| 15 August 2004 | Sunday | 28 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425 |
Sudan in the firing line
It is all about the system
Olympics & the Greek reality
During the Soviet Union days, a bitter joke circulated about a haughty Soviet premier who one fine day escorted his mother around his plush holiday home, showing off the beautiful lakeside location, fine antique furniture, a flock of obedient servants, and many more high-level party perks. All his.
The proud mother duly gushed over her son's power and possessions until she was suddenly struck by the dreadful thought of a single potential threat, "But what if," she worried aloud, "the Communists come to power?"
The joke resonates all too well in America today. Renowned writer Gore Vidal, among others, likes to say what the United States really needs is a two-party system, instead of the prevailing arrangement of the Republicans and Democrats behaving as two loyal wings of one overarching party of big money. What happens to ordinary Americans?
After Democratic Party candidate John Kerry's acceptance speech recently, the question whether a Democrat can beat Bush was answered resoundingly in the affirmative. Riding out of the Boston convention with a five-point lead in one poll, and barely three months to go, John Kerry has a very good shot at deposing George W. Bush. Some of us will be surprised if he does not win in a landslide. The more vexing question is whether, if elected, a Kerry presidency will change very much at all.
In a stringently stage-managed show of unity in their Boston convention at the end of July, Democratic Party leaders carefully muffled internal policy divisions, especially over whether to reverse the upward redistribution of income (instead of just "paying down the debt"), and whether to withdraw from Iraq or else "stay the course" there, as if democratizing Saddam Hussein's domain were actually George Bush's goal.
Amid red, white and blue balloons, confetti showers and throbbing music a smiling Kerry promised "a stronger America" and to uphold "the values of America's working families" for whom "wages are falling and health care costs rising".
John Kerry attacked Bush's arrogant foreign adventures but, nonetheless, an anti-war plank was thwarted in backroom party struggles to preserve Kerry's image as a tough guy, and one woman with an "end the occupation" sign was hustled out of the convention hall as soon as she lifted it. The party regulars, of course, are mostly a swarm of ambitious sharks who are happy enough to promote whatever agenda gets them where they want to go.
So, to appease the right, Kerry, playing on his record as a decorated Vietnam veteran, promised 40,000 new troops (but not, he said, for Iraq) and more special forces (presumably for Iraq, and future Iraqs).
A New York Times/CBS poll found that 56 per cent of Democrats urged the United States troops to "leave Iraq as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable," while only 38 per cent believed the that the US should stay for "as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy."
Yet party insiders forced anti-war groups to swallow the feeble platform statement that "people of goodwill disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq." Kerry also joined Bush in utmost support of Israel, which crazily excludes any reflection on the role of the unresolved Palestinian crisis in stoking terrorism.
John Kerry can hardly differ much from President George W. Bush when his campaign is competing for the same few swing "centrist" voters' as the Republicans seek.
This strange bind occurs because only half the potential American electorate matters. Just 51 per cent voted in the 2000 election, and those who do vote are disproportionately drawn from the well-off segment of society, which inevitably encourages conservative stances in both parties.
A Democrat, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or John Kerry, may be elected but the natural Democratic majority constituency is shrugged off.
So the Americans who live paycheck to paycheck will foot the bill for the Iraq war while oil companies, arms merchants, and "reconstruction" mega corporations like Halliburton rake it in. Republicans zealously slash services for the needy while raising taxes on average income earners to pay for the tax cuts for the rich and for Pentagon gadgets. But it's mighty hard to see what Democrats, especially under former president Bill Clinton, have done to change it. Half the US, mostly people of modest means, have been turned off the formal political process by a lack of candidates who dare to say anything that answer their needs.
Why is that? The Democratic Party coffers - not unlike Republican pockets - are filled mostly by big firms, banks, and affluent donors who naturally steer policy their own way: public order (keep the poor down); low taxes on themselves (cut education, housing and health spending); and strong defence (feed avaricious arms firms and foreign investors who the military really exists to protect). Perhaps the reason why Bush junior had to establish an explicitly named "Homeland Defence" agency was in order to remind the pampered military that occasionally they are more than just hired guns at the service of United States capital abroad.
