| 10 May 2004 | Monday | 19 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Merger of PML factions
Dark times in Darfur
Asia's journey to democracy
The recent decision of the Punjab government to ban the movement of wheat out of the province until it procures 3.5 million tons of the commodity, has evoked a sharp reaction from other provincial governments as problems of non-availability have caused the price of wheat/atta to soar.
Both the Pakistan and Punjab governments see their role in balancing conflicting interests, assuring farmers of a minimum remunerative price for their crops, while keeping the price of food products low for consumers.
In this regard, wheat, which accounts for around 30 per cent of the value-added by major agricultural crops and that is produced largely by small growers, has strategic importance both economically and politically.
Among the provinces, only Punjab produces surplus wheat. Until the policy decision in 2001 to allow free sales and movement of wheat across district and provincial boundaries, farmers were only theoretically at liberty to sell their wheat to anyone.
In practice, provincial governments frequently resorted to the imposition of Section 144 to prohibit the inter-provincial/district mobility of wheat during harvest time. This has again been resorted to by the Punjab government, which has caused bitterness between it and other provincial governments.
The restrictions on the movement of wheat is forcing farmers to part with their wheat at depressed prices, below the market price of the crop, thereby defeating the purpose of establishing support prices, with the procurement price having effectively become the maximum/ceiling price. Punjab's claim that it has imposed this ban partly to check the smuggling of wheat is ill-founded.
There have to be market-oriented solutions to curtail smuggling. If the difference between the domestic price of flour and the price in neighbouring countries like Afghanistan is large, and the cost of smuggling and the chances of being caught low, the incentive to smuggle wheat will remain high.
Attempts to develop alternative means of checking smuggling will only meet with partial success. In such a case, the only effective solution to the problem of smuggling is the elimination of the subsidy, the alignment of domestic prices with prices on international borders and the removal of all restrictions on the inter-regional movement of wheat.
One supports the decision of the federal government to scale down public sector intervention in the market for wheat and allow an expanded private sector role. All other policy instruments will neither eliminate the rent-seeking opportunities for government officials nor facilitate the achievement of a more efficient allocation of resources.
However, in view of the private sector's experience of inconsistency in and the unpredictability of government policies, the private sector will adopt a wait-and-see approach before committing itself to any major investment in activities pertaining to the procurement, storage and marketing of wheat.
The decision of the Punjab government to re-impose a ban on the inter-provincial movement of wheat will have put paid to any plans of the federal government of facilitating the private sector into becoming more active in the market for wheat.
Moreover, the federal and provincial governments have been incurring an annual subsidy of more than Rs. 8 billion on wheat. However, what is classified as the atta subsidy in budgetary allocations, is only very partially a consumption subsidy.
The bulk of the fiscal cost of the activities related to wheat operations comprises expenditures on incidentals - bagging, handling, storage and stock carrying costs - which go towards subsidizing the high cost of management, wastage, processing (financial charges and gunny bags), pilferage and corruption. Any relationship between the levels of poverty and the allocation for atta subsidy is at best tenuous.
This is because of the definition of this subsidy and the manner in which the accounting entry for the subsidy is recorded, whereby the higher the stocks, the higher the subsidy.
It is not the consumer who is benefiting (in whose name the subsidy is being incurred) but the middlemen, the banks (lending the money) for procuring wheat, the officials of Passco, the food departments and the flourmills.
Less than 10 per cent of the total fiscal cost of the subsidy on wheat actually accrues to the consumer. The bulk of the expenditure in the name of subsidy for consumers is absorbed by the inefficiencies in and poor management of the government's wheat marketing operations.
Also, since the subsidy is a general one and available in the same proportion to even the more privileged segments of society much of it accrues to unintended beneficiaries including those dining out in five-star hotels and restaurants.
Therefore, if the subsidy on atta is withdrawn completely the net adverse impact on the consumer will be marginal. However, since perceptions are more powerful than realities a better strategy would be to phase out the subsidy gradually, say over the next two years or so, to avoid a political or social backlash.
