| July 20, 2005 | Wednesday | Jumadi-us-Sani 12, 1426 |
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Not by rhetoric alone
Let Saudi women drive
BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair may deny it, but there is a lot of truth in what a prestigious British think-tank has said about the link between the London bombings and Britain’s Iraq policy. Popularly known as Chatham House, the think-tank said in a report released on Monday, that Britain’s Iraq policy gave a “boost” to Al Qaeda’s propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising network. It criticized Whitehall’s anti-terrorism strategy and accused the Labour government of acting as a back-seat passenger instead of being an equal partner with the US. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw quickly rose in defence, saying that no less than 25 other countries, too, had been victims of terrorism. He is right, but the issue is not the 25 other countries but Britain.
It is now confirmed even by sections of the western media that 9/11 was used to attack Iraq to advance America’s — and Israel’s — geopolitical interests. In principle Israel is opposed to the existence of an Arab country with some military power, even though Iraq had more or less been defanged after the Kuwait war. But in 2003, Baathist Iraq was still the only Arab country, besides Syria, that had refused to fall in line and was a firm supporter of the Palestinian cause. Iraq’s destruction thus was one of Israel’s major policy objective. However, there was no casus belli available, so between them Washington and London invented the fiction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. How the intelligence was doctored is now known to the whole world. Millions of TV viewers the world over sensed Secretary of State Colin Powell’s discomfiture as he read out to the Security Council the supportive intelligence data that he knew to be false. The Anglo-American twists to the facts included the false uranium trail to Niger and the insertion of the 45-minute warning time in the British intelligence dossier. No one exposed this bizarre falsification of the truth more than the American and British media. That there were no WMDs in Iraq became clear when the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, headed by Dr Hans Blix, reported that it had found no “smoking gun” in Iraq. Yet, these categorical findings made no difference to Washington and London, for both chose to attack Iraq.
The post-war behaviour of the victors has been no less abominable. The abuse of prisoners by American and British soldiers has been widely criticized by world human rights bodies and the international media. As for civilian casualties, Lancet, the British medical journal, puts it at a minimum of 100,000. Meanwhile, suicide bombings, in which a lot of innocent civilians are killed, continue because the occupying powers, which basically mean the US and Britain, have not given a pull-out schedule. All these developments have tended to fuel anti-British sentiments throughout the Muslim world because the Labour government is seen as America’s collaborator. This is a great disappointment for all those who had expected Britain to go with France and Germany and use its special relationship with the US to avert war.
That Al Qaeda should choose to punish and kill British civilians to make Mr Blair change his Iraq policy deserves to be condemned without any reservations. Killing civilian commuters in London is as fiendish as murdering civilians in Baghdad or Fallujah. But the Labour government should take Chatham House and others in Britain seriously when they see a link between the London bombings and Mr Blair’s Iraq policy.
PRESIDENT Musharraf has spoken the right words in combating rising religious extremism and fanaticism. Speaking at a national youth convention in Islamabad, he said that it was important to fight this scourge because if elected to political office such elements would take Pakistan back to the dark ages. With reference to the London attacks of July 7, he castigated those who advocated or supported such actions saying that it was in fact against the tenets of Islam to blow up oneself in order to kill innocent people. Without doubt, this is the right stance to adopt in dealing with the menace of religious obscurantism and fanaticism.
The only problem — and a major one at that — however, is that we have heard these words many times before. We have also seen that the some of the key institutions in the country which can take the initiative in fighting the fanatics have done little to expose the dangers of militancy. For instance, the government has completely failed in its half-hearted attempt to regulate the madressahs, to modernize their curriculum and to bring these institutions within the ambit of government monitoring. In fact, the whole approach to this issue of madressah registration has been obfuscated with the education minister supporting regulation and the religious affairs minister opposing it. The madressahs are now in the spotlight once again because three of the London bombers are believed to have visited some in Pakistan prior to the attacks. Similarly, the government has also failed in its attempts to stop mosque imams from routinely branding those of other sects or faiths as ‘kafirs’ or from glorifying a militant version of Islam at odds with, and bent on converting, the non-Muslim world. It has failed to mobilize the active support of Muslim scholars and intellectuals who believe in a progressive and liberal vision of Islam and who could be an important bulwark against religious intolerance and bigotry. And, there are now reports that jihadi training camps are back in business, although with much less publicity. So where is the government in all of this? The fight against religious extremism and for a more progressive and tolerant Pakistan has to be fought on these fronts but, regrettably, it is nowhere to be found. Until that happens, what the president has said will remain empty rhetoric.
IMAGINE that you are one of the estimated 70 per cent of Saudi women who drive when abroad but are banned from doing so in your own country. It is hard to imagine how such a senseless law can exist in this day and age but it does, and calls to repeal it continue to be met with fierce resistance. On Monday, members of the Saudi ulema once again warned society of the dangers of women driving. They fear that it is likely that women driving could lead to corruption or it could encourage them to mix freely with men. The logic is mind-boggling, especially when Saudi Arabia is known to have one of the highest road accident rates in the world — and that has nothing to do with women drivers. In a defiant move in 1990, nearly 50 Saudi women challenged authorities by going out for a drive. The backlash was severe and the unofficial ban was made into a law. If a woman is now caught driving, her male guardian is made to sign a statement in the presence of the police and representatives from the feared religious police, saying that he will never allow her to drive. It is time for this kind of antediluvian attitude to change for no society can progress if it restricts its women’s movements and actions to that extent.
Interior minister Prince Nayef, ostensibly under growing pressure to allow women to drive, has said that there are more pressing issues facing the country than this. This is tragic, especially since there is growing frustration amongst Saudi women who are said to lead some of the most restrictive lives in the world. The Saudi authorities need to take a lesson or two from neighbouring Kuwait which recently accorded women the right to vote, recognizing the important role women have to play in building their country’s future.