What do Americans get beside expensive military fireworks shows on their television screens? Since 1973, productivity in the United States rose by a third but the benefits were all captured by the upper 20 per cent.
For everyone else living standards have been stagnant or slipped backward. Nearly half the new jobs with the highest growth rates today pay paltry wages no one can live decently on.
Meanwhile, 61 per cent of US corporations paid no tax at all last year, and over a hundred billion dollars in government subsidies for corporations exceed all state aid to the needy. Predictably, as the Democrats "pragmatically" slide rightward to court affluent "centrist" voters, the Republicans shifted ever more further to the rabid right. Hence, we ultimately get the current Bush administration, many of whose members were regarded 25 years ago as nutty extremists.
Kerry's advisers believe that they need not make many concessions to the liberal left because the left has nowhere else to go.
The situation is not so different in Pakistan where elites in the major parties have little except rhetoric to offer the poor, who comprise two-thirds of the nation.
No doubt the two countries appear similar, not only facing terrorism but also in their attitude towards the poor. The United States has brought security laws which have put the Democrat candidate in the league of many of his allies.
When the United States left did find a candidate responsive to their concerns, such as Ralph Nader, they were roundly vilified for helping elect Bush (with critics conveniently forgetting that far greater hordes of registered Democrats voted for Bush). Nonetheless, the Democrats must say something to the numerous non-wealthy: the squeezed middle class and, as Kerry put it, "those struggling to join it, who deserve a fair shot."
Kerry's convention speech undeniably hit strong chords slamming Bush's loose way with the truth at home and abroad: "I will be a commander in chief who will not mislead us into war." Kerry, despite a pro-free trade Senate record, vowed to protect American jobs from export. Despite a commitment to a balanced budget as the highest priority, Kerry teasingly declared that health care "is a right" - dangling the prospect of a national health care system.
According to the polls, the American public overwhelmingly favours a multilateral defence policy and the shifting of money from defence to social needs. (Recall that right up to the Iraq invasion most Americans opposed an attack without a second UN resolution.) All these measures are deemed unspeakably "liberal' by corporate media.
Kerry's stated intent to keep troops in Iraq until international forces stabilize the country can be construed as either a hard-line stance or as a convenient "cover" for a quick pullout. It is hard to say. Could Kerry be feinting one way during the campaign in order to go the other way afterward?
Kerry may not know what to do as yet, but Iraq clearly cannot be held at a price that the United States public is willing to pay.
In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began as a balanced budget advocate but experimented his way into the New Deal, which rescued America from the Great Depression and prepared it for the fight against fascism.
A tendency to "flip-flop", for which Kerry is ridiculed, is not a weakness but a likely asset for any intelligent leader. The whole point of democratic politics is that the un-moneyed public can pressure otherwise insulated and imperious politicians to do flip-flops.
That's a vital sign of a functioning democracy. And it is all one can hope for in a new Kerry administration after the repugnant regime in Washington is tossed in the rubbish bin. Perhaps people other than shrewd party elites and their cronies will begin to matter again.
Sudan in the firing line
At a time when the credibility of the war on Iraq is taking a beating in both the US and Britain, their media has latched on to the year-old conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, to highlight the humanitarian lapses of a major Muslim country. The furore also serves to establish the credentials of the West as the main upholder of civilized values.
Judging by the way reports of mass killings and ethnic cleansing of hapless black Africans by government-backed Arab "janjaweed" militias from the desert region of western Sudan have been played up by the BBC and CNN, it appears that the government in Khartoum is actively involved in what amounts to genocide.
Memories of massacres in Rwanda, and the on-going atrocities in Congo and other African states in the grip of civil war, have pushed the UN Security Council to assert the role denied to it elsewhere. It took the urging of many Asian and African countries to persuade the council not to impose sanctions but to give Sudan time to put things right, by reining in the Arab militias, and providing security and humanitarian assistance to the uprooted Africans.
