wanted to have a little nap. We poured the rest of the contents of the bottle in our glasses and toasted him, took our leave and were on our way. The memories of that wonderful afternoon shall live with me to my last dying day. — Courtesy Abdullah Malik
THOSE who watched the TV coverage of the looting that followed the earthquake in Gujarat or during the mindless violence unleashed by Indians upon fellow Indians there last year, would disagree with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s characterization of the loot and plunder of Iraq by its own citizens, as an expression of pent-up feelings caused by years of repression.
Rich, prosperous looking men and women in swanky cars were seen carting away what belonged to those that they apparently disliked and whose shops and homes their fellow goons attacked with impunity. Were the people in Gujarat looting their own fellow countrymen because of some pent-up repression of the Indian state?
Ask any human rights group that has watched the anti-Tamil violence in Sri Lanka or anti-Ahmediya mobs in Pakistan. They would have tomes of gut wrenching details in their archives about the huge gap between an ideologically motivated violence and its less pretentious, cruel human face, at times as looters, at others as cold-blooded killers.
To confuse them with nascent democrats can only be a Rumsfeldian innovation.
So what did Rumsfeld say?
“While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression.” These were his exact words at a press briefing the other day when he sought to play down the outrageous scenes of looting that have been televised all over the world by everyone who wields a camera in Iraq.
“If you go from a repressive regime...in that transition period, there is untidiness,” the imperious secretary of state declared with a wave of hand.
Is that what happened in New York in the aftermath of the horrific attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001? There is a book by a decorated American writer which records the loot that followed the tragedy in New York on that fateful day. Were these people, some of them supposedly from the highly-lauded fire brigade, acting out of pent up repression?
There were many Americans who rejected what William Langewiesche claimed he had witnessed in his book — American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Centre. They targeted him because the book includes a passage relating the discovery of dozens of new jeans from the clothing store The Gap — still tagged, folded and stacked — inside the cab of a fire truck pulled from the rubble after September 11, 2001.
To put the context to Langerwiesche’s standing as a credible journalist, his book was among the finalists for the National Book Critics’ Circle awards, and there were protesters who called for the nomination to be withdrawn.
As a matter of fact, loot and mayhem have accompanied almost all the social and political upheavals of recent centuries except that the plunderer was hardly ever the underdog.
In what must be a reflection of an old human frailty, the Bible too counsels against coveting the neighbour’s goods. Why? Because walking away with someone else’s belongings is neither the preserve of colonial powers nor is it a fine art in which the so-called natives excel.
The symptom is as old as the hills, only the means and the method and the brazenness have evolved from the days of the Roman empire to the ways of Enron and other assorted institutions that straddle and rule the world today. Rumsfeld cannot be unaware of the palpable reality of both as the war grinds on, sustained by one mythical ruse to another.
Remember the days when we used to have our own private languages in school, from classroom to classroom, from one closely knit secret group to another? The idea was to keep nosey rivals, including the teachers, out of the loop of our private confabulations, which could be about anything from the smuggled bag of tuck in the dormitory to a young man’s growing up problems?
One common method of making our communications difficult for others was taking recourse to Spoonerism. For example “Three Little Pigs Went to Town” would read as “Pree little thigs went to town.” Decoding similar but infinitely more complex messages requires nations to invest heavily in their intelligence agencies.
So I have been having a difficult time masking my amusement at the plight of all the diplomats one has been meeting in New Delhi, with everyone wanting to know the exact meaning of what the Indian parliament, after much huffing and hawing, had to say on Iraq.
For the Indian parliament, their secret language used to confuse everyone, including the ones who passed the resolution, was to say it in Hindi and to avoid at all costs translating it into any other language, including the official link language, English.
No one is in any doubt about who the Indian government is trying to please by refusing to explicitly and unequivocally condemn the war, although it’s a bit late in the day for that.
“Ninda” is the word used in the parliamentary resolution to criticize the American incursion in Iraq. Newspapers interpreted it as meaning condemnation and/or criticism.
But that is not where it ends. Adding to the chaos is the fact that the word ninda is regarded as one of the three deadly sins by many devout Hindus.
According to Meher Baba, an important Hindu holy man based in the United States, the three most important things to be eliminated before attaining salvation are greed, lust and ninda; the last, meaning “back-biting,” is the worst and most disastrous, the Baba says.
Let’s hope the holy man will not confuse the Indian parliament’s school-boyish peccadillo with anything sinful.
AMONG some of the aspects that distinguish the present government in Sindh from its many predecessors the more notable is the emphasis on education. This is indeed just as it should be. One can say this wisdom has not dawn too soon. By all reckoning, education has been receiving step-motherly treatment in this province for a long time. Proof? Count the number of ‘ghost’ schools — monuments to literally monumental mismanagement of education.
