IN the authoritarian tradition neither dissent nor challenges to established authority are tolerated. In the bad old days dissent that invited the most hostile attention related to issues of doctrine.

During the Abbasid caliphate, about three decades after the death of Mamun-al-Rashid, tens of thousands of the Mutazilites (who believed that the Quran, being God’s creation, could not be regarded as partaking of His immortality) were put to death as heretics. Philip the Fair of France, coveting the enormous wealth the Templars, an ascetic Christian military order, had accumulated, invented charges of heresy against them as a result of which thousands of them were tortured and killed between 1300 and 1320 AD.

During the Spanish Inquisition, initiated by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella at the close of the 15th century, countless “conversos” (descendants of Spanish Muslims and Jews who professed to be Catholics but were suspected of holding on to their original faiths secretly) were tortured and/or killed. Thirty thousand blasphemers and “witches” in England, and some 100,000 of them in Germany, were burned alive at the stake between about 1500 and 1800 AD.

Those found guilty of “blasphemy” have been sentenced to death in Pakistan even in this day and age, specifically since Ziaul Haq’s time.

Political opponents have been penalized through history, so much so that the practice was not even considered particularly reprehensible. We have all heard of the Court of Star Chamber, and of the Tower in London, where this court dispatched the king’s opponents for detention and torture. Similar forums and places functioned in other countries. Closer to our own time, the Iranian secret police (SAVAK) inflicted fearsome torture on political prisoners. Secret agencies in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have been second to none in this regard.

Surprisingly enough, resort to torture is common enough to have called for a United Nations convention on the subject in 1987 and the establishment of the International Council for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims. Redress Trust, a human rights organization, reported in 1995 that security forces in as many as 150 countries tortured prisoners. These include the United States which is known to be holding more than 500 men and women for suspected affiliation with Al Qaeda and Taliban at its military base at Guantanamo.

Torture is the business of inflicting unbearable physical pain or mentally unhinged condition on the victim to extract admission of guilt or desired information from him. It is intended to mutilate his personality, destroy his decision-making capability, and break his will. In medieval Europe the favoured instruments were: wheel, rack (which stretched the body by pulling it in opposite directions), “strappado” (a machine that hoisted the suspect’s weighted body by a rope), thumb screws, deprivation of food, drink and sleep, not to speak of plain flogging or breaking of one’s jaw. Modern techniques include destabilizing drugs, manipulation of intense light, burning of flesh with lit cigarettes and cigars, skin removal, electric shocks to the more sensitive parts of one’s body (genitalia).

The custom of persecuting political opponents has been alive and well all along in Pakistan. But torture came to be practised on a large scale for the first time during Ziaul Haq’s rule. Those targeted were mostly the hard-core PPP workers and middle-ranking leaders. General Musharraf’s government seems to prefer the option of harassing unacceptable politicians and/or putting them out of commission.

I should like now to turn to the case of Asif Ali Zardari, which is intriguing in that it combines elements of harassment, persecution, and possibly even torture. Born on July 27, 1955, he had done nothing to merit public attention until Benazir Bhutto married him on December 18, 1987. He gave the impression at the time that he had no desire to give up polo for politics, and that he intended to mind his own business.

Later he changed his mind, served as a senator and as a minister in his wife’s cabinet, but it may be fair to say that his political significance derives entirely from the fact that he is married to Benazir Bhutto. Unrelated to her, and thrown back to his own resources, he poses no threat to any regime. She is right in saying that his continued imprisonment is merely the present government’s way of intimidating and pressuring her.

Mr Zardari was first sent to jail for about a year (1990-91) when Jam Sadiq Ali (once himself an accused in a murder case) was chief minister of Sindh. Ms Bhutto’s second government was dismissed on November 5, 1996. Mr Zardari was arrested the same evening in Lahore and he has been in prison since then. At the lowest count, he is sought in eight accountability references, filed under the Ehtesab Act of 1997, and six criminal cases. The references relate to financial impropriety while three of the criminal cases allege complicity in murders (those of Murtaza Bhutto, September 1996; Alam Baloch, September 1997; Sajjad Hussain, September 1998). In the last of these cases the police did not submit a “challan” until three years after the event, and a court did not “indict” Mr Zardari until after another two years (August 5, 2003).

Mr Zardari has been granted bail in several of these cases but he has never been released. At one time it appeared that he had got bail in all of the cases pending against him, but then the government came up with the allegation that he had evaded taxes on a BMW automobile he had acquired, and kept him in jail.

