The Mukhtaran Mai fiasco

WHOEVER came up with the bright idea that stopping Mukhtaran Mai from proceeding to the US to attend a conference organized by an association of Pakistani-American professionals would help protect Pakistan’s international image should be taken to task by the government. After all, the end result has been just the opposite, and the country’s image abroad has been sullied all the same.

The reprehensible course of events during which first Mukhtaran’s movements were restricted to her home in Meerwala, then her name was placed on the infamous Exit Control List, followed by the release of the men who allegedly raped her and, finally, her apparently forced travel to Islamabad to meet the prime minister’s adviser on women’s affairs — all seem to suggest a whole band of government functionaries competing with each in making a hash of a simple matter. It was a case of paranoia getting the better of judgment discretion. Ironically, at least in this case, it was action by some top government functionaries in the first place which did help make life slightly easier for Mukhtaran, at least initially, when her case came to light and when the Lahore High Court had announced that since no case could be proved against her alleged rapists, they should all be set free.

Clearly, a much better approach would have been to allow her to travel to the US because what could be a better role model for women anywhere than the one from rural Pakistan, who was subjected to gang rape, then has to deal with feudal lords and a hostile police in her village, face the stigma that a society like Pakistan’s places on rape victims, and, after all that, she has the courage to set up a local girl’s school and seek justice at all levels.

Even if some senior government officials were (mistakenly) apprehensive that Mukhtaran’s visit to the US would end up tainting Pakistan’s image, how could they possibly think that placing her on the Exit Control List was the right preventive step? The ECL is normally reserved for bank defaulters, fugitives from the law, or, perhaps more so, a particular government’s political opponents. Were the officials so naive that they did not expect the outcry that would result once it came to public knowledge that Mukhtaran had been placed on the ECL and that her movements had been severely restricted?

To make matters worse for the government, we had the minister of state for interior, Dr Shehzad Waseem, telling parliament that the restrictive security cordon around Mukhtaran Mai was for her own good and that her movements had not been restricted and that she was free to travel anywhere — although newspapers were carrying reports suggesting otherwise.

The conduct of the adviser to the prime minister on women’s development, Nelofer Bakhtiar, was equally petulant and unconvincing. She told parliament that a few NGOs were making a big deal out of the whole affair, implying that such NGOs depended heavily on foreign donations and were, therefore, playing to their benefactors’ tune. Such ill-advised remarks had little to do with the valid queries that the opposition benches had raised in the National Assembly. They wanted to know why a woman who had been gang-raped on the orders of a panchayat, been placed on the Exit Control List, while the perpetrators had been released. The adviser’s remarks did nothing to address that, and, in fact, reflected a pettiness of approach.

As for the initial plan that preventing her from travelling abroad would somehow avoid a lot of negative publicity for the country and its government, just the opposite happened. Newspapers in Pakistan, especially the English-language press, wrote strongly critically of the government’s conduct in this episode. This was followed by a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof and a lead editorial on the issue, both of which demanded that the Bush administration raise issue with Islamabad on the matter of human, especially women’s, rights. And then on June 15, the Voice of America quoted a US State Department spokesman as saying that the travel restriction on Mukhtaran Mai had been lifted after “high-level intervention” by the US government.

The report quoted State Department spokesman Sean McCormack as describing Mukhtaran as a “courageous woman and victim of a horrendous crime.” She was “welcome to visit the United States at any time”. The VOA report further quoted him as saying on June 15 at a press briefing: “We conveyed our views about these restrictions to the senior levels of the Pakistani government... We have also advised Pakistani officials that she was invited to the United States by a Pakistani organization based in the US”.

Apart from the New York Times’ influential readership, which got to read Mr Kristof’s column and the newspaper’s own stinging comment on the matter, papers around the world carried reports of the outrageous manner in which Mukhtaran Mai had been prevented from flying out to the US and the limits imposed on her free movement even within Pakistan.

On June 16, several international media outlets carried the news that the travel ban on Mukhtaran had been lifted and almost all of them said that this had been done after the US government exerted pressure on Pakistan. These included the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Independent, the Indian Express, the Telegraph (India), The Age (Australia), Reuters, BBC News, ABC News, CBC News (Canada), Sify News (India) and AKI (Italy), to name a few.

