| April 26, 2003 | Saturday | Safar 23, 1424 |
My favourite programme
Now where are those weapons of mass destruction?
Jail reforms get short shrift
Jails are jails, no matter where they are, although the degree of comfort and facilities provided to inmates may vary from country to country and prison to prison.
THE one thing that comes to mind when people talk about FM radio in Pakistan are the terrible accents of its presenters. And here one isn’t talking of those who insist on talking in English but even those who speak in Urdu.
Take the case of the male voice on FM 100 which announces the call to prayer. For some reason, the man, speaking in Urdu, suddenly tries to sound as if he is a native Arab while announcing “Maghrib kee azan ka waqt hua chahta hai”. Perhaps, he thinks that talking in Urdu with an Arabic accent (and a bad one at that) will make him more devout and pious in the minds of the listeners. And then there is the ubiquitous station identification announcement, made regularly on both FM 100 and 101. The announcer, usually a woman, pronounces the word ‘one’ as ‘won’ and ends up making a complete fool of herself and her channel.
However, the English DJs take the cake in all of this. Clearly, the screening process at both FM 100 and 101 leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the DJs who present or moderate the English music segments speak some weird mish-mash which any normal person could not even hope to make sense of. As if this wasn’t bad enough, almost all the DJs, especially one very annoying female one, insist on speaking for quite some time, well after song has been played. What could they possibly achieve by such antics? Haven’t they heard how FM channels work in America or Europe? Does any normal DJ continue speaking a minute after a song, normally played on request, has begun? They should realize that listeners want to hear the song that they have requested, not their (VJs’) voice.
A READER, Dr Abdullah Jan Pathan, chest physician from Hyderabad, sent in an email asking me to write about the way some of our musicians and even some cricketers bend over backwards and promote cigarette brands. Well, they probably get oodles of money for it, and today’s world being what it is who can blame them?
He wrote that the Pakistan Chest Foundation had recently won a case in the Lahore High Court against TV channels and radio stations in Pakistan.
According to Dr Pathan, the court has ordered the federal government to pass legislation within three months banning ads on television or radio. Currently, the position is that cigarette adverts come after khabarnama. Apparently, the tobacco companies think that no children or minors watch TV after this time and use this ‘reasoning’ to justify their label of being responsible corporations.
The doctor from Hyderabad points out that an ordinance was issued in this regard in 2002 but was, like most good laws in this country, never implemented. He also says, and one must agree with him, that some of our best-known musicians and cricketers find nothing wrong with endorsing products made by tobacco companies or betelnut manufacturers. This shows that the claim by cigarette companies that they no longer target younger audiences is hogwash (I, for one never really believed it). Pointing quite clearly to Shehzad Roy, the doctor said people like him are role-models for young people. Mr Roy clearly has a bit of schizophrenic attitude because on the one hand he is currently trying to raise money for charity while on the other he endorses a product (Tulsi supari) which if eaten can be quite bad for one’s health. His humble plea (which I do not think will ever be accepted though): “May I request our stars to rise above petty financial considerations and not allow themselves to be used by vested business interests.”
HERE is something that our mainstream press failed to report. Reuters carried a story, datelined April 16, that the Muslims at the Pentagon were “incensed” after finding out that a Christian evangelical preacher who once called Islam an “evil religion” had been invited to lead prayers on Good Fridays.
The Rev Billy Graham’s son, Frank Graham, had been invited by the Defence Department to preach. Muslim employees at the Pentagon urged officials to find a “more inclusive and honourable” religious leader in place of Mr Graham.
The story quoted US army spokesman, Ryan Yantis, who said the evangelist had been invited several months ago and that the Pentagon chaplain’s office would not withdraw the invitation. — OMAR R. QURESHI
(email:omarq@cyber.net.pk)
LACK of space last week prevented me from writing about quite some functions held in the city and even this time I shall have to omit some. So let me first begin with an important, and somehow my favourite, literary get-together. It is the third Tuesday of the month assembly in the Alhamra Cultural Complex where one has the pleasure of listening to readings in English, Urdu and Punjabi. In addition, one can add to one’s knowledge by listening to an invitee who is by all means a devotee of the arts but not of the written word. He is the one who handles the ‘arts capsule’, an essential ingredient of the readings sessions.