Once, responding to a reporter as he came out of a court hearing, he said he had been allowed a “cooler,” a radio and a television set in his room in jail. He may also have access to reading material, and it is not unlikely that he gets food of his choice from outside. Visitors do not get to see him except rarely. For the most part, he is kept in solitary confinement that, one may be sure, can be extremely tiresome and enervating.

Has Mr Zardari been tortured? He and his wife say he has been subjected to sleep deprivation and, at times, denied food and drink. In May 1999 the government alleged that he had attempted to commit suicide. He says that that was actually a case of the police attempting to kill him. At one time doctors found lacerations on his tongue and bruises on his neck that, according to him, were the scars torture had left.

Friends and family portray Mr Zardari as a very sick man. He is said to suffer from abnormal blood pressure, a touch of diabetes, inflammation of the vertebrae, sciatic pain, stomach ulcers, bad gums and teeth. He is often in pain and, yet, the government denies him prompt and adequate medical care, allegedly because it wants to keep him in pain and suffering. He misses his wife, and this long imprisonment has robbed him of his right to see his children grow up.

It may incidentally be mentioned that much of Mr Zardari’s deprivation was initiated by the government of Mr Nawaz Sharif, formerly Ms Bhutto’s unrelenting foe and now, strangely enough, her adopted “brother.” In any case, how shall we regard Mr Zardari’s continued detention?

His own contention, supported by many PPP dignitaries, that the charges against him are all bogus is probably no more than partially valid. The argument that Mr Zardari should be let go because other politicians, who have violated the law, are running around free is also unsatisfactory. Nowhere will the courts accept a thief’s plea that he should be left alone because others, known to the police as thieves, are not being prosecuted. The argument then takes an interesting turn. The present regime, it is said, is not only disregarding the crimes of these other thieves; it is embracing them and giving them places of high honour and power. What business does it then have keeping Mr Zardari in prison for seven long years?

One commentator said that, after General Musharraf’s rigged referendum and elections last year, Mr Zardari was beginning to look respectable. The voter in Pakistan, he said, did not have much of a choice, for everyone running for office was likely to be corrupt. That being the case, and looking for something positive, preference should go to those whom the people have chosen. Using that yardstick, one may say that Zardari is more deserving of freedom than many of Musharraf’s clients.

I do not subscribe to any of these views. I would rather argue from the incontrovertible proposition that justice delayed is justice denied. It is preposterous, indeed disgraceful, that the question of Mr Zardari’s complicity in a murder has not been settled in seven years. He should have been convicted or acquitted long ago. The same goes for the other charges against him. One reason for this inordinate prolongation may be that the prosecution lacks conclusive evidence to substantiate its charges. In that event the honourable course of action is to withdraw the cases.

The impression is inescapable that in actual fact a conspiracy is afoot to defeat the spirit and purposes of the law in which the head of the government, prosecutors, and judges are all participants. Mr Zardari’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant to their design which is to keep him in isolation until his wife accepts her exclusion from politics for the foreseeable future. Those responsible for ensuring the rule of law have chosen to be crooked and lawless. General Musharraf should be aware that in the domain of which he has made himself the overseer an obscenity is being enacted.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.

E-mail: ssyed@cox.com

THE US and Britain imposed an unprovoked war on Iraq without the approval of the UN. Both claimed that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Both vehemently argued that the allegations against Iraq were based on incontrovertible evidence and hard intelligence.

US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed on ABC television on March 30, ‘We know where they (WMD in Iraq) are.’ Additionally, Britain sounded an alarm bell that Iraq could ‘deploy some WMD within 45 minutes.’

The ‘free’ western media created a pre-meditated war hysteria and indulged in the media trial of President Saddam Hussein who was held ‘guilty’ without giving him a charge-sheet or hearing. The high-tech military forces of the US and Britain invaded weak Iraq with the military might they possessed and overran it speedily. The undeclared goal of taking control of Iraqi oil reserves was achieved. The occupation forces failed to find the ‘smoking guns’ in Iraq.

Hans Blix told the Council of Foreign Relations on June 23, 2003, ‘It’s sort of puzzling that you can have 100 per cent confidence about WMD existence, but zero per cent certainty about where they are.’ The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in October 2003 that it did not find any evidence of Iraqi nuclear programme.

