A horrific atrocity

NO words are strong enough to express one’s grief and horror over Tuesday’s carnage at Karachi’s Nishtar Park. That the perpetrators of this dastardly crime should have chosen a day like Eid Miladun-Nabi to spill blood adds both to the mystery as to the motive. It was not a time-bomb, nor a device exploded by remote control, because it is now confirmed that a suicide-bomber had carried out the attack. But who motivated him and with what motive? The security authorities have, of course, come in for criticism, especially for being late after the blast had killed 47 people and injured more than 100. The security authorities’ version is that they had cleared the stage as being safe, and that the blast was the work of a suicide bomber, who had mixed with the crowd. It is humanly impossible for any security agency to check every person in a procession or crowd of such magnitude. But as they say of fire, one should douse the source rather than the flames with water. A crime of this magnitude cannot be the work of a single individual or two; it requires careful planning, recruitment and training. That the intelligence agencies failed to get wind of all this points to a serious lapse on their part.

This is not for the first time that a religious gathering has been turned into a scene of death and destruction. The bombing of places of worship and religious rallies has been going on in Pakistan for several years, as seen in the attacks on churches, Shia mosques and Ashura processions. Yet the very many intelligence agencies that are there have failed to penetrate the terrorist organisations and unearth the brains behind them. Many extremist militias stand outlawed, but the ban is only in theory, for in practice they exist underground and are able to strike wherever they wish. The other part of the security agencies’ performance is to investigate such crimes, but here too their work leaves much to be desired. No clue has yet been found to many acts of terrorism, including last month’s murder of an American diplomat in Karachi.

As in our comment on Sunday’s tragedy at Faizan-i-Madina women’s gathering, we again would like to express our concern over the growing trend in our religious establishment to place emphasis on form rather than substance. The fundamental principles of Islam — love, peace, restraint and compassion — appear to be getting lost in the midst of what seems to be an over-emphasis on processions and rallies in a spirit that is competitive rather than positive. Graffiti, banners and haranguing arouse participants to such emotional heights that at the slightest provocation there is violence. In this case, the provocation was indeed formidable, but in the aftermath of the blast people began attacking buses, gas stations and even those very ambulances which were carrying the wounded to hospital. This testifies to the growing trend in our society towards mob hysteria. While the dead cannot be brought back to life, the real service we can do to them is to draw lessons from the tragedy. The security agencies must redouble their efforts to unearth the brains behind the crime, see if any well-known terrorist organisations were behind the massacre and bring to justice the fiends responsible for what indeed is the worst massacre of its nature in Pakistan.

How will the ban help?

THE government has begun to betray its sense of desperation and helplessness in the strategy it has adopted vis-‘-vis the insurgency in Balochistan. Having proved ineffective in curbing the violence in the besieged province, Islamabad has now resorted to measures that are bound to prove counterproductive. The latest step it has taken is to ban the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) after declaring it to be a terrorist organisation. Exactly how the authorities expect the ban to help suppress the on-going violence in Balochistan is not very clear. True, the BLA has claimed responsibility for many of the acts of sabotage which are harming Balochistan’s civil society and its economy. But experience has shown that militant outfits taking recourse to violence usually follow a hit-and-run mode of operation, making their detection and reining them in extremely difficult. The BLA can therefore be expected to remain in existence as an organisation fighting for the rights of the Baloch in its own way. The ban will only create more bad blood between the two sides and make conciliation more difficult.

The problem with the government’s Balochistan strategy is that it has been closing the political options available to it. One cannot dispute the government’s need to counter violence by using force. Acts of terrorism, sabotage and attacks on various installations, highways and communication networks have been on the rise. They have to be dealt with firmly, no doubt. But that does not mean that the door should be shut on the negotiating process. Even armies of two countries locked in a war against each other always keep the option for a dialogue available to them. Needless to say, Balochistan is a part of Pakistan and the Baloch are our own people. If there are disputed issues between Islamabad and the people of the province led by the sardars, they have to be sorted out on the negotiating table. The other strategy would have been to win over the people by giving them their full share in development — to marginalise their exploitative feudal leadership. But it is too late in the day to rely on this strategy alone. A dialogue with the sardars is urgently called for.

Why the delay?

