Stalemate in the ME

EIGHT days after Israel killed 15 Palestinians in Gaza, a suicide-bomber struck in Tel Aviv on Monday, killing nine people and injuring nearly 60 — a desperate act by a people who apparently have lost hope that they will achieve their aim by peaceful means. While America condemned the attack in forceful terms and warned Hamas of “grave consequences”, the European Union and Russia appealed for restraint and called on both sides to resume negotiations. However, as always, the aggressor and the victim, and the occupier and the occupied are being judged by the same yardstick. The slant given by the western media to developments in the wake of Hamas’s victory in January’s elections seems to confound the truth about Israel’s decision not to negotiate with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, making the world believe as if it is the Hamas-led government with which Israel is not willing to talk to. The truth is Israel cut off all ties with the PA in March 2001 when Ariel Sharon, former Israeli prime minister, came to power. He never met Yasser Arafat, sabotaged the ‘roadmap’ unveiled by US President George Bush in April 2003, reoccupied the West Bank and Gaza areas it had vacated, destroyed Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters and carried out a massacre in Jenin.

His pretext for not negotiating with the PA was that Arafat must first have a prime minister and carry out reforms in his administration. The Republican administration in Washington dutifully followed Tel Aviv and broke off all contact with the PA. In fact, President Bush never met Arafat, unlike his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who in spite of his pro-Israel leanings, used to have regular contacts with the Palestinian leader. However, after Arafat had a prime minister, neither Israel nor the US resumed negotiations with him. That remained the position even after Arafat died and Mahmoud Abbas became PA president. Even though Mr Sharon did meet Mr Abbas, the peace process was never revived. Now when Ehud Olmert says he will not negotiate with the Hamas government, he is saying nothing new. This has been Israel’s policy now for more than half a decade, and the assumption of power by Hamas and Kadima’s victory in the March elections have only to hardened positions on both sides.

Mr Olmert has now threatened to reoccupy Gaza, which Israel vacated in August last, and Israeli troops have made incursions into the strip twice recently. A reoccupation of the Gaza strip will be a disaster, for it will force Palestinian resistance groups to retaliate, leading to more casualties on both sides. The spiral of violence will thus continue, because Israel’s supporters avoid mentioning the obvious solution - Israel must withdraw from territories which do not belong to it. So long as Israel continues to occupy the West Bank, violence will continue because not only will Palestinians retaliate for Israeli attacks every now and then, they will have every right to fight for the liberation of their territories and the establishment of a sovereign state on their own soil. The cutting off of aid to the PA by Israel, the US and the EU has not had the desired effect, because Hamas has not so far changed its stance. However, if the Hamas government fails for financial reasons, then the US and EU must examine their conduct and ask themselves whether cutting off all aid to an elected government is the best way of promoting peace and democracy in the Middle East.

Blight of bonded labour

An international conference on bonded labour has called on the Pakistan government to appoint a judicial commission to eliminate private jails and take measures to rehabilitate freed haris. It would seem incredible that such a demand has to be made even 14 years after the National Assembly had adopted a law abolishing bonded labour in Pakistan. But the fact is that there are an estimated six million people still living in a state of slavery in the country. They are those who have been forced to work on lands, brick kilns and other home-based industries owned by their exploitative owners. By underpaying them, manipulating peshgis (advance wages in the form of loans) and charging them compound interest at exorbitant rates, the landowners are known to keep their haris in a permanent state of indebtedness. Illiterate, unable to do complex calculations and with no knowledge of the law, the workers are cheated into pledging to repay their employers massive sums which they can never hope to do in their or even their children’s lifetime. Thus, the bondage is passed on from generation to generation.

Efforts by human rights activists to get bonded labour released have not been very successful. Some workers have managed to win their freedom but often after paying a heavy price. There is the case of Munno Bheel who was freed from the private jail of his landlord in Mirpurkhas in 1996 only to have eight of his family members kidnapped two years later, allegedly by his employer. Even the courts have not succeeded in providing him redress. The national committee for bonded labour set up in 2001 and the vigilant committees it supposedly created have failed to do much, that is, if they are functional at all. A judicial commission has been demanded and once established it would do well to look into the working of these committees. The government must demonstrate the political will to address this major social evil. By ensuring that these committees perform their duties efficiently and the judiciary provides them the legal support that is needed, the government can eliminate bonded labour from Pakistan.

