| 04 September 2004 | Saturday | 18 Rajab 1425 |
Is it mere rhetoric?
Paving the way for good governance
Drawbacks of devolution
Children make it different. Like the tragedies of Columbine and Dunblane, the terror that stalks the classrooms of besieged Middle School 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, is uniquely disturbing.
Who in these torrid days of random, global violence has not become accustomed, even inured, to the suicide bombings in Iraq or a host of other trouble spots? Yet who, anywhere in the world, is not touched, angered or frightened - or all three - by the thought of young kids traumatized by masked killers wearing bomb-belts?
When the victims are children, the sort of horror on show in Beslan, real or threatened, represents the adult world's ultimate betrayal of innocence, its final failure to nurture and protect. Here is a shared disgrace, borne of a universal grief. Here is an international crying shame, beseeching an urgent remedy.
The Chechen conflict, in which the Ossetian siege is inextricably bound up, has become internationalized in many other ways since it re-ignited, in its modern incarnation, in the early 1990s.
Like Czechoslovakia in a different time, the Caucasian lands of Chechnya, North and South Ossetia, Ingushetia and Dagestan cannot be dismissed as distant countries of which we know little and care less. What happens there matters here.
"Their suffering is our suffering," Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said recently. "The awesome responsibility of President Putin and his government is our responsibility, too."
The mere fact of non-stop international media coverage makes Beslan school a shared reality around the world. The inescapable fact that the Chechen conflict once again pits Muslim peoples against Christians or plain non-believers, setting "Islam" against the "West", sounds an only too familiar post-9/11 global echo.
Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to Al-Qaeda.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate.
In effect, it was Russian generals and their turncoat allies who internationalized a war that should never have begun and which could have been peaceably resolved long ago. For this foolishness, Russia's conscript soldiers still pay a terrible price.
The risk of a spreading, regional conflagration grows with every outrage, every unanswered act of blood - and with every broken child. Since the time of the tsars, the mountain tribes of the Caucasus have fought for land, faith and just for the heck of it. In A Hero Of Our Time, novelist Mikhail Lermontov wrote admiringly in 1840 of the bravery of his opponents along Russia's lawless southern flank.
But now Caucasian instability threatens ever more broadly. Neighbouring Georgia, home to last November's "rose revolution", is no model of stability. And by coincidence, the Beslan siege has forced the postponement of a presidential visit to Turkey, Russia's historic Ottoman rival.
Putin wants to build up trade and other links. But primarily, he needs Turkey as a southern bulwark of stability and security in a region sliding dangerously beyond Moscow's control.
Ten long years of destructive, on-off conflict, egregious human rights abuses, massive refugee displacements and blatant flouting of international law have also rendered Chechnya a matter of undeniable international concern. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the OSCE have kept a brave and faithful tally of the human toll and political cost of Russia's heedless policy.
Again and again, campaigners have lobbied western governments to draw a diplomatic line, to sponsor a political process, to honestly recognize Chechnya for what it ever more evidently is - a threat to international peace and security, as defined by the UN. Again and again, those same governments, including Britain's, have mostly preferred to look the other way.
When Tony Blair talks of Britain's "moral responsibility" in Darfur and Iraq; when he speaks, as most famously in Chicago in 1999, of the criteria for intervention; when he sends troops dashing off to Kabul and Freetown, where in all this is there a thought for Chechnya? Ten years of conflict, tens of thousands dead and no end remotely in sight.
When Straw spoke of the "expanded range of issues" on which the UN will now consider the use of outside force under chapter VII - including "the overthrow of democratically elected government, terrorism, large-scale human rights violations, humanitarian catastrophe (and) refugee crises" - can he credibly exclude Chechnya which, in truth, arguably qualifies in all categories?
Russia has always maintained that the Chechen conflict is an internal matter, to be resolved internally. But now that Putin, by asking for international support, has for the first time effectively invited the Security Council to consider the issue, western leaders have a clear choice.
Britain and others can hide behind the pretence that, as Putin maintains, violence in the Caucasus is just another front in the US-led "war on terror" - and close their eyes to causes and remedies.
They can give Putin what he wants, which is carte blanche to do whatever he deems necessary. Or they can find the courage to change the habit of the past decade. They can dispense with the sort of mealy-mouthed, turpitudinous shuffling about indulged in by France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroder at their recent meeting with Putin.