ONE wonders when the government is going to take action against those behind the sugar crisis. For the past many months, sugar, an essential commodity, has been selling at record high prices. Much has been written about it in the media laying the blame for the whole crisis primarily on the mill owners for resorting to hoarding and creating a shortage of the product, and partially on the government for not standing up to these hoarders. Even the National Accountability Bureau decided to get into the act and began collecting information to ascertain the extent of the market manipulation.

The hoarders eventually managed to stall any action against them by NAB, helped in large part by the fact that several of the sugar mills are owned by leading figures of the ruling party. However, the official line, as advocated by NAB itself in a press release issued after it was told to back off, was that the action was not being taken because the mills had assured the government that the price of sugar would come down in the market through the release of extra stocks. This has not happened, as is evident from several recent news reports all of which suggest that the price of sugar is back to around Rs 42-43 per kilogram. The government should never have believed the mill owners in the first place since that seems to have been a tactic only to stave off NAB. Clearly, the nexus between sugar mill owners and some elements of the ruling party are forcing millions of ordinary Pakistanis to pay almost double the normal price of sugar. The government’s continuing failure to act against the hoarders and break their hold over the market only serves to lower its own credibility and reinforces the public perception that business cartels are able to manipulate policy-making in their own favour.

Italy decides to be indecisive

IN the run-up to this week’s Italian elections, the Western European press was filled with tentative political obituaries of Silvio Berlusconi, in the wake of opinion polls that showed him trailing by a few percentage points. None of the obituarists, however, was rash enough to write him off completely.

Given his unusual career path, even the most hostile of analysts had the nagging suspicion that the Italian prime minister, who has publicly compared himself with Jesus Christ, may yet pull off a miracle.

Nonetheless, the growing signs of desperation in the Berlusconi camp were hard to miss. There were unexpected tax bribes: the prime minister vowed to abolish council tax on primary homes. Cleverly, the promise was made at the very end of his second debate with Romano Prodi, the rival prime ministerial candidate, making it impossible for the latter to raise the obvious questions about how councils would, in that case, be funded.

A couple of days later, Berlusconi announced the prospective abolition of the garbage collection levy that every household has to pay. The monetary value of the two bribes adds up to six billion euros: a financial hole that, given the state of the Italian economy, couldn’t easily be filled by other means. “Rubbish,” explained the prime minister, “can become a source of energy.” Responded the mayor of Bologna: “By tonight I expect Berlusconi to have abolished irony.”

Another tactic, apparently, was to cause as much offence as possible, Berlusconi has never held back from insulting his opponents, be they politicians, businessmen, journalists or magistrates. Last week, he decided to extend this courtesy to the electorate as a whole — or at least to that portion of it which planned to vote against him. “I have too much esteem,” he said, “for the intelligence of Italians to think that they could be such coglioni as to vote against their own interests.”

Coglioni is a coarse term for idiots or dimwits, and at a Prodi rally the following day, some members of the audience sported “I’m a coglione/cogliona” T-shirts. It is unlikely that this particular tactic motivated many undecided voters to opt for Berlusconi’s Casa delle Liberta (House of Liberties) coalition, or persuaded others to change sides. The same cannot necessarily be said for the prime minister’s concerted campaign to denounce Prodi’s L’Unione coalition as a communist front.

L’Unione does indeed stretch from moderate conservatives to the “post-Marxist” Communist Refoundation party and smaller radical groups — just as post-fascists and neo-Nazis figure among Casa delle Liberta’s components — but under Prodi there has hardly been any prospect of the coalition veering much farther to the Left than, say, New Labour in Britain. That didn’t prevent Berlusconi from raising the spectre of leaders who worship Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. He didn’t stop there. He warned Catholics that the Left includes “priest eaters”. And to clinch the argument, he accused Chinese communists of boiling babies to make fertiliser.

One would like to think that most Italians took these dire pronouncements for what they were: the deranged rants of a leader desperately fighting for his political life.

But it’s worth recording that this variety of fear-mongering is part of a dishonourable tradition that stretches back decades — to the time when, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) emerged as one of the strongest political organizations in the country, not least because of its record of resistance against Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship.

In the constituent assembly elections of 1946, the communists and the Socialist Party (PSI) won more seats overall than the Christian Democrats. By 1948, they had joined forces in a Popular Democratic Front, the prospect of whose triumph in that year’s elections loomed large. This was not an outcome that the cold warriors in Washington were willing to countenance, hence a concerted pre-emptive drive was launched.