Even local newspapers in the US carried the report meaning that the result of the mishandling is that the rest of the world thinks that justice in Pakistan is so perverted that a gang-rape victim is forbidden to move freely within or outside the country while her rapists are free and face no such restrictions. Those who know how things work in Pakistan would know that while the interior ministry sends the names of people who are to be placed on the ECL, such instructions usually come from various intelligence agencies.

It is quite plausible that the same happened in this case too. In their misguided view, they mounted what they thought would be an effective damage-control exercise by stopping Mukhtaran Mai from travelling abroad. In any case, it doesn’t matter who made the decision; whoever did it seems to have had idea how images are built up, maintained or destroyed.

The government may hire all the expensive image-building consultants it wants, as it recently did, but it should know that it is its own actions and decisions or lack of them that most

effectively project the country’s image to the rest of the world.

One other unfortunate aspect of the whole affair is that on many issues the only voice that the Pakistan government yield to is not that of its elected representatives, media or civil society but that of Washington. It might deny this but the US State Department already seems to have taken credit for the quick cancellation of the travel ban on Mukhtaran Mai.

Email: Omarq@cyber.net.pk

An issue of legitimacy

EVEN had the European constitution scraped through in the French and Dutch referendums — the most that could have been hoped for after so many months of gloomy polls — the union would still have been in crisis.

The difficulty then would have been that, where Europeans had a direct say in the matter, they were evenly split between opponents and supporters, and, as the chain of referendums continued, each vote would have been seen as either shifting the balance or confirming that unhealthy division.

It would have been no good saying, as some do now, that parliaments representing half or more of the European population had already approved the constitution because, rightly or wrongly, those decisions do not carry the same sort of weight in the public eye as do referendums. That would have been especially the case if opinion polls had been held, as they certainly would have been, either ahead of parliamentary votes or retrospectively, and had shown results contrary to those known or expected.

The legitimacy of the constitution would have been pretty ragged by the end of the process. The problem of a huge popular protest against what is taken to be Europe’s direction would have been almost on the same scale as the one we actually face, but the union might just have got away with it.

Now, however, the ratification process is even more an issue of legitimacy. If it previousl y had the aspect of a perfect showjumper’s round, in which not a single major obstacle could be refused or knocked over, today it looks more like a race in which key competitors have collapsed from heat exhaustion, some of those remaining are on foot and some on bicycles, and the audience has gone home.

How to count referendum votes against parliamentary votes, how to count Polish yes votes, say, against French or British no votes, and what, even if this arithmetic could somehow be done, the exercise would actually mean, is very hard to say. Yet that is what Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder and others seem to be recommending. Maybe they can think of nothing else to propose, or maybe they would prefer to leave it to someone else to declare that carrying on with ratification is not a good idea.

—The Guardian, London

Cooperation, not conflict

THE relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, it represents perhaps the most consistent expression of a bipartisan, long-range American foreign policy. Starting with Richard Nixon, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations with China and the American commitment to a one-China policy — albeit with temporary detours at the beginning of the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

President Bush and Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell have described relations with China as the best since the opening to Beijing in 1971. The two presidents, Bush and Hu Jintao, are planning reciprocal visits to Washington and Beijing this year and to meet several times at multilateral forums.

Nevertheless, ambivalence has suddenly re-emerged. Various officials, members of Congress and media are attacking China’s policies, from the exchange rate to military buildup, much of it in a tone implying China is on some sort of probation. To many, China’s rise has become the most significant challenge to U.S. security.

Before dealing with a long-range view on how to keep the relationship from becoming hostage to reciprocal pinpricks, I must point out that the consulting company I chair advises clients with business interests around the world, including China. Also, in early May, I spent a week in China, much of it as a guest of the government.

The rise of China — and of Asia — will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The centre of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic, where it was lodged for the past three centuries, to the Pacific. The most rapidly developing countries are located in Asia, with a growing means to vindicate their perception of the national interest.

China’s emerging role is often compared to that of imperial Germany at the beginning of the last century, the implication being that a strategic confrontation is inevitable and the United States had best prepare for it. That assumption is as dangerous as it is wrong. The European system of the 19th century assumed that its major powers would, in the end, vindicate their interests by force. Each nation thought a war would be short and that, at its end, its strategic position would have improved.

