For London, a whiff of the war

IS there any way last Thursday’s tragedy in central London could have been avoided? It would be rash of anyone to offer an unequivocal answer to that question. But let’s suppose, just for a moment, that instead of unconditionally volunteering his nation’s services as a junior partner in George W. Bush’s “pre-emptive” war against Iraq, Tony Blair had taken a principled stand in opposition to that illegal imperialist adventure.

No doubt that is an improbable scenario, but if it had come to pass, what are the chances that the British capital would nonetheless have been subjected to the sort of atrocities that were inflicted on July 7? Given the nature of the terrorist menace, there can be no absolute guarantees. However, it would be hard for anyone reasonable to disagree that, in the event, the likelihood of an attack on London would have diminished considerably, perhaps even to the point of negligibility.

Notwithstanding Blair’s culpability in leading Britain into the Iraqi quagmire, on the basis of ferocious lies and falsified evidence, and in the face of overwhelming popular disenchantment, it would be disingenuous and perhaps even perverse to hold him directly responsible for the murder and mayhem in London. The onus for that rests squarely on the shoulders of those who meticulously planned and carried out the coordinated bombings. Their cold-blooded determination to inflict the maximum possible pain on innocent Londoners, on hundreds of commuters who left home but failed to reach their workplace, is utterly inexcusable.

But the crime does have a context. Terrorism does not take place in a vacuum. Blair had been warned by his intelligence agencies that British involvement in Iraq would considerably increase chances of terrorist strikes. In making his case against the war, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone had specifically cited the heightened likelihood of an attack on the capital. For all that, the relevant agencies were apparently caught unawares — even though the juxtaposition between the bombings and the Group of Eight summit in Scotland hardly qualifies as a stroke of genius on the part of the terrorists.

It may seem fatuous to contend that the timing was predictable, but shouldn’t all those who kept saying that an attack was “a question of not if but when” have wondered whether the G8 summit might be deemed an opportune moment for a show of force by terrorists? They appear not to have considered that possibility, given that the alert level had lately been lowered, and a substantial proportion of the Metropolitan Police deployed around Gleneagles. Yet another failure of intelligence? It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe it thus, although it is difficult to see how such lapses might be remedied, short of instituting draconian measures that would attract charges of totalitarianism — and almost certainly prove unacceptable to the citizenry at large. Under existing circumstances, it is far from impossible for a small, highly motivated terrorist cell to go undetected. At the same time, the authorities simply cannot start searching all those who use public transport. And even if they could, the terrorists would be able to find alternative means of perpetrating their foul deeds.

Following initial investigations, Scotland Yard has more or less ruled out the involvement of suicide bombers. It was assumed from the start, not without justification, that deed was planned and carried out by Muslim extremists. A group whose nomenclature suggests it could be the European branch of Al Qaeda is one of a handful to have claimed responsibility.

Such claims, usually posted on websites, are invariably unverifiable. Forensic evidence from the four bomb sites is being meticulously studied, and British police are said to have launched their largest ever manhunt. One ought to wish them success, provided they go after the criminals rather than scapegoats — as happened all too often in the wake of terrorist outrages by the Irish Republican Army.

It’s easy to forget that as recently as two decades ago, terrorist attacks by Irish nationalists were far from uncommon on the British mainland. At one point they tried to decapitate the British government during a Conservative Party conference in Brighton; another time they fired a missile at No.10 Downing Street. Not even the most gung-ho Tories suggested that retaliatory bombing raids on Londonderry or Dublin would be an appropriate response. Instead, the government had the sense to open negotiations, beginning a long and tedious but not entirely fruitless journey. the Northern Ireland question is as yet unresolved, but the sporadic bloodbaths appear to have become a thing of the past.

The same pathway doesn’t appear to be an option vis-a-vis Al Qaeda and its offshoots — there are no obvious candidates for a dialogue, and even if there were, chances are their demands would offer an untenable basis for any sort of compromise. But the IRA experience yields at least one invaluable lesson: that in such conflicts a military solution is rarely a viable option.