An objective analysis of the "problem" shows that the western powers are making a concerted effort to pursue their own agenda against the Islamic world, for their own ends. President Bush clearly wants to capitalize on his popular standing as the chief exponent of the war against terrorism. His ratings on economy and general leadership have declined steeply, but the US electorate still rates him highly for the conduct of the war on terror. Apart from playing up the continuing threat from Al Qaeda, danger is also perceived from Islamic fundamentalists who are violating the rights of ethnic minorities in Muslim countries.
The simplistic explanation offered in the western media of the crisis in Sudan is that there was a rebellion last year in the region, spurred by the compromise Khartoum reached with the rebels in southern Sudan on the grant of autonomy. The government in Khartoum reacted by arming and letting loose the "janjaweed" Arab militias, who are blamed for carrying out murderous attacks on the indigenous black Africans, killing tens of thousands and uprooting a million locals from their villages, with many seeking refugee in Chad across the desert border.
The truth about Sudan is quite different. The New York Times carried an article by Sam Headley, former editorial page writer of the Wall Street Journal, on August 8, based on his visit to the "janjaweed" area of western Sudan. Far from being the allies of the regime in Khartoum. the "janjaweed" are a group of Arab and African tribes who have been contending for a fair share of the vast desert of Darfur where they roam looking for pastures. When the British left in 1956, the problem of nomadic tribes in a region twice the size of France was left unresolved.
Since February 2003, local rebellions have broken out, with anti-Khartoum groups sponsoring them. The so-called movement for justice and equality is the creation of Hassan Al-Turabi, one-time ally of President Bashir, who is in jail because of his militancy. This faction also receives support from groups in Chad. Eritrea, which broke away from Ethiopia, has encouraged a group, called the Sudan Liberation Front, to start political agitation. The intra-tribal fighting has spread, and the government in Khartoum relied on the Arab tribals to counter the rebellion. The mass movement of refugees has dramatized a situation that requires a political solution.
The situation, as handled in the UN Security Council, is largely influenced by its western members. Among these determinants is the view adopted by the US Congress that genocide is going on in the region. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also sought to divert attention from his embarrassment over Iraq by talking of dispatching British troops to Sudan. When the Sudanese government sought a clarification from the British ambassador, he denied any plans to send troops.
However, the government in Khartoum has received a more sympathetic hearing from the African Union, which has scheduled meetings later in the month between the Sudanese government and the rebel groups in Obuja, the Nigerian capital. The meeting of the Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo also called for more time than the thirty days given to the Sudanese government under the UN resolution.
The manner in which the plight of the refugees in Sudan is being highlighted in the western media appears to reflect a continuing desire to defame Islamic countries as being incapable of maintaining civilized standards. Until a few years ago, Sudan was included by the US in its list of terrorist states. However, the government of President Bashir has got rid of the Islamic radicals headed by Turabi, and has cooperated with the international community in ending the 25-year old civil war in southern Sudan. It has entered into agreements with many western companies to develop and exploit its rich mineral resources.
Some of the current propaganda in the West reflects a desire to weaken, and even dismember, Africa's largest country. Certain human rights groups, and organizations representing Christian missionaries, do not appear to mind tampering with the truth. Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Usman Ismail spends much of his time contradicting falsehoods still being spread by the western media.
Among the points he has made are the following:
- Sudan, far from arming the "janjaweed", is trying to disarm them, and some of the leaders have been arrested and imprisoned.
- Sudan does not need foreign troops. It has agreed to African Union troops coming to look after the security of African observers, but is capable of policing the region.
- The number of casualties in Darfur owing to unrest and conflict does not exceed 5,000, and the oft-quoted figures of 30,000 and 50,000 are exaggerations. As the representative of the European Union stated after a visit to the area, there has been no genocide.
- Sudan is already providing substantial quantities of humanitarian aid will facilitate delivery of additional supplies.
Taking into account the relevant facts, notably the findings of the African Union and the Arab League, as well as the European Union and the prestigious New York Times, there is no need for desperate measures. The Sudanese government is cooperating with the UN, which has a representative in Khartoum, monitoring progress. The proposed meetings under the auspices of the African Union in Obuja later this month will start a process that should lead to the easing of political tensions.
