| June 7, 2003 | Saturday | Rabi-us-Sani 6, 1424 |
Advertisement overkill
May is for Majeed Amjad, too
UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations is trying to prevent a major humanitarian disaster in Central and West Africa by dispatching a battalion of diplomats and a contingent of peacekeepers to the politically troubled continent. But non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and peace activists say the international community is doing too little too late to prevent the spreading crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ivory Coast, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi and the Central African Republic.
The inaction reflects a new division of labour in international security, where the United States and other rich nations will handle “hard issues” such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, leaving local conflicts, poverty and HIV/AIDS to others, says Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action.
The United Nations is left with “soft issues” such as peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, adds Booker, with peacekeeping largely carried out by troops from the developing world. “It is an international double standard,” he says.
After dragging its feet over the last few months, the 15- member UN Security Council is sending two high-powered delegations to Africa this month to help prevent more devastation on the beleaguered continent.
Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere of France, who is heading the mission to Central Africa later this week, told reporters that his delegation will focus on two conflicts that “are tearing the region apart” — one in Burundi and the other in the DRC.
A second Security Council delegation is scheduled to leave for West Africa on June 28.
Last week, Council members responded to a plea by Secretary- General Kofi Annan and approved a 1,200-strong multinational rapid deployment force to restore law and order in DRC, where over 430 lives were lost last month in a violent conflict between local militias for control of the town of Bunia.
Booker says the Security Council is only trying to prove that it is not preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
“But at the same time, it is not taking action commensurate with the size of the problem in the Congo,” he said. The decision to send a military force to DRC is a positive move, he told IPS, but the 1,200-strong French-led force “is woefully inadequate”.
Booker said the United Nations already has 3,000 to 4,000 troops in the country — the UN Observer Mission in the Congo (MONUC) — but they are spread too thin. In a report released last week, Annan urged the Security Council to increase the troop strength in DRC to 10,800.
So far, according to UN sources, the only Western nations that have agreed to supply troops to the new force include France and Britain. Other potential contributors include South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The United States has ruled out any participation in the new force, said Booker, because it is not prepared to sacrifice the lives of US soldiers in Africa.
Sending troops would signal to the world that Washington is serious about helping to end the conflict, says MaryAnne Hoekstra, associate director of the Africa Centre for Peace and Democracy.
Hoekstra said that “human rights should be more of a priority than our national interest in their resources”, adding, “only then can we see peace and stability flourish in Africa”.
Although the new rapid deployment force in the Congo is a step forward, the number of troops needs to increase significantly in order for peace to be restored, she added.
In an interview Hoekstra described the situation in DRC as “a humanitarian disaster on a scale that surpasses the horrors of World War II”.
Under-Secretary-General Ibrahim Gambari told the Security Council last week that the world community should make greater and more creative efforts to consolidate the peace in places like the Central African Republic, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau after peacekeepers leave.
That effort should include the donor community, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) he added.
Gambari, UN special advisor on Africa, said the Security Council mission to West Africa will also assess the capacity of regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) to participate in peacekeeping operations — particularly in Burundi and Ivory Coast.
But Doug Brooks of the International Peace Operations Association challenges both the quality and quantity of troops assigned for the new mission.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.
YOU only have to tune into PTV these days, any time between seven and nine in the evening, to see that there simply are too many ads and not enough programming content. The typical primetime drama begins at around 7.45 and out of the next seventy minutes or so, well over two-thirds are taken up by commercial airtime. It seems that all that the state-owned channel has in mind is to make more and more money from its commercial sponsors because how else does one explain an advertising break literally three minutes after the last one had ended. No one is denying here the right of PTV to make a reasonable return on its investment, but it has to be borne in mind that this profit should not come at the expense of those who watch PTV, and who also happen to pay its licence fee.
If the channel is bent on carrying on with making a hash of a decent drama, then at the very least it should immediately make an announcement that from now on, and because of the dozens of ads that it shows during a single sixty-minute programming slot, people who own television sets will no longer be required to pay the annual PTV licence fee. However, even for aesthetic reasons, it makes more sense to bunch the ads together, and keep the commercial breaks reasonably far apart so that viewers can make some sense of the programme that they happen to be watching.
Quite often, an ad break disrupts what is about to be the climax of that week’s episode of a particular show. At that point in time, the last thing that a person watching a show would want to see is an ad for Tapal chai. Perhaps, our multinationals and other major corporate sponsors should also realize that this kind of advertising overkill cannot possibly help in the promotion of their brand, and if anything might make the intended audience quite hostile towards it.
It would be a great help if Pakistan had something like a television or media standards council like the ad council they have in the UK to review the content of advertising on television and related issues. Composed of representatives of the industry itself and from civil society, it would be a way of striking a balance between the rights of corporate sponsors to advertise their products and the right of viewers to watch programmes in a manner so that their viewing pleasure is not spoiled by incessant advertizing.
THE much-publicized hacking of Pakistan’s Internet infrastructure by presumably Indian hackers (also called by IT people as ‘denial of service’ attacks) had led to a significant lowering in download and browsing speeds. Regular net users will have seen a sharp slowdown in recent weeks with the ministry of information saying that it was working overtime to get the services back at normal speed and to install safety features to prevent future cases of such damaging hacking.