As regards the need for targeting this subsidy to meet genuine needs of assistance, a well-structured scheme, a rupee for rupee increase in the atta subsidy, would both reflect and ensure a pure transfer to the poor. A part of the existing allocations and levels of subsidy could be used for such transfers and could even be supplemented with allocations from the zakat fund.
To address equity concerns and minimize the adverse impacts on the poor of elimination of the general subsidy, the provinces should either use savings from the phased withdrawal of the subsidy to augment support to less affluent households under the Food Support Programme or formulate a food stamps scheme.
Subsidized wheat should be sold through shops located in poor neighbourhoods or through government agencies selling flour from mobile shops located in trucks to slums and sold at subsidized rates.
The need for stock reserves of wheat for food security reasons, to avert situations of shortage in emergencies or to smoothen out large fluctuations in wheat prices either during the time lag between production and consumption or during periods of price volatility has been stressed.
In a world of declining international prices of food grains and access to information on price and the availability of tradable stocks, the demand for wheat reserves reflects poorly on domestic planning, information on crop size, marketable surpluses, domestic consumption patterns and requirements and international wheat smuggling.
Therefore, buffer stock operations should constitute a step in the phased transition to the development of a free, unregulated, market for wheat through a gradual acceptance of greater flexibility in wheat prices, with phased shifting of buffer stocks operations entirely to the private sector over three to four years.
Moreover, the size of such a stock should be limited to two months of potential consumption requirement to account for the lead/lag times of transportation of wheat from world markets, although reserves earmarked for the NWFP and Balochistan may be maintained for three to four months in view of transportation issues.
If the underlying assumption determining the size of the strategic reserve is that it need only cover the requirements of the urban population for two months, then the initial size, assuming a consumption of 130-135 kgs per capita per annum, may not exceed 1 million tons and around 2.2 to 2.5 million tons if the non-agricultural population in the rural areas is also to be accounted for, compared to the Punjab government's desire to procure 3.5 million tons of the crop.
To conclude, the policy decision of the Punjab government to ban the inter-provincial movement of wheat is not only misplaced but also fails to achieve what are ostensibly well-intended objectives.
The Punjabi farmer is losing out on a higher price that he would have earned if the market had been allowed to operate freely. The price of wheat in the deficit provinces will continue to be high unless they are allowed to import wheat from abroad and the principal unintended beneficiaries of the subsidy regime will continue to be the officials of the provincial food department, the middlemen and owners of flour mills.
The writer is a former finance minister of Punjab.
Merger of PML factions
One wishes the prime minister would make up his mind. One week he asserts with a certain finality, that in spite of the hype that is being tossed about in the country about no political government being allowed to complete its tenure in office, he will ensure that the current parliament will finish its term.
And then a week later, as if he has suddenly discovered some Excalibur in the lake just waiting to be picked up, he hints at the possibility of holding fresh elections This is a sure sign of faltering angst.
The fact is that irrespective of which way one looks at it, the country, which is now being referred to as a pseudo democracy, is in a right royal mess. Mr Jamali certainly doesn't have any answers. And neither, unfortunately, does President Musharraf, who is the architect of the national contretemps.
What started out as a clean-up operation, inspired by a stifling intellectual smugness over the alleged incompetence and corruption of politicians and civilian administrators, has ended in a state of siege where established traditions have been tossed out of the window, and the military has been given a defined, permanent political role in the future of the country.
On the political front there is a hiatus. An elected prime minister, who has lost his distinctive voice, heads a ragbag of politicians which has achieved the unique distinction of not having passed a single worthwhile bill during the time it has been in power, while an unelected National Security Council, which will act as a warren of watchfulness, will now wield the sword of Damocles over elected representatives in parliament.
On the administrative front there is utter confusion. The devolution plan has still not been fully understood or implemented, and many incidents have been recorded of officials from different departments competing for attention.
