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| December 31, 2006 | Sunday | Zilhaj 09, 1427 |
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Deeper and deeper into the vortex
THE road stretches ahead like a snake winding its way through a desert. There is nothing here except for vast, empty stretches of pitted land, scarred by the fires of giant kilns which bake the bricks fashioned in the dead of night by children who wake before dawn to knead the freezing clay with their hands.
THE outgoing year was one marked by bloody conflicts as well as confrontations that can be traced directly to the global politics of the post-9/11 period. Its salient feature was the war on terror that has spread its tentacles far and wide. This has and will continue to shape contemporary history. Further proof of this came just two days before the year ended when Saddam Hussein, the former strongman of Iraq, was hanged in Baghdad after a trial held to be a farce by many. The execution took place on Eidul Azha and is bound to make a hero out of a villain given the role of the United States in the current violence and turmoil in Iraq. President George W. Bush used the war on terror as an opportunity to extend America’s hegemony to all corners of the globe. However, the outgoing year might well prove to be a watershed in global politics. It saw a tangible manifestation of the emerging equations that will ultimately cause the pendulum to swing back the other way to provide the countervailing force to the present pattern of America’s unilateralism in the conduct of its foreign policy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two principal focal points in 2006, exploded the myth of American invincibility. In Afghanistan, where the US has a substantial military presence by virtue of the International Security Assistance Force, the resurgence of the Taliban in a big way pointed to the dangers still inherent in the situation. The US, backed by Britain, also found itself sucked deeper and deeper into the quicksand of Iraq as its casualties mounted, bringing public pressure on the Bush administration to plan an exit strategy. On the other side, the Islamic militants, indiscriminately dubbed as the Al Qaeda by the West and who now show scant respect for international borders, stepped up their assaults not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in other parts of the Muslim world, Somalia being the latest hotspot of the eruption of Islamic extremism. Another example of how America’s obsessive resort to brute force by proxy has given birth to Islamic militancy is Palestine. Israeli bellicosity fuelled the Palestinians’ anger at the injustices meted out to them and in January the Hamas swept the polls to enter the government. An indication of things to come was available in the shape of the war in Lebanon where Israel and the Hezbollah were locked in bitter fighting with the Lebanese having little say in the matter.
The war in Iraq had a paradoxical effect on Muslim societies. By and large, public opinion had no sympathy for Al Qaeda or the Taliban and their brutal way of waging jihad against the Americans. But people could not stomach the colossal loss of lives in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan for which the US was held primarily responsible, even though it was not always the one pulling the trigger. But American policies were widely perceived as having created a mess in the Middle East and the peripheral region. America’s clumsy attempts at government-making in Iraq created a deep sectarian rift leading to six months of wrangling to form a coalition and suicidal attacks that resulted in a spiralling of Shiite casualties. Besides, the war on terror unleashed by President George Bush made many enemies for America. A reaction was bound to set in sooner or later. When it did, it was difficult to stem the tide of anti-Americanism that began to engulf region after region. International economics, especially the WTO-driven globalisation and the World Bank-inspired spread of a market economy, also encouraged strong sentiments against the US. In 2006 this trend was most pronounced in South America, which Washington has traditionally treated as its backyard. In the outgoing year it was plain that a battle through the ballot box for Latin America’s soul was in progress. Elections in nine countries there in 2006 confirmed the social-democratic and anti-Yanqui complexion of the region. Of the 20 countries south of the US, 10 had left-of-centre leaders at the helm sending a warning to Washington that it could no longer take its zone of influence for granted.
Another straw in the wind came with the emergence of Russia, China and India as significant players in the post-9/11 global politics. Russia, which had undergone a difficult economic and political phase after the break-up of the USSR, appeared to have regained its confidence as it was billed the oil capital of the world. Wresting the country’s oil resources from the western multinationals, Vladimir Putin proceeded to use the leverage his country gained by virtue of its position as the largest oil producer in the world, having displaced Saudi Arabia from that position. Russia began to demonstrate its clout in world affairs and offered some resistance to the United States. Its presence was most visible in the diplomatic wrangling over Iran’s nuclear programme when a UN Security Council resolution on sanctions against Iran had to be watered down on Moscow’s insistence. In 2006, “the year of friendship”, China and India forged ahead in consolidating their ties. Their trade turnover jumped from $1.5 billion in 1999 to $20 billion and President Hu Jintao paid an official visit to India, while their border dispute was put on hold. Both managed to take advantage of their ties with the US — India signed a deal on the transfer of nuclear technology and China sustained its phenomenal trade surplus of $200 billion with America without any concessions on the question of the devaluation of the yuan by President Hu in his first visit to Washington.
