| 28 August 2004 | Saturday | 11 Rajab 1425 |
Singh pushed into the background
Media's role in conflict management
An intense debate is going on in Washington between the realists and the neo-conservatives on what policy the United States should adopt towards Iran in the coming days. The discussion has been occasioned by a report on Iran, published by the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR), New York.
This report has been prepared by an independent task force, co-chaired by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and the former CIA director Robert Gates. The other members of the team are also distinguished Americans who hardly give any impression of "softness".
The neo-conservatives have mocked the recommendations of the report as "appeasement". They are, on the other hand, in favour of increasing pressure on Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programme.
They argue that Iran's decision to resume building uranium centrifuges have wrecked a long-running European Union-led dialogue which is a proof of Iran's bad faith.
The US will consequently ask a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on September 13 to declare Iran in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, a prelude to seeking punitive UN sanctions. The neocons maintain that the nuclear issue is too urgent to brook further delay.
But nuclear weapons are not Washington's only worry. The US charges include Iran's perceived meddling in Iraq, where the blame for the surge in Shia unrest is laid partly at Tehran's door. The recent Kean report on 9/11 has strengthened the hands of neocons as it details some unofficial links between some of the Al Qaeda hijackers and Iran.
Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria has asserted that Iran is the problem of the future. Some reports, emanating from Washington, even speak of a "surprise" in store for Tehran in October, a month before the US presidential election. The hawks in the Bush administration could recommend a punitive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
Some astute analysts, however, maintain that the current propaganda campaign against Iran has intensified as the presidential election draws closer. Knowledgeable observers like William Beeman feel that "the new round of Iran-bashing is not a prelude to another invasion of a Persian Gulf country but rather a political ploy in an election year."
While the Bush administration seems set on a tougher line, it should be reassuring for Tehran that ideological imperatives notwithstanding, practical considerations are beginning to be voiced in the United States.
For instance, Dow Jones Energy Service reported on July 30 on the work in Iran of a Halliburton subsidiary and quoted its chief executive telling a business gathering in Houston that working in Iran "is right and right."
The most important recommendation of the CFR's report is that Washington should start talking to Tehran. "Iran is experiencing a gradual process of internal change," the report says. "The urgency of US concerns about Iran and the region mandate that the US deal with the current regime through a compartmentalized process of dialogue, confidence-building and incremental engagement".
The interesting part of the recommendation is that a direct dialogue with Iran be initiated through "a basic statement of principles along the lines of the 1972 Shanghai Communique" signed by the United States and China that led to the normalization of relations between the two former antagonists.
The focus of the dialogue, according to the report, should be on six themes: (a) regional stabilization in Afghanistan and Iraq; (b) a quid pro quo on the question of terrorist groups with Iran coming clean on the question of the presence of Al Qaeda elements in that country in return for the US taking steps to "conclusively disband" the Iraq-based Mujahideen-i-Khalq cadres that often mount across-the-border forays in Iran: (c) a more focused strategy for the fulfilment by Iran of its October 2003 commitment to the IAEA on the nuclear issue or face multilateral sanctions imposed by the Security Council.
The other three themes for dialogue will be of special interest to Iran: (d) Resumption by the US of "a genuinely active involvement" in the West Asian peace process and Iran would acquiesce in a settlement since its "hostility towards the peace process is not immutable"; (e) take steps to reduce Iran's isolation by permitting wider contacts in different fields, including financial institutions whose support Iran would need for its major energy and pipeline projects; (f) consent for Iran's application to begin talks with the WTO.
The question naturally arises about the reasons which have impelled the authors of the report, influential and distinguished Americans not known for their "softness" to adopt a constructive, cooperative and conducive attitude towards the Iranian problem.
One reason could be the difficulties encountered in the Afghanistan and Iraq ventures. Another reason could be the sheer impracticality of ignoring an important country like Iran in a strategy covering West and Central Asia.
The CFR in a way represents the US foreign policy establishment and its report is both a public acknowledgement of the failure of the current policy and a recommendation that a post-election Iranian policy will need a lot of new thinking.
Interestingly, the response from Tehran to the CFR's report is typically Iranian - defiant as well as conciliatory, reflecting the multiplicity of the power centres that characterize the decision-making process in Tehran.
There is deep internal division between the hardliners and moderate reformers in the Iranian power structure which sometimes complicates its stand on foreign policy issues.