Those on the programme for the evening were listed as Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Shaikh Sharif Sabir and Jocelyn Ortt Saeed. Somehow, Qasmi Sahib was not in the best of health and could not turn up. However, on request from Muzaffar Ghaffar, who arranges these programmes on behalf of the Lahore Arts Forum (LEAF), Qasmi Sahib’s chosen daughter, Mansoora Ahmad, came over to fill the slot. She is a poet in her own right.
The programme opened with a reading in Punjabi. The person invited to the rostrum was Shaikh Sharif Sabir, well known for the research he has carried out in many fields of Punjabi literature. His translation of Data Sahib’s Kashful Mahjub from Persian into Punjabi is considered the best translation of a book written in any language.
That evening Shaikh Sahib read out one of his plays. Its theme was a clash between old timers and those holding modern views. Listening to the chastity of the language used by him, the spontaneity of the dialogue exchanged by the characters, and the way Shaikh Sahib read the play — rather acted it — I may call it the best item of the evening. It is unfortunate that he has no strings to pull; he may never get recognition at the official level.
Jocelyn Saeed charmed everyone with her poems. But then, she gave me a jolt. She has lived a full life, so why did she have to say:
Even life unlived finishes like a battery in a torch lying years unused.....
Mansoora Ahmad presented some of her nazms and a ghazal. The nazms, as usual, are too long to be reproduced. But here is a verse from her ghazal:
Ik bhanvar mein ghoomti heh sans ki kashti azal sey
Apni fitrat hi kahan thi panioan key sath behna
To handle the arts capsule was the well known painter, politicians and promoter of crafts, Mian Ijazul Hasan. He made an excellent presentation on the crafts of Pakistan with emphasis on the Punjab. He pointed out that our crafts were not decoration pieces but things to enrich our lives. He suggested the organization of Pakistani crafts festivals in other centres of the country to develop a market for our local artisans. He made another candid suggestion as well. He said: “Why not convert the Freemasons Hall on The Mall into a crafts museum instead of making it a dining hall for official gatherings?”
This particular reading session of LEAF attracted Pakistan’s former foreign minister, Sardar Assef Ahmad Ali. Being a painter as well, he turned up with a contingent from the Punjab Council of Arts. Availing the opportunity, Muzaffar Ghaffar made some proposals for the Crafts Museum which is being managed by the Cultural Complex. Dubbing it as an apology for a museum, he said it should remain open in the evenings when several people visit the area and could purchase quality crafts from the artisans. He also suggested that a resource centre be established with the crafts museum to give design and marketing support to the craftsmen.
I DID not know that there was yet another literary organization in the city until invited by it to a function. Operating under the name Alao, those behind it are two poets, Munir Saifee and Husain Majrooh. The function was arranged in a local hotel to launch a poetic collection of Jazib Qureshi as also a collection of his critical essays.
Quite a few collections have been published of this Karachi-based poet and literary critic. He has been discussing major literary issues in his articles while in poetry, he appears as a romantic. I would have liked to hear what Intezar Husain, Dr Salim Akhtar and Tehsin Firaqi had to say about him but unfortunately, I could not make it to the function.
IT was a long time ago that Mustansir Husain Tarar wrote a regular column for the popular daily Mashriq of Lahore. In addition he also wrote short stories, TV plays and much else. For the last few years, besides novels and travelogues, he has been writing a regular column for a reputed Urdu weekly of Karachi. Many of these columns have also appeared in book form.