The country's premier administrative service, a legacy of the British who certainly knew what they were doing, on which considerable time, money and effort were expended, stood condemned the day the president took over the reins of power.
His remarks about the deputy commissioner being a relic of colonial times and the commissioner doing precious little, might have evoked a few chuckles from citizens who hadn't obtained satisfaction in their dealings with members of the civil service.
But one wonders how many people in Islamabad, and indeed the rest of the country, have asked themselves how the Waziristan operation might have ended had it been handled by a deputy commissioner who has been trained to deal with insurrections.
Anyway, I haven't yet come across a civil servant in Karachi who cut down a fleet of eucalyptus trees, because of some archaic superstitious belief that the plant was injurious to the environment.
It is a little late to do anything about the peculiar state of affairs prevailing in the country today after the Constitution has been given a severe mauling. But if the president intends carrying out some of the reforms which he alluded to four years ago, he would find the following guidelines useful.
The biggest threat to the political system now operating in Pakistan is the tacit formation of what is fast becoming one- party rule. The coalescing of various factions of the Muslim League into one huge monolithic party, to be possibly headed by the president, with or without his uniform, does not augur well for the country.
Even for a sham democracy to function meaningfully, there should be a multi-party system which reflects the various cultural, political and linguistic identities of the people.
After all, in India, where with all its linguistic, ethnic and religious problems, Mr Vajpayee managed to sit over a coalition of 28 political parties and still found time to write poetry.
It is not clear how the president and the prime minister expected the public to respond to the news of the grand merger. All factions of the Muslim League, including Mr Nawaz Sharif's satellite, which is currently in coventry and which provided the recruitment ground for the bulk of the turncoats, are full of reactionary, retrogressive elements who harbour rather quaint views about what constitutes progress.
For the system to work, the president must create the necessary conditions for the middle and lower middle classes to enter parliament, so that the poor and dispossessed can also be given a forum to air their grievances.
The graduate clause, though well intentioned and targeted against retrogressive elements in the landed aristocracy, did not have the desired effect, and did not prevent MNAs and MPAs from behaving the way they did in the national and provincial assemblies.
The people who continue to dominate politics in the country, with the possible exception of the MMA who exert a different and more insidious type of influence, are the affluent and the influential.
It is ironic that the man who for years headed the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy and thrived on his anti-establishment stance, was a feudal who not only vociferously opposed land reforms but also employed serfs to till the land.
The ARD was against the interference of the army in politics and did not agitate for the rights of the poor, even though its most important component is the PPP, which is currently the only secular, liberal party in the country.
The president must also give more attention to domestic issues like the creation of jobs and the improvement of the various utilities, especially the generation of electricity.
The advent of spring, which in other countries is a cause for celebration, is received in Karachi with a sort of trepidation as people suffer excessively long bouts of load shedding.
Whenever one speaks of the inadequacy of Wapda and the KESC, one is reminded of the time Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, visited Karachi. A barrage of photographers and newspaper men besieged him at the airport, and one brave soul asked him what Pakistan should do to improve its exports. Lee Kuan Yew took two seconds to answer. "Make sure you have uninterrupted electricity throughout the year".
Dark times in Darfur
The mosque in the village of Urum was packed with people mourning 80-year old Yahya Abdul Karim when armed men on horseback rode in, firing indiscriminately. The village imam, Yahya Warshal, ran out of the mosque to try and protect his orphaned grandson.
Some of the attackers rode into the mosque, where they killed 16 mourners. Others chased the imam into his grass hut and killed him there, along with the three-year-old child he was holding in his arms.
Before leaving the village, driving more than 3,000 stolen animals before them, the attackers set the mosque on fire. Barely a week later, the horsemen returned with soldiers from the regular Sudanese army and in a four-day rampage killed 80 more people, including women and children.
"The soldiers stayed on the edge of a village," a 37-year-old man said. "But they saw everything." In the village of Sandikoro, soldiers and horsemen tore religious books before burning the mosque with its imam inside it.