This kind of insanity has characterized planning of education from the federal level downwards. Almost every new government wasted money and time in formulating a ‘new education policy.’ As far as the primary and secondary level education is concerned you need not change policies and programmes and strategies with every new government. All you need is a minister with a clear head on his/her shoulders and an earnest commitment to the basics.
Now that the government is committed to the culture of compulsory primary education the issue at policy level is settled. The next step is to start working for the basic wherewithal of primary education. You need premises to house primary schools. Not every primary school has to be of the same size. It would depend upon the size of the community to be catered for.
What has to be properly worked out is a formula about space and staff. That formula should help work out the details in respect of the school unit. One of the imperatives should be the distance between the school and the students’ home. As far as possible, the school premises should be within conveniently walkable radius of the child student’s residence. And the route should be safe from road hazards.
Primary education is not something that can be left to amateurs. A primary schoolteacher (whether male or female, preferably female) should be trained specifically and specially for the job of teaching children. As far as possible, primary-level schools should be on the basis of co-education — boys and girls together. This sort of common sense is usually anathema to the mullah mind. Let that sort of mindset (or mindlessness) not inhibit education for the innocents.
We tend to do our planning in thin air. Even when there is no hanky-panky, our planners bring too much of wishful inanities into the process. One cannot be very sure if this is not the case in Sindh’s planning for the mighty big job of making compulsory primary education a reality in the proper sense of it. Do we have on the ground the facilities needed to train primary schoolteachers?
It may not be easy to obtain a firm affirmative by way of an answer to this question. If not, that’s just where the planning for compulsory primary education ought to begin. First and foremost, get down to put the infrastructure for teacher-training in place and get going. Even before this, what needs to be done is to conduct a thorough survey of the primary-stage child population in the province, in each city, in each manageable locality. Without this survey, planning would be shooting in the dark.
Let Karachi be the model for this planning. Of course, there is an education minister and an education department. But, make no mistake, here what we are talking about is a revolutionary enterprise. The education minister and his caboodle of bureaucrats alone cannot deliver, if they do not manage to get the society as a whole involved and committed to the objectives of compulsory primary education. In this city, larger than many sovereign states, there would be some hundreds of thousands of children who may not be in a position to go to school even if the school is available. How do we get such child into our projected ‘compulsory’ primary education? Not an easy question to answer. But a question that ought to be addressed and sorted out. This is something that society shall have to consider and do the needful. But the initiative ought to come from the government. It is noted that the Sindh government has started a campaign through the media to put the message of compulsory primary education across to the people. Some of the jingles on radio and TV are okay. But the mission of compulsory primary education cannot be realized by jingles alone, no matter how melodious.
We now have political governments. First of all, the government should mobilize public cooperation through its party cadres. Some sensible and sustained thought has to be focused on the question of books. What is to be the content of the books for the primary school student in general — and for such student in Karachi? We have to admit that the education bureaucracy’s conduct in the context of book production is an irredeemable shame with a very visible element that should be treated as culpable. The quality of books is atrociously poor and through this undeniable fact one can see all manner of dubious intent and substandard authorship. No less deplorable is usually the printing and binding. More often than not, books are not available at the beginning of the session and parents run from pillar to post.
The present minister of education owes it to himself and the innocent primary school child that the past and existing inefficiency and corruption in book production should be investigated and those found with tainted hands be handed out sternest possible punishments. There can be no forgiveness for those who indulge in criminal misconduct in production of books, particularly books for our innocent children. It is not enough that the government make provision of books free of cost. Absolutely the first consideration ought to be that the book is a genuine education aid.
At the primary stage, education has to be treated as a sacred mission. It is here that the roots of the character of society lie. The noble English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has said ‘child is the father of man.’ Primary education is a profoundly sensitive service. It has to be treated as a mission, nothing short of it. What is compulsory must also be seen as sacred, something that would admit of no compromise, no half-measures. The minister of education should see himself and his staff as people dedicated to a noble and sublime cause to which selfless service is its own soulful reward.
The heading of this week’s column is taken from the title of Frantz Fanon’s brilliant book. He was a French psychiatrist, born in Martinique, who wrote about what happened to the people of Algeria during their war of liberation from the French.
The ‘wretched of the earth’, as the phrase would suggest, lead a wretched existence. They are powerless, no one listens to them and they can’t do anything about their miserable life. Hence, they have no option but to live a dreadful — physical as well as mental — existence.
Perhaps, we have in our city people who live an equally wretched existence. Most of us cannot see them, but might only if we bothered to look beyond ourselves. Of course, we have our thousands of streetchildren, for whom no one in any position of influence — either in government or in the private sector — bothers to do anything. But what one is talking about here are the thousands and thousands of people who live in the city in jhonpries (huts), in dwellings not even worth the name.
We don’t really get to meet these people — of course, why would any decent working individual want to even stand next to these wretched smelly creatures — but we do, from time to time, read about them.
