Hurdles in the way

SEVERAL developments in recent weeks seem not to help in the process of normalization now underway in Indo-Pakistan relations. Once again, Pakistan has come up with some new proposals for a solution of the Kashmir dispute, the latest being President Pervez Musharraf’s idea about joint management of the territory. This follows his earlier proposals for a demilitarization of three areas — Srinagar, Kupwara and Baramulla — so that the two countries could jointly fight terrorists, besides a suggestion for self-governance for Kashmir. While it is too early to expect an Indian response to the joint management proposal, New Delhi has been cool to the proposals earlier made by Islamabad, including the idea of self-governance for Kashmir. The basic reason behind the new ideas floated by Islamabad is to show to India that Pakistan’s approach to Kashmir is not hide-bound, that it is flexible on the issue and that it expects New Delhi to adopt the same approach. Regrettably, the Indian stance has been characterized by a lack of flexibility. India has ruled out demilitarization and has insisted that occupied Kashmir already enjoyed autonomy and self-governance — something President Musharraf said in a TV interview Pakistan could not accept. The visiting Kashmiri leaders have also said that there could be no autonomy or self-governance within the ambit of the Indian constitution.

Controversy now surrounds “cricket diplomacy”. According to an Indian spokesman, Dr Manmohan Singh has no intention of attending any of the one-day series matches in Pakistan. This has been interpreted by some observers as New Delhi’s snub to Islamabad. However, as the Foreign Office spokesperson clarified on Monday, President Musharraf extended no formal invitation to the Indian prime minister to visit Pakistan. According to the spokesperson, the president was specifically asked whether he would invite the Indian prime minister to Pakistan during the one-day series, and the president said he was willing to do so. These are, however, minor issues, for there have been more serious developments that deserve to be tackled by the two sides in the spirit in which the detente has been progressing.

A disturbing development is Pakistan’s claim that there was evidence of Indian involvement in Balochistan. In a CNN-IBN interview the other day, President Musharraf said that he was “annoyed” over India’s “direct interference in our internal affairs”. He said that there were lots of “indications” of New Delhi’s financial and material support to militants in Balochistan. The president also expressed his disappointment over India’s negative response to his proposal for self-governance, even though the Kashmiri elders visiting Pakistan have approved of the idea. The foreign office spokesperson seems to be doing some damage control when she said the situation was not “all bleak”, and the foreign secretaries’ meeting in India next week would give an indication of “what we can achieve”. Let us note here that the composite dialogue aims at solving all outstanding problems between the two countries. Any rigidity on Kashmir means stalling the peace process, since a durable peace in South Asia and friendly relations between the two sides are dependent on a solution of the Kashmir issue. Let us hope New Delhi will change its rigidity on Kashmir and examine Pakistani proposals with an open mind. In the meantime, the least India can do is not to vitiate the atmosphere by interfering in Pakistan’s internal affairs.

Not at the cost of safety

THE newly elected Nazim of Karachi has undertaken the daunting task of getting all illegal buildings in the city regularized. It is said that the previous nazim had issued notices to 12,000 building owners asking them to pay a surcharge and get their structures regularized. But the challans had been mostly ignored. In order to tempt homeowners to fall in line, Syed Mustafa Kamal has offered to waive the surcharge that is also payable in such cases. He is using the carrot and stick method to induce people to observe the rules. If property owners who have received the notice do not respond in time, the Nazim has threatened to have their buildings razed to the ground. One can only guess as to what exactly the city government hopes to achieve by its present move. It appears that the idea is to raise revenues by collecting fines from building owners.

But will that serve the real purpose of ensuring the safety of the residents of high-rise buildings in the city? The KBCA has prescribed regulations for construction which are also supposed to ensure safe construction practices. If these were not being observed and yet owners were getting away with irregular construction and encroachments, it was because the KBCA was itself a party to the corruption that is known to be rampant in the construction sector. It is time the city government made a move to cleanse its own agencies of corruption and ineptitude. It is not enough to require building owners to submit their documents, pay a fine and walk away with a certificate of clearance. The KBCA must check the buildings for their safety and that would be possible only if its engineers and architects — who should be men and women of integrity — actually visit the sites of the buildings which have to be regularized and ensure, as far as possible, that the construction rules have been observed. A four-storey building with a foundation to support only three storeys can be dangerous. But fining the owner and issuing a certificate will not make it any safer. One hopes these aspects will be kept in view when the regularization process is undertaken.

