Not a false dawn

AS past experience has taught us, too much good news has not been good for South Asian politics. A series of far-sighted and confidence-building steps taken by Pakistan and India, during the past few weeks, topped by a bold statement by President Pervez Musharraf on December 18, had raised hopes that the two sides were now determined to initiate a comprehensive process leading to durable peace and amity in the sub-continent.

But those hopes have now been dampened. India’s low-key reaction to Musharraf’s Kashmir offer was disappointing, if not cynical. Are we to believe that the sharp-eyed experts at India’s external affairs ministry failed to grasp the full significance of the Pakistani president’s statement? If that is not the case, then why a lukewarm reaction to a crucial policy statement?

* For the first time since the Kashmir dispute began, the top man in Pakistan has publicly stated that his country is prepared to leave aside Security Council Resolutions on Kashmir in an attempt to resolve the perennial dispute.

* This observation was made about two weeks before the Saarc summit to be attended, among others, by the Indian prime minister.

* The Pakistani leader has warned that if we throw away “the very real opportunity” to make peace, it is the moderates who will lose and the extremists will win on either side — an ominous development for both Pakistan and India.

It is difficult to assess at this stage the real reason behind foreign minister Yashwant Sinha’s low key reaction conveyed after a meeting of the Indian cabinet. Was it simply a diplomatic stratagem designed to conceal New Delhi’s gratification at the new development or was it a continuation of India’s cynical attitude adopted after the Agra summit? Or did it reflect a genuine suspicion of Pakistan’s intentions and motives?

May be New Delhi is still undecided as to whether the welcome change in Islamabad’s Kashmir policy and attitude toward India has been brought about solely by American pressure or dictated by a genuine desire to peacefully settle bilateral disputes.

Prime Minister Jamali’s statement that the UN resolutions cannot be overlooked could not have been more ill-timed and ill-advised because it will only help to strengthen Indian suspicions and misgivings. New Delhi must be wondering which of the two statements truly reflects the thinking in Islamabad — President Musharraf’s interview to the Reuter’s or his prime minister’s observations to NDTV. The hallmark of a true leader is not to be led by populist notions but to lead his people along rational and pragmatic lines. President Musharraf’s Kashmir statement is a bold and timely offer to give dejure recognition to a de facto situation in the Security Council provided India is prepared to respond positively.

The problem with New Delhi seems to be, as is apparent from its response to Musharraf’s Kashmir offer, that it is still in two minds about taking the Pakistani president at his word. Kargil appears to be still haunting New Delhi. But if Pakistan is prepared to forget the past and look to the future, why can’t India let bygones be bygones? The only sensible approach for the two sides is to start a comprehensive dialogue, accept the importance of Kashmir dispute (let us not use the word ‘ centrality’ as New Delhi is allergic to it) and look for a solution acceptable to all the concerned parties . The only way for Mr. Vajpayee to find out whether President Musharraf means what he says is to have a face to face meeting with him during the forthcoming Saarc summit. There is no other way to test the sincerity of Pakistan on this and other related issues.

According to a recent Indian Express report, “there has not been a single infiltration attempt across the Line of Control since the ceasefire came into effect.” The assessment is based on inputs from Indian intelligence bureau, military intelligence and the border security force. The stoppage of infiltration across the LoC is a development of major significance which should facilitate the beginning of a comprehensive peace process between the two neighbours. After the failure of Agra summit, Mr. Vajpayee on July 23, 2001 said that the Agra talks broke down because of “Pakistan’s adamant attitude against making any reference to cross-border terrorism.” According to the Indian version, the Agra summit failed because Mr. Vajpayee failed to get a commitment from President Musharraf on ending cross-border infiltration (which India calls “terrorism”).

Now when this infiltration has come to an end and there has been a strategic change in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy, Mr. Vajpayee should fulfil his part of the commitment contained in his well-known “ musings” in 2001 and 2002 that he was ready to “get off the beaten track” to find a solution to the Kashmir dispute. By insisting, in his recent address to BJP parliamentarians, that for talks to be meaningful, mujahideen camps in Azad Kashmir should be destroyed, Mr. Vajpayee is going far beyond Agra. No one knows it better than the Indian prime minister, himself a seasoned politician, that the man across the border also needs his domestic constituency to back him up and even a military ruler has his limitations and cannot give anything away unilaterally.

