| 24 March 2004 | Wednesday | 02 Safar 1425 |
'Les Miserables'
Now a Mexican threat
A charter to intervene
In order to offset the adverse impact of the WTO regime, the likely outcome of discriminatory adherence to prescribed rules by developed countries, the developing countries specially in South Asia are going ahead with the agenda of creating economic and trading alliances and collaborations.
South Asia Free Trade Agreement (Safta) signed unanimously by member countries during the Saarc conference held in January at Islamabad depicts a real concern in this respect. Fortunately this happened despite age-old political quarrels among most of the member countries relating to issues with no solutions in sight in immediate future.
The agreement signed envisages an economic union focused on reducing tariffs and easing up trade among member countries. Some of the member countries, India in particular, had floated the idea of having a common currency for SAARC bloc, which for the time being has been set aside by the majority of the members including Pakistan.
The move has been opposed on the grounds that first political conflicts and confrontations must come to an end before putting in greater economic stakes in adopting common currency for the region.
Since all the countries including Pakistan and India are gradually moving towards the goal of political tranquillity, should one hope for Safta signing countries to work with common currency in a foreseeable future, in order to achieve economic integration and financial stability in the region.
The world has a history of such common currency country unions and the recent one being the European Common Union where euro has been adopted as a common currency for the Union to work with.
During the last couple of years Euro has emerged as a currency much stronger than US dollar depicting monetary credibility and greater economic integration of the union.
No doubt plausible arguments in favour of adoption of common currency by Saarc countries or any other economic union are that it results in more economic integration among member countries and less volatility of exchange rate (as the foreign exchange transactions are at the minimal in this scenario). Further a faster economic growth is achieved and economies become less vulnerable to internal and external financial shocks.
Here the question arises as to whether business, political and infrastructural environments in the region are suited to the adoption of a single currency and whether the said mechanism can work successfully.
The success or failure of the programme depends on trade pattern, business cycle, economic growth pattern, financial integration and political harmony in the region concerned.
The trade pattern of Saarc member countries, having agrarian economies is more or less the same except the volume of trade, which goes in favour of India, primarily because of the size of the country itself.
Then come other factors like size of its literate population, consistency in the GDP growth rate and maximum use of latest technology in all fields. Hence it is imperative that India, being a dominant trading partner and having economic supremacy over the region, shows an intention to promote specialization and do trading not only amongst Safta member countries, but also with outside world by providing equal marketing opportunities to smaller member countries to trade outside the region effectively under the WTO regime.
However, in the present scenario when political harmony is totally non-existent and India is pacing up fast to become a superpower, one can have little hope for smaller countries even to share trading within the region according to the size of their economies, much less to expect trading with the outside world under a common currency mechanism in the presence of a dominant partner in the region.
India's business cycle depicts continuous expansion trend and boom stage persisting for quite a long time in almost all the industrial sectors except those which have been influenced by global recession, engulfing even the countries with strong economies for quite a long time.
However, business cycle of other Saarc members, including Pakistan, show short-lived boom and longer recession trends due to internal political and economic upheavals and usually most of the member countries are found entangled in heavy internal and external debts due to fiscal and balance of payment deficits. It is an established fact that common currency mechanism can be adopted effectively only by the group of countries having synchronized business cycles.
The economic growth pattern of the Saarc countries also lacks homogeneity. India, having vast natural resources along with sizable quantum of quality human resources, enjoys sustainable growth in industrial and agriculture sectors and has become a major global partner in development of information technology. That is why outsourcing of services relating to information technology in countries like the US, the UK and European countries is being offered to India.
Rapid industrialization in India has effectively utilized rural human resources also and consequently the percentage of rural population has reduced to 54 per cent in recent years.
Economic growth rate in Saarc countries other than India oscillates around four to six per cent, yet high population growth rate especially in Pakistan has impeded improvement in employment condition and per capita income.
Thus, India's status of a dominant partner in the South Asian region would impede homogeneity in monetary policy of the member countries, which is a foremost requirement for the success of common currency mechanism.
In view of the great disparity in economic growth pattern between India and the rest of the Saarc countries, smaller countries would prefer to have independent monetary policies in conformity with their internal and external economic situations.
Besides, any financial shock suffered by a member country in the form of outflow of foreign investments resulting in crash of capital markets would not be absorbed by the region as a whole, quite contrary to the very philosophy of working with a common currency.
For a common currency mechanism to work effectively, it is essential that members of an economic union have fully autonomous organizations regulating their fiscal and monetary policies.