Iraq did have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes. However, by mid-1990s, significant quantities of Iraq’s WMD weapon programmes were destroyed or rendered harmless under UN supervision. This process was accelerated soon after the termination of hostilities in 1991 Desert War. Iraq cooperated in this effort. In 1996 IAEA reported to the UN Security Council that no nuclear weapons had been manufactured in Iraq, that proscribed nuclear material had been removed from the country, and that no clandestine nuclear weapons programme remained.

The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) had also accounted for 817 of Iraq’s 819 short-range Scud missiles. In early 1990s, Iraq had turned over to the United Nations more than 40,000 proscribed chemical warheads, half of which were drained and destroyed under UNSCOM guidance. In the light of such documented facts it was incorrect to allege — as Washington and London did — that Iraq did not cooperate in a significant manner.

On the contrary, hard evidence has now surfaced to prove that Saddam was made a victim of premeditated deception and deceit. The British claim that Iraq ‘could deploy some WMD within 45 minutes’ was based on questionable single-source evidence — unacceptable to neutral intelligence analysts. Similarly, experts consider that the CIA’s claim about Iraq seeking processed high-grade uranium from Niger was wrong and planted.

The US allegation that Iraq sought high-strength aluminium tubes for enriching uranium is also considered ‘dubious’ as the tubes probably were for rockets. It was further alleged by Washington that Iraq had unmanned aircraft ‘probably intended to deliver biological warfare agent’ that could be used against US cities. The US air force intelligence disagrees maintaining that the small aircraft were for reconnaissance and lacked the capacity to reach targets in US.

It was also alleged that Iraq possessed mobile facilities for producing biological weapon agents. Two mobile labs found in Iraq were mentioned in support of this allegation. However, US experts later concluded that the trailers were, in fact, used for producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

Neutral experts have concluded that after decades of sanctions and inspections Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was now a myth not a reality. In fact Iraq’s chemical and biological programmes, were long destroyed under the supervision of UN inspectors.

Intelligence, an essential input in the decision-making process, ought to be timely, accurate, and unbiased. It is inevitably flawed and dangerous to use it selectively — as Bush and Blair administrations did — to justify predetermined political decisions. The resultant backlash, in the case of Iraq, has dwarfed the global image of the US and Britain and damaged their credibility. the Iraqi episode highlights the danger that national intelligence capabilities can be subjective in their assessment and can be misused by ambitious countries.

That, the US and British adventure in Iraq, was based on faulty intelligence is too grave a matter to be ignored or taken lightly. If unchecked such excesses can be repeated elsewhere in the world on contrived charges, flimsy excuses and self-serving reasons. Peace and security of weak states should never be compromised by the strong to satisfy the ego of war hawks and neo-colonialists. Iraq became a victim of the arrogance of power, setting an unacceptable precedence.

US deputy under-secretary for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin claims that war on terror is a crusade and he promises victory for Christianity. Was destruction of Iraq a part of the so-called Christian crusade? If so, the rabbit pops out of the hat. Such bigoted mindset is the height of arrogance. One thought one Hitler was enough for our age. It is shameful that a person placed so high makes such a low and incendiary statement. Perhaps, moral scruples are only meant for weak states. Saddam’s weak Iraq had no chance to win the unequal war imposed on it by the present day power hawks. The opposing power equation was so lopsided that Iraq had lost the war even before the first shot was fired in the battlefield. But, where was the battlefield? Baghdad’s collapse, inevitable as it was, neither surprised military analysts nor brought credit to the victorious invading forces. The victors are now learning the limitations of power that can neither settle political disputes, nor conquer the hearts of the defeated people. Iraq burns with gunpowder and insult. Peace is a far off cry.

The declared objectives of the invading countries were to (1) disarm Iraq, (20 topple Saddam government, (3)introduce a democratic order in Iraq and (4) establish US-UK military presence in the region. These were based on the assessment that included (1) the people of Iraq, suffocating under the ‘tyrannical’ Saddam rule, would rise to welcome the ‘liberating’ forces, (2), the Kurdish minority would support the attack, (3), the Iraqi Shia population would welcome the fall of Saddam, (4) the high-tech war would save US-British casualties, and (5) the process of transition would be smooth and short.

All these calculations proved wrong. Arab nationalism prevails and the myth of the ‘popularity’ of the invading armies lies buried in the sands of Iraq. The occupation forces are bogged down. The people’s resistance is strong, persistent and effective. The cost of occupation is heavy. So are the losses in manpower and equipment. The body bags of those killed in distant Iraq raise doubts and questions in the minds of the people of the US and Britain. Instances of ambush, sabotage and explosions deny the troops’ freedom of movement.