And they can insist instead that in return for active western support, Russia must finally accept the obvious: that Chechnya is a pressing, international problem requiring an agreed, collective, non-violent, international response.
Is it so absurd to suggest that EU troops, or even forces organized through Nato, be deployed under a UN peacekeeping mandate? Is it practically impossible to set in train some form of externally mediated peace dialogue, currently absent?
Chechnya offers a key test of how, if at all, new, much-discussed post-Iraq rules governing future humanitarian and security interventions can be made to work. Certainly Chechnya is a devilish hard case to crack. Certainly it would be a fraught undertaking. But it is surely worth it - if only for the sake of the children. - Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Is it mere rhetoric?
There is a saying on our side that after hearing the discourse on the "Ramayana" the whole night, one of the listeners asked who Sita was. Justice Afrasiab Khan from Pakistan reacts in the same manner when he says in one of his articles: "The state of Jammu and Kashmir shall be partitioned on the basis of the two-nation theory as has already been done in the case of Punjab, Bengal and Assam."
Justice Khan is 57 years late in his observation. The two-nation theory he is talking about held good then, not now. Religion as the basis of nationality was buried during the lifetime of Pakistan's founder, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
True, he propounded the theory that Muslims and Hindus constituted two separate nations. But he also gave a different interpretation after the formation of Pakistan. He said that India and Pakistan were two nations.
Therefore, those living in Pakistan, whether Hindus or Muslims, were Pakistanis while those in India constituted the Indian nation. Religion was a private affair.
There is a strong lobby in Pakistan which still plugs Justice Khan's line. But that is tantamount to reopening partition, the repercussions of which should not be lost on those who are trying to do so. One million people were killed during the divide and 20 million ousted from their homes.
The division of Jammu and Kashmir, on the basis of religion, which the two-nation theory adumbrated before Jinnah reinterpreted it, will spell disaster for not only the state but also India and Pakistan. Justice Khan does not realize that what he is preaching is no longer relevant after the subcontinent was divided in August 1947.
Some Pakistanis still do not face the fact that the 1947 thesis cannot be repeated. I do not know what the deposed Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif thinks now. But when I met him during former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore, Shahbaz Sharif held the same views which Justice Khan has expressed now.
He proposed that the Hindu-majority Jammu and the Buddhist-majority Ladakh should be integrated with India and the Muslim-majority Kashmir with Pakistan. I warned Shahbaz Sharif against the danger of resurrecting the ghosts of partition. He was not convinced.
Whatever else we may do to settle the Kashmir problem, the division of the state on the basis of religion is not an option. It will complicate matters. We have paid a heavy price for mixing religion with politics.
India is still not out of the woods because the BJP is not reconciled to a pluralistic society. Former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Uma Bharti, mixed religion with politics only some days ago to the detriment of the nation.
She exploited the Congress's ill-advised move to reopen the 10-year-old case of her "hooliganism" at the Hubli Eidgah where she tried to hoist the national flag.
Mr Jinnah himself opposed mixing religion with politics. He highlighted the pernicious results of such a policy in his opening speech to the Pakistan Constituent assembly. He made the world understand that his country, for one, would never do so.
This does not mean that Pakistan has to accept the status quo in Jammu and Kashmir. It has conveyed in many ways - and through many channels - that it does not want the LoC as the international border.
If India were opposed to making religion the criterion for settling the Kashmir issue, it would have to offer Pakistan something that satisfies it to a large extent. The reason why no such formula has been worked out so far is because of the mindset of the bureaucrats on both sides.
They are the ones who formulate policies to humiliate one another, and still worse, they have their own agenda - and their own methods - when it comes to relations with India and Pakistan.
Whether the Pakistan bureaucracy or the military junta thought of introducing militancy in Kashmir to put pressure on India is a matter of debate. But the fact is that Islamabad did set up camps for militants. They are still there.
It also introduced the "jihad" to evoke religious frenzy in both Kashmir and Pakistan. Thousands of people have died in the valley. The worst is that an indigenous movement in Kashmir has been communalized and external elements have taken it over.
A delegation of Pakistan MPs to India recently admitted that they were worried about terrorism gaining ground in their country. Still, Islamabad took exception to New Delhi's statement to emphasize the point.
