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| February 8, 2006 | Wednesday | Muharram 9, 1427 |
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Indian troop cut
Sugar price crisis
Nothing to kill or die for
THE two sides locked in the crisis on Iran’s nuclear programme have crossed the Rubicon. While the nuclear powers on the IAEA’s board of governors have voted for a resolution asking the agency to report Iran to the UN Security Council, Iran has decided to resume the enrichment of uranium and pull out of the safeguard arrangement it had voluntarily entered into under the additional protocol. Unless one of them pulls back from the brink, the situation has the makings of a grim crisis that could lead to an armed conflict. Although there are more than three weeks to go before the IAEA director-general submits a report on Iran to the board and the case is reported to the council, the developments in Vienna don’t appear to give rise to much hope.
Unlike the last occasion when a resolution was put to vote on the Iranian issue in September, the nuclear powers are united this time. Russia and China voted in support of the resolution last week — which means they can be expected to go along with the western powers in imposing sanctions against Iran and not veto the move in the Security Council. As for Iran, it seems to be hardening its stance in confronting the West. The Iranian leader elected last year was known all along to be a hardliner. But it seems he is prepared to ignore possible repercussions for regional peace and national security as well in sticking to his position. This will not leave any room for the Security Council to avoid sanctions.
The problem is that history has demonstrated that sanctions have never brought an intransigent power round to doing what it is required to do. Besides, sanctions create more problems as happened in Iraq where the sequence of events pushed the country over the brink. What is worse is that the animosity being displayed towards Iran and the hostility the West feels against Iran under its present leadership could lead the country to a point of no return. In the last few months there have been straws in the wind indicating the possibility of war. Israeli and American leaders have felt no qualms about talking of air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. President Ahmadinejad has been unequivocally denouncing Israel and the necessity of wiping it off the world map. But war will not be a sane option for either side. With an abundance of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of many countries, war would devastate the world. Given the polarization that has developed between the Muslim world and the West, the escalation of tension on the nuclear issue could prove to be a spark in the tinderbox.
It is important that efforts to defuse the crisis are not abandoned. Three years ago, in 2003, the nuclear issue between Iran and the West had taken a serious turn when the EU-3 offered to open negotiations with Tehran. It is time that a dialogue was started again. Russia had offered to enrich uranium for Iran on Russian soil. This offer should be taken up. The UN secretary-general and the IAEA’s director-general should intervene immediately and open talks. Although Iran has not violated any clause of the NPT so far, it will have to admit that there is lack of faith between the two sides and as a confidence-building measure both will have to go the extra mile for the sake of peace.
WHETHER it is withdrawal or redeployment, one must welcome New Delhi’s decision to cut down the number of troops in the occupied territory, though one wishes the pull-out was substantial. On Monday, Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee denied that the pull-out of 5,000 Indian troops from Kashmir constituted a “withdrawal” and said that this was possible because the level of violence had gone down. He insisted that it was “a routine exercise” and that the decision was made after a review of the situation. It would be futile to go into the semantics of it and decide whether it was a withdrawal or a redeployment. What matters from the point of the view of the people of Kashmir is that the occupation forces are fewer by 5,000 soldiers. Even though it is not much of a figure — given that India has over half a million troops in the valley — the cut in numbers must be welcomed because it will strengthen the peace process.
India has not positively reacted to President Pervez Musharraf’s offer of demilitarization of Kashmir. He has also made many other proposals to show flexibility in Pakistan’s position that have also been negatively greeted, and this has often led to a feeling in Pakistan that the peace process could come to a halt if there were no progress on Kashmir. Nevertheless, a troop cut of the kind announced by Mr Mukherjee holds out hopes that a higher level of withdrawal could be achieved if India changed its attitude towards the people of Kashmir. The level of violence Mr Mukherjee spoke of could fall further if New Delhi was to talk to all shades of Kashmiri opinion. As has been suggested, talks with Kashmiri leaders need not necessarily be tripartite. One can understand India feeling uncomfortable at a meeting where the other sides happen to be Pakistan and the representatives of the Kashmiri people. Instead it could be a trilateral affair where both Pakistan and India could talk separately to Kashmiri leaders. Islamabad has already done so. New Delhi could make a major move in the direction of peace if it could overcome its inhibitions and begin talking to mainstream Kashmiri leaders.
