| 22 December 2004 | Wednesday | 09 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Promises that can't be fulfilled
America's war on itself
Putting the past on trial
The bomb blasts in Najaf and Karbala on Saturday, which killed more than 60 people and wounded scores of others, was a grim reminder of the continuing conflict in Iraq and the difficulties that lie ahead as the Americans and the interim government move ahead towards the elections scheduled for January 30.
The horrific carnage was the second worst incident involving civilian casualties in Iraq, and there is no doubt in anyone's mind that it was designed to disrupt the country's elections plans. Many believe that it was also intended to provide a fresh provocation for an outbreak of sectarian violence that could bring civil war to Iraq.
So far, it appears that this incident and the doubts expressed earlier notwithstanding, the Americans remain determined to hold elections in Iraq on the scheduled date. After the tragedy in Karbala and Najaf, Bush reiterated, at a press conference in Washington, his administration's resolve to hold elections on time.
What are the prospects? The election preparations have moved ahead satisfactorily according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who, in what was probably his last meeting with Secretary Colin Powell, maintained that the 59-member UN staff deployed in Iraq - 25 of them experts in the conduct of elections - had trained 6,000 Iraqis for election duties and would recruit some 130,000 people to man the polling stations.
Mr Annan made it clear that the UN did not think it necessary to send any more staff into Iraq. He also revealed that he has only one contingent of 150 Fijian soldiers to provide security for the UN officials.
There are reports that while the American led forces are providing additional security they have indicated that they have their own limitations and that the UN cannot expect the degree of security support that its officials believe would be necessary for a larger deployment of UN officials.
The UN has been able to open some 540 registration centres in the country to draw up a list of 14 million potential voters based on the ration card system introduced by the Saddam Hussein regime after sanctions were imposed on the country.
Of these registration centres, some 90 were closed down for security reasons. It is apprehended that some more may be closed after the deadly incident in Baghdad where insurgents deliberately targeted three election workers within a mile of the heavily guarded "Green Zone" that serves as the headquarters of the American forces and the Iraqi interim government.
The election procedure laid down by the American Transitional Administration Law does not permit individual candidates in individual constituencies. Instead, the entire country is to be treated as one constituency with the voter voting for a party instead of an individual and that party then being allocated seats in the 275-member assembly according to the percentage of the vote that it wins.
An individual candidate's chances of getting into the assembly would depend on where he/she was placed on the slate of the party. The law requires that one third of every party's slate should be reserved for women.
There is also the requirement that each party should have broad geographical representation even though it is unclear as to whether any percentages have been laid down.
In addition to the election to the National Assembly, the voters will also be required to vote in the Kurdish areas for the candidates contesting the election for the 105 member Iraqi Kurdistan National Assembly.
All Iraqis will also vote for councils in each of Iraq's 18 provinces, with the idea being that these provincial councils will provide the framework for local government. So far, however, the size of the provincial councils and the method for selecting the candidates has not been decided.
Some 220 parties and individuals have registered for the elections. There are, according to some reports, some 7,000 candidates on the slates of these parties. The UN Secretary General's personal representative for Iraq drew lots in Baghdad recently to determine the order in which the parties and the candidates would appear on the several pages thick ballot paper.
The Americans have drawn some consolation from the fact that many of the Sunni groups that had earlier called for a postponement of the elections have now decided to participate.
Still, the practical difficulties of holding the elections are trivial when compared to the larger issue of security and the apparent success attending the efforts of the insurgents to instigate sectarian strife. The latest reports out of Najaf and Karbala suggest that of the 50 odd people arrested after the blasts in the two cities, only one was a foreigner.
This would suggest that despite all the warnings being issued to Syria about allowing the use of its territory for the infiltration into Iraq of Sunni insurgents from neighbouring countries, the insurgency is largely, if not wholly, indigenous.
There may well be foreign funding as many claim but it is probable that much of the manpower is being provided by the disaffected soldiers of the Iraqi army that Paul Bremer had disbanded.