The ruling Congress was correct in saying at its convention that the Pakistan government had failed to stop cross-border militancy in Kashmir. But Pakistan's official spokesman only pooh-poohed the statement and complained that it created "road blocks."
Such rhetoric does not help in the midst of confidence-building measures. After all, the violence in Kashmir is essentially being carried out by militants who have their base camp in Pakistan.
Belatedly, Islamabad has realized how the ghost of terrorism has become Frankenstein. President General Pervez Musharraf has escaped two attempts on his life. Even mosques have been attacked to show that terrorists can hit anywhere.
It is time that some non-officials - not the Track II type - from both sides met to prepare a common ground. It is tragic that liberals on both sides adopt a rigid or jingoistic approach to Kashmir.
If they cannot agree on anything among themselves, how can they expect the rulers, who have their compulsions, to do so? The first round of composite dialogue is more or less over.
Though it has not yielded any result, the atmosphere between the two countries is more amiable. Whenever the secretaries of the two governments have met, they have ended up saying that the talks were "positive." Obviously, there has been no breakthrough.
Islamabad has a feeling that the Manmohan Singh government, unlike its predecessor, is dragging its feet. Some dismiss this as nothing more than a few hiccups. But there are many who suspect that New Delhi has changed its policy.
The Congress-led government's emphasis on cross-border terrorism is seen as evidence. Even Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri has said that the India's concerns were not in keeping with the spirit of the dialogue.
This means that Islamabad suspects New Delhi focusing all its attention on terrorism. This may be somewhat true because India's home secretary reportedly gave to his counterpart the facts and figures of training camps in Pakistan and the number of militants trying to infiltrate into India.
I hope we are not receding to square one. National Security Adviser J.N. Dixit has said that Kashmir is an important issue but its resolution should not hold the people of India and Pakistan hostage.
On the other hand, Musharraf has made it clear that there will be no progress in other fields until Kashmir is solved. The latter has even wanted a timeframe. New Delhi does not have to follow Musharraf's wishes.
But it must give proof of its anxiety to settle the Kashmir issue. To begin with, it should withdraw unilaterally some of its forces in the valley. Another step that will mollify even the Kashmiris is the withdrawal of repressive laws in the state.
Paving the way for good governance
For the better part of Pakistan's existence, the country's ruling elite has defined polity in terms of national security, owing to the perceived threats emanating from India. This security-driven thinking has gone into the formulation of national and foreign policies.
While one cannot deny that there has been reason for Pakistan to build up deterrence to a much more powerful India, our ruling elite, in its zeal to make the country physically impregnable, has ended up blurring the lines distinguishing national security imperatives from socio-economic requirements.
This has resulted in an obsession with national security at the cost of good governance, the rule of law and the strengthening of national institutions.
Almost all Pakistan's domestic and foreign policy decisions have owed their existence to the security paradigm of the establishment, leading the military to not only guard the frontiers of the country but also to become the custodian of its ideology.
The formulation of the country's foreign policy, which at times has been instrumental in landing it in trouble, became the sole preserve of the military-dominated establishment.
When the size and influence of the establishment grew, its leadership came up with more innovative ways to generate economic resources to meet its corporate interests.
This compulsion necessitated intervention in the formation of economically-oriented national policies. The result has been the frequent intervention of the military in political affairs.
Even when so-called "democratic" governments held sway, real power remained in the hands of the military-led establishment. This is why former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, with her liberal approach to politics, could not make her mark in the national political scene and chose to play second fiddle to the powerful establishment.
It is widely known that she came to power in 1988 as a result of a deal she struck with the establishment. This also explains the inability of Nawaz Sharif's second government to undermine the influence of the establishment, despite enjoying an unprecedented two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. Had he had an independent political base, he could have acted with the vision of a far-thinking politician instead of playing ducks and drakes with the system.
Pakistan's political parties have rarely questioned the military's disproportionate hold on power, and have contented themselves with enjoying the crumbs - an example of the debasement of our national politics.
Those ready to share power have been co-opted and elevated to positions of influence by the establishment. Those seen to be developing a tendency for independent action are instantly thrown overboard.
