Claims lack credibility

PRIME Minister Shaukat Aziz informed the National Economic Council (NEC) on Tuesday that poverty had declined by 6.7 per cent on the basis of calorie intake. Quoting the initial findings of the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey 2004-2005, he said that overall poverty had fallen from 32.1 per in 2001 to 25.4 per cent in 2005. Similarly, unemployment had dropped from 7.8 per cent in 2003-04 to 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal year. However, these impressive figures do not seem to correspond with the ground reality especially with the weakening of the trickle-down effect and a high rate of inflation eroding the earnings and purchasing power of low-income groups. Coming at a time when the data compiled by various government agencies lacks authenticity and credibility among independent economists and multilateral lending agencies, the official figures on poverty and unemployment will remain suspect. The government itself has not done anything to dispel this impression, particularly by not making the Federal Bureau of Statistics and autonomous agency. Also, no parameters for the survey had been announced. Similarly, when national accounts were rebased in 2003-2004 which enlarged GDP and raised the per capita income, the methodological details were not made public. The initial findings of the latest survey are yet to be subjected to detailed scrutiny and analysis. It is pre-mature for the government to make the claims it has made.

One needs to concede, however, that the sustained economic growth over the past three years, peaking at 8.4 per cent in 2005, must have made some dent in the poverty levels and in unemployment but the impact has not been noteworthy as is evident from the State Bank’s annual report on the exceptionally good performance last year. The strong growth was “narrowly based relative to previous years” with an extraordinary increase solely in major crops and heavy reliance on a few large-scale manufacturing sub-sectors like textiles. Unemployment, which declined to 7.7 per cent in fiscal 2004, was still very high and even this drop was not broad-based. The improvement was primarily because of inclusion of unpaid rural household members. Social indicators were no better. The mortality rate for children under five years of age, for example, was the worst among the Saarc countries. The ADB reports that in 2005 the share of spending on poverty as a percentage of overall government expenditure declined from 27.3 per cent to 26.4 per cent despite increased spending.

Though the public sector development programme (PSDP) which provides temporary jobs on infrastructural development has been enlarged over the years, it’s execution suffers cost overruns that occur as a result of delays in the release of funds, procedural bottlenecks, the shortage of manpower required to execute projects and weak monitoring. It was only on Tuesday that the NEC allowed Punjab and Sindh to recruit personnel for the implementation of federally funded projects in their provinces. Any significant reduction in poverty cannot be achieved without an equity-based economic growth strategy, including a policy of income distribution. The government has not yet come out with a comprehensive policy for development of small and medium-sized industries which has been delayed for long. And to lend authenticity and credibility to its data and analysis, it needs to set up an independent statistical authority. Without authentic data, appropriate policies cannot be formulated.

Bird flu precautions

THE fact that the government has sent virus samples from affected poultry farms in the NWFP to London for confirmation of the deadly H5N1 influenza strain shows just how little prepared it is to deal with a large-scale outbreak of avian flu at home. There is no excuse for such laxity. For some time now, global health authorities have been predicting a worldwide pandemic of avian flu that could affect humans and cause millions to die. Already, bird flu has killed nearly 100 people in countries as far apart as Turkey and Indonesia. Moreover, Pakistan’s own experience with a less virulent form of avian flu in 2003 that led to the death and culling of more than three million chickens should have spurred health authorities into taking measures aimed at keeping the virus out. This has not been done as the dearth of laboratory facilities for conclusive testing shows.

However, it is quite possible that, in the end, the samples sent to London may test negative for the N1 subtype. Even in that case, there should be no room for complacency, for the present H5 virus strain could rapidly evolve into a more dangerous type enabling bird-to-human transmissions, and further mutations might see humans contracting the infection from one another. Pakistan has already banned the import of poultry products from countries where the H5N1 virus has been detected and has culled 25,000 chickens following the latest outbreak. What it needs to do now is to improve border controls to prevent the entry of poultry into the country and also to impose a nationwide ban on the inter-provincial movement of birds, at least until laboratory tests prove current fears wrong. The economic loss will, no doubt, be huge for poultry farmers — who have already been affected by the drop in poultry sales — and such stringent measures might cause them to put pressure on the government to downplay fears and lessen restrictions. On no account, should the authorities succumb to such demands. Even the slightest negligence at this point could prove devastating in the months ahead.

