The wages of poverty

IF by putting his little children up for sale, Shaukat Ali of Mian Channu, a Punjab town known for well-off farmers, had tried to shake the authority out of its slumber, and remind it of its foremost duty to guarantee each citizen’s right to life, he does not seem to have succeeded. The matter has been treated as an individual grievance and the protester promised some relief, but there is no indication that the scale of citizens’ plight caused by lack of gainful employment has been addressed, or even realised.

Amazingly, the government leaders appeared to have been surprised by Shaukat Ali’s tale. Some of his fellow citizens have now realised that his audacity in offering his children for sale gave the country a bad name. That a good number of children are sold in Pakistan every year should be common knowledge. Perhaps the prime minister, who rushed to the aid of Shaukat Ali, is unaware of the auction of girls in the NWFP. Is it possible to describe the giving away of girls in marriage under the custom of vulvar (or in exchange for money under any other pretext) as anything other than sale of girls?

Last year a Peshawar court expressed its disgust and anger when it noted the sale of women by their fathers and brothers under the guise of marriage. The authorities are also perhaps aware of considerable trafficking of women and their sale in Pakistan cities, and not all of them are from Bangladesh or Burma. Many a brothel-keeper buys and sells women under the nose of custodians of law and order and not infrequently in connivance with them.

Likewise, bonded labourers, particularly those working on farms and brick-kilns, sell not only their labour but also their bodies and their freedoms. A new evil is the sale of parts of human body, mostly kidneys, that have been recognised as an important source of earning foreign exchange. One has seen hospitals that advertise kidney-transplant services on the internet and have added floor after floor to their establishments. They are making huge gains by finding poor Pakistani sellers of their kidneys for sick people from India (women as well as men) or the Middle East (usually richly-robed men only).

The main cause of this large-scale trade in human body or its organs is poverty made unmanageable by lack of job opportunities. The number of Pakistani citizens caught in this vicious trade is legion. How many cheques for 100,000 rupees each can be signed by the prime minister and how many unemployed people can be offered and satisfied with low-wage jobs? Extending relief in individual cases is not the way to deal with so widespread a phenomenon as poverty of the unemployed hordes in Pakistan has become. From the point of view of the people this is the biggest and the most critical challenge Pakistan faces today.

Sale of labour, sale of organs, sale of children – these are not the only symptoms of the grinding poverty in which millions of Pakistanis live as a result of their failure to find adequably gainful employment or any employment at all. The nexus between poverty-unemployment and a rise in suicide cases is now fairly widely recognised. Many jobless young persons drift into a life of crime. Poverty impels a large number of citizens to abandon their children to quasi-religious seminaries in the hope that they will get something to eat and something to wear.

The poverty-stricken areas have also provided the militant organisations with their main recruiting grounds. Anybody who wishes to fight terror or militancy without mounting a meaningful assault on poverty does not know what he is talking about.

It will be grossly unfair to say that the government has not seen the need to combat poverty. Quite a few schemes have been launched under the label of poverty alleviation, and the government’s belief in the trickle-down effect of development and the rich becoming richer has never been shaken. But all these schemes and ideas amount at best to ensuring that some of the poor do not become poorer than they are. What Pakistan urgently needs, however, is a strategy to prevent the people from falling into the trap of poverty in the first instance, and that can be done only by recognising the right to work and the right to social security of all those who are permanently or temporarily unable to earn their living.

The basic issue then is the state’s determination not to recognise the right to work. Pakistan came into being at a time when social and economic rights of the people had begun to be debated and a bare 16 months after its birth the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which duly emphasises the right to work.

The governments of the day could not ignore their people’s right to work but they were unsure of their capacity to concede it. They therefore sought ways to avoid mandatory guarantees in this regard. Thus we find the authors of the Indian constitution, adopted in 1950, inserting the following article in the chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy:

“41. Right to work, to education and to public assistance in certain cases: The state shall, within the limits of its economic capacity and development, make effective provision for securing g the right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement, and in other cases of undeserved want.”

The language of this article makes it clear that the state does not deny its citizens’ right to work and to public assistance of old, sick and unemployed citizens but makes practical realisation of these rights subject to availability of resources.