In Kondoli, they killed the imam, Abrahim Durra, the second imam and the muezzin during prayers. The story is the same all across Darfur, Sudan's westernmost region.
In 25 days of research on the ground in Darfur and among refugees on the border with Chad, Human Rights Watch documented 62 attacks on mosques in Dar Masalit, the homeland of one of Darfur's three main African tribes. Several of them were accompanied by murder inside the mosques, often during prayer-time. Symbols of Islam were routinely desecrated.
The western world, reluctant to take the focus away from peace negotiations between the government and the SPLA, has been shamefully late in acknowledging the atrocities in Darfur. But the Muslim world, even more shamefully, has yet to speak out.
Pakistan has just taken up the chair of the UN Security Council and thus has a critical leadership role to play in stopping the killing Darfur. The UN Security Council could consider the issue of Sudan as early as next week.
The war in Darfur is in many respects a replay of the war in southern Sudan, waged with weapons that include ethnic militias, scorched earth and denial of humanitarian access. Both wars pit Sudan's Islamist, Arab-dominated government against African rebels demanding equal rights and an end to decades of neglect - in the south, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, in Darfur, the similarly named but quite separate Sudan Liberation Army.
But there is one big difference between the 21-year-old war in the south and 15-month-old war in Darfur. The Africans of Darfur, unlike those of the south, are Muslim. And not just Muslim: deeply, devoutly, unshakably Muslim.
Theirs is not the shrill, extremist Islam of the fundamentalist generals who seized power in Sudan in 1989, but the quiet, tolerant Islam that has characterized Sudan for most of its recent history and that still characterizes most of its citizens - Arab and African.
"Our Islam is good," says Izhaq Abdullah Adam Saber, 65, imam of Kudumi village. "We pray all the time. We read the Quran all the time. It is they who are bad Muslims. Not us."
UN human rights investigators have accused the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed, the horse- and camel-riding Arabs who are fighting side by side with the regular Sudanese army, of unleashing a "reign of terror" in Darfur.
Senior UN officials have described the suffering there as the "worst humanitarian crisis in the world". Some have gone as far as to draw comparisons with the genocide in Rwanda.
The US Agency for International Development, USAID has warned that unless the Sudan government breaks with past practice and grants full and immediate humanitarian access, between 100,000 and 350,000 war-affected civilians of African ethnicity could die in Darfur within the next 12 months.
The government's swift and bloody crackdown on the rebellion in Darfur reflects the unique importance of the SLA rebellion within Sudan. For the uprising is not only dramatic proof of Muslim opposition to the country's rulers.
It is, perhaps even more importantly, a war that cannot be "sold" to the nation as a rebellion against Islam. The rebels cannot be condemned as "infidels", as they were in the south.
And so they are vilified as "thieves and robbers" - thieves and robbers, however, who have proved capable of mounting a formidable military challenge to a government that has the advantage of air power and the added punch of Janjaweed.
The war in Darfur has laid bare the racial animus that has always underlain the war in Sudan. The killing here is not about religion. It is about race and ethnicity.
In Darfur, the government's drive to "Arabize" a country that is made of a myriad ethnic groups has found a full and willing partner in Arab nomads whose search for new water and grazing for their herds has led them into conflict with the majority population of settled African farmers.
When the SLA took up arms in February 2004, protesting government inaction in the face of increasingly violent encroachment by Arab nomads, the government responded by increasing its support for the nomads - reincarnated as Janjaweed - and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to lay waste the countryside and starve the rebels of support.
"The government wants to kill all African people, Muslim or not Muslim, in order to put Arabs in their places, says Imam Izhaq Abdullah, unwittingly echoing the conclusion of many analysts.
The writer recently returned from Darfur, Sudan. She is the author of a new Human Rights Watch report on Darfur.
Asia's journey to democracy
Twenty years ago, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea were all dictatorships. Now they are all democracies, and between March and July of this year they will all have held national elections.
