| 5, April 2005 | Tuesday | 25 Safar 1426 |
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SATURDAY’S attack on the Abu Ghraib jail shows the strength of the Iraqi resistance. The nearly 60 casualties resulted not from car bombings but from a frontal assault by insurgents estimated at 40 to 60. The attackers also fired from nearby buildings and the battle lasted a full 40 minutes. While the Americans said 44 of their men were injured, Al Qaeda’s Iraqi chapter, led by Abu Musa’ab al-Zarqawi, claimed that 12 Americans had been killed, 15 vehicles destroyed and a helicopter shot down. The attack coincided with the Iraqi parliament’s long-delayed process for electing a speaker. Hajem al Hassani was elected to this office on Saturday. The extraordinary delay in electing the speaker stemmed basically from the disarray in Sunni ranks. This brings us to the question of the Iraqi scenario in the wake of the Jan 30 general election.
The partial boycott of the election by the Sunnis does not appear to have served Iraq’s cause or the cause of the community itself. Being in a majority, the Shias took part in the election, as did the Kurds. The result was a 60 per cent turn-out, in spite of threats of violence. With parliament now in place, it obviously has a Shia majority, which feels that it is in its interest to push the political process forward. The Kurds — suppressed for long by the ruling Sunni elite — similarly look forward to a continuation of the political process. Unfortunately, because of their boycott of the elections, the Sunnis have only 20 seats in a house of 275. This has deprived them of their due weight in the assembly, which is to form a new government and draft a constitution. In the meantime, those outside the assembly now seem to rely more on militancy than on the political process to achieve their aims.
For any observer of the Iraqi scene, three aims must override all other interests and considerations for the newly elected parliament and those parties and groups that are outside it. The first and foremost aim should be to maintain Iraq’s unity. The country has three well-recognized sectarian and ethnic zones: the Shia south, the Kurdish north and the Sunni triangle in the middle. Continued violence and lack of a central focus of power for long could accentuate fissiparous tendencies and make the state structure crack. The second aim should be to carry the political process forward, because it is only through political interaction that Iraq’s territorial integrity can be maintained. The Kurds and the Shias are natural partners in the post-Saddam Iraq, because they have a chance now to achieve the rights which the Baathist regime had denied them.
The third, and obvious aim, is for America to end its occupation of the country. More than two years have passed but Washington has not given any timetable for the withdrawal of its forces. It is thus the combined will of the Iraqi people, irrespective of sectarian and ethnic considerations, which can force the US to pull out. Any failure to present a united front will come in handy for the Bush administration, which will be able to say that it cannot leave Iraq in the midst of anarchy. The current state of militancy may continue indefinitely, but it is doubtful if without Shia and Kurdish help, it can make the Americans pull out. On the contrary it will merely serve to scuttle the political process and that would hardly advance the cause of a united and stable Iraq.
SENSE and sensibility were dealt a severe blow on Sunday when over 800 MMA activists, led by an MNA of that grouping, disrupted a mini-marathon in Gujranwala as a protest against women’s participation in the race. They came armed with petrol bombs, clubs and bricks which they used to torch vehicles, destroy property and attack male and female participants. As was to be expected, a violent clash took place between the police and the self-styled guardians of public morality. This led to the arrest of some 50 activists, against whom a case has been registered in an anti-terrorism court. Meanwhile, the MMA’s local leadership’s stance should come as no surprise either as they said they had already warned the district administration against holding the event in the first place. The logic is that it was the district administration’s fault and not of the local MNA who, incidentally, had led a similar group of protesters in 2003 in Gujranwala against a circus which they had eventually burnt down. Although the Punjab government has said it will deal with the “miscreants” with an iron hand, given the way the federal government has given in to many of the MMA’s previous demands - the restoration of the religion column in the passport being the most recent example - one is not sure whether the trouble-makers in this case will be dealt with the firmness and determination the incident in question calls for.
This episode shows just how powerful a lobby the religious right has become and how free they feel in pursuing their obscurantist agenda in political and social spheres. The issue is not that they objected to women participating in the race but the manner in which the MMA activists chose to impose their will in the name of Islam. No one could have objected to their giving vent to their feeling of disapproval in a peaceful and dignified manner. Instead, the protesters in Gujranwala used violence and disruption to achieve their objective. This makes them culpable of lawlessness and other offences punishable under the law.
PRIME Minister Shaukat Aziz did well to warn people not to invest in schemes that did not have the approval of the State Bank of Pakistan or other regulatory bodies. The present government has to be partially blamed for driving people into risky ventures by making national savings schemes less attractive for small savers. The prime minister told victims of the cooperatives scandal, who were being partially reimbursed in Lahore the other day, that the National Accountability Bureau had helped recover at least part of their money. In the recent past, government officials have issued warnings to people not to invest in housing schemes, especially those in the Gulf region, without first checking whether they were approved by local authorities. Interest rates of national savings schemes have been repeatedly lowered, coming down to almost half their pre-1999 levels. Since the bulk of those investing in the NSS were senior citizens and small savers, the effect of this policy was that ordinary people began trying other avenues of investment and in the process, more often than not, got their fingers burnt. In fact, the financial fortunes of small investors can be badly hurt even in the presence of a government regulator, as the recent fall in the Karachi Stock Exchange shows.
The truth is that to a large extent people themselves should exercise caution and common sense when considering an investment proposition. They should try and obtain as much information as possible about a scheme before taking a decision to invest. Also, any promise of an unusually high return on investment should be looked at not with joy but with a certain degree of scepticism. For most of such investors, there is not much to fall back on other than savings, and in such situations it always pays to be risk-averse. At the same time, the State Bank and other financial regulators need to act promptly to not only blacklist fraudulent investment schemes but also take action against their organizers.