LONDON: Two radically different versions of what happened inside Tony Blair’s office in Downing Street, London, in September last year in the run-up to the war with Iraq emerged this week from Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the death of the British weapons inspector Dr David Kelly.

The version that Downing Street presented to the British public at the time was of a prime minister struggling to avoid war, intent on working within international law by going through the United Nations, and hinting that Britain was acting as a check on the wilder and more belligerent elements within Washington.

But the e-mails from various staff members at Downing Street produced in evidence to the Hutton inquiry this week suggest an alternative narrative. These e-mails, covering the period between September 5 and the publication on September 24 of the UK government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, are not full of concerns and proposals about how the dossier will impact on efforts to get the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq and ensure that Saddam Hussein cooperated with them.

Instead, the thoughts expressed in the e-mails convey a frantic attempt to produce a dossier that will justify aggressive action against Saddam Hussein. Within the space of a fortnight and with almost no new evidence — other than the now infamous “45 minute warning” — Mr Blair’s aides turned British policy towards Iraq upside down.

For more than ten years, British policy was to contain Saddam by keeping him weak through sanctions, imposition of no-fly zones and diplomatic isolation. He was regarded as a potential threat but not a pressing one.

He dealt with his own people brutally but, with regard to the threat posed to his neighbours and the west, he was in his box and, as long as the US and British planes remained in the region, he could be kept there.

By the time the dossier was published, Saddam had become someone that had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency, one intent on aggression towards his neighbours and the west. Downing Street had produced a new narrative.

In an e-mail released this week Daniel Pruce, a UK Foreign Office diplomat seconded to the Downing Street press department, offers a glimpse into how Downing Street worked to achieve this transformation. “Can we insert a few quotes from speeches he [Saddam] has made which, even if they are not specific, demonstrate that he is a bad man with a general hostility towards his neighbours and the west?” Mr Pruce wrote in the e-mail on September 10 to another diplomat, Mark Matthews, who at the time was in the Foreign Office press department.

He set out a sneaky course of action for bringing public opinion round: “Much of the evidence we have is largely circumstantial so we need to convey to our readers that the cumulation of these facts demonstrates an intent on Saddam’s part — the more they can be led to this conclusion themselves rather than have to accept judgments from us, the better.”

In a separate e-mail, Mr Pruce said: “Our aim should be to convey the impression that things have not been static in Iraq but that over the past decade he has been aggressively and relentlessly pursuing WMD while brutally repressing his own people.”

He added that any reference to weapons should describe their destructive capacity, for example that UN weapons inspectors between 1991 and 1998 “found enough chemical warfare agent to kill X thousand people or contaminate an area the size of Wales.”

Other Downing Street aides were also throwing in suggestions that would contribute towards an alarming picture of the Iraqi threat. Tom Kelly, a Downing Street press officer, in an e-mail to Alastair Campbell, the UK prime minister’s director of communications, on Sept 11, wrote that there was a need to demonstrate that Saddam had not only the capability to mount an attack but the intent: “We know that [Saddam] is a bad man and has done bad things in the past. We know he is trying to get WMD — and this shows those attempts are intensifying. But can we show why we think he intends to use them aggressively, rather than in self-defence? We need that to counter the argument that Saddam is bad, but not mad.”

Mr Kelly also wrote to another Downing Street press officer, Godric Smith, expressing regret that the dossier could not talk up the nuclear threat. The British Intelligence (MI6) assessment was that while Saddam wanted a nuclear capability, he did not possess one and was unlikely to do so for years to come. Mr Kelly reluctantly acknowledged this: “The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon.”

Mr Campbell, when asked at the inquiry on Tuesday about Mr Pruce’s e-mails, played down his importance, saying that decisions about what should be in the dossier were taken by staff above his pay grade.

But such e-mails cannot be dismissed that easily. These e-mails were in response to a remit set out by someone senior at Downing Street.

The tone of the exchanges suggest that the remit was not to draw up a dossier presenting a realistic appraisal of the threat posed by Saddam but to exaggerate it.

The alternative narrative is that after Mr Blair saw George Bush at Camp David on Sept 8, the prime minister was readying British and international opinion for war. The flurry of e-mails came immediately after that Camp David meeting.

Peter Stothard, the former Times editor who had access to Downing Street at the time, describes in his book 30 Days how Mr Blair in September based his policy on six points, one of which was that “Gulf war 2 — president George W. Bush vs Saddam Hussein — would happen whatever anyone else said or did”.

This sense that the decision had been made is also echoed by the former UK cabinet minister, Clare Short, who opposed the war and who told the British House of Commons foreign affairs committee she had been informed by three senior people — believed to be another cabinet minister, an MI6 chief and a top civil servant - that war was inevitable. One of them told her to stop fretting because it could not be stopped.

Seen against that background, the frenzied tone of the Downing Street e-mails makes sense.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

A NEW point of contention appeared in the troubled relationship between Dhaka and New Delhi, thanks to the latter’s unilateral decision to implement its massive river-linking project that has already earned the reputation of being a “weapon of mass destruction” against Bangladesh.