Fear-mongering, inevitably, was a part of the deal, the idea being to inculcate the impression that a victory for the Front would be tantamount to a Soviet takeover. At the same time, the carrot of additional aid was combined with a big stick: the threat that all funding would be cut off unless the communists were defeated.

A range of less overt measures were simultaneously employed, including an officially sponsored letter-writing campaign by Italo-Americans to their relatives in Italy.

The effort proved so successful — the leftist coalition was defeated 48 per cent to 31 by the Christian Democrats — that it was effectively institutionalized, and plans secretly approved by the US included the possibility of a military takeover in the event of the PCI doing too well at the ballot box at any future juncture. By 1956, the operation had been given the name Gladio; it involved American collaboration with the least salubrious elements in Italian society, including fascists and the Mafia, and it formally survived until 1990.

By then the socialists had long since been co-opted into a game of centrist musical chairs: governments changed hands with alarming frequency, switching from the socialists to the Christian Democrats and back again, but their policies were virtually indistinguishable, and the communists were generally kept out.

The American role in the subversion of Italian democracy is comparable, of course, to its efforts in other parts of the world — although these, in many cases, were considerably more violent. The recent suspension of aid to the Palestinian Authority is but the latest manifestation of Washington’s determination to undermine the popular will wherever and whenever it comes into conflict with US strategic objectives.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that the possibility of a Prodi prime ministership was viewed with too much consternation by the Bush administration, even though Berlusconi considers himself a bosom pal of George W. and Tony Blair, as well as a leading crusader in the semi-fictitious war against terror. After all, notwithstanding the would-be Roman emperor’s hullabaloo over communists, the ideological ravine between the rival coalitions is neither particularly deep nor too wide. To most observers, the left-wing radicals on the periphery of Prodi’s coalition have consistently provided far less cause for alarm than the right-wing radicals at the heart of the team led by Berlusconi.

The latter is a media tycoon whose first foray into politics in the early 1990s followed the implosion of the PSI and the Christian Democrats after investigations uncovered a long history of elaborate corruption. Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy (and number 37 in the world), had previously relied on the patronage of politicians, in particular the former socialist leader Bettino Craxi. Once Craxi became an international fugitive, Berlusconi realised that he would have to fend for himself.

What better way to achieve this than by becoming the nation’s CEO? Besides, getting into politics seemed to be the best way of staying out of jail. So he formed a party named after a football slogan — Forza Italia — and pulled off an audacious gamble in 1994 by seducing an electorate sick of politicians’ shenanigans. It helped, of course, that he owned three television channels and a leading newspaper. For all that, his joyride lasted only seven months, and in 1996 the voters considered it too soon to give him another chance: they opted for Prodi instead.

A new, improved Berlusconi was back again in 2001, with a facelift and a hair transplant, not to mention a glowing permanent sun tan. He promised to kick-start Italy’s moribund economy. However, while his own businesses have thrived, the nation’s annual growth has declined in the five years since then from 1.8 to zero per cent.

In the Italian context, however, staying at the helm for five years is quite an achievement in itself. No one has managed it since Mussolini — the predecessor that Berlusconi most closely resembles in terms of flamboyance, egotism and pomposity. Apart from Jesus, he has also compared himself to Napoleon and Churchill, remarking at one point: “It is not a superiority complex. It is an objective fact. No one is as valuable as Berlusconi.” On another occasion he described himself as the best leader not only in Italy or Europe, but in the world.

Under investigation over a long period for a range of business wrongdoings, Berlusconi has at times evaded conviction by using his parliamentary majority to decriminalize the relevant offences. One suspects Italians would have been more eager to dispense with the services of this Machiavellian clown prince had the alternative been a trifle more inspiring than an economics professor who looks the part, and who has been reluctant to promise anything more specific than “good governance”.

Even that vague vow will be hard to honour following a victory based on 0.1 per cent of the popular vote, even though that will, under Italian electoral laws, translate into 55 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. But the shape of the equally powerful senate remained unclear at the time of writing, and the Berlusconi camp was demanding a recount.

In the short term, political turbulence appears to be the only certainty. Which may seem unfair to the nation’s electorate, 84 per cent of whom turned out to vote despite creeping cynicism about the political process.

It could also prove to be a price well worth paying if it spells the end of Berlusconi’s malign influence on Italian politics and ethics, which always overshadowed his entertainment value. However, as this week’s verdict reminds us, that’s still a very big if.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com