Shocking beyond belief

THE news that researchers in Canada and India have found that a staggering 10 million female foetuses might have been selectively terminated following ultrasound tests in India in the last two decades — 500,000 girls a year — is shocking beyond belief and belies official claims that infanticide has been reduced. While Indian society is not alone in preferring boys to girls, like other countries in the subcontinent, it tends to view a daughter as a liability, particularly because high-cost dowries have to be provided at the time of their marriage. Despite a decades-old ban, many dowry-related crimes are committed against women in India; at one time in the year 2000, a ‘mother-in-law’ section of Tihar prison in Delhi could not accommodate the sheer number of inmates in this section. These findings in the aforementioned report, published in the medical journal The Lancet, only confirm the kind of discrimination women in this part of the world continue to suffer. That this preference for boys is not confined to the illiterate classes is even a greater cause for concern.

The practice continues despite well-intentioned bans like the one outlawing foetal sex discrimination or abortions purely on the basis of gender. A story on Monday in the Hindustan Times reported on advertisements in rural areas “harping on the expense of aborting a female foetus vis-a-vis the cost of dowry at the time of marriage of a daughter.” Analysts argue that if this continues, the gender imbalance already prevalent in India will ultimately lead to alarming social consequences. But the war on female infanticide is not restricted to that country. According to UNFPA, Pakistan, China and South Korea also face similar problems, although of lesser magnitude. The task ahead for the respective governments lies in tackling attitudes that condone female infanticide as well as strictly enforcing the law to prevent such crimes from taking place.

Convoluted legacy of the Bulldozer

AFTER Ariel Sharon was hospitalized a week ago following a massive stroke, there were some, particularly among Palestinians, who lost little time in dancing on his grave. From a distance, the celebrations were more than a little callous.

However, anyone even perfunctorily acquainted with Sharon’s record ought not to have been shocked by that reaction. The fact that his ill-wishers included those who wanted him to survive because they felt he hadn’t suffered enough may have provided cause for dismay, but not for surprise.

Others, mainly — but by no means only — in Israel, prayed for a miracle, although the Israeli prime minister’s doctors made it reasonably clear that even if he survived, a continued political career would be more or less out of the question. Among Israeli Jews, overt satisfaction over Sharon’s predicament was restricted to the far-right extremities of the ideological spectrum: to those who detested him for daring to pull troops out of the Gaza Strip.

However one may view that withdrawal, carried out with brutal efficiency in the middle of last year, it was unquestionably a watershed in the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as in Sharon’s life, much of which was devoted to the establishment of illegal settlements, the creation of “facts on the ground” designed to indefinitely appropriate Arab land.

There are those who believe that he underwent some sort of epiphany upon becoming prime minister, after he had triggered the second intifada with a publicity-seeking visit to Temple Mount/Al Aqsa. To cite but one example, Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and Peace Now founder, says that he resented Sharon for decades because “he symbolized for me everything I could not stand about my country: violent self-righteousness, a mixture of brutality and self-pity, insatiable greed for land .... There was no other individual who personified the intoxication of many Israelis with the power of power.”

But then, he says, “a sudden change occurred .... When Sharon said for the first time, about two years ago, that the occupation is a disaster for the occupied and the occupiers, I could not believe my ears. When he started to speak about two states for the two nations, I thought he must be joking. When he mentioned for the first time the rights of the Palestinians, I thought he was mocking the slogans of the peace movement.”

Oz concedes that Sharon’s motivations remain a mystery that may never be solved and laments the fact that he “never really sat down with the Palestinians to try to talk with them.” But he seems to accept that the prime minister’s change of heart was genuine.

It is unlikely Oz would go as far as fellow novelist David Grossman, who expresses admiration for Sharon’s “courage and determination” in doing “what he thought necessary, in complete contradiction of his previous ideology.” This is the sort of basis on which Sharon was widely hailed, as he lay in a chemically induced coma, as a great statesman and an unlikely peacemaker. And not everyone peddling this evaluation has sought to gloss over Sharon’s brutal past.

As a 25-year-old lieutenant in the Israeli army back in 1953, Sharon was in charge of a unit that attacked Qibya, a West Bank village, to avenge the murder of an Israeli woman and two children. The unit dynamited 45 houses, killing 67 men, women and children. The action reportedly earned the young officer a reprimand from Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion — who on another occasion noted that if Sharon “could overcome his bad habit of not telling the truth, he could be an exemplary military leader.”