SUGAR prices have never been higher in the country with the open market rate as high as Rs 42 per kilogram. According to the government, the hike has been caused by a shortage in the market, and the crisis has forced even the controlled price of sugar to be raised from Rs 23 to Rs 27 per kg. However, this measure is not really going to solve the crisis since subsidized sugar is available only at utility stores whose network is not very extensive and which are themselves afflicted with inefficiency. The government has also decided to import 50,000 tons of sugar from India but these stocks will not arrive until mid-March. What is surprising however is that the Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) has over 200,000 tons of sugar in its stocks but has not so far been permitted by the government to release its stocks into the market.
The obvious beneficiaries of the shortage are the mill owners and traders, and they profit at the expense of the common consumer. Since the item is a necessity, even a somewhat higher price means that whatever is on offer for sale in the market will be sold. While the import of sugar from India may well send the necessary signal to hoarders in the market, the government, especially the ministry of food, must be blamed for not acting earlier to prevent the price of sugar from spiralling out of control. It should ensure that the federal and provincial food ministries do not favour mill owners at the expense of consumers and should act against any official involved in facilitating hoarding. Also, since shortages of essential items seem to be occurring with increasing regularity, now is the time to improve the efficacy of the TCP. The whole idea of having a buffer stock is to ensure price stability but the TCP has so far failed on that score.
AT the start of this week, the death toll stood at five and the situation seemed likely to deteriorate, even as commentators throughout Europe tried to hose down suggestions that what we have been witnessing is a clash of civilizations. It is harder to allay the impression that it is a clash of cultures, exacerbated by inordinate degrees of obduracy on both sides.
Simplistic views of the dispute reduce it to a contest between two absolutes: immutable religious beliefs and uncompromising freedom of speech. And never the twain shall meet, goes the argument, which is often deployed in defence of the stance that Islamic and European value systems are inherently incompatible. Invariably, the implicit or explicit corollary is that most Muslim immigrants will never really fit into Europe.
There is no incontrovertible evidence that this is what the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten set out to illustrate late last September, when it decided to publish a dozen third-rate caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). It had apparently commissioned the drawings as a sort of test case after hearing from comedian Frank Hyam that he was scared of satirizing the Quran, and after learning that children’s writer Bent Bludnikow, who had written a book about the Prophet, couldn’t find any illustrators who were willing to put their names to their work.
Neither the poor quality of the caricatures, nor — more significantly — the fact that at least a few of them were explicitly racist deterred Jyllands-Posten from publishing them. The newspaper reputedly has a history of extremist inclinations, including support for Mussolini and Hitler back in the 1930s. More recently, Denmark has been among the European countries where xenophobia has been whipped up by right-wing forces. The conservative government of Prime Minister Anders Rasmussen depends for its survival on the parliamentary support of the Danish People’s Party, one of whose MPs has publicly likened Muslims in Europe to “a cancer”.
This context is obviously not irrelevant to the publication of the cartoons, which was followed by angry complaints from Danish Muslims, protest marches and, deplorably, death threats against journalists and cartoonists. After Rasmussen refused to receive a delegation of Muslim ambassadors, some local imams decided to go on a tour of the Muslim world with a dossier containing the offending drawings and their correspondence with the authorities, along with three further caricatures considerably more obscene and inflammatory than anything published by Jyllands-Posten.
The provenance of these supplementary drawings is uncertain: they are said to have been received in the mail by unnamed Muslims in Denmark. It is not clear whether the distinction between the two sets of cartoons was clear to all those who saw the dossier.
Was parading the sketches through the Muslim world such a a terribly good idea? Having made clear how hurt they were, it may have been wisest for the concerned Danish Muslims to leave it at that.
It would, no doubt, have helped if Jyllands-Posten had promptly apologized for its indiscretion and if Rasmussen had at least lent an ear to the protesters. The apologies came only after a boycott of Danish goods in the Middle East threatened to hurt Denmark’s economy, which raises doubts about their sincerity. Jyllands-Posten, incidentally, has expressed regret for injuring Muslim feelings, not for publishing the caricatures.
In retrospect, would it not have been best from the Muslim point of view if the matter had been restricted to Denmark? Among other things, that would probably have prevented the cartoons from being reproduced in newspapers throughout western Europe, as they were last week (with the notable exception of Britain). More important, that may also have kept the issue from being adopted by the international brotherhood of extremists.