On another plane, as Karen Armstrong pointed out in The Guardian on Monday, even at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign, Irish nationalists were never demonized as Catholic terrorists. “Our priority,” she points out, “must be to stem the flow of young people into organizations such Al Qaeda, instead of alienating them by routinely coupling their religion with immoral violence.”

Other media analysts, as well as official British spokesmen, have pointed out that Islam bears little resemblance to the ideology spouted by dangerous fanatics. Of course, the appropriation of a religion by extremists isn’t by any means an exclusively Muslim phenomenon: it continues to happen in Christianity, in Judaism, in Hinduism.

In such cases the compassionate elements of a faith, its appeal to all that’s best in human nature, is often subsumed by dogmatism. For instance, the Christian Right in the United States — which was responsible for Bush’s re-election last year — can be fairly intolerant towards more open-minded variants of Christianity, let alone competing faiths. Likewise, when Al Qaeda gazes out at the world through the distorting prism of its zealotry, it sees relatively unbigoted Muslims as apostates and adherents of other faiths as infidels.

The trouble, of course, is that the demonization of Islam and Muslims tends to swell the ranks of extremists. This profoundly unfortunate phenomenon is not unknown among Britain’s 1.3 million Muslims. It is yet to be determined whether the perpetrators of the London outrages were British citizens or foreigners, but even in the latter case they are likely to have had some local logistical support.

Just as a handful of British citizens were found fighting on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, there have been cases of Britons bolstering the Iraqi resistance and volunteering as suicide bombers in Palestine. They may be part of a minuscule minority, but any backlash is likely to be indiscriminate. And its worst consequence will be to create new recruits for the purveyors of violence. As has been happening in Iraq on a much grander scale.

In his response to the events in London, Blair was considerably less ineloquent than his American best friend would have been in comparable circumstances, yet, as Mike Marqusee pointed out in Red Pepper, a monthly British journal, “While the delivery may be slicker, his ‘us vs them’ worldview was indistinguishable from Bush’s. Even by Blair’s standards, it was a performance of nauseating hypocrisy, as he sought to seize the moral high ground in relation to violence and destruction that he himself helped unleash.”

The tableau he set up for his second statement of the day was even more nauseating: Blair was flanked by Bush and Jacques Chirac, with the rest of the G8 leaders and their guests from Africa, India and China stoically standing to attention on the sidelines.

Maybe Ken Livingstone had caught a glimpse of his grotesque charade before he issued a statement saying, almost wistfully: “This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old.”

He went on to address the perpetrators: “In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.”

London is indeed one of the world’s most multicultural capitals, but the attack would have been just as reprehensible had the city been predominantly, or even exclusively, Anglo-Saxon. Condemnation of the deed must be unconditional. But it is important not to lose perspective. On the moral plane, those responsible for it are only as guilty as those who rained death and destruction upon Fallujah. As Gary Younge wrote in The Guardian on Monday, “the two should not be equated .... what Fallujah went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly”. The Bush-Blair combo claims that the war against Iraq, which is believed to have consumed at least 100,000 Iraqi lives, is intended to keep terrorism at bay. In which case it clearly hasn’t worked.

As Britons pause at midday tomorrow for two minutes of silence, the foremost thought on many minds will be that they did not deserve last Thursday’s visitation. It’s not hard to empathize with that feeling. Hopefully, most of them will also realize that they don’t deserve Tony Blair.

What after the blasts?

JULY 7, 2005, that saw horrific bombings in three tube stations and a double-decker bus in London, represented as much a “day of infamy” for the British, as September 11, 2001, did for their American cousins. It was a day on which they were celebrating the selection of London as the venue for the 2012 Olympics.