This has led to an incessant power struggle among various centres so that a great divide has been created between the rulers and the ruled. So, whatever mess we witness in our body politic, whether it is the destruction of national institutions like the parliament, the judiciary, the election commission, or partisan economic policies to safeguard the interests of the establishment, the roots will be found in the security-driven vision of the rulers.
We should take a leaf from China's book. Although China is an emerging superpower, it has not allowed foreign policy considerations to cast a shadow on the internal management of the country.
Chinese foreign policy has been an offshoot of the demands of its domestic socio-economic agenda. Its leadership has been wise enough not to get embroiled in unnecessary conflicts at the foreign policy level that could distract attention from building up internal strength. Thanks to political stability, China is all set to emerge as a giant world economy in the next two decades.
Pakistan cannot afford to neglect the socio-economic needs of its teeming millions. It is high time that we brought about major policy shifts in our national policies. The emphasis must shift from a security-driven vision to one that includes social and economic progress.
Our foreign policy ambitions must play a subordinate role to the considerations of poverty. Our nuclear deterrence is capable of safeguarding us from Indian dangers. It should be no more used for furthering the personal and corporate objectives of the establishment.
Improving the lives of the common man should now be the basis of our policy-making. Once we are internally stable, our security would become impregnable in the real sense.
amanatchpk@hotmail.com.
Drawbacks of devolution
It is now three years since the devolution plan, a policy change proposing restructuring of government, was initiated with the formation of about a hundred district governments, several hundred TMAs (Tehsil Municipal Administration) and thousands of union councils, and followed by wide-scale administrative and financial shake-ups across the country.
This restructuring was hailed as a silent revolution by President Musharraf, and perceived as the new opportunity for development by donors including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc.
While devolution has strengthened local political institutions, promoted gender justice in politics and bolstered development by creating new channels for development funding, it has yet to place an enabling bureaucratic structure to give direction and sustainability to these local political institutions.
It has also to prove its efficacy as a government tier in provision of services, in enforcement and in maintenance of law and order - all of which are its functions under the local government ordinances.
A new insecurity is now growing among its implementers, the nazims and echoes of resentment are increasing among political representatives and provincial governments that somewhere the system is stuck.
An intense debate over this structural change continues to be fanned by a very mixed experience of all those who are the system's practitioners and its beneficiaries.
More than this, across all tiers of bureaucracy and sections of society, it has increasingly led to the belief that the system cannot work in its present form. The different tiers of governments seem to support it for no other reason than the one that makes most sense these days in real politik - that it is supported by President Pervez Musharraf. Beyond President Musharraf is a landscape full of question marks.
Now hundreds of meetings have been called by the National Reconstruction Bureau, with suggestions of amendments to the local government ordinances, but there is no consensus that is emerging with regard to the way forward.
There are two popular demons that, in the rhetoric of proponents of the system, are responsible for all the bad things that are happening to the devolution plan.
One of them, is, as is oft repeated, the bureaucracy; the other are the provincial governments. One must contest this tendency to create scapegoats and lay stress on the fact that the reasons why the system is not going where it should are political, systemic and historical.
The political resistance comes from provincial governments and the assemblies and the structural resistance from the bureaucracy. Therefore, the issues of concern are political and structural, and these must be addressed if the present system is to survive beyond President Musharraf.
The devolution system has, it is argued here, challenged the principles of federalism although not to the scale of Ayub Khan's very inventive basic democracies that replaced the dissolved provinces under the one unit system, but none the less to serious proportions to the extent that even the very pliant provincial governments are reluctant to let go of the district's administration.
While it has been artificially protected by the Constitution through the controversial 17th amendment, the lack of political ownership of this programme by the provincial and national assemblies, and by the provincial and central governments, also make the local government laws suffer from problems of legitimacy.
With intense conflicts within political stakeholders, bureaucracy has become rudderless and is being sucked in by multilaterals and donors, further deepening the governance crisis.
The way forward is to first restore full parliamentary democracy, delete the concurrent list from the Constitution, and strengthen the federating units, the provinces, as provided for in the Constitution and free the political institutions to design local governments at lower levels.
Historically local governments are encouraged when constitutions are suspended, governments are regulated under doctrines of necessity or certain invented one-man laws by dictators.
Mostly, the laws which frame the local governments are often in the context of the construction of systems to pave the way for one-man rule, and therefore, eventually these laws become messy and contradictory.
