Destruction of heritage

The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban was met with an outcry in the United States, Britain and the countries that form the coalition in Iraq. Yet the coalition forces can now claim, among other things, the destruction of the legendary city of Babylon.

Ironically, the bombing campaign of 2003 had not damaged archaeological sites. It was only in the aftermath, during the occupation, that the most extensive cultural destruction took place. At first, there was the looting of the museums under the watch of coalition troops, but that was to be followed by more extensive and active destruction.

Active damage of the historical record is ongoing at several archaeological sites occupied as military camps. At Babylon, I have seen the continuing construction projects, the removal of and digging into the ancient mounds over the past three months, despite a coalition press release early in June stating that work would halt, and the camp would be removed.

A helicopter landing zone, built in the heart of the ancient city, removed layers of archaeological earth from the site. The daily flights of the helicopters rattle the ancient walls and the winds created by their rotors blast sand against the fragile bricks.

When my colleague at the site, Maryam Moussa, and I asked military personnel in charge that the helipad be shut down, the response was that it had to remain open for security reasons, for the safety of the troops.

Between May and August, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters.

Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theatre from the era of Alexander of Macedon. The minister of culture has asked for the removal of military bases from all archaeological sites, but none has yet been relocated.

Iraq is ancient Mesopotamia, otherwise called the "cradle of civilization". It has more than 10,000 listed archeological sites, as well as hundreds of mediaeval and Ottoman Muslim, Christian and Jewish monuments.

The coalition did not establish a means of guarding the sites, though they would be protected in any other country rich in antiquities. As a result, archaeological sites are being looted to an extent previously unimagined.

The looting supplies the appetites of an international illicit trade in antiquities, and many objects end up in places like Geneva, London, Tokyo and New York.

The lack of border controls has only added to the ease with which the illegal trade in Mesopotamian artefacts functions. The looting leaves the sites bulldozed and pitted with robber holes. Ancient walls, artefacts, scientific data are all destroyed in the process.

But it is not only the stolen artefacts that are lost. The loss of this data is the loss of the ancient history of this land. Many important Sumerian and Babylonian cities have been irreversibly damaged in this way already. Passive destruction of this kind has been widespread under the occupation, but antiquity is not the only area of concern.

In Baghdad, the National Library and State Archives building is a burned-out shell in which the employees work in the most horrendous conditions. The Ottoman archive that records the history of the country, spanning the 16th to the early 20th centuries, is in the gravest danger.

Having been soaked by flooding last year, the archive began to mould. Upon the advice of conservators, the entire archive was removed to freezers to stop the mould.

Because of the lack of electricity and equipment, the only place that could be found with large freezers, and where power could be maintained, was an abandoned and bombed building that had previously been a Ba'athist officers' club.

In Iraq, where it is not unusual for temperatures to soar up to 60C (140F) in summer, and where the Coalition Provisional Authority never managed to restore the electrical power to the country, this was no small feat.

The power in Baghdad (outside the US-occupied presidential palace and embassy buildings) is available, sporadically, about nine hours a day. If the archives should thaw, the documents will be destroyed.

The conservation process needs to be done in a time- and climate-controlled manner if the archive is to be saved. But the Coalition Provisional Authority reassigned ownership of this building to the ministry of justice.

There is now still no place to move this archive to, the loss of which would be the loss of the modern historical records of Iraq, much of which has not been studied or published.

In the midst of the disasters of Iraq under occupation, the condition of its cultural heritage may seem a trivial matter. But, as a historian of antiquity, I am painfully aware that there is no parallel for the amount of historical destruction that has taken place over the past 15 months in Iraq.

The Geneva and Hague conventions make the protection of heritage the responsibility of the foreign powers during occupation. Instead, what we have seen under the occupation is a general policy of neglect and even an active destruction of the historical and archeological record of the land. -Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is professor of ancient Near Eastern art history and archaeology, Columbia University, US.

Denationalization controversy

There is much speculation these days about the impending change in the status of the St Joseph's and the St Patrick's Colleges in Karachi. The Sindh government's move to "retransfer" or "denationalize" these colleges has angered the teachers' community and their association has launched a protest movement.

Given the state of college education - in fact the entire education sector - in the country it is important that the issue be discussed dispassionately and objectively in all sections who feel concern for the future of the younger generation.

