A convenient blinker

ANTI-SEMITISM is a very convenient phrase. Once it used to stand for philosophies and state policies that tended to persecute or discriminate against the Jewish people in Europe. It found expression in pogroms in Tsarist Russia and in the 20th century it was seen in action in the form of the Holocaust in which Christian Europe murdered six million people because they were Jews. The Zionist movement developed basically as a reaction to the persecution of the Jewish community in Europe. However, since the usurpation of Palestine by European Jews and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, this phrase has become a convenient tool to strongly react to or suppress any criticism of Israel’s policies. Anti-Semitism no more means stereotyping the Jews or casting slurs on their beliefs and way of life; instead many interpret it to mean anything said by way of criticism of Israel’s policies. The latest victim of the charge is famed Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder. His fault was that in a newspaper article, Gaarder had some truths to say about Israel’s ongoing massacre of Lebanese civilians. Writing in Oslo’s Aftenpost, Gaarder said that by massacring Lebanese civilians “Israel has massacred is own legitimacy”. He also made some remarks which even Muslims would find abhorrent. Immediately, Norwegian Jewish groups went after him and accused him of being anti-Semitic. One critic went so far as to say that it was the worst thing he had read since Mein Kampf.

Since its founding, the state of Israel has committed horrendous crimes against humanity. Its history is drenched in blood and includes such massacres as those of Deir Yassin, Sabra-Chatilla, Qana I and II and Jenin. As acknowledged by some of Israel’s own dissidents, the Zionists levelled 300 Palestinian villages during what they call its “war of independence”. Arab sources put the figure at 500. This was done to ensure that Palestinian refugees, should they try to return to their homes after disturbances had ended, would not have any villages and homes left to return to. By a rough estimate, 800,000 Arabs were made to flee their villages, which later were turned into kibbutzim for Jews coming from Europe. The movable and immovable property which the Palestinians had left behind were confiscated by Israel and used to finance the migration of Jews to Israel. The policy which it pursued during the British “mandate” to drive Palestinians out of their soil has continued till this day. This is to be seen in Israeli actions in the occupied territories, which Israel continues to hold in defiance of UN resolutions, including resolution 242 which calls for Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.

The Norwegian author’s criticism comes in the wake of the war crimes being committed by Israel against the state and people of Lebanon. Ignoring the Qana II massacre and the cold-blooded murder of 23 Syrian farm workers in Baalbek, Israel has not confined its attacks to south Lebanon, which is a Hezbollah stronghold; instead, it has bombed civilian targets throughout Lebanon. The targets have included apartment buildings, homes, power stations, infrastructure and factories producing civilian goods. Yet those who can tame Israel and make it behave have chosen to keep quiet. An American senator, a Congressman or even a president knows he has bleak electoral prospects without the benefit of the Jewish money and media if he chooses to criticise Israel.

Pacifying Waziristan

ONE hopes that the ceasefire reaffirmed last month in Waziristan will not be revoked after Monday’s beheading of a pro-government tribal leader who was kidnapped last week from South Waziristan. As it is, it took the government over two years to realise that only a political dialogue can resolve the crisis in the troubled region that has resulted in the loss of innumerable lives — from the innocent civilians to local and foreign militants, not to mention the military personnel. Last month’s ceasefire, announced after the convening of a 45-member grand jirga, seemed to reflect a commitment from both sides to restore peace in the area. The government released some prisoners, closed and relocated some check-posts and restored perks and privileges of tribal members as a goodwill gesture while the other side vowed not to attack military posts. Relative calm prevailed — until Monday’s incident. It is somewhat ironic that on the same day that the tribal leader Loi Khan was brutally murdered, members of the grand jirga called on the NWFP government to reiterate its commitment to help restore peace. This could mean that Loi Khan’s murder is an isolated incident, the result of some personal enmity for which he was punished and then labelled an ‘informer’. The more likely possibility, however, is that his murder is the work of unscrupulous elements opposed to the ceasefire.

Whatever the case, the jirga members will have to devise new strategies with the government to rein in these undesirable elements who threaten law and order in the area. At this point it is imperative that the government continue to exercise restraint and not resort to any heavy-handed method as that is likely to have disastrous consequences. The militants too have much to gain from keeping the ceasefire in place and expelling foreigners whose presence has caused more harm than good. The government also seems to have realised that it needs to heavily invest in the socio-economic development of the area. Last month, it allocated Rs6.2 billion as development funds for Waziristan, the highest sum ever given to the area. This is one of the surest ways lasting peace can be achieved.