Mustansir has now taken to English journalism as well and started contributing a column to the top most daily of the country. There is nothing odd about it as the English language is not foreign to him in any way. He was originally sent to England by his father to do a course of studies which he never completed. Instead, all he did there was to join the cult of travellers and ended up as a vagabond. But he is proud to admit the fact. — Ashfaque Naqvi
ONE of the big reasons given by President Bush for the attack on Iraq was to get rid of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that the country allegedly possessed. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein would have been the consequence of such an action.
So now, weeks after the takeover of Iraq, the obvious question is, where are the weapons of mass destruction? And why is the United States and its chief ally Britain balking over the return of UN weapons inspectors to verify that Iraq is rid of all WMDs?
The United Nations Security Council members are of the belief — and rightly so — that in order to lift crippling sanctions which have been in place for the last 13 years, it has to obtain a report from its own inspectors, giving Iraq a clean bill of health. That is what international law stipulates.
The US believes that the UN should have no role in the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, but it also wants the international body to lift sanctions which it worked tirelessly to keep in place, to pressure President Saddam Hussein to give up his WMDs.
In an article in the liberal weekly magazine “The Nation” writer David Corn observed, “But what is surprising, if not scandalous, is that two weeks after US troops moved into Baghdad, the US has not yet mounted a full sweep of Iraq for WMDs, or even dispatched a sufficient amount of trained troops and specialists to conduct such a mission. It is as if the Bush administration and the Pentagon had not bothered to listen to their own rhetoric about Iraq’s purported WMDs while planning the invasion and occupation.”
“Shouldn’t a mess of these units have been scrambling across Iraq — using all that prewar intelligence that allowed administration officials to declare without pause that Saddam Hussein controlled enough of these dangerous weapons to be a direct threat to the United States — within days, if not hours, of the collapse of Hussein’s murderous regime?”
Corn notes that “the Pentagon had months — actually, over a year — to ready WMD teams for Iraq. As early as November 2001, Bush warned Hussein that trouble would be coming unless he opened up Iraq to international weapons inspectors.”
That was two months before he designated Iraq an original member of the “axis of evil”. With so much lead time, why did the Pentagon not arrange for a force of specialists who could immediately be dropped into Iraq to find and take control of the WMDs?
On March 20, the day after the bombing began, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted, “We have a serious task before us, and it is to remove that regime and find the weapons of mass destruction.” The following day, he identified several “specific objectives.” Number one was smashing the regime and its military. The second item on his to-do list was, “to identify, isolate and eventually eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, production, capabilities, and distribution networks.” (After that came driving out terrorists, delivering humanitarian relief, securing oil fields, creating conditions that would allow a transition to a new, representative government.) He noted that “we will...ensure their weapons of mass destruction will not fall into the hands of terrorists.”
Days later, he remarked, “we’re there to eliminate the weapons of mass destruction in that country.”
But the available public evidence suggests Rumsfeld had no plan to quickly and fully addressing this priority, or for preventing that much-discussed nightmare scenario, where in the chaos caused by war, chemical and biological weapons and WMD- related materials (if any did exist in Iraq) are grabbed by terrorists, crooks, former officials, or whomever, and spirited out of Iraq.
At a press conference on April 9 — the same day US forces took Baghdad — Rumsfeld said, “We are in the process of trying to liberate that country. And at the moment where the war ends and the coalition forces occupy the areas where those capabilities, chemical and biological weapons, are likely to be, to the extent they haven’t been moved out of the country, it obviously is important to find them.”
The point of this war was to make sure Hussein could not hand off nuclear, chemical or biological weapons to terrorists who would use them against the United States. (It was uncertain whether Hussein had such weaponry, whether, if he did, he had the inclination to share them with terrorist groups, and whether he maintained any operational links to such outfits.) And before the war, an obvious possibility loomed: a US invasion would cause the collapse of the central government, which presumably would lead to a breakdown of the command and control system controlling Iraq’s purported WMD arsenal. All that dangerous stuff would then be up for grabs.
Corn notes “Rumsfeld and the Pentagon offered no indication they had prepared thoroughly for that contingency. On April 17, Rumsfeld noted that the Pentagon’s WMD teams “for the first time in the last few days” had been able to start looking at suspected sites.