A few schools had been denationalized by General Ziaul Haq's regime and there had been some talk of returning the nationalized colleges to their owners. But it was only in 2001 that a serious move was made when the Sindh cabinet decided on the guidelines to "retransfer/denationalize educational institutions".

These categorically stated that all nationalized institutions would be transferred back to their owners or genuine successors if they applied for it. Institutions that were not claimed within three years would be permanently retained by the government. Priority was to be given to community-based welfare organizations.

The conditions laid down required the claimants to establish clear title. It was also stated that "the premises will be used for imparting education only". Other terms and conditions pertained to the services of the staff, their salaries, golden handshake, etc.

They were made on the assumption that the staff and students would be transferred along with the college building to the new management, the Catholic Board in the case of SJC and SPCs.

These conditions have been laid down ostensibly to safeguard the interests of the stakeholders, namely, the teachers and the students. But it was never questioned how the staff who are government servants and the students who were admitted under the centralized admission policy of the education department could be dumped as a liability on the Catholic Board which had applied for the return of these institutions.

In fact a process of negotiations started between the Catholic Board and the authorities which has been frustratingly slow. The delay was partly on account of the government's own political constraints.

Elections were due in October 2002 and the administration did not want an issue to be brought into the limelight which was bound to be exploited by its opponents as a political weapon.

The negotiations have centred round the financial terms of the transfer - how many teachers are to be retained and for how many years. None of the points of agreement reached verbally have been incorporated in a written document.

Nor has a memorandum of understanding been signed. On July 28, 2004 the Sindh cabinet again decided to return these colleges but there has been no movement forward. The notification which normally follows a cabinet decision has still to reach the Education Department, though five weeks have elapsed.

Meanwhile the SPLA has used this delay to come into the field capturing newspaper headlines with stories of its protest and colourful pictures of young students demonstrating in various colleges.

It is time for some calm and serious negotiations on the issue. On talking to various parties - or stakeholders to use the term in current use - we realized that the issue is not as complex as is being made out to be by some government functionaries and the agitating teachers. It appears that the confrontation has been artificially created by vested interests.

To begin with, the courts set the tone in the case. In its judgment the Sindh High Court held that the services of teachers who are government servants cannot be transferred to the private sector.

The Supreme Court on its part ordered the return of the properties of the minorities. Hence it is not at all clear why the Education Department has been dillying dallying and trying to impose stringent financial terms on the two colleges to force them to accommodate the staff and students already there.

According to Sister Mary Emily, who was the principal of SJC when it was nationalized in 1972, it would cost the Catholic Board Rs 1,600,000 per annum to meet the terms of the government only for the transfer of SJC. SPC would incur an additional sum.

The government's stand is ambiguous. It has spoken of returning these colleges but at the same time it has not announced so far that technically this involves a straightforward hand over of their property to the original owners. This would not be an unprecedented case.

In other instances, the government colleges functioning in private premises have been moved into government buildings and the property returned to the lawful owners. That is how it was in the case of St Lawrence's College and the Safya College in Karachi and the Forman Christian College in Lahore.

The SJC is located in Saddar on 2.06 acres of prime land which was leased in perpetuity by the Military Estate Office in June 1949 for the purpose of building a women's college.

The government itself recognizes the Catholic Board's title to the land by paying it a princely sum of Rs 22,500 per annum as rent ever since the college was nationalized.

It is a pity that this simple situation has been made so intractable. A major role in this crisis has been played by the SPLA for reasons best known to it. It took us by surprise when in a meeting its president Mr Riaz Ahsan himself suggested that the SJC be transferred to one of the 13 college buildings which the Karachi nazim has pointed out are lying vacant and the premises be handed back to the Catholic Board.

When asked if this solution was acceptable to him, Mr Ahsan categorically answered in the affirmative, as had the SJC teachers when I had posed them the same question earlier. He assured us repeatedly that his fight was not with the Catholic Board but with the Education Department.

Yet he has been quite happy to let the impression be conveyed that one of his demands is to stall "denationalization". When asked why he did not publicly articulate his demand to return the premises to the Catholic Board and shift the college elsewhere, he said he could not reveal his cards prematurely as he claimed to be a skilful negotiator.

In the process the SPLA has created more confusion by advancing all kinds of arguments and making charges that have little bearing on the present situation. These range from the absurd claim that the standard of education in these colleges was dismally low before nationalization and the extraordinary performance of their students in examinations today is to be attributed to the college being in the public sector.