Only the reckless could make such calculations in a globalized world of nuclear weapons. War between major powers would be a catastrophe for all participants; there would be no winners; the task of reconstruction would dwarf the causes of the conflict. Which leader who entered the First World War so insouciantly in 1914 would not have recoiled had he been able to imagine the world at its end in 1918? Our age knows the consequences, at least nearly enough. Wise statesmen will do their utmost to avoid the re-emergence of the deadly calculus that, after Germany’s rise, turned the international system into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Another special factor that a century ago drove the international system to confrontation was the provocative style of German diplomacy. In 1900, a combination of Russia, France and Britain would have seemed inconceivable given the conflicts between Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia and between France and Britain over the sources of the Nile. Fourteen years later, a bullying German diplomacy had brought it about, challenging Britain with a naval buildup and seeking to humiliate Russia over Bosnia in 1908 and France in two crises over Morocco in 1905 and 1911.

Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. Clausewitz, the leading Western strategic theoretician, addresses the preparation and conduct of a central battle. Sun Tzu, his Chinese counterpart, focuses on the psychological weakening of the adversary. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances — only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown.

It is unwise to substitute China for the Soviet Union in our thinking and to apply to it the policy of military containment of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was heir of an imperialist tradition, which, between Peter the Great and the end of the Second World War, had projected Russia from the region around Moscow to the centre of Europe. The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years. The Russian empire was governed by force; the Chinese empire by cultural conformity with substantial force in the background. At the end of the Second World War, Russia found itself face to face with weak countries along all its borders and unwisely relied on a policy of occupation and intimidation beyond the long-term capacity of the Russian state.

The strategic equation in Asia is altogether different. American policy in Asia must not mesmerize itself with the Chinese military buildup. There is no doubt that China is increasing its military forces, which were neglected during the first phase of its economic reform. But even at its highest estimate, the Chinese military budget is less than 20 percent of America’s; it is barely, if at all, ahead of that of Japan and, of course, much less than the combined military budgets of Japan, India and Russia, all bordering China — not to speak of Taiwan’s military modernization supported by American decisions made in 2001. Russia and India possess nuclear weapons.

In a crisis threatening its survival, Japan could quickly acquire them and might do so formally if the North Korean nuclear problem is not solved. When China affirms its cooperative intentions and denies a military challenge, it expresses less a preference than the strategic realities. The challenge posed by China for the medium-term future will, in all likelihood, be political and economic, not military.

The problem of Taiwan is an exception and is often invoked as a potential trigger. This could happen if either side abandons the restraint that has characterized U.S.-Chinese relations on the subject for over a generation. But it is far from inevitable. Almost all countries — and all major ones — have recognized China’s claim that Taiwan is part of China. So have seven American presidents of both parties — none more emphatically than President George W. Bush. Both sides have managed the occasional incongruities of this state of affairs with some skill.

In 1972, Beijing accepted a visit by President Nixon, even while the United States recognized Taipei as the capital of all of China, and by another president — Gerald Ford — under the same ground rules in 1975. Diplomatic relations were not established until 1979. Despite substantial U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Sino-American relations have steadily improved based on three principles: American recognition of the one-China principle and opposition to an independent Taiwan; China’s understanding that America requires the solution to be peaceful and is prepared to vindicate that principle; restraint by all parties in not exacerbating tensions in the Taiwan Straits.

That delicate balance has held steady for 33 years. The task now is to keep the Taiwan issue in a negotiating framework. The recent visit to Beijing by the heads of two of Taiwan’s three major parties may be a forerunner. Talks on reducing the buildup in the Taiwan Straits seem feasible.

With respect to the overall balance, China’s large and educated population, its vast markets, its growing role in the world economy and global financial system foreshadow an increasing capacity to pose an array of incentives and risks, the currency of international influence. Short of seeking to destroy China as a functioning entity, however, this capacity is inherent in the global economic and financial processes that America has been pre-eminent in fostering.

In that context, the historic American aim of opposing hegemony in Asia — first announced as a joint aim with China in the Shanghai Communique of 1972 — remains valid. It will have to be pursued, however, primarily by political and economic measures — albeit backed by American power.

The test of China’s intentions will be whether its growing capacity will be used to seek to exclude America from Asia or whether it will be part of a cooperative effort. Paradoxically, the best strategy for achieving anti-hegemonic objectives is to maintain close relations with all the major countries of Asia, including China. In that sense, the rise of Asia will be a test of America’s competitiveness in the world now emerging, especially in the countries of Asia.