Pakistan has played a responsible role, opposing sanctions or condemnation, but urging the Sudanese government to move expeditiously to carry out its obligations. Any inclination to politicize a humanitarian problem, or needlessly pressure Sudan needs to be resisted. One would hope that problems left over from colonial times would not be exploited to maintain unjustified pressure on a government that is in compliance with international norms. Sudan should be spared being dragged into America's election-year politics.
It is all about the system
President Pervez Musharraf assured a group of visiting Commonwealth parliamentarians the other day that democratic institutions in Pakistan were now stable and functioning. On the same day, the defence minister, Rao Sikandar, tried to convince some pressmen that the president must not leave his army post for another two years if the country is to be saved from a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
Both cannot be right at the same time. Democratic institutions are sustained by laws and the will of the people, and not by the army commanders. If the Commonwealth were to agree with the defence minister, surely Pakistan would be denied re-entry to that club once again.
Being a politician of longstanding and changing loyalties, the minister knows well that without a military scaffolding the institutions - the assemblies and the cabinets - will crumble. The president, too, seems to have had the same realization, and that is why he is unwilling to commit himself to a deadline for relinquishing the army command.
The people, on their part, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. While Rao Sikandar predicts chaos if General Musharraf leaves his army post, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, speaking for the religious alliance he heads, threatens to create a bigger chaos if he doesn't before the end of the year. Added to these forebodings is the demand, growing more vehement, by the intelligentsia and other elements in the opposition (as by the PPP and Nawaz's Muslim League) for fresh elections or (as by the nationalist parties of Sindh and Balochistan) for an altogether new constitutional dispensation.
Whatever may be said for or against the present system, serious doubts will continue to persist about whether it will be able to outlive its author. The president has himself admitted (in an interview with this paper recently) that "the greatest thing" he had done - the institution of the district government - had "created a turmoil". It is worse than that.
Besides unhinging the administration, it has extended federal control to an area that under the Constitution and by tradition belonged to the provinces. To add to the injury, though the local government law is provincial in nature, the provinces have been constitutionally barred from altering or repealing it for five years. The politicians are protesting loudly, the masses are suffering silently.
Prime Minister Shujaat Hussain, instead of helping to end the "presidential turmoil" (that was expected of him being a seasoned politician whom Musharraf trusts), is adding his bit to it. As his freak prime ministerial stint draws to a close he has announced a plan of his own which hits at the root of governmental authority both at the centre and in the provinces.
His plan envisages a future set-up in which the prime minister would do no more than manage the economy while, he as party chief, would take care of the problems and grievances of the people. In the provinces, his district party chiefs will be in charge of the public welfare programme and also receive funds for development schemes.
This plan has many flaws and sinister implications. An obvious legal difficulty would be in placing public funds at the disposal of a political party. If that is somehow overcome, it would not be at all possible to invest the party chief and his district chiefs with the executive powers without which no material help can be rendered to the people.
In an orderly government, a political party or its chief can influence the policies and actions of the prime minister or his cabinet only through the legislature. The party can vote a prime minister out of office but cannot exercise any of his powers. A government can implement the manifesto of its party but only by remaining within the bounds of the law and the rules of business.
The thinking of the ruling faction of the Muslim League pertaining to the relationship between the party and the government appears both confused and contradictory. At one time, it was contemplating to make the chief executive of the country also the chief of the majority party. That thinking now seems to be veering to the other extreme where the party chief would share the prime minister's authority. It is a swing from the improper to the illegal.
In the provinces the control over development funds and services is the main source of conflict between the provincial and district governments. In this sordid tussle, more funds lapse or are squandered than invested in schemes of public welfare. Making the district party chiefs heads of development programmes will broaden this conflict resulting in larger waste and longer delays.
A basic fact overlooked by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain in propounding his ideas is that the government at the centre is of a coalition of parties and not of the Muslim League he heads. So are the governments in Sindh and Balochistan. In the NWFP coalition, his party is not represented at all. It will, therefore not be the Muslim League chief alone but the chiefs of all the other parties in the coalitions who will have to be given a share in the powers of the government and control over public funds.
General Musharraf's checks and balances and devolution have done a great deal of harm. If a last nail needs to be driven into the coffin of good governance, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain seems to be providing it. There have been enough political antics and experiments, while disorder is on the increase. Whether it is a minor infraction like driving breaking the signal or a macabre crime like kidnapping for ransom, the people look to their friends and to volunteer groups for help and counselling - and not to the government.
