| 27 October 2004 | Wednesday | 12 Ramazan 1425 |
Nowhere close to Cairo goals
The waistcoat breed
Iraq: does Kerry have a plan?
Where nightmares come true
The redeployment of British forces in Iraq to support a US assault on Fallujah marks another stage in a creeping return to the colonial era, when popular revolts against occupation were routinely suppressed by overwhelming force. These past episodes, revealed in declassified British government files, provide numerous parallels with Iraq, and suggest a pattern of future blunders and atrocities.
Those in Britain who like to regard more recent military interventions as humanitarian might dwell on those parallels as the latest phase of the Iraq war unfolds. British ministers' claim of defending civilization against barbarity in Iraq finds a powerful echo in 1950s Kenya, when Britain sought to smash an uprising against colonial rule. Yet, while the British media and political class expressed horror at the tactics of the Mau Mau, the worst abuses were committed by the occupiers. The colonial police used methods like slicing off ears, flogging until death and pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight.
British forces killed around 10,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau campaign, compared with the 600 deaths among the colonial forces and European civilians. Some British battalions kept scoreboards recording kills, and gave #5 rewards for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent, whose hands were often chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. "Free fire zones" were set up, where any African could be shot on sight.
As opposition to British rule intensified, brutal "resettlement" operations, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands, forced around 90,000 into detention camps. In this 1950s version of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, forced labour and beatings were systematic and disease rampant. Former camp officers described "short rations, overwork, brutality and flogging" and "Japanese methods of torture".
Guerrillas resisting British rule were routinely designated "terrorists", as now in Iraq. Britain never admitted that it was opposing a popular, nationalist rebellion in Kenya. Similarly, leftwing Malayan insurgents fighting British rule in the 1950s had strong popular support among the Chinese community but were officially called "terrorists". In secret, however, Foreign Office correspondence described the war as being fought "in defence of (the) rubber industry", then controlled by British and European companies.
But under the banner of fighting communism, British forces were given free rein in Malaya. Collective punishments were inflicted on villages for aiding insurgents. A shoot-to-kill policy was promoted, tens of thousands of people were removed into "new villages" and used as cheap labour, and British soldiers had themselves photographed holding guerrillas' decapitated heads. The idea that the revolt was ended through "winning hearts and minds" is a myth; it was crushed by overwhelming force, such as massive aerial bombing.
The brutality needed to be kept secret, a key theme in suppressing revolts. After Britain intervened to crush a rebellion in Oman in 1957, an internal Foreign Office minute stated that "we want to avoid the RAF killing Arabs if possible, especially as there will be newspaper correspondents on the spot". The British army commander in Oman later noted that "great pains were taken throughout the Command to keep all operational actions out of the press".
The reason for this was that Britain committed numerous war crimes in Oman, including the systematic bombing of civilian targets such as water supplies and farms. These attacks "would deter dissident villages from gathering their crops" and ensure "denial of water", officials stated in private. Bombing was intended to "show the population the power of weapons at our disposal" and to convince them that "resistance will be fruitless and lead only to hardship".
Britain was defending an extremely repressive regime where smoking in public, playing football and talking to anyone for more than 15 minutes were banned. Yet Harold Macmillan told President Kennedy in a 1957 telegram that "we believe that the sultan is a true friend to the West and is doing his best for his people".
As Blair and Bush claim to support democracy in Iraq, it is as well to remember that London and Washington have almost always opposed popular, democratic forces in the Middle East, preferring strong regimes capable of bringing "order". Britain's stance on the US war in Vietnam offers other useful lessons. Just as Tony Blair poses as providing a brake on US tactics in Iraq, Harold Wilson claimed to do the same over Vietnam. Yet Britain secretly backed the US in every stage of military escalation.
In July 1965, when the US doubled its ground troop numbers in Vietnam, Wilson privately reassured President Johnson of his support for US policies "in the interests of peace and stability".
The Wilson-Johnson correspondence highlights a shocking level of connivance between No 10 and the White House to deceive the public. When the US first bombed Hanoi and Haiphong in June 1966, Wilson issued a statement disassociating the government from the bombing. Yet this statement had been passed to the US for approval while Wilson assured Johnson that "I cannot see that there is any change in your basic position that I could urge on you."
The myth in Iraq that Britain is not complicit in US brutalities has its precedent in Vietnam. Declassified files show that, in 1962, Britain covertly sent an SAS team to south Vietnam under "temporary civilian status", to help train soldiers of the dictatorial regime of President Diem. Britain secretly provided arms and intelligence support to the US to improve US bombing.
