| 28 August 2004 | Saturday | 11 Rajab 1425 |
Truth about prisoner abuse
Losing historical treasures
With Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's return to Najaf, the way seems to have been cleared for a political solution to the uprising there, led by Sayyad Moqtada al-Sadr. Even though casualties still occured in Najaf and Kufa on Thursday - 74 killed - a bloodier outcome was averted.
Credit for finding a solution that would restore peace to the city, and spare the population further misery, goes to these two clerics. Under the agreement, the militiamen of the Mehdi army promised to leave the Hazrat Ali shrine, while the US forces would pull out of the holy city, the responsibility for security there being assumed by the Iraqi police.
The agreement also promises amnesty for militiamen who would surrender weapons. The solution to the Najaf crisis is Ayatollah Sistani's second contribution to peace in Iraq, for he helped end a similar uprising by the Mehdi army in April and May.
In all this drama, one amazing fact stands out: the provisional government headed by Mr Iyad Alawi played no role and seemed spurned and lacking respect. Neither the Mehdi army's leader nor Ayatollah Sistani sought its help.
The way for the entry of the Iraqi police into Najaf was paved by the agreement between the two Shia divines, and it remains to be seen whether this force will be able to maintain peace.
Sayyad Sadr's militiamen may withdraw, but the man who will command the respect and obedience of the people there is Ayatollah Sistani, not the Iraqi police. Like the government itself, the police are seen by the people as America's collaborators.
This is evident from the number of recent suicide-bomb attacks targeting police recruiting centres. After Najaf what? As the events of this year show, revolt in one city is followed by insurgency in another: Baghdad, Najaf, Fallujah, now Najaf again.
Will there ever be an end to what appears to be an unending cycle of violence since the fall of the Saddam regime? The truth is that the US has no credible exit strategy. The artificial transfer of power in June does not hide the fact that Iraq is still under occupation.
Worse, Washington has given no date for the withdrawal of its nearly 140,000 troops in Iraq, plus soldiers from other countries. The occupation thus appears open-ended. In President George Bush's words, American troops would be withdrawn only when Iraq is "free, peaceful".
Given the level of violence, it is doubtful if elections to the transitional assembly will be possible in December this year or early January. Even if held, they will lack credibility because they will be held under the bayonets of the occupation forces.
Without the UN's effective presence, neither the Iraqi people nor the world will accept the elections as genuine and transparent. The result will be continued instability and bloodshed.
The only way Iraq can have peace and stability is through a UN-conducted election. The world body must be inducted into Iraq and then elections held under its supervision.
If the US wants to leave Iraq gracefully, it must look afresh at the situation. More specifically, it must ask itself whether unilateralism has helped give Iraq a workable system of governance and achieve peace and stability in the heart of the Middle East.
Truth about prisoner abuse
The findings of a US panel investigating torture of Iraqis by American guards at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib only seems to confirm the obvious. It says that the prison was an "animal house" where US soldiers tortured prisoners at will and in a brutal manner.
It also says that the abuse was not restricted to this prison complex but that at least 300 such cases were reported, including many in other detention camps.
The report blames senior officials in the Pentagon for not doing anything to end the abuses and also mentions a memo that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had written detailing the tactics that could be used to interrogate prisoners.
However, it points out that this memo was for prisoners detained at the US military facility at Guantanomo Bay in Cuba and not for those in Iraq. This seems strange because in the days after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal surfaced, there were several reports in the US media suggesting that the interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay were used at other places as well where the US military was fighting its so-called war against terror, including Afghanistan.
It has to be said that given that US presidential elections are just a few months away, any disclosure that Mr Rumsfeld had authorized the torture methods is likely to affect Mr Bush's re-election prospects.
If the soldiers, as the report says, tortured the prisoners for "the sake of doing so", and if the responsibility for it went up to brigade level, then why should it stop at that? Surely, if the abuse was widespread, as the panel says it was, it could not have happened without the knowledge of the US military high command.
That is precisely what the defence lawyers of Jonathan Idema, a former US special forces soldier, have told an Afghan court after their client was charged with running a private jail in Afghanistan.
It appears very unlikely that either Mr Rumsfeld or his other senior neoconservative colleagues in the US defence department were not aware of what was going on.
Regrettably, the panel has chosen to take a narrow view of the whole sordid affair instead of trying to get to the bottom of the episode. Perhaps that is asking for too much, given that the panel was set up by Mr Rumsfeld himself and included former Republican party officials and armed forces veterans as its members.
Losing historical treasures
While archaeology aficionados in Pakistan would have received the news of the recent foiled bid for smuggling historical artefacts with relief, they must have mixed feelings about the latest revelation that most of the 153 objects recovered by Lahore's customs department are more than 6,000 years old.
The articles, marked as kitchen and tableware, were bound for Australia, and actually consisted of pottery, human figurines and Buddha sculptures. Although some of the pottery is believed to have been found in Sindh, most of the relics are said to have been excavated at Mehrgarh, located in Balochistan and considered one of the earliest farming settlements in South Asia.
No doubt, the customs officials deserve credit for frustrating the designs of the smugglers. However, it is tragic that despite the presence of antiquities laws, federal and provincial departments of archaeology and customs officials, many of Pakistan's historical treasures are taken away to foreign lands, where they are put up for auction or privately sold at astronomical prices to collectors.
The main problem lies not so much in the inadequacy of the legal and other mechanisms to prevent cultural thefts as it does in the lackadaisical attitude of most Pakistanis towards their cultural heritage.
Perhaps, errant officers and those digging at sites, both known to bear a degree of responsibility for missing antiquities, would not steal with such impunity if the people played a more participatory role in protecting their heritage.
For, what would future generations of Pakistanis care, if the past today remains in a state of shambles as seen in the case of Moenjodaro? Action must be taken now not only to implement the law and arrest the smugglers, but also to foster in the people a sense of worth of their history dating back to thousands of years.