These insurgents clearly have some popular support not only for their resistance to foreign occupation but also for their efforts to prevent the elections which can only result in a Shia dominated government in Iraq.
To deal first with the question of foreign involvement, Iraq's Sunni neighbours have misgivings about Shia domination in Iraq. Jordanian King Abdullah has claimed that more than one million Iranians have crossed the 910-mile border into Iraq, many to vote in the election - with the encouragement of the Iranian government and that, "It is in Iran's vested interest to have an Islamic republic of Iraq ... and, therefore, the involvement you're getting by the Iranians is to achieve a government that is very pro-Iran."
He went on to assert that, a new "crescent" of dominant Shia movements or governments stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria and Lebanon could emerge, altering the traditional balance of power between the two main Islamic sects and posing new challenges to US interests and allies.
Given this perception, which is undoubtedly shared by other Arab countries, it would be understandable to reach the conclusion that not only individual extremists in the Sunni Arab countries but even the governments would encourage and assist the Sunni Iraqis to sabotage the elections. In my view, these fears are misplaced.
It is true that many of the religious parties that dominate the slate put up by the Ayatollah Sistani backed United Iraqi Alliance have Iranian connections. Many of the prominent leaders spent years of exile in Iran and developed strong ties with the Iranian clergy.
Ayatollah Sistani himself as the name suggests (his name is derived from the Iranian province of Balochistan and Sistan) is of Iranian origin. But the Iraqi Shias are for the most part Arab first and Shia later.
There was little evidence during the Iran-Iraq war of sectarian affinities affecting the discipline or loyalty of the Shia component of the Iraqi army. Moreover, the Shia Iraqi believes, that for the Shias around the world it is the Howzas of Najaf and Karbala rather than the seminaries in Qom and Mashed that are the true repositories of Shia religious learning.
In Iran itself, many true believers accept as their mentors and guides the ayatollahs of Najaf and Karbala rather than those of Qom and Mashed. Lastly, the philosophy that Ayatollah Sistani and indeed the howza of Najaf has traditionally embraced is that the clergy should not form part of the government in Shia countries.
The current political activism is an aberration brought about by the peculiar circumstances in which Iraq finds itself. If the Iraqi Shias are not pushed into a corner there is every prospect that the Iraqi Shia clergy will, after the elections, retire once again into its seminaries and encourage the evolution towards a Shia dominated but largely secular government.
Such a government will have the same commonality of interest with its Arab neighbours as the Saddam Hussein regime. Its relations with Iran will be more cordial but they will certainly not be relations in which Iran will call the shots.
The big problem is that the Sunnis in Iraq have been offered no guarantees of what their share in power will be. Having dominated the Iraqi political landscape for the last century, they cannot easily accept their relegation to the status of second class citizens.
The monumental blunder committed by Paul Bremer of disbanding the Iraqi army, a bastion of not only Ba'athist but also Sunni power, contributed to the feeling that the Americans were intent on degrading the Sunnis and exploiting Iraq's resources with the help of the two groups most disaffected by Sunni dominance - the Shias and the Kurds.
The refusal of the Americans to accept the eminently sensible UN proposal for handing over the reins of power for the pre-election period to a group of technocrats in which the Sunnis would obviously have had more than a fair share of cabinet positions also contributed to the Sunni distrust of the intentions of the occupation forces.
President Ghazi Al Yawar, a leader of the powerful Sunni Shamar tribe, has announced the formation of a party to contest the election and this will be largely a Sunni party.
Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and respected elder statesman, will also be putting forward a largely Sunni slate. These developments may be regarded as encouraging but there is no doubt that Sunni opposition to the elections is going to remain strong.
Under these circumstances, the prospects for elections that produce viable or credible results are bleak. What is even more frightening is that the spectre of civil war looms ever larger. Even a cursory perusal of the sermons preached in the Sunni and Shia mosques in Baghdad show the ever-widening gap between the two sects.