Moreover, brutal US "counter-insurgency" programmes were based on prototypes developed by British advisers. Britain's "Delta Plan" for the south Vietnamese regime, described by the Foreign Office as intended "to dominate, control and win over the population" in rural areas, became the US "strategic hamlets" programme, which forced millions of Vietnamese peasants into fortified villages that resembled concentration camps.
As in Iraq, the publicly proclaimed search for peace was largely a charade. A senior Foreign Office official wrote in 1965: "The government are fighting a continuous rearguard action to preserve British diplomatic support for American policy in Vietnam. They can only get away with this by constantly emphasizing that our objective, and that of the Americans, is a negotiated settlement".
These episodes highlight the gulf between what ministers have told the public and what they have understood to be the case in private. The declassified secret files point to some harsh truths about current policy in Iraq: that the war is not about what our leaders say it is (democracy), is not primarily against who they say it is (terrorists) and is not being conducted for whom they say it is (Iraqis).
Iraqis are in practice regarded as "unpeople" whose deaths matter little in the pursuit of western power; the major block on committing atrocities is the fear of being exposed and ministers will do all they can to cover them up. The public is the major threat to their strategy, which explains why they resort to public deception campaigns. If, as must be expected, atrocities now multiply in Iraq - with Britain complicit - we cannot claim we were not warned. - Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Nowhere close to Cairo goals
How many of us remember the population conference held in Cairo in September 1994? Some of us may recall the rumpus created by the religious lobbies when it was indicated that Benazir Bhutto, who was then the prime minister - for the second time - would be attending the summit. She must be given credit for her courage. Not only did she go to Cairo, she also made a spirited speech in support of family planning.
But there was more to the Cairo conference (termed as the International Conference on Population and Development, ICPD, in UN parlance) than Ms Bhutto's participation. It produced a 20- year programme of action, which Dr Nafis Sadik, the UNFPA's executive director at the time and a vocal champion of the reproductive rights of women, had described as "having the potential to change the world".
Has the ICPD's programme really changed the scene in Pakistan? Ten years on, it is time for an honest assessment. This document "provides a blueprint for actions in population and reproductive health that countries agree are essential to realizing global development goals", to quote the UNFPA's State of the World's Population, 2004. The report assures us that this programme is essential to end extreme poverty and hunger, empower women, reduce maternal mortality, preserve the environment and stem the AIDS pandemic. This is no exaggeration.
It has now been universally recognized that a burgeoning population is a bane. It obstructs a society's journey to progress. As the UNFPA's report points out, the population size, growth and distribution are closely linked to prospects for economic and social development and action in one area reinforces action in the others.
Hence it is not just the availability of reproductive health and contraceptive facilities which impact on the population profile of a country. The standard of education, health awareness and economic development have a direct bearing on its demographic profile.
The three key goals adopted by the ICPD in 1994 were:
* Gender equality in education by eliminating gender gap in primary and secondary education by the year 2005 and arranging for complete access for boys and girls to schools by 2015;
* Reduce infant, child and maternal mortality to no more than 50 and 70 for infants and under-5s respectively per 1,000 live births by the year 2000 and to below 35 and 45 respectively by 2015 Maternal mortality was to be reduced to 60 per 100,000 births by 2015;
* Provide universal reproductive health services to a full range of safe and reliable family planning methods by 2015
While reviewing the first five years of the implementation, the UN adopted some specific targets which suggested a thrust towards an integrated health and population strategy. It was proposed that by the year 2005 the countries should equip the 60 per cent of their primary health care facilities with the capability to provide family planning methods and essential obstetric care.
This didn't amount to asking for the moon. One can turn to the statistical section of the population report to see how various countries have fared. The attached table gives some statistics for three Third World countries which also happen to be Muslim.
The question we should be asking ourselves and also our policymakers is: why are our demographic and socio-economic indicators so dismal? The popular belief that religion plays a backwardizing role in determining our attitudes towards family planning is evidently a myth. The comparative figures of three Muslim countries from three regions should end this misconception. In fact many surveys conducted in Pakistan have also shown that very few respondents identify religion as a factor in determining their family size.
There are two major causes for Pakistan's poor showing in this area. First, we as a society have yet to develop a commitment to human rights and gender equality, which should underpin any sound programme for social development. The second is that our ruling elites lack political will to put the people at the centre of their policies.