Ceasefire and CBMs are only a means to an end. They cannot sustain themselves for long in the absence of meaningful follow-ups. The hard-liners in Pakistan have always argued against choking of support for the Kashmiri militants because, in their opinion, that would leave Pakistan with no Kashmir policy as it will deprive Islamabad of the only means available to keep the Kashmir dispute alive.

The danger is that if New Delhi does not respond positively to Musharraf’s peace offer it will give the impression that, having forced Islamabad to give up support for cross-border infiltration, it is no longer enthusiastic about solving the Kashmir dispute amicably. If India does not act to dispel these fears, it will only weaken the moderates and strengthen the hands of extremists and hard-liners in Pakistan.

It is, therefore, in the interest of both India and Pakistan to move out of their past mindsets, initiate a meaningful and comprehensive dialogue and settle their disputes by being “ bold and flexible”, as President Musharraf has put it.

It is, however, apparent that any earnest search for reconciliation and adjustment is pivoted on mutual trust, a scarce commodity in the sub-continent. The real problem is that both the neighbours are caught in a self-created trap of pathological distrust of each other extending over more than half a century. Mutual suspicions have reached a stage where a face-to-face meeting between the Indian prime minister and the Pakistan President could perhaps change the entire atmospherics.

Interestingly, President Musharraf’s peace initiative may have far-reaching implications for BJP’s internal and India’s domestic politics. If Islamabad’s peace initiative gathers momentum, Vajpayee may lead the BJP in the 2004 parliamentary elections and may win them on a more moderate plank.

Saddam: will his trial be fair?

“(SADDAM Hussein) was wise not to wait too long,” said Colonel James Hickey, commander of the American forces that took the former Iraqi leader prisoner on 14 December.

“We were about to clear that (underground facility) in a military sort of way,” he added, explaining that “things like that are cleared with hand grenades, small arms, things like that.” But Hickey’s instructions were to capture or kill’ Saddam, and the latter managed to get his hands up in time.

The Bush administration is probably wishing quite hard by now that Saddam had waited a little longer and been killed in his hole. While others debate where he should be tried and by whom, and whether he should face the death penalty or not, President Bush’s people will be realising just about now that they can’t afford to give him a fair trial at all.

He would certainly be convicted in the end: the evidence of Saddam’s crimes over the years is overwhelming. But in a fair trial, with normal rules of evidence and reasonably competent defence lawyers, it would be impossible to stop the defence from pointing out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 (all Republican administrations, as it happens) was directly or indirectly complicit in his crimes.

During Saddam’s quarter-century of power in Iraq, every year saw tens of thousands of people tortured and killed, for that is the nature of absolute dictatorships of any political ideology. Mao Tse-tung, the Argentine generals and Idi Amin all did it, the Algerian regime, the Burmese generals, and Kim Jong-Il are all doing it today. But nobody would have tried Mao for the routine fifty or hundred thousand people killed by his regime in an average year like 1962; they would have focused on the millions who were exiled, tortured, and/or murdered during the Cultural Revolution.

Saddam’s career includes three great crimes: the use of poison gas against Iranian troops during the 1980-88 war; the slaughter of rebellious Iraqi Kurds towards the end of that war and just afterwards (again involving the use of poison gas); and the massacres of Kurds and Shia Arabs who rebelled against his rule after the Gulf War of 1991. After that, his misdeeds fall back to a more mundane level.

These three great crimes, committed between 1983 and 1991, would be the primary focus of any trial. The problem for the US government is that it was directly implicated in the first two, and largely though indirectly responsible for the third as well. A truly impartial court might even lay charges against senior American political and military figures (including some in the present administration) who assisted Saddam in his war crimes. At the least, the whole process would be acutely embarrassing for the United States.

US involvement with Saddam’s regime began in 1983, when his ill-advised invasion of Iran had backfired spectacularly and Iraq was facing defeat at the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini’s radically anti-American regime in Iran. The US knew that Saddam was already illegally using chemical weapons against Iranian troops on an almost daily basis, but in December, 1983 the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld (now US Defence Secretary) to Baghdad to tell Saddam that it was willing to help and wanted to restore full diplomatic relations.

In the following years, the US government allowed vital ingredients for chemical weapons to be exported to Iraq, together with dozens of biological agents, including anthrax. It also supplied Iraq with intelligence information on Iranian troop movements and positions, and from 1986 even sent US Air Force officers to Iraq to help interpret US-supplied satellite and aerial photos to plan attacks against Iran — in which it was clearly understood by Washington that huge quantities of poison gas would be used.