It will, however, be not easy for the United States or Iran to forget the past, get over mutual mistrust and normalize relations. After a quarter century of hostile relations, starting with the toppling of the Shah and the 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the United States and Iran find themselves in a vicious circle. Too much of national pride is involved on either side to let them leave the beaten track and explore new ways of solving their mutual problems.
An important recommendation of the CFR's report is that the slogan of "regime change" be dropped because it arouses Iranian nationalist sentiments and brings back the memories of the American role in the ouster of Mosaddeq in 1953. Instead, the new American policy should be to encourage political evolution and include Iran in the US Middle East initiative.
John Kerry has made it clear that, if elected, he will hold direct bilateral talks with Iran. After the bitter experience of Iraqi venture, George Bush, if re-elected, should be the last person interested in another foreign military adventure.
So it appears that the recommendations of the CFR's report will receive due attention from policy-makers irrespective of whether George Bush or John Kerry wins the presidential race.
Most analysts are agreed that the present state of affairs cannot last endlessly. Resumption of bilateral relations is in the interest of both Iran and the United States.
The regime in Tehran is essentially flexible, though it knows that in times of political turbulence it is dangerous to make radical u-turns. For the Americans, regional conflicts - Iraq and Afghanistan - underline the urgency of a new approach towards Iran.
Since the US has compelling interests in both Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran has demonstrated its ability and readiness to use its influence constructively in these two countries as well as its ability to make trouble, Washington may decide to resume and expand the Geneva-type discussions that were held with Tehran earlier.
There are clear indications that the futility of the current American attitude towards Iran is being increasingly realized in the foreign policy establishment. The CFR report on Iran reflects the new trend in influential US circles which have begun to voice practical considerations in ties with Tehran.
Irrespective of the result of the presidential election, some new thinking on Iran may lead to positive results in the post-November period. Resumption of US-Iran ties will be a momentous event which will have far-reaching implications for the region and beyond.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Singh pushed into the background
Manmohan singh's government is 100 days old. It is too short a period to judge its performance, particularly when the BJP has not allowed even parliament, much less the administration, to settle down to normal functioning.
Another limitation the Congress has faced is that since it has never been part of a coalition, it has not been aware of its constraints. Still 100 days are 100 days.
What strikes one straightaway is that there is no focus on governance. Manmohan Singh is the prime minister but Congress president Sonia Gandhi is all over. She is the main power and her policy, tailored by the coterie around her, counts.
Long before the elections, whenever people thought of ousting the BJP-led government, they would wish if Sonia Gandhi were to stay as the Congress president and nominate Manmohan Singh to be the prime minister, things would work perfectly. Both are in position.
But what has raised the eyebrows is that Sonia Gandhi has come to combine the two positions, the Congress presidentship officially and the prime ministership unofficially.
People want to see Manmohan Singh visibly ruling. But when she goes to Chennai to release a stamp in memory of Murosali Maran, she usurps the territory which belongs to the prime minister. An official function becomes the DMK show. It is not a healthy precedent to set.
The real criterion to assess 100 days is to find out how far the common minimum programme (CMP) has been implemented. How many jobs have been created and how less arduous is the life of the common man than before? Inflation has nearly doubled since the new government has taken over.
The budget was supposed to be cutting new grounds. But it has not set the Yamuna on fire. The government has not yet been able to decide the quantum of FDI to be allowed in the insurance or telecommunication sectors.
Two other disconcerting developments are that too many retired hands have been recruited and too many committees have been constituted. Both tell upon the government's performances. One lacks the dynamism which the prolonged experience kills, while the second delays the decision that retards growth.
Understandably, the Congress had to accommodate many power-seekers because the party has been in the wilderness for over a decade. Even after many undeserving appointments, the list has not been exhausted yet. The inner party quarrel continues over the distribution of loaves.
There is some weight in the allegation that those who have been loyal to Sonia Gandhi have been rewarded, whether in or outside the party. Some old hands have come to be preferred because they were the ones who came into contact with her when her husband was prime minister more than 15 years ago.
But the biggest problem is that Sonia Gandhi is restricting the space of the prime minister. One, the process of nominating Manmohan Singh when the Congress party wanted him was bound to lessen his stature. The other frighteningly true is that she has institutionalized her position which is one rung above the prime minister.
Sonia Gandhi does not have to prove anything. Nor does she have to suffer from the paranoid of insecurity. Her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi had the same obsession and split the Congress in 1969.
The country has suffered a lot since because the split provided the Jan Sangh, the BJP's predecessor, an opportunity to make room in the name of religion. Secular forces, divided as they were, did little to put up a fight against communalism or casteism.
