| 28 October 2004 | Thursday | 13 Ramazan 1425 |
More needs to be done
Deaths in Thailand
Mr Ariel Sharon might have carried the majority with him in parliament on Tuesday, but that hardly takes Palestine any closer to peace. With a 67 to 45 vote, the Israeli parliament approved his Gaza disengagement plan. For 37 years, Israel has maintained its military occupation of the Gaza Strip in violation of all UN resolutions.
It has brutalized Gaza's population centres, maintained illegal Jewish settlements and committed gross human rights abuses. In its most recent blitz in September-October, Israel killed at least 130 Palestinian civilians and rendered nearly 1,000 homeless by blowing up their houses.
The Israeli prime minister now has a plan to pull out of Gaza not for the sake of peace, nor because he believes that Israel has no moral right to occupy someone else's land; he is withdrawing his troops and dismantling the settlements only to strengthen Israel's stranglehold over the West Bank. But there is a catch here too: even after "withdrawing" from Gaza, Israel will maintain control over the coastline, airspace and borders.
Under the peace accords signed at the White House on Sept 13, 1993, Israel should have vacated all occupied territories and a final settlement should have come into place in April 1999. Instead, the successors of Mr Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the peace accords, set about to systematically torpedo them. First Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and then Mr Ehud Barak reneged on the peace treaties and had them renegotiated with the help of President Bill Clinton.
The series of summit meetings at Wye, Cairo and Sharm el-Sheikh served only to distort and delay the implementation of what was left of the accords. Whatever hope remained vanished when Mr Sharon, then in opposition, visited the Islamic holy sites in September 2000 despite being warned not to do so. Matters worsened when he became Israel's prime minister the next year. He reoccupied the areas vacated by Israel and began a new reign of terror.
Hopes for peace were revived when President George Bush unveiled a roadmap in April last year. It provided for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the emergence of a sovereign but truncated Palestinian state by 2005. However, Mr Bush virtually sabotaged the roadmap, which had been prepared in consultation with the EU, Russia and the UN. Mr Bush said even after withdrawing from the territories, Israel would retain "some" West Bank land. Then he went a step a further and said that 2005 was an unrealistic date for a Palestinian state to emerge. All this only encouraged Mr Sharon in his land grab designs.
The Gaza withdrawal plan is one big hoax. There can be no unilateral settlement of the Palestinian question. Withdrawal from any part of Palestine must form part of the overall aim of ending Israel's illegal occupation and creating a sovereign Palestinian state. As Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat said, the "seriousness of the Israeli government will depend on resuming negotiations" with the PA. Of this there is no indication. Mr Sharon does not believe in negotiations. He will have no qualms about proceeding with this fake withdrawal. He will, of course, get full support from the US on this score, but that will hardly help bring peace to Palestine.
More needs to be done
The passage on Tuesday in the National Assembly of the government-sponsored bill aimed ostensibly at plugging the loopholes in the laws pertaining to honour killing and blasphemy had all the drama and none of the substance one expected of the occasion. The government chose to table the bill after the opposition had walked out in protest against the speaker's denial of a number of private motions by its members. Then, putting parliamentary tradition and procedure aside, the treasury moved the bill on karo-kari on a day reserved for private motions and bills. As expected, the government would not have found a more opportune day for the purpose.
The bill was passed immediately after its tabling, without a single note of dissent. While the bulldozing of such an important bill without a proper debate in parliament points to the scant importance the government attaches to the legislative process, the opposition too by its matching response to the issue has disappointed the nation. Instead of the odd member going to the media and pointing fingers at some of the undesirable components of the bill, the opposition as a whole should have made its objections known on the floor of the house when the bill was moved for consideration.
Consequently, one now only has the criticism voiced by rights groups to go by. Foremost among the lacunae is the state's refusal to act as the 'wali' of the victim of honour killing. This leaves the heirs of the victim free to forgive the accused, a practice often carried out either under duress or in order to protect the family from further 'disgrace'.
As for the requirement under the new bill that investigations of blasphemy be carried out by a high-ranking police officer before the accused is charged with it, the condition can easily be countered by presenting two adult Muslim witnesses against the accused before the investigating officer. The bill, thus, leaves a lot more to be desired. One hopes that the opposition will be more willing and prepared to debate the bill's contents when later it comes up for discussion in the Senate.
Deaths in Thailand
The death in military custody of 78 persons in Thailand, most of whom died of suffocation or were crushed to death, was horrifying. The Thai prime minister has promised an investigation which will hopefully bring those responsible for these deaths to justice. The Thai government maintains that most of the violence in the south of the country can be attributed to local criminal gangs. While this may be partly so, the government cannot ignore the wave of resentment in this predominantly Muslim part of the country.
This week's violence and the deaths of such a large number of people in custody will only exacerbate the problem. Another point of concern is the suspicion that organized Islamic separatist groups are playing at least a part in the violence. The government's immediate concern is to ensure that the troubles seen this week in some parts of the south do not spread to other areas.
More than 430 people have died this year alone in clashes between the militants and security forces in the southern provinces. Muslims have long complained of discrimination, and civil servants and security officers have been targeted in a wave of violence, which began in January this year. Prior to that, Muslim separatists had staged a low-key insurgency in the region in the 1970s and '80s but this died down in the '90s when the government promised to invest heavily in these areas to provide jobs and economic opportunities. But that has not happened and the resentment has resurfaced.
The proliferation of criminal gangs is only one face of a problem that runs much deeper. The Thai government needs to address the problems faced by people of these backward provinces. At the same time, strong action needs to be taken against police and military highhandedness as this only increases discontent amongst the local people and makes it easier for extremist groups to exploit the situation.