With this approach, the government has lost whatever little interest it had in the social sectors. As a result, official funding is drying up, supervision and monitoring are virtually absent, accountability is missing and corruption is rampant. It appears that social development is not high on the government's list of priorities. It has over the years disengaged itself from the health, education, housing and population sectors and has encouraged private entrepreneurs to fill the vacuum so created.
Some of these investors are more efficient and enterprising and manage to produce results by ensuring the accountability of their workers. But this is at a cost which is beyond the reach of everyone making their facilities inaccessible to the poor. Since a successful population policy calls for a holistic approach, it is not surprising that it suffers along with the others.
Social development cannot take place without a change in the mindset and behaviour of the people. With a culture devoid of respect for human rights and gender equality, our country has failed to promote family planning as a norm. It has now been established that a society that does not recognize its women as human beings to be treated equally with men, cannot develop socially or economically.
Many women with large families say that they go on producing children because their husbands/mothers-in-law want them to. They are expected to have a number of male offsprings. Sons being status symbols bring honour and social esteem to the mother in the family and the community which daughters don't.
The public controversy over the honour killing bill and the Hudood ordinances indicates that the clerics are in cahoots with the feudals to suppress women. And when they are at the helm, can any population programme work? It is now up to the civil society to adopt the population cause. The demand for reproductive health facilities and consciousness raising should be on the agenda of all human rights and women's rights organizations.
Country
Infant mortality ratio
per 1000 live birthsUnder-5 mortality
per1000 live births male/femaleMaternal mortality
per 10,000 birthsPrimary school
enrolment (%)Conraceptive
prevalence (%)
Tunisia
23
29/24
120
114/109
51
Iran
33
39/39
76
94/90
56
Malaysia
10
15/11
41
95/95
30
Pakistan
87
121/135
500
84/62
20
Less developed
regions (average)
61
89/89
-
-
54
Country
TFT*
Public health
expenditure % GDP per capEducation expenditure% GDP
% births with skilled
birth attendancePopulation growth
rate (%) GDP
Tunisia
2.01
4.9
15.8
90
1.2
Iran
2.3
2.7
11.6
90
1.0
Malaysia
2.9
2.0
17.0
97
1.9
Pakistan
5.08
1.0
--
20
2.4
Less developed
regions (average)
2.9
-
-
-
1.5
TFT is total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her reproductive life span)
Source: The State of the World Population, 2004 (UNFPA)
The waistcoat breed
An Islamabad daily carried a report some time ago that a number of houses in the federal capital had been illegally occupied by some government officers and that they were refusing to vacate them. It added that the Estate Office had failed to dislodge them because of the influence they command.
"What" I said to myself, "even in a government that is half military?" Probably this is the difference between the present regime, a successor to a full-fledged military government, and previous martial laws. The current dispensation does not frighten civil officers who justifiably consider themselves part of it.
Another report said that the estate officer had been directed to furnish information on how official residences had been allotted in the past. There was no need to ask that. Any government servant with some political or military backing could get a house. This is called merit.
My reaction to the so-called illegal occupation was that newspaper reporters have a habit of creating a sensation out of minor happenings. The one who filed this story did not take into account a basic fact. Vacant houses are like job vacancies. If these vacancies are not filled by civil officers who else is going to fill them? It's as simple as that.
And if the reporter really felt that these public servants had no business occupying these residences (which, after all were built for living in) he should have asked the government to check the bona fides of these bureaucrats. Just as they are without proper allotment orders for these houses, maybe they do not possess proper appointment orders also and stepped into their posts simply because they were lying vacant. Sometimes one hears of such bizarre things in the federal and provincial government that one is reminded of Sikha Shahi.
People who have made it a lifelong mission to run down the bureaucracy ignore certain essentials. It is an admitted fact that public servants are paid much less than their real market value. Those who enter government service know this beforehand. They do not compete for these jobs for the salary, but for the authority and clout that go with them and for the fringe benefits known as perks. On paper the fringe is small but it is extremely elastic, and those who know this also know how to stretch it according to their needs.
In the case of critics and detractors I think it is really an example of the grapes being sour. Those who are outside will always describe the insiders as devils, and at the same time, leave no stone turned to join them if they can. If that is not possible they will give their daughters in marriage to them.
Among these critics the most vociferous have been politicians who assert that the bureaucracy has brought the country to the brink of ruin. They are so earnest in their condemnation that they are willing to replace errant and corrupt officers with their own sons and nephews and brothers-in-law for the sake of the national good.