The Shia mullahs, in keeping with the directives of Ayatollah Sistani, advocate restraint but at the same time say the insurgency celebrated at Sunni mosques amounts to "terrorism," and the attacks are no more than a cover for men loyal to Hussein or followers of Wahabism, a Sunni sect hostile to Shias.
In Sunni mosques, on the other hand, the Sunni community is termed as the bulwark against US and Israeli designs on the country. Clerics in these mosques assert that Shia Iranians, posing as Iraqis, are flooding the country, and the Kurds are serving as stooges of the US.
The Sunnis are the nation's defenders against an occupation, and they are being called upon to act with the implication being that they are required to act not only against the occupiers but also against their Shia and Kurdish stooges.
The Shia push for elections on schedule is strong. For somewhat different reasons the Bush administration is equally adamant. At this time, when the insurgency is touching new heights any backing down will be seen as a sign of weakness.
It is, therefore, unlikely that a change will be agreed upon. One can only watch and pray that the disaster will not be as big as it threatens to be. Bush has talked of the American "catastrophic success" in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Let us hope that the elections do not turnout to be another such "catastrophe".
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
Promises that can't be fulfilled
Everyone makes promises. There are those who sincerely desire to keep them but may be hampered by circumstances. There are others who laugh off solemn promises with an insouciance that is most exasperating.
There are still others who make promises but have no intention to fulfil them because they know it is not possible for them to do so. Among inveterate promise-makers (and promise- breakers) are politicians, both new-comers and those hardened by long practice.
For instance, when they stand for election they will promise to solve all the problems of the constituency ("even if it costs me my life"). Voters are a gullible lot, not even learning from their own past experience or that of other vote- seekers, but when they approach their man sitting in the provincial or national assembly, it is hard to catch him. When they do catch him, he admonishes them for pursuing parochial problems and advises them to think on national lines.
If by chance he becomes a minister, and is really in a position to help, the voters have to run harder than before to catch him, but he runs faster, and even if they get to him he is as slippery as an eel and knows a hundred ways of putting them off.
It must be said to his credit that he does not really want to make patently false promises, but it is difficult to come out of the habit. Most of the ruling regimes and politicians in power during the last five decades or so have been of this variety.
Pakistan has seen numerous regimes in the saddle, including frequent martial laws and the unavoidable caretakers. Each was at pains to make grandiose promises for the welfare of the people. Some of the promises were as tall as skyscrapers.
Many of them may have legitimately taken years to come to fruition, but an impression was always created that the promised prosperity was just around the corner, and that Pakistan would soon have to change its name to El Dorado.
Most of the promises that politicians make can never be fulfilled, simply because no power on earth can help them do what they swear they are out to do. Today I propose to enumerate some of the more popular ones.
I can't go beyond selection because the total number will require a number of write-ups. And I shall have to generalise, because the names of the men who make them (or made them) and the dates when they did so are not possible to remember.
Readers will have heard them often, so there is no question of their being far-fetched or unbelievable. The most frequent and the obviously attainable promise is that corruption will be wiped out.
It is made day in and day out all over Pakistan without a sign of shame faced ness. It is never "We'll do our best to fight and reduce corruption," or "Efforts will be made to minimize it." No, corruption has to be pulled out along with its roots (as the Urdu idiom goes) and nothing less than that tall promise is acceptable to the powers-that-be.
No minister or chief minister or prime minister pauses to think that if this happened it would be an unprecedented event in the history of mankind. They promise to do what numerous civilizations, countless noble kings with the power of life and death over their subjects, and many saints and prophets could not even dream of seeing in their time.
Ministers are not exactly known for saying memorable things, but some of their pronouncements are unforgettable. I recall a chief minister of the NWFP in Mian Nawaz Sharif's time telling his officers on assuming office that he was determined to provide inexpensive justice to the people.
Maybe he forgot that he was not authorized to make changes in the judicial system. Actually this too is an oft-made promise, and even Mian Sahib himself used to repeat it.