A detailed comparative analysis between the local governments during the time of other dictators, Field Marshal Ayub Khan and General Ziaul Haq, will clearly illustrate stark similarities.
The military men preferred to overlook the federal tier and the province in favour of setting up a stronger tier further down. General Ayub Khan's laws led to the basic democracies system with a local government which had district councils and union councils which were apolitical bodies at the district level.
Similarly, with the dissolution of the one unit system and the restitution of the Constitution, the elected prime minister overlooked the local bodies system with the parliamentary apparatus in place. This system was revived through the local bodies elections in 1983, by General Ziaul Haq - again at a time when no elected assemblies were in place.
One may conclude, therefore, that whenever the federal structure weakens and a highly centralized system is set up, local governments are constructed. Dictatorships find it easier to deal with depoliticized development and social work oriented local governments as opposed to federal units that have a separate and independent status in the Constitution vis-a-vis the centre.
An inherent contradiction, therefore, in the implementation of local governance in Pakistan is that it has historically been a top-down phenomenon. The National Reconstruction Bureau's version, too, of devolution conceptually was a top-down system, as opposed to the principles of subsidiarity, following in most of the developed world's local governments.
Subsidiarity is a bottom-up system, based on the assumption that the people - as opposed to the government - should look after all the subjects that they are able to deal with, barring only those that they cannot.
Therefore, all service delivery systems are always at local levels, where as higher governments are largely policy-making and have only limited unifying subjects like resource distributions, national security, defence, or national communication systems.
The subsidiarity principle is applied in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and in other federal systems. Here in Pakistan, we are devolving certain functions to lower formations of government and the discretion, choice and limits are set by the higher governments.
However, as I see it, the higher governments have actually devolved nothing, they have only shared jurisdictions. For instance, the federal government has not devolved anything to the provincial government away from itself. Neither have the provincial governments devolved anything.
They have simply begun a sharing of government by introducing a third tier. The central government has conceived and created a structure and let the provincial government deal with the repercussions of its implementations.
The provincial governments have, in turn, framed the term "post office" for their new and vague role as a transit government between the districts who implement development and the federal government who transfers the resources.
The main issue concerning with regard to devolution is not so much in the concept or content of it, but in its design and method of implementation. The most serious threat to the system was built into the context in which it was initiated, processed and implemented.
The system was conceived by technocrats and intellectual army personnel like General Naqvi, and implemented by a government whose own legitimacy was under question. In a government of, by and largely for the military, the reform agenda it proposed, though conceptually sound, had no long-term political popular system backing it.
In the own words of General Musharraf, the government was only a transitional one, a small hiatus in democracy, a time-out taken to put the country back from where it had been derailed.
There was, therefore, a political vacuum. A structural change of the magnitude introduced in the transition government did not have the political support that it would have been needed for its sustenance.
The content and substance of the law also did not come out of the parliaments, the only supreme and legitimate lawmaking bodies, as is supposed to happen.
A law that is designed exclusively by part-time technocrats, with no practical inputs from the political leadership that would direct it, will be flawed at best - just another of those hundreds of mixed up ordinances that take us into conflicting directions and increase pluralisms and duplicities.
The substance, therefore, is complex, with a multiplicity of jurisdictions and the creation of many institutions without at all providing for the institutional set-up that would run it. All of this would have been vetted by the parliaments if the parliamentary procedures had been followed.
Further, administrative institutional restructuring should have preceded the creation of political institutions, that is, the councils, and the nazims. However, by putting in place a political set-up, and just changing the nomenclatures of the officers simply allowed the old system to continue in the new form.
A key paradox of this local government system is that the very provincial governments who are its implementers and are responsible under the principles of federalism for it, were, at the time of its formation, apolitical governments, and therefore, were not able to fully participate, comprehend or amend the system that was fashioned.
It is no wonder then that once political institutions were placed and a semblance of democracy introduced, the governments at the provincial level perceived this system as foreign and one that challenged their mandates.
Even though the provincial governments have, at the outset, voiced their support for the system, it is in their actions that the competitiveness over jurisdictions can be experienced. The nazims' voices from all over the country are in themselves testimonies of a growing alienation and disillusionment with the local governments.
To be concluded
The writer is the zila nazim, Khairpur.