| 18 March 2004 | Thursday | 26 Muharram 1425 |
What the tribunal lacks
It's Europe's 9/11
(Robert Fisk was in Baghdad when the US-led war on Iraq began. He now marks the war's first anniversary on March 19.)
The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number.
When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.
At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and fear the attack which so many of the guests have been predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at dinner-time when the South African and British mercenaries come clanking back from their "security duties", all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the 'fajr' prayers, their souls cleansed for self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when they most often strike. I've lost count of the number of times my bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-time.
When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south, we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs to avoid the killers on Highway 8.
We were driving down there at first light last week - ah, the relief to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning - when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, came on the car radio.
We were just approaching the spot where two American civilians working for the occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away. Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with hollow laughter.
A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was a law-and-order land. There, the looting and raping was done by the government, not by the people. Now it's the other way round.
I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship. "Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says.
We passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the soldiers at the gate.
It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn't they know, I kept asking myself? Didn't they realize what was coming?
I remember the last night before war. I had gone to buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders.
Last leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam's infantile novels that they read on their way to the front? In the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him within hours.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will." We all had our "minders" then, Saddam's lads from the corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to steer us away from the paths of political unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American street demonstrations and the interminable press conferences of junior ministers.
But after a while, once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the minders too, bought them from their government allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to go, even into the firestorm of America's armour, the Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in front of us.
The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed expert on terrorism, now works and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time. Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked), had already degenerated into senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Baathist newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Saddam stood in the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusay but on his right Uday, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt, the beloved son gone to seed and drugs. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?
Yet Saddam thought he could win; that destiny - a dangerous ally for all "strongmen" - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information minister, predicting America's doom.
It was not just Iraqi patriots who would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them; the desert would consume them; the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their bodies.
Not since the caliphate had such curses been called down upon an invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz who warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer won.
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares and dreams, encouraged by the right-wing, neo-conservative, pro-Israeli American Vulcans, who did so much to bring about this catastrophe and who - now that everything is falling to pieces - are working so hard to minimize their pre-war ideological importance.
To them Saddam was the all-powerful, evil state terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington must be laid low.
Liberation, Democracy, a New Middle East. There was no end to the ambitions of the conquerors. I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous nonsense would be set upon.
Try to explain the crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001, and you were anti-American. Warn readers about the crazed alliance of right-wingers behind President Bush and you were anti-Semites. Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the Anglo-American air bombardment and you were anti-British, pro-Saddam, sleeping with the enemy.
When Blair's first "dossier" was published - most of it, anyway, was old material on Saddam's human rights abuses, not weapons of mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability was already hedged around with "mights" and "coulds" and "possiblys".
When a day after Baghdad's "liberation" I wrote in The Independent that the "war of resistance" was about to begin, I could have papered my bathroom wall with the letters of abuse I received. Letters like those no longer arrive.
But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Saddam thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic enemies as Chamberlain and fitting Saddam into Hitler's uniform.
I remember the sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading television screen and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber attacking US troops - during the invasion.
It was a young soldier, a married man, who had driven his car bomb at the Americans near Nasiriyah. Never before had an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like this, not even in the Somme-like mud of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Then two women drove their car into the Americans in southern Iraq. This was astonishing.
The Americans dismissed it all. They were cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime, journalists were told. But those three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Baathists were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely instigated by the soldier and the two women themselves. - (c) The Independent
To be concluded
What the tribunal lacks
Of late the Federal Service Tribunal has been in focus. It has been widely reported that there is an enormous backlog of accumulated cases which are either the subject of frequent adjournments or are outrightly lying in cold storage for one reason or the other.
One of the reasons stated is that there are several vacancies of members of the tribunal which are lying unfilled and that the federal government has for some time now been unable to make up its mind on fresh appointments. But there are other problems too that the tribunal is faced with.
The FST was created in 1973 as a follow-up of Article 240 of the 1973 Constitution which says that instead of the Civil Services having any chapter to themselves in the Constitution (as was the case in previous constitutions) they would henceforth be regulated by an organic law i.e. a separate piece of legislation by parliament. Consequently came the Civil Service Reforms of 1973 consisting of the Civil Servants Ordinance 1973 and the Civil Service Rules 1973.
The Federal Service Tribunal was born out of this event and created as a product of what can be described as hurried/instant legislation which initially descends in the form of an ordinance which is promulgated straightaway through executive fiat and later placed before parliament for ratification within 60days or so of its already having taken effect.
By that time the processes and procedures of the new legislation are already under way on the ground and parliament has little or no option except to vote the said ordinance into law.
