| 8 April 2005 | Friday | 28 Safar 1426 |
Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
Right to return
Doing without rough justice
JUST how perilous the journey to durable peace between Pakistan and India is has been vividly brought home by Wednesday’s attack on a passenger building in Srinagar where the first Kashmiri travellers for the bus to Muzaffarabad were billeted. The assault is described as the work of militants, who were successful in breaching security at the heavily guarded complex; how is not yet clear. Two of the attackers were killed, but fortunately there were no casualties among the passengers. Both the services to Muzaffarabad and Srinagar crossed over yesterday without further trouble, although the sound of some still unexplained firing was heard when the bus for Azad Kashmir was about to leave.
The dangers that threaten the new service should not be underestimated, but its troubled start should not be allowed to cloud the historic significance of the reopening of the Kashmir link after nearly 60 years. This is the first concrete manifestation of repeated declarations by leaders in India, Pakistan and Kashmir that they want the LoC to become a line of peace. It goes to the credit of General Pervez Musharraf and Dr Manmohan Singh that they cut through bureaucratic resistance and brushed aside administrative hurdles to enable the buses to run. The humanitarian aspect of the event should not be overlooked, which was palpable in the emotional scenes witnessed as a handful of divided families were allowed to meet. It is important that despite all the threats and risks, both sides should persist with and expand travel links between the two parts of Kashmir, which will be one of the surest ways of bringing the people of Kashmir to centrestage in the effort to normalize Indo-Pakistan relations.
At the same time, such gestures cannot be a substitute for a determined political effort to tackle the Kashmir problem and other knotty issues that divide Pakistan and India. Kashmiri leaders have welcomed the bus link, but they have also emphasized that this should not be allowed to deflect attention from the need for a just and durable Kashmir solution. The Kashmiris have suffered erroneously all these years. The people of the Valley have been practically under siege for nearly six decades, suffered constant violations of human rights and suppression of civil liberties and seen their economic life crippled. If no other twists are discovered, the attack on Wednesday could well be seen as symptomatic of Kashmiri rage at being ignored in the normalization process. The goodwill that is bound to be generated by freer travel and interaction should be built upon to establish a political dialogue between Kashmiris as well as between Kashmiri leaders on the one hand and the governments of Pakistan and India on the other. New Delhi should overcome its disinclination to talk to the APHC, which in turn should seek to reason with the more militant groups of Kashmiris to give negotiations and peace a chance. Because of domestic compulsions on both sides and developments internationally, an opportunity of a lifetime has presented itself to the people of Kashmir and the people of India and Pakistan to live in friendship and cooperation. It should not be missed.
ANY member of the Jewish community anywhere in the world, even if his ancestors have never been in the holy land, has the right to “return”, but the ones who cannot return to Palestine are Palestinians. Dying to have more people and grab as much of others’ land as possible, Israel has been asking Jews the world over to come to Israel and settle on Palestinian lands. The latest in this on-going scheme is the report that some tribesmen in north-eastern India have been recognized as Jews of the lost tribe and they will be allowed to settle in Israel — most probably in occupied West Bank. In the eighties, some Ethiopians also claimed to be Jews and were eventually smuggled into Israel. Some of Zionism’s most ardent believers have come from Eastern Europe. Their ancestors were never in Palestine. Latest historical research shows that, because of constant wars between the Byzantine empire and the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth and 10th centuries, the people of the Khazar state, living between the Caspian and Black seas, abandoned paganism and became Jews. In modern times, this area came under the Czarist empire, and the descendants of these converted Jews spread in what is known as the Pale — the area that stretches from the Ukraine to the Baltic. Persecuted for centuries and treated like animals by Russia, these Jews became the most ardent supporters of the Zionist cause in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Some of the world’s leading Zionists, including Menachem Begin, Chaim Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Shamir, were born in Eastern Europe and claimed Palestine to be theirs. They and their ancestors were never in Palestine and so the very idea of their return seems preposterous.
In 1948, following the Deir Yassin massacre during the first Arab-Israeli war, 800,000 Palestinians — 83 per cent of the population — fled Palestine. Today their descendants number about 4.5 million. But the Zionists refuse to recognize their very existence. Their right to return is recognized by international law, and in 1948 the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194 reaffirmed the Palestinians’ right to return. Any power which supports Israel and denies the Palestinians’ right to return to their country is guilty of violating international law and the relevant UN resolution.
THE flogging of a man in Khyber Agency in the Tribal Areas on the orders of a self-styled ‘peace committee’ is further proof that parallel systems of ‘justice’ are thriving and dispensing harsh and brutal punishments with impunity because the government turns a blind eye to such aberrations. The so-called committee is said to have detained the brother of an outlaw and lashed him because he threatened one of the committee’s members. It has been reported that the local administration facilitated the formation of the so-called ‘peace committee’ in an effort to tackle rising crime and that most of its members are local religious figures. A private jail was also established to house ‘prisoners’.
To place judicial power in the hands of private individuals, no matter what the pretext, is not only unconstitutional, it encourages misguided vigilantes to take the law in their own hands. This system of rough justice is not new and not restricted to FATA alone. In Punjab, a panchayat sanctioned the gang rape of a woman as a punishment for a crime allegedly committed by her brother while in Sui a female doctor who reported being raped was herself declared a kari by her in-laws, and hence liable to be killed. Such repressive and barbaric systems of adjudication are found most commonly in the rural hinterland where people often need the protective arm of the law and assurance of justice, both of which are non-existent. A high level of illiteracy, a backward and feudal mindset and prevalence of misogynistic views among a large section of the people further compound the problem for them. Besides providing education and enforcing respect for the law, the government has to ensure that the justice system reaches rural areas so that those who live there are not left at the mercy of panchayats, jirgas or ‘peace committees’. Also, instead of acting as an accomplice in such misdeeds it would be better if official authorities discourage all form of arbitary and summary justice anywhere in the country.