Rioting in Kabul

THE riot and the curfew in Kabul on Monday prove one thing beyond doubt — things are not under the control of the Karzai government even in Kabul. Conspiracy theory is irrelevant here. There was an accident: an American military truck rammed into a dozen vehicles, people reacted angrily, a riot followed which acquired an anti-US, anti-Karzai tilt, leading to acts of arson and looting. In the ensuing clash between protesters — estimated at 2,000 — and security forces, 14 people were killed and over 100 injured. The demonstrators raised anti-American and anti-Karzai slogans, pulled down a Karzai billboard and ransacked the offices of some aid agencies. The same day in the southern Helmand province, coalition airplanes bombed a mosque where a Taliban meeting was taking place. This left 50 people dead. The targeting of the mosque will have wider reverberations. No official spokesman for the US-led coalition forces has so far regretted the incident or said that the bombing was accidental. They knew that a Taliban meeting was going on in the mosque, and they chose to bomb it. Whether they were Taliban or people who had simply gathered for prayers remains unclear. In any case, the death of 50 people in the mosque is bound to have serious consequences.

Fortunately, President Hamid Karzai was realistic in his analysis of the Kabul rioting. Instead of blaming Pakistan — as he and his cabinet colleagues usually do — the Afghan president blamed the Kabul rioting on “opportunists and agitators” and said that the Afghan people should not let internal enemies destroy the country’s peace. If he had focussed all along on the internal situation and found reasons why lawlessness is rampant in the country, a lot of the bad blood that now exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan could have been avoided. The unfortunate incidents should also serve as an eye-opener for officials in the western world and the media that see a Pakistani hand behind the upsurge in Taliban violence and want Islamabad “to do more” to curb it.

Pakistan is doing all that is humanly possible to rein in Taliban activists and Al Qaeda guerillas. It has arrested some of Al Qaeda’s leading figures, including Al Libbi, Abu Zubayadh, Ramzi bin Alshiba and Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani. It has deployed 70,000 troops along the Durand Line, and its security forces have suffered heavy casualties in fighting foreign militants in the Wana area, despite intense domestic criticism of the government’s policy in Waziristan. Regrettably, Afghanistan has not reciprocated Pakistan’s gesture, for saboteurs — sometimes encouraged by Afghan officials — cross over into Pakistan for acts of sabotage and terror. The rioting in the capital city should also provide some food for thought for the US-led coalition. Four and a half years have passed since the Taliban regime fell, but the US-led allies have failed to pacify the country. Donors who had pledged huge amounts of money at the Tokyo moot are reluctant to part with funds because the reconstruction task is hampered by lawlessness and violence. The writ of the Karzai government is confined to a few urban centres. The obvious lesson to learn from the Kabul incident is that the US-led coalition and the Karzai administration are putting too much emphasis on force, and that they have made little effort to try political means for winning over the Pakhtoon dissidents, all of whom do not necessarily subscribe to the Taliban creed.

A fitting response

IN a welcome move, the government has decided to continue the policy of duty-free cement import. This is a fitting response to the failure of the cement manufacturers to honour their commitment to print Rs 275 ex-factory price on the bags to stabilise the retail prices at around Rs 280-285 per bag. The very announcement of the April 14 decision has had a salutary impact on cement market sentiments and even before the arrival of any of the imported stocks the prices have come down from Rs 400 per bag to Rs 300 per bag. This has happened in spite of the fact that the captains of the cement industry, some of whom also own large banks, had tried to discourage the opening of letters of credit in their banks for cement import. They had also tried to manipulate market sentiments by spreading rumours that they would dump their stocks in the market at far below the cost of imported cement to ruin the importers. It appears that in anticipation of a steep rise in the demand for cement from the earthquake regions, the producers had started hoarding the commodity creating a wide gap between the demand and supply and forcing prices to skyrocket in the open market.

The problem is that such unscrupulous manipulation of the market for profiteering cannot be ruled out altogether in a system of unregulated market economy that we now have in place. To be sure, the two-decade long privatisation spree in the country has given rise to a host of powerful cartels and vertical and horizontal monopolies. Representatives of those who own these cartels and monopolies in the meanwhile have either bought their way into the government or have acquired enough political clout to influence government policies and actions. It is from this state of affairs that problems like shortages of essentials and unusually high prices of commodities like sugar and cement flow. It is essential, therefore, that the government take immediate steps to break all cartels and monopolies and also introduce a system of price monitoring and regulation to discourage hoarding and any manner of market manipulation for profiteering.