Many people in the US and Britain are now debating the wisdom of military aggression and the implications of a prolonged occupation. Fifty-seven Islamic countries deeply resent the taunts hurled against Islam and the bias of the western rulers and the media. The public feelings against the US are strong and it is becoming increasingly difficult even for the US’s friends to support Washington. The impotence of the UN shows Bush and Blair face mounting criticism.

The situation in Iraq demands vision and statesmanship to convert chaos into tranquillity. The US met its Waterloo in Vietnam and made a hurried retreat. Faced with a no-win situation, the erstwhile Soviet Union quit Afghanistan. Simmering Iraq poses problems. Washington Post quotes General Richard Myre saying that the US forces in Iraq wish an early return to home. Reportedly, 28 US soldiers failed to return to Iraq after two weeks leave in US. Such indicators are ominous.

The time is ripe for the occupation powers to consider giving a timeframe of the withdrawal of their forces from Iraq. They may claim, ‘Mission completed. Time to return home.’ Obviously such a choice is not without a price tag. But, if this does not happen, Bush and Blair may face greater difficulties in their respective countries.

The writer is a retired general of the Pakistan army.

SERENITY is sitting in the sky at 33,000 feet on a clear afternoon watching the earth pass by. The land between Britain and Poland has soaked more human blood than any other comparable stretch.

The great wonder of our age is surely the peace that Europe has woven from the torn shreds of a mutilated history: even the cold war is over. Britain and Poland will form the western and eastern boundaries of the European Union after May next year, when Poland, along with nine other countries, is admitted.

Clouds appeared after we crossed the English Channel: light, fluffy, square pieces of cotton that formed rows of extraordinary straight lines like the parade of a benevolent, slightly slipshod army. The sky became a bit more dense as we neared our destination, Cracow, the old capital of Poland and on the Unesco list of the world’s 12 most remarkable architectural complexes.

The first mention of the city in a document has been dated to 965 AD, when a Jewish merchant from Muslim Spain, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, left a record of his visit. A sharp breeze welcomed me outside the modest airport, but the real weather was measured by the warmth of friends waiting for me. There are days when life seems too short. This was one of them.

A trumpet blast from a tower at the corner of Market Square begins powerfully and ends abruptly. They still commemorate the moment when a dutiful watchman warned the city in the 13th century that the Tartars were invading Cracow. The abrupt end came when a Tartar arrow slit the watchman’s throat. The story has a happy ending, which presumably is why they remember it. The citizens rallied and repelled the Tartars on that occasion, but of course the Tartar invasion of Poland has many more chapters. There are still some 10,000 Muslim Tartars in Poland.

The square is dominated by the Church of the Virgin Mary, unprepossessing outside but resplendent inside. This Sunday they are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the papacy of Karol Wojtyla, their most famous priest and now Pope John Paul II. Faith may have disappeared from the rest of Europe, but Poland remains a deeply religious country. Even Stalin did not dare eliminate the church from Polish lives. He remarked that putting Poles under communist atheism would be like placing a saddle around a cow. The splendour of the Church of the Virgin Mary was doubly dazzling in the light of a live service. Every generation contributed its genius to a social monument and museum of faith.

The two imposing towers at the entrance begin symmetrically but end differently; one is higher. The story goes that they were built by two brothers, competing for the glory of God. When the elder completed the north tower, he killed his younger sibling to prevent the south tower from rising beyond his structure. The knife he used is preserved in the church.

Poles take their faith seriously, but never so seriously as to deny themselves a joke. A rabbi was invited by a cardinal to see the glories of his church. Each wall, each corner, each square inch of space was packed with treasures: a feast of jewellery, paintings, tapestry, chandeliers and rising altars in gold. The rabbi looked around at the packed church and asked the cardinal: “Where is the space for God in this church?”

The only skyscrapers in Cracow are church steeples, which is a good thing; plaster peels off the walls of innumerable homes, which is not. The city is an extraordinary mix of castles, cathedrals, and compounds that look like a backdrop from a Fifties’ neo-realist Italian movie. All this will change in five years, when the economic and social laws of the European Union take over the city. This has been Poland’s consuming mission ever since its liberation from the Soviet empire at the turn of the nineties, and it will realize its dream on May 1 next year. Not every Pole was keen to join the Union, with its laissez faire attitudes. One of the slogans of the nay-sayers was: “Vote for the European Union! It will become much easier for your son to find a husband!”