Reappearance of opium

THE United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s report that poppy growing has returned to Pakistan for the first time since 2002 warrants the government’s immediate attention. The reason for this is twofold: first, that in 2002 the country was declared poppy-free by the UN and, second, that it is now being grown in some of the areas for the first time, including parts of Balochistan and Kohistan. The reason for the resumption has not been mentioned but it may have to do with economic compulsions and the unstable situation next door in Afghanistan where it is being grown on a big scale. Since cultivating opium is far more profitable than other conventional crops — and in any case the poppy plant grows readily in such areas because of climatic factors — it is tempting for locals to do so. Besides, most of the areas where it has been grown traditionally and where it is reportedly being grown now are socio-economically backward and those who live there find growing opium the easy way of earning a livelihood.

The federal government and the anti-narcotics force, in conjunction with the provincial governments concerned, need to nip this in the bud before the practice expands. The UNODC has said that several donors are willing to fund the Pakistan government in reining in the reappearance of opium cultivation. The offer of such assistance should be accepted. The best way to persuade growers to give up poppy cultivation will be to offer them alternative means of earning a living. It should be kept in mind, however, that the areas where the plant is grown are extremely backward, and schemes that bring about their general uplift and generate employment will help curtail the temptation to grow opium. At the same time, the government should coordinate with the Afghan authorities to enforce their respective writs in the border regions since drug production and use is a bane afflicting both countries.

A lot is rotten in the state of Denmark

PAKISTAN is on fire, as are a dozen other Muslim states over the cartoon controversy sparked by the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. The fires in the Muslim world have been further stoked by the cartoons being reprinted in several other European countries as an expression of solidarity with the Danish temerity.

The Danish affront to Muslims’ universal sensitivity about the sanctity of the Prophet Mohammad’s(PBUH) persona and the reverence it commands in the heart of every believer was deliberate and provocative in the extreme. It was a far more calculated mischief than Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. No doubt, the backlash from Muslims of all hues is so much more spontaneous and sweeping than was the case when Rushdie set about to measure the depth of Muslim sentiment regarding their Prophet.

Europe and the West as a whole are justifying the brazen act of caricaturing the Prophet of Islam as an attribute of the western ethic of freedom of speech and expression. So no apologies are in the offing. There is no contrition because admission of wrongdoing would be tantamount, in the western eyes, to sacrilege of the sacred right of free speech.

But the western tutelage over free speech and free expression looks increasingly vacuous when measured against the palpable reluctance of several European governments to share these hallowed freedoms with their visible Muslim minority. Wearing clothes of any kind is, in European eyes, an essential expression of freedom of choice. However, France, ever so proud of husbanding Europe’s break from its feudal past, is not prepared to let Muslim girls wear an innocuous piece of clothing, such as a meter long head scarf, or hijab, in their schools. That Muslim expression of free choice is deemed a threat and an affront to French secularism, which until now was believed to be far more resilient.

But France, and for that matter others in its league in Europe, is not prepared to admit that secularism essentially means that you give quarter to others’ beliefs and values and assign them the same value and prestige as you do to your own. Had there been room for ‘the other’ in European secularism France wouldn’t have banned the wearing of head- scarf by Muslim girls as an affront to its liberte.

European thinkers boast of Europe’s ‘migration’ from religion and religiosity. They argue with obvious elan that religion has been consigned in Europe to the dustbin of history like so many other archaic notions and ideas. As the veteran British journalist, Robert Fisk wrote in the Independent recently, Europe may be Christian in name but Europeans practise their faith more in its avoidance. That is not an exaggerated statement. What else would otherwise explain deserted churches in a country like Holland, for instance, being converted into a place of recreation and, in some instances, night clubs opening in them.

Therein lie the seeds of a clash of religions, if not exactly of civilizations, between the European pride of forsaking religion and the Muslim tradition of taking their religion seriously, dead seriously in some cases.

Western thinkers proudly proclaim that the West has struggled, ever since the Reformation five centuries ago, to acquire the right to trash religion and make fun of religious deities and heroes. There is no way, they argue, that the West would barter away this freedom to make fun of any cult or religious figure as a matter of choice.

But in an increasingly interconnected and shrinking world — shrinking down to the level of a global village — no freedom is unlimited any longer, not even the absolute freedom of sovereignty. So just as a heightening global sense of reverence for fundamental rights and civil liberties of human beings across national boundaries and frontiers is trumping the classical sanctity of sovereign right of a state, unrestrained freedom of speech or expression is becoming a licence if devoid of regard for others’ rights and sensitivities.