Re-transferring the college to the Catholic Board would, according to the SPLA leader, hurt the cause of education. It would deprive the poor masses of low cost education, because as a private college it would charge an exorbitant fee that would be unaffordable for the students from low-income families.

Mr Riaz Ahsan alleged that the Catholic Board had made its claim for the college when it found that CAP, which is the admission policy based on open merit, had denied students from the missionary schools access to the college which was now taking students from all over the city.

Then he expressed the fear that the land would be used to build a shopping plaza! His rhetoric was regularly punctuated with declaration of his commitment to education and his important role in society as a teacher.

The fact is that college education has suffered because of deteriorating academic standards that is confirmed by the widespread prevalence of the tuition syndrome, overcrowding in classrooms and the excruciatingly slow rate of expansion of the college network. The solution offered by the teachers would address all these issues by shifting the existing institution to other premises.

The college which will be set up by the Catholic Board would, given its past record and glorious tradition, provide high quality education. This would of course cost more than the Rs900 per annum the students pay in a government college but it would still be much less than the fabulous amount most students of SJC were paying in the expensive private schools they studied in before they came to college.

It would be in the interest of education if the teachers who are agitating - though they don't describe their action as such - stopped using this as their trump card for their trade union purposes.

They have linked their demands for promotion and pay rise to the SJC and SPC issue. The government could rob them of their pretext to protest by resolving the issue in accordance with the courts' judgments.

The Maoists of Nepal

"If we have a Pol Pot scenario, this would be extremely destabilizing for the region," said a Western diplomat in Nepal when the last ceasefire went into effect in early 2003. "India would probably come in and that would upset the Chinese and Pakistan and who knows what would happen."

Unfortunately, we may soon find out what would happen next, because the Maoist rebels in Nepal may be only a year or two away from victory. The ceasefire of 2003 is long over, and the insurgents already control almost half the country.

On August 18 they declared a blockade of the capital, and for a week almost nothing and nobody moved on the roads in or out of the Kathmandu valley (population 1.5 million).

Then they lifted the blockade and let the city have fresh food again - but not because they had to. They didn't even have to put road-blocks on the highways; they closed them by threats alone. They can do it again whenever they want.

Nepal is one of the few countries where you are tempted to say that reform is impossible and revolution is necessary. All but perhaps half a million of its 24 million people lead lives of grinding poverty (per capita income $220 a year), and nothing any government does changes the picture one bit.

A Maoist-led peasant revolution sounds hopelessly out of date in the 21st century, but Nepalese peasants don't live in the 21st century. For the most part, they live in the Middle Ages, with feudalism defining their lives.

There have been attempts at reform from above in Nepal, but they all quickly ran out of steam. Mass demonstrations in 1990 forced King Birendra to allow multi-party democracy, but it never really worked since all the major parties were led by people from the old elite who saw them simply as another opportunity to feather their nests.

Then the king and most of his family were massacred in 2001 by the crown prince, a young man called Dipendra who was high on drink and drugs and cross about being forbidden to marry the woman of his choice. He shot himself, too.

When the shooting stopped, the last man standing was Gyanendra, brother of Birendra and now king in his stead. The trouble is that most ordinary Nepalese were very fond of Birendra and suspect Gyanendra of conspiring at his death.

(It's almost certainly untrue, but it is a measure of his unpopularity.)Indeed, the only thing that inspires much loyalty to the 55-year-old Gyanendra is the fact that if he dies - and male members of the Nepali ruling family generally die of heart attacks before they turn 50 - then he will be succeeded by his bratty son Paras, who shows no more interest or concern for the real Nepal than his socialite friends.

King Gyanendra suspended Nepal's shoddy democracy two years ago, and has since ruled through prime ministers appointed from the small pro-monarchy party. He has also turned the Nepalese army loose on the rebels, causing a steep rise in the killing. (Ten thousand have died since the guerilla war began in 1996, but at least half of those were killed in the past two years.)

The Nepalese army once made a living by leasing itself out to the UN for peacekeeping missions, but US military aid and advisers, attracted to Nepal by the notion that it is part of a war against "terrorism," are rapidly converting it into a duplicate of those Latin American armies that suppress peasant revolts in the Andes.