Women’s empowerment

ADMINISTERING a well-deserved rap on the knuckles to Pakistan, civil society groups attending a UN meeting in New York last month accused the country of “opposing the empowerment of girls in birth control and marital relations”. This charge is substantiated by the UN’s gender empowerment measure which puts Pakistan just nine (out of a list of 80 countries) notches above the country where women are the least empowered. While gender inequality is a recurrent feature in several areas of social life, family planning is among the worst affected as the strong patriarchal set-up does not allow women a say even in matters such as reproductive rights. The result is there for all to see: a fast-growing population and a total fertility rate of 4.3 — that is, the average number of children a woman bears.

It is unfortunate that the state does not recognise the precarious situation of Pakistani women. It has invested very little in their education and even less in their healthcare. They have no say in their marriage and are at the receiving end of medieval traditions, especially in the rural areas where customs such as karo-kari and swara have reduced them to the level of chattel. It is true that given our deeply conservative values, it might be difficult at the moment to break cultural rules and give women all the rights of those living in the more emancipated parts of the world. But surely, a start can be made in that direction by doing more to change the fundamental nature of things. Removing biases, providing education facilities and improved healthcare and encouraging a healthy debate on reproductive rights are just some of the issues that need to be addressed in order to create an atmosphere where women can freely exercise their right of choice.

Can the revolution outlive Castro?

IT probably would not be considered particularly ageist to contend that no nation’s fortunes ought to be linked to a supreme leader having been in office for several decades.

Yet there was something distinctly unpleasant about the jubilations in Miami that greeted the announcement in Havana that Fidel Castro was going on sick leave for the first time since he assumed power in 1959. Although the relevant statement about intestinal bleeding following an operation — reportedly on account of a stomach tumour — came from Castro himself, it did little to dampen speculation that the president may already be dead, or at least dying.

Although the available evidence does not necessarily favour such a conclusion, to many of Castro’s detractors his demise would signal the death of the revolution he led 47 years ago. Others believe that several aspects of the revolution will be preserved, at least in the short to medium term, even without Fidel at the helm. In truth, there’s more than an element of wishful thinking in both these opinions. No one really knows what lies ahead.

Much will depend, of course, on what the United States has in mind. For nearly five decades it has sought to undermine the revolution — with some success. The embargo it slapped on the tiny Caribbean island in 1961 remains in place: it has, on occasion, been tightened but never relaxed. The relentless blockade by Cuba’s giant neighbour denied the island’s economy the opportunity of developing under normal conditions. For nearly three decades, it relied mainly on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for trade (and aid). Meanwhile, the embargo gave the regime in Havana a standing excuse for poor economic performance — an excuse that was invariably widely accepted, because it was always at least partially valid.

Once Cuba lost its communist trading partners towards the beginning of the 1990s, the revolution attracted obituarists by the dozen. Their predictions of the Castro administration’s imminent demise proved premature as Cuba entered what was officially designated a Special Period. This involved belt-tightening, but also leeway on a limited scale for private enterprise, as well as an increasing focus on tourism, rather than sugar, as the economic mainstay.

Against the odds, Cuba pulled through — and it managed to do so without sacrificing the revolution’s most noteworthy gains: free education up to university level and a system of health care that is not only the envy of the Third World but also more efficient than state-operated medicare facilities in many developed countries. Cuba’s doctor-patient ratio of 1:170 is superior, for instance, to the 1:188 average in the US. The average life expectancy of Cubans is 77.3 years; in the US, the figure is 77.4 (and five years lower for African-Americans).

Similarly, in terms of infant mortality, Cubans are only marginally worse off than the citizens of the world’s richest country. There is, however, one significant difference between the two: the US annually spends $5711 per person on health; the comparative Cuban cost is $251.

A month ago, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which was set up by the Bush administration in 2003, issued a report claiming that “chronic malnutrition, polluted drinking water and untreated chronic diseases continue to affect a significant percentage of the Cuban people”, adding that “conditions will not improve as long as Fidel Castro remains in power”.

This must have come as a surprise to the United Nations, which recently declared Cuba to be the only country in Latin America where there is no malnutrition - despite, one might add, chronic shortages, although conditions have noticeably improved in recent years and the CIA Fact Book attributes a hardly unhealthy growth rate of eight per cent to the Cuban economy.

The spurt is due in no small measure to Cuba’s close relationship with Venezuela, which provides petroleum to the island in exchange for medical expertise. However, the oil is a kind of bonus: most of the humanitarian missions Cuba operates in 68 countries earn nothing more tangible than goodwill.