Manmohan Singh can never be a threat to her. He does not even have a political base. Nor has he ever sought to build one. He has been a civil servant all his life, disciplined and devoted to file work. He has more facets, not merely of an economist.
But Sonia Gandhi's attitude has not given him a level playing field. He knows that the party president is above the prime minister but this does not have to be dinned in every time.
On the Independence Day, when all eyes were fixed on the prime minister, she arranged the Congress session in Delhi. It is to the media's credit that it did not give her publicity but otherwise she imagined that her speech would have more prominence than that of Manmohan Singh.
The Congress president trying to assert supremacy over the prime minister is nothing new. Congress president K. Kamaraj made Lal Bahadur Shastri the prime minister but the latter was soon pushed into the background. Indira Gandhi did even worse.
She ousted the old guard, including Congress president Nijalingappa, and reduced the party to a personal fiefdom. Sonia Gandhi has no such compulsions because Manmohan Singh has no ambition to build his own base. He would serve the government as long as she wants him to do and then withdraw.
The two unofficial committees, which Sonia Gandhi heads, dilutes the authority of the cabinet. The first one to ensure the implementation of CMP enjoys untrammelled authority.
It is an extension of the PMO, maybe, because of financial and procedural difficulties. But the result is that the PMO as such has suffered. So much so, the Congress leaders, including ministers, pursue the committee members who reportedly enjoy the real power.
I recall Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru constituting a Citizens Committee during the India-China war in 1962. He made Indira Gandhi its chairperson and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister D.P. Mishra secretary. As days went by, the committee became powerful because it basked in the glory of Nehru.
Still another unofficial committee is for coordination. The prime minister is only a member. What message is it supposed to send? When the ruling United Progressive Alliance is already there, discussing and debating the implementation of CMP, the creation of the coordination committee only suggests that key decisions will be taken there first and in the cabinet later. Sonia Gandhi's authority comes to be entrenched further because she is the chairperson.
On the other hand, Manmohan Singh's own diffidence comes in the way. He does not let any minister feel that the prime minister is more than a leader among the equals. Even otherwise, Congress leaders like HRD Minister Arjun Singh and defence minister Pranab Mukherjee do not think that they are answerable to the prime minister. They consider Manmohan Singh much junior to them.
Manmohan Singh should realize that he represents the tone and tenor of governance. It is his business to ensure that the government does not give the public a distorted picture.
At present, the government looks too dispersed, too disseminated and too diffused. Sonia Gandhi's pre-eminence does not do any good. But the unfortunate part is that the prime minister prefers to take the back seat. This affects the government's prestige.
This makes it all the more necessary that Manmohan Singh should seek election to the Lok Sabha which represents the house of the people. He will not be challenging Sonia Gandhi but only proving his popularity among the people. A prime minister cannot stay as the Rajya Sabha member for long.
Nonetheless, Sonia Gandhi did well by standing in the line of ministers and some other VIPs for saying bon voyage to Manmohan Singh on his first trip abroad as prime minister. Such gestures are necessary because the unimportance of Manmohan Singh is beginning to be noticed.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Media's role in conflict management
In today's world, media is no longer content with simply reporting international events as they take place, but seeks to influence and direct the events to a certain extent. Its role in the new generation of regional conflict and sub-state violence is ambiguous, unclear, and often misconstrued.
Journalists and policymakers alike tend to assume that media coverage has an undefined yet pivotal role in helping conflict management or prevention. A role for the media in conflict prevention is routinely assumed at conferences and seminars without question or any clear understanding of what that role is.
Frequently, there is an undignified rush to pronounce a judgment. The instinctive assumptions made by policymakers, diplomats, and the military are often wrong.
Their instant, superficial analysis of the media's role is usually skewed by the emotion of anecdotal comments as opposed to rigorous analysis. Frequently, the media is blamed both for what does and does not happen.
It is regrettable, some argue, that more real-time technology and capability to report from the world's zones of conflict have not necessarily been matched by a qualitative improvement in journalism or information flow.
Instead, the trend is towards superficial, less-than-well-informed reporting, often based on second or third hand information as opposed to primary data. The growing drift towards comment and opinionated journalism is also identified as an obstacle in the way of clear, impartial comprehension of a conflict and its root causes.
The picture presented by such coverage is not as accurate or reliable as initial emotions might lead one to assume. The emotive effect on public opinion can be profound. But despite the conviction of many journalists about the powerful influence that their reporting has on policy, ministers and government officials instinctively doubt the veracity of such reporting.