The authors of Pakistan’s constitutions also were not unaware of the right to work and the obligation of the state to provide for the unemployed poor. But they have been consistently averse to using the expression ‘right to work’ and have avoided making a strong state commitment to helping the unemployed. The formula adopted in the chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy in the 1956 constitution was:

“29. The State shall endeavour to:

(b) provide for all citizens, within the available resources of the country, facilities for work and adequate livelihood with reasonable rest and leisure;

(c) Provide for all persons in the service of Pakistan and private concerns social security by means of social insurance or otherwise;

(d) provide basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, housing, education and medical relief, for all citizens, irrespective of caste, creed or race, as are permanently or temporarily unable to earn their livelihood on account of infirmity, sickness or unemployment.”

After some editing of the foregoing article the Ayub government laid down the following articles in the chapter under the shortened title ‘ Principles of Policy’;

“10. Opportunity to Gain Adequate Livelihood: All citizens should have the opportunity to work and earn an adequate livelihood, and also to enjoy reasonable rest and leisure.

“11. Social Security: All persons in the service of Pakistan or otherwise employed should be provided with social security by means of compulsory social insurance or otherwise.

“12. Provision of Basic Necessities: The basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, housing, education and medical treatment should be provided for citizens who, irrespective of caste, creed or race, are permanently or temporarily unable to earn their livelihood on account of infirmity, disability, sickness or unemployment.”

The 1973 Constitution incorporated the scheme and content of guarantees of the people’s social and economic well-being contained in the 1956 and 1962 texts in Article 38 in the chapter on Principles of Policy with two changes. Firstly the ‘should’ in the 1962 document and the ‘State shall endeavour to’ in the 1956 text were discarded in favour of a firmer commitment by declaring that “the State shall secure”/ and “provide”. And, secondly, the principle of rejecting discrimination on the basis of sex was added to unacceptability of distinction on the basis of caste, creed or race.

Governments of Pakistan, however, have rarely paid due respect to the Principles of Policy. Since the facilities or opportunities promised to citizens and other persons in the Principles of Policy are not justiciable, no law or act of government can be challenged on the ground of its being in conflict with these principles. Further, each authority is competent to decide whether its actions are in accord with the principles of policy.

Thus, the president and the governors have consistently ignored their duty to present every year in the National Assembly / provincial assemblies “a report on the observance and implementation of the Principles of Policy.” Members of the National and provincial assemblies also have made no attempt to provide for discussion on such reports by the assembly concerned.

Government spokespersons often claim that everything required to be done under the Principles of Policy, and that is subject to availability of resources, has been done and is being done. Such assertions can easily be challenged. The state is spending on its organs and its establishment much more than it should and is depriving the people of the employment opportunities and social security to a greater extent than anyone can fairly justify.

Besides, some of the most fundamental rights (to work, education, health and social security) have been kept out of the chapter on fundamental rights for over 50 years. For how many more years must the Pakistani people be fopped off with principles of policy that are not implemented in place of judicially enforceable rights?

A recognition of the right to work and extension of social security net to all citizens and persons alone will mark the beginning of a genuine effort to stop sale of children and provide relief to all the miserable Shaukats in Pakistan.

Since we are living in a period when constitutional provisions and laws no longer offer the disadvantaged and the marginalised any comfort, the cynics are likely to refer to non-implementation of the laws and guarantees that are already there. A new constitutional guarantee for the people’s right to work and their right to freedom from poverty and want will not immediately solve the problems of the poor and the helpless, but it will at least offer them a sound plank to fight on and take their fight from the closed chambers of authority to the no less closed councils of political parties.

Multiculturalism is not a threat

THERE is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.

Some cultures cherish one kind of value more than others do (Arabs and hospitality, for example, or the British and emotional self-discipline), but there is nothing inherently Arab about hospitality, or inherently British about not throwing a hysterical fit. Tolerance and compassion, like sadism and supremacism, can be found anywhere on the planet.

It was one of the mighty achievements of the radical Enlightenment to reject the idea that virtue or vice depend on your ethnic background. Nobody is morally better off because they were born in Boston rather than Bosnia. The postmodernists who deny universal values in the name of cultural difference are unwittingly in cahoots with the tub-thumpers for Trafalgar and the groupies of St George.

The basic moral values of the average Muslim dentist who migrates to Britain are much the same as those of a typical English-born plumber. Neither is likely to believe that lying and cheating are the best policy, or that they should beat their children. They may have different customs and beliefs, but what is striking is the vast extent of common ground between them on the issue of what it is for men and women to live well. As far as morality goes, it is hard to slide a cigarette paper between Allah and Jehovah.

So why are so many of our politicians getting steamed up about the supposed dangers of multiculturalism? Shouldn't they just accept that shared moral values run very deep in human beings, and that cultural differences are accordingly irrelevant? Not in the least. From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.

