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| April 23, 2006 | Sunday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 24, 1427 |
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Fighting on campuses
Bird flu outbreak
Inmates of ‘temple of truth’
Alone on the shrinking ice
WE used to call it the Temple of Truth. The 10-storey cube of brown and cream marble on the Mezze Boulevard in Damascus had vast, sand-covered windows that were never cleaned, a set of four battered silver elevators that took up to 15 minutes to reach the dreaded top floor and a bust of President Hafez el-Assad which appeared to be made of dark yellow margarine.
THIS is the most monumental Earth Day since its inception more than 30 years ago because the issue of global warming is finally catapulting toward a tipping point. With the debate firmly behind us, the focus is turning to solutions.
KING Gyanendra’s move to end absolute rule in Nepal and hand executive powers to the people seems to have come a little late in the day. His call for the nomination of a prime minister by the seven-party opposition alliance and the establishment of a new council of ministers for governing Nepal in accordance with the 1990 constitution has been dubbed a ruse by political parties as well as by the rebel Maoists. For more than two weeks, demonstrations against the king have gathered pace, and are showing no signs of abating, even after he expressed his commitment to multiparty democracy and to holding elections as soon as possible. The popular call on the streets now is for the king to step down, which he may well be forced to do, considering the series of regressive measures he has taken over the past several months to crush the country’s nascent democracy.
Ever since the palace killings of 2001 in which the then crown prince killed several members of the royal family, including his father, the late King Birendra, and which brought the present king, Birendra’s brother, to the throne, political developments in Nepal have followed a turbulent course. In November 2001, the Maoists, who are opposed to the monarchy and in control of large swathes of Nepal’s hinterland, stepped up their operations against state forces. Hundreds were killed in the violence that followed, prompting the king to declare a state of emergency. In May 2002, the king dissolved parliament at the prime minister’s request. Some months later, elections scheduled for November 2002 were put off indefinitely. Throughout the period, the country faced economic hardships brought on by regular strikes and blockades imposed by the Maoists. In February 2005, after dismissing or forcing the resignation of four prime ministers in succession, the king assumed direct powers which he is now prepared to relinquish. But the damage has been done, and the people will not easily forget the severe curtailment of civil liberties imposed by the king. Abject poverty — about half of Nepal’s population lives below the poverty line — and underdevelopment have added to their woes. While the Maoists are known to practise repressive methods against dissenters in the areas they control, their 12-point agreement with the country’s main opposition parties on the whole has been welcomed. Support for a constituent assembly is growing.
However, many analysts fear that even with people’s power on the rise, the shape of the next political dispensation continues to be in doubt. For all their promises to respect human rights, the Maoists remain a militant force while the opposition parties are bitterly divided on several issues, although they have joined hands against the king at the moment. In asking the king to restore democracy, the international community is aware of its limitations, and most countries — especially India where the Naxalite movement supports the Maoists — would be averse to seeing the rebels sharing power in Nepal. From New Delhi’s perspective, such a development might considerably reduce its clout in the region while strengthening the Naxalites at home. Meanwhile, Nepal’s political parties which are urging the people to revolt should pause to ponder and redefine their strategy that, following days of countrywide protests, may have acquired emotive overtones. The people have proved their power, but it is the political process that will determine the ultimate outcome.
IT is disturbing that the APMSO and the IJT have turned Karachi college campuses into battlegrounds. Both the MQM and JI must share the blame for the death and destruction on the campuses because of their failure to restrain their student wings. Now the Sindh Professors’ and Lecturers’ Association has decided to go on strike to protest against the deteriorating law and order situation in colleges. Earlier, the SPLA had given a 48-hour ultimatum to the administration to take action against those “external elements” who had burnt cars and motorcycles belonging to teachers and non-teaching staff. This reminds one of a similar 48-hour ultimatum given by a political party following the recent Nishtar Park tragedy. That teachers, who are supposed to embody wisdom, restraint and all that is best in a society, should invoke ultimatums as a mode of protest is regrettable indeed. The provocation was no doubt great — outsiders entering campuses and resorting to violence and arson. But this has been going on for more than a decade, and the teachers cannot absolve themselves of their responsibility because of the partisan attitude which some of them display towards the IJT and the APMSO.
