Afghan economy’s impact

A FEW days ago this newspaper carried a story from its Peshawar correspondent headlined “40,000 illegal vehicles plying on NWFP roads”. The story revealed that some 13,268 of these vehicles had been granted registration by the Political Agents of seven tribal agencies and two frontier regions. The excise minister of the Frontier is also quoted as having said that the Frontier government had now submitted a proposal to the federal government for regularizing these vehicles against payment of some sort of reduced duty which, according to the minister, would yield Rs. 7 billion in revenue.

No one has spoken of the fact that this transgression of the law deserves punishment and at the very least the confiscation of the smuggled vehicles. No one has talked about the measures that need to be taken to prevent such smuggling in the future.

While I cannot speak with authority anecdotal evidence suggests that most of these vehicles are four-wheel drive Land Cruisers and Pajeros or the more heavily powered sedans. Their legal import is prohibitively expensive, even when they are classified as second-hand discards from Japan where the second hand car exports market is dominated by Pakistani businessmen with connections or branches in Dubai and perhaps the Iranian port of Chahbahar.

It is reasonable to assume that the number of such vehicles in the NWFP is matched or exceeded in Balochistan. From Herat, which is the entry point for most of these vehicles, the Herat-Kandahar-Chaman route is easier and closer to the lucrative markets in Quetta and points further south.

Again there is anecdotal evidence that the enterprising smugglers will gladly deliver such vehicles in any part of Pakistan charging a premium of Rs. 1 lakh for simple delivery, 2 lakhs for delivery with registration papers from a tribal agency; and Rs. 4 lakhs for delivery with registration papers from a provincial registration authority. This has, of course, been going on for a long time. Every senior official in the provincial governments is aware of it as are the customs officials some of whom even had the temerity to suggest that if full cooperation were extended by the law enforcement agencies the smuggling could be brought to an end.

A high level meeting held in end-1996 decided that all steps be taken to confiscate the smuggled vehicles, and to seal the borders to prevent a further influx. Unsurprisingly the implementation agencies — without whose assistance the customs could do little — pleaded their inability to enforce this decision while other agencies suggested that such a step would be a body blow to the Taliban whose principal source of revenue was the import duties they imposed on items to be smuggled into Pakistan.

The loss of import duties was a small price to pay, went the argument, for the bolstering of the Taliban and for maintaining peace and tranquillity in the Tribal Agencies where smuggling provided one of the very few avenues of employment. The next suggestion, which followed logically, was that the restrictions on Afghan transit trade through Pakistan, imposed because of the outcry from the Pakistani business community should be lifted.

The sponsors of the high level decision very wisely decided that they had misjudged the temper of the establishment and allowed the record of the decision and the subsequent effort at implementation to lie dormant in files that, one feels sure, have since then become untraceable.

Coming to the present day, it is being widely reported by western correspondents that Ismail Khan, the governor and, until recently the Military Commander of Herat was earning a revenue of about $500 million annually from the customs duties he was imposing on imports from Iran and Turkmenistan. None of this revenue was reaching the Karzai administration until early this year when in a dramatic dash to Herat, Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani managed to extract some $20 million in cash and brought it to Kabul. Whether there have been any further transfers to the federal treasury is not known. At the moment it seems that Ismail Khan, having initially acquiesced, is resisting Karzai’s decision to have Gen. Baz replace him as military commander of Herat even while he remained governor.

Without going into Ismail Khan’s colourful past one can say that at the moment Ismail Khan thinks of himself as the Emir of Herat who does not need to do more than pay token attention to the Karzai government or its directives. He runs an autocratic administration but his large revenue base makes it possible for him to maintain an intelligence network and a military force which ferrets out and then uses brutal force to quell any opposition.

He has been accused rightly of persecuting the Pushtuns that live in Herat and its immediate vicinity. This is attributable in part to his desire to maintain the supremacy of the Persian speaking Tajiks, in part to the desire for revenge for the persecution of the Tajiks in Taliban-controlled Herat and in part his long term aspiration to make Heart and its environs an entirely Persian speaking region. Ismail Khan’s name figures prominently when it is alleged that foreign powers are accused of using warlords of their choice to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Ismail Khan is undoubtedly ‘Iran’s man in Afghanistan”.