In the view of a former British foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, "In complex conflicts, it is difficult within the constraints in which journalists operate to portray a balanced picture which properly represents all the factors in a conflict."
Rifkind's analysis is correct. Invariably, the reporter on location does not get it quite right. Sometimes such reporting can be downright wrong. For example, the few "facts" that Lindsey Hilsum reported to the BBC from Kigali during the first days of the Rwanda genocide in April 1994 were found as incorrect. She herself admitted that whatever she reported "turned out not to be quite true."
In 1991 the TV images of JNA (Yugoslav National Army) tanks in the former Yugoslavia, moving towards Slovenia left the impression of a unilateral offensive by Belgrade.
The fact that Slovenia had declared independence and set up border posts tended to be forgotten as the graphic TV images showed a large JNA military operation advancing towards military engagement.
Humanitarian agencies report that too often the governments of developed countries face a proliferation of data and information. The problem frequently is that they are either overloaded or inept at handling it.
Thus, it is only the media which could do a better job of analyzing the available information. Many a government can be viewed as equally culpable of skewed interpretation, but probably for different reasons.
Like the misplaced assumptions of the power of the media in conflict management, most people readily assume that there is, or must be, a direct cause-and-effect relationship between media coverage and the chances for either preventing and pre-empting, or limiting a conflict. The emotions created by vivid, gruesome TV images add weight to this assumption.
Again, the evidence suggests otherwise. Conflicts are now predominantly of a sub-state and intrastate nature in what are described as "sick state" cases. Rarely is there media coverage of a conflict that is about to explode.
It is war, and the images of fighting, that catalyses TV coverage, in particular, and not the vaguer possibility of a conflict breaking out at some indefinable moment. When it comes to prevention, media coverage is usually too late to help.
Many in the media despise the minimalist view implicit in government calculations of national interest. For reasons of self-interest or conviction, many journalists who risk their lives to report on a looming or exploding conflict will not be deflected from the view that the media factor either directly influences policy, or, if it doesn't, then it should.
Martin Bell, the BBC's distinguished former foreign affairs correspondent, complains that the wars he has covered were the result of failed politics and diplomacy. "The Bosnia war," said Bell, "has left me with the conviction that a foreign policy based only on considerations of national interest, and not at all of principle, is not only immoral but inefficient."
Just before leaving TV journalism and becoming a member of the British Parliament, Bell actively promoted the need for what he christened a "journalism of attachment."
Many colleagues, however, have rejected the concept. Others continue to argue that without TV coverage, looming conflicts and humanitarian crises would not appear at all on the government radar screen and, therefore, would be ignored by the international community.
However, once again, putting a conflict on the governmental radar screen is not the same as forcing that government to do something about it. The US definition of "vital" or "extremely important" national interests is not the only one to rule out virtually any conflicts without direct relevance. British national interests, for example, may be a little different.
Additionally, it is hard to find evidence that pre-emptive media coverage has explicitly led to pre-emptive diplomatic action designed to prevent a conflict from exploding.
Almost none of the covert preparations made in advance of a conflict (e.g., secret weapons deliveries or plotting by adversaries) are ever known to or discovered by diplomats and the NGOs, let alone journalists, until it is too late, and the conflict has exploded.
Nevertheless, the record suggests that despite emotive and often brilliant reporting, the government negativists have prevailed. The question arises whether the kind of moral stand taken by the likes of Bell, whether implicit or explicit, influences politicians who make costly decisions about whether to commit effort and resources to intervene in some way in a conflict.
For many journalists who have witnessed and reported conflicts as they unfold, there is no doubt. They want the bloodletting halted in an impartial way. "The case for intervention is not to help one side against another, but the weak against the strong, the armed against the unarmed; to take the side of the everyday victims of war who, until now, have had no protection. It is really a question, finally, of whether we care," wrote Bell.
Except for a few rare moments of policy vacuum, politicians by and large take a starkly different view. Both in Chechnya (claimed as part of the territory of a former superpower) and Burundi (a tiny independent nation with no strategic importance to any great power), the international determination to respect the right of a sovereign nation to reject offers of outside assistance overrode any personal ministerial revulsion at the unfolding horrors being reported by the international media.
Therefore, media transpires as an actor of tremendous importance in the process of management of conflicts. The world beyond our direct observation reaches us through the media.
People heavily rely on the media for the construction of social realities. A proper and saner management of media can definitely prevent deadly conflicts and transform the world into a happier and better place to peacefully co-exist.
The writer is an assistant professor in the department of mass communication, University of Punjab.