DAWN - Opinion; 04 April, 2004

Published April 4, 2004

Extravagance in government

By Kunwar Idris

Democracy, whenever it has returned to the country in between military rule, brought a cheer which was short-lived but caused a damage to society and administration which has been longer lasting, often irreversible. Depressingly, it is no different this time round when democracy has returned with greater fanfare and under military superintendence. Rigging in elections, horse trading in forming the government and swift public disillusionment on its performance remain its central features as they were of the past governments.

A democracy is founded on elections. The elections of 2002 were not fair as indeed weren't the ones held earlier (leave alone the fair election of 1970 with its tragic aftermath). That was the basic reason for the tottering elected governments of the past making way for military rule without a lament.

Now that the military itself is not just involved in the fray but leads the government and intends to keep it on course through a National Security Council (NSC), the government has to act on its own to reform itself for there would be, hopefully, no intervention from outside. It cannot overlook or condone its own wrongs or fail to deliver and yet expect the NSC to sustain it in office. Ultimately the people will judge its performance and determine its fate.

With many important contenders disqualified or fleeing, the people expected the 2002 election to be fairer than the elections held earlier. That expectation was belied. The Election Commission was unable to prevent interference or intimidation and hardly took cognizance of the reported irregularities and expenditure incurred in excess of the prescribed limit.

Most candidates - winning or losing - readily concede that the expense can be as much as ten times the sum allowed. Even if it is less than that because of stronger support coming from the officials, clan and party - in that order - it remains much above the limit laid down in the law. The commission did not detect even one such instance. It was the will and not the evidence that was lacking.

Our Election Commission could profit by studying the example of its counterpart in India. Though comprising of civil servants, and not superior court judges as here, the Indian election commission is able to conduct fairly what has come to be known as the largest electoral exercise in the world. A string of chief election commissioners there - Seshan, Gill, Lingoteh, to name but a few - were known not just to defy but to direct the government.

Once the elections were announced, Prime Minister Vajpayee was stopped by Mr Lingoteh from advertising the achievements of his government at public expense for it would influence the voters.

Here on the eve of even the local council by-elections, the chief minister of a province issued full-page advertisements projecting his (impossible) "mission" to achieve 100 per cent literacy in fulfilment of the "vision" of the president.

Even the illiterate voters would have viewed it only as an exercise in sycophancy at their cost. If the Indian study shows that the legal framework for elections there is better, we should bring ours in line. If it shows that the administrators can do the job better, the judges should be kept out of the election hullabaloo.

President Musharraf is keen on establishing the NSC to make the elected representatives behave while in office. More important than that is to reform the Election Commission to ensure that these representatives enter the office through a process in which all citizens are able to participate freely.

Now a large question mark hangs over the representatives character of the assemblies and cabinets which robs them both of moral authority and public respect.

Some instability is inherent in a parliamentary form of government practised everywhere. In Pakistan it has been more unstable because the parliamentarians who come in more because of their wealth and official patronage than popular vote tend to place little value on loyalty to a party or its manifesto.

The enlarged national and provincial assemblies and Senate have in no way made them more representative but certainly more costly. In turn the cabinets have grown so large that even the World Bank felt compelled to advise reduction in their size to save money for the poor. For good measure the bank should have pointed out that one minister less means subsistence wage for 300 teachers.

Having come into being through devices not too honourable, this government could have won public recognition by being smaller, humbler and cleaner. It is failing on all three counts. It is large and extravagant. Most practise nepotism, its best illustration: most party leaders nominated their female relatives to fill women's seats in the assemblies.

All of them want a share in public funds to spend as they like and job quotas for their kin and cronies. If a press report is correct that a Balochistan minister has spent Rs. 140 million on a road to his own village, one wonders if any money left for other roads in the province.

For good governance, which has become more of a cliche than a commitment, the number of ministers (advisers included) needs to be limited by a constitutional provision - 15 at the centre, 11 in Punjab, nine in Sindh, seven in the NWFP and five in Balochistan should suffice; the funds for development should be allocated not to ministers / members but to schemes selected through a planning process based on the need of the public; all jobs should be filled through tests conducted by public service commissions or committees. There appears no other way to save both the private morals and public money in the prevailing political system and keep it going.

