GENERAL Pervez Musharraf unveiled the second track of his strategy for the troubled and embittered province of Balochistan during his recent trip to Quetta. Hitherto Islamabad had been banking largely on force to impose peace and order; now it has put a bagful of carrots on display. And memories of the drift during 1968-71 have been revived.

Addressing a public meeting, General Musharraf announced a large financial allocation for Balochistan. The package includes: Rs2.5 billion for parliamentarians to strengthen their position in their constituencies; one billion rupees for the development of Quetta; Rs3,800 million for the 38 districts in the province (100 million for each district); opening of seven cadet colleges and two campuses of the Balochistan University (at Gwadar and Turbat); 1,000 scholarships for Balochistan students; Rs120,000 over a year for each student who has completed 16 years of study; quota for Baloch students at the Ordnance Factories, Aeronautical complex and the Taxila Heavy Industries; and electrification of all villages by 2009.

He also told a news conference that the PSDP allocation for Balochistan had been raised to Rs30 billion from a mere two billion rupees before the year 2000, but conceded that the province needed more. Further, he offered amnesty to the militants who chose to surrender and that the doors for dialogue were open, although nobody should expect him to beg for talks.

To anyone not familiar with Pakistan’s history of bungling with the affairs of the federation and unaware of the intensity of the Balochistan people’s discontent, the new development package will appear most impressive, perhaps generous too. But anyone with a longer memory than the present regime’s leaders seem to have been endowed with will find disturbing similarities between Islamabad’s strategy to win the minds and hearts of the Baloch with the Ayub regime’s development plans for East Pakistan during 1960-69 (the so-called Development Decade).

What this development package will achieve can easily be calculated. The legislators aligned with the federal government will be able to buy some public support. A number of young men (and perhaps women too) will possibly be weaned away from nationalist caucuses and put to work or studies hitherto unavailable to them. A large number of villagers will hope to get electric lighting in their huts and hovels.

Thus, the government’s support system in Balochistan will become stronger by the movement of a segment of the population over to the government side from the mass of dissidents, opposition followers, jobless and directionless young persons and the apathetic multitude. The critical question is: will this shift decisively remove the causes of Balochistan’s alienation?

The subject demands an unbiased discussion on a few key propositions: What are public perceptions of good governance? Can material development be accepted as a substitute for self-government or can it eliminate a people’s sense of political deprivation? These precisely were the issues in East Bengal the governments of Pakistan failed to grasp during 1948-58 and which were aggravated beyond redemption by the Ayub regime’s extraordinary faith in its fallacious strategies.

The feudals in ancient times, the colonialists of the 18th and 19th centuries and the dictators of the 20th century all justified their power to decide the fate of their subjects by civilising them or by guaranteeing them better management of their affairs than they themselves were capable of. Each variety of non-representative rule was defended as the best dispensation the people could hope for. All such administrations claimed lack of public disorder (often described as peace and tranquillity), stability (that is, lack of effective challenge to authority), and an increase in the number of recipients of the collective’s largesse (development) as not only indicators of the success of their enterprise but also as confirmation of their legitimacy.

History shows that these arguments did not prevail in any part of the world. If they had, the world would not have moved beyond the age of feudal lords, the colonised people would have never been able to gain independence and the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar (and some of their more recent incarnations) could not have been deposited in the garbage bin of history. The fundamental lessons humankind learnt after centuries of suffering and toil is that the best form of governance is self-governance and that the mess and din of representative rule is better than the regimentation and stillness of despotism.

The foremost issue in Balochistan, as it was in East Bengal, is the people’s belief that they have persistently been denied their right to self-rule. Attempts were made to meet the grievances of the people of East Bengal by belatedly accepting their language as one of the official languages, by giving them a second capital and the headquarters of one of the defence forces. They were allowed their own governors, ministers, bureaucrats and police chiefs. Finally, they were allowed due share in parliament. (That the country’s dismemberment was preferred to giving the Bengali Pakistanis their due share in power is another story but that too should never be forgotten.) General Musharraf is the latest person to concede that Balochistan has been neglected for over 50 years. That at best is a half-truth. The Baloch’s book of grievances is full of tales of broken pledges, sacking of their governments and denial of their rights over their land and its natural resources. A feeling of denial of self-rule as deeply rooted as it was in East Bengal and as we find in Balochistan can never be erased by putting up centre’s surrogates from amongst the natives in authority.