Another karo-kari murder

YET another karo-kari case has been reported from Sindh, but it is unlikely to move the government to take any kind of action, let alone undertake any introspection as to why such crimes are rising at an alarming rate. Despite the media attention given to such horrendous acts committed in the name of honour, there is little action taken against the offenders — be it those who commit the crimes or the jirgas that prescribe them. This is either because the police are hesitant to register cases against offenders as many of them have the backing of influential feudals or tribesmen or because loopholes in the law allow lighter sentences against those who can prove that they acted under grave provocations. The government’s lack of interest or commitment in addressing the issue creates an impression among the adherents of primitive customs and traditions that they can literally get away with murder. As a result, crimes against women are not given the importance they deserve. The Hudood Ordinances remain the biggest hurdle in a woman’s quest for justice. However, it is society’s indifference to such crimes that is most worrisome. It accepts such crimes as “tribal customs” rather than viewing them as murders pure and simple.

Society cannot allow Monday’s murder of two women and three men to go unpunished. However weak it is, the legal system must run its course and prevail over any primitive tribal system. In this case, the man who murdered his wife, aunt and three male relatives, was accompanied by three men who aided him in murdering and disposing of the bodies in a waterway. Not only should these men be prosecuted immediately, but their case should be made an example of. Until the government comes down hard on such crimes, they will continue to play havoc with the very fabric of society.

Big trouble in a small country

EAST Timor was supposed to be a United Nations success story. Yet in recent weeks, a mere four years into its journey as an independent nation, it has exploded into violence, exhibiting many of the symptoms of state failure. Foreign troops — thus far mainly Australian — are back patrolling the streets of Dili, the capital, less than a year after the last of the UN peacekeepers left the little country. What went wrong?

The immediate cause of the unrest was evidently the dismissal in March of 600 soldiers after they went on strike, complaining of discrimination, and defied orders to return to their posts. They took their weapons with them. In many countries the defection of 600 troops would have been considered a relatively minor rebellion. In East Timor it meant depletion of the military by about 40 per cent, with the standing army reduced to 800 soldiers.

Apparently the rebels’ chief gripe was that troops and officers from the east of the country were being favoured for promotion and the like. Hardly anyone outside the country would hitherto even have been aware of any sort of ethnic divide; for the past three decades, the primary dichotomy has been between East Timorese and Indonesians. It is more than likely, however, that the differences that have surfaced — and which have now affected the rest of the population — are a symptom rather than the cause of East Timor’s woes.

The nation was born in extreme poverty: in its infancy it was designated the poorest country in Asia. Drought-prone East Timor has an almost exclusively agrarian economy, and the current level of unemployment is about 40 per cent. It’s worse than that for the younger generation, in a country where the average age is less than 21. The midwives that proudly delivered the baby showed far less interest in nurturing it. The level of aid flow, while perhaps not negligible, has certainly been inadequate.

There is the prospect of a steady stream of revenue from extensive oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea under a joint exploitation treaty with Australia, but it hasn’t so far started flowing. Besides, it is argued that the prospective income won’t automatically rescue East Timor from impecuniosity, because corruption has already set in.

The rising levels of discontent and despair are likely, in some parts of the world, to prompt the argument that perhaps it would have been best to leave East Timor under Indonesian control. But that would be patently untrue. Jakarta’s military invasion in 1975 led to the worst phase in East Timor’s modern history. It cost an estimated 200,000 lives — roughly one-third of the population. The toll was proportionately higher than that exacted by the Nazi-led Judaeocide in Europe, Pol Pot’s ruthlessness in Cambodia or the Pakistan army’s rampage through Bangladesh.

Before that, East Timor was a Portuguese colony for nearly 400 years. For a while Portugal controlled the entire island of Timor, but it lost nearly half of it to the Dutch in an 18th century battle. As part of the Dutch East Indies, West Timor was incorporated into Indonesia when the latter gained independence. By most East Timorese accounts, Portugal was a relatively benign colonial power: by and large it let the Timorese get on with their lives. After the Portuguese overthrew the successors of the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar, Lisbon lost little time in divesting itself of its colonies, notably Angola, Mozambique and East Timor.