Now the IJT has announced plans to hold a sit-in at the President’s House in Islamabad to protest against the recent murder of a college student in Karachi. Unfortunately, the issue has been politicised because the rally held outside a mosque to protest against the killings was also addressed by some MMA leaders, including Allama Hasan Turabi and MPA Younus Barai, who linked the Nishtar Park carnage to the campus violence and demanded action against the Sindh government. The MQM’s responsibility is the greater because it is now part of the government. It must not only restrain its student wing, it must also avoid saying or doing anything provocative. The government must investigate the charges that two of its SHOs were “patronising (APMSO’s) terrorist activities”. If the charges are proved, strict disciplinary action should be taken against the two. Basically, it is for the MQM and JI high commands to decide whether there should be peace and normality on campuses or whether these should continue to be rocked by violence and strife.
THE reported outbreak of avian flu in the Islamabad region should be cause for concern. Notwithstanding the health ministry’s statement that no human has been infected so far with the deadly H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus, it seems quite obvious that at least one poultry handler may have been infected — his laboratory tests are pending — by bird flu. In fact, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has so far received seven cases of patients with symptoms similar to bird flu, taking the total of such cases to nine. The virus was recently reported in chickens in poultry farms in Sihala near the capital and it seems to have now spread to several other poultry farms in the region. The response of the local administration so far has been to put a temporary ban on the movement of poultry from the affected area.
However, much more needs to be done to contain what could turn out to be a major public health problem. Other than treating those who already might have contracted the deadly virus, the other important step is to spread public awareness of the disease and to target certain vulnerable groups of people. As for the former, given the high temperatures at which chicken is cooked in Pakistan, it is unlikely that anyone can get infected from eating the meat of an infected bird. However, as far as eggs are concerned, it should be publicised that if they are to remain on one’s menu, they must be eaten hard-boiled and not soft-fried. The vulnerable segments are those who work in poultry farms and also those who sell chicken meat. Neither sector is known for attention to cleanliness or taking precautions against infections. The government should impress upon those in the poultry business to improve the level of their hygiene. This must go along with a systematic campaign of awareness in areas where birds are found to be infected.
Herein sat the cigarette-smoking priests of the temple whose sullen fate was to ensure that foreign journalists — alas for them, Fisk among this number — understood the avuncular, humanist, Arab nationalist values of Baathism.
In the days of Old Syria, this was a harsh task for any attendant lord. Iskander Ahmed Iskander was the minister of information when I first arrived in Damascus, a slim, moustachioed helmsman whose title belied his proximity to the Assad. He ruled from an office with a heavily bolted security door in a building which housed the Syrian Arab News Agency; its indigestible dispatches filled the pages of each day’s Syria Times, a tabloid-sized journal invariably recording the completion of five-year industrial plans and telegrams from delirious agricultural workers congratulating the president on the anniversary of his corrective revolution.
It was Iskander whose task in 1982 was to berate me for daring to enter the forbidden city of Hama where the legions of Rifaat el-Assad — brother of the Assad and now quietly enjoying forced retirement in the European Union (that scourge of war criminals) — butchered thousands of Islamist rebels. This occurred without a squeak of complaint from the same Americans who are currently trying to liquidate an equal number of insurgents in Iraq.
Damascus Radio (one of Iskander’s pets) had already denounced me as a “liar” for claiming to have wormed my way into Hama even though I had penetrated the burning city by offering a lift to two of Rifaat’s officers and spent more than 10 minutes watching one of his tanks shelling the city’s oldest mosque.
Yet when he received me in the spring of 1982, Iskander was anxious to preserve good relations with my then employer, The Times. First he insisted I had not been to Hama — a charitable suggestion I swiftly disposed of — and then that he knew nothing of Damascus Radio’s claim that I had lied. I had no doubt that Iskander had approved this very broadcast. But he beamed at me, thrust a cigar in my direction and said: “Only true friends could have this argument.”
Years later, Iskander would go for cancer surgery in London where part of his brain was removed. When I asked him what it was like to wake up after the operation, he replied: “Part of me did not exist.” Tough folk, Baathists. These were also difficult days for Zuhair, Syria’s “director (sic) of foreign press” whose genial, kindly ability to wangle visas for ungrateful journalists — and whose “minders” shadowed all of them — was rarely rewarded. Zuhair was eventually appointed press officer at his country’s London embassy, a post swiftly abandoned when the Brits discovered that the would-be bomber of an El Al airliner had been hidden by Syrian diplomats — not Zuhair — in London.
Back in Damascus, he approved a visa to an American journalist who failed to tell Zuhair that he was also an Israeli and who filed a number of reports to his paper in Tel Aviv.