These are the people who live on the city’s fringes and inhabit its underbelly. The police harasses them no end, comfortable in the knowledge that they have no access to any minister or influential person. Petty officials in the bureaucracy try and extort whatever money they can from them, while local thugs and goondas try and use them for their own ends. The government, and even the mainstream media in general, ignore them since they are not that important in the larger scheme of things. As for our NGOs and human rights, well they do talk about them, but mostly in their ‘annual reports’ or in seminars held in plush five star hotels where ‘recommendations’ or ‘poverty alleviation strategies’ are discussed ad nauseum.
And so it is only logical that no one will remember or miss these wretched of the earth when they die. Four such people, all living in huts and all children, died this past week in two separate fire incidents in the city’s sprawling shanty towns. The reports gave their names and ages but not much beyond that. Maybe their parents didn’t even have enough money to bury them properly. But then who really cares, right?
A group of medical students described their concerns to the Notebook on the way blood banks, even some of the best ones, were dealing with donors and donated blood.
They said: “We have been donating blood since our days in our school, thanks to its voluntary donors’ society. Now we are all medical students and in recent times have given blood at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), Fatimid Foundation, Patients’ Welfare Association and Husseini Blood Bank. We would like to point out at a few flaws in the process of collecting donated blood.
“At the time of registration, not all blood banks do the copper sulphate test to determine the donor’s haemoglobin concentration. This is a simple and basic test, and a requirement because it helps screen out donors who might be anemic. The AKUH and Fatimid are exceptions. At the PWA, a sad incident occurred a few months back. A female colleague of ours wanted to donate blood but was refused on the ground that it was that time of the month for her. Apparently, they have a policy that prevents them taken donations from menstruating females, since this they fear might lower the haemoglobin level. But they didn’t even carry out the test to check whether the potential donor was actually anaemic.
“Admitted, most donors at the PWA are from poor backgrounds and run the risk of being anaemic due to poor nutrition. But the staff at the PWA should have made some exceptions because our colleague certainly looked quite healthy. And they should have carried out the copper sulphate test to see if she actually was anaemic. We would like to point out that nowhere in the world are women debarred from donating blood if they are in the middle of their periods. Our colleague says she has never had any problems whenever she has donated blood elsewhere. In fact, right after that we went to the AKUH where, after the simple copper sulphate test proved that she was not anaemic, she was able to donate blood.
“Next, certain blood banks refuse to take donations from volunteers if there is a surplus in stock. They ask you to register with them and to come and donate blood when the need arises in the future. This does not seem sensible because blood can be stored for quite a long time. They have to understand that volunteer donors come to donate blood without any compulsion and that too after having taken some time out of their busy schedule. They do so purely out of service to humanity, and to turn them away and require them to return when needed seems to suggest that their (the volunteers’) services are not valued.”
One of the medical students said he was a worker at the PWA but could never raise these issues directly with his seniors because unless they were brought out in the open no one would be willing to address them.
on cycles
Anyone who has stopped at a red light might have noticed that cyclists seem to break every conceivable traffic rule there is in existence. They don’t stop before the white marking of the zebra crossing. They don’t stay in lane, they dart in and out as they please, and they don’t stop for the red light, even when dozens of vehicles are going past, from the direction of the green signal.
Apparently, their monstrous behaviour has a lot to do with the fact that the traffic laws do not even account for them. That is why traffic cops say that they cannot do much when cyclists break red lights. One isn’t sure whether this is a myth perpetuated by an underworld cabal of cyclists bent on getting their way on the streets of Karachi or that maybe the law really is this deficient.
But jokes aside, the traffic police at the very least can tell them to install reflectors so that accidents can be averted. One has yet to come across a bicycle with a reflector, a requirement even in most developing countries. It’s in the interest of especially the cyclists themselves since they have the most to lose from a collision with a vehicle. In fact, the same should also apply to animal drawn carriages, especially donkey carts since they too can hardly be seen at night from a distance, even on a lit road.
Karachi’s streets are paved with gold. Literally. Unnoticed by most passersby, there’s a big gold rush taking place in the heart of Karachi and hundreds are involved in this lucrative trade.
If you happen to be a regular visitor to Saddar, you might have noticed some frenetic activity outside the area’s jewellery makers’ shops. Dozens of boys can be seen crouching on the street with small brooms with which they sweep what seem to be small particles of dust into large pans. Asked why on earth they were so carefully collecting this fine dust, the boys inform you that they are prospecting for gold. The boys painstakingly set about their task in the morning and continue for hours on end. Their target is not so much the area’s jewellery showrooms but the places where karigars work to make the pieces of jewellery that are eventually put on display.
That is why their favourite hunting ground is the maze of alleys around Zebunissa Street, which form the heart of this trade. After the dust has been collected it is taken home where it is carefully strained and sifted. The boys look for tiny particles of gold, made up of the shavings left over by those crafting the precious metal into jewellery. The gold dust gathered through this laborious process is then sold to dealers, allowing the boys to make some sort of a living.— By Karachian
Email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com