It was the day that Prime Minister Tony Blair was hosting a G8 summit at which he hoped to win approval for debt forgiveness and increased aid for the impoverished nations of Africa from the world’s richest and most powerful nations, and perhaps even persuade President George Bush to not only acknowledge the dire consequences of global warming but to cooperate with the rest of the world to reduce the emissions that were causing it. All this became peripheral.

The British have reacted admirably. Reports suggest that the contingency planning and mock drills the British police and other authorities had organized in anticipation of such a terrorist attack, enabled them to carry out the rescue work and the treatment of the wounded with remarkably well coordinated efficiency. The legendary British stoicism in the face of adversity was quickly reinforced by evoking memories of the manner in which Londoners had coped with the London Blitz 65 years ago when they had carried on with their day to day tasks even while bombs of the Luftwaffe rained down on the city.

On the political front, as was to be expected, there has been a rallying behind the Blair government and any questions and criticisms that the opposition may have, have been muted for the time being. A large degree of normalcy has returned to the city and one can be certain that alongside the conducting of the most intense investigation of the bomb blasts, the London and British authorities are also making preparations for the hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

An intense effort has also been mounted to prevent people from jumping to conclusions about who the perpetrators were. But of course, all speculation centres on the fact that this attack was carried out by the Al Qaeda or an allied group of Muslim extremists. As a result Muslims and their places of worship have become targets of ire not only in the UK but in faraway New Zealand, where three mosques and cultural centres were vandalized with the graffiti sprayed on the walls clearly indicating that the London bombings were the provocation for the attack. In the UK, the spate of hate mail — more than 30,000 messages — caused the server of a Muslim organization to crash. There were complaints registered about arson attempts on mosques and Muslim community centres all over the UK — the last BBC report I saw listed four attacks reported by the police, three attacks listed by a Muslim newspaper and several attacks in London reported by the Muslim Council of Britain — and these are being robustly investigated. But the police believe that many other cases of violence or attempted violence have gone unreported as many in the Muslim community retreat into their shells and hope that the storm will pass. For them, the experience is not new. 9/11 had prompted such attacks as had every subsequent terrorist incident in Europe.

Phrases such as the “world has changed” have not been used in the UK. But the fact of the matter is that the world will, in fact, be seen as having changed. The British have had a long tradition of maintaining individual freedoms and providing asylum to political dissidents from all over the world. They have fostered multiculturalism and, it is said, it was by projecting London as a city of diverse ethnic groups and cultures that the British were able to win the bid for the 2012 Olympics. On the other hand, the UK has been perceived as a safe haven for Islamic militants or at least fiery preachers who provide inspiration to the terrorists.

The US and the UK’s partners in the EU have been urging the British to enforce greater checks on British Muslims who, as British citizens, can travel freely to Europe and under the visa waiver programme to the United States. Even before July 7, the UK was beginning to respond. Earlier this year, the Tories joined the ruling Labour Party in embracing sweeping immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures for asylum and family reunification, a computerized exit-entry system like the new US visitor and immigration status indicator technology programme. Responding to what appeared to be popular demand, they also campaigned for numerical caps on immigrants. Proposals for an ID card system had been mooted and discussed but not adopted.

It is now likely that the ID card will be pushed through and immigration caps along with even more stringent visa regulations particularly for visitors from Muslim countries will be introduced. The indigenous Muslims, already in many cases the subject of surveillance, will suffer further and there will be less subtle discrimination. The events of July 7 as much as the need to be seen as making London a safe city for the Olympics make this almost inevitable. The impact on the British Muslim of Pakistani, and to a lesser extent of Bangladesh, origin will be severe. I will return to this subject in my next article.

Most observers agree that even though Osama bin Laden had identified the UK as a crusader country responsible for many of the ills afflicting the Muslims it was Blair’s unstinting support for the American war on Iraq that made a terrorist attack on London inevitable. Daniel Benjamin, the author of a soon to be published book entitled The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, has in a recent piece recalled that the former British ambassador to Italy had, a little before the American presidential election of 2004, termed President Bush the “best recruiting agent for Al Qaeda” and opined that “if anyone is willing to celebrate President Bush’s re-election it is Al Qaeda”.