The vast majority of nations view their relations with America in terms of their perception of their own interests. In a U.S. confrontation with China, they will seek to avoid choosing sides; at the same time, they will generally have greater incentives for participating in a multilateral system with America than adopting an exclusionary Asian nationalism. They will not want to be seen as pieces of an American design. India, for example, perceives ever closer common interests with the United States regarding opposition to radical Islam, some aspects of nuclear proliferation and the integrity of Asean, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

It sees no need to give these common purposes an ideological or anti-Chinese character. It finds no inconsistency between its dramatically improving relations with the United States and proclaiming a strategic partnership with China. American insistence on an ideological crusade and on a Cold War-type of containment might accelerate such gestures. And they would risk inflaming India’s Muslim population.

China, in its own interest, is seeking cooperation with the United States for many reasons, including the need to close the gap between its own developed and developing regions; the imperative of adjusting its political institutions to the accelerating economic and technological revolutions; the potentially catastrophic impact of a Cold War with America on the continued raising of the standard of living, on which the legitimacy of the government depends. But from this it does not follow that any damage to China caused by a Cold War would benefit America. We would have few followers anywhere in Asia. Asian countries would continue trading with China. Whatever happens, China will not disappear. The American interest in cooperative relations with China is for the pursuit of world peace.

Pre-emption is not a feasible policy toward a country of China’s magnitude. It cannot be in our interest to have new generations in China grow up with a perception of a permanently and inherently hostile United States. It cannot be in China’s interest to be perceived in America as being exclusively focused on its own narrow domestic or Asian interests.

The issue of nuclear weapons in North Korea is an important test case. It is often presented as an example of Chinese failure to fulfil all its possibilities. But anyone familiar with Chinese conduct over the past decade knows that China has come a long way in defining a parallel interest with respect to doing away with the nuclear arsenal in North Korea.

Its patience in dealing with the problem is grating on some American policymakers. But it partly reflects the reality that the North Korean problem is more complex for China than for the U.S. America concentrates on nuclear weapons in North Korea; China is worried about the potential for chaos along its borders. These concerns are not incompatible; they may require enlarging the framework of discussions from North Korea to Northeast Asia.

Attitudes are psychologically important. China needs to be careful about policies seeming to exclude America from Asia and our sensitivities regarding human rights, which will influence the flexibility and scope of America’s stance toward China. America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government.

As a new century begins, the relations between China and the U.S. may well determine whether our children will live in turmoil even worse than the 20th century or whether they will witness a new world order compatible with universal aspirations for peace and progress. —Dawn/Tribune Media Service

The writer is a former secretary of state of the United States.

Candour on immigration

IMMIGRATION is crawling its way back onto the national agenda — and not just as a footnote to keeping terrorists out. This year Congress enacted a law intended to prevent illegal immigrants from getting state driver’s licences.

The volunteer “minutemen” who recently patrolled the porous Arizona border with Mexico attracted huge attention, and members of Congress from both parties are crafting proposals to deal with illegal immigration. All this is good. But unless we’re brutally candid with ourselves, it won’t amount to much. Being brutally candid means recognizing that the huge and largely uncontrolled flow of unskilled Latino workers into the United States is increasingly sabotaging the assimilation process.

Americans rightly glorify our heritage of absorbing immigrants. Over time, they move into the economic, political and social mainstream; over time, they become American rather than whatever they were — even though immigrants themselves constantly refashion the American identity.

But no society has a boundless capacity to accept newcomers, especially when many are poor and unskilled. There are now an estimated 34 million immigrants in the United States, about a third of them illegal. About 35 per cent of all immigrants lack health insurance and 26 per cent receive some sort of federal benefit, reports Steven Camarota of the Centre for Immigration Studies. To make immigration succeed, we need (paradoxically) to control immigration.

Although this is common sense, it’s common sense that fits uneasily inside our adversarial political culture. You’re supposed to be either pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant — it’s hard to be pro-immigrant and pro tougher immigration restrictions. But that’s the sensible position, as any examination of immigration trends suggests.

Consider a new study of Mexican immigrants by Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz. Mexicans are now the single largest group of US immigrants, 30 per cent of the total as of the 2000 census. Indeed, the present Mexican immigration “is historically unprecedented, being both numerically and proportionately larger than any other immigrant influx in the past century,” note Borjas and Katz. In 1920, for example, the two largest immigrant groups — Germans and Italians — totalled only 24 per cent of the immigrant population.