The status that was given to the federal service tribunal was that of a High Court so that the forum of an appeal against its judgment would be to the Supreme Court and that too in the event of a point of law arising that could warrant an appeal. The net result of course was that very few of the aggrieved persons are able to make an appeal to the Supreme Court in service matters on relevant issues.
Whereas it is an accepted practice all over the world that an aggrieved party must necessarily have the right of two appeals and there is virtually no justification therefore for the service-related matters to be kept out of the operation of this principle and be able to have the possibility of only one appeal which again is very seriously encumbered by the point of law requirement.
Now the question arises as to how does one provide the two appeals to the affected person. One option could be to abolish the FST and transfer its jurisdiction to the respective courts i.e. in other words, let the law of the land prevail and take its course.
This may well meet with resistance from the governments both federal and provincial which have over 30 years got used to an arrangement that is tilted in favour of the appointing authority of civil servants.
If so, one has to think of an arrangement that equitably takes care of the competing interests of the government as well as its employees. So in order to marry these two factors what needs to be done is to retain the FST and re-define its status as a quasi-judicial tribunal i.e. of lesser status than that of a High Court and thus make provision for the two appeals system that is a bed-rock of the British-bequeathed judicial system.
The reasons for making such a proposal is not just in order to pander to the civil servants' lobby in the country. But after all civil servants also happen to be the citizens of our republic.
One must also not forget that the FST by its very description and nomenclature is only described as a tribunal and not a High Court. Its status can in any event be reduced and/or enhanced.
In real terms it consists of a retired Judge as its chairman and is packed with retired civil servants and police officers etc who serve totally during the pleasure of the government and wish to hang on to the coat-tails of Islamabad and/or the provincial capitals well beyond their service tenures.
Consequently even though at present the FST does enjoy the status of a High Court in the public estimation as well as of the legal community consisting of lawyers and judges, it is not quite rated as a High Court as such.
Therefore it will indeed be in the fitness of things that the FST's status is re-defined as that of a quasi-judicial tribunal for instance like say the income tax tribunals or for that matter any other tribunals set up under a law that is currently on the statute book. This will indeed make a lot of sense and will be a lot more acceptable to the discerning public of our country.
In civilized societies enough time is given to new legislation to gestate in the relevant minds so that a public debate ensues and the people get the best possible service from the machinery of the state. Therefore in service matters the first appeal from an order of the FST ought be to the High Court and the second appeal should lie with the Supreme Court.
The same analogy needs to be recommended to the provinces for enactment at the provincial levels as per requirements of Article 40 of the 1973 Constitution. In doing so a long-standing public requirement will have been taken care of and government's sensitivity to the public's needs will have been highlighted well.
Even in the Armed forces the principle of two appeals is very strictly adhered to and allowed in cases of discipline and service rights. I do not see why this basic tenet which has been imbibed by us from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of administration in the sub-continent we should be shying away from.
The government would be well-advised to wake up and make appointments against vacancies of the members of the FST. It may be worth considering going outside the pale of retired 'goodie goodie' officials in looking for the men and women from various disciplines to fill up these places.
It's Europe's 9/11
It is already being referred to as 'Europe's 9/11' - the worst massacre on Spanish soil since the civil war; the bloodiest act of terrorism in Europe in living memory.
The Red Brigade, the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Olympics, IRA bombs, previous ETA attacks - all pale in comparison to what happened in Madrid on the morning of March 11: ten virtually simultaneous bomb blasts, 200 dead, 1,400 injured. After 9/11, the Americans had to grapple with a new reality: now it is Europe's turn.
But first a thought for the victims. Death is always difficult to handle. Sudden death - that comes without warning or time to prepare - is even harder. But sudden and violent mass death, that strikes indiscriminately claiming young and old alike, is the hardest of all: hard on victims, hard on their families and hard on their countrymen. Joined by a common humanity, we share their grief. Spain's tragedy is everyone's tragedy.
And what a tragedy: the response of the Spanish people is testimony to its awfulness. Two million people thronged the streets of Madrid the day after the attacks: a further nine million in towns and villages across the country.
By coming out in such large numbers, the Spanish demonstrated both their essential unity and their determination not to be cowed by terror. The strength, dignity and solidarity displayed by the people of Spain is indeed commendable.
The same cannot be said of the government of Spain. When something as horrific as the Madrid train blasts occurs, people look first to their leaders for solace, anchor, guidance.
The government of outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar did provide a unifying, steadying hand - of sorts. All Spaniards welcomed its condemnation of terrorism and its determination to punish those responsible, and to defend democracy. But the decision to blame ETA, the Basque separatist organization responsible for most of Spain's previous terror attacks was, at best, premature.