I have used this quote because it is colourful and evocative of the bitter feelings aroused by the Bush created Iraqi quagmire. But in more prosaic terms, the CIA itself warned in a classified report in May this year that Iraq — since the American invasion in 2003 — had become a training ground in which novice terrorists were schooled in assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other terror techniques. The report said Iraq could prove to be more effective than Afghanistan in the early days of Al Qaeda as a place to train terrorists who could then disperse to other parts of the world, including the United States.

But there is an even more ominous consequence of the Iraqi invasion and, ironically, the success in decimating the Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda leadership. The Iraqi invasion confirmed the suspicions of unassimilated disaffected Muslim settlers in the UK and Europe that the United States in particular and the West in general was intent upon destroying Islam and occupying Islamic countries. (Muslims form the single largest minority in most of the West European countries.

The immigrants from Muslim countries and their children number between 15-20 million. Most live in isolation). The Al Qaeda was perhaps no longer able to provide training or guidance but it became their inspiration for forming groups of their own to fight the ‘infidels’.

In an earlier article on Iraq I had highlighted the apprehensions of the European security agencies that Muslim communities in Europe had become a fertile source of recruits for the insurgency in Iraq. Further readings on the subject suggest that these agencies also suspect that emerging from these communities, are self-starting groups, perhaps with a core membership of Iraqi insurgency veterans, who are independent of Al Qaeda but are using its techniques to carry out terrorist attacks. It is probable according to some experts that the investigation in London may reveal that the perpetrators were part of one such group.

One American observer maintains that “The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells”. It follows, he believes, that in this circumstance, with no obvious target to retaliate against, the West will shut out the Muslims by denying them visas and by treating every resident Muslim as guilty until proven innocent.

He advocates that to avoid this, the Muslim world must really “restrain, inhibit and denounce its extremists”. These are hard words. They ignore, as only the powerful can ignore, the contribution the US in particular and the West in general have made to the creation of these “extremists”.

The Muslim reply could be, as Tariq Ali said in a recent article, “The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine...As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge”. Again powerful words but very dangerous. The damage that these “young people” do to the West is nothing compared to the damage they do to the body politic and social structures of their own countries. It is the Muslim countries rather than the West that will regress into chaos if extremism is not curbed.

Hopefully the West will help the Muslim countries. Prime Minister Blair, speaking after the London blasts talked of the underlying causes of violence and identified them as being deprivation, lack of democracy and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. He felt that to pull out the roots of terrorism required boosting the understanding between peoples of different religions, helping people in the Middle East find the path to democracy and easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Indications, however, are that the easing of conflict in Palestine will only be on Israeli terms. The Israelis have now acknowledged that the fence they are building around Jerusalem will deprive 55,000 Palestinians of access to their workplaces and make a mockery of the concept of a contiguous Palestinian state. There is no indication that Blair will be able to persuade the Americans to negate this approach.

I would argue, however, that while such developments will cause justified anger in the Muslim world and will make the task of curbing extremism more difficult it is incumbent upon each Muslim country to use all its resources to do just that. The Muslim countries would do no favour to the Palestinian cause, or indeed to any other Muslim cause, if they allow extremism to destroy the fragile fabric of their societies. Perhaps no country other than Pakistan has more experience of the disaster that can flow from allowing extremism to take root in its society in the deluded belief that this can then be harnessed to serve Islam, a national interest or a regime’s vested interest. Suffice it to say that today we have to live with the fact that sectarianism is rife, the Hudood and blasphemy laws cannot be repealed or modified, the Hasba is to become law in one part of the country and Pakistan stands accused of allowing wittingly or unwittingly the use of its territory by extremists to wage war against a government in Afghanistan with which we desire the friendliest of relations.