From Pakistan’s perspective Ismail Khan is one of the principal obstacles to the consolidation of the Karzai regime and an obstacle, as a persecutor of the Pushtuns, to the more equitable division of power between the ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Both these elements inhibit the restoration of security and stability in Afghanistan which Pakistan desires. There is little or no consumption in Afghanistan’s ravaged economy of the items that are imported into Afghanistan through Iran.

These goods are smuggled into Pakistan. Assuming that the rate of duty is 15 per cent and the slippage is about 35 per cent (Afghan customs officials must also make a living) one can estimate that the $500 million collected by Ismail Khan represent goods worth $4-5 billion that are smuggled, duty- free into Pakistan.

It is ironic, nay tragic, that Ismail Khan, whose interests run contrary to those that Pakistan wishes to promote, is maintaining his hold on power by using revenues that are earned almost entirely at the cost of the Pakistan economy. The colossal losses this imposes on Pakistani industry and on the government’s tax revenues cannot now be justified even on the spurious geo-political pretexts employed in 1996. In fact our geo-political interests call for exactly the opposite policy.

These losses are of themselves enough to call into question the assertion that we are implementing our so-called policy of “Pakistan First” but the fact is that these losses represent only the tip of the iceberg. If there is a wink and a nod at the smuggling of luxury consumer items then there is an even more vehement wink and a nod (because it is so much more lucrative) at the movement of more deadly substances such as narcotics.

Thanks to the rains and the failure of the anti-poppy cultivation campaign Afghanistan is going to harvest a bumper crop of opium for processing in the heroin laboratories that have now been set up in the border areas and which for the most part will be consumed by the four million users if not addicts that we have now in our own country.

Gone are the days when we could claim that heroin was the West’s problem and it was for the West to control its demand. The first demand to be met will be the demand of Pakistani and Iranian users.

It would not be surprising at all if the officials or the law enforcing agencies, who allow this to happen, believe that in the hereafter these transgressions will be forgiven because they do at the same time bestow a wink and a nod (perhaps without extracting a fee) on the movement from our side of the “Warriors of Islam”. These warriors, dedicated followers of Mulla Omar, are committed to the ejection from Afghanistan of the Americans (with whom we have an alliance) and the “puppet Karzai”(who at least at one level Pakistan believes represents the best chance for restoring security and stability in Afghanistan).

If one were looking for evidence of Pakistan being a “soft state”, or a state in which “vested interests” rather than rational assessments govern policy, or a state where venality and corruption rule the roost, one need look no further than our Afghan policy, the state of our border with Afghanistan and the treatment we propose to accord to smuggled vehicles.

Let me put it another way. There can be no implementation of a coherent foreign policy in a country that cannot control its borders. There can be no coherent economic policy if there is not a level playing field created by ensuring that imported goods are taxed as much if not more than locally manufactured goods.

The armed forces must assume charge of our borders and enforce the laws on movement across the border. We can no longer take shelter behind the excuse of the “traditional free movement” of the tribals. The cost is too high.

The import duty regime must be strictly enforced on all our borders and the rampant smuggling must be stopped. If this needs a radical reorganization, an ignoring of political sensibilities, and even draconian punishments, so be it.

Otherwise the current euphoria about the performance of the stock exchange must give way to sober thoughts about the decline in the investment rate to an all-time low and to the realization that no effort at poverty alleviation, no effort to promote labour intensive small and medium enterprises is likely to succeed while smuggling is rampant. The lowering of import duties will not be enough. Smuggled goods pay no sales tax or excise duty either and that too will be enough to offer an incentive to smuggling.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

Why block NA proceedings?

THE dialogue between the government and the MMA on the issue of Legal Framework Order has once again failed to make a headway. As far as General Musharraf’s tenure as chief of army staff is concerned, he has left no doubt that he would not compromise on this issue. The most he is willing to concede is that ultimately he would shed his uniform but he would be the sole judge of its timing. He will give no date.

The general’s reluctance to shed his uniform is understandable. He is cognizant of the fact that despite the referendum, he is neither a constitutionally elected president nor would he be able to ward off any serious challenge to his power without absolute support from the military. He also knows that the military gives absolute support only to its own serving chief. Even a genuinely elected, popular, charismatic leader stands little chance of survival if the military is opposed to him. Indeed the more popular a leader is, the greater is the possibility of his tragic end.