“But,” he added, “I don’t think we’ll discover anything, myself. I think what will happen is we’ll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. It is not like a treasure hunt where you just run around looking everywhere hoping you find something. I just don’t think that’s going to happen. The inspectors didn’t find anything, and I doubt that we will. What we will do is find the people who will tell us.”
Imagine if Rumsfeld had made that statement before the war began: “We’re invading another country to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, but I doubt we’ll find the WMDs unless people there tell us where they are?” asks Corn.
Indeed it looks as though the US and its so-called coalition forces will not be able to find any massive stockpiles of WMDs. And as events unfold there, and keeping in view the past record of Washington’s war planners, the United States would blame it all on Syria and Iran for helping Saddam Hussein hide or worse, help smuggle them out.
Is this another reason for another war?
Robert Scheer profoundly noted in his article in “The Nation”: “President Bush went to war with Hitler’s Germany and found another Afghanistan instead. After comparing the threat of Hussein to that of the Fuhrer, it was odd to find upon our arrival, a tottering regime squatting on a demoralized Third World populace. Now the pressure is on for Bush to find or plant those alleged weapons of mass destruction fast or stand exposed as a bullying fraud.”
Conditions in Pakistani prisons are appalling, and three MPAs, all from the treasury benches, posted identical questions on prison conditions in Peshawar, Swabi and Malakand division for Friday’s session of the provincial assembly.
In written answers, the prison department was candid in its admission that Peshawar prison, built in 1854 for 1,350 prisoners, at times held more than 3,000 prisoners. Lakki jail which can accommodate 36 prisoners has more than 200 inmates. Worse is the case of the jail in Malakand, which originally was a stable and was later converted into a prison. It has 149 residents against its capacity of 89.
The department further acknowledged that jails in Swabi, Charsadda, Kohat, Swat and Mansehra were also overcrowded and due to lack of resources it was unable to give proper attention to this problem. During the course of discussion, it was also revealed that the money spent per day on a single prisoner in Malakand jail was eight rupees, which includes two meals a day and breakfast. There is no doctor and no dispensary inside the jail, the house was told.
The house laughed it off, but Zar Gul, the witty MPA from Kala Dhaka, was ominous in his prophecy. He warned the house to give due attention to jail conditions for who knows, he said, some day they all might end up in prison.
The issue was serious enough to warrant a full debate and the resurrection of the jail reforms committee. ANP leader Begum Nasim Wali Khan, who was parliamentary leader in one of the previous assemblies, and PPP’s Qamar Abbas, a political activist who has been to jail many a time for political reasons, had done tremendous work on the subject and introduced several reforms in jails. Sadly, however, the speaker in his usual style of pushing through the day’s agenda, did the same with this issue also. “Next”, he said and the matter was over.
He also rescues ministers whenever they are in trouble. He frequently urges the members to be a little considerate to the ministers who are often at a loss and seem struggling to find the right answers when it comes to fielding questions. Malik Zafar Azam, the minister for law and parliamentary affairs, though not new to parliamentary politics, is not helpful either. He rarely commits himself to referring a matter to the standing committees for more detailed deliberations and encourages members to thrash out issues amongst themselves.
Another issue which was brought up for discussion before the house on Friday was the fate of former employees of the now defunct provincial cooperative bank. The opposition wanted the bank to be revived or the employees adjusted in other government departments. Senior Minister Sirajul Haq who is leading the treasury benches in the absence of Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani since the commencement of this session, deftly handled the issue. He said that efforts were being made to adjust the bank’s employees but pointed out that the bank could not be revived since most of its assets had been sold out and while going down-under, it also took with it over a hundred billion rupees of the federal government.
Monday promises to be more interesting when the assembly meets again. The opposition has forced the government to debate contentious transfers and postings in the health and education departments and we may hear some names.
Abdul Akbar Khan’s adjournment motion regarding the contract policy will come up for discussion on Tuesday.