But the president of South Korea is under impeachment, the president of Taiwan was almost assassinated, an alleged war criminal has been nominated by Indonesia's biggest party as its presidential candidate in the July 5 election, and an ex-movie star and high-school dropout who just mumbles a few well-rehearsed sentences before breaking into a pop song at his rallies is the leading challenger for the Filipino presidency in the election on Monday (10 May). Is this glass half-empty or half-full?
Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ or 'Da King' for short) makes Arnie Schwarzenegger look like a serious politician. "He's an actor who has been living in a bubble," said one Filipino journalist.
"He has nothing between the ears." But he is an old drinking buddy of Joseph 'Erap' Estrada, the film-star president who was toppled in 2001 by street protests against the massive corruption of his administration.
Now 'Erap' is on trial for plundering public funds, but the same wealthy families who backed him have now thrown their support behind 'Da King', including Imelda Marcos, widow of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (She also happens to be Fernando Poe's godmother.)
If FPJ wins, he will almost certainly pardon Estrada before plunging his own snout into the trough, and the few hundred families who control 95 percent of the wealth in a country of 80 million people will be safe once more. But their position was not in great danger under incumbent president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo either.
She was not personally corrupt (being wealthy already), but the general corruption that causes an estimated 40 percent of the national budget to end up in the pockets of officials hardly declined at all under her rule. Small wonder that so many of the Filipino poor are inclined to vote for someone who at least seems like one of them.
It's a hell of a way for democracy to end up in the country that pioneered the concept of non-violent democratic revolution in Asia eighteen years ago - and it's not a lot better in neighbouring Indonesia, where a similar revolution turfed out General Suharto, the long-ruling dictator, only six years ago.
Suharto's old party, Golkar, emerged as the biggest party in the parliamentary elections on 5 April. It has now nominated General Wiranto, army head in the last years of the Suharto dictatorship, as its presidential candidate in July - even though he s accused of sponsoring atrocities in East Timor in 1999.Then there is South Korea, where President Roh Moo-hyun faces impeachment on charges of election violations and corruption as a result of a vote in March in the outgoing parliament.
And Taiwan, where President Chen Shui-bian suffered a stomach wound in an assassination attempt just before the election on 20 March, which he then won by the narrowest of margins on a sympathy vote. The opposition accused him of faking the incident, but he still ended up in office for another four years.
So what was the point of it all? Between 1986 and 1998, every one of these countries, home to over 350 million people, overthrew corrupt and oppressive dictatorships, mostly by non-violent public protests. But how much has really changed? Not nearly enough, would be most people's answer: the glass is half-empty.
But who ever believed that democracy would automatically end poverty and corruption (in the Philippines and Indonesia) or political chicanery (in South Korea and Taiwan)? Democracy doesn't make people wise or good. It's just a better tool than any of the available alternatives for choosing people who are wiser and better to run our affairs - but we mustn't expect miracles.
In the end, Filipinos probably will re-elect President Arroyo by a narrow margin, partly because she really is wiser and better than 'Da King' (it isn't hard) - and partly because she has just spent about $25 million in public funds to create temporary jobs in poor areas.
And while President Megawati Sukarnoputri will probably lose the July presidential election in Indonesia because of her lacklustre leadership, the likely victor is not General Wiranto but another former general with a much better reputation, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The recount in Taiwan confirmed the original result, the assassination attempt against President Chen was almost certainly genuine - would you hire someone to shoot at you with a handgun while you are in a moving car and just graze your stomach? - and the opposition now seems to be grudgingly accepting the legitimacy of the outcome.
The impeachment charges against South Korea's President Roh were a cynical political ploy by the opposition parties, who were duly punished by the voters. The liberal Uri Party, which supports Roh but had only 49 seats in the outgoing National Assembly, won 152 seats in the mid-April parliamentary election, giving it a slim majority and guaranteeing Roh's survival. -Copyright