Bangladesh-India relations have long suffered from at least half a dozen unresolved disputes that include demarcation of 6.5kms of land border, demarcation of the maritime boundary, exchange of enclaves, a huge trade imbalance in favour of India and sharing of water management of 54 common rivers.

And now India has officially announced that it will go ahead with a project linking 37 rivers through which it will transfer water from the Brahmaputra and other peninsular rivers in the north and the northeast of India to Cauvery in the south.

Experts in Bangladesh have expressed great concern over the “river linking”, arguing that diverting the rivers upstream will inflict colossal social, economic and ecological damage on deltaic Bangladesh. The blocking of flows will also cause depletion of fish stocks and loss of navigability, endangering the jobs of millions of people including boatmen, fishermen and subsistence farmers.

Dr Ainun Nishat, environmentalist and country director of IUCN Bangladesh, says if India implements the project, “Bangladesh will have to face a severe and endless natural disaster”. Akhtar Hossain, an expert on water resources, believes that “river linking” will be a “weapon of mass destruction”.

Another Indian project, the Tipaimukh hydro-electric power plant on the River Borak, near the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, will reportedly be inaugurated in October this year. If India constructs a dam on the river for irrigation and hydro- electricity, the natural flow into the rice terraces of Bangladesh’s fertile Sylhet region will be drastically reduced, say experts.

The dispute between Bangladesh and India over management of common river waters is nothing new. The two countries have been at loggerheads over water sharing since 1974, when India completed the Farakka barrage over the Ganges close to the border, diverting crucial dry-season flows into Indian irrigation canals. Bangladesh blames the barrage for dried-up fields, diseases and salinization of the vast Sundarban mangrove swamps in the Ganges delta.

The Joint River Commission (JRC) of the two countries, which is mandated to meet at least thrice a year over the sharing of waters of the common rivers, has not held any meeting for over two years now — thanks to reluctance on India’s part.

However, experts in Dhaka assert that international law bars the building of any structure that blocks the natural flow of waters at any point, and disregard of any grievance of a co- riparian country is also considered gross violation of international conventions.

But Delhi seems heartlessly oblivious of both Dhaka’s “concern” and legal obligations that spring from international conventions. Dhaka officially conveyed its “protest” against Delhi’s planned river-linking project on Aug 13. But the day after, Delhi declared that it “must” go ahead with the river- linking project. “The first mission on the networking of rivers is under the active consideration of my government. We must move on to a mission mode programme and ecological enhancement plan for executing the project,” President A.P.J. Abul Kalam announced on India’s independence day on Aug 15.

Dhaka’s reaction was expected. “Bangladesh will make every effort to settle the issue bilaterally. If these efforts fail, we will consider international measures,” said Water Resources Minister Hafizuddin Ahmed on Aug 16.

Civil society in Dhaka has also reacted sharply to India’s attitude. A group of eminent citizens formed the Padma-Jamuna-Meghna Bachao Andolan (movement to save Padma-Jamuna-Meghna) last week. The group, which has urged all citizens to start an “all out movement on a war footing” against the Indian river-linking project, includes reputed academics, journalists, lawyers, physicians, engineers, economists, rights activists and environmental experts.

The group has demanded that the Bangladesh government take both long- and short-term “scientific” measures to avert possible catastrophes to be caused by the Indian project. The civil society group has also expressed concern over possible donor assistance to the Indian project and urged all quarters inside the country to launch a campaign against such a possibility.

The Indian government doesn’t seem bothered. The New Delhi correspondent of a Dhaka-based English language daily, The Daily Star, reported on Aug 20 that the Indian external affairs ministry believes that “Bangladesh’s criticism of inter-linking of the country’s (India’s) major rivers only complicates matters” and Bangladesh “should address these ‘complex issues’ in a mature manner”. The Indian authorities, reportedly, also believe that Delhi showed a “great deal of generosity” to Dhaka by signing the Ganges water treaty in 1996!

There is so much of everyday challenge, frustration and unhappiness in the Sindh capital, in a sense, that to talk of this “rough, tough” city is to be repetitive. That it is time to pay a tribute, to the Karachiite for braving one tiring season after another, one exasperating setback after another, one strike after another, one bloody killing after another, one accident after another, one hidden hand after another.

As the seasons change, and this August, the month of our Independence, moves towards its end, it occurs to some of us that it has been a particularly sad week that we have lived through. Of course one also counts one’s blessings as one says this. But the fact that the Clifton beach is closed (and I don’t reside anywhere near it — fortunately) is grim enough reason to mourn. One wonders what parents are telling their children about all this marine pollution, all this negligence? Sabotage? No one is likely to know for some time at least — the true story.

Before proceeding any further there is relevance in referring to a conspicuous banner that is flying cheerfully near the roundabout at one end of the Aiwan-i-Sadr Road, near where there once was a “musical fountain”. There was also a Rex cinema there, which later became Rex centre. One is tempted to talk of the lovely cinemas that Karachi once had aplenty; and now we have cable. TV and its operators have threatened a strike from 24th August (today). Strikes, that is another frustrating tiring facet of this city.