Prince Karim Aga Khan, who is highly regarded in the West as an epitome of a moderate Muslim, put the perception gap in the western mind about Islam most succinctly in an interview with a Canadian journalist. He called it a ‘clash of ignorance’ and not of civilizations. He couldn’t be more right. There is so much ignorance among the educated western men and women about Islam. What is worse is that there is hardly an effort, individual or organized, to learn about a religion practised by one fourth of humanity, and practised with such devotion and reverence.

However, Denmark is not suffering as much from ignorance as from a festering antipathy against Muslims and Islam bordering on paranoia. The editor of Jyllands-Posten knew exactly that those horribly distasteful and provocative cartoons of the Prophet of Islam would offend Muslim reverence of their Prophet and hurt them no end. And yet the paper didn’t shy away from treading so roughshod on the raw nerves of Denmark’s 140,000 Muslims, and 1.3 billion of their peers across the globe.

Not that the paper or its editor was ignorant of how strong religious sensitivity was. Two years ago, the same paper and the same editor had refused to publish a caricature of Jesus Christ as being too explosive. Anything even remotely suggestive of doubting the Holocaust or questioning the mythical figure of six million Jews supposedly slaughtered in Hitler’s pogroms is taboo as anti-Semitic and thus not to be touched with a barge pole.

Muslims, however, have been fair game for the Danish government and its press for years. The events of 9/11 seem to have given a carte blanche to the Danish authorities and their media to stereotype Muslims as terrorists and anti-liberal with impunity. The ‘crusade’ against the Muslims in Denmark has enjoyed royal patronage of, no less than Queen Margrethe. Last April, as reported by London’s Daily Telegraph, she went on record calling on her subjects to stem the tide of Islam in Europe because there is “something scary” about the “totalitarianism that’s part of Islam.” She went on to say, “We are being challenged by Islam these years, globally as well as locally... We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

Understandably, with the head of state denigrating Muslims in her kingdom and beyond, with such relish and exuberance, the Danish press and other news media may have felt fully entitled, if not duty-bound, to join the fray in Muslim-baiting. Jyllands-Posten could well be obeying the Queen’s command by providing its readers with a crude weapon to go for the Muslim jugular — all in the line of freedom of expression.

Denmark, with a Muslim presence of less than three per cent of its population, has been ahead in the pack of European countries where fascism is on the rise. It has shown the way to other European countries how to lift the draw- bridge and shut out Muslim immigrants at its gates. It has also been a pioneer in legislating Islamophobic laws to tighten the screws on the voiceless Muslim immigrants already inside the country.

The current government of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in coalition with the neo-fascist Danish People’s Party that has long advocated expelling all Muslim immigrants from Denmark. Little wonder that Rasmussen arrogantly refused to meet Muslim ambassadors based in Copenhagen and, to date, has stoutly refused to apologise for the grievous hurt that his country’s licentious press has caused to the world Muslims.

The Muslim stereotype of a ‘terrorist-friendly’ people is being beefed up with special legislations, the latest being from the UK that makes any ‘glorification’ of terror a crime, without even defining ‘terror’ or its ‘glorification’.

This is in addition to insults, injuries and outright invasions of Muslim lands by neo-imperialists on flimsy and patently false premises. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq are the festering wounds inflicted on the body politic of world Muslims under the West’s undeclared new ‘crusade.’ Iran, Syria and Sudan are in the hair-triggers of imperialists itching for newer adventures in the Muslim world in order to stamp the superiority of their ‘civilisation’ and way of life over anything Islamic. Strategies are already in place to starve the Palestinians because they have committed the ‘crime’ of electing Hamas to power.

Muslims in the West and the rest of the world are furious over the cartoons because they rightly see these as the tip of an iceberg submerged not too deep below the surface. They see the iceberg drifting at an alarming pace to wreak more damage on the world of Islam out of sheer depravity and vengeance. They have good reason to feel disturbed.

The response, of economic boycott of Danish goods and dairy products, by Arabs of the Gulf and by the Iranian government is the right retribution which should knock the fear of God in the hearts of the Danes and their like-minded peers in the western world. In this interdependent world of ours nothing hurts more than a bite into one’s bread and butter. The Danes would soon learn it to their cost. Two million dollars a day in lost exports to their dairy industry should make them realize what a gross error it was to provoke Muslims who had done no harm to the Kingdom of Denmark.

The writer is a former ambassador.