Unless authority entwines itself with the roots of people's experience and identity, it will remain too abstract and aloof to win their loyalty. If it is to secure their allegiance, power must become the invisible colour of everyday life itself. And this is what we know as culture. Culture is what keeps power in business. When those for whom culture means Mansfield Park and The Magic Flute begin avidly debating culture as dress, language and religious faith, you can be reasonably sure that they feel their political interests to be under threat.

Thirty years ago, only a few leftist mavericks like Raymond Williams insisted that culture was ordinary. With immigration, however, culture has become ordinary in the eyes of our rulers, too. Today, even global capitalist corporations prate about the importance of local knowledge and distinctive ways of life. Almost everyone is now sensitively alert to cultural difference. It is just that some of them are alert to it in the way that a cat is to a mouse.

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted? Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies.

So culture today means not just sonnets and string quartets, but history, origins, language, kinship and identity. As long as these things are fairly uniform, political power can afford to leave them alone. It is when they become too diverse to scoop into one rigid set of categories that the state risks being undermined, and thus seeks to override them. Culture then becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. It ceases to be a spiritual solvent of material conflicts, as it was in days of Matthew Arnold and TS Eliot, and becomes instead the very terms in which those conflicts are articulated.

Tony Blair believes in a common culture, just as early New Left writers like Raymond Williams and EP Thompson did. It is just that what Blair means by a common culture is that everyone should share his values so that they won't bomb tube stations. In fact, no cultural value is ever extended to large groups of newcomers without being changed in the process. This is why the Blair project is wet behind the ears as well as culturally supremacist. There is no assumption in Downing Street that such values might be challenged or transformed in the process, which is what thinkers like Williams and Thompson had in mind. A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life. If this is to include those from different cultural traditions, and if our current society thrives on the exclusion of certain groups, then the culture we are likely to end up with will be nothing like the one we have now. And this is just what will be so valuable about it. –The Guardian, London

The writer is a professor of English literature at Manchester University.

Suicide attacks are an aberration

A SUICIDE attack is carried out by a person who knows that his action will also result in his own death. The self-destructive act is perpetrated by a person or a group of persons who are weaker against their stronger enemies. Generally their targets are innocent civilians rather than combatants.

When suicide attacks carried out with religious convictions evoke retaliation from the concerned quarters, they are perceived as a clash between civilisations.

Suicide attacks on innocent civilians are a violation of fundamental human rights, a breach of the Geneva Conventions and war crimes against humanity. These attacks are a kind of tactic and are carried out to attain specific strategic goals. Islam specifically prohibits the killing of innocent persons, non-combatants, women and children and even forbids the destruction of trees, killing of livestock and poisoning of water resources.

Moreover, the Muslim warriors always considered it a shameful act to kill a defenceless person. As a matter of fact, following Islamic teachings, the Muslims had developed ethical standards for warfare even if they were in a weaker position militarily against their foes.

One of the cardinal principles of warfare is that the civilian population must not be made the target of an attack. It follows from this that suicide attacks, which are devoid of legal and moral objectives and constitute a grave violation of humanitarian laws and undermine the normative principles, must never be carried out. As a matter of fact, all other forms of extremism such as hostage-taking, hijacking and planting bombs in public places are also strictly forbidden in Islam.

Regrettably, however, in violation of the inimitable teachings of Islam and the noble examples set by the Holy Prophet (PBUH), some self-styled and misguided religious scholars have recently fostered radical beliefs and convictions. This tiny minority of Muslim clerics considers suicide attacks not only a legitimate war tactic against powerful enemies, but also a highly commendable act of martyrdom. It is incomprehensible that a Muslim scholar should seek to justify barbaric acts like suicide attacks as a legitimate political weapon notwithstanding the fact that Islam explicitly prohibits the killing of civilians and considers suicide a major sin.

One of the mainstays of international law is that the warring parties distinguish between combatants and civilians. This precept has also been reaffirmed by the 1945 Nuremberg Charter as well as the 1977 Geneva Conventions.

Recently, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which defines crimes against humanity as the “participation in and knowledge of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population” also endorses this view. According to the Rome statute, both individual perpetrators and organisations sponsoring them bear criminal accountability for such acts.

It is indeed unfortunate that fanatical religious leaders have implanted the idea in the minds of young boys and girls that by carrying out suicide attacks they will be serving the cause of their religion.