Some Mexican Americans have made spectacular gains, but the overall picture is dispiriting. Among men, about one in 20 US workers is now a Mexican immigrant; in 1970 that was less than one in 100. Most Mexican workers lacked a high-school diploma in 2000 (63 per cent for men, 57 per cent for women).

Only a tiny share had college degrees (3 per cent for men, 5 per cent for women). By contrast, only 7 per cent of native-born US workers were high school dropouts, and 28 per cent were college graduates in 2000. Mexican workers are inevitably crammed into low-wage jobs: as food workers, janitors, gardeners, labourers, farmworkers. In 2000 their average wages were 41 per cent lower than average US wages for men and 33 per cent lower for women.

What’s particularly disturbing about the Borjas-Katz study is that children of Mexican immigrants don’t advance quickly. In 2000 Americans of Mexican ancestry still had lower levels of educational achievement and wages than most native-born workers. Among men, the wage gap was 27 per cent; about 21 per cent were high school dropouts and only 11 per cent were college graduates.

Borjas and Katz can’t explain the lags. “What’s the role of culture vs. lousy [US] schools?” asks Katz. “It’s hard to say.” Borjas doubts that the cause is discrimination. Low skills seem to explain most of the gap, he says. Indeed, after correcting for education and age, most of the wage gap disappears. Otherwise, says Borjas, “I don’t know.”

But some things we do know — or can infer. For today’s Mexican immigrants (legal or illegal), the closest competitors are tomorrow’s Mexican immigrants (legal or illegal). The more who arrive, the harder it will be for low-skilled workers already here to advance. Despite the recession, immigration did not slow much after 2000, Camarota says.

Not surprisingly, a study by the Pew Hispanic Centre found that inflation-adjusted weekly earnings for all Hispanics (foreign and American-born) dropped by 2.2 per cent in 2003 and 2.6 per cent in 2004. “Latinos are the only major group of workers whose wages have fallen for two consecutive years,” said the study. Similarly, the more poor immigrants there are, the harder it will be for schools to improve the skills of their children. The schools will be overwhelmed; the same goes for social services.

We could do a better job of stopping illegal immigration on our southern border and of policing employers who hire illegal immigrants. At the same time, we could provide legal status to illegal immigrants already here. —Dawn/Washington Post Service

Decline in quality of life

THERE are five national themes that are mauled in the national press on a regular basis — human rights, intolerance, education, corruption and the increasing militarization of civil society. There is a fifth which while it has not been specifically identified, is very much in evidence, and is a spin off of the first three. This is the gradual deterioration in the quality of life.

As long as there are no fundamental changes in the social structure in this country, human rights will continue to figure high on the agenda of the crusading newspaper man. But even he is becoming increasingly disillusioned. At a recent stag dinner, two highly cynical members of the dwindling minority confessed to this writer that there was really no point in banging away at the keyboard week after week, when people who are regularly caught with their fingers in the national till always manage to get away scot-free, and rape victims inevitably end up getting ostracized and punished.

Those television viewers, whose remotes had gotten fixed onto a certain TV channel last Wednesday, would have learned of the extraordinary lengths the establishment has to stoop to in order to cover up what the thinking man sees as a contentious judgment followed by an equally iniquitous administrative decision.

In a stimulating 30 minutes viewers were acquainted with the latest twists in the saga of the multiple rape victim Mukhtaran Mai, as attractive anchor woman Shaheena Salahuddin described the rigours of her situation and placed before Shahida Jamil, a former Sindh law minister, the utter hopelessness of the case.

The nation then learned that a possible reason for placing the multiple-rape victim on the ECL list was that the government was afraid that the rape victim might stir up fresh emotions within the human rights groups in the United States and the horrendous details of the assault might come to the attention of those sections of the media which still characterize Pakistan as a barbaric country with a stone age culture.

The Meerwalla case reminded this writer of other cover-ups that the government executed with certain finesse in the past, especially the one where this writer was officially slapped on the wrist.

The United Arab Emirates used to import young boys who were strapped to the backs of the animals whenever a race was scheduled.

The main function performed by these lads was to scream as loudly as possible when they were whipped by the camel jockeys. The scream apparently goaded the animals to greater speed.