Growing unrest in Nepal

AS political restlessness intensifies in Nepal with thousands of protesters taking to the streets, there are deep forebodings that the current situation may mark “the beginning of the end” for the monarchy in that country. Not many would be sorry to see King Gyanendra go. He has sorely disappointed his people by reverting to absolute rule and dismantling all democratic institutions that were allowed to function during the latter part of his brother King Birendra’s reign. But the question remains: in case the king is forced to quit, what kind of political dispensation will take his place? Will the Maoist rebels allow the main political parties, with whom they have joined hands against the king, to take over following elections? Known for employing violent methods to stifle dissent in the countryside, it is unclear how much popular support they actually command. The current political turmoil is an expression of anger against the king’s policies and does not mean popular support for the Maoist agenda.

There is still time for the establishment to retrieve the situation. If the king wants to win the trust of his people and ward off an uncertain future for Nepal, he must hold elections as soon as possible and restore civil liberties and democratic rule. He should realise that in this day and age his role can only be a constitutional one, and that bypassing democracy can have grave consequences. Besides, he has not lived up to his promise of bettering the lot of the poor, and reports say that he has only added to his own personal wealth. Unless the king takes counsel from realism and comes up with a two-pronged plan to bring back democracy and to tackle the problem of poverty and underdevelopment, there is not much chance that he can save his crown as well as country.

French tradition of protest

WHEN the president and the prime minister of France, earlier this month, rescinded a law that had provoked a series of mammoth protests by students and workers, they were widely excoriated in the West. Jacques Chirac, most commentators suggested, had by this act further sullied his legacy. What’s more, his favoured successor, Dominique de Villepin, no longer stood any chance of a reasonable stab at the presidency in next year’s elections.

One can only wonder whether the critics would have shouted words of encouragement from the sidelines had Chirac and de Villepin stood firm in the face of mounting unrest, refusing to budge an inch. Or would their obduracy have been blamed for inciting violence and risking a repetition of the May 1968 revolt?

One would have thought that responding to an extra-parliamentary expression of the popular will was a reasonably democratic thing to do. After all, if people in large numbers take to streets in, say, Lebanon or Liberia and the government of the day refuses to heed their concerns, it stands a reasonably good chance of earning a rebuke from the self-ordained guardians of democracy. But what good are principles if they can’t be twisted to suit your strategic or ideological interests?

If Chirac and de Villepin had legislated improved working conditions for the average person and had subsequently changed their minds after receiving deputations from employers’ representatives, they would in all likelihood have been acclaimed for seeing the light. They are being denounced as losers because they did the opposite: having instituted, with almost no parliamentary debate, a law that took away young workers’ rights, they cancelled it after trade unions and students’ organisations made it clear that they considered it unacceptable.

The Contrat Premiere Embauche (CPE), or First Employment Contract, which became law on April 2, allowed employers a two-year trial period for employees aged under 26. During this period, it would have been legal for employers to cancel the contract at any time, without an explanation. The ostensible intention behind introducing this insidious clause was to reduce unemployment among the youth: at 23 per cent, it’s almost twice the national average, and in poorer suburbs it is said to be closer to 50 per cent.

Among the gravediggers of the welfare state, one of the key mantras is ‘labour market flexibility’; the chief ingredients of this concoction are lower wages and sharply reduced job security. Since last year, French businesses that employ less than 20 people already have the right, with no age limit, that de Villepin sought to extend to all businesses in the case of under-26-year-olds. One of his excuses was last November’s riots in the banlieus — the deprivation-stricken suburbs on the fringes of French cities, inhabited largely by minorities.

Reducing youth unemployment is, of course, a laudable goal, but how you go about it makes all the difference. If reducing school-leavers and university graduates to a cheap, disposable workforce is deemed to be the ideal means of accomplishing this end, this is proof of a profound systemic malaise. But that should hardly come as a big surprise: the demise of the primary alternative made it more or less inevitable that capitalism’s fangs would become more prominent — and that capitalists would no longer be afraid to use them.

Another unfortunate side-effect of the extinction of Soviet-style command economies has been the opportunity to propagate the impression that their failure somehow validates capitalism and unequivocally establishes its superiority. That is nonsense, but it is widely accepted nonsense. And this helps to explain why French workers and students have this month been agitating on behalf of the status quo — in stark contrast to their predecessors in 1968, who were determined to change the world.