In its 2003 report, Amnesty International said that "the security forces continued to carry out unlawful killings. It was estimated that of the more than 4,000 'Maoists' officially declared as killed since 2001, nearly half may have been unlawfully killed." That is to say, shot while in custody, shot by mistake, shot as an example to others, or just randomly shot to make the army's numbers look better.

The Maoists could well win in Nepal - but that would be a much bigger disaster, for they belong to the same tradition of ultra-egalitarian and anti-foreign extremism that animated the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Sendero Luminoso (the "Shining Path") in Peru.

Mercifully, the latter group never attained power, but between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge murdered about a quarter of Cambodia's population in a drive to exterminate everybody who was a "class enemy" or had been exposed to foreign influences.

"Comrade Prachandra," the 42-year-old ex-horticulture teacher who is the Nepali Maoists' leader, never gives interviews, but deputy leader Baburam Bhattarai (whose PhD thesis was a Marxist analysis of Nepal's problems) was chilling when asked whether his movement's policies would really be similar to those of the Khmer Rouge:

"There is no independent and authentic account of events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge available so far. Whatever is emanating from the western media appears to be highly exaggerated."

In other words, yes, they are the same. If the Maoists win, an early Indian intervention might spare the Nepalese population the worst horrors of a Khmer Rouge-style genocide, but only at the cost to India of a long and thankless guerrilla war in Nepal plus serious international complications with China. Nepal is heading straight for hell, and nobody in the country seems remotely capable of stopping it. -Copyright

Our concept of democracy

In no other country do educated people shout so much in favour of democracy as in Pakistan. They say they want to live in a democratic atmosphere, and some are even ready to die for democracy.

And yet even the leading political parties which should serve as the nurseries and breeding grounds for democracy, claiming millions of adherents, will not allow these adherents to elect local party bosses. "No elections. Just do as our great leader says. He (or she) knows what is best for the people."

Then, the general belief is that democracy is part of politics only and has nothing to do with other aspects of life, least of all with the family and the home. In the West, from where the modern concept of democracy came, mutual consultation is inseparable from its other demands.

We are averse even to incorporating the Islamic concept of shoora, i.e. mutual consultation, in our brand of democracy. As I see it, rather than talking of the ingredients of democracy, the stress should be on imbibing a true democratic spirit in whatever we do.

Public leaders are always advising us to adopt valued traditions and tried moral values. Moral values is a beautifully vague expression, and nobody in Pakistan has been able to define them.

Therefore, leaving them aside for the moment, let us look at what we are doing to protect, preserve and promote democracy, which can be a palpable experience involving such high attributes as tolerance and respecting the rights of others.

A politician comes home from a meeting where he has been extolling the virtues of democracy and its absolute need in politics. His sincerity is without doubt.

But look what happens when he doffs the mantle of politician and dons that of husband and father. The audience changes from political colleagues and followers to wife and children and servants.

All of a sudden the dedicated democrat is transformed into an autocrat, accustomed to having his every word obeyed without demur, just because he is the head of the family and the household.

Day in and day out we lecture people on the need for democracy in our political dealings with those who differ with us. Experts, teachers, editors and government leaders are at pains to inculcate the democratic spirit of tolerance in students and young people.

All this is said and done in blatant disregard of the obvious yawning gap between precept and practice. All of us are agreed that democracy should prevail in every walk of life.

And yet it is not allowed to prevail because we have decided that it is only in politics that it is required in order to achieve a balance between ambition and tolerance. Otherwise in our private daily lives everyone of us wants things done according to his wishes, his lights.

Take the average head of an average family. Normally, the father, because he provides the money, calls the shots. He rules the home like an absolute monarch, with the "queen" agreeing with most of his whims and fancies.

Together they believe that they have to run their children's lives for them, however old and intelligent the boys and girls may be. They are convinced that even in middle age, married and settled in life, the offspring will need their advice, for they, the parents, will always remain wiser, even if they are morons.

If the sons and daughters just whisper their desire to differ, the father will threaten to turn them out (economic blackmail) while the mother will utter weird oaths like "May you see my dead face!" or "I'll never bless you the milk I fed you!" (emotional blackmail).

By the way this last is the most stupid, selfish and meaningless threat I have ever heard, and implies that the mother is putting a price on her milk. (Please keep in mind that I am talking of average middle class people).