President Musharraf is never more emphatic and sounds never more sincere than when he speaks of curbing religious extremism and rooting out the terrorists it creates. His actions never seem to match his pronouncements. First, he leaned on the obscurantists to secure his presidency in the Constitution. His prime minister, in gratitude, promised never to forget that favour.

Now, amusingly, while in the midst of a grim struggle against extremists he has chosen Ejazul Haq as his religious affairs minister. Ejazul Haq's father was also the father of extremism who made Pakistan a haven for fanatics from world over. Symbolism is important in politics but then Ejazul Haq is also committed to his father's creed, otherwise he wouldn't have formed a party of his own and named it after him.

President Musharraf's conviction and bravado aside, the armed operation in South Waziristan, from whatever angle it is viewed, has been a failure. There was no way the scouts or soldiers in whatever number employed and how well armed could locate and kill 500 or so terrorists in a population of 500 thousand scattered over a barren range of rocks and defiles. The government claimed success for the operation while admitting in the same breath that the militia and troops both found themselves surrounded when they thought they had surrounded the terrorists.

In dealing with the terrorists hiding in South Waziristan, the president can rely, as he says, on the might of the state but he has to use it in ways other than the firepower of the army. To his Wana venture he has now given a wider, more far-reaching dimension. He plans to settle all of the tribal territory ending its special status. It is too fateful a decision to be made in a hurry.

Before his ultimatum to the delinquent tribe to surrender expires and before he pursues his merger plan further, he should seek advice on a more traditional but less costly solution to the terrorist problem from the political agents of yesteryear - Roedad Khan, Ijlal Hyder Zaidi, Jamil Ahmad and Imtiaz Sahibzada, the ombudsman. They all live in Islamabad.

That should make it convenient and economical. Between them they know everything about the Frontier tribes and what they do not know is not worth knowing. The president may not do what they advise him to do but he should not do what they advise him not to do.

Belligerence has been tried with tragic result. A chance should now be given to the tribal tradition to come into play. The point at issue is not terrorism but how to deal with it.

Only an 'uptick' in violence

By Robert Fisk

What has happened to the 'Coalition Provisional Authority', also known as the occupying power? Things are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Last week's horrors proved that.

Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America's deputy director of military operations, assured us that there was only an "uptick" in violence in Iraq . Not a sudden wave of violence, mark you, not a down-to-earth increase, not even a "spike" in violence - another of the general' favourite expressions. No, just a teeny-weany, ever-so small, innocent little "uptick". In fact, he said it was a "slight uptick."

Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little 'uptick'. A Marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a Marine killed, a second attack with small arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hilla police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a westerner through the streets of their city.

When you go to the manicured lawns and villas of the so-called 'Green Zone' in Baghdad, you get this odd, weird feeling; that here is a place so isolated, so ostentatiously secure - it is not secure of course, since mortars are regularly fired into the compound - that it has no contact with the outside world. Here US proconsul Paul Bremer lives in Saddam Hussein's former palace.

There are less than 100 days before he supposedly hands over the 'sovereignty' of Iraq to America's own new hand-picked Iraqi government which will hold elections at an unknown date. And so within the palace walls, the occupying power believes in optimism, progress and political development.

When someone asked - just a few hours before the horror - about the deteriorating security in Mosul, Kimmit snapped back that this was only "an assessment that you may be making." As for the Iraqis down in Anbar province, where five US soldiers were also killed by a bomb and where at least four foreigners were murdered, Kimmit stated on Wednesday - and here is a quotation to remain in the history books - that the US Marines in Fallujah "are quite pleased with how they are moving progressively forward."

Every week, it is like this. From the hot, dangerous streets of Baghdad with their electricity cuts and gunfire - and an awful lot of 'upticks' which never get recorded - we make our way through pallisades of concrete drums, US army checkpoints and searches, into a vast, air-conditioned conference centre, a cavernous Saddamite built in 1981 for presidential summits.