While the parleys between the government and the MMA go on endlessly, General Musharraf’s manoeuvring has marginalized the mainstream opposition parties while projecting the MMA as the real opposition. It suits the general’s strategy. The MMA is a group of pragmatic religious parties which are willing to play the game within the prescribed rules. They oppose the government but not beyond the limits of tolerance of our true power centre. Indeed they are happy with the present rules of the game which brought them to power in two provinces. The religious complexion of the opposition is a source of unflinching support for the general from the United States. The presence of religious opposition feeds the aura of his indispensability to America’s global war against terrorism.

General Musharraf’s strategy has been amply facilitated by the inapt response from the mainstream political parties. These parties are bogged down on issues having little relevance to the national problems. There is no one in the parliament to take on the government on its failure to face national disasters and its inability to govern.

In this nerve wracking game that is being played, the ultimate losers are the hapless people of Pakistan. Their suffering continues unabated. Poverty and lack of basic facilities such as drinking water, utility services, hospitals and education add to their miseries. If that was not enough, rains which should have been a source of relief ended up destroying thousands of home and uprooting much of the infrastructure.

An avoidable incident at our national port has caused a major environmental and economic disaster for the country. The government has no agenda to alleviate the sufferings of the people. Its response to calamities like rain and oil spillage has been, to put it mildly, indifferent. And yet there is little meaningful response from the opposition against this massive failure of governance.

The joint parliamentary opposition which has been protesting against the LFO from day one has now indicated that if the government does not accept its demands, it may shift from passive protest in the parliament to blocking its proceedings. But it would bother the general in the least. Neither the present parliament nor any of its predecessors have ever been the centre of decision making. Even our elected leaders have neither treated the parliament as source of their strength.

With parliamentary proceedings at a standstill, the president would be more than happy to portray this as a failure of the civilians to govern the country. The politicians of all stripes would be blamed as incompetent and incorrigible. This has been the game which the establishment has been playing since 1950s with much assistance from bickering politicians. They have successfully projected the image of the civilians as quarrelsome and untrustworthy. With the politicians once again on the path of self-destruction, all vital decisions affecting the people at large would be safely shifted from the gaze of the belligerent parliamentarians to the safer hands of the unaccountable establishment.

Nothing could be more imprudent than the strategy of blocking the parliament’s proceedings. With politicians themselves rendering parliament dysfunctional, the extra-constitutional forces would be happy to oblige. The opposition should seriously reconsider this chaotic and disastrous approach to fundamental national issues. While the opposition must register its protest on the LFO and the president’s uniform in most emphatic terms, it must not stake the survival of the political process on these issues. On the contrary, the opposition should evolve a strategy which strengthens the civilian/political setup against the forces represented by a uniformed president.

Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, despite all his personal and political infirmities, is the leader of an elected Assembly and his position should be strengthened vis-a-vis the uniformed president. The prime minister should not be pushed into the president’s camp. It is the naivety of the opposition which has so far driven Mr Jamali safely into the president’s arms.

With no support from his own power base, he sees his survival dependent on the president’s goodwill. The opposition should make Mr Jamali realize that he is the leader of the house which represents the collective will of the people of Pakistan. Mr Jamali would not be able to assert his constitutional authority and stand up to the president unless he has clear support from the assembly.

If there is consensus in the Assembly, the Constitution can be purged of all the undesirable amendments introduced by the LFO. With its formidable numerical strength, the opposition should insist that all issues of national importance are brought before the parliament for its scrutiny. The president should be made to realize that it is still a parliamentary form of government in which all constitutional functionaries including the president are answerable to the parliament.

The president’s functions, barring few exceptions, are still ceremonial even under the present dispensation. He is only a symbolic Head of the State and not the Chief Executive of the government.

President Musharraf appears to entertain some misconceived notions about his constitutional position. He continues to function like the Chief Executive of the country while relegating the prime minister to ceremonial status. This is not what the Constitution provides. The president has no role in conducting the day-to-day business of the government or conducting the nation’s foreign relations.