A daughter wishes to marry the man of her choice. The prospective young man may be the ideal one available, but just because the father was not initially involved, he must oppose the match. It is just like saying, "Nobody will vote against my wishes."

The politician will never do this in politics, but the home is a different turf altogether. Here there is no place for freedom of opinion. A son has no aptitude for science or mathematics. He knows that if he goes on with these subjects in college, he will fail and make a mess of his education.

But his democrat father has set his heart on engineering as a career for him. So the poor boy must carry on against his own better judgment and personal inclination. (I went through this in college).

Marriage and a vocation are very important matters. But even in making minor choices the will of the parent or parents must hold sway. A child does not like tomatoes, in fact hates them, but must be made to eat them because they "make blood." (Another common silly notion). They will be forced on him, no matter if the poor child throws up. This too happened with me when I was small.

The children will not be allowed to meet an uncle or an aunt just because they and the parents have been at loggerheads over some trivial quarrel that took place twenty years ago.

Other curbs on the children are predicated by the reason, "I have said so, and that is the end of it." No other explanation is considered necessary. That's democracy for you.

I may have funny notions, but I cannot believe that one can be a real democrat unless one allows the principles of democracy and respect for differing personal opinion to rule one's life in everything that one does.

My thesis is that you have first to be a democrat in your home, your mohalla and your city before you can claim to be a champion of democracy at the national level. That can only come about by giving everybody the right to have an opinion of his own, by recognizing that right and by fighting for it.

Look elsewhere for heroes

Many commentators find it fairly remarkable that the presidential election campaign in the United States is focused to such an extent on battles that were being fought 35 years ago rather than the ongoing war in Iraq.

What no one appears to have bothered to point out is that the debate, for whatever it's worth, is woefully lacking in perspective. The fact is that the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, cannot sensibly be lionized as a war hero.

This is not to suggest that the Vietnam War was short of heroes. They were plentiful. But they all fought on the other side. They fought to defend their country against arguably the worst instance of imperialist aggression since the Second World War.

And they won. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese lacked the requisite international clout to insist upon a Nuremberg-like reckoning for American war criminals. That sort of closure would probably have diminished the likelihood of fundamental misconceptions about that war persisting nearly three decades after it ended.

It would also have made it less likely that many of the same mistakes would be repeated in a different context. It does not, of course, follow that every American who fought in Vietnam was guilty of war crimes - even though that war as a whole, from the motivation behind it to the means employed in pursuing it, deserves to be designated a crime against humanity.

(Much the same could be said about the Iraq misadventure.) The fact remains that most of the Americans deployed in the Mekong Delta and other war zones had no wish to be there. They were unwilling participants in the aggression, involuntary cogs in a degenerate war machine.

If there were any heroes among American combatants, they were those who, upon returning from Vietnam, devoted themselves to decrying what their country was doing to that tiny Asian nation. Not war heroes but anti-war heroes. One of them testified before the Senate foreign relations committee that his compatriots in Vietnam had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to genitals and turned up the power, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians [and] razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

That was the impression John Kerry brought back from a five-month tour of duty that involved commanding a river gunboat. While there, he had been awarded a Bronze Star for heading back into a firefight in order to rescue a comrade who had fallen into the river, another medal for pursuing and killing a Vietnamese soldier, and three Purple Hearts for injuries sustained during active service.

In television advertisements shown last month in three crucial swing states (that is, states where relative party strength is so finely balanced that they that could go either way on November 2), it was alleged that Kerry's war record was not quite so honourable.

Kerry's boat, it was said, wasn't under fire during the rescue operation. It has also been implied that Kerry faked an injury or two, knowing that three Purple Hearts would entitle him to an early exit from Vietnam.

Given the circumstances, self-inflicted wounds could hardly be considered a sign of cowardice or a badge of dishonour, and numerous soldiers opted for that route out of the nightmare they found themselves in.

There seems to be no evidence, however, that Kerry was among them. The man whose life Kerry saved and several others who fought alongside him have rubbished the charges laid against him by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), a group of pro-Republican but ostensibly independent war veterans who were in the combat zone at the same time as Kerry.

Although the ads, which received nationwide publicity, led to a sharp drop in support for Kerry among Vietnam veterans, it was feared that they might backfire. The Democrats have filed a complaint against SBVT, claiming that its endeavours are being directed by George W. Bush's re-election committee.

