| August 10, 2005 | Wednesday | Rajab 4, 1426 |
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Pakistan’s enigma of democracy
Memories of 1945 mass destruction
Plunder of forests
My summer vacation
Koizumi’s last post
MUCH has already been written and said on the nuclear agreement reached between the United States and India in the Pakistani, Indian and international media. In each case, the focus has been different. Our media comment has focused on what this would mean for the strategic balance in South Asia and why this favourable treatment being accorded to India when Pakistan was a key partner in the battle against terrorism etc.
WITH the local bodies elections looming large on the political horizon, the usual wheeling and dealing among politicians has started. This is not something new. In the backdrop, the debate on the quality of our democracy, if we can describe ourselves as one, continues endlessly.
The Indian coverage has focused on the one hand on what concessions the Indians made in other spheres to get this deal and what sort of controls the US and the IAEA would be able to exercise on what had hitherto been a wholly untrammelled nuclear programme and on the other has offered a stout defence of what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been able to get from the US without compromising the essential independence of India’s nuclear programme.
The western media coverage has focused on the fact that the Bush administration has with this decision driven a coach and four through the non-proliferation regime, particularly the NPT and pointed out the adverse consequences for the current negotiations with Iran and North Korea.
Also highlighted are the American motivation in strengthening India as a counterweight to China whose recent moves on Taiwan and increase in defence expenditures have triggered alarm bells in the Pentagon; the strong opposition the administration would face in Congress to amending American laws to permit such cooperation; the opposition from within the nuclear suppliers group to this move; question marks against how far Indian and US policies on China will coincide; and what would be done with regard to Pakistan and its claim for similar treatment.
From what has appeared, the following dispassionate analysis can be made of the motivations of the parties concerned and its global consequences. The agreement did drive a coach and four through the current nonproliferation regime particularly the NPT but the Bush administration has generally a low regard for formal treaties and regimes, and had bought the view that some nuclear proliferation may even be beneficial. The creation of a counterweight to China in Asia was necessary if the US was to be able to maintain its influence over that continent. Even if Indian and American views on China were not identical there would be Sino-Indian regional rivalry and the Americans would be beneficiaries.
Regarding arguments to be used in Congress, the fact is that on a practical plane, India has nuclear weapon status and this could not be reversed. Letting a theoretical adherence to the NPT stand in the way of the development of the much touted strategic partnership was bad politics. India had a moral claim of sorts on American assistance, since after the passage of the non-proliferation legislation the US had reneged on its agreement to provide low enriched uranium for the US supplied Tarapur reactors. More importantly, India had few indigenous sources of natural uranium and such as did exist, produced uranium at extremely high prices.
Production levels had fallen at most of the Indian power reactors because of the shortage of fuel. While Indian research on extracting fuel from the thorium sands would probably yield positive results after some time, for the foreseeable future India would remain dependent on American and other western sources for its uranium fuel requirements. Moreover, even while India had foresworn unilaterally any further nuclear tests the present agreement would make this a formal binding commitment.
From the Indian perspective negotiations were entered into with the hope — perhaps recognized as vain — that India would secure American endorsement for its entry into the nuclear weapons’ club. Failing that securing access to western civilian nuclear technology while accepting no more by way of safeguards than had been accepted by the Nuclear Club members was acceptable. The need for access to uranium for fuel was desperate if the civilian nuclear programme was to continue.
According to the former chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Mr Srinivasan, the old power reactors had reached 85 per cent of full capacity but had to be downgraded because of shortage of fuel. He maintains that “with larger quantities of uranium available at international prices, which are much lower than Indian prices, the operating costs of our older units will go down”. Even more dramatically an Indian official is reported to have told the BBC that “The truth is we were desperate. We have nuclear fuel to last only till the end of 2006. If this agreement had not come through we might have as well closed down our nuclear reactors and by extension, our nuclear programme”.
There would be a problem in separating the civilian and military nuclear facilities. Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has already posed the question of whether such a separation would inhibit India’s ability to decide the nature and size of its nuclear deterrent. The Indians, however, draw comfort from the fact that each nuclear weapon state has negotiated its own language with the IAEA, in the broadly similar safeguards agreements.
An Indian commentator has pointed out that the Chinese safeguard agreement provides that China has only to provide a “list of the facilities” that would come under safeguards, and had the right to “add facilities to or remove facilities from the list as it deems appropriate”, and that it also has the option to “withdraw” materials from the list of facilities under a set of procedures.
A more serious inhibition on the development of a more extensive nuclear deterrent may be the commitment to “continuing India’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing” and “working with the United States for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty” (FMCT). The moratorium on testing could be difficult but the Indian calculation may be that it can continue the development of its nuclear weapons through “cold tests” and that in any case, the US itself appeared to be moving towards a resumption of testing and in that case India could hardly be held to its commitment.
On the FMCT, the Indian response probably would be that in so far as the cut-off treaty is concerned it would be many years before this can be concluded and in the meanwhile India can add enough to its already extensive stockpile of fissile material to meet any foreseeable needs.
Reports from Washington suggest that the administration had not consulted Congress before reaching this agreement with India. It is possible that the original intent may have been to meet India’s fuel requirements particularly for the US-supplied Tarapur plant by using the president’s waiver authority and not to seek amendments in domestic legislation but that the Indians insisted that if they were to make binding commitments on safeguards they needed an assurance of durable supply arrangements that could only come after legislative changes.
Will Congress now agree? There is no doubt that the debate will be intense. The non-proliferation lobby in Washington is girding its loins and there are dedicated non-proliferation advocates in Congress, not least among them Senator Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The record, however, suggests that in 1979-80, a period when relations with India were at low ebb and the presidency (President Carter) was particularly weak the administration was able virtually in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, to get a last shipment of enriched uranium to India for the Tarapur reactor. Today, the administration is better placed particularly, given the Republican majority in both houses and the legislators’ obsession with China.
The nuclear suppliers group will, despite the proliferation concerns of the public in Europe and elsewhere, happily go along with the American decision. The nuclear industries of France, the UK, Russia etc. all starved for business from indigenous sources, will all be anxious to vie for orders and will salivate at the thought of India raising its nuclear power production capacity from the current 3310 Mwe to the 275,000 MWe that Mr Srinivasan visualizes as the nuclear industry’s contribution to India’s energy mix in 2052.
Where does this leave Pakistan? A recent decision of the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) had approved an energy security plan under which Pakistan would enhance its nuclear power generation from 437-mw to 8,800-mw by 2030. Clearly such an increase is not going to come from indigenous sources even though there is mention in the plan of a project to enhance the capacity of the fabrication capacity of the Pinstech laboratories from 300MWe to 1000MWe.
Assistant Secretary Christina Rocca during her recent visit to Pakistan told journalists that American plans for assisting Pakistan meet its energy needs would, in the nuclear field be a mirror image of what had been done with India. The fact, however, is that once American legislation has been amended, the US would be hard put to deny Pakistan access to civilian nuclear technology. It would probably insist on a longer gestation period so that it could convince itself and the world that Pakistan was a responsible nuclear power.
I would assume that in her conversation with President Musharraf shortly after the conclusion of the Indo-US agreement Secretary Condoleezza Rice may have made the point that, for the moment, Pakistan should not make a demand for similar treatment since this would make it difficult to get congressional approval for changes in the law, but after the changes had been made and Pakistan had made further progress in the battle against internal extremism, the issue could be taken up.
Pakistan should regard it as satisfactory. It will ease the current problems with China on getting Chashma II which can now be more easily grandfathered as predating the Chinese adherence to the NSG guidelines. We have no other immediate problems in the nuclear power generation field nor should we have any insurmountable problems in the future in separating the civilian facilities from the military ones. It would probably be cheaper for us in any case as it is for the Indians to get fuel for our civilian facilities — all fully safeguarded from abroad and leave our limited non-civilian fuel production facilities outside the ambit of safeguards contained in the additional protocol which we, like the Indians, would have to conclude with the IAEA.
This may prove to be an overly optimistic assessment of future developments but even if it is borne out we must recognize that there has now been a concrete manifestation of the new strategic relationship between India and the US.
It has been noted in our media and by analysts in Washington that despite the great interest America is said to have in improving Indo-Pakistan relations, this secured no mention in the joint statement nor was there even a hint that the status India sought internationally would be more easily endorsed if it was seen to be at peace with its neighbours in South Asia. This is a new reality that must be factored into our calculations.
The main issue of contention at the moment is whether a serving army chief can be a civilian head of state. It is also contended that the devolution of power he has instituted is designed to promote the hold of vested interests on the governance of the state.
In this context, it would be instructive to revisit the theoretical discourse on democracy. A lot has been written about it, Fareed Zakaria’s’ The Future of Freedom (2004) being one of the most thought-provoking. But in the scenario of the 21st century new elements have influenced the traditional concept of democracy — the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
No autocratic government wants to admit its true nature and therefore, it goes to any length to keep up the facade of being a democracy. There is a stigma of sorts in being an openly dictatorial regime. Hence, the efforts by unconstitutional governments to provide all the trappings of democracy to the state structure and proclaim themselves to be democratic.
According to Freedom House, a Washington-based organization which describes itself as a non-profit, nonpartisan think-tank and a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world, the number of electoral democracies in the world has risen from 69 to 119 since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. This shows that democracy as an idea has gained strength today than at any other time in human history. It has come to stay.
Yet democracy as a system does not necessarily ensure the real empowerment of the people which is the essence of a truly representative form of government. That is because the emphasis has been preponderantly on forms and rituals than on the roots of power and institutional structures.
For instance, elections are regarded as being fundamental to democracy and all debates on the subject in Pakistan have mostly centred on elections, their mode, frequency, qualifications of candidates, etc.
Freedom House has published since 1978 an annual comparative assessment of the state of political and civil liberties in 192 countries. With each country assigned a rating for these two elements based on a scale of one to seven (with one representing the highest degree of freedom and seven the lowest), in the 2005 report Pakistan is classified as “not free” with a score of 5.5.
This is not at all surprising. Even when this country has had elections — sometimes too frequently, as in the nineties — have we been any better off? The controlled polls under military rulers such as the electoral exercises of 1965 under President Ayub Khan, of 1985 under President Ziaul Haq, and of 2002 under General Pervez Musharraf did not give a voice to the people. Even the relatively free elections held by Yahya Khan in 1970 failed to produce a viable and stable representative government, and worse led to the break-up of the country. Ironically, in the elections conducted by civilian governments in 1977, 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1997, the country fared no better in terms of their impact on the people and form of government.
The main factor in this crisis of democracy in Pakistan is the absence of a tradition of constitutional liberalism and the willingness of rulers — even elected ones — to respect the liberties and fundamental rights of citizens. Zakaria succinctly defines this as “tension between constitutional liberalism and democracy” that centres on the scope of governmental authority. Zakaria adds, “Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power; democracy is about its accumulation and use.”
Since we view the elected ruler as the representative of the people, the tendency is to allow him/her to encroach on those powers too which are not really in his/her domain. That is why our democratic rulers have also been so autocratic. This also explains why there has been no meaningful effort towards institution-building which is important if power is not to be centralized in an individual’s hands. Leave aside the political sector in Pakistan, society frowns upon dissent and does not encourage the freedom of expression to the people nor allow them to participate in public life if they are not conformist. Pluralism is conspicuous by its absence.
In this situation, democratic values receive no more than lip service. This pseudo-democracy of the modern age has created paradoxes which can have grim repercussions for Pakistan. On the one hand the concentration of power in the hands of the ruling class denies political empowerment and participatory roles to the people. On the other hand, technology, especially communication technology, and the thrust towards globalization have given groups power of a different kind.
Such groups which generally operate illicitly — drug smugglers, arms dealers, terrorists and others — disengage themselves from the legal, political and social framework of the state to enjoy unparalleled freedom.
They have become independent of the state and network with other likeminded groups to plan and carry out their operations. This so-called democratization of terror has been possible only in an age where democracy has on the one hand raised the expectations of the people and on the other failed to provide them the participation which would have contained their negative impulses.
In the days of yore when democracy was not a widely prevalent idea and the state could use force without any constraints, such groups were easier to check. But not so today. It is only by observing the rule of law fairly and honestly, that a government can neutralize the anti-state elements while retaining the support of the masses. A government without a popular base but which claims to be democratic creates problems for itself by tying its own hands.
SIXTY years ago yesterday, a single plutonium bomb killed 80,000 people in Nagasaki. The Second World War ended about a week later with Japan’s surrender, and it’s only in the past few decades that a causal relationship between Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the outbreak of peace — fairly logical, on the face of it — has increasingly been discredited.
It has long been common knowledge, of course, that Japan was anyhow on the verge of surrender, notwithstanding the presence therein of militarists willing to fight to the last Japanese. Some historians, primarily American, hold that the use of weapons of mass destruction was justified, because a messy ground invasion would have put hundreds of thousands of American lives at risk. On the other hand, researchers have unearthed documents that suggest the surrender was chiefly a consequence of two ostensibly unrelated causes: the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan on August 8, 1945, and an American assurance that Hirohito would not be toppled from the imperial throne.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also come to be seen, with some historical justification, as the first shots fired in the cold war. What’s beyond doubt is that following the atomic attacks, the United States was at pains to conceal evidence of their unspeakable aftermath. The targeted cities were off-limits to all journalists. When an American reporter, George Weller, sneaked into Nagasaki a month after its devastation, his eyewitness accounts, which confirmed rumours of radiation that continued to kill people long after the explosions, were suppressed by military censors. They were published for the first time two months ago, when the Japanese newspaper Mainichi began serializing copies of the reports accidentally unearthed last year by Weller’s son, who believes wartime officials feared his father’s despatches could turn American public opinion against their government’s plan to build a nuclear arsenal.
Be that as it may, there can be little question that nearly a decade and a half later, the almost unbelievably appalling effects of nuclear warfare were common knowledge, at least among government scientists in countries that already possessed weapons of mass destruction. There were only three at the time: the US, the USSR and Britain. Last week, it emerged — again more or less by accident — that when Israel was in the market for heavy water for its then new Dimona reactor in 1958-59 (its request for assistance evidently having been turned down by the Eisenhower administration in the US), it found a willing supplier in Britain.
According to documents discovered by researchers from BBC2’s Newsnight programme, Britain sold Israel 20 tons of heavy water (and turned down a subsequent request for another five tons) without demanding any safeguards that the crucial component wouldn’t be used for military purposes. The deal was purportedly struck for commercial rather than political reasons: Britain had apparently purchased too much heavy water from Norway and the latter refused to buy back the access, but eventually agreed to on-sell it to Israel on Britain’s behalf.
It is being said that the sale was negotiated by civil servants. No evidence of ministerial involvement has emerged thus far. It is also being maintained that Britain concealed the deal from its closest ally: Robert McNamara, who became US defence secretary in 1961, professed complete surprise at last week’s revelation. Perhaps some of these claims deserve to be taken with a pinch or two of salt. Number 10 Downing Street was occupied at the time by Harold Macmillan. France had collaborated with Israel in the construction of Dimona.
In 1956, Britain and France had, alongside Israel, gone to war to war against Egypt. It is hardly inconceivable that helping Israel acquire a nuclear weapons capability was another instance of Anglo-French collaboration. The UK Atomic Energy Authority’s main files on the subject remain classified.
More than 45 years later, Israel — now believed to possess a stockpile of 130 nuclear warheads — remains the great untouchable, even as Britain and France, alongside other European nations, endeavour to persuade Iran against developing what the UK in its own case describes (or at least used to describe) as an “independent nuclear deterrent”. That sort of terminology was sharply devalued by the demise of the Soviet Union, but as Robin Cook pointed out in his last article, the cold war mentality lingers on.
Tony Blair’s former foreign secretary died unexpectedly on Saturday during a walking holiday in his native Scotland. An effective and well-respected parliamentarian for more than 30 years, Cook was less than outstanding at the helm of the Foreign Office (although a decidedly better performer than his invertebrate successor, Jack Straw) and was relegated to leadership of the House of Commons in Blair’s second term. Cook’s moment of glory came on the eve of the aggression against Iraq. In a parliamentary speech on March 17, 2003, he asked: “Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?” He then went on to declare: “I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.”
From the backbenches, Cook remained an eloquent critic of the war and of his nation’s collusion with the US, his loyalty to Blair progressively wearing thin. He eventually began calling upon the prime minister to step aside, and it was widely assumed that there would have been a prominent perch for Cook in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
Cook’s byline could regularly be encountered in the pages of The Guardian, and his final extra-parliamentary intervention was devoted to a coherent argument against possible plans to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines. “There could not be a more convincing way,” he wrote, “for Tony Blair to break from the past and to demonstrate that he is a true modernizer than by making the case that nuclear weapons now have no relevance to Britain’s defences....
“However, the spirit of the cold war lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go of fear and who need an enemy to buttress their own identity. Hence the vacuum left by the cold war has been filled by George Bush’s global war on terror .... Partly as a result, (terrorism) is now a worse threat than ever before.
“But ... elegant theories of deterrence all appear beside the point in the face of a suicide bomber who actively courts martyrdom. And if we ever were deluded enough to wreak our revenge by unleashing a latter-day Hiroshima on a Muslim city, we would incite fanatical terrorism against ourselves for a generation.”
He went on: “There is a chasm too wide for logic to leap, between arguing that Britain must maintain nuclear weapons to guarantee its security, and lecturing Iran et al that the safety of the world would be compromised if they behaved in the same way.”
On Monday, Iran announced it had resumed working on uranium conversion, under IAEA supervision, at a facility near Isfahan — a move that could potentially entail UN sanctions. However, as Cook suggested, hypocrisy isn’t a particularly helpful vantage point for making demands related to disarmament and non-proliferation. In the Middle East, the most galling and provocative aspect of this hypocrisy isn’t America’s continued determination to develop new nuclear weapons, nor Britain or France’s considerably smaller arsenals, nor the tacit Western acceptance of India and Pakistan’s equally lamentable stockpiles. It is the deafening silence over Israel’s warheads.
The destabilizing tussle in that country between rival Zionist factions — those opposed to relinquishing an inch of Palestinian territory, and those who wish to withdraw from the Gaza Strip in order to demonstrate the impracticality of letting go of most of the West Bank — could produce unpredictable consequences and plenty of bloodshed.
On Sunday, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu left his post in Ariel Sharon’s cabinet, declaring: “A unilateral withdrawal without anything in return is not the way.” That sounds a bit like a thief refusing to surrender stolen goods without some sort of compensation.
Netanyahu’s implication points to security guarantees from Palestinians, who are in no position to offer anything of the kind — and with whom Sharon is refusing to negotiate because not even the most pliable of Palestinians could even dream of conceding what the Israeli prime minister has in mind vis-‘a-vis the West Bank. By all indications, the stage is being set not for a stalemate but for yet another indefinite period of strife. One can only hope that no weapons of mass destruction will enter the equation.
That phrase has gone out of fashion ever since nothing matching that description could be found amid the ruins of Iraq, but it returned fleetingly to George Bush’s vocabulary as he announced his intention to despatch the ultra-conservative John Bolton to the UN without congressional approval. The president commended the former undersecretary of state for having “shown valuable leadership on... preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction”
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com
FROM Peshawar comes the news that something is being done at last to prevent the plunder of forests in the Frontier province being carried out by the timber mafia led by corrupt politicians. Which means that the MMA regime there is doing some good work as well apart from giving its people the controversial Hasba Bill.
The same mafia was also active in Azad Kashmir, and maybe still is, but no such news has come from Muzaffarabad. The corruption that takes the form of legally permitted tree-felling is nothing short of a national tragedy. It has been allowed to go on for the last twenty years. Good people have been shouting about it but their voices fell on ears deafened by the wax of graft and selfish political power.
These are the politicians (whom some of us want back in the name of democracy) who knowingly allowed the forests of Dir and other places to be plundered.
Look at the past democrat prime ministers whose concepts of democratic politics consisted of sheer concentration of power in their own hands and overlooking corrupt practices of their friends, cronies and supporters. Many times the problem of permits issued by the Frontier administration for tree-felling was brought to their notice, but not once did they react.
And how could they have reacted? Their cronies who functioned as chief ministers had no other means to seek loyalty of the MPAs, Senators and MNAs, except by offering them opportunities for corruption. The easiest was to issue permits for marked areas in forests for tree-felling, with the obliging Forest Department certifying that the trees had lived out their lives and could be converted into useful timber. A small fee was charged.
The permit-holders did not restrict themselves to the earmarked plots. With chief ministers at their back, and the rifles held ready by their hirelings, they played havoc with the surrounding areas. You may not have noticed that some courageous foresters were given state awards on national days for laying down their lives fighting these goondas. I have yet to see a politician laying down his life for democracy.
How can the thousands of trees felled by the mafia come to life again? You can’t even hold the chief ministers and others accountable for the crime, for it is a crime permitted by law. Issuance of a tree-felling permit cannot be made the subject of an FIR even by converting it into a moral crime. I do not know if misuse of authority of this nature can call for punishment. Some years ago there was an interesting report in newspapers. A provincial minister had made hundreds of appointments, not authorized by rules, in one of his departments. The appointees, whose services were later terminated, went in appeal to the High Court. The department asked the court how it would justify the unbudgeted expenditure incurred on their salaries. The court hinted that it could proceed against the minister under the law to recover the amount from him.