Small bands of British Muslims, for instance, have chosen to express their anger through vows of further atrocities along the lines of 9/11 and 7/7. That’s precisely the sort of emotional bluster that feeds into the consciousness of those who, in turn, might choose to condemn all Muslims as terrorists or endow a representative figure with a fuse-bearing turban. Nor has the torching of embassies in Damascus and Beirut done wonders for the image of the followers of Islam.
It could be argued that even the commercial boycott and diplomatic ruptures have implicitly been based on the misapprehension that European governments exercise the sort of control over the press that is more or less mandatory through much of the Middle East. A plea to the Vatican by the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, also hints at a naive misconception of the church’s role in Europe.
Europeans are justifiably proud of their right to free speech, won during a long struggle against the power of the very church that Prince Nayef appealed to, plus various other vested interests. However, it is not a right that has consistently been honoured during the past century. Even now, there are limits to free speech, some based on custom and common sense, others enshrined in legislation.
For instance, in Germany and Austria, Holocaust denial — that is, to contend that Nazis did not conduct a campaign of Judaeocide — is punishable by imprisonment. Whether or not this is justified, the point is that it is clearly a curb on the freedom of expression, in a country — Germany — where newspapers seemed a bit too keen to reproduce the Danish drawings, using the argument that to refrain from doing so would be tantamount to self-censorship. Other European papers contended that republication of the cartoons was necessary in order to show their readers what the fuss was all about. But would they have been quite so eager to go down that road had the story — and illustrations — in question related to, say, graphic child pornography or paedophilia?
Most probably not. Why? Obviously, in the interests of good taste, and in order not to offend public sensibilities. Does this mean Muslim sensitivities somehow matter less than those of other sections of the public?
Another argument that has been trotted out by numerous western commentators is that all sorts of satirical and sometimes even derogatory references to biblical luminaries are commonplace in their culture, so why should Islamic figures merit a different approach? There is some validity in this point. Depictions of Jesus Christ, for instance, that would once have invited charges of blasphemy and harsh punishment now generally elicit no more than a few polite protests, if that (although there are occasional exceptions).
However, one suspects there would be a wider and more emotional response were Jesus to be disrespectfully depicted in a Muslim or a Jewish publication. And, while we’re on the subject, it’s probably also worth pondering whether Jyllands-Posten’s efforts would have been reproduced quite so widely across Europe had the object of derision been Jews rather than Muslims.
Some European writers have compared the Danish caricatures to the open slather against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Others have noted that they would have sympathized more readily with the Muslim outrage had anti-Semitism not been so rampant in the Islamic world. Neither of these views seems altogether unreasonable.
Meanwhile, there are various other pertinent questions that need to be raised, and directed at Muslims — predominantly those who are always on the lookout for any opportunity to take up arms (metaphorically or otherwise) in the face of perceived insults to their faith, rather than the less excitable sorts whose moderate voices tend to be drowned out amid the cacophony.
The most obvious of these is, which of the following has lately contributed more towards reinforcing Islamophobia: the stupid cartoons, which in the normal course of events would have vanished from the consciousness of most Jyllands-Posten readers within a few days, or the violent protests in the Muslim world, the instances of arson, the unambiguous death threats and invocations of terror and hellfire on the streets of London and elsewhere?
Then again, is it reasonable to expect secular societies to abide by Islamic strictures against iconography (which aren’t accepted by all Muslim sects anyhow)? Besides, isn’t it sometimes wiser — and braver — to let sleeping dogmas lie? Furthermore, regardless of their validity, don’t Muslim complaints of victimization in Europe ring a little hollow when so many Islamic countries go out of their way to discriminate against religious minorities?
Echoing Oliver Wendell Holmes, Noam Chomsky argues: “If you’re in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.” It is also widely accepted that cartoons that don’t give offence to some section of the population are generally ineffective. It is important, nonetheless, to know where to draw the line.
Editorials in much of the British press have been at pains to point out that whereas Jyllands-Posten — and, by extension, Le Soir, Die Welt and all the rest of them — had every right to publish what they did, they were certainly under no obligation to do so. In other words, they ought to have known better. The same could be said of those Muslims whose reaction to what they saw as an unreasonable provocation has facilitated the further demonization of Islam’s adherents.
Sometimes the thoughts and actions of the supposedly ultra-devout hint at a cerebral malfunction.
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com