The other sharp critics are newspaper writers, whether they are columnists or reporters, or merely citizens writing letters to the editor. Not that it makes any difference to the officers. Not at all. They laugh up their sleeves on reading this kind of fulmination. They know that those days are gone when even a small gossipy item in a mofussil paper used to make the government shake in its shoes.
Today if a mass circulation daily were to publish a banner headline that, say, the officer concerned had sold the massive PM Secretariat (which I call the palace of the Maharajah of Gwalior) and pocketed the proceeds, nobody will bother. The officer's boss will consider it his moral duty to protect the man, while the local MNA will just table a question in the National Assembly (if that assembly is not on forced furlough) and leave it at that. In any case the ministers' replies to questions raise the most laughter in that august House.
I know of two former journalists who used to lash out at the ways of the bureaucracy, its arrogance and its aloofness from the public. Later, both of them were laterally absorbed in the Punjab government, one in the early fifties and the other in the 1970s. The speed with which they picked up the habits and habits of the officer class was a treat to see.
They began by speaking to their peons and PAs (and some say even to their wives) in Urdu instead of Punjabi and soon started using abbreviations like DFA and PUC, much to the surprise of their families who were least acquainted with such words. In a matter of days they looked as if they had been born wrapped in a file cover tied up with red tape.
When a political government is in power, even the smallest peccadillo by a government officer makes MNAs of the opposition run to the scene of the crime. The Public Accounts Committee is kept so busy by the misdemeanours of public servants that none of them have ever been penalised as a result of its deliberations. Since most sins come up to the committee more than five years after their commission, many of the culprits have been promoted to senior positions in the meantime or have departed from this world.
Coming back to the news report about unlawfully occupied houses, I am told that about a year ago the FIA had been asked to look into the matter and submit a report. One can imagine an FIA man, a subordinate minion, sidling up obsequiously to the senior officer standing in the porch of one such house with his thumbs thrust in the pockets of his waistcoat. When the FIA underling asks if he has a valid allotment order, the demigod, without removing the pipe from between his teeth, tells him to go to the blazes and take along whoever had sent him there. Something of the sort is not unlikely. After all, clout is clout.
One must admit that the intentions and claims of successive governments to turn officers into servants of the people have come to nought. With every martial law, the armed forces too entered the arena of administration with this resolve and went back to the barracks converted to the civilian bureaucrats' mindset. They also left a sufficient number of their brothers in the field. Maybe that is why the realist in General Pervez Musharraf abstained from making any such promise when he took over.
Iraq: does Kerry have a plan?
The Kerry campaign, which pledges to re-energize American diplomacy, does not confuse this goal with being sweet to foreigners. Richard Holbrooke, one of the front-runners for a top foreign policy position if John Kerry wins the presidency, used the iron fist in the Balkans as much as the velvet glove during the 1990s.
And last week Sen. Joe Biden, Holbrooke's chief rival, chastised French President Jacques Chirac for having "an ego as big as this room," adding that the French have "been a pain in the you-know-what." As for our other cherished European allies, Biden had this to say: "In the 30 years I've been a senator, there is very seldom an initiative that is generated from the European community to take action on almost anything."
Maybe, as a future cabinet official, Biden will lecture Americans on the irrelevance of "Old Europe"? Biden's comments, at a public meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, also shed some light on the central tension in Kerry's Iraq position. Kerry has said repeatedly that he wants to "win" in Iraq, meaning that he wants stability and some form of democracy.
But he also says simultaneously that (a) President Bush has undermined the Iraq mission by failing to commit enough troops and that (b) a Kerry administration would hope to start bringing troops home six months after taking office. The way out of this contradiction is to promise that allied troops will shoulder some of America's burden. Which raises a question for Kerry's aspiring secretary of state: How would allies be persuaded to come forward?
Biden's answer came in the form of a long anecdote. (Warning to State Department correspondents: Many of Biden's answers come in the form of long anecdotes.) The story featured a European leader who tells Biden he wants Kerry elected, to which Biden shoots back, "Be careful what you wish for." Within two weeks of Kerry's election, the senator continues, he'll be telling his friend to help more in Iraq.
What if we say no, the European asks. Biden retorts: "If you would not act at all, I'd advise Kerry to leave Iraq."
This would be a fairly risky sort of brinkmanship. Biden is right that Europeans have plenty at stake in Iraq, and that they ought to contribute more than they've done so far. But this is bit like saying that Americans can't afford their entitlement programmes, so they ought to reform them. Both statements are true, but logic doesn't necessarily drive action.