As against the Constitutions’ mandate, the country’s foreign and defence policies are being conducted by the president to the exclusion of the prime minister and the cabinet. The economic policy is formulated by a finance minister who is answerable to the president. Virtually all public utilities and corporations are headed by serving or retired military men who share the president’s disgust of the civilians and are immune from political accountability.

All this is contrary to the Constitution in its present amended form. This needs to be rectified. While giving up his position as Chief Executive, President Musharraf had vowed to abstain from interfering in the governance of the country. He has forgotten his commitment and there is no one to remind him of his constitutional obligations. The opposition has little time or inclination to address these fundamental issues.

In the present circumstances Mr Jamali would not oppose a president in uniform. It would be suicidal. The threat from the opposition keeps him glued to the president. But if the opposition acts prudently and demonstrates political maturity, he could be their best bet against presidential ‘excesses.’ It would be a gradual process of realization of one’s strength.

Eventually Mr Jamali would discover his strength in the parliament and would have to act as its custodian. The president would have to realize that his best days are already behind him. This is the law of nature and no one can claim immunity from providential dispensation. The country cannot have two Chief Executives for too long.

It would be bordering on insanity if the opposition blocks the proceedings in the parliament and pushes the ruling party in the president’s camp. The opposition should realize the parliament’s potential which can remove all the undesirable amendments from the Constitution and ensure subordination of all other institutions to civilian leadership.

Women and Pakistan

LAST week I wrote on the march of Pakistani women from purdah to politics but that was based on a book. It made me think of the all-round progress that our women have experienced in their domestic life and in their prospects outside the home ever since independence. My wife used to reminisce about this whenever she talked about women doing their bit for the Pakistan movement in 1946 and early 1947; how she and her college classmates demonstrated on the roads, were tear-gassed and bundled into police trucks to be left outside the city.

Those were unusual circumstances, but, she maintained, the real impact of Pakistan came after independence.

As an offhand example she reminded me of the crowds of Lahore women we had witnessed moving towards the Minar-i-Pakistan on August 14 some years after 1947. We had never seen so many women together at one place. They created traffic jams, and their infectious laughter rose in the air to signify their self-confidence.

Hardly any one was in a burqa and they far outnumbered the men. My wife said this was as important as the number of women doctors and scientists and judges that Pakistan had produced.

And yet it seems like yesterday when, a few days after August 14,1947, a fanatic created a sensation on Lahore’s Mall by chopping off the pigtails of some Muslim girls for going about bare-faced in an Islamic country!

There are such crazy people now too, and the maulvis are always after feminine freedom, but there is a difference. Now every religious party, even the most diehard, has a vocal women’s section, and there are more women sitting in the assemblies and lower elected bodies today than the total that have sat there since independence.

It is not a question of assessing what successive governments have done for women, or to find out how the state has helped to improve their lot. I am talking of the change that the very establishment of Pakistan brought about in the general outlook of women, and of men towards women.

No credit goes to any government or any regime for this. What they did (if they did do anything) was only cosmetic. The transformation came about because of the urge among women to go ahead, because of the belief that Pakistan meant progress and development and not a lapse into antediluvian ways.

If you were too young to sense the conditions of life around you in 1947, you can never realize what it was to be a Muslim woman before that epoch-making year. In a few words, all that is backward, orthodox and unenlightened was associated with her, as compared to the women of this region’s Hindus and Sikhs and Christians, leave alone their European sisters.

And what is the position now? You will find that in social freedom, educational advancement, independent identity, choice of profession, and even in the choice regarding marital life, they are as endowed as the women of any other country in this part of the world. Of course woman is still discriminated against in many ways, and also exploited, but then, in which country of South Asia is she not?

I have often written about the inferior position of women and the handicaps suffered by them in Pakistan. You may, therefore, find a contradiction in my words of today.

But the truth is (and it can only be appreciated by those who belong to the pre-independence era) that, generally, the diffident, uneducated, helpless and frightened woman of those days, who couldn’t even travel alone by bus or train, no longer exists in Pakistan.

It is after all a matter of comparative judgment. As I’ve just said, the Pakistani woman may still be helpless in many ways, but she has certainly come a long way since 1947. It is how you look at a thing.