The second issue in Balochistan is its people’s deeply entrenched belief that their resources — land, oil and gas — have been and are being exploited for the benefit of compatriots outside their province, just as all children in Dhaka believed in the sixties that the palaces in Karachi and the roads in Islamabad had been built by the money earned from the export of their golden fibre. Attempts to disprove this did not work in East Bengal; they are unlikely to work in Balochistan. The way the mega-projects in Balochistan — Gwadar, highways, cantonments — have been handled has aggravated the people’s feeling of loss of control over their resources.

Grievances relating to denial of a people’s ownership of their resources are never removed by raising the amount of central grants. Ayub Khan argued that his regime was giving East Bengal more than it could have made from its resources and now the same medicine is being prescribed for Balochistan. Unfortunately all peoples live by their perceptions, often preferring them to facts and reason. It will not be possible to convince Balochistan that it will be worse off than now if its resources were managed by its genuine representatives.

That development of the kind Islamabad is offering Balochistan, which should be defined as exogenous advancement, cannot be a substitute for political empowerment is borne out by our own experience as well as by examples from world history. Were it not so East Bengal might not have voted for Awami League’s Six Points. New Delhi’s expenditure on development in Jammu and Kashmir, to the envy of quite a few other territories in the Indian Union, has not extinguished the public yearning for political rights.

The adage that human beings do not live by bread alone may have lost some of its popularity but it has not been completely excised from civilised discourse. Indeed, a rational view of development is the greatest good of the greatest number through an indigenous process of planning and implementation. A process which reduces the beneficiaries to mere users of externally provided bounties is not accepted as development. While dealing with political deprivation, it is necessary to remember that political empowerment is the bedrock of democratic culture and its denial is taken as cultural deprivation that affects all members of the community. Even apolitical people get infected.

It is unfortunate that the use of the bogey of external force’s involvement in Balochistan has not been resisted. This too was tried in East Bengal. Once reference to foreign hands’ stoking of trouble is made the whole political debate is subverted. All attention is diverted to fruitless speculation as to who is interfering in Pakistan’s affairs and how and to what extent, and the issues that need to be addressed are left unattended. Maybe there is substance in Islamabad’s allegations that some Baloch elements have promoters abroad or may be that is not true or not true to the extent claimed.

It is often impossible to keep foreign hands out of contention. The Statue of Liberty is a monument to foreign hands involvement in the American war of independence and perhaps Pakistan had a hand in the Afghan conflict. But the essential fact is that foreign elements only exploit situations that domestic factors create. This is true of Balochistan today as it was of East Bengal 40 years ago.

What then, one may ask, is to be done? Balochistan’s alienation will not be overcome in one day or by one package, however large. Before anything else is done the language in addressing the Baloch must change. Instead of threats of trial by fire and brimstone, courteous persuasion may for a change be tried. The desire to arrest and detain each dissident should end. Not only Balochistan, but Sindh and the Frontier will be pleased if the promise to scarp concurrent legislative list is fulfilled — and that can be done by a stroke of the same pen that was used to draft the LFO of 2002.

A decision that population will not be the sole basis of the NFC awards will make the Baloch, the Sindhi and the Pakhtun happier than any promise of billions of rupees can. The coming general election will be a test of the federal government’s respect for the Balochistan people’s rights. The composition of the caretaker regime will matter. Islamabad will be playing with fire if it is found to be manipulating the election process or allowing its satraps in Quetta to do so.

Once the federation has found the way towards an order based on respect for pluralist imperatives, things should start falling in place. It will be a long haul, nevertheless.

TORTURE, secret prisons and disappearances: all feature prominently in the legacy of Augusto Pinochet. It is a matter of great regret that the former Chilean dictator — brought to power in a CIA-backed coup on September 11, 1973 — avoided trial for gross abuses of human rights in his ravenous pursuit of power.

But it is a matter of even greater regret that the same tools and the same sponsors are back in action today, with the same impunity, as part of the “war on terror” launched after September 11, 2001.