Reacting to the London bombing President Pervez Musharraf has warned that this would have a deep impact on the Muslim world and has been quoted as saying that “We should move together with the world in the war on terror and this way we would be on the safe side. Otherwise, we would be facing terrifying results.”

Next week I will try and suggest what this should mean in terms of the concrete action we need to take to be on the “safe side”, not only for solidarity with the rest of the world but to preserve ourselves as we would want to be.

Farce or fiction?

IN Pakistan, all the 365 days of the year are Rulers’ Days, whether the ruler is a political party or the military, and it is decent of them to lend some of them to the United Nations for occasions like Children’s Day and Women’s Day and the altogether unnecessary Senior Citizens’ Day.

I call it unnecessary because the rulers may be doing something for women and children in their own way, but the Senior Citizens’ Day obliges them to tell lies, make silly promises and use up all their stock of cliches.

For instance, newspapers reported after the day observed on First of October last year: “The government has established a Senior Citizens’ Task Force in support of the fundamental right of the elderly to a dignified, economically secure and productive life. It is to devise methods to maximize the intellectual contribution of the older people, thus fostering an inclusive concept of a society for all.” Did you ever see a bigger collection of cliches anywhere else in a paragraph of just 50 words?

There are some fields of welfare activity in which no government in Pakistan would do anything off its own bat. It’s only when the subject is adopted by the United Nations as one of its welfare objectives that the government feels obliged to make a show of interest so that it may be counted among the civilized, and should not appear to lag behind the rest of the world. The Senior Citizens’ Day is one of those things.

And so far as a government dominated by the military is concerned, what better than a Task Force to solve the problems of the aged? Anyway it’s a good mental exercise for old people like me to imagine how this Task Force is going to enhance my dignity in a social milieu that believes that I have lost my utility. I say “imagine” because nothing has been heard for a long time about the so-called Task Force.

I have been wondering what the last conference called by the federal government on the Senior Citizens’ Day discussed by way of problems of the aged. (Official handouts never tell the truth). There was talk of poverty, but only in the context of retired public servants. They do not make up even one per cent of the total population of people above 65, the age when you get promoted as a senior citizen. Did the conference also take into account the millions of the really poor and decrepit, including the ageless baba who stands at my street corner silently begging for alms?

For more than 17 years now the associations of pensioners, who were all invited to the conference, have been literally imploring the government to end the discrepancy that is totally unjustified. Their appeals have fallen on deaf years. The Wafaqi Mohtasib gave a verdict against the differentiation, the Supreme Court endorsed it, but the government in the Finance Ministry remained unmoved. I am told that Mr Shaukat Aziz, who is a very good prime minister otherwise, agreed with the government view because he is basically the finance minister.

Well, the government was not unmoved really. There was a motion now and then, and every one of the half a dozen regimes since 1986 (when the Mohtasib gave his findings) have said, “We are giving serious consideration to the matter.” You can imagine how serious that consideration must be that it has taken successive governments 17 years pondering it, with no end in sight.

A lady high up in government told the First of October conference that she would “send a strong message” to the Pay and Pension Committee to bring old pensions at par with new ones when it wakes up. (The Committee has been at work for many years and is still to submit its recommendations). Obviously shaking in their shoes at the lady’s threat, its members hastened to change its name to the Pension and Pay Committee. Do you comprehend the revolutionary change? Now pensions come first! But you can bet the situation about the new and old pensions will remain the same.

I recall the first ever such conference in which prime minister Nawaz sharif mechanically read out a list of silly concessions for senior citizens that have still to be implemented. The conference was a masterpiece of bad management, with brash young PML workers shoving older people aside to get close to their beloved leader. The only retired official whose problems were solved that day was the one killed by a racing police truck as he was leaving the location after vainly trying to get in. The others spent the day looking for parks in Islamabad where their entry would now be free, and found there was no entry fee for any park.