Central Banks should be totally independent and capable of resisting any political pressure. Until recently in majority of the Saarc countries, central banks were found yielding to political pressures for modifying monetary and foreign exchange regulatory policies.
However, the intensive intervention by foreign funding agencies such as the IMF has forced all the countries to provide total autonomy to their central banks and to bring transparency in all state operations.
Fortunately, Pakistan government has ambitiously worked for giving maximum autonomy to State Bank of Pakistan and bring transparency in financial sectors. Other Saarc countries which are encountering rapid political upheavals like Nepal and Sri Lanka, it is to be seen whether central banks of these countries can regulate financial structure, independent of state interference.
Over and above these imperatives needed for effective working of common currency mechanism, it is essential that there should be political harmony among member countries. This does not exist at least at present in case of Saarc.
More than half a century old Kashmir issue still remains a bone of contention between India and Pakistan and one can witness occasional excesses of India towards neighbouring counties like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Complete peace and tranquillity remains a distant dream for the region.
Hence, Indian prime minister's suggestion for a common currency for the Saarc countries is not realistic. Perhaps Mr. Vajpayee wants that in view of the fact that India is heading fast to become an economic superpower in the near future, the Saarc member countries should delegate their monetary policies to it, forego using their own currencies entirely and accept Indian rupee as a legal tender.
'Les Miserables'
There have been commissions galore to bring about reforms in the fields of law, police and prisons. They sat for long periods and produced voluminous reports. But somehow none of them was able to find a remedy for the heartbreaking cases that crop up in various parts of the country now and then - the plight of men languishing in jail for long years without trial. Maybe these commissions never gave a thought to the matter.
If they had they would certainly have made sure in their recommendations that such instances must not recur. But the trouble is that the dear and near ones of eminent persons who become members of such commissions never go to jail.
If they happen to do something cognizable in terms of any law, they are exiled by their families to London. By the time they come back the matter has been forgotten or glossed over dexterously by their patrons.
Read these excerpts from a Karachi news report published in Dawn some years ago and culled from my scrapbook. "A man arrested and charged with possession of illicit arms has been released from confinement after 12 years without being presented before any court of law.
Munir Shah was arrested in 1987 by the CIA police under section 13(d) of the Arms Ordinance and an FIR was duly registered. He was got released by the Qadir Khan Mandokhel Welfare Trust. In two other cases, Saeedul Haq was got released through the High Court after 28 years of illegal detention, while Sirajuddin was released after 15 yeas of detention without trial."
Before I say anything about the horrifying social aspects of these cases which, had they taken place in a civilized country, would have shaken the very foundations of the government in power, let me express my despair and frustration at the treatment they received at the hands of the press. No newspaper in Karachi contacted the three hapless individuals when they got home, there was no write-up on what transpired with their families in their enforced absence, and how they planned to rehabilitate themselves after their traumatic experience.
One thing is clear. Neither Munir Shah nor Saeedul Haq nor Sirajuddin belong to families or a societal group that exercise clout in official or political circles of Karachi or elsewhere, not even a distant relation holds any position of authority in the country, and certainly none of the three is related to a member of the commissions still probing the state of affairs in the domains of law, police and prisons in order to reform these institutions.
How would you describe the state of progress and development of a country where such incidents of miscarriage of justice or complete disregard of human rights take place so frequently? What does the ability to test a nuclear device by Pakistan or the record increase in exports and foreign exchange reserves mean to these three men and their families and others like them? And does the word patriotism really ring a bell in their hearts?
Nuclear capability takes the mind of the observer to the height of scientific and technological achievement, and he cannot even conceive that a country that can possess nuclear power and manufacture deadly missiles can be so backward in its human obligations. What if there had been no Qadir khan Mandokhel Welfare Trust to keep a watch over cases of administrative tyranny. Does the government of such a country feel no shame that such cases should be pointed out by NGOs?
The three instances (and there must be many more that have not come to notice) are examples of heartlessness reminiscent of autocratic regimes of old days which threw their opponents into dens called oubliettes and forgot about them. Some of the communist countries of Europe, the military dictatorships of South America and racially motivated governments of Africa have copied these old regimes with considerable success. History and retribution are now catching up with some of them. But to what purpose? Who will bring back the hundreds, nay thousands, who died?
I was grieved to note the skimpy treatment given to the report I am talking about, so I can only presume they were not political prisoners (like Asif Ali Zardari) but the victims of neglect, indifference and insensitivity. Let us take it that no court was moved by their friends and relations all these years. But prison rules were there to draw attention to them. Did no IG of Prisons or jail visitor ever think about them? In the three fields of law, justice and jails there is (on paper) a permanent and regular system of inspection. What is this system meant to do? I wish there were a system whereby the persons responsible could be identified and they or their sons subjected to the same treatment as a kind of retributive justice.