On one occasion, a six-year old child slipped and fell and was crushed by the stampede of camels. The press in Dubai covered the incident in four lines, but a Pakistani reporter got wind of the accident and broke the story in Punjab. At first the police ignored the incident, but eventually decided to take some action.

The camel kids resided in Rahim Yar Khan, where exceptionally poor parents have been known to sell their children, and were recruited by a local agent. The agent was arrested. He got a good lawyer, obtained bail, and within a week was shipping another batch of kids to the Gulf to spur the camels into action. Life is apparently cheap in southern Punjab.

One was naturally appalled at this turn of events. I produced a hard hitting article peppered with illustrations, satisfied that some sort of action would be taken. The reaction came a few days later. A joint secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs telephoned and admonished me for painting such a negative picture of Pakistan.

He added in a tone which suggested that somebody was about to cut off our supply of oil, and that we had offended the Arabs. He also pointed out that my narrative was being used by our “enemies” abroad as propaganda. Would it be possible to publish a retraction?

This writer politely suggested the evil should be nipped in the bud and that the foreign office should exert its influence to ensure that in future people who gamble with other people’s lives should not be given bail.

One can see signs of this deterioration everywhere — In the colleges and universities which use the medium of English, where graduates are churned out by the hundreds and still experience considerable difficulty in putting together a sentence. And in the workplace where employers are increasingly adopting the American work ethic with its inbuilt approach to insecurity, where large clusters of employees are dreadfully unhappy but can’t leave because there is little horizontal mobility for white collar workers and at the end of the day have to be grateful they still have a job.

Also, in the lower middle class home where the breadwinner spends two and a half hours a day commuting to and from his place of work and returns home tired and exhausted to be told by an equally harassed wife that two of their six children are down with measles and they will have to again settle for a non-protein meal now that she has heard on the telly that inflation has crossed the 15 per cent mark.

The deterioration is also occurring in the corridors of power. No action has as yet been initiated by the prime minister against the speaker of the National Assembly for purchasing an 11-million rupee Mercedes Benz with the taxpayers money. Or against the string of defaulters in the king’s party who are currently propping up the government and whose names are still etched in NAB files. And nobody has been able to explain why the military budget was increased so substantially when, “the peace process is irreversible.”

The irony is that while there has never been so much press freedom in Pakistan as can be seen today, the government takes no notice of what is chronicled in the newspapers or what it sees on television. And so while parts of Sindh still have no clean drinking water or electricity and jirgas continue to decide the fate of women, and in some parts of the country life, echoing the words of Thomas Hobbes, is still nasty, brutish and short, somebody in Islamabad thought it fit to order a huge fleet of bullet-proof German cars for a price that could have set up 70 schools in Balochistan.

The president, secure in the knowledge that he is going to be around for another two years, is apparently reluctant to implement action to correct the wrongdoings of other members of the establishment and is content not to rock the boat. What will happen in 2007 only time will tell. However, judging from the way things work in Pakistan, one should not expect much change. The uniform will be the same. Only the face might change.

A cunning plan

CHILDREN seldom get a rest from the attentions of the adult world. A report is published by nutritionists condemning them, yet again, for refusing to eat up their greens and for ranking chocolate and pizza above the likes of swede and liver.

Will grown-ups never learn? How can a child’s uncluttered mind take seriously a world that purports to love the swede or the stag beetle and yet makes life so difficult for both. If pizzas and chocolate are inferior or even unhealthy, why are they so massively marketed and attractively wrapped? Why is beetle-unfriendly gardening equipment the subject of summer offers?

It is enough to make the well-adjusted child retire to a corner to plot heists of the latest Harry Potter .

Without being world-weary, it was ever thus. Lamentations about the deplorable ways of the young go back to the world’s first written records.

Not far behind are well-meaning instructions to do some miniature act of good which is clearly at odds with the ways of the adult world.

The best way to entice a child towards virtue is to use a little of that same guile; portray the turnip or spinach as a dodgy teenage craze (remember Popeye?). Hint that the stag beetle has nasty but interesting habits or can be useful for frightening younger brothers and sisters.

The best teachers never used the nature table as a self-consciously virtuous guide to the beauties of the natural world; more a doorway to its dark secrets, many still needing new Darwins to unravel them.

It has always a been an appealing side to Lady Thatcher (and an explanation of her achievements) that she played a part as a young research chemist in the development of Mr Whippy ice cream.

— The Guardian, London