When the Bush administration brought 14 of its most highly valued terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Bay from secret prisons in various countries in September, the US president himself acknowledged for the first time the existence of a network of CIA prisons. This was intended to close a chapter that had become embarrassing to Washington. The US practice of illegal kidnapping known as “extraordinary rendition”, and the secret detention and torture that was part of it, had — after more than four years - finally become a scandal condemned by many European politicians, UN officials and international lawyers, as well as US-based human-rights groups.

But, as a new report from the British monitoring group Cageprisoners reveals, the men held in Guantanamo Bay are only the tip of the iceberg: thousands more are hidden elsewhere, outside the law. The “war on terror” is taking a terrible toll on Muslim families and societies through a vast programme of secret detention and torture.

Since January 2002, when the first Muslim men were flown from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, an estimated 14,000 men have been held. They have been hidden in prisons, army barracks, holes in the ground, private houses, hotels and schools. Those responsible for them have been in overlapping chains of command, including the US department of defence, the CIA and the national intelligence services of many countries, such as Britain.

The Cageprisoners report is a meticulous record of information cross-correlated from the testimony of numerous released prisoners in many countries and of lawyers such as Clive Stafford Smith and his team at Reprieve, who represent some of the men in Guantanamo and have been able to talk to them. But Stafford Smith’s own statement that as many as three-quarters of the men in Guantanamo have never seen a lawyer, and that the Guantanamo men represent only 4% of all those imprisoned in the war on terror, is a chilling reminder of just how little outsiders have been able to penetrate this dark, illegal world.

None the less, we now have a mass of detail, much of it new, that has never been collated before. The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, should publicly dissociate Britain from the wholesale violations of human-rights law and the Geneva conventions that have taken place in the last five years.

The countries listed as being used by the US include Thailand, Germany, Greece, Dubai, Jordan, Egypt and Syria, while some men have been held on US navy vessels. Different prisons and other detention centres are listed for each country, and in many cases the names of prisoners who were held there. But in some cases the prisoners giving the testimony had no idea where they had been held, and could only describe the temperature, the accents of the guards, and other clues. Muhammad al-Assad, for instance, was flown about three hours from Tanzania to somewhere very hot where the accents of the guards in Arabic seemed to be Somali or Ethiopian, as was the bread. He was interrogated by a white western man who spoke good Arabic.

Two women prisoners rendered from Pakistan are reported to have been held in Syria’s Far’Falastin prison in Damascus. Canadians who were rendered there by the US, including Mahar Arar and Abdullah al-Maliki, have described this and other Syrian prisons and the appalling conditions, including torture, under which they were held. Syria and Yemen use only their own nationals in their prisons.

But in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Malawi, Mauritania, Morocco, Bosnia and Dubai, CIA and other US or UK personnel are heavily involved in the prisons. One thread running through the report is the presence of British intelligence personnel in many of the interrogations. The experiences of prisoners such as Muhammad al-Assad, Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah and Salah Nasir Salim Ali Qaru, who suffered extreme sensory deprivation during months in a “black site”, are also described. All the guards covered their faces and said nothing, so there was no way to even guess their nationality.

Innocent men such as Mahar Arar, from Canada, and Khaled el-Masri, from Germany, were lucky to be released from this archipelago of secret prisons, but have had no apology or compensation, nor seen any hint of charges being brought against those responsible for their kidnapping and torture. But, like Pinochet’s victims, they will not give up the fight for justice. Few tears were shed at news of Pinochet’s death, which came, aptly enough, on International Human Rights Day. But the near unanimous condemnation of his US-sponsored crimes loses its moral weight if not accompanied by an equally vociferous denunciation of the similar abuses being perpetrated today.—Dawn/Guardian Service

Dr Adnan Siddiqui is a London-based GP and trustee of Cageprisoners. Victoria Brittain was the co-author of Moazzam Begg’s book “Enemy Combatant”.

WITH Fouad Siniora’s cabinet hiding in the Grand Serail behind acres of razor wire and thousands of troops — a veritable ‘Green Zone’ in the heart of Beirut — the largely Shia Muslim opposition, assisted by their Christian allies, brought up to two million supporters into the centre of the city to declare the forthcoming creation of a second Lebanese administration on Saturday.