In any case, it was evident that America would find its power effectively challenged in the near future. Developments on the nuclear proliferation front left little doubt that the nuclear club of which the US is a key member was losing its exclusivity. North Korea, which had been locked in a dispute with the US and other powers on its nuclear programme, announced in October that it had carried out an underground nuclear test. Soon thereafter Iran, the other power also embroiled in a nuclear dispute, announced that it had enriched uranium at its Natanz facility. Although there was a big fuss over the nuclearisation of these two countries, it was evident that new entrants would be difficult to keep out of the nuclear club when conventional wisdom held that nuclear weapons offered security.
This polarisation was reminiscent of the Cold War years of the 1950s when the world was divided into two camps with the non-aligned states playing a balancing role. The difference is that the third force is missing this time and there are not two competing power centres but several of them. The dividing lines are blurred, multiple and crisscross across the globe. A major confrontation, feared since 2001 and which had been put aside, now appears set to take shape. The encounter that is in the making is between the Muslim world and anyone perceived as the enemy. The clash of civilisations predicted by Samuel Huntington and brushed aside by scholars and statesmen alike as irresponsible theorising loomed large on the horizon. The year started with a wave of protests across the Muslim world against some blasphemous cartoons first published by a Danish paper in 2005 and reproduced by some other publications in Europe in the name of freedom of expression, though saner opinion held that free speech must be tempered with a sense of responsibility. The furore it created had barely died down when Pope Benedict XVI caused a storm of protest by quoting remarks by a fourteenth century emperor that were not favourable to Islam. Seen against the backdrop of the banning of the hijab in some schools in Europe along with other measures directed at the Muslims, the Pope’s remarks led to a backlash that can have wider repercussions.
I am 36 kilometres from the city centre; it is pitch dark here, except for the string of Christmas lights embellishing the rough walls of the compound where these children live and eke out an existence. I have entered the domain of bondage, having crossed through a chained entrance, having left semblances of participatory democracy behind.
Just beyond, on the other side of the road, lie the housing estates for the newly-rich. Sign boards boasting of custom-designed Spanish villas set in an Alpine landscape and bordered by lakes and desert palms loom over us like threatening clouds. None of those promises of quality living waft down on to the other side, the other side of the body politic.
It is Christmas Eve and I have come to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ amongst children who have been abandoned by other, self-proclaimed saviours. It is colder here than in the city, the wind whipping up the loosened soil of a ravaged landscape, dust and gravel settling over the hearts of young children who have been born into a state of despair. I watch them as they unwrap presents, eagerly tearing away the tissue which holds within it a gift of pencils and a book.
These are the children of a literacy centre started by a young man who, like these children, had spent years waking before sunrise to knead the clay to mould into bricks for the houses of the privileged. There are 40 students — forty lives whose future has not been mapped by the minds which have created the paradise of our body politic.
After all, these minds have been kept busy by concerns greater than the lives of our children. Why should it matter to these ideologues that thousands of Pakistani children die for want of clean drinking water? That mothers die giving birth, that fathers plod the streets in search of work?
Why should it matter to these great minds which obsess over women’s bodies that over a hundred thousand women die in our country each year due to botched abortions? That a woman is rarely allowed control over her own body in order to limit the number of children she bears, in order to give the ones she has borne a reasonable chance at life? That women’s bodies are mutilated and brutalised in the name of honour? That women scarred by acid burns lose their vision, their identities, their faith in life just so that men can feel comfortable in the knowledge of having destroyed that life?
Why is it that none of this emerges high on the agenda of this body politic? Why is it that dealing with fornication and the consumption of alcohol are the number one priorities in a land described as a failed state? Could it be that the minds of these great men, and, disconcertingly, some women, are fogged over by layers of myopia and obscurantism? Could it be that they cannot see the obvious, the tragic truth of systemic injustice, of skewed distribution, of rising inequities, of flawed policies? Could it be that they have stopped wondering about what makes a body politic?
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a ‘Failed States Index’ is based on 12 criteria: mounting demographic pressures, massive movement of refugees and internally displaced persons, a legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance, chronic and sustained fighting, uneven economic development along group lines, sharp and/or severe economic decline, criminalisation or delegitimisation of the state, progressive deterioration of public services, widespread violation of human rights, security apparatus as a ‘state within a state’, the rise of factionalised elites, and the intervention of other states or external actors.