The Reagan administration used its influence to kill a Senate bill banning the export of US military technology to Iraq to punish Saddam for using chemical weapons against Iran. When Saddam used poison gas against his own Kurdish population at Halabja in 1988, killing 6,800 innocent people, US diplomats were instructed to blame the incident on Iran. All this would come out in gory detail (and perhaps much more besides) if Saddam ever got a fair and public trial.

The third great crime of the Saddam years was the massacre of rebellious Shia Arabs and, to a lesser extent, of Kurds, after Saddam’s defeat in the 1991 war. These occurred because President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi population to revolt against Saddam — but when they did, he withheld US military support, even allowing Saddam’s helicopter gunships to range freely over the rebellious areas. It was not complicity, but it was at least great carelessness.— Copyright

A realistic approach

“ZULFI, I know that we must find a solution for Kashmir. But we have got caught in a situation which we can’t get out of without causing damage to the systems and structures of our respective societies.” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told this to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistan foreign minister, as far back as November 1961 in London. This holds good as much today as it was then.

President General Pervez Musharraf is right in saying that he will not give up Kashmir. No ruler in India or Pakistan can stay in power if he or she relinquishes Kashmir. People on either side will not accept a settlement which they perceive as a defeat. But it is wrong if the Pakistan president expects Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to concede anything basic on Kashmir. He has more compulsions than Musharraf.

The problem has, in fact, become more complicated than before because the Kashmiris, those living in the valley, have begun to cherish the dream of becoming independent. People in the Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist-majority Ladakh, the two other regions of the state, have openly dissociated themselves from the demand of independence. They want to stay part of India. This scenario has, unfortunately, polarized the state, more aptly, trifurcated it.

Musharraf was realistic when he said that he had “left aside” the 50-year-old demand for a UN-mandated plebiscite in Kashmir. Both prime minister Mir Zarafullah Khan Jamali and foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri unnecessarily misinterpreted Musharraf’s reading of the situation so as to placate the extremist opinion in Pakistan. They should know that holding a plebiscite is neither feasible nor possible.

If at all, where do you hold it? Apparently, in the valley where the Muslim population has swelled to more than 98 per cent after the migration of Kashmiri pandits who number only 20,000 now. What will it prove? The All Party Hurriyat Conference has already admitted that its influence — or claim — does not go beyond the valley. Still if a plebiscite is held and the choice given between independence and the integration with Pakistan, more than 90 per cent will opt for independence.

Only recently did Musharraf reject the proposition of independence. There are yet some in Pakistan to argue that it is only a matter of time before the independent valley of 98 per cent Muslims will join the Islamic state of Pakistan. An independent Kashmir is considered part of the strategy. The Pakistan government, on the other hand, says that it recognizes only the Hurriyat faction headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani who has always advocated that Kashmir should join Pakistan.

As far as the Kashmiris are concerned, they do not like the prospect of joining Pakistan. They are opposed to be part of a country where the military set-up has reduced liberty to a farce and where the different provinces have little autonomy. “We do not want to change masters,” as many Kashmiri leaders say. “We want independence.”

Repercussions of Kashmir’s independence or integration with Pakistan or India are beyond proportions; they are too dangerous to even contemplate. People in the rest of India will see it as the Muslim-populated area seceding from the country on the basis of religion. It will amount to reopening partition. Fires of hatred might rage to such an extent that the very complexion of Indian polity might undergo a change.

Not only that, a political party that thrives on building up animus against the Muslims will find an apt argument to administer a fatal blow to India’s pluralism. Hindutva, so far a danger in the distance, may come to engulf the country. The Sangh parivar will hawk around the country that even after 56 years the Muslims of Kashmir preferred to opt out of Hindu-majority India and join the Muslim-majority Pakistan. A secular society, with 12 crore Muslims, cannot even entertain such a heinous thought.

In fact, Pakistan has itself moved from the plebiscite demand. It did so first implicitly in 1966 at Tashkent and then explicitly in 1972 at Shimla. At both the places, plebiscite did not figure either directly or indirectly. No UN resolution regarding the plebiscite was recalled. At the preparatory meeting at Murree (April 1972) for the Shimla conference, DP Dhar from India and Aziz Ahmed from Pakistan exchanged several documents on how to establish “a durable peace.” But none of them mentioned plebiscite. Nor did Pakistan bring it up at any stage, not even during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s meeting with Indira Gandhi at Shimla.

