The elusive goal

TO no one’s surprise, Unicef has come out with its pessimistic assessment that the millennium development goal of achieving gender parity in primary education by the end of 2005 will not be met. The target was to have all the children in primary school by the year 2015 and have gender equality by 2005. Now we are told that 115 million children are still out of school and of these 90 million are girls. It is a pity that the Third World countries where these out-of-school children live have failed to promote primary education in a big way. Their failure to send more girls to school has serious implications for these societies.

As the Unicef chief said, female education is the cornerstone of national progress. Without imparting education to women who are the mainstay of social and family structures, governments put at risk their wider efforts to cut poverty, that is the first millennium development goal. There is, however, a silver lining in this bleak cloud. Of the 180 countries for which Unicef has data, 125 are on course to meet the gender parity target — 34 are industrialized while 91 are developing. But the regrettable fact is that the 50 nations, where more girls remain out of school than boys, are the poorest ones. At this rate they may not be able to eliminate poverty either because the education of girls is basic to social, economic and human development. It has a multiplier effect by impacting on factors which in turn have a positive effect on the national economy, society, community and also the family.

Another serious concern is that Pakistan is one of the countries that is off track in the matter of gender equality, especially in school enrolment. A Planning Commission report, prepared by the Centre for Research on Poverty Reduction and Income Distribution in Sept 2005, confirms that gender equality in primary education has not been achieved. Girls’ enrolment is only 85 per cent that of boys in the 5-9 year age group. However, this is an improvement on the earlier ratios — 73 per cent in 1990. According to the MDGs, this should have been 100 per cent in 2005. Besides, at this rate parity will not be reached in 2015 either. The Planning Commission points out the reason for this disparity is the initial low enrolment rates for girls and their high dropout. These need to be addressed. The government admits that a major factor in creating this imbalance is the absence of girls’ schools — nearly a third of rural communities have no schools for girls. This obviously affects female enrolment. But the question not answered in the report is: why is the dropout rate so high? This is a reflection on the poor state of our education which fails to attract students. They leave the system when they find that their schooling offers them no particular advantages while it calls for disproportionately high investment in time, effort and money. The government will, therefore, have to concentrate on not just setting up more girls schools in every community. It must also ensure a good standard for these schools and their teaching if girls are to be persuaded not to leave their education midway. Without a massive effort in this field, women’s empowerment will remain a distant dream. Without education, women will not participate in the social and political processes. Besides, they will not play a role in the social transformation of Pakistan which is essential if the country is to progress.

Preparing for winter

HOLLYWOOD star and UNHCR goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie’s visit to the earthquake-affected areas reflects the worldwide concern over the tragic plight of the quake victims. It will also hopefully remind the people abroad that the need for providing shelter, sanitation, medicines and food for millions of affected people is as urgent as it was several weeks ago. In fact, the need to provide winterized tents, warm clothing and a steady supply of rations and medicines through the harsh winter is increasing with every passing day. Many of those who have not heeded the government’s plea to come down from their mountain villages could be very badly affected by the cold weather. This is a problem especially in the NWFP where the affected areas are steeped in a patriarchal tradition that marginalizes women completely. Such is the ignorance in these areas that many survivors cite local clerics who they say have warned them that if they move to the government camps, the chastity and honour of their women will be compromised because of the presence of strangers.

Hopefully, the severity of the winter will force the men of these areas to head to the camps situated at lower altitudes. Further, to allay the fears of the local people in this regard, the authorities should ensure that there is adequate security at all relief camps. This will also check human traffickers who have reportedly tried in some cases to kidnap young women from the camps. In addition to this, pictures and reports coming from some areas suggest at least one very positive development — the re-opening of many schools. Here, though, it has been seen that some of the schools are open-air. Surely the students will need a roof as well as walls as the winter months approach. There have also been reports of organized gangs, patronized by local officials or political parties, looting relief goods and of army officials having sold bags of wheat to survivors. All this should be investigated and those held responsible for profiting at the expense of the hapless survivors awarded exemplary punishment. Most of all, coordination remains of paramount importance to ensure that the survivors have adequate shelter, food, warm clothes and medicines through winter.