Let us take each of these criteria and examine our body politic: Pakistan has amongst the highest population growth rates in the world, with a total fertility rate of four children per woman. Despite apparent efforts by international, governmental and non-governmental organisations to lower the population growth rate by increasing the contraceptive prevalence rate, most women are not allowed to make decisions regarding their fertility, their bodies being the locus of notions of virility and children being the only safety net in a society marked by unequal development and inadequate opportunities.
To mention the massive movement of refugees and internally displaced persons would be to open a Pandora’s box, with the CIA-assisted “jihad” against the erstwhile Soviet Union resulting in the presence of several million Afghan refugees within our midst. To mention the survivors of last year’s earthquake who a year later still struggle to find adequate shelter and opportunity to reclaim their shattered lives would be to show wounds which are still fresh. And to touch upon the 84,000 internally displaced persons in Balochistan who face starvation because of a government-sponsored war against political opponents would be a slap in the face of “genuine democracy”.
As for “vengeance-seeking group grievance”, one only has to look back at the past 25 years of communal, ethnic and sectarian violence to consider the fragility of our body politic. These conflicts, often engineered by “invisible hands”, have led to the fourth criterion of the index. While estimates suggest that at least 4,000 people, largely from the minority Shia Muslim sect, have died as a result of sectarian violence since 1980, the last five years have witnessed a steep rise in incidents of sectarian violence.
In recent years, Sunni extremists, often with connections to militant organisations such as the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan have targeted the Shia community. There was a sharp increase in the number of targeted killings of members of the Shia community, particularly Shia doctors, in recent years. Those implicated in acts of sectarian violence are rarely prosecuted and little action has been taken to protect the affected communities.
Discrimination and persecution on grounds of religion continue and an increasing number of blasphemy cases were registered. The Ahmadi community in particular is the target of religious extremists. Other religious minorities, including Christians and Hindus, also continue to face discrimination.
Mentioning uneven economic development would be tantamount to holding a red rag in front of the bulls of the finance ministry which insists that poverty in the country has been reduced by 10 per cent. The figures provided by the Planning Commission have not only been disputed but rejected by our godfathers at the World Bank. The reality is that the richest 10 per cent of our population appropriates 11 times more of the national income than the poorest 10 per cent.
The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper fails to talk of growth with equity or the redistribution of assets. Land reform, a demand of the people interviewed in the Participatory Poverty Assessment, finds no mention in the PRSP. And while around the world per capita income and development are usually viewed as being interdependent variables, our government fails to recognise that economic growth does not necessarily indicate equitable development or a better life for all.
A deficit in reserves, high inflation rates and lopsided balance of payments with emphasis on the import of luxury items belie the reality of our economy, as much as growing malnutrition and the galloping incidence of diseases such as tuberculosis refute the claims of a reduction in poverty.
The less said about the criminalisation and delegitimisation of the state the better. As a case in point, let us remind ourselves of the kidnapping of three judges while driving from Larkana to Shikarpur. One of them returned home after securing his release by paying the kidnappers two million rupees in ransom, raising this amount through the sale of his property. Regretting that the police did not help him at all, he was quoted as saying: “When people like us are left helpless, how can the common people survive?”
Everyday thousands of crimes are committed with impunity while the state looks the other way. Everyday citizens face the breakdown of not only law and order but of public services. In Karachi, roads have disappeared under rain water and commuters resign themselves to spending several hours log-jammed in traffic.
Most parts of the country do not have clean drinking water or even water to wash with; the deteriorating health profile of citizens eats into the meagre earnings of breadwinners. Education remains a dream for most children, especially girls, despite the claims of the much-touted National Commission for Human Development. A heavy emphasis placed on private sector tertiary education, driven by an overstated passion for an as yet undefined “knowledge economy” fails to address the appalling inadequacy of primary and secondary schooling in the public sector.
Human rights violations, including ‘disappearances’, have continued unabated. These cases of disappearances bring to light the inadequacies of the habeas corpus process because the superior courts can offer no relief if the agency named as respondent denies the arrest or detention of the missing persons. Clearly, a state within a state exists in our body politic.
As far as the influence of external actors is concerned, Pakistan remains heavily dependent on the United States for economic and military aid. The US has notably failed to press for human rights-related legal reform in the country, in exchange for Pakistan’s support in the US-led “war on terror”. For its part, the government of Pakistan has excused its failure to uphold human rights and the rule of law by citing domestic political pressure from hard-line religious groups and militant organisations. To murder its citizens instead of putting on trial these alleged criminals is further proof of the state’s increasing and unbridled power and fury against those it sees as the enemy.
And here, for the children of the Madina Brick Factory, it is a long wait for the saviour, and a long, dark night ahead.