A ‘transitional’ government is what ex-General Michel Aoun called it while Naeem Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy chairman, spoke ominously of the mass demonstrations as “the separatist day”. So is the Hezbollah militia, which withstood Israel’s disastrous bombardment of Lebanon last summer, really planning a coup on behalf of its Iranian and Syrian backers, as Siniora suspects? Or are Siniora and his cabinet colleagues — Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze — working on behalf of the Americans and Israelis, as Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, proclaims?

Already, Siniora’s administration is being referred to in the American press as Lebanon’s “US-backed government” — the virtual kiss of death for any Arab leader these days — while Aoun’s split with his fellow Christians could prove fatal to him. Only because of his weird alliance with the Hezbollah can the latter claim that their opposition represents Christians as well as Muslims. True to the ironies of Lebanese politics, it was the same former General Aoun who fought a “war of independence” with Hezbollah’s Syrian friends in 1990, a conflict which he lost at the cost of a thousand lives.

But even supporters of Siniora’s administration were taken aback by the vast numbers of Lebanese whom Hezbollah could mobilise, men and women who in many cases came from the villages and urban slums which suffered near-total destruction in this summer’s war. Their speakers played the role of representatives of the poor — “the people of the street” is how one foolish Sunni prelate called them in a sermon on Friday — who had no time for the privileged classes or feudal pretensions of the government’s supporters: Amin Gemayel, father of the murdered industry minister, Nayla Moawad, widow of a murdered Lebanese president, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and Walid Jumblatt, son of the murdered Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.

If Lebanon’s politics and history were not so tragic, there would be an element of Gilbert and Sullivan about all this. Siniora, now regularly visited by America’s busy little ambassador, Jeffrey Feltman, was told by one of Feltman’s predecessors only a few years ago that his multiple re-entry visa to the United States was invalid because he, Siniora, was believed to have donated money to a charity associated with — yes — the Hezbollah. And there was more than a hint of sarcasm when Qassem announced to the crowds that Siniora worked for both the Americans and the Israelis.

“Death to America, death to Israel,” he roared and, of course, the mass of demonstrators repeated this tired rhetoric. To the Arab nations which supported Siniora’s government, Qassem had a simple message: “We are in the hearts of the Sunnis of the Arab world — not you!” And the danger for Siniora is that Qassem’s conviction is probably correct. Indeed, there was a hint of revolution in the air as the poor and the village youths and the people of the Beirut slums converged on Martyrs’ Square where Rafiq Hariri’s tomb was cordoned off from the crowds — thus imitating in miniature the very partitioning of Lebanon of which both sides in this ever graver crisis accuse each other.

Leila Tueni, the daughter of another of Lebanon’s murdered political leaders, the journalist Jibran Tueni (like all the victims, anti-Syrian), stated in a hall only a few hundred yards from the protests that the real reason why Nasrallah wanted to overthrow Siniora’s government, from which all Shia ministers have resigned, was to prevent it giving its approval to the UN tribunal intended to try Hariri’s killers — whom Ms Tueni and the rest of Siniora’s supporters believe to include some of Syria’s senior intelligence apparatchiks.

But something even more dangerous was getting loose on Saturday. The sheer size of the crowds apparently permitted Qassem and Aoun to demand a different — or a rival — government. It was as if the Shias were carrying out a Lebanese census which, for sectarian reasons, has not been held since 1936. But it was not they but Siniora’s supporters who won a majority in the last elections in Lebanon.

If that election result — under the terms of Lebanon’s precarious confessional system of polling — were no longer valid, what did this say about the Hezbollah’s respect for electoral politics and Lebanon’s constitution? Is everyone who can rally the masses to the centre of Beirut now to be awarded their own administration? And it was not just the heavily defended look-alike ‘green zone’ around Siniora’s offices that linked Lebanon to Iraq.