Maybe that is why he engineered an attack on the Supreme Court in Islamabad, but, due to bad planning, he did not achieve its objective and the people were deprived of a great blessing!
What ministers forget, or choose to ignore, is that the expenses of securing justice are not grudged by the people. They are even willing to pay through their nose (as they say) if that justice is readily available. The stark reality is that the thing can't be had for the asking.
A similar promise is that justice will be provided to the common man at his doorstep. I have never been able to understand what that means. I can only visualize it.
A robed judge, along with his retinue and a bevy of lawyers, walks up to a litigant's house, knocks on the door and says pontifically, "My dear common man, here is your justice!"
Then there is the promise made with the greatest of self- confidence and ease that law and order will be rigorously enforced, and that no one will dare to flout the law, and those who do so will be drastically dealt with. Actually they are dealt with, but this is in the form of a deal between the police and the law-breakers. The more such promises the worse the situation.
Arising from this is the asinine promise that the perpetrators of heinous crimes will be awarded exemplary punishment. There is no such thing as exemplary punishment.
All penalties are prescribed by the Penal Code, and not even the Supreme Court can bypass it and string a convicted person by his feet or order the hide to be taken off him or throw him to the lions. Then what does exemplary punishment mean when the expression is used by highly educated heads of government who should know better?
Another promise often heard is that prices of essential commodities will not be permitted to rise (further), as if they rise after obtaining permission from the rulers.
Hoarders and profiteers are threatened with severe punishment if they persist in their activity. Of course it is nonsense. It is also said that the government is keeping a vigilant eye on prices, but it is never said if this is to prevent them from rising or falling.
I will conclude this column with a story, the last of today. Just before he was eased out of office, Chief Minister Manzoor wattoo announced pompously, "I promise that within 90 days Punjab will be rid of all kinds of crime." All that the people of the province got rid of after some time was Mr. Wattoo himself!
America's war on itself
I have a persistent mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.
Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were no links between the Ba'athists and Al Qaeda: now Bush's government has created the monster it claimed to be slaying.
The US army developed high-grade weaponized anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who launched the anthrax attacks in 2001 took it from one of the army's laboratories. Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences.
The Pentagon's space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which doesn't yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself.
It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States.
It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, characterized by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D. Roosevelt's widow.
The US is now the only member of the UN Security Council whose word is law, with the result that the UN is one of the world's most effective instruments for the projection of American power.
The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It ensured that Saddam Hussein could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil to its allies in Jordan and Turkey.
Republican congressmen are calling on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The US finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.
So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government at the climate talks in Buenos Aires last week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its own interests. US economic growth depends on the rest of the world's prosperity.
The greatest long-term threat to global prosperity is climate change, which threatens to wreck many of America's key markets in the developing world. Coastal cities in the US - including New York - are threatened by rising sea levels.
Florida could be hit by stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities are likely to be affected by droughts. In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees global warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism.
As a result of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to define human life... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern re-emerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies." The nuclear powers are likely to invade each other's territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.
So how does George Bush respond to this? "Bring it on." The meeting in Buenos Aires was supposed to work out what the world should do about climate change when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012.
Most of the world's governments want the protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher agreement. But the Bush administration has been seeking to ensure both that the original agreement is scrapped, and that nothing is developed to replace it.
"No one can say with any certainty," Bush asserts, "what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided." As we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute "terrorism" for "warming".
When anticipating possible terrorist attacks, the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best. The "precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters of national security that it now threatens American civil liberties. But it is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.
The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But instead of helping to design a treaty that would eventually bring them in, the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international cooperation.
It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by carbon cuts.The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed.
On Saturday, 36 hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement.
The US permitted them to hold an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new commitments" is forbidden. According to the head of the US delegation, the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". It's like saying that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane is flying into the tower.
Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But this is now familiar practice. The US tried to sink the bio safety protocol in 1999, even though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it.