That of course is a far cry and wishful thinking. But patent wrongs do get rectified sometimes. If the prime minister can come to know of a family in some God-forsaken place that has gone through a holocaust of rape and murder and pays a visit there, surely the governor of Sindh and the chief minister of that time must have read the news about these miserable men. Did they think for a moment that the matter called for a sympathetic inquiry and some kind of apology and compensation? Or were the three men too insignificant to arouse their sense of shame?
There are so many other aspects of the matter that I can talk about but cannot for lack of space. For example, what were these blighted men's thoughts in prison? If they were breadwinners how did their families make do in their absence? How did the noble members of the Qadir Khan Mandokhel Welfare Trust come to know of their plight when the law, the police and the jailers were ignorant of it?
Now a Mexican threat
Dr Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and co-founder of 'Foreign Policy' magazine, is like a dog that has only one trick: we've all seen it before, but he won't stop doing it. We're going to have to stop giving him biscuits.
Dr Huntington's trick is to identify some alleged new threat to US security, dress it up in academically respectable language, and inflate it to bursting point. He did it in 1993 with his essay 'The Coming Clash of Civilisations', which warned Americans that the Islamic hordes were coming from the East while the Chinese hordes were growing to the West.
It did very well in US national security circles, where people whose jobs were endangered by the end of the cold war were urgently looking for some new threat to justify their pay-cheques.
He recycled the article as a best-selling book in 1996, and the book enjoyed a whole second life after 9/11, but now it's time for a new threat. This time it's the Mexican hordes coming from the south.
In the most recent issue of 'Foreign Policy', he poses the question: "Will the US remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? (Or will) Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish)?"
Don't confuse Dr Huntington with the foul-mouthed bigots who usually rant on about the 'Mexican Peril': his usual habitat is Harvard University's dreaming spires, not some redneck drinking establishment on the wrong side of town.
But his article, 'The Hispanic Challenge', is a trailer for his new book 'Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity', and one suspects that his definition of 'We' does not include African-Americans, Muslim Americans, or Mexican-Americans. In fact, it doesn't really even include Catholic Americans.
Dr Huntington is not exactly predicting that Mexican-Americans will grow into a permanent Spanish-speaking minority as important as French-Canadians in Canada, with a territorial base in the Southwest, a culture that profoundly diverges from the traditional white, Protestant culture of the United States, and the political clout to impose bilingualism nation wide.
He's just warning about it, that's all (and he's too cunning to court charges of extremism by suggesting specific policies to avert this dreadful fate).It would be a waste of time to go through his arguments piecemeal, but a couple of examples will convey the style.
He admits that the share of Mexican immigrants in current US immigration is lower than that of Irish immigrants in the period 1820-1860 or of German immigrants in 1850-1870, but insists that the danger is greater now because Mexicans won't assimilate.
Then he quotes a study showing that over 90 per cent of second-generation Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles speak fluent English and that over 60 per cent of them speak either no Spanish or worse Spanish than English, but promptly frets that "with the rapid expansion of the Mexican immigrant community, people of Mexican origin would have less incentive to become fluent in and use English in 2000 than in 1970." Yes, they might, but where's your evidence? There is none; just false parallels, unsupported conclusions, and a lavish use of the conditional mood.
Yet there is more to Huntington than just cynical careerism; you sense a genuine cultural and racial panic in what he writes. He talks of the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers" as "the bedrock of US identity", and lists its key values: "the English language; Christianity; religious commitment;...the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a 'city on the hill'."
Anybody who does not live in the United States would reel back in disbelief at the arrogance and naivete of that list, as if France and Japan didn't have the rule of law and the work ethic, or as if the British and the Spanish couldn't really manage democracy because so few of them ever go to church.-Copyright.
A charter to intervene
The survey that the BBC conducted in Iraq last week is shocking to those of us who opposed the war. Most respondents say that life is now better than it was before the invasion. Those who thought the US was wrong to attack are outnumbered by those who thought it was right.
Our instinct is either to ignore these findings or to dismiss them. When the questioner is employed by the state broadcaster of one of the occupying powers, the respondents might be expected to answer warily. But this is not how the poll looks to me.
When asked, "Do you support the presence of the coalition forces in Iraq?", 39.5 per cent said yes, and 50.9 per cent said no. Fewer than 10 per cent said they had confidence in the occupation forces; over 40 per cent said they had confidence in Iraq's religious leaders. These are not the answers you would expect from people too frightened to speak freely.