Now this banner suggests, motivates, (attempts to) or reminds, citizens that we all need to keep Karachi free of pollution, and that there is a need to plant trees to keep the environment pollution free. Good. Such banners however make one cynical about the effort, and one can even read sadness into the whole exercise. No one is really serious about the lasting value of protecting the environment, argues one citizen and keeps on referring to the ‘Tasman Spirit’ oil spill to illustrate the extent to which we have failed to tackle the issue. To have prevented it, and then to have stood up to the challenge of containing the destructive impact of the oil, which reports say is still flowing into the sea. Forget the calculated denials from officialdom.

But let me return to the “musical fountain” that we had near the Rex cinema. Both have gone. Yes, Karachi was that kind of a city, once, not very long ago, when its planners thought we needed a musical fountain. And we got one. It worked as well, and citizens in cars or on foot went past that fountain, in what was a recreational pursuit. There may not have ever been music in the air in Karachi, but there was never a time like now, when there was oil in the air.

There is such terrible pollution, following the oil spill that its hazards and damages are going to show their negative bearing for a decade, it is being argued. Official claims are being viewed with the usual amusement. But there is also quiet anger. Who is responsible? Will there be any accountability? Will there be another report, filed away eventually...?

Somehow life in the city, of late, has moved with a sort of misery and monotony, at the same time, in recent weeks, to say the least. Without trying to create any alarm, or despondency there is reason to put some experiences, and events together and then ask: is there a morning when the citizen can wake up to good news in the morning paper? In fact Karachiites besides being tuned into TV channels for any ‘bad news’ that may have hit them, are subconsciously also keeping their eyes on the headlines of the morning and the afternoon dailies.

What has happened in the city in the last few hours? That is the sort of tension or uncertainty that the average citizen grapples with, besides the humiliation and harassment of surviving a traffic jam. Everybody seems to have taken these for granted? Like the bursting of yet another water pipeline (72 inch dia rising main) on Tuesday at 3am. Surprisingly the media didn’t pay much attention to it, and a spokesman of the oft-troubled Karachi Water and Sewerage Board explained it all by saying that the pipeline was laid in 1957, (even before Ayub Khan came) and was commissioned in 1963. It has outlived its design age of 25-30 years, and is it not amazing and disappointing that no one in the official corridors of power or private sector, or non governmental organisations, ever thought of raising this issue effectively to ensure that Karachi gets a dependable water supply network.

Everything that relates to basics is somehow not on priority, and a reason for this is that we are far too trapped in the present. No one bothers about the future, and the past is only to be erased from memory. The only nostalgia that Karachiites relish it seems are the coffee houses that it once had?

Once summer time also meant the city enjoyed the sunny side of the weather, and the rains brought relief. Now the advent of summer (once again this year) brought out the sheer failure of water and power supplies, and when it rained in July the whole city underwent a trauma whose effects still remain, almost all over the city. Of course relief, repair, and rehabilitation efforts are on, but grossly inadequate, and there are no two opinions about this, argue citizens pointing to roads and standing water on open plots and streets in so many places. But civic amenities is one side of the shabby story.

Now take the story about the disruption in Railway traffic, when a doctor was killed in Malir and violence erupted in that part of the city. Then, on Sunday last mourners set many vehicles afire, clashed with the police and resorted to other forms of violence after the funeral of was over in North Nazimabad. Another area of the city was affected therefore. On that very day (18th August) was reported a shameful ordeal that a couple narrated to Dawn about the gangrape that a girl was subjected to. All this when they went to an amusement park on Rashid Minhas Road, and reportedly not the first one of its kind either here or elsewhere in the city, where innocent couples are targeted, exploited. The officials/authorities have taken notice of this and one hopes that action taken will be made public, in public interest.

Then the city had hardly recovered from the shock of the doctor’s killing in Malir, when there came another doctor’s killing near Stadium Road. This time the doctor was from the Liaquat National Hospital. Obviously the city’s doctors are protesting. In fact there is more protest in the city, and more gloom, and anxiety than what we can fathom from PTV. There is also protest coming up from the cable TV operators, and there is protest by the city’s college principals and teachers at the fact that the principal of the Commerce College was shot at and wounded in a shoot-out between two student groups. The oil tankers are on strike; as a matter of caution people are staying away from seafood; yes, we have returned to the Tasman Spirit oil slick again. Whither Creek City!

Of course in all these breakdowns of sorts there are always and constant dreamy assurances and clarifications from official quarters and sources. These are generally disregarded and brushed aside as bogus.

The poor citizen lives with his doubt, anxiety, and fear. And with his favourite beach closed, perhaps until the end of the next month, he is sad. TV images of destruction at the Clifton beach make one mourn. How close this city can be to a breakdown of sorts is a thought to contemplate my dear citizens, and not to run away from.