At worst, it could be interpreted as political opportunism: the government using the horror generated by the attacks to strike a crushing blow against the Basque separatist movement.
Given that elections were just three days away, pinpointing ETA could be seen as an effort to influence the results - to boost support for a government that has always taken a hard line against Basque extremism. Should this prove to be the case - as many suspect it is - Aznar's reputation is ruined forever (his premiership is already over).
All the signs pointed away from ETA and to an Al Qaeda type attack. The use of multiple strikes within a short space of time, the lack of any warning, the deliberate massive death toll - all these are the hallmarks of Al Qaeda rather than ETA.
And so, apparently, it is proving. The early discovery of a car with detonators and an Arabic cassette might have been too obvious to be credible, but the subsequent e-mail to an Arabic paper in London and the video in which Al Qaeda claim responsibility, would appear to confirm it. The 3/11 Madrid was most likely part of the 'war on terror' being waged between the West and Islamic extremists.
Muslims across the world will greet this discovery (should it be confirmed) with a sinking feeling of deja vu. With the exception of Oklahoma, almost all major terrorist incidents in recent years have been the work of Islamic extremists. Their ultimate targets are western governments (notably that of the US), but those they end up damaging most are fellow Muslims.
Both as victims of bomb blasts (as seen recently in Iraq and Quetta) and as victims of the backlash that follows, Muslims pay the price. No one has suffered more since 9/11 than Muslims: those living in the US and Europe, and those living in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine.
The inevitable backlash against Muslims will come later, though. First has come the backlash against the government of Jose Maria Aznar. From being 3-5 points ahead in polls before the bombs, the conservatives found themselves overtaken on election-day by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialists.
The Spanish prime minister was not standing for a third term, but the defeat of his Popular Party reflected public anger at Aznar rather than his nominated successor. The Spanish punished Aznar both for prematurely blaming ETA (and the underhand manipulation implicit in that) and for dragging Spain into the Iraq war.
About 90% of the Spaniards opposed Spanish troops being sent to Iraq. Prime Minister Aznar, like his British counterpart, opted to please George Bush rather than his own people. Not only did he commit Spain to a deeply unpopular war, it now appears he brought extreme Islamist wrath on the Spanish public.
They are, of course, furious with the perpetrators of the 3/11 attacks but - should it be confirmed that the Madrid blasts were indeed a reaction to Spanish presence in Iraq - they will be even more furious with their former prime minister.
The impact of 3/11 on Spanish politics will not stop at the conservatives' electoral defeat. Next up is the country's Iraq policy. Spain now has a government willing to place its people before Washington. [Zapatero is on record hoping for George Bush's defeat in November 2004.] Wave goodbye, therefore, to Madrid's cosy relationship with Washington and to its participation in the war on terror.
The PM-elect's statements could not be more blunt: 'You can't bomb people just in case' they pose a perceived threat. 'You can't organize a war on the basis of lies.' Do not be surprised if Spanish troops are pulled out of Iraq, even before the June 30 deadline set by the new prime minister.
In terms of fear and insecurity, the impact of the Madrid blasts will be felt across Spain and Europe. Like 9/11 before it, 3/11 shows the devastating power of Al Qaeda (or whichever Islamic group of the same genre was responsible). No one is safe.
Bombs could explode at any time, in any place. In the aftermath of 9/11, uncertainty and fear became the norm for many Americans. Now Europeans will have to live with the same menacing threat: the same constant questions of: 'Where will they strike next? Who will they strike next?' 'If' Al-Qaeda hits the European mainland is no longer an issue.
The Spaniards have considerable experience of tackling terrorism, having suffered decades of ETA's attacks. This is little cause for complacency, though. ETA is like a newborn baby when compared to Al-Qaeda and their ilk. If there were prizes for terrorism, the organization, suicidal determination and ruthlessness of Islamist groups would win gold hands down.
Nine-eleven turned America into a frightened (and therefore dangerous) superpower. America's reaction was to strike out: against Muslims living in the US, against the Taliban, against Saddam.
In the process thousands of innocents have been killed, injured, detained, made homeless, impoverished. Thousands have suffered - and all this while the threat of terrorism has multiplied. It is to be hoped that the Spanish (and wider Europe) will not react with the same emotion and short-sightedness.
Ultimately, 3/11 confirms the frightening power of terrorism. What other single event could topple governments, change policies, trigger wars? Terrorism is an awesome weapon - and that is precisely why madmen will continue to use it.
iffatidris2000@yahoo.co.uk.