What successive governments have failed to realize is that old people need financial assistance most of all. If they can be self-sufficient to a reasonable extent dignity and respect will come automatically. Fortunately the average family in Pakistan still cares for its aged members, and I have heard people scorning the government’s promises to help. “We can look after our buzurgs,” they say.

Take my case. I finally retired from a Grade-20 job in 1989 after an extension and two contract appointments. I am still earning my bread and butter, for my permanent income and pension are not enough for my needs. All that I want by way of relief is my right to free medical treatment, for I can do without free entry into parks and libraries and museums. My monthly bill for medicines comes to nearly 3,000 rupees. Eight years ago I gave up the frustrating exercise of trying to get medicines gratis from the government hospital. Usually there were none because the budget quota had been exhausted by ministers and MNAs and federal secretaries. I can write a whole column on it.

There is another rosy promise that must have excited retired officers. A Senior Citizens’ Talent Pool & Placement Service was being initiated (there’s still no sign of it) with the intention of putting some of them to work if they are physically fit. This wouldn’t have pleased serving officers who would exclaim, “No, don’t tell me that old clot is coming back!” The clot may not necessarily come back to his old department, but the general comments is that this kind of re-employment is contrary to the concept of retirement.

All said and done, the senior citizens stuff as put forth by the government is good fiction, if not a total farce. I wonder when the next instalment is coming.

Population day thoughts

JULY 11 was world population day — a day of introspection on where the human race is heading. In Pakistan, we have plenty of soul-searching to do given our rapidly increasing population and its far-reaching impact on every sector of national life. In 50 years, the population has galloped from 33 million to 152 million to make Pakistan the seventh most populous country in the world.

It is now recognized that one of the causes — not the only one — of the country’s economic backwardness, poor education level and social underdevelopment is the population factor. The government now claims that the population growth rate came down to 1.9 per cent in 2004-2005 — at one time it was three per cent. According to the official sources in Pakistan the total fertility rate (TFR), that is the average number of children a woman has in her reproductive years, has come down from 4.8 in 2000-01 to 4.07 in 2004-05.

All this sounds very impressive. But the UNDP which publishes the Human Development Index every year gives different figures in its report of 2004 (the last to be issued). According to this agency, Pakistan’s population will grow at the rate of 2.4 per cent in 2002-2015. TFR is estimated to be 5.1 in 2000-2005.

What does one make of this wide discrepancy between the Pakistan government’s statistics and the UNDP figures? If this is the positive image of the country we are trying to project, it may not necessarily solve all our problems. If by juggling around with numbers, the policy makers succeed in confusing themselves, their strategy will backfire. It will result in lopsided planning as they would never know the precise number for which provision has to be made.

According to the population policy adopted in 2002, the country should achieve replacement level fertility (TFR of 2.1) by the year 2020. For this it seeks the expansion of family planning services in the rural areas in a big way. The problem with the population policy is that it presumes that by making contraceptive services freely available and accessible to all, the government can induce people to adopt the small family norm all too willingly.

But the fact is that there are other factors which determine family size apart from the availability of birth control facilities, financial assistance to agencies working for population planning, inter-personal and other modes of motivational campaigns and the use of all kinds of means to raise awareness.

It is now universally recognized that the demographic pattern of a country is directly linked to the status of its women in society. The population policy does not lay sufficient emphasis on this prerequisite and it is doubtful if Pakistan can really achieve success in slowing down the population growth rate without raising the status of women and making them equal citizens of the state enjoying respect in society.

The theme of this year’s population day, “family planning: equality in decision”, clearly implies that women should have an equal share in deciding the family size and the spacing of children. This right they can only get if they are accepted on an equal level as men. If it is not recognized that women should share the responsibility of decision making with men in every sphere of life, how will they be entrusted with the responsibility of making decisions on family planning issues?

