| 11 July 2004 | Sunday | 22 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
India's defence allocation
Law on honour killing
The International Court of Justice's indictment of Israel on the separation barrier is total and categorical. In a landmark judgment on Friday at The Hague, the 15-man court - with the American judge dissenting - branded the Israeli fence in the West Bank illegal and called for it to be pulled down. If the barrier became permanent, the court said, it would constitute a "de facto annexation" of Palestinian lands.
The wall's current alignment does not conform to the border between Israel and the West Bank. Instead, it has been altered to include more Palestinian lands within Israel. If the wall were not pulled down, the court said, it would create a fait accompli and impede Palestinian self-rule. In any case, it said, the wall could not be justified "by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order."
While the Palestinian Authority has hailed the judgment, saying it has confirmed Israel's character "as an outlaw state", Tel Aviv has treated the verdict with contempt. Mr Binyamin Netanyahu, the superhawk former prime minister and now foreign minister in Mr Ariel Sharon's cabinet, has mocked the court's judgment, claiming it was like saying "the earth is flat". Like the countless General Assembly resolutions Israel has flouted, the ICJ's ruling, too, is non-binding.
But would it matter if it were binding? Unlike General Assembly resolutions, Security Council motions are binding. But Israel has violated them whenever the UN Council was able to pass a resolution that evaded a US veto. Like Friday's ICJ decision, the council's resolution 446 declares that Israel's "policy and practices" in the occupied territories have "no validity in law".
Mr Netanyahu's denunciation of the judgment is symptomatic of the stark racism that governs the state of Israel. This racism has been condoned by Europe and unabashedly encouraged by the US. The current support which Israel enjoys from Washington is not something new; ever since Israel was carved out of Palestine in 1948, all US administrations have backed Israel in all of its military adventures against its Arab neighbours.
Since 1967 especially, the US has underwritten Israel's occupation of Arab territories and beefed up its economic and military strength with heavy doses of aid, besides unqualified diplomatic support. It has always looked the other way at Israel's gross violations of human rights in the occupied territories and never hesitated to use the veto to stop the UN council from censuring the Jewish state.
Washington has also let Israel torpedo the Oslo peace process and derailed the US-backed roadmap announced last year by President George Bush. Regrettably, Mr Bush himself scuttled the process by saying that Israel would be allowed to keep "some" Palestinian lands. As for the ICJ verdict, Washington has termed it "inappropriate".
This being Washington's record, it would be naive for the US to believe that it can win its war on terror. Nothing has encouraged anti-American feelings in the Arab and Muslim world than Israel's brutalities against the Palestinian people. Names like Deir Yassin, Sabra-Chatila, and Jenin are not going to be erased from Arab-Muslim memory.
If there is to be peace in the Middle East, and America is to win its war on terror, it must persuade Israel to respect the will of the international community and withdraw from occupied territories. Making reform within the Palestinian Authority as a condition for progress in the direction of peace is a crude attempt to sideline the real issue.
India's defence allocation
The clarification by Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram regarding a 18-23 per cent increase in this year's defence budget should put to rest some of the concerns voiced by India's neighbours, including Pakistan. Mr Chidambaram has said that his hands were tied by the multi-billion dollar defence purchase deals which the previous BJP-led government had concluded with a number of countries.
These include the purchase of fighter jets, submarines, an aircraft carrier and the Phalcon radar system from Britain, Russia, France and Israel, among others. Without questioning India's actual need for such sophisticated military hardware, the finance minister has argued that reneging on these deals would have meant paying hefty penalties to the manufacturers. As for the Congress-led government's stance on India's defence allocations, he has said that next year's allocations will be more traditional, hinting that New Delhi's defence purchases will go back to being "stagnant".
This is a wise approach in a region where teeming millions continue to live below the poverty line. Neither India nor Pakistan can afford even the traditional high level of defence spending. As for India, it already has a marked superiority in conventional weapons over Pakistan, and there is no threat to its security from the bigger and stronger neighbour, China. In fact relations between the two have improved so much during the past few years that India and China conducted joint naval exercises in waters off Shanghai last November.
The purchase bill inherited by the present government in New Delhi speaks of the BJP's xenophobic approach to security. It was misplaced priorities such as this that cost the BJP its fall from power in the recent elections, and there is good reason to believe that the Congress-led government will not succumb to the same mistake. With the peace process underway in South Asia and the mending of fences with China in process, any extraordinary increase in defence allocations by India makes no sense. A continuation of this policy will only heighten tensions in the region.
Law on honour killing
Even as the Senate is told that honour killings in the country claimed 4,000 lives in six years, the government continues to prevaricate on introducing a bill in parliament banning this reprehensible practice. It says that a draft law has been prepared and is being referred to the relevant ministries. Sadly, what our dawdling lawmakers do not seem to realize is that time is of the essence in matters of life and death, and that the delay over an issue that should have been resolved years ago has resulted in a number of lives being needlessly lost.
This speaks of the small premium that the government places on the sanctity of human life. It also throws light on an all-pervasive feudal and tribal culture whose endorsement of archaic values and customs has left even the ruling elite with regressive principles that are held in contempt by civilized society. This fact is amply borne out by the Senate's refusal to endorse a resolution condemning the "honour" killing of Samia Sarwar in 1999, where a young woman seeking to end an unhappy marriage was killed at the behest of her own parents.
It will be interesting to see the Senate's reaction this time if and when the bill in question is placed before it. Will it make a distinction between "honour" and crime or will it get cold feet and shy away from passing it? It must be remembered that if undue concessions to tradition are allowed to come in the way, there will be no end to inhuman practices like honour killings, where the murderer almost always goes without punishment owing to some lacunae in the legal process. However, if the law is passed and acted upon, Pakistan would make it to the ranks of those countries that respect the lives and dignity of their citizens.