It sought to trash the 2002 Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This isn't, as some people suggest, isolationism. It is a thorough and sustained engagement, whose purpose is to prevent the world's most pressing problems from being solved.
And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the Pentagon is now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of dollars in Buenos Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity.
Of course we know that its delegation was representing the interests of the corporations, not the people, and that what's bad for America is good for Exxon. But this does not detract from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity of its position.
The US has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately, while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that appealing to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but surely there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's making of America. - Dawn/Guardian Service
Putting the past on trial
It isn't very often that dictators have to answer for their misdeeds, not least because they have a tendency to cling on to power until the bitter end. Occasionally, their comeuppance takes the shape of a violent death.
Such an extreme fate may, under certain circumstances, be construed as a kind of justice. But it robs dictators' surviving victims of the closure that a different sort of reckoning can provide: a public trial, for instance, intended primarily as a means of laying bare the truth rather than extracting revenge.
Historical experience world wide suggests that nations which are willing to take a long, hard and honest look at their past are invariably better placed to tackle the demons that torment them.
They emerge from traumas not unscathed but wiser. On the other hand, the failure to acknowledge foibles, follies and fascist tendencies substantially increases the likelihood of their repetition.
These observations have been prompted by a recent resurgence in efforts to make General Augusto Pinochet answerable for at least a few of the countless crimes committed by the state during his 17 years as Chile's head of state and 25 years as the nation's army chief.
It is difficult, however, to banish Pakistan from one's thoughts in the context of coups and cliques. And it is equally difficult to resist marvelling at the contrast with Chile, which has been struggling with some success for the past 14 years to expose the excesses of the Pinochet regime, to neutralize them not by pretending they never occurred, but by facing up to them. And considerable progress has been made despite dogged resistance from vested interests.
In our country, similar efforts are seldom made. This may partly be the case because the army is rarely out of power, and because even during civilian interludes the ship of state's rudder remains largely under military control. But it goes beyond that. Weaned on a distorted sense of patriotism, the national psyche appears to be programmed to shut out unpleasant truths.
More than three decades ago, a mob stormed PTV's base in Lahore in order to prevent the national broadcaster from airing footage of the fall of Dhaka. We didn't want to know about it.
And, unfortunately, the question of war crimes tribunals never arose: those who sought to smother Bangladesh at birth and to drown it in blood were never made answerable for their role in one of the 20th century's worst instances of mass murder.
Pakistan has never truly come to terms with what happened in 1971. The eventual release of the fairly sanitized Hamoodur Rehman Commission report did not precipitate a cathartic debate. We still don't want to know.
The Zia-ul-Haq regime's atrocities were but a pale reflection of the terror unleashed under General Yahya Khan and his henchmen. The consequences of General Zia's misrule are, of course, still with us in a more palpable form. Yet even that era is seldom revisited.
Again, this is partly because so many powerful people - not all of them in uniform - have a personal interest in preventing revelations. But then again, were the nation better equipped to deal with the past and more determined to uncover the truth, most of these people probably wouldn't occupy positions of power.
When a government-appointed Chilean commission last month published a 1,200-page report, based on the testimony of more than 30,000 Chileans, about the Pinochet regime's systematic use of torture against perceived political opponents, the opposition Independent Democratic Union's leader Jovino Novoa, who had himself served under the general, commented that civilians who had participated in the military government in good faith had nothing to apologize for.
Reading that comment, I couldn't help wondering how many serving Pakistani politicians would issue similarly defensive statements were the question ever to arise of a thorough investigation of the bleak Zia years. It won't. But the existence of another militarized administration isn't the only barrier.
Interestingly, Chilean efforts to establish the truth about the nation's recent past took off as soon as Pinochet relinquished the presidency in 1990, even though he retained the post of military chief for a further eight years. However, it was only after he gave up the latter post that legal proceedings were instituted against him.