Their inclination towards clinging on to the vestiges of a mixed economy may invite pathos, but their resistance to change is also understandable. Because, through much of the West, change tends to be for the worse. The seemingly benign term ‘market reform’ contains within it brutal mechanisms for profit maximisation that would have sparked revolts, if not revolutions, three or four decades ago. Nowadays too many people take in their stride the whittling away of long-cherished rights.

There was barely a squeak, let alone a strike call, when the Australian government earlier this year introduced a raft of industrial relations regulations aimed at making life simpler for employers and more tenuous for employees — enabling, for instance, businesses employing up to 100 people to sack workers more or less at will. That’s why the French resistance, notwithstanding its limited and purely economistic aims, is a healthy sign.

The fact that it led to a small victory for young workers (and, by all accounts, a big defeat for Chirac and de Villepin) can be construed as a bonus. France, of course, has a long tradition of agitation: although people power doesn’t often produce the desired results, the French are usually willing to have a go. The same could be said of innumerable other countries — but there are also places in this world where the strictest measures are in place to ward off the threat of unrest. And when these preventive measures fail to work, you can be reasonably certain that conditions have truly become intolerable.

The UAE — and Dubai in particular — has for decades been a magnet for workers from the subcontinent, chiefly because of the prospect of higher wages, regardless of the working conditions and sometimes mediaeval terms of the contracts. Labour unions have thus far been specifically outlawed, and even informal attempts at collective bargaining have usually entailed en masse dismissal. Not to put too fine a point on it, workers haven’t been allowed many rights, and those on the lowest rungs of society’s ladder — construction workers and other manual labourers — have had to put up with egregious wrongs.

Dubai’s building spree has accelerated over the past decade or so, and the lust for architectural marvels — ranging from an underwater luxury hotel and indoor snowfields to the world’s tallest tower, Burj Dubai — has spurred demand for workers. However, a ready supply, mainly from India and Pakistan, means wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, and working conditions remain dire.

But something has changed. Organised protests among the foreign workforce have hitherto been all but unknown because of the fear of dismissal and deportation. However, last month, workers at the Burj Dubai site went on strike over pay and working conditions, including overtime and medical care. An outbreak of violence resulted in damage estimated at $1 million. Then labourers working on a new terminal building at Dubai airport downed tools in sympathy.

A week later, the UAE announced it would allow labourers to form unions — or at least one union, ‘with separate representatives for the construction, fishing, agriculture and other industries’. What’s more, ‘The law will control how strikes will be conducted. It will outline rights, the do’s and don’ts.’ One could be forgiven for suspecting that there will be more don’ts and do’s, and it remains to be seen whether this gesture produces any results.

On the face of it, the move is a small step in the right direction. It’s proximity to the Burj Dubai strike may, however, be little more than a coincidence. The UAE is said to have been under gentle pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to improve conditions for labourers — and one can only imagine how depressing the situation must have been for institutions such as these to intervene on behalf of the workers.

Then there is the small matter of a Human Rights Watch report, which recently accused the UAE of treating underpaid foreign labourers as “less than human”, and noted that increasing protests reflected withheld wages, hazardous working conditions and filthy living quarters. The UAE dismissed the report as ‘misguided’, but the effort to make amends — at least superficially — indicates a desire to improve the country’s international image.

That’s easier said than done in a tiny country where such yawning disparities of wealth — an unavoidable byproduct of unrestrained capitalist growth — are on display. Measures that could effectively narrow this obscene gap tend to be seen as disincentives to investment. That is why there is good reason to be sceptical about meaningful changes in a system that delivers 17 per cent growth — phenomenal by any standard — but simultaneously guarantees that its benefits flow exclusively to the wealthy.

Next to nothing can reasonably be expected to trickle down for as long as it’s the hands with diamond rings that control the gilded taps. Meanwhile, the organisers of the Burj Dubai disruption live in fear of reprisals. Official sources have hinted that left-wing troublemakers from India and Pakistan are responsible for stirring up the labourers; if that is indeed the case, the agitators deserve our gratitude for breaking through the stultifying docility that had hitherto been the norm.

Dubai’s towers of glass and steel and gold have been raised on the toil and sweat of South Asian workers — who in some cases aren’t allowed inside the buildings once they are complete. They have every right to demand higher wages and improved living conditions. But, hopefully, one day they’ll realise that they deserve a lot more than that.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com