Zuhair was dispatched to the lower floors of the Temple of Truth, protected only by a new minister of information, Mohamed Salman, a shrewd Baathist whose fall from grace was inevitable after he unveiled yet another bust of the great leader outside the Temple of Truth. The following morning, a squad of workmen were seen dismantling the statue.
Next time I saw Mohamed he was under house arrest, freighted to a Baath Party Congress to vote for the leadership of Assad’s son Bashar in 2000, nervously sipping coffee in a corner of the room while his Baathist colleagues showed their fear of contamination by creating a 20ft radiation zone around him. Along with a colleague, I broke the radiation belt by approaching Mohamed to ask after his health. His look of relief was palpable. A few hitherto craven Baathists then followed our example.
I liked Ahmed, translator and “minder” to Zuhair’s successor. His chain-smoking detracted from his ascetic, cynical, literary approach to the world. Amid quotations from William Blake, Ahmed — who suffered from a weak heart — would explain Baathist teachings with a roll of the eyes and often prefaced his remarks with the words: “You promise me, Robert, you will never repeat what I say.”
There would then follow a transparently honest account of life under Hafez el-Assad and — once — a description of how his colleagues would behave on the day he passed away. “In my native Tadmor, the people will go to the mass graves of political prisoners and throw rose petals on the sand,” he said. “And in our offices at what you call the Temple of Truth, we will sit with cigarettes in our mouths, each watching our comrades from the corner of our eyes to observe their reactions to the death of the Great Leader.”
On that day, the denizens of the Temple of Truth behaved in exactly this manner — there were, unfortunately, no rose petals on the graves of Tadmor — but, once Bashar settled into office, a carefully modulated Baathist breeze stirred along the corridors of the temple. When I joked about the previous “iron rule”, there would be much back-slapping and praise for Bashar.
Why only this week, the new minister, a cheerful, intellectual surgeon called Mohsen Bilal, recounted how he had often discussed my reports with General Ghazi Kenaan, the interior minister who last year unhappily blew his brains out at the height of the UN inquiry into the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
To my shock, I found that both Adel and Ahmed had died of heart attacks in recent years. Iskander is long dead. Mohamed Salman currently “lives at home”, though no longer under house arrest, while Zuhair, whose neck was saved by Salman, now edits a newspaper about horses. Horses, I asked at the temple? Horses? “Yes, his paper’s called The Thoroughbred.” Big circulation? “The people of Damascus, Mr Robert, do not all talk about horses.” Indeed. The Syria Times has gone broadsheet and is as boring as ever. “Cabinet Stresses National Unity” was one of this week’s headlines.
But other papers are reporting Lebanese accusations that Syria was behind Hariri’s murder. My hotel displays magazines recording the repression of Syrian Kurds. The windows are still covered in sand and the lift still takes 15 minutes to reach the 10th floor. But this is New Syria and life has changed in the Temple of Truth.
And they call this place, I keep reminding myself, the Axis of Evil.—(c) The Independent
Around the world, countries are finally recognising the urgent need to deal with global warming. China just mandated stronger fuel economy standards for its vehicles than we have in the United States, and it imposed a tax on gas-guzzling vehicles and disposable wood chopsticks. Brazil has shifted almost half its cars and trucks to ethanol. London imposes a toll on all vehicles entering its congested business district. Sweden is on course to become the world’s first country with an oil-free economy. In Barcelona, 40 per cent of new buildings have hot water courtesy of solar power.
In the United States, the media have begun to recognize the severity of the issue as well and have responded with an explosion of coverage. A recent Time magazine special report on global warming warned: “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.” In the last few months, every major broadcast network has investigated the subject, including, to the surprise of many in the environmental movement, a one-hour prime-time special that aired on Fox News last November. Even the Weather Channel has a full-time global warming expert.
Oprah devoted a show to the subject and, as a result of her call to action, efficient, compact fluorescent lightbulbs were sold out at stores across the country. Wal-Mart has since expanded the floor space for and prominence of the bulbs in its stores. Vanity Fair and Elle just published their first green issues, the latter making fashion magazine publishing history by printing on recycled paper. On May 26, former vice-president Al Gore’s film on the subject, “An Inconvenient Truth,” will open in movie theatres nationwide.
Membership in environmental groups is at an all-time high. Daily extreme weather events have forced Americans to realize that something is very wrong. The dots are finally being connected, and global warming is fast becoming recognized as the most critical issue of our time.
The only place not feeling the heat is the White House. President Bush has admitted, half-heartedly, that Earth is warming and we are addicted to oil. —Los Angeles Times