We could never have imagined at that time that a woman could be prime minister of the country, or sit on the bench of the superior courts or fly an airline. This could only have been visualized in a dream. Men would not have tolerated her in either of these places, so the credit goes to the Muslim men of Pakistan too.

It is really great that their interpretation of being citizens of an Islamic country has not involved retrogressive thinking but freedom from intellectual bondage and a yearning for progress.

This is a happy thought because the position of Muslim women in undivided India was ascribed by non-Muslims to the influence of religion; that somehow the restrictions of faith were keeping its female followers bound to orthodox conventions which prevented them from going ahead shoulder to shoulder with the rest of womanhood in the subcontinent. Naturally it was thought that in the emerging country based on Islamic principles, the march of women would be even more backwards.

But then they did not know Islam, or perhaps we Muslims had given them wrong notions about it, because what happened at the birth of Pakistan was quite contrary to their expectations.

At once, as if a button had been pressed, there was an upsurge among Muslim women to find their true place in the new Muslim society. They realized that they must play a role in building up the country and its institutions, just as they had done in the fight for freedom and in the Pakistan movement. And they did this not because they were prompted by their men. No.

The provocation and the inspiration came from within themselves.

The result was that almost overnight the concept of women in Islam found its true expression in the country that was founded in the name of the Indian Muslims’ separate identity as a nation. Maybe they had been overawed by the non-Muslim women’s march towards progress and had held back in timidity; sometimes I find it inexplicable.

But the fact remains that there was a sudden change, a remarkable change, a revolution almost that must have surprised the women themselves. From a state of affairs that offered them just one profession — that of housewife (with rare exceptions) — they blossomed into identifiable persons equal to men in everything.

My feminine readers, particularly young girls, should ponder these words and thank the Almighty, and their mothers and grandmothers, for what they are and what they have in this country today.

And yet, some of them are heard saying, “What does Pakistan give us?” Which means they need to read their own social history.

He had a dream

FORTY years ago tomorrow, a certain event in Washington DC helped change America for ever. Some Americans viewed it as a calamity, but for countless others it was an epiphany. That day a quarter of a million people, the vast majority of them African-Americans, rallied to the pre-eminent cause of their times. At the symbolically precious Lincoln Memorial, they heard the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr deliver an oration that’s universally recognized as one of the 20th century’s most significant speeches.

The pastor wasn’t just preaching to the converted. His address to the March on Washington received extensive coverage on national television. King’s eloquence, his passion and the underlying sense of moral outrage militated, above all, against indifference. He got through to those blacks who, notwithstanding their relegation to third-class citizenship, until that point had deemed it imprudent to challenge the status quo. And he spoke also to the whites who were either only peripherally aware of the situation in the southern states, or who realized the inhumanity of segregation but couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

King reminded them that a hundred years after Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated Emancipation Proclamation, which officially ended slavery, “crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination .... the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity .... languishing in the corners of American society”.

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquillizing drug of gradualism,” King went on to say. “This sweltering summer of the negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning.” His reference was to a rapidly growing civil rights movement in the states such as Mississippi and Alabama, which involved peaceful marches, sit-ins and voter registration drives — actions that invariably excited the wrath of segregationist authorities as well as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations.

Black leaders and activists were routinely beaten up by the police or white vigilantes, arrested for “breach of the peace” when they insisted, for example, on being served in segregated eateries, convicted by all-white juries, and sentenced to disproportionate terms in prison by segregationist judges. In Birmingham, Alabama, police had sought to disperse a schoolchildren’s march by attacking them with water hoses and dogs. Images of a police hound biting a teenager appeared in newspapers across the nation — and around the world, seriously undermining President John F. Kennedy’s claims about leading the fight for freedom in Berlin and Saigon.

“The whirlwinds of revolt,” cautioned King, “will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” He remained adamant, however, that the earthquake must be of a non-violent nature. “Let us not seek,” he warned, “to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred .... Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Not all African-Americans shared King’s Gandhian attitude. Prominent among those who refused to advocate turning the other cheek was Malcolm X, a minister in the Nation of Islam who had by late 1963 begun to distance himself from Elijah Muhammad’s mafia-like sect. The NOI advocated black separatism under the leadership of a man who projected himself as Allah’s messenger (a claim that the Muslims elsewhere would have viewed as blasphemous) and demanded unquestioning obedience.