That is not the only aspect calling for attention. When women do not enjoy the same respect as men, who are accorded a higher status that symbolizes honour, esteem and distinction, the girl child is not accorded the same welcome as her brother. Not many parents accept a family consisting only of daughters. Many family planning workers have observed that parents do not consider their family complete until they have had a son or two. This makes family planning a game of chance, with the gender of the offspring being the key determinant factor of family size.

Given the dismal treatment meted out to women in Pakistani society, to hope for a better status for them is like waiting for Godot. True, conventionally women have been the victims of violence, oppression and discrimination for centuries all over the world. Keeping this fact in view, President Pervez Musharraf recently reacted to the protest against the treatment meted out to Mukhtaran Mai by saying that women have been victims of injustice globally and Pakistan should not be singled out in this particular case.

He offered to hold an international conference to invite these women to come and narrate their ordeals and recommend remedial measures. He was also unhappy that although his government had made tremendous headway in emancipating womenfolk through enlightened policies, none of these achievements were kept in mind when Pakistani society was labelled as retrogressive.

This is a strange argument. Mukhtaran Mai’s case symbolizes the woes a woman in Pakistan — especially if she is not from the elite class and has to rely on state institutions and her standing in society to win justice for herself — has to undergo. Whatever reforms the government has instituted, women are still denied justice, the anti-women jirgas continue to operate blatantly and the infamous Hudood Ordinances are still on the statute book.

Given the chauvinistic attitude many members of our society still harbour, the overall social climate is not woman-friendly at all. Admittedly, in many other countries, including the developed ones, women are also gang raped and become victims of violence. But state institutions there stand strongly behind women and seek to provide them justice and redress the wrong done to them. They do not need pressure from foreign governments and world public opinion to spur them into action. That is important if social prejudices and biases against women have to be uprooted and not be institutionalized as has been the case in Pakistan.

Where the government has dismally failed is in providing state support and protection to women when they become victims of atrocities in the name of honour. It is also important that the gender gap in Pakistan is reduced drastically so that giving birth to a girl means the same advantages as having a son. This is not the case at present.

The World Economic Forum is the latest international forum to measure gender gap. Its index uses economic participation, economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment and health and well-being as the measure. The gender gap index for 58 countries has been calculated on a scale of one to seven (seven representing optimum gender equality). Where does Pakistan figure in this? It is ranked as 56th with a score of 2.90 (Sweden is first with a score of 5.53).

In this climate, would any population planning programme actually work? It is not a coincidence that in all countries, which have succeeded in curbing the population growth rate, the women’s social, economic and legal status has improved concurrently. Pakistan will have to work concertedly on both fronts. This is what a holistic strategy should entail.

The scar of Europe

FEW people outside of the Balkans had heard of Srebrenica before the eastern Bosnian town first registered as a place of horror and shame that ranked alongside Auschwitz in the catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man.

It is both right and necessary that now, 10 years after the systematic massacre of 8,000 Muslims by Serb forces, the world should pause to remember exactly what happened there. Jack Straw — representing the European Union, not just Britain — will be on hand to listen to a specially composed requiem for Srebrenica and prayers for the dead in Europe’s most savage mass killings since the Nazi era.

Those prayers, in Arabic, will be a reminder too of a time when Christians stood by as other Christians killed with impunity in what was officially designated, with what turned out to be literally deadly irony, as a UN “safe area”. And they will recall the multiple and collective failures of western governments, the UN and Nato, which stood by, squabbled and did too little.

This is not the place to analyse those failures nor to reflect on the way that Bosnia’s war ended only after long-delayed US intervention and a deeply flawed peace agreement at Dayton which depended far too much on Slobodan Milosevic, who is still facing genocide charges at the UN war crimes tribunal. But it is a matter of continuing regret, and worse, that the chief architects of the massacre, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, respectively the military and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, remain at large.

—The Guardian, London