They are induced to strap bombs around their bodies to kill 'infidels’ by being promised a heavenly reward for their sacrifice and money for their bereaved families in this world. The blame for the death of these youths falls on religious fanatics who use the naive young converts to fulfil their political ambitions.

These radical elements have also formed networks which support terrorist activities through funding and recruitment.

It is also important to note that these youths do not hesitate to kill even fellow Muslims if their mentors so desire. This is contrary to their proclaimed objective of safeguarding the interests and security of the Muslims. Hence a big question mark hangs over their action.

Needless to say, suicide attacks killing Muslims have created a negative impact on the Muslim world. Indeed, there are strong indications that they have ignited rage and hatred towards those elements who manipulate the killing of the Muslims in the name of faith and weaken support for their cause. It seems that the patience of the Muslim population throughout the world is running out at the abhorrent attitude of the radical elements who are involved in sowing death and destruction and thereby earning a bad name for Islam.

The Muslim world is faced with a protracted challenge from radical elements that have a propensity for violence and scant regard for human rights, peace and security. It is necessary to effectively counter the influence of these elements by marginalising them and strengthening the concept of moderation which is an essential component of a Muslim society. The Islamic world must realise the enormity of the danger that is looming large on the horizon threatening its peace and security as a result of the extremist activities.

For obvious reasons, the Muslim world cannot abdicate its responsibility for the preservation of its stability and security interests. It should not, therefore, allow radical elements to misinterpret Islamic teachings to support violent action. It must develop a strategy for the prevention of terrorist acts to save the lives of innocent people. The failure of the Islamic world to address this important issue is fraught with serious dangers.

The lack of democracy, education and enlightened governance in most Muslim countries has enabled radical elements to create pockets of support by manipulating Islamic teachings that are at variance with true Islamic injunctions.

When a monarch or a dictator is at the helm of a country's affairs, it gives rise to tyranny, despair and radicalism.

Muslim nations should, therefore, make an earnest effort to promote democracy in their countries – which is the only way forward to restrain the extremists from imposing their version of Islam and foil acts of terrorism and suicide bombing that they carry out with impunity.

The writer is a former ambassador.

A problem of passivity

AFTER the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was a painful and sometimes bitter debate in the United States about how two administrations could have failed to take decisive action against an obvious threat — Al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan.

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that it was partly a "problem of imagination": Few US officials considered the possibility that Al Qaeda was capable of reaching out from its remote base to stage devastating strikes on New York and Washington.

We know now that allowing Al Qaeda a safe haven can have terrible consequences for US homeland security. And yet the Bush administration appears to be letting the threat develop again.

For several months US intelligence officials and independent observers have been telling journalists — most recently at the New York Times — that Al Qaeda has established several camps in the Pakistani territory of North Waziristan, along the Afghan border.

Those camps are populated by Pakistani, Afghan and foreign militants; some may be Westerners who are being trained for attacks in Europe or the United States.

The camps have operated unhindered since at least September, when Pakistan's military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, agreed to a separate peace deal with local Taliban leaders. Since then, cross-border attacks by the Taliban into Afghanistan have tripled, according to the US military.

Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in Waziristan have developed a "complex cooperative relationship," Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the outgoing US commander in Afghanistan, testified before the House Armed Services Committee last week. Yet no action has been taken, either by the United States or by Pakistan, its nominal ally in the war on terrorism.

President Bush accepted and endorsed Mr Musharraf's truce with the militants when it was reached. Now senior administration officials acknowledge that it has created serious problems.

"A steady, direct attack against the command and control in Pakistan in sanctuary areas is essential," Gen Eikenberry said. In separate congressional testimony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "President Musharraf . . . has to do something." Mr Musharraf has done nothing. Instead, he has continued to defend his deal with the Taliban and suggested that similar havens should be created in Afghanistan.

The provincial governor who brokered the deal held a news conference last weekend at which he said the truce was a success and called the Taliban's terrorism against US and Nato forces "a resistance movement, sort of a liberation war."

The administration's response to such statements -- and Pakistan's failure to act -- has been to heap praise on Mr Musharraf and to express sympathy for the pressure he is said to be under.

Such indulgence, which has gone on for five years while the general has tempered his action against Islamic extremists and suppressed Pakistan's pro-Western democratic parties, will be hard to defend if the consequences of allowing Al Qaeda a safe haven are unchanged.

"Direct intervention against the sanctuary in Afghanistan apparently must have seemed . . . to be disproportionate to the threat," said the Sept. 11 commission report. Is that how the administration thinks of Waziristan?

—The Washington Post