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| April 03, 2007 | Tuesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 14, 1428 |
CII’s good initiative
Screening for TB
Riyadh summit in perspective
THE recently concluded Riyadh summit seems to have brought to an end a fairly long sequence of Arab League meetings getting distracted from the core Arab causes by internal differences.
THE second quarter report of the State Bank of Pakistan released on Friday shows that while the broad inflationary pressures on the economy have somewhat eased, the consumers continue to suffer from rising food prices. The food inflation rate, which dipped in January, returned to double-digit level in February. The average annual inflation as measured by Price Consumer Index (CPI) during July-February 2007 at 7.7 per cent is above the official target of 6.5 per cent set for the current fiscal year. The high food inflation price is attributed mainly to an increase in the prices of rice, flour, some vegetables and fruits. Abnormally high food prices have kept the CPI inflation above eight per cent for most part of this fiscal year. While the tight monetary policy has helped subdue the non-food and non-energy inflation, government policies have failed to tackle the high consumer prices and have left the middle and lower income groups at the mercy of a volatile market. To manage trade and current account deficits, the government is focusing on foreign capital and financial inflows that are creating excess liquidity. These depress the rate of savings for financing investment and contribute to inflationary pressures on the economy. In its report, the central bank has stressed that inflation needs to be contained to provide positive real returns to savers that would lower the country’s dependence on what the regulator describes as “potentially fickle foreign investment.” It is the small savers who provide the bulk of the money for investment.
There is also so much excess money in the domestic market unable to find productive outlets and is parked in speculative trading in commodities, stocks and real estate. Unfair trade practices which contribute substantially to a high inflation rate have been normally curbed by imports to improve supplies in a market cornered by hoarders and speculators. But the government continues to drag its feet on promulgating a competition law and setting up of a Competition Commission to tackle monopolies, cartels and oligopolies indulging in rampant market abuse. While inflation is eroding the purchasing power of the rupee in the domestic market, its real effective exchange rate index has appreciated by 2.5 per cent during the first eight months of the current year because of rising inflows of loans, foreign investments and remittances. The State Bank says that it indicates the loss of external competitiveness of the rupee and reinforces the need for bringing down domestic inflation. Much neglected, the problem needs to be tackled properly and on a priority basis, particularly when the growth in exports has plummeted to a mere four per cent.
In the absence of effective social safety nets and any policy on income distribution and not enough jobs, the overarching issue is the misery that a persistent high rate of inflation inflicts on the fixed income groups particularly the poor. The vulnerable are getting more impoverished and their quality of life is deteriorating. Many often go without meat for weeks. With all hopes dashed, some commit suicide in desperation. The development strategy needs to be reviewed and altered to ensure a high growth rate with low inflation. The poor and vulnerable do not have a voice in the military-led government to seek solutions to their problems as the regime is not accountable to the people. Democracy is very much a bread and butter issue for the ordinary citizen.
THE Council of Islamic Ideology has done well to spell out its views on how the law should treat rape and adultery. The protection of women law that was adopted in December 2006 certainly attempted to rectify the cruel injustice that had been perpetuated for many years under the Hudood Ordinances of 1979. Under that law a woman who was raped could be charged and punished for zina if she failed to produce witnesses in her support. The women protection law has separated the two issues and has made it compulsory for a person charging a woman of adultery to produce witnesses before a court to have the case registered. In the case of rape, she could lodge a complaint and her own statement charging that she had been raped could not be used against her if she failed to prove the charge, as was the case earlier. The CII has done well to reinforce this approach in very unambiguous and specific terms. There should now be no confusion about the legal distinction between rape and consensual sex and the council’s assertion is correct that in one case the woman is the complainant and in the other she is the defendant.
The CII’s opinion, however, is not legally binding and the government has to pass a law or promulgate an ordinance to make it effective. In this particular case, it might simply require some amendments to the protection of women law to strengthen it on this count. This should be done without delay. Now that the government has shown the political will to address the anti-women laws that have made life so miserable for many women in this country, the ministries and functionaries concerned with law-making should not allow this opportunity to be lost. It is important that the misogynist laws that were enacted in the name of religion should be done away with and the injustice done to women corrected. This is the least the government can do. Although an impact will be made on the status of women only when a change is effected in the mindset of the people and the behaviour of men and women, changing laws provide the much needed framework for social action.