Next to General Kimmit always stands the rather more spectral figure of Dan Senor, spokesman for the 'Coalition Provisional Authority' who with his frameless glasses, unsmiling demeanour and his occasional, fearful glances at the general when the latter faces a dodgy question, resembles the kind of a doctor who clears his throat and quietly advises his patients to settle their affairs.

That's how it was when Mr Senor was asked if the editor of the Shia newspaper 'Al Hawza' - shut down by dozens of police and US soldiers this week - had been warned in advance that it might be closed. Under CPA law, it was not necessary to issue warnings to newspapers, Mr Senor huffily replied. Over 200 newspapers had sprouted up since "liberation" but the CPA would not "tolerate" anyone who encourages "violence against coalition forces."

In Baghdad, "Coalition Forces" - i.e. US forces - had conducted 620 patrols, in the north-central zone 254 patrols, one raid and the arrest of eight "anti-Coalition suspects" (sic). US forces - this from General Kimmitt - were "continuing to conduct precision operations against "anti-Coalition elements and enemies of the Iraqi people."

The latter sounded positively Soviet. Didn't the Red Army used to conduct operations against "anti-socialist elements and enemies of the Afghan people?" But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of Wednesday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a 'terrorist' to being an 'insurgent', then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a 'freedom-fighter.'

Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, "former regime elements, perhaps trained in the Iraqi army" who have "some sort of idea that they can return." These, it turned out were 'insurgents' They attacked soldiers and the local police station in Fallujah.

Then there were the 'terrorists" who go in for "suicidal, spectacular attacks". These involved Al-Qaeda and Zarqawi - the latest bogeyman whom the Americans enlarged for us last month - and other groups who attack the Iraqi army, hotels, mosques, religious festivals, Karbala, Baghdad...

So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good 'terrorists' and bad 'terrorists', there are common-a-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any 'terrorists' actually here, though there are now.

The catch, of course, is that Kimmit defined the Fallujah gunmen merely as "insurgents". After westerners were dragged dead through the streets of that Sunni Muslim city - at least one of them reportedly an American - I doubt if he will use that word again.

And here lies the problem. From inside the 'Green Zone' on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. When a suicide bomber accidentally slammed his truck into a minibus in Baghdad two months ago - he was chasing a US convoy - and killed up to 20 people, the occupying power claimed it was a road accident.

In fact, US troops had told us on the scene that the bomber had fused his explosives with hand grenades, some of which were still lying on the road. When two weeks ago, another bomber blew up the Jebel Lubnan hotel in Baghdad, more than 17 people were killed; the authorities then stated that only seven had died.

This correspondent had counted 11 corpses. Then it turned out that the powers-that-be were only talking about casualties in the hotel, not the surrounding buildings. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?

On Wednesday's five o'clock follies, two armed American soldiers stood guard at both doors - watching us, not the approach to the doors - while a backdrop carried a vast shield with the words "Equality, Security, Liberty, Justice." When we first arrived, vast screens flashed a series of dire warnings at us. "Do not attempt to take any photos of this building." "The area directly in front of the podium is off-limits." "Do not, under any circumstances, take photos of Coalition Checkpoints." "Welcome."

Did I detect, among my colleagues, a quickening of our step as we headed back through the thousands of tons of concrete to the smog and fear of the streets outside? Baghdad may be dangerous. But at least it's on Planet Earth.

The trouble is that the real world in which Iraqis live - and in which we travel - is nasty, brutish and potentially short. When we point this out, we are abused as pessimists, as journalists who want failure.

And when a bloodbath occurs on the television screens, we are asked to censor out the worst carnage. Hence the dragging of the mutilated, fried corpses through the streets of Fallujah was not shown on western television; only a truncated, heavily censored version was broadcast because of "images too gruesome to show." But the Iraqis see these scenes. So do we. They looked like Somalia. The best the authorities can say is that they were "particularly brutal". Particularly? They were an outrage.

I was outside one western office in Baghdad yesterday, observing yet another concrete wall being erected around it. Armed Iraqi militiamen stood at every corner of the compound. If Bremer's palace now resembles the seat of the old British raj, the office I visited was beginning to look like the British residency at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. That is what we have now come to. And still Mr Bremer and the men and women of the 'Green Zone' dream on.- (c) The Independent

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