| 01 April 2004 | Thursday | 10 Safar 1425 |
EU's economic reforms remain elusive
Seep celebrates its 40 years
Don't let anyone tell you that George W. Bush takes himself seriously all the time. At last week's Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner, an annual black-tie event, the president of the United States was the guest of honour and thereby, by tradition, the post-victuals entertainer.
Now, George Bush isn't what you would call a natural when it comes to stand-up comedy, especially of the self-deprecating variety. He certainly isn't in the same league as Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan - but let's face it, chances are that Al Gore would have been even less convincing.
Anyhow, when Bush is deliberately trying to be funny, he requires props. And at the shindig in question, these props took the shape of slides flashed on a large video screen, accompanied by live presidential one-liners.
A picture showing Bush seated at his desk in a boxing robe elicits the comment that he's preparing for a tough election fight. Another one shows him on the phone with a finger in his ear, whereupon the president informs the audience that he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies". Ha ha.
The leader of the "free world" said: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed, which only encouraged the president. A few slides later, an image showed him peering into a corner of his office.
"Nope, no weapons over there," he quipped with a smirk. More laughter. Shortly afterwards, a third picture of Bush searching for something. The punchline? "Maybe under here."
The point is not that any search for weapons of mass destruction in the US would be well rewarded, for its stockpiles (no inspections allowed, of course) are unmatched. Nor that the audience sniggered - we journalists tend to be a cynical lot.
The point is that Bush considered it opportune and appropriate to joke about the false premises on which a war was waged - a war that has thus far claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 600 Americans.
Not all Americans look upon that as a laughing matter. But then, callousness and insensitivity are hallmarks of the administration Bush presides over. Except when it comes to matters concerning its own survival.
The White House is remarkably sensitive to claims that the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, may partly have been a consequence of its complacency about Al Qaeda. Former White House counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke suspects that when he first briefed her on the subject, Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had never heard of the organization.
Now that's funny, isn't it? Or perhaps not, given that Rice rose to academic prominence as an expert on the former Soviet Union and the Cold War, and her national security team reflects her abiding interest in that area. What is funny is her refusal to testify in public before the bipartisan commission investigating the intelligence failures before and after September 11.
She testified in camera last month, and has agreed to do so again. But not under oath. Could it be that she has more qualms about regurgitating falsehoods after swearing to tell nothing but the truth than colleagues such as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz?
Rice has been at the forefront of efforts to discredit Clarke, who has testified that on the day after the twin towers came crashing down, Bush was adamant that a link be found between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein's regime, while Rumsfeld helpfully suggested that Iraq offered better targets than Afghanistan. Unfortunately for the administration, plenty of people are prepared to corroborate Clarke's charges.
Meanwhile, a prime example of state terrorism - the assassination by direct missile hit of a sexagenarian paraplegic - has provoked neither rage nor alarm in Washington. The State Department at least pretended to be mildly miffed by the brazen murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, saying that the development could prove unhelpful.
The White House betrayed no such scruples: barely stopping short of crowing about the deed, it repeated the mantra that Israel (unlike the Palestinians) has the right to defend itself.
Even unfunnier was the veto fired off by US ambassador John Negroponte in the UN Security Council vote on an Algerian resolution condemning the targeting of Yassin. Although the resolution slammed all violence against civilians, it purportedly fell short of Negroponte's expectations because it failed to single out Hamas for condemnation.
That was just an excuse. After all, stonewalling attempted UN criticism of Israel is second nature to the US. Perhaps one ought to be grateful that no one has so far attempted to crack jokes about old terrorists in wheelchairs.
There are two obvious grounds on which Ariel Sharon's decision to eliminate Yassin is worthy of the strongest censure: targeted assassinations are incompatible with civilized norms, and at least in this particular case there never were any grounds for assuming that such an act would wind down the cycle of bloodshed - a cycle in which, notwithstanding the Western media's penchant for paying more attention to suicide bombings than to the Israeli actions that provoke such a violent response, most of the victims are Palestinians.
Predictably, Hamas - an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that was once propped up by Israel as an alternative to the secular PLO - has vowed revenge, while the Sharon regime threatened to seek and destroy the rest of the organization's leadership.