Saving marine turtles

THE year-long beach cleaning campaign being organized by an international conservation body in the country should go some way in achieving the objective of protecting Pakistan’s endangered marine turtles. Given the general apathy towards conservation, it is commendable that the campaign is being targeted at schoolchildren who, by the end of the beach-cleaning drive, should find themselves considerably better informed about the marine environment than before. But providing a secure environment for nesting turtles would involve more than a simple beach-cleaning operation. The turtle population, especially the green and olive ridley variety, is threatened by numerous elements. Despite legislation and international commitments, Pakistan’s success rate in conserving marine turtles is far from satisfactory as only one out of 1,000 hatchlings lives to adulthood. This is so despite the efforts of the Sindh Wildlife department for whom the protection of marine turtles has been a pet project for years.

Besides pollutants, other dangers to marine turtles should be focused on equally. The most obvious among these includes predators, both animals and humans, who attack and kill them. There are many countries in the East where turtle meat is considered a delicacy, and news reports some months ago had indicated that a huge consignment bound for Vietnam from Pakistan had been intercepted. There is a similar demand for body parts of turtles that are used in traditional medicines. This makes it necessary that in addition to awareness-raising activities, there should also be stricter enforcement of the law so that at least rare species do not become part of the larger illegal wildlife trade. One way to keep a check on predators would be to involve the help of coastal communities tasked with looking after turtle hatcheries for a small sum of money. In addition to boosting their income, the process would make them more environmentally conscious.

US media’s slanted role on Iraq

THE recent drama surrounding the 85-day incarceration of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for not divulging the source of her story in which she had disclosed the name of an undercover CIA agent raises many questions about the way the US media covers crucial foreign policy issues, the close nexus between some journalists and the White House and Pentagon, and the lack of editorial oversight at a newspaper that is believed by many to be America’s ‘newspaper of record’.

After being released from prison, it emerged that the reporter was not really trying to protect the identity of her source but that the issue was much more complex. It seemed that part of her reluctance stemmed from not wanting to expose her own close ties with the Bush administration. Eventually, she had to leave her newspaper, ending an association that had lasted 28 years.

However, Miller’s critics have been far less charitable. They have been scathing of the way she had conducted herself; passing herself off as a champion of press freedom and then doing a volte face and revealing her source who turned out to be none other than L. Lewis Libby, the controversial chief of staff of the US vice-president. In fact, in the days leading to her being sent to jail, her employer also stood by her and hired an expensive legal team to plead her case before a federal judge.

However, once it became clear that Miller was not fighting so much for press freedom as to hide her own proximity to controversial (and very hawkish) members of the Bush administration, the newspaper backed off. Another reason perhaps was that White House officials (including President Bush’s chief political strategist and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove) were being closely examined for having leaked the identity of the undercover CIA agent, a criminal offence under the law.

By not disclosing the identity of her source, Miller seemed to be shielding him from possible prosecution — something which in fact did happen once Libby’s identity became known (he was indicted on Oct 28 for committing perjury). Clearly, all this was quite different from Miller’s initial — and seemingly loftier — reason not to divulge the source’s identity: protection of a source of information.

After the reporter’s release, the NYT editor admitted that he was partly to blame for not subjecting Miller’s reports to greater editorial scrutiny. Clearly, he was trying to deflect some of the blame that inevitably must fall on the newspaper’s senior editors, still reeling after the infamous Jayson Blair episode where another apparently rising star reporter was found to have concocted most of his stories filed over a two-year period. However, it wasn’t as if Miller had all of a sudden begun to write unsubstantiated or irresponsible stories — she had been covering Iraq for years and apparently had notched up several exclusives on it, in the process winning in 2002 a Pulitzer prize for coverage of the Middle East after 9/11.

The newspaper’s failure to subject Miller’s articles to greater scrutiny should be seen as part of a wider failing among mainstream US media to subject the policies of the Bush administration to greater questioning and journalistic scepticism. Those who have followed Judith Miller’s stories, especially after 9/11 and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, will know that she often came up with exclusives detailing the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in that country.

That such stories appeared prominently in what many consider America’s newspaper of record meant that President George W. Bush’s controversial case for invading Iraq was immensely bolstered in the eyes of the American public, and more so in the eyes of the paper’s influential readership.

It also should be remembered that these stories were published at a time when various American allies — notably France and Germany — and many independent observers and former UN weapons inspectors (especially Scott Ritter) had cried themselves hoarse saying that eight years of stringent weapons inspections had left Iraq with practically no WMDs or a chemical weapons stockpile.