A bilateral dialogue for a “final settlement” has come to be accepted a way out since the Shimla conference. For a long time after the conference, Islamabad did not even mention the UN resolutions. Later when the Kashmiris came into the picture, Pakistan began clubbing together the Shimla conference and the UN resolutions to suggest the Kashmiris’ participation.

India dropped the option of plebiscite in 1954 itself when Ghulam Mohammed, the then Pakistan’s governor-general, said after visiting Washington that a “Middle-East defence pact” with Pakistan was in the offing. Nehru warned then that the whole psychological atmosphere between India and Pakistan would change “for the worse” and every question pending between the two nations would be affected by Pakistan’s membership of military pacts.

The point that the Indian prime minister was making was that with American arms increasing Pakistan’s fighting potential, it would be ridiculous to talk of “demilitarization” of Kashmir as the first step to hold a plebiscite. Nehru even wrote to Mohammad Ali Jinnah: In fact, the question before us becomes one of militarization and not that of demilitarization.

This was the beginning of New Delhi’s subsequent stand that military pacts by Pakistan had negated the very basis on which India agreed to a plebiscite.

It is no use beating a dead horse. Musharraf is right — he is on tape — to keep aside the plebiscite. But it does not mean that Kashmir should not be discussed. To begin with, India should implement the agreement on the Siachen that its foreign secretary initialled more than 15 years ago.

Whatever the outcome, an overall situation, as Nehru told Bhutto, should not cause damage to the “systems and structures” that India and Pakistan have.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.

US expansionist designs in the Middle East

You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors And the land which I cultivated Along with my children And you left nothing for us

— Mahmoud Darwish, 1967

FROM the Second World War the US emerged an “oil hungry power”, with a predictably keen appetite for the Middle East. By 1950 its investments in oilfields there amounted to $596 million, and it controlled about 40 per cent of oil production. In 1951, British insistence on clinging to its old “rights” in Iran led to the government headed by Mosaddeq to nationalize the oil industry.

The Iranian military, led by General Zahedi, had close ties with America, and with the Shah’s sanction, the army overthrew Mosaddeq’s government in 1953. Mosaddeq was arrested, massive repression launched, and the Shah was installed in power. Economic aid from Washington was just waiting to be channelled into Iran under Shah’s rule. A year later a new settlement was made with foreign oil interests, giving 40 per cent of shares in a new controlling corporation to five big American companies.

America’s interest in the Middle East has extended to other, strategic considerations as well, and its ascendancy in the region was ironically hampered by its strongest ally, the state of Israel, created by colonial forces and propped up by neo-colonial powers. America’s own interests prescribed an alliance with the Arabs, but its own self-imposed obligation to underwrite the Jewish state led it into a fifty-year long confrontation with Arab nationalism, to half a century of struggle waged by the Palestinian people, colonized, ghettoized, and disenfranchised by the expansionist designs of the state of Israel, supported by the US Congress which approved $2.76 billion in its annual aid package for Israel for this year.

The total amount of direct US aid to Israel has been constant, at around three billion dollar per year for the last quarter century. A new plan was recently implemented to phase out all economic aid and provide corresponding increases in military aid by 2008. This year Israel is receiving 2.04 billion in military aid and $720 million in economic aid.

In addition to nearly three billion dollar in direct aid, Israel usually gets another three billion dollar or so in indirect aid: military support from the defence budget, forgiven loans and special grants. It is safe to say that Israel’s total aid amounts to at least five billion dollars annually.

According to the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), from 1949-2001 the US has given Israel a total of $95. The direct and indirect aid from this year should put the total US aid to Israel since 1949 at over one hundred billion dollars. What is not widely known, however, is that most of this aid violates American laws.

Moreover, the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military assistance to any country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The Proxmire amendment bans military assistance to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities, which Israel refuses to do. To understand why the US spends this much money funding the brutal repression of a colonized people, it is necessary to examine the benefits for weapons manufacturers and, particularly, the role that Israel plays in the expansion and maintenance of US imperialism.

Of course, the US administration had decided long ago that Middle East oil was a “stupendous source of strategic power...one of the greatest prizes in world history.” Sixty-five per cent of the world’s known oil reserves lie in the Middle East. Control over the flow of this oil by US oil companies has given America strategic power over Europe, Japan, and the developing world.

In 2001, Henry Kissinger stated that “oil is too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” The US government had been planning for a war in the Persian Gulf since 1979, when President Carter set up the Rapid Deployment Force and declared that any threat to Gulf oil “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

In the early 1980s, Iran was seen as the main threat to US “interests” in the Gulf. Washington and its allies supported the Iraqi invasion of Iran and provided the Iraqi military with massive amounts of high-tech weaponry to use against its neighbour. US companies sold Iraq materials to make chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax.