However, as it turns out, part of the reason why the net has been so slow in recent weeks is because the ministry has given a list to the Pakistan Internet Exchange (which has been set up to regulate Internet traffic) to censor around a hundred pornographic websites. However, the websites that the government wanted blocked are still available to users in Pakistan through alternative (or proxy) servers and web addresses. That web masters (or those who put up a website) often use such tactics to get around government bans or prohibitions is something that is known to even a child, but the bureaucrats in the ministry of information were obviously unaware of this possibility.
This means that anyone bent upon accessing such material (and there shouldn’t be any problem if you are an adult) is still able to do that and the only tangible impact that the ministry’s decision has been a significant slowing down of the Internet. This is what happens when you allow those who know nothing about the Internet to regulate its contents. Hopefully, the ministry will learn and stop its hamhanded actions and concentrate on real issues, like asking all Internet service providers, and especially state-owned Paknet, to upgrade and improve their services.—OMAR R. QURAISHI
(email: omarq@cyber.net.pk)
MAY is also for Majeed Amjad for it was on the 11th of this month in 1974 that this eminent poet passed away, as quietly as he had lived. Originally from Chiniot, his family settled in Jhang, where he received his early education. After graduating from the Islamia College, Lahore, he assumed the editorship of the weekly, Dehat Sudhar, and then another weekly of Jhang, Urooj. Finally, he joined the civil supplies department as an inspector and spent the major part of his service in Sahiwal. He was married to a cousin who was teaching at Jhang, but she did not leave the city to live with him. As a consequence, he never had a child.
Majeed Amjad was a very well read person. I have this on the authority of Dr Khurshid Rizvi who had seen him during his student days in Sahiwal and attended literary meetings at which he was present. Majeed Amjad, according to him, was not only modest, but also erudite. He had read the entire English literature available in his college library. He had a vast vocabulary which is evident from the frequent use of Arabic, Persian and Hindi words in his poetry. Moreover, his poetry has a lot of variety.
Majeed Amjad started writing poetry at an early age and remained more occupied with the nazm. The reason why he did not gain popularity was because of his reticence; he never asserted himself. He is not a hackneyed poet, but one whose work reflects new images and modern references. Even a person of the stature of Faiz Ahmed Faiz remarked about him, Arrey, shairi toa Majeed Amjad kar gaya.
Majeed Amjad was not a revolutionary yet he was unhappy with the prevailing conditions:
Zindgani ka yeh farsooda nizam
Aansuon ki subh aur aahon ki sham
is nizam-i-kuhun ko badley koi
Living all by himself during his last days, Majeed Amjad was one day found lying dead in his humble abode. Here I would like to quote a verse from one of his rare ghazals in which he describes his loneliness:
Meri manind khud nigar tanha
Yeh surahi mein phool nargis ka
The papers found in his quarters were taken care of and put in a bank locker. It was only due to the untiring efforts of Dr Khawaja Zakariya that his unpublished poetry was published in 1989 in chronological order. His only collection published during his lifetime, Shab-i-Rafta, went unnoticed.
As said in the beginning of this column, May happens to be the month of Majeed Amjad as well because he passed away during it. It was for that reason that the Halqa Arbab-i-Zauq devoted its weekly meeting to his memory. The function was presided over by Dr Khawaja Zakaria while the keynote address was delivered by Dr Salim Akhtar. They said all that had been said above.
Others who made their presence felt on the occasion included Niaz Sufi, Dr Fakhrul Haq, Tariq Zaidi, Nayyar Samdani, Abbas Najmi, Azhar Ghauri, Salman Siddiq and Hussain Majrooh.
IN Russian literature one figure who towers above the rest is Pushkin, the country’s national poet. He is considered master of the Russian language. But Dostoevsky (1821-81) does not lag far behind. His vertiginous novel, Brothers Karamazov, is one of the greatest landmarks of world literature. And one cannot forget his other novels, Crime and Punishment or The Idiot. In his novels he has brought out ‘russkost’, that is the essence of the Russian spirit.
Dostoevsky belonged to St Petersberg where his father was a doctor in a charitable hospital. Joining the army, he obtained a degree in engineering. However, he soon quit the job and started a career as a wholetime writer, passing the major part of his life in penury. His first novel, The Poor Folk, appeared in 1864 when he was hardly 25 years old. The same year he came up with his second novel, The Double. However, his activities with a group in favour of socialism came to notice with the result that Czar Nicholas I sentenced all of them to death. Later, the punishment was commuted to ten-year imprisonment in Siberia.
The ever active, Dr Anis Nagi, has now come up with an Urdu translation of Dostoevsky’s novel, Notes From Underground. Shorter in length than his other novels, he started writing it in 1864 and it was completed when his wife lay terminally ill. It is a story of the wisdom, or awareness, of one passing his days during the 19th century.
Anis Nagi has done full justice to the original work and couched it in a language within reach of every reader.
ALL credit to Kanwal Feroz for producing his monthly Shadaab with extreme regularity. He has been at it for the last 34 years. But one look at the list of contributors to the magazine is enough to stun anyone. I really do not know how he manages to attract such top class poets as Khayal Amrohvi and Abdul Aziz Khalid together with Karamat Bukhari, Hasan Askari Kazmi, Majaz Jaipuri and Nisar Akbarabadi. Well done, Kanwal; keep it up.
— ASHFAQUE NAQVI