In a now famous — or should one say infamous — report citing reliable sources, Judith Miller wrote that Saddam Hussain had hidden his cache of WMDs and chemical weapons close to the Syrian border. President Bush’s main argument for invasion — for which a resolution was moved in the UN Security Council — was to capture and disable Iraq’s WMDs. But when America and its allies did invade, the WMDs were nowhere to be found. That probably wouldn’t have mattered much to the architects of the US invasion, the neocons of Bush and Cheney’s inner circle, because by then it was clear that finding Iraqi WMDs was just a pretext to get into a country with a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves, and placed strategically next to America’s implacable foe, Iran.

Not only were the WMDs never found in Iraq, many of Judith Miller’s stories used sources that were either suspect or too close to the US administration to have any real credibility. The source of the story quoted above — and of many others that Miller later confirmed — was none other than Ahmed Chalabi, a well-known foe of Saddam’s and a convicted embezzler and fugitive from Jordan.

For many years, he had been lobbying the US to overthrow Saddam and in that time had acquired a reputation for being close to the CIA. A journalist with even a little bit of judgment and integrity would have taken Chalabi’s “information” with a pinch of salt. Miller, by her own admission, used him as a reliable source for years, and the NYT let all those stories run.

As Miller’s own story further unravelled, it came to light that as an embedded reporter she had access to classified military information but that the rules for accessing and sharing such information were set by the Pentagon. In effect, the Pentagon was allowing her to view classified information — obviously for use in her stories which were run prominently — but she could not discuss the details or sources of this information with those who were responsible for editing her stories. That the NYT allowed this to happen also speaks for the newspaper’s lack of editorial oversight.

In fact, according to the US-based media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, one of her (also now discredited) stories was about an Iraqi scientist in US custody who led soldiers to a cache of buried chemicals that he claimed had been part of an illegal weapons programme. The scientist said that the materials were being smuggled into Syria and that the Saddam government was working with Al Qaeda (another false claim).

The watchdog noted, with quite a bit of dismay that for this article Miller was not allowed by the US military to talk to the scientist, could not name the chemicals in question and had a three-day embargo on its publication. Despite the external rules imposed by the Pentagon the newspaper ran the story on its front page.

Going a bit deeper into Miller’s past, one comes across several sensational stories but which often contained unverifiable information. The direct source for stories like ‘Secret arsenal: The hunt for germs of war’ (Feb 26, 1998); ‘Defector describes Iraq’s atom bomb push’ (Aug 15, 1998) or ‘Iraqi tells of renovations at sites for chemical and nuclear arms’ (Dec 20, 2001) was either Chalabi or Iraqi defectors or exiles provided by him.

In what can only be called as a campaign orchestrated by Miller and her sources in the Bush administration to make a strong case for invading Iraq, neither the New York Times nor any major newspaper in America seemed to take much note of repeated remarks to the contrary from experts who actually had more credible knowledge of Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDS.

Rolf Ekeus, the former head of UNSCOM (the UN monitoring body that oversaw weapons inspectors in Iraq) was reported on August 16, 2000, by the Associated Press as saying that Iraq’s WMD capabilities had been “fundamentally eliminated” well before 9/11. There was also Scott Ritter who publicly aired doubts on the claims made in Miller’s stories — his own credentials were later questioned in slanted stories run in both the NYT and the Washington Post and it cannot be too difficult to see who or what must have motivated those particular reports.

In fact, one of Saddam’s close aides, Lt Gen Hussain Kamel, later told the Americans that Iraq had in fact destroyed on its own, in 1991, all its secret stockpiles to evade sanctions.

That the then chief of Iraq’s secret weapons industries was making this statement should have made a credible story but the mainstream US media ignored his comments presumably because it would have diluted the case for Iraq’s invasion. Certainly, all of Miller’s reports on Iraq’s WMDs took no note of Kamel’s remarks, or of people like Ritter or Ekeus.

Now, nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller stands thoroughly discredited as do some of those who proved to be her key sources. The only question is will the mainstream US media learn anything from this episode, or will it continue to have (mostly) unquestioning faith in the policies of the Pentagon and the White House, especially when advocating the case for invading a sovereign nation.

Email: omarq@cyber.net.pk