| 19 February 2004 | Thursday | 27 Zilhaj 1424 |
Problem of girls education
Poetry collection launched
Virtually everyone following the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly reached the conclusion (whether publicly admitted or not) that both the BBC and the government made mistakes that contributed to his suicide.
Question: how then could Lord Hutton deliver a report in which sole blame fell on the BBC? How could he exonerate the government of any wrongdoing when the evidence presented in the inquiry clearly showed it was culpable?
Answer: either Lord Hutton was asleep during the inquiry, or his report is a whitewash.
Dr David Kelly's death in July 2003 took place against the backdrop of a bitter dispute between the government and the BBC. Kelly was the source of BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan's story that Downing Street 'sexed up' the September dossier (in which the government laid out the intelligence case for Iraqi WMD), and inserted the notorious '45 minute' claim when it knew this to be false. Gilligan also alleged that the intelligence community had reservations about the conclusions drawn in the September dossier.
Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications, reacted furiously to the BBC's allegations. Soon after Dr Kelly told his ministry of defence superiors that he suspected he could be the source Gilligan referred to, this became public information.
The MoD downplayed Dr Kelly's seniority in an effort to discredit the BBC. He was grilled and publicly humiliated by the foreign affairs select committee. Kelly faced the very real prospect of dismissal and losing his pension: the chances of his returning to Iraq to do the job he loved were almost zero. On July 17, 2003, he slashed his wrist and bled to death.
The Hutton inquiry was launched to investigate the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, and specifically to examine the culpability of the BBC and/or the government.
Lord Hutton declared that he did not have a remit to examine the quality of the intelligence that led Britain to war. But he did have a remit to examine Andrew Gilligan and the BBC's allegations, and to examine the role of the MoD and Downing Street in 'outing' David Kelly.
The evidence presented clearly showed that at least some of Andrew Gilligan's story was true, and that both the MoD and Downing Street failed to protect Kelly's identity.
The inquiry revealed, for example, that the '45 minute' claim actually referred to battlefield weapons - not WMD; and it came from a single source. Had these points been included in the dossier, the '45 minutes' would not have suggested anything like the imminent threat it appeared without them.
An original draft asserted that Saddam Hussein 'is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat.' On the behest of Blair's chief of staff Jonathon Powell, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee John Scarlett removed the last eight words and changed 'is prepared to' 'will'.
Another conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not attack Britain was deleted. Mr A, a serving member of defence intelligence, told the inquiry: 'The perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives.'
With regard to the 'outing' of Dr David Kelly, the evidence presented showed that the MoD wanted his name to come out, and actively facilitated this. Tony Blair chaired a meeting in which the 'naming strategy' was agreed.
Lord Hutton ignored all the evidence. Quite incredibly, he found the government guilty of nothing. Yes, some MoD officials failed to do as much as they could to warn David Kelly that his name had been made public.
And yes, perhaps the joint intelligence committee was 'subconsciously' influenced by the government's obvious desire to make a case for war, and therefore presented intelligence about Iraqi WMD as stronger than merited. But other than that, the government and the establishment behaved impeccably.
The degree of leniency shown by Lord Hutton to the government was matched in degree by the harshness he showed to the BBC. In his report Hutton tore into the BBC, presenting it as seriously flawed in its journalistic, editing, and control processes.
The BBC has already admitted it made mistakes. Gilligan admitted he attributed words to Kelly that he did not say and that he compromised Kelly's anonymity by passing his name onto the foreign affairs committee.
BBC news director Richard Sambrooke admitted that sufficient care was not taken to check Gilligan's story. Director-General Greg Dyke and the BBC's governors admitted they defended Gilligan's story without adequately checking its veracity. The BBC made mistakes. But those errors do not justify the whipping it received at the hands of Lord Hutton.
Hutton took the BBC's mistakes and inflated them to characterize the whole functioning of the BBC. His damning conclusions, and the subsequent gloating and sanctimonious admonitions for corporate reform by Campbell et al, fly in the face of what is so obvious as to be almost a given.