It's just about certain that Biden's ultimatum would yield no results in France. Chirac's anti-American foreign policy is supported by 76 percent of his countrymen, even though only 36 percent approve of him generally. The Economist recently asked Michel Barnier, the French foreign minister, whether French soldiers might go to Iraq if Kerry became president. "Never," he said flatly.
Other allies appear scarcely more promising. Spain's Socialist prime minister has boosted his popularity by pulling Spain's soldiers out of Iraq. The leaders of Britain, Poland and Italy face public pressure to withdraw, too, and they are not going to increase their commitments. "For the 368th time, no, we are not sending any German soldiers to Iraq," a German Foreign Ministry official told the Associated Press on Friday.
In sum, it seems unlikely that a Kerry administration could persuade allies to contribute substantially more troops. So what about training more Iraqi soldiers? This would certainly help, but unfortunately building security forces takes time: Last week, the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated it would require five years to train Iraqi forces to the point that they could take over from Americans.
Besides, Iraqi units will never be likely to spearhead the tough counterinsurgency missions. If you send Shia units to attack Sunnis, you deepen Iraq's dangerous religious split. If you send Sunnis to attack Sunnis, you can't count on orders being followed.
If neither foreign nor Iraqi troops come to the rescue, a President Kerry might face a choice: Take back his election talk of bringing soldiers home, or take back his election talk of winning. Kerry is a responsible leader surrounded by a tough foreign policy team, and in the past few days I've edged closer to the view that he would not abandon Iraq prematurely. But if his team really did present the Europeans with a Biden-style ultimatum - you get into Iraq or we get out - it would risk creating a dynamic that would lead to a U.S. withdrawal and terrifying anarchy.
Supporting a presidential candidate is never without risk, and the possibility that Kerry is less than determined to win in Iraq is the most significant risk that he poses.-Dawn/Washington Post Service
Where nightmares come true
There is a series of images that has lodged itself in my consciousness. Some of you may have had the same confronting, dystopian nightmare.
It begins like this.
A girl barely into her teens wakes up one fine October morning. She eats breakfast with her brothers, gets ready for school, grabs her satchel, exchanges a hug and a kiss with her parents, and walks out of the door.
Her school isn't too far from home. But she doesn't go there directly. For some reason, perhaps on a childish whim, she decides on a detour. She wanders into a deserted area at the end of her street. There used to be an orchard there, until the bulldozers came some months ago. Now only sand remains, rising into a hill on the top of which sits a forbidding structure.
The girl shows no sign of being aware that she has strayed into the Forbidden Zone. She continues to saunter aimlessly. If there are any shouts of warning from outside the zone, she doesn't hear them. Perhaps she is daydreaming.
There are places where it is dangerous to daydream. The child's reverie is shattered as a gun barks somewhere close by. She feels a sharp pain in her leg. The satchel drops from her hand. She falls down on the sand, then gets up and tries to hobble away. As fast as she can. But it's only a moment or two before that awful sound rings out again and another bullet fells her. She won't try to get up again. Ever. No more school. No more bantering with her brothers at breakfast-time. No more hopes, fears, laughter, tears. No more daydreams.
But hold on, her ordeal isn't over yet. A man in uniform walks up to her crumpled little body and shoots her in the head. Twice. Just making sure she doesn't try to hobble away again. He turns away, takes a few steps, then turns back, switches his weapon to automatic, and empties his magazine into her inert form.
Just making sure, perhaps, that the girl's daydreams don't outlive her, don't pour out and take root in the soil fertilised by her innocent blood. In the place where an orchard once stood.
This is a true story, of course. It could have come out of the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation. But it didn't. It happened earlier this month. The girl's name was Iman al-Hams. She was 13 years old, a Palestinian Arab, a refugee in her own land. Her killers were Israelis. Not fanatical settlers but members of the armed forces of what is often referred to by the western media as the only democracy in the Middle East.
The pathological brutality of the officer who couldn't stop shooting Iman even after she was dead proved too much even for some of the soldiers under his command. "Don't shoot, it's a little girl!" one of them had shouted. "We were in shock," another soldier later told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "We couldn't believe what he was doing. Our hearts ached for her. Just a girl of 13."
The soldiers' account of what happened was broadly in agreement with that of Palestinian witnesses. Some of them refused to report for duty unless their commander was replaced. They demanded an investigation.
An inquiry was duly instituted, and evidently conducted in a cursory manner. That is the norm in such circumstances. Last week the commander was formally cleared of any wrongdoing. He had done nothing unethical but would be suspended for losing the confidence of his troops.