Olympics & the Greek reality
"We Europeans are the children of Hellas." The opening words of Fisher's History of Europe make a familiar claim. It is the "democracy, etc" argument which traces the European best to the classical Greek legacy.
Fisher himself, a member of UK prime minister Herbert Asquith's cabinet (Asquith was premier in the run up to and during the first two years of the Great War), was a good example of the English Hellenist - an elite group of liberals keen on Greek values as an escape from modern confusion. And "Hellas", as represented by that brigade, has offered something for most. Classical architecture appeals to those who hate modernity.
Plato's fears and Thucydides' strictures are used to show that democracies fall apart unless controlled by educated types. Greek religion, nice and hazy, has proved a useful stick with which to beat nastily dogmatic Christianity. And gay life has always thrilled to the idea of what really went on in the gymnasium. The appeal of Hellas lies in its capacity to be manipulated to suit later purposes.
Now emerging from the Piraeus smog come the Olympic games - the most fraudulent bit of the Hellenic mythologizing. There's always been Greek scepticism about the games, whose historic claims offer an artificial past lifted in isolation from ancient soil, with little relevance to modern Greece. Olympianism, so lofty in ideals, after all had no problems in accommodating itself to the Greece of the colonels.
And Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the whole terrible circus, concentrated on France, England and the US - those colonial powers that mattered - when he searched for the sponsors who helped to revive the games in 1896. The contemporary Greek reality didn't enter into the games much except as local heritage backdrop.
Hellenism shows the power of what French historian Marc Bloch called the idol of origins - the temptation to find legitimacy by searching for roots whose tenacious grasp explain all later developments. But the urge to isolate one strand and then ignore everything that happened afterwards is usually done for propagandist reasons; that way back in the past there is a line of descent which is more pure than anything that came subsequently.
Just clear away the supposedly irrelevant bits and you will see how, for example, the "origins" of the English parliament lay in the assemblies of the Teutonic warriors, or how African state-collapse is traceable to an ineradicable tribalism. A similar silliness claims that Greek identity is traceable to its Hellenic origins in Sophocles and all that.
Most visitors to Greece looking for continuity with the classical past are struck by its absence. The evidence is mostly a question of archaeological remains - empty spaces which deepen the sense of a really dead history.
The Slav invasions of the 7th centuries AD played a role in this lacuna - and it's uncertain to what extent the Greeks of the classical age intermarried with the Slavs or retreated inland.
What is uncontestable is that when the Greeks revived as a community by the 9th century AD it was two qualities alone which defined them. To be a Hellene meant that you could speak the language and practise the faith of Orthodox Christianity. You could therefore be a Greek even if you lived outside the jurisdiction of the emperor in Constantinople. After the fall of that city to the Turks in 1453, these questions of identity became even more important.
This was an assertion of a national spirit in consciousness and customs, as in that other Middle Eastern diaspora - that of the Jews. This way of thinking has persisted long after the founding of the modern Greek state in 1827 and was a triumph of a community which had willed itself into political existence just south of the Balkans.
Greek politics is Balkan in its obsessiveness with roots and identity. But it uses those tools of imagined beginnings in order to distinguish itself from the mess to the north. Even the name Macedonia is a problem. The Greeks' own Macedonia is the territory in the north once ruled by Alexander. But the name's appropriation by the former Yugoslav republic seemed to Greeks to betoken their absorption within a Balkan world.
Sensitivity about Macedonia shows how modern Greece has used Hellenism as a tool of differentiation. Like many a modern, insecure nation it wishes to claim a longer history than the evidence suggests. But Christian Orthodoxy, which gave the Greeks their modern cultural identity, is also shared with the Slavs. As a result, modern Greece has more in common with Slavic culture than it does with the Latin west.
The myth of Hellenic-classical continuity has become a weapon in the modern Greek armoury of self-definition. It is a national region too often tempted by a falsifying myth of its own origins. Which makes it an appropriate home for Olympic nonsense. - Dawn/The Guardian News Service