The Security Council veto, meanwhile, has visibly angered many Arabs. That anger may not extend to Britain, which, although it abstained in the UN vote, has been reasonably forthright in denouncing Yassin's assassination as "unlawful, unacceptable and unjustified".
But this stance is compromised by a whiff of hypocrisy, given that Britain appears to have no problem with targeted assassinations by the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
And while Tony Blair has earned some kudos for becoming the first British prime minister to visit independent Libya, there's more than a hint of inconsistency in the rapidly improving ties between London and Tripoli.
The Blair visit, we are told, is a reward for Muammar Qadhafi's good behaviour. After all, he has given up WMD. We now know that Saddam had more or less done the same. Qadhafi, it is said, has dissociated himself completely from international terrorism; the whole truth about Lockerbie isn't yet known, but Libya enjoyed close relations with the IRA and other violence-prone European groups in the 1970s and 80s - and it emerged at the weekend that he may have been behind the 1986 Pan-Am hijacking that ended in Karachi, although the plan was to crash the plane on Jerusalem. Saddam's reputation as a sponsor of terrorism, on the other hand, was somewhat exaggerated: he specialised in domestic violence. But then, internal repression is not exactly unknown in Libya either.
Since assuming power in 1969, Qadhafi has been a great deal more unpredictable than Saddam. Back when the Iraqi leader was being courted by the West in the mid-1980s, Reagan described his Libyan counterpart as "the mad dog of the Middle East"; in 1986, US Air Force planes took off from Thatcherite Britain for bombing raids on Tripoli and Benghazi, with targeted assassination as a primary objective. Qadhafi survived, but one of his daughters died in a direct attack on his residence.
The thaw with Libya has been spearheaded by Britain in consultation with the US, although it appears that the direst neoconservatives on the other side of the Atlantic were kept out of the loop.
Perhaps it's meant to prove that whereas some Arab dictators epitomize pure evil, others, mad though they may appear to be, are not beyond redemption. And who better to save souls than the evangelical Blair? There is, of course, a business angle too, with oil deals and, believe it or not, arms sales already being negotiated.
The question that arises is: What if a similar tack had been employed with Saddam? The WMDs were long gone, but the Anglo-American alliance kept bombing Iraq instead of lifting sanctions and seeking to normalize relations - which would, at the very least, have given Saddam an incentive for good behaviour.
Keeping the bloody occupation of Iraq in mind, perhaps there's reason to be grateful that similarly disastrous methods have not been employed elsewhere. But don't fall for the fiction that Qadhafi has been befriended because he's a changed man. Because he isn't. If you doubt that, have a look at www.algathafi.org, which purports to be the official website of the Brother Leader of the Revolution.
Its hugely entertaining contents include convoluted arguments for a three-state solution to the Kashmir conundrum and a one-state solution - Israetine - to the Middle East conflict.
Perhaps something is lost in the translation. And perhaps the first Libyan import from Britain should be a website editor, so that the Brother Leader's name is spelt consistently and places such as Beshawar (Peshawar) and Butane (Bhutan) can acquire their rightful nomenclature.
But there are some priceless phrases in Qadhafi's discourses that deserve to be preserved - including a reference to former British MP Tony "Ben" as "the spiritual leader of the labours in the UK".
Say what you like, but when it comes to entertainment value, the flamboyant North African colonel could certainly give the flatulent North American colonizer a run for his money.
e-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net
EU's economic reforms remain elusive
With just a month to go before the European Union's historic big bang expansion, leaders from the 25-nation bloc's current and future states have agreed to set aside their power-sharing battles and clinch a new constitutional deal by mid-June.
The charter is desperately needed to streamline and simplify EU decision-making over the coming years. But it won't do much to improve the bloc's flagging economic fortunes.
A European Commission report on eurozone economies issued this week warned that the 12-nation currency bloc will enjoy only a "moderate" recovery of around 1.8 per cent this year and perhaps three per cent next year2005, lagging far behind the much more buoyant economic performance of the US, Japan and the rest of Asia.
The bad news was further compounded by a rare acknowledgement from the Commission that euro-area exporters have suffered 'considerable loss in price competitiveness' due to a strong euro - although earning losses could now be offset by a rebound in global trade.