Now that's justice. Iman, the army said, may have been carrying an explosive device in her satchel. But the satchel was riddled with bullets after she dropped it. It didn't explode. It only contained books, perhaps a snack for recess. That didn't stop them from murdering the schoolgirl.
The second line of defence was that, well, she may have been sent into the Forbidden Zone by militants who wanted to distract the troops guarding the Gaza Strip's Rafah refugee camp, which sits next to the border with Egypt. That's pure conjecture, unsupported by an iota of evidence. And even if the suspicion was not groundless, it hardly adds up to sufficient cause for killing a child in cold blood.
The doctor who examined Iman's body found 17 bullets. The girl's face was almost completely destroyed.
Iman wasn't the first schoolgirl to be murdered by the Israeli army. Nor by any means the last. Just days later, Raghda Alassar was working on an English test in her class at an UNRWA elementary school in the Khan Younis refugee camp when a bullet silently tore into her brain.
The nine-year-old's cries for help were drowned out by a crescendo of screams from her classmates as a pool of blood formed on her desk and spilled on to the floor. She had fallen silent by the time she was conveyed to hospital. For five days the army prevented her from being transferred to an Israeli hospital. Shortly thereafter, she was dead.
Since the second intifada began four years ago, nearly 150 children have been killed by the army in Rafah and Khan Younis alone; both these Gaza camps have been classified by the Israelis as war zones, alongside West Bank towns such as Nablus and Jenin. Even so, if the army's own rules of engagement were strictly applied, most of these killings would be considered illegal.
The latest spurt of violence came as the Likud-led government struggled to win parliamentary approval for its plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which has been resisted by a handful of Jewish settlers and their far-right political supporters.
The 14 deaths on Monday were not much higher than the daily average as Ariel Sharon engineers yet another round of carnage in order to convince his compatriots that the coming pullout is a sign of Israeli strength rather than weakness. In turn, Palestinian militants have increased their level of activity in order to prove the opposite.
The withdrawal is not part of any agreement with the Palestinians. The peace process, for what it was worth, ground to a halt years ago. Israel has been under no pressure whatsoever from its chief patron. Although the Jewish state has always enjoyed a high level of influence in Washington, it is believed that with the advent of the Bush administration, Likudites were ensconced in key positions: not mere sympathizers, mind you, but bonafide Israeli spies. When the FBI sought to mount an investigation on the basis of its suspicions, it was told to back off.
Israel has clearly been extremely influential in determining the course of the Bush administration's overall Middle East strategy - that includes policies on Iraq, Iran and Syria; it also involves not having an independent policy at all on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and simply going along with whatever Likud proposes.
This is demonstrated by the Gaza "disengagement" plan. The official line in both the US and Israel is that the withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Strip will be a concrete step towards a two-state solution. In reality, the move is intended to kill off any prospect of a Palestinian state.
Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weinglass, conceded as much earlier this month in an interview with the newspaper Ha'aretz, saying that the prime purpose of the plan was to freeze the peace process, thereby effectively annexing the West Bank - the larger territory where 190,000 Jewish settlers are based, and where the settlements have steadily been expanded in contravention of international law and UN resolutions.
"When you freeze that process," Weinglass told Ha'aretz, "you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with [US] authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing [from Bush] and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
"The disengagement," he went on to say, "is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
The interview sparked a political row in Israel (but not in the US, where that part of the Middle East has barely rated a mention throughout the election campaign), and Sharon sought to defuse it by reaffirming his government's commitment to the US-sponsored "roadmap" to peace - an uninspiring initiative that was long ago consigned to the morgue.
The Gaza Strip on its own cannot, of course, be a viable state. At best it will be eventually be parcelled out to the Egyptians, condemned indefinitely to a colonial status.
Sharon, meanwhile, has the satisfaction of knowing that his "war against terrorism" - targeted assassinations combined with indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and the demolition of their dwellings - has acquired the status of an international model. It is being replicated by the occupation forces in Iraq. Vladimir Putin has taken a leaf out of it for subduing the Chechens.
It's not hard to tell where this roadmap leads. It is tantamount to sowing the seeds of resentment, anger, despair. It incubates terrorism. It spawns suicide bombers.
Anyone who doubts that should pause for a moment. Just think. How would you react if Iman was your daughter, your baby sister, your playmate, your neighbour? How would you feel if, for your children or siblings, attendance at school entailed the risk of getting their brains blown out?
mahirali2@netscape.net