In all three cases, liberation led to civil war. It dragged on for decades in Angola, which, along with Mozambique, became a proxy war zone for the superpowers. (At one point, Cuban military assistance proved crucial in thwarting a South African invasion of Angola.) Neither the Soviet Union nor China showed much interest in East Timor. However, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), like most liberation movements at the time, was deemed vaguely Marxist in orientation. It also happened to be the most popular faction. This helped Indonesia to project East Timor as a potential communist state. Australia was wary of the prospect; the United States was even more paranoid about the idea in the wake of its final defeat in Indochina earlier that year.

Ten years previously, the US and Britain had secretly collaborated with Suharto and other generals in their “war against communism” — which in those days was de rigueur for would-be western allies, just as the “war against terror” is today. The Indonesian armed forces killed an estimated one million people, sometimes acting on lists drawn up by the US embassy; many of the details (and mass graves) have begun to emerge only in the post-Suharto era.

In 1975, the US, Britain and Australia were keen on Suharto occupying East Timor. Privately, they indicated as much; and the US didn’t even bother to issue any strident public protestations or pretend to have been taken by surprise.

Suharto launched his invasion on the very day US president Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Indonesia after a two-day state visit.

This continued, on and off, for nearly a quarter of a century. Even when Indonesia’s post-Suharto president B.J. Habibie agreed to a referendum in 1999, the Indonesian army, or TNI, embarked on a full-fledged intimidation campaign aimed at coercing the East Timorese into rejecting independence. Among the most vociferous supporters of the TNI’s role in those years was the then US ambassador to Jakarta, a gentleman by the name of Paul Wolfowitz.

Fortunately, the UN was called upon to organise the referendum. More than 90 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote, and 78 per cent of them opted for independence. That proved to be the signal for a final paroxysm of punishment by the TNI and allied thugs; it left 1,000 dead and destroyed much of the infrastructure before an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force was deployed.

That last blow helped to guarantee that East Timor’s rebirth as an independent nation would be an extraordinarily painful affair. In all likelihood it would all have been rather different if Fretilin’s declaration of independence in November 1975 had led directly to statehood. Western military intervention would not have been required to achieve that objective. Washington and Canberra were well aware at the time that Suharto, who basked in western adulation and was heavily reliant on western arms sales, was extremely nervous about the possibility of annoying his benefactors. A stern frown from Uncle Sam would probably have sufficed to deter him from barging into East Timor.

The past may be another country, but it is hardly surprising that the fragile shoulders of a very young nation are weighed down by the burden. Instead of demanding any sort of compensation or reparations from Indonesia, the East Timorese leadership has made every effort to be accommodating: Xanana Gusmao, the popular and charismatic president of East Timor, who once led Fretilin’s armed wing, Falintil, and spent several years in an Indonesian prison, went as far as to publicly embrace TNI chief General Wiranto. Under Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia has made some effort to try a few of those held responsible for the most egregious human rights abuses in East Timor, but hardly any convictions have been secured.

It is also important to remember that Fretilin had no experience of governance when it was thrust into that role: as many countries have discovered, there’s a vast difference between leading an independence movement and running a country.

Furthermore, there are — perhaps inevitably — factions within Fretilin, and in the opinion of some observers the present unrest is driven more by political differences than by ethnic divisions. Jose Ramos Horta, the foreign minister, hasn’t been particularly adept at disguising his prime ministerial ambitions. The incumbent prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, is frequently described in western news reports as aloof and unpopular.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Ramos Horta lived in Australia and the US during the years of Indonesian occupation; Alkatiri spent his years of exile in Mozambique. Ramos Horta has been as gung-ho as George W. Bush or John Howard about the war against Iraq. Alkatiri, reportedly a practising Muslim (his ancestors were Yemeni traders), has been labelled a communist keen on emulating the Cuban model.

Australia — whose intervention force is to be supplemented by smaller contingents from New Zealand, Portugal and Malaysia — has formally adopted a politically neutral stance, but there is little doubt it would prefer to see Ramos Horta in the hot seat in place of Alkatiri — whose days, at the time of writing, appeared to be numbered.

Dili continued to burn after last week’s Australian deployment, with large numbers of residents fleeing the capital for safer ground. It can only be hoped that the reintroduced crutches will help East Timor stand on its own feet, rather than reinforce its status as a dependency. But that will require a concerted effort on the part of the East Timorese to demonstrate that they are decidedly not a latter-day manifestation of what was once condescendingly known as the white man’s burden.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com