But the need to join Nato and then EU was understandable; Poland wanted iron-clad guarantees for its independence from Moscow. Curiously, after having achieved this, Poland now wants guarantees of independence from the European Union. Well, maybe not that curiously. Germany and France partitioned Poland as eagerly as Moscow swallowed it. The new mantra therefore is the United States of America.

This craving for a special relationship has persuaded the Polish government, against the will of the majority of its own people, to send 2,000 soldiers to guard Iraq on behalf of Washington. Ease overlaps with unease in this decision. Having been a victim of occupation, Poland erases the word from public discourse; its troops are a “stabilization” force. There is great eagerness on the part of the officials to underline the difference, and suggest that their contingent is under local command for all practical purposes. This then is why Polish soldiers did not intervene in a firefight of the kind the other day that left three American soldiers dead.

On the television screen a Polish officer in Iraq says that he has nothing to say to the media. At least in this respect, they are different from the Americans. In Warsaw, officials stress that a large number of NGOs have gone with the soldiers, and that they are busy opening schools for Iraqi children. This is yet another baffling aspect of the American intervention. The Iraqis never had any shortage of schools under the Baathists or ever since the second Abbasid emperor established Baghdad more than thirteen hundred years ago. Every occupation needs to justify its presence by promising ‘civilization’.

It is undeniable, however, that the Poles are more sensitive to local sentiment than their superpower ally. There have been no casualties so far in their contingent. But then, again, they have been posted in the Shia regions of the east and the south, and the real war may not have even begun there.

Cracow university was built in the 14th century and thank God they have not tried to improve it. The curse of modernization was one of the principal socialist temptations, and Cracow side-stepped it. All that it needed was heated rooms, and that is a welcome change. Professors no longer have to be celibate, or sit silently in square cells either reading or hearing the Bible as their principal means of education and entertainment. I am in Poland for a series of lectures and everywhere the faculty is open, discursive and enlivened by the necessary touch of the eccentric professor. Learning is a serious business, but not a grim one.

The students are attentive, thoughtful and involved. I was surprised at the turnouts for the lectures, since the subject — Islam and the West — was not especially glamorous. True, the presence of their soldiers in Iraq must have played its part in provoking interest, but their eyes were genuinely in search of an alternative view. They responded positively when I pointed out the first fallacy: that Islam was a faith while the West was a geography, and then suggested that this is where the thesis of civilizations might have misled them.

One very real problem is that the dialogue has got trapped in words that mean totally different things in different environments. The word ‘fundamentalist’ for instance. A believer is defined by the fact that he believes in the fundamentals of his faith, so fundamentalism is not an accusation but a compliment. Is the Pope a fundamentalist, then, for being the guardian of the faith? A lecture never hopes to answer all questions, but if it can open the door to some questions about previously held convictions, then the effort is worthwhile.

The week had aged, and the season changed. The sky had absorbed the grey ink of oncoming winter, and a cold wind searched the tolerance levels of the body. A group of children laughed as they raced out of the stark, sprawling complex of prison camps, a steaming cup of coffee in their hands to challenge the cold. Children have their own ways of dealing with shock. They are less sentimental about evil than we think.

They were schoolchildren from Israel, and this visit to Poland was part of their transition, a defining moment in their individual and collective history; and a reminder that they were fortunate not to have lived in the times of their grandparents. We were at the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz.

Knowledge can never prepare you for reality. I must have read many many thousands of words about these camps, and all of them simply evaporated in the face of what I saw. What I saw was only shards of preserved evil; the weight of the full truth leaves you crushed and helpless. The Jews were the prime target of the racist Nazis, but not the only one.

The poet has not been found who can describe such barbarism. Instead of words, an image appeared in my mind from some distant closet of memory, a photograph of the first encounter between a group of prisoners and the first soldiers to reach Auschwitz as the Nazis fell back on the eastern front. There was absolute incredulity on the face of the liberator. There was absolute immobility on the face of the prisoner, a complete indifference to the freedom they had dared not contemplate a minute before and could not yet comprehend as real.

Those prisoners had died too often in the concentration camps for them to believe anymore in life. There were times that afternoon, as I walked through the gas chambers, and halls of photographs of gypsy children, and mute hills of shoes and suitcases which the condemned had brought, when I felt violently ill. But you cannot even throw up when there is only emptiness inside. Anger filled the vacuum. Nothing made me angrier than the sheer banality of Nazi evil. The sign that welcomed prisoners to Auschwitz said: ‘Work makes you free’. It was a joke on the slaves, most of whom would prefer death before long.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age based in New Delhi.