Namely, that no global-reach news organization - not CNN, not Sky and most definitely not Fox - comes even close to the objectivity, accuracy and balance of the BBC's news coverage. If you want spin and nationalist rhetoric you watch Fox: if you want the facts, you watch the Beeb.
Ironically, the ultimate proof of the BBC's quality was provided by its coverage of the Hutton report and its aftermath. Listening to its analysis of the findings - totally objective, totally neutral and balanced - you would never have guessed that it was one of the main parties in the dispute examined by Lord Hutton.
Hutton drew the wrong conclusion. The mistakes made by Gilligan and his bosses were not symptomatic of BBC malfunctioning, but an aberration from the norm. Those mistakes cannot be excused - especially as they contributed to the tragic death of David Kelly - but they can be understood when seen in wider perspective.
For they were made in the context of a virtual war between the BBC and Downing Street, with the former struggling valiantly to break the mould of embedded reporting that characterized coverage of the Iraq War and present the true facts, and the latter trying to silence it.
Greg Dyke has revealed since his departure (a shameful episode) that the BBC was subjected to a constant barrage of 'rants' from Alastair Campbell in Downing Street. Most of the stories that Campbell complained about as untrue turned out to be very true. Dyke and the BBC's mistake was to assume that the Gilligan story was an example of the same thing.
And again, one should not forget that the crux of Gilligan's story was true. Downing Street did influence the wording of the intelligence dossier to make the case for WMD much stronger than that originally presented by intelligence sources.
There was serious disquiet within the intelligence community about the dossier. And of course, there is the utter lack of any WMD in Iraq. Almost a year of scouring the country has yielded nothing. What stronger indication could there be of intelligence being distorted to make a case for war?
Dyke accused the government, and particularly Alastair Campbell, of focussing on the Gilligan story last summer as a strategy to deflect growing criticism of the war and growing questions about the intelligence that led to war. Campbell's strategy worked in that his row with the BBC became the main story, instead of the accuracy of the September dossier.
Lord Hutton could and should have shifted the focus back from the small story of whether Gilligan's 6.07 am report on the Today programme contained errors, to the bigger story of how Britain ended up going to war in Iraq.
He failed. By focussing on the Gilligan story, and exonerating Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell with resounding words like 'integrity', Hutton has again muddied the waters and blurred the real issue - of how the Blair government led Britain to war.
Perhaps not, though. The irony is that the Hutton report is so one-sided it has minimal credibility, and therefore it could actually damage the government. Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell, Geoff Hoon, John Scarlett and other establishment figures might have been cleared in the court of Lord Hutton, but they are far from cleared in the court of public opinion.
The British people are not relying solely on Lord Hutton to interpret the facts for them. They are capable of reaching their own conclusions and, as a recent poll suggests, many more of them believe and trust the BBC than the government.
The government 'won' the battle with the BBC, but it could yet lose the war. For, despite Hutton's divorced-from-reality conclusions, the fact is that not a single WMD has been found in Iraq.
Tony Blair took Britain to war on the grounds that Iraq's WMD posed a 'grave and imminent danger' to the rest of the world. Faced with the obvious falsehood of that assertion, there are only two possible conclusions: either the intelligence agencies got it badly wrong, or the government manipulated intelligence information to suit its pro-war agenda. Given what was revealed in the Hutton Inquiry, which would you put your money on?
The British government still has much to answer about the death of Dr David Kelly and even more about the thousands of others killed in the Iraq war. Lord Hutton's whitewash report, an over-zealous attempt to protect the establishment, failed to deliver those answers. But thanks to institutions like the BBC, the truth will eventually come out.
Problem of girls education
Ahmedpur east, the oldest tehsil of Bahawalpur district, is also the biggest tehsil of the Punjab area-wise. Its population of over three lakh is facing many problems.
A serious problem is girls education at the college level. The degree college has no building of its own. Some 15 years ago, a girls intermediate college was established in the building of a boys high school. It was upgraded to the degree level later, but it is still running in the same building.
The building is inadequate for the students and staff. The site for the construction of a new building has been selected, but without the necessary funds it cannot be built. The government claims that a special attention is being paid to the education sector in the Punjab. It should provide funds for the college building.