This seems to be a less outlandish charge than the anti-Kerry accusations. Last week, Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer who advised SBVT, resigned from his Bush campaign post.

And SBVT received crucial early funding from rich Texans who are known to be close to key presidential adviser Karl Rove. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Bush praised Kerry's war record but refused to explicitly condemn the ad, saying instead that all negative advertising by "527 groups" (so called on the basis of the taxation loophole that allows them to exist) should be suspended.

Such groups exist on the Democratic side too, but what's pertinent about the SBVT ad is that its part of a smear campaign. What's more, it's part of a trend. Back in 2000, Bush's backers successfully employed a similar tactic against his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Senator John McCain, who had spent time in a Vietnamese prison.

And another veteran, Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was in 2002 at the receiving end of a Republican campaign that depicted him as unpatriotic; he lost his seat in the Senate.

At the weekend, Bush conceded in an NBC interview that Kerry's tour of duty "was more heroic than my flying fighter jets. He was in harm's way and I wasn't." He added: "On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone."

In truth, neither of them was heroic. And Bush didn't fly too many fighter jets. He ended up with the Texas Air National Guard (the chances of which being "called up" were negligible), on account of his father's clout, precisely because he didn't want to go to Vietnam.

Not because he was opposed to the war. He was all for it, as long as it didn't involve risking his own life. And he didn't show up all that often for National Guard duty either.

Several luminaries in the neoconservative clique that controls the White House also managed to avoid service in Vietnam through student deferments and the like. They include Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz. Small wonder, then, that they're such avid hawks. Folks with no combat experience of their own often have fewer qualms about unleashing the dogs of war.

It must be noted, though, that Kerry has played no small role in bringing this scrutiny upon himself. He marched to a martial tune at the Boston convention of the Democratic Party in July, beginning with that dumb "reporting for duty" quip, with the emphasis almost entirely on his service record, to the exclusion of his longer and far more significant stint as an anti-war activist.

The intention, presumably, was to neutralize Bush's perceived advantage as the "security" president. Surely a better course would have been to challenge that ridiculous perception, given that the incumbent has almost certainly improved upon Ronald Reagan's record in the sphere of creating new terrorists. But caution is John Kerry's middle name, and strategic ambiguity is his game.

Bush is vulnerable on Iraq but, instead of scoring any telltale hits, Kerry blurted out last week that he would have supported the aggression against Iraq even if he had known the WMD claims were false.

That dangerous and stupid comment was presumably intended to improve his standing among "patriotic" sections of the electorate. It would take courage worthy of a hero to convince the majority of Americans that there's no honour in aggression, and that peace is not unpatriotic. But then, who knows what Kerry believes?

It will be interesting to see how he defends himself against the second SBVT volley, which concentrates on his anti-war activism. In a recent comment, the irrepressible John Pilger implied that a Bush victory might, in the long term, prove to be a less disastrous outcome - not because a Kerry administration would be more odious, but precisely because the image it projects would be marginally less offensive, while its substance and its thrust would remain essentially the same.

Pointing out that Democratic presidents have been responsible for some of Uncle Sam's worst imperialist excesses, Pilger argues that "lesser evilism" will get us nowhere: what is required is a debate about the system Bush and Kerry exemplify, about the subversion of democracy and the marginalization of the masses. And the sharpening of contradictions would facilitate that debate.

That is a perfectly valid point of view. But look at all the people who began making themselves heard, in the hundreds of thousands, in the streets of New York even before the Republican convention opened there this week. Many of them are not particularly keen on Kerry.

Their immediate goal, however, is a Bush-free future. It would be unkind and unfair to say to them: Hold on, suffer this fool for another four years to increase the likelihood of a genuine choice for voters a couple of decades, perhaps even a couple of generations, down the line.

More than 80 per cent of New Yorkers opposed the choice of their city as a venue for the Republican orgy of self-gratification. Unfortunately, they could not match the power of the Athenians, who managed to keep Colin Powell out of the Olympic closing ceremony.

It is nonetheless reassuring that as Republicans in Madison Square Garden suffocate themselves with the Stars and Stripes while shamelessly exploiting the 9/11 tragedy, immeasurably larger number of Americans will be conjuring up a far more democratic vision for their nation outside that arena. If there are any heroes in New York this week, they will be found out on the city streets.

Email: mahirali2@netscape.net.