Once he discovered the extent of Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy, Malcolm found his position within the NOI untenable; shortly afterwards, a pilgrimage to Makkah helped him to realize that Islam in the real world bore little resemblance to the NOI’s doctrine. He was influenced also by the African Marxists he encountered in that continent’s newly liberated nations. On his return to the US, Malcolm adopted an integrationist posture and became an effective rallying point for blacks disenchanted by Elijah Muhammad as well as those dissatisfied by King’s strictures against violence.

Within a year, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. Malcolm’s murder was a huge blow to black America — although arguably not quite as profound as the one struck by King’s assassination three years later, on April 4, 1968. By then Malcolm’s mantle effectively belonged to the Black Panthers.

Contrary to their portrayal by the authorities, the Black Panthers did not believe in violence just for the heck of it; although armed and geared for self-defence, they also devoted considerable energies and resources to feeding and educating African-American children. Like Malcolm, and unlike King, they saw little sense in turning the other cheek. Many of the leading Panthers were gunned down in cold blood during Richard Nixon’s first term in office; some of them are still in prison.

Yet, back on August 28, 1963, it would have been difficult for any black Americans, regardless of which route to liberation they favoured, to disagree with the vision King so inimitably conjured up towards the end of his speech.

The evocation, the story goes, was improvised on the spot. King was winding up his oration when the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson prodded him, saying: “Tell them about your dream, Martin.” The preacher took the bait, sonorously intoning the words by which his speech is invariably remembered. “Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he said.

“....I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood .... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists .... little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

At a commemorative gathering last Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial, King’s wife and son, among other speakers, reminded fellow Americans that in four decades his dream has, at best, only partially come true. Disproportionately poor, ghettoised, and over-represented in the world’s largest prison population, for millions of African-Americans the American dream still resembles a nightmare. In the Deep South, segregation isn’t unknown and even lynchings, although relatively uncommon, aren’t unheard of. And events in Florida in 2000 showed how blacks can still be “legally” disenfranchised.

It is true that 40 years ago a black secretary of state or national security adviser would have been unthinkable. But you have to be a Condoleezza Rice or a Colin Powell to make it. Andrew Young, a close associate of King, became the first black US ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, but was forced to resign before long — ostensibly because of secret contacts with the PLO, but also because the political establishment regarded him as too liberal.

Back in the 1960s, a frequent charge against King and his associates was that they were covert communists. It was pursued most vigorously by the powerful cross-dressing fascist who headed the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover. It was untrue, but it was also a backhanded compliment to the Communist Party of the USA, one of the few consistently non-discriminatory political organizations in the country.

Although the March on Washington is widely viewed as the apogee of the struggle for civil rights, it was, of course, just one among countless events that dramatized the limits of American democracy. Barely a month after King outlined his dream, four schoolgirls were killed when a bomb planted by a white supremacist went off in a Birmingham church. In the face of such provocations, it was extraordinarily difficult to forswear retaliation. But King prevailed for the time being — and his unflinching devotion to non-violence offers a lesson to us all in today’s reactionary world.

Remarkably, the civil rights movement found a better friend in former segregationist Lyndon Johnson than it had in the supposedly liberal JFK. Despite the longest filibuster in congressional history, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act followed a year later. Unfortunately, entrenched prejudices can’t be legislated out of existence. That is why the struggle had to go on. That is why it continues today, in one form or another.

In concluding his speech, whose power lay at least as much in its almost unbearably moving delivery as in its memorable words, King called for freedom to ring out from every mountainside, valley, hamlet and city, in order to “speed up that day when all of God’s children .... will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

From Birmingham to Basra, Baghdad and Bethlehem, we still yearn for that day. In the meanwhile, it’s worth remembering the words of the American poet Carl Wendell Hines, who cautioned after King’s murder: “....now that he is safely dead/ we, with eased consciences/ will teach our children/ that he was a great man .... knowing/ that the cause for which he lived/ is still a cause/ and the dream for which he died/ is still a dream/ a dead man’s dream.”

mahir59ali@netscape.net