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The new building of Rescue 15 has been opened in the city. Funds for it of Rs2.8 million were provided by the deputy ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan Bin Raashid Al-Maktum, in 2001. His special representative, Sheikh Khalil Ibrahim, unveiled the plaque at a ceremony presided over by the DIG police.
On the occasion, DPO Sikandar Hayat explaining the objective of Rescue 15 assured that the police would extend quality emergency service to telephone callers. According to him, a batch of 50 police officials, including those of the Elite Force, will remain on duty at the rescue centre to promptly meet emergency in the city.
He said the rescue centre would also serve as a reporting centre for people in distress and maintain a computerized record of stolen vehicles in the district. He said so far the centre had updated the record of 624,852 stolen vehicles. He assured that certificates would also be issued to the desirous people regarding clearance of stolen cars.
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Punjab Education Minister Imran Masood during his recent visit here addressed an educationists' meeting and warned that strict action would be taken against those heads of institutions whose performance was poor and unsatisfactory in respect of results of various examinations.
The minister said the government was providing them all facilities, concessions and privileges, and as such it was necessary for teachers to perform their professional duties honestly, diligently and with a sense of dedication for showing better results.
He said the government was utilizing a sum of Rs21 billion for the promotion of education in the Punjab. The government's targets could be achieved with the cooperation of teachers and educationists, he said.
Stressing the need for primary education, he pointed out that currently some nine million children were school-going. Out of them, he said, over four million left school after getting only primary education and thus remained without proper education.
He said in order to keep these children studying in schools continuously at least up to high level, the government was embarking on a comprehensive programme to make them useful citizens.
The minister's attention was drawn towards high fees of private schools, fleecing in the name of English schools. The minister assured that concrete measures would be taken to check such trends.
Poetry collection launched
Karachi: A poetry collection from a Pakistani poet since long based in Nairobi (Kenya) was launched on Tuesday. Soch kinaray - the maiden collection of Jazaul Ehsan Jaza includes ghazal, verses and also prose poems showing her poetic talent and competence in all the popular and not so popular forms.
With noted critic and poet Ahmad Hamdani, in the chair who had to leave a bit earlier due to failing health, the audience was addressed by many city writers- Prof Saher Ansari, Prof Shaheda Hasan, Dr SM Moin Qureshi, Dr Nigar Sajjad Zaheer, Farast Rizvi and Ishrat Romani. Rais Baghi paid his compliments in his poem.
Prof Ansari who was the last to speak admired Jaza for her social consciousness and for the role she wanted for the Muslim Ummah to play in the present anti-Muslim bias in the West.
Hailing from a literary family of Sialkot, and emotionally linked with such eminent poets as Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, both from her native town Sialkot, Ms Jaza is basically a poet of human love, her emotions rooted in feminism. To prove his point, he read out a few of her verses.
Ms Shaheda Hasan felt that our writers during their stay abroad usually lose contact with Pakistan but Jaza was an exception. Her binding relationship with the language, culture, and traditions of the East was admirable.
She added that Jaza had studied the famous English language poet like Keats and Wordsworth and many others she drew inspiration from modern thought and poetic treatment apart from her own training in the usage of Urdu idioms.
Ishrat Romani felt that Ms Jaza was deeply influenced with Urdu's classical poetry although she had a clear vision about the demands of the modern times. To Ferasat Rizvi, she was " a poet from the East", humanism being the focus of her poetry, simplicity with touching images of feminism her hallmark. Nigar Sajjad Zaheer referred to the poet's experience of migration from her own land which carried a feeling of pathos, although she was not pessimist in her approach. A couplet quoted by most speakers which showed her feminist feeling combined with realism was the following:
Khuli jo aankh to hathon pa aablay paey
Yeh aur baat ki Khaboon mein titliyaan dekhen
Syed Meraaj Jami and his Bazem-e-Takhleeq-i-adab were the hosts. Mr Jami who introduced the poet living in Kenya for the last twenty years read out the comments about Jaza's poetry he had received from Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik, Iftekhar Arif Najmus Saadiq and Ms Kishwar Naheed.
But the person who stole the show by his humorous and satirical essay was Dr Moin Qureshi, whose comments drew spontaneous applause and laughter from the crowd.