In the eyes of some Israelis, Sharon eventually superseded Ben-Gurion as the iconic national leader, but many of his military superiors were less than enchanted by his tendency to disobey commands, and to take the law into his own hands. These habits never left him. Nor did his inclination to tell lies, or his proclivity towards vastly disproportionate revenge, which has unfailingly played into hands of violence-prone extremists among the various Palestinian factions and kept in motion a gruesome cycle of bloodshed.

The grimmest single crime on the charge sheet against Sharon is, of course, his role in the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in September 1982, which ranks among that decade’s direst crimes against humanity. The indiscriminate mass murder of children, women and men was committed by Lebanon’s fascist Phalange militias, but Israeli troops fired the flares that illuminated the infamous deeds, and protected the camps from prying eyes for as long as the killings continued.

That, however, was not the extent of the Israeli role. Time magazine reported in 1983 that an unpublished segment from an Israeli inquiry commission’s report into the incident noted that Sharon had visited the family of assassinated Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel and spoken of the need “to take revenge.” The commission found him guilty by association and Sharon lost his post as defence minister in the government of Menachem Begin, but remained in the cabinet — perhaps partly because the Likud leadership feared his unpredictability. At one point in the 1980s, Begin had noted that “Sharon is liable to surround the prime minister’s office with tanks.”

It never quite came to that as Sharon continued to be associated with successive governments, all too often being put in charge of construction or housing, which gave him a platform for pursuing his devotion to the spread of settlements. He bitterly opposed the Oslo agreements and remained consistent in his distaste for negotiations with Palestinians. None of this, however, necessarily precludes the possibility of a conversion. At some point after becoming prime minister, Sharon appears to have concluded that some sort of a Palestinian state would be essential, not because it was a natural right of the Palestinians, but because it would be conducive to maintaining Israel’s security.

He was partly right: Israel would indeed be better off as a neighbour, rather than an occupier, of the Palestinians. But only if the latter’s nationhood involved a viable state, as sovereign as Israel. There is absolutely no evidence that these essential details were ever a part of Sharon’s vision.

As Harry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East project and a former head of the American Jewish Congress (and therefore unlikely to be dismissed as a self-hating Jew by the ideological watchdogs of Zionism) commented in The Observer last Sunday: “It is difficult to imagine another Israeli leader who could retain popular support for the return of most of the West Bank ... and compensate Palestinians for the retention by Israel of the major settlement blocs adjoining the pre-1967 border with comparable territory within Israel. The same is true of allowing the Arab-populated parts of Jerusalem to serve as the capital of a Palestinian state ... But Sharon had no intention of making such concessions, nor is there any basis for the expectation that there will ever be a Palestinian leader willing or able to accept an agreement that does not include these provisions.”

Sharon, says Siegman, “intended Gaza to serve as a precedent for a continuing unilateralism enabling Israel to retain de facto control of the West Bank, even if a nominal Palestinian state were to come into existence. Sharon believed a nominal state was the only way for Israel to deal with the demographic challenge posed by Palestinian population growth and — equally important — the only way to retain US support for its unilateralism.”

Although Sharon was notorious for clutching his cards close to his chest, Siegman’s evaluation of the latest phase of Sharonism appears to bear a closer resemblance to reality than all the plaudits and panegyrics about the vicious old hawk who metamorphosed into a dove.

From targeted assassinations to house demolitions (the nickname “Bulldozer” was well deserved for a range of reasons), there was no letup in violence against Palestinians, whom he always held in contempt. Sharon did not really change his mind; he calculatedly changed his strategy.

It is not the sort of strategy that could have brought lasting peace. There is currently much talk of the uncertainty that has followed his involuntary exit from the political scene, just months after he left Likud to form the Kadima party. Although it is indeed unclear what will happen during and beyond the elections likely to take place on March 28 — not to mention this month’s Palestinian elections, with significant gains expected for Hamas — it is worth remembering that the uncertainty was always there, even with the Bulldozer at the helm.

Perhaps meaningful change will only come if and when Israel is blessed with a leader who understands as clearly as Michael Rosen, the British poet and Jewish activist, precisely what went wrong — not in 1967 but in 1948. The brief poem that follows, titled Promised Land, accurately encapsulates that moment in history:

A family arrived and said they had papers
To prove that his house was theirs.
— No, no, said the man, my people have always lived here,
My father, grandfather .... and look the garden,
My great-grandfather planted that.
— No, no, said the family, look at the documents.
There was a stack of them.
— Where do I start? said the man.
— No need to read the beginning, they said,
Turn to the page marked ‘Promised Land’.
— Are they legal? he said, who wrote them?
— God, they said, God wrote them, look,
Here come His tanks.
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com