Its generosity in flying across hundreds of teams of doctors as well as medical equipment has widely been acknowledged in Pakistan; what is perhaps less well known is that when the final batch of medical workers returned to Havana, Castro turned up at the airport to thank them in person.

The internationalist spirit has been evident in Cuba since the earliest days of the revolution, and there was a time when it included armed assistance. The US inevitably sought to portray Cuba as a Soviet proxy in the context of military missions, but that wasn’t always the case. At Nelson Mandela’s inauguration a dozen years ago, while embracing his Cuban counterpart the new South African president reportedly whispered, “You made this possible” — a reference to the crucial role played by Cuban soldiers in reversing South African aggression against Angola, a defeat that is acknowledged to have abbreviated apartheid’s life-span.

The CIA, meanwhile, was passionately devoted to the idea of abbreviating Castro’s life-span: by Havana’s reckoning, it was involved in no fewer than 638 plots to bump off the Cuban leader, following an abortive attempt to strangle the revolution in its infancy in 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the embargo were ostensibly a response to the revolutionary government’s decision to nationalise the industries owned and operated by US multinationals such as United Fruit. There was, of course, more to it than that. In Washington’s view, the primary concern in such circumstances revolves around the likelihood of an example that other nations might emulate.

Cuba established an unacceptable precedent by choosing independence over the neocolonial status that had characterised it since the turn of the century. Worse still, it turned into the first communist state in the western hemisphere.

These were paths it could not be allowed to follow, not only because the idea of a communist entity 90 miles from Florida stuck in Uncle Sam’s craw, but also because of the risk that other semi-dependencies in the region the US regarded at its backyard may be tempted to follow suit.

However, for a variety of reasons — including Soviet support, as well as the fact that revolutionary Cuba’s armed forces evolved from Castro’s Rebel Army, which relegated the possibility of a coup by US-trained officers — the change that Cubans had opted for could not be reversed, despite the collective punishment meted out by Washington over the decades. Other Latin American countries — Guatemala under the reformist Jacobo Arbenz, Salvador Allende’s Chile, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas — were not so fortunate, despite the fact that each of them boasted a popularly elected government. US support for the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002 suggests that the regional hegemon’s preferred strategy for regime change remains intact.

Many of these lessons were not lost on Cuba, which has steered clear of multi-party democracy. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a commendable achievement. Restrictions on the freedom of _expression fall in the same category: open debates on policy and strategy would arguably have benefited Cuba in numerous ways. Similarly, prisoners of conscience can hardly be construed as an advertisement for Cuban socialism.

Deplorable aspects of the Cuban revolutionary experience do, however, need to be put in perspective. Subversion from across the Florida Straits cannot lightly be dismissed as a spectre that the communist authorities in Havana conjured up as a means of entrenching their dictatorship.

In fact, that aspect of the geopolitical reality will acquire even greater significance in a post-Castro scenario: however appealing the idea of an open democracy, it will inevitably involve the influx of millions of dollars - accompanied, of course, by a plethora of free-market strategies — from Miami and Washington. What are the prospects of the Communist Party as well as local groups of dissidents, whose anti-communism in many cases does not extend to a blanket disapproval of the revolution’s achievements, standing a chance against the imported chimera of instant prosperity?

Well before Castro bowed out, the US had already appointed a “transition coordinator” for Cuba. The “freedom” and “democracy” that Washington has in store would, in all likelihood, entail a return of sorts to the pre-revolutionary era, when Cuba was a coveted playground for all manner of American gangsters and pimps while the local population put up with indignities and profound inequities.

The ideal alternative would be a social democracy that consolidates revolutionary gains while dispensing with the repressive apparatus that has allowed ideologically motivated propagandists to dismiss the island as a tyranny. But even if that should come to pass, will it be sustainable?

Notwithstanding the autocratic aspects of Castro’s rule, the depiction of him as a tyrant was always a gross caricature: repression in Cuba never came close to scaling the heights reached by US client states in the region, and even today by a long stretch the most atrocious facilities in Cuba are concentrated on a US-occupied slice of the island known as Guantanamo Bay.

Yes, Castro should have retired years, perhaps even decades, ago. Had Cuba been left alone, he may actually have felt comfortable doing so. The resilience of the revolution he spearheaded with a handful of comrades 50 years ago will be sorely tested in the months and years ahead.

The affection he attracts among the masses in Latin America offers a clearer reflection of his place in history than the hatred he inspires among US-based ideologues. Only time will tell, meanwhile, how safe the brightest aspects of his legacy are in the hands of his successors in Havana, as well as his popularly elected friends and admirers in Caracas and La Paz.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com