The Pentagon supplied satellite photos of Iranian troop deployments and then looked the other way when Iraq bombarded them with poison gas. In fact, even in the infamous gassing of the Kurds in Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces, the US was silent and evasive. Hallabja became a human rights issue only when justifications were being sought for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US troops.

Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, President Bush immediately began to prepare for a massive war and blocked all possibilities for a negotiated solution. He rejected Iraq’s offer to withdraw from Kuwait in exchange for convening a Middle East peace conference. President Bush knew that the conflict could be settled through negotiations, but he preferred a “rapid and decisive victory”. Bush launched the most intensive bombing campaign in history using conventional bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, and phosphorous bombs which cling to and burn the skin, as well as fuel air explosives which are like small nuclear bombs. Later the US military used weapons tipped with depleted uranium which is now suspected of having caused cancer in both US and Iraqi soldiers, and birth defects amongst their children.

It is estimated that 150,000 Iraqis died during the Gulf war in 1991. Even more people, especially children, died from the water-borne diseases that spread when the US systematically destroyed Iraq’s electrical, sewage treatment, and water treatment systems. Once the war was over, the US imposed the most severe economic sanctions in history, causing thousands of more deaths as a result of increasing poverty and the mounting incidence of disease which needed to be treated with drugs that were not there.

In 1999, Unicef estimated that infant and child mortality in Iraq had more than doubled since the war in Iraq. It largely attributed this trend in mortality to malnutrition and deteriorating health conditions caused by the war and on-going sanctions. Unicef estimated that more than half a million children died as a result — mere “collateral damage” for Madeline Albright. Who were the winners of this war? Oil companies reaped windfall profits through speculation and price gouging that drove up gasoline prices. Exxon reported a 75 per cent increase in profits during this time, Amoco reported 68.6 per cent, Mobil 45.6 per cent, Texaco 26.5 per cent and Chevron 17.8 per cent. More importantly, oil companies strengthened their grip on Middle Eastern oil supply, preserving the comfortable relationship between US capital and Arab royals. As a result of the first Gulf war, US troops are permanently stationed in Saudi Arabia, despite strong opposition from many Arabs.

Bankers also reaped profits from oil revenues generated in the Middle East. Nine hundred billion dollars fill the vaults of Citibank, JP Morgan and other US, Japanese, and European banks. Large construction contractors and oil service companies raced to get their share of the 100 billion dollar worth of contracts to rebuild Kuwait. Giant US corporations such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Motorola and Caterpillar got the majority of the contracts. The same players are vying for vital shares in the reconstruction of Iraq this year.

Following the first Gulf war, US arms sales skyrocketed from eight billion dollars in 1989 to more than 140 billion dollars in 1991. The US is now selling more arms than any country has before. Loans and grants to developing countries often have arms deals built into them, so that the money loaned goes to the US military-industrial complex.

In 1991 the then US secretary of state, James Baker, declared that “the time has come to change the destructive pattern of military competition and to reduce the arms flow to the region.” These words were obviously spoken too soon, for the US still had many more weapons to peddle, many new technologies to try out on supposed enemies, and many more miles to go before peace became a reality for the majority of the world’s people.

Just ten years later, the US unleashed yet another reign of terror, ostensibly seeking retribution for the destruction of the World Trade Centre. The US bombing of Afghanistan in its pursuit of the alleged mastermind behind the WTC attack left thousands of civilians dead, and millions starving because of the fact that food supplies were cut off during the bombing attacks. Cluster bombs and daisy cutters were used indiscriminately, and the richest and most powerful country on earth prided itself on the attack it was carrying out on one of the most impoverished countries in the world.

The US military budget is now larger than the next 25 spenders put together. It takes up a full 36 per cent of the total global military spending. Its annual military expenditure amounts to $396 billion. The US refuses to sign a new protocol under the 1972 biological weapons treaty and is busy developing deadly strains of germ and chemical warfare. Since 1948 the US has spent $15 trillion to build up its military might. It spends $776 billion a year to feed its military addiction.

In the United States of America, every 50 minutes a child dies of hunger. An American child, a child born under the shadow of human greed, nurtured on the entrails of a carcass whose heart has been ripped out and sold in the open market for the highest profit possible.

The writer is United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund.