| September 6, 2005 | Tuesday | Shaban 01, 1426 |
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A bull in the UN’s china shop
Making helmets a must
American heartbreak
I am the American heartbreak The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe
SMARTING from the “massively rigged” local body elections, the opposition has announced that it will launch a pro-democracy movement from September 9. After striking out on their own earlier, the two major opposition alliances, MMA and the ARD, have come together, along with several other smaller groups, to demand a return to the 1973 Constitution as it existed on the day of the Musharraf coup. Some economic issues have also been mentioned as part of the planned agitation, including high prices and unemployment. This marks a change from the previous protests by the MMA that appeared to be focussed more on ideological rhetoric. They failed to either evoke a sympathetic response from the public or persuade the government to be more accommodative of opposition concerns. The government feels that its position is impregnable; its reaction to the new development has been dismissive. But the period between now and the general elections scheduled for 2007 is crucial. The existing constitutional mess, not least as reflected in the new local government system, needs to be seriously tackled if the elections are meant to mark a transition to a genuine democratic order.
The Constitution has over the years become so encrusted with amendments forced by one authoritarian figure or another that it is difficult to remember its original shape. The amendments relate both to efforts to consolidate individual power and to responses to problems that could be tackled only politically, a course that the rulers were unwilling to follow. Institutions have been weakened and corrupted even as the military has sought to entrench itself further in governance. The government believes that it can subordinate every autonomous body to suit its own purposes. In the process, incalculable damage is being inflicted on administrative structures, which have become unresponsive to public needs. Parliamentary sessions are marked by lack of quorum, the absence of key ministers from the house, walkouts and personal exchanges. Law-making is often done through ordinances. Obviously the country has continued to function in spite of these drawbacks, but no long-term constitutional, political or economic stability is in sight.
Will the opposition campaign succeed in creating enough pressure on the government and the establishment to treat these problems seriously? It is very doubtful that it will. For one thing, the environment doesn’t seem right for a mass movement. For another, the opposition itself has proved to be fractious, poorly organized and unable to mobilize its own cadres, let alone the people at large. Two of the main opposition parties are run by remote control, and inevitably there is lack of coordination. It is a measure of the bankruptcy of opposition politics that the steering committee set up for the protest movement includes a retired admiral and two former generals, neither without any party to his credit. The latter two had worked assiduously against the opposition during the Zia dictatorship. A serious effort to start a dialogue with the government on constitutional and political issues remains the best option to get us out of the present morass. The onus for this lies as much on the opposition as on the government. It would be a mistake for the rulers to believe that, in this day and age, they can continue with the hybrid system they have created without irreparably weakening the country’s fabric.
WITH barely ten days to go for the UN’s 60th anniversary summit of 195 heads of state/government, it is a pity that some leaders have decided to raise eleventh hour objections to the draft document that is supposed to outline new approaches to key issues such as poverty, global security and human rights. The draft has been before a 32-member core group since April and it was widely believed that a consensus was on the way, until the United States decided to step in and seek 750 major amendments to the text. Although a task force has now been set up to look into the matter and marathon sessions are being held to sort out the problems, the UN’s task is a daunting one. Failure to reach an agreement would reduce the summit — billed as a historic one — to no more than a ritualistic get-together with the participants endorsing a broad declaration that imposes no obligations on any party.
Mr John Bolton, the United States’ permanent representative to the UN, whose appointment was blocked by the US Senate, was sent to New York by President Bush after bypassing the upper house. Now he is trying to make his presence felt by voicing vociferously the Bush administration’s concerns on issues which have made America so unpopular in the 21st century. For instance, Mr Bolton has rejected the emissions reductions obligations based on the Kyoto agreement, the establishment of the international criminal court, and a commitment by countries to set aside 0.7 per cent of their gross national product to finance aid for Africa.
At the same time the US wants the world body to set up a peace building commission to provide support to countries to make the transition to democracy, agree to independent monitoring of UN spending and create a smaller human rights council to replace the present 66-member commission. But these are bound to run into trouble because without give-and-take and a spirit of compromise, negotiations do not succeed. The Third World which already feels alienated from the US will not support the US-backed proposals if it does not feel obliged to uphold the provisions that promote the interest of developing countries.
IT IS difficult to fathom why the Sindh government’s September 1 deadline — which made wearing helmets for motorcyclists mandatory — was met with criticism from cyclists who find the measure unreasonable given the province’s hot temperatures and polluted environment. There is also a small lobby which seems convinced that the government is in cahoots with helmet manufacturers who stand to benefit from this directive. They find some credence in this view because the price of motorcycle helmets has shot up. While one can sympathize with the motorcyclists on price, no compromise should be made on their safety, which seems to be the primary objective behind the decision. If involved in an accident, motorcyclists not protected by helmets are at a higher risk of suffering fatal head injuries. The rise in traffic accidents is enough cause for concern and requires that safety be given the foremost importance.
No consideration other than the safety of motorcyclists should be allowed to come in the way of enforcement of a sensible measure. Indeed, one should appreciate Sindh’s initiative in the matter — Punjab made the decision in March — for it is an effort on their part to address an important issue: safety on the roads. According to statistics released in February, the number of traffic-related fatalities was between six and seven every day which works out to about 2,400 deaths a year. What makes it even more painful is that by and large, these accidents were avoidable had proper safety rules been observed and enforced. On Friday and Saturday alone, Karachi’s traffic police fined 10,434 people for not wearing helmets. Motorcyclists — many of whom are coming up with ingenious alternatives to helmets — are complaining of police harassment. This matter should be looked into by higher-ups to ensure that the law is followed by all.
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.
— Langston Hughes “American Heartbreak”
IN 1619, twenty African slaves were brought from West Africa to Jamestown, Virginia, one of the thirteen English “colonies” established in North America by early immigrants fleeing religious persecution or hunger or other adversity.
This was more than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed by the luminaries of America’s struggle to free itself of colonial control.
At this point in the history of this enigmatic nation, when shiploads of slaves had begun to arrive at the ports on the eastern seaboard, a series of complex colonial laws began to relegate the Africans and their descendants to the inimical position of being chattel, owned by white masters who were convinced of the inherent inferiority of the “savage” African. Captured Africans were sold at auctions like inanimate property or animals, African women were raped, the children born of this violence sold again into slavery by their masters, in this case their biological fathers.
The legalized practice of enslaving Africans occurred in every colony. Slave labour was required to work the massive cotton, rice and sugar plantations in the southern United States. The economic realities of the Southern colonies perpetuated this institution, cultivation of these particular crops being labour intensive. By 1790 twenty per cent of the total population in the thirteen colonies was of African descent.
In 1808, the government of the United States of America outlawed the transatlantic slave trade, but the domestic trade and illegal importation of slaves continued for several decades. In November 1841, the 135 enslaved Africans on board the ship “Creole” overpowered the crew, murdering one man, while sailing from Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1842, in New Orleans, at the lofty building known as the Rotunda, Africans were sold along with other items of value such as paintings and estate. Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, ten million Africans had been sold at auctions such as the one held regularly at the Rotunda; ten million souls dehumanized and stripped of the last vestiges of dignity and freedom.
What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected, but the lack of control over their lives, their lack of freedom. No state law recognized marriage among slaves, masters rather than parents had legal authority over slave children, and the possibility of forced separation, through sale, hung over every family. These separations were especially frequent in the slave-exporting states of the upper South.
On a typical plantation the capital value of the slaves was greater than the capital value of the land and implements. Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. The total number of slave owners was 385,000. As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88 per cent held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50 per cent held fewer than five. For comparison’s sake, let it be noted that in the 1950s, only two per cent of American families owned corporation stocks equal in value to the 1860 value of a single slave. Thus, slave ownership was much more widespread in the South than corporate investment was in 1950s America.
Undoubtedly, the most outstanding slave revolt in the western hemisphere took place in Haiti. During the French revolution, concepts of the rights of man spread from France to its colonies. In Haiti, the free mulattos petitioned the French revolutionary government for their rights. The Assembly granted their request. However, the French aristocrats in Haiti refused to follow the directives of the Assembly. At this point, two free mulattos, Vincent Oge and Jean Baptiste Chavannes, both of whom had received an education in Paris, led a mulatto rebellion. The Haitian aristocrats quickly and brutally suppressed it.
By this time, however, the concepts of the rights of man had spread to the slaves. In 1791, under the leadership of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the slaves began a long and bloody revolt of their own. Slaves flocked to Toussaint’s support by the thousands until he had an army much larger than any that had fought in the American revolution. This revolt became entangled with the French revolution and the European wars connected with it. After Napoleon came to power in France, he sent a gigantic expedition to reestablish French authority in Haiti. While he claimed to stand for the principles of the revolution, Napoleon’s real interest in Haiti was to make it into a base from which to rebuild a French empire in the western hemisphere.
Toussaint was captured by trickery, but his compatriots carried on the fight for independence. Finally, Napoleon was forced to withdraw from the struggle. One of the results of his failure to suppress the slave revolt in Haiti was his abandonment of his New World dreams and his willingness to sell Louisiana to the United States. Unfortunately, this meant new areas for the expansion of the plantation economy and slavery. In other words, the Haitian revolution was responsible for giving new life to the institution of slavery inside America.
The handing over from France to the United States of this territory carved out of land belonging to native tribes such as the Seminole came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase. One of the cities that emerged in the south of this territory was named after the French city of Orleans, the city vanquished by Joan of Arc in 1429. Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we come to know of the heritage of this city of New Orleans, a history rich with stories of captivity, anguish, struggle, captured poignantly in the lilting strains of the music which grew out of slavery’s agony.
In recent days we have all seen the images of the citizens of this city, overwhelmingly black, struggling to cope with an unprecedented disaster the likes of which has not been experienced by this most prosperous and powerful country. None of the wars that the United States has fought in the 20th and 21st centuries has been fought on its soil. Natural disasters, plausibly precipitated by human carelessness, have taken their toll on the people of the “less developed” world, where images of desperate, dark skinned men and women and children flood the media with a regularity which numbs one to the human tragedies faced by entire nations.
We know of famine and drought, typhoons and tsunamis, civil war and sectarian strife. We know of the dishonouring of women, the dehumanization of men, the blatant disregard of children. We know that these human wrongs are committed within our homes, our cities, our nations. And we have the world’s policeman telling us that it is wrong, it is uncivilized to struggle for self-determination, for equal rights, to insist on the sovereignty of our soil.
And we listen, for we believe that our white master is always right, the Baas of apartheid South Africa, the “Massa” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Godfather of contemporary political realities. We listen, and shamelessly we bow our heads in submission to the will of the mighty, mightily pleased with the “mutually beneficial strategic dimension” which has been acquired by this loss of honour. What, then, do we do when we see images of this mighty leadership, the world’s greatest power, casually dismiss its own citizenry which finds itself homeless, hungry, and desperate? What do we do with our exaggerated sense of self-assurance when the ones we worship fall and flounder in the morass of their own arrogance born of the lethal combination of ignorance and sheer stupidity? Do we look around and peer behind the facade of liberty, democracy and free markets to understand the histories of oppression and tyranny and slavery?
Before the 1790s slavery seemed to be a dying institution in the United States. Most Northern states had set emancipation in motion and the philosophy of the American Revolution — the idea that all men were created equal, with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — also motivated planters to free their slaves. Of crucial importance to the act of freeing slaves was the decline of tobacco. But the introduction of cotton, which increased the demand for slaves, caused a hurried change in attitude.
Before the turn of the 19th century, there was little cotton production in the South. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed that, and with it also the history of Black America. Before the invention of the cotton gin it took a slave a day to clean a pound of the short-staple cotton. With the gin, by contrast, the slave could clean up to 50 pounds a day.
By mid-century America was growing three-quarters of the world’s supply of cotton, most of it shipped to England or New England where it was manufactured into cloth. During this time tobacco fell in value, rice exports at best stayed steady, and sugar began to thrive, but only in Louisiana. The Louisiana Purchase, resulting from the revolution in Haiti, greatly expanded the possibilities of plantation agriculture. This meant a greater need for slave labour.
The Republicans, headed by Jefferson, began to detach themselves from the cause of the French Revolution after 1793. It would have been hard for the slaveowners to remain enthusiastic for the French Revolution after February 1794 when the French National Convention decreed the emancipation of all slaves, both in the dominions of the French Republic and of Great Britain (which had included, up to 1783, the American colonies).
More than two hundred years later, it appears that it is as difficult for the current coterie of neo-conservative republicans ruling America to accept responsibility for a large part of its population living, literally, on the edge. Most of the populations affected seriously by Hurricane Katrina are descendants of African slaves, sons and daughters of Africa, robbed from their homes, flogged with the brutal whip of racist convictions. Are we to believe Ms Condoleezza Rice when she insists that the neglect of the people of New Orleans has nothing to do with the racism inherent in the blatant disregard shown by the government of George W. Bush to all human beings on the wrong side of the divide?