It was a Spanish judge who first took up cudgels on behalf of the general's victims, issuing a warrant that led to Pinochet's detention during a visit to Britain in 1998 - much to the consternation of his old friend Margaret Thatcher.
The ex-tyrant was kept under house arrest in luxurious conditions, of course, and allowed to fly back to Chile in early 2001 (coincidentally or otherwise, shortly after George W. Bush had taken oath as president) after the Blair government accepted a medical opinion that the onset of mild senile dementia rendered him incapable of meaningfully participating in court proceedings.
As soon as he reached Santiago, the octogenarian got out of his wheelchair and engaged well-wishers in perfectly coherent conversation. Since then, this approach has become something of a habit.
Whenever a legal threat arises, Pinochet goes limp. Last week when Chilean Judge Juan Guzman - who has made it his mission to bring the retired dictator to justice - issued an order placing him under house arrest, the general's doctors said he had suffered a stroke.
At the weekend, he was said to be making a satisfactory recovery in hospital. Pinochet is now at an age when a health crisis can plausibly be created at any given moment to ward off his foes.
Although Guzman has questioned him at home over Operation Condor - a covert regional programme to eliminate dissidents in which Chile collaborated with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - chances of Pinochet actually finding himself in the dock are minuscule.
There is some evidence, though, that his mental acuity is pretty remarkable for an 89-year-old. Last year, to mark the 30th anniversary of his coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende, Pinochet gave a perfectly lucid interview to an anti-Cuban TV station in Miami, in which he described himself as a "patriotic angel".
Furthermore, somewhat ironically, the search in America for Al Qaeda bank accounts yielded details of secret accounts maintained by Pinochet and his family. The question of how a military chief on a supposed salary of $10,000 a year amassed a fortune of more than $10 million remains to be answered.
The likelihood of corruption could damage Pinochet's reputation for financial probity among his right-wing supporters. What's more to the point is the question of how the dementia-stricken ex-soldier was personally able to manipulate and shuffle these funds during and after his "ordeal" in Britain.
Such discrepancies led Supreme Court judges to decide earlier this year, by a majority of one, to strip Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution for his role in the assassination of his pro-democracy predecessor, General Carlos Prats. On Monday, an appeals court unanimously rejected his lawyers' attempt to stave off proceedings in the case that had provoked the house arrest order.
The Supreme Court is now the last resort, and an uneasy Christmas is all but guaranteed for the more ardent pinochetistas. But even if the highest court decides to block the legal escape route, it is difficult to see how Guzman and other seekers after justice will get past the doctors willing to issue Pinochet with certificates of diminished responsibility at the drop of a hat.
However, the fact that a former military dictator whose very name has become a byword for brutality has lost his designation as an untouchable offers an illustration of how far Chile has come since the days when it was tyrannized by a US-supported junta.
Intriguingly, Washington's role in undermining Allende's Popular Unity government, aiding and abetting the coup-makers and defending the neo-fascist order that ensued remains a controversial topic in the US.
Late last year it sparked a bitter row in the Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrating particularly the prickliness of Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state when the Nixon administration's determination to make an example of Chile's socialist experiment bore fruit on September 11, 1973.
With so much blood on his hands - only a small proportion of it Chilean - Kissinger, like Pinochet, is wary of travelling abroad. In his homeland, however, he inspires more awe than revulsion, and there has never been any prospect of a trial.
In terms of selective amnesia, the US resembles Pakistan more than Chile - where President Ricardo Lagos has announced a package of lifetime pensions for nearly 28,000 Chileans who suffered imprisonment and torture under Pinochet.
Most wrongs cannot, of course, be righted through compensation or any other means. But even acknowledgement alone is a crucial step in healing a nation's scars, and even Chile's armed forces are playing a role in this process.
Last month commander-in-chief published a report titled The End of a Vision in which the military accepted institutional responsibility for torture, assassinations and disappearances. Sadly, it is impossible to imagine the Pakistan army making a comparable effort to come clean about its past.
Email: mahirali2@netscape.net.