The message from the Commission is simple: EU governments must step up economic reform, using the opportunities offered by the current world economic upturn to catch up with their American and Asian rivals.
But the EU's problem is not lack of advice or the absence of vision - it's failing to keep promises. EU leaders meeting in Lisbon four years ago, agreed on a long list of reforms and structural adjustments which they grandly claimed would make Europe the most competitive region in the world by 2010.
The plan - dubbed the Lisbon agenda - called for the EU to overtake the US and Japan. More recently, EU policy-makers have added China and India to the list of potential rivals with which the bloc must compete over the next years.
But four years later, EU results in implementing the Lisbon pledges are meagre. "It's shocking to reveal that 40 per cent of the Lisbon goals have not been implemented by member states," European Parliament President Pat Cox complained recently.
Carrying out reforms agreed on paper has proven far more elusive than leaders envisaged, with member states often refusing to harm national sacred cows. A recent report by the European Commission criticized governments for running up excessive budget deficits, failing to create new jobs and making inadequate use of productivity-boosting information technology.
"Investment - both public and private - in human capital is still inadequate," the Commission warned, adding that governments and companies were also not investing enough in research and development and not working hard enough to breakdown national frontiers, especially in the high-growth services sector.
The Commission paper singled out Germany - the bloc's biggest economy - as being a particular drag on the entire EU for lagging in a series of key areas. Berlin has repeatedly overshot the eurozone budget deficit limit of three per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), lacks a far-reaching state pension reform plan, and has rigid labour market regulations and high unemployment, said the report.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has in fact resigned from his post as SPD party leader to push through unpopular economic reforms. In France, voters rebuffed the centre-right government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin this week at least partly because of anger at his confused reform programme.
With the EU due to take in 10 new member states on May 1, mainly from the former communist bloc, economic divergences in Europe are about to increase radically. But contrary to popular belief that expansion will make a bad EU situation even worse, Commission experts say the entry of new members- currently registering growth rates of about four per cent-will actually stimulate the European economy.
But the turnaround will not be immediate. Eurozone GDP is expected to rise by 0.3 and 0.7 per cent during the first two quarters of 2004, only "accelerating to potential" during the second half of the year.
European monetary affairs chief Pedro Solbes-set to become Spain's finance minister-has admitted to harbouring "some anxiety" over the state of eurozone finances. Policy-makers across Europe, he says, should start turning their reform promises into deeds. So far, however, Europeans would much rather fret rather than act over the economy.
Seep celebrates its 40 years
KARACHI: Seep, a known literary journal, completed its 40 years of publication last week, so its editor Nasim Durrani and Seep Adbi Markez decided to celebrate the event on Tuesday at Nipa auditorium.
Poet and columnist Jamiluddin Aali who had admiration for Nasim and his journal since long presided over the assembly of writers and readers who had filled the auditorium by their presence.
Aali spoke about the acute problems of literary journals depending less on the growing number of readers and more on financial support of the advertisements. He recalled Nairang-i-Khayal of his school years, than Saqi, Adbi Dunya, and in later years Adab-i-Latif, Naqoosh, and many others who kept the literary activities alive and enriched literature, beside grooming the new talent.
Seep did the some and Aali wished him all the best. Earlier, Prof Saher Ansari presented a review of Seep, which produced 72 issues during its illustrious life. Ansari recalled many notable articles of Prof Hasan Askari and Salim Ahmed which ignited discussion on national level and suggested that at last three separate volumes on fiction, literary criticism and different articles be published to the benefit of readers.
Khushbakht Shujaat read out a survey of Seep publications which provided a forum for young and budding writers when during the early years of the sixties, literary activities were at its peck.
A peculiar quality most admired by the readers of Seep had been its wide range of literary coverage giving equal space to young writers along with such seniors as Krishen Chand, Ghulam Abbas, Akhtarul Iman and other notables.
Nasim Durrani said he started writing shortstories since 1954 and now could easily publish those stories in three volumes, but he preferred concentrating on Seep. He described how his journal and its different contents attracted the attention of students at various universities, and researches were undertaken by research scholars.
Poet Ahmed Umer Sharif recited a 'geet' in praise of Seep and was much liked by the audience. Ahmed Mobarak did the compering.