The growing Shia-Sunni divisions here mirror, in faint, pale but frightening form, the tragedy of the two sects in Mesopotamia. Shias have twice attacked the Beirut Sunni suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, a Shia has already been murdered and turned into an opposition “martyr”, and the mufti of the Sunni Qoreitem mosque was recently reported as attacking the historic Shia imams, Ali and Hussein. Jumblatt has now called for students at the Lebanese University to study at home after a brawl on campus between Shia and Sunni undergraduates. “This university is for all Lebanese,” Jumblatt insisted. But is Lebanon? — (c) The Independent

WHEN an official American report talks about collapse in Iraq and catastrophe sweeping through the region, its sheer novelty after years of denial gives it a certain credibility. Don’t be fooled. The Iraq Study Group’s report is just as unrealistic as all the other plans for getting the United States out of Iraq without loss of face.

But don’t assume that some cataclysm is going to shake the entire Middle East, either. It’s just an American defeat, not the end of the world, and the wild talk about chaos spreading across the whole region is an almost exact parallel to the “domino theory” that held sway in the United States the last time it was losing a war, in Vietnam. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once claimed that “We are the indispensable country,” but there are no indispensable countries.

“The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” says the ISG report, but it never acknowledges that this is the direct result of the US presence there. Before the US invaded, the country was impoverished as a result of Saddam Hussein’s wars and United Nations sanctions, but it was no longer any threat to its neighbours (the Iraqi army was never rebuilt after its defeat in the Gulf War of 1990-91), and there had been no mass killing of regime opponents since the failed Shia revolt that the United States had encouraged at the end of that war.

It was the American invasion that unleashed the violence that is now devastating the country. The departure of American troops will not automatically end it, for the invasion “opened Pandora’s box,” as Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, admitted last March. The rival groups cannot even begin the end-game until the US forces pull out — and yet the ISG report STILL does not commit the United States to a full and final withdrawal from Iraq.

There are some useful minor advances over previous Washington doctrine in the report, like the admission, finally, that almost all the resistance fighters in Iraq are local people — there are only 1,300 “foreign fighters” in Iraq, according to the ISG — but there are no new ideas in it. Fair enough; as the newly appointed Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, put it, “Frankly, there are no new ideas on Iraq.” But re-arranging the old ideas won’t work either.

Build up the Iraqi army and police? They are already divided into sectarian units that will not act against their own sect. Get Iran and Syria to help? Why on earth would they, after being painted as “rogue states” by Washington for the past six years? Broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal? Sure, with a Bush administration that has never dared to put any pressure on Israel, Hamas rejectionists at the heart of the elected Palestinian administration, Lebanon trembling on the brink of a new civil war, and a largely paralysed cabinet of discredited hawks clinging to power in Israel.

In any case President George W. Bush, one of the world’s more stubborn individuals, will probably reject any recommendations that require abandoning his delusional optimism on the subject. It is very unlikely that the bulk of the US troops will be out of Iraq before the next US election in November, 2008. However, it is very likely that they will be out of Iraq six months later, no matter whether the new president is a Democrat or a Republican. And what will happen then?

Iraq faces more slaughter, although nobody knows how much more. It might just break up into three parts, Kurdish, Shia Arab and Sunni Arab, with only a few tens of thousands of extra deaths as the price of finally dissolving the state that was created almost ninety years ago. The Shia Arabs might successfully subjugate the Sunni Arab minority, at a considerably larger cost in lives, and retain loose links with an entirely self-governing Kurdistan. Or, most likely of all, the entire country might be dragged into a Lebanese-style civil war lasting for many years and killing hundreds of thousands more.

But the broader predictions of chaos spreading through the region borne by refugees and “Islamist terrorists,” of regimes toppling and Shia-Sunni conflicts erupting from Bahrain to Lebanon, are probably wrong. These dire predictions are about as credible as the old “domino theory.” Just as the US administration exaggerated its power to effect change on the way in, so it overestimates the harm that it is likely to do by leaving.

And what if radical regimes do seize power in one or more of the major Arab states? Hard luck on the local people, of course, but even then the United States doesn’t pay a high price. Oil is the only thing the Middle East produces that is of real importance to the rest of the world, and it ultimately does not matter who runs these countries (except to their own people) because even the most radical regimes have to sell their oil. Post-revolutionary Iran is one example; Qadhafi’s Libya is another. They must have the oil income in order to feed their people.—Copyright