Until we see persuasive evidence to the contrary, in other words, we should take this survey seriously. We know that the Bush and Blair governments lied about their motives for war.
We know that humanitarianism was used as a cover for imperialism. We know that thousands of civilians were killed. But we do neither ourselves nor the Iraqis any favours by using them to ventriloquise our disgust.
We can say without contradiction that the war should not have happened, and that it has been of benefit to the Iraqi people by ridding them of one of the world's most abhorrent dictators.
Outside Iraq, the effects of the invasion have been overwhelmingly negative. The fury it generated among Muslims has created a hospitable environment for Islamist terrorism.
International law, which, for all its flaws, provides a diplomatic alternative to war, has been gravely wounded. A group of unquestionably dangerous and questionably sane old men in Washington strengthened - until their campaign fell apart - their grip on global politics.
But to document the lies that led to the war and the dangers that arose from it is to answer only half the question. The other half - what should have been done instead? - still hangs above our heads. If we are not to be torn to bits by the hawks - as Harold Pinter was by Kenneth Adelman on Newsnight last week - then we have to provide an answer.
Let us picture a small, comparatively weak, nation, governed by someone who commits any number of atrocious crimes to stay in power. Let us assume that the citizens are incapable of overthrowing him by themselves.
Let us assume, too, that all non- violent means have been exhausted, that the dictator shows every sign of living for another 30 years and has children to succeed him. What, if anything, should the people of more powerful nations call on their governments to do?
Some members of the anti-war movement would say "nothing more", and would put forward the following arguments to support that position: First is that any force with the power to intervene will have interests that extend beyond the liberation of the oppressed.
It will use the intervention to further those interests. This was demonstrably the case in Haiti last month, when the US used the restoration of order as a pretext for deposing a disobedient leader.
As Noam Chomsky says: "One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle, 'First, do no harm.' If you can think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing."
As it is impossible to send in an army and do no harm, or to exercise power in another nation without affecting the balance of power elsewhere, this surely means that it is always better to do nothing.
In which case, it is better for the powerful nations to stand back and watch as the Ugandan army and a handful of paltry militias carry out mass killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the rich world's decision not to intervene effectively in Rwanda was the right one; Nato should not be sending reinforcements to Kosovo this week.
Is hypocrisy always worse than cynicism? Chomsky would appear to say yes. But I would rather prefer a flawed power intervened in a flawed manner in the Congo than no one intervened at all.
The second argument against intervention is that it will only ever be exercised against the weak. As David Rieff points out, it is impossible to conceive of force used against Russia on behalf of the Chechens, or against China on behalf of the Tibetans. Humanitarian action will always be a matter of victors' justice.
But there are surely circumstances in which victors' justice is better than no justice at all. Just because other countries cannot invade the US to free the Chagos islanders does not in itself constitute a case against invading Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein.
The third argument is surely the strongest. This is that as soon as we accept that an attack by a powerful nation against a weak one is legitimate, we open the door to any number of acts of conquest masquerading as humanitarian action.
As Chomsky points out, Japan claimed that it was invading Manchuria to rescue it from "Chinese bandits"; Mussolini attacked Abyssinia to "liberate slaves"; Hitler said he was protecting the peoples he invaded from ethnic conflict. It is hard to think of any colonial adventure for which the salvation of the bodies or souls of the natives was not advanced as justification.
Faced with this dreadful choice, a sort of moral numbness comes over us. To accept that force can sometimes be a just means of relieving the suffering of an oppressed people is to hand a ready-made excuse to every powerful nation that fancies an empire. To deny it is to tell some of the world's most persecuted peoples that they must be left to rot.
It seems to me that there is no instant or reliable answer to this dilemma. But one thing is clear: that the current framework of international law is incapable of resolving it for us.
Even if other nations wished to act selflessly on behalf of the oppressed by attacking a despotic state, the charter of the United Nations forbids it. What this means is that any government can then claim it has a moral duty to ignore the law. In attempting to prevent unjustified acts of aggression, in other words, the charter's lack of discrimination may have encouraged them.
Surely then we need a new UN charter, not just to save the oppressed from the likes of Saddam Hussein, but also to save both humanitarianism and world peace from the likes of George Bush.
We need a charter that permits armed intervention for humanitarian purposes, but only when a series of rigorous tests have been met, and only when an overwhelming majority of all the world's states have approved it. We need a charter that forbids nations with an obvious interest in the outcome from participating.
Only then will international law be able to distinguish an act of aggression from an act of compassion. Only then can humanitarianism be divorced from imperialism. -Dawn/Guardian Service.