I think this was a landmark verdict. The High Court did not only hand down a decision, it also showed the department a legal way out of its financial problem. In the on-going process of accountability many such cases are bound to come to light against former ministers, and many must already have been decided or filed without any action being taken against the culprits for want of knowing what to do. No political criminal should be allowed to go scot free.
Once upon a time when I used to do a weekly column for an English daily of Peshawar, I must have written some half a dozen times over a period of four years about this scandal of looting the forest wealth of that province. Not once did I feel that my writings had made any difference to anyone, although I am sure the provincial information officials must have been doing their duty of forwarding important clippings to the concerned bosses. I can imagine someone high up saying. “Don’t worry about what journalists say. Poor chaps, they too have to earn their bread.”
I KNOW what I did on my summer vacation. I discussed real estate. Everyone on Martha’s Vineyard discussed houses. It was the main topic of conversation at dinner parties. It topped politics, sex scandals and food.
This is how it went:
“The Gordons have just sold their house for one million two hundred thousand dollars,” Murphy said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“They only paid $750,000 for it five years ago.
Ella Fitzgerald said, “I told Edward to buy it when it was $515,000.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He said he was afraid once he bought it, the house would be put in eminent domain and the government would tear it down to put a Wal-Mart on the property.”
Myron Leavitt said, “When you buy a house, you have to take your chances.”
Edith Jaffe said, “The Mattlocks are breaking up, and I hear they’re going to have to sell the house to pay for their lawyers’ fees. I think if someone offers them two million five, they can get it. It will only take nine hundred thousand to fix it up.”
I asked, “When do you think the bubble will burst?”
Brown, who sells real estate, replied, “It may have already popped. I used to sell a one-bedroom, one-bath ranch house for $750,000. Now the last one I sold went for $730,000.”
Bronstein said, “It scares the hell out of you.”
There was much discussion at the table about mortgages.
Throwback, who’s always bragging, said, “I got five-point-seven percent for a fixed mortgage, thirty years, with no points.”
Nichols said, “You got shafted. I got one for five-point-three per cent and the bank threw in a set of Tupperware.”
Annie Wolf said, “We’re holding back until the rates go down even further. The banks have too much money and they’re begging us to borrow it. My neighbour just got a call from a mortgage company and the guy said he’d refinance his house for three points less than the bank.”
“They always say that on the telephone.”
“This is a wonderful Burgundy wine,” Throwback said.
Nichols said, “It comes from my wine cellar. We built it after we bought the house. It cost us $20,000, not counting the wine.” Hemlock said, “We’re getting a bigger house. But first we’re going to put our present one on the market for one million nine.”
Wolf said, “Even if you get what you’re asking for it, you’ll never find another one like it for that.”
“It wasn’t my idea. It was Cynthia’s. She said we have to keep up with Joneses. They have six bedrooms and we only have four.”
“You heard the Hatchards made two million dollars?”
“What kind of house was on the property?”
“There was no house. It was just land adjoining their property.”
I said, “Can’t we talk about something else besides real estate?”
“OK. Did you hear Martha Stewart is going to sell her house for ten million once she finishes her probation?” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services
IMAGINE Tony Blair standing up in the House of Commons and announcing that the NHS is to be broken up and privatized. That gives some sense of the ferocity and magnitude of the political battle being fought by Mr Blair’s Japanese counterpart, Junichiro Koizumi, over the dismantling and privatisation of Japan’s post office.
In fact, “post office” hardly conveys the institution’s main role in Japanese society: “national savings bank” would be rather more accurate. After all, how many national post offices have a wallet-bulging 3 trillion US dollars in assets? That is a lot of money — by way of rough comparison, the UK’s annual economic output is valued at 1.1 trillion pounds or nearly $2,000 billion.
The fight over the fate of Japan’s post office has rumbled on for almost a year. As opposition hardened, Mr Koizumi staked his remaining political capital on proceeding with privatisation, turning yesterday’s key vote in the upper house into a make or break one for his administration. In losing the vote, thanks to substantial defections within the ruling Liberal Democratic party, it may be that Japan’s post office remains intact while the LDP, Japan’s dominant postwar political party, is the institution that ends up being brutally dismembered.
The LDP has governed Japan for all but 30 months since democracy was instituted in 1948. It has always been a fitful collection of interests whose pragmatic allegiance to being at the centre of power makes the British Conservative party seem like a 1960s commune of tree-huggers.
—The Guardian, London