THE plan of the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) to screen people for tuberculosis in Karachi is an ambitious but welcome one. For a variety of reasons, the TB detection rate has remained unsatisfactory in Karachi and most other parts of the country. By mobilising medical teams consisting of doctors and students to test possible TB patients living in certain areas, the DUHS will be employing a proactive method of spreading the message of TB awareness and the need for immediate detection and treatment. If this proves successful — DUHS will start with one township — the project can be replicated by medical teams in other parts of the country. It cannot be stressed enough that TB is a highly contagious disease and unless contained at the early stage of its onset, it can be transmitted to many people living in the same neighbourhood, especially a crowded one. It has been estimated that in Karachi, where slums abound, the number of people likely to contract TB this year will be about 21,000 (32 per cent of all the cases projected for Sindh) and perhaps more if the detection rate falls short of expectations.
It is unfortunate that despite extensive coverage by the DOTS programme, under which a TB patient takes his or her medication under supervision and does not leave off midway through the course, the number of people with the disease in the country has continued to mount. Every year there are 250,000 to 300,000 new cases of TB while approximately 50,000 people die of what is both a preventable and curable illness. The stress must be on timely diagnosis and prompt treatment. For this, it is important that the health authorities ensure that testing facilities are accessible to all and that the cost of treatment, which can be beyond the reach of the poor man, is kept affordable.
The outcome has been clear and coherent and though the summit would not have eliminated diverse perspectives in the Middle East, it has certainly cobbled together a unified position that should facilitate resumption of the peace process.The summit has marked a milestone in the journey of the Saudi diplomacy towards a proactive role in arresting the descent of the region into anarchy, sectarian strife and into a situation of helplessness in the face of Israel’s growing colonisation of Palestinian land.
The summit was an appropriate sequel to the Saudi-sponsored Makkah accord that enabled Fatah and Hamas to form a government of national unity. Significantly, heads of state or government from Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia were present at the summit to underline support from non-Arab Muslim states for the decisions of the summit. Amongst world figures attending the inaugural session were the new UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, EU’s Javier Solana and Iranian foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki.
There has been a tendency all over the world to attribute the Saudi initiative and the rather unexpected interest taken by President Pervez Musharraf to mobilise the so-called like-minded Muslim states in its support to a tactical change in the United States’ policy towards the region.
Both of them were interpreted as moves designed to weaken the ties that radical Arab states and movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas had forged with Iran, isolate Iran in the context of the emerging geo-political tussle in the area and dilute the aims of the Palestinian struggle.
The Riyadh summit should dispel most of these misgivings. It demonstrated that the Saudi-led pragmatism of a group of Arab states including Egypt, Jordan, and UAE, which in turn was backed by several non-Arab states, was by no means identical with the thrust of the American policy revealed in a series of visits by secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to the region. If there were points of convergence, there were equally important points of divergence.
In fact, the summit showed that there is no disconnect between the fundamental ideas that came to be associated with Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz when he was the crown prince and the dynamic that he is trying to create now as the Saudi monarch. A continuity in his approach had become apparent even before the summit. If Washington wanted him to tighten the siege around Iran, the Saudi king focused on the Iranian question by sending Prince Bandar bin Sultan to Tehran and by inviting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Riyadh. There was a clear difference: Washington seemed to use the present situation to ratchet up a confrontation with Iran while Riyadh sought to bring it in the realm of peaceful and patient negotiations.
The keynote address of the custodian of the two holy mosques at the summit contained memorable passages testifying to an independent assessment of the grave crisis in the Middle East.
First, he did not mince his words in evaluating the role of the Arab states. He spoke of the need for the “restoration of confidence in us and in one another” in the quest for salvation. If credibility is regained, he said, “we will (then) never allow any forces from outside the region to draw the future of the region, and no banner will be raised in the Arab land but the banner of Arabism”.
Second, in comments that brought ripostes from Washington and Baghdad, the king lamented that “bloodshed (in beloved Iraq) is continuing under an illegal foreign occupation and detestable sectarianism.”
Third, he called for an end to the international blockade of the Palestinian people “so that the peace process can move in an atmosphere far from oppression and force’. He made this call when Israel and the United States were coordinating their policies to prolong the blockade.
It would be naïve to think that intra-Arab differences have vanished with this outstanding address. But the summit has concentrated the Arab mind and drawn the contours of an acceptable solution in a bolder manner. It did not fulfil the Israeli hope that the Arab terms would be further scaled down as the price of Israel’s readiness to come to the negotiating table. The Arab summit reaffirmed the Saudi plan of 2002, the Beirut declaration, as the basis of a final settlement with Israel.
Against a backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating situation in the region, the Saudis had made a proposal in 2002 for all the Arab states to recognise Israel and its right to exist within secure borders in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands and Israel’s recognition of an independent Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.
The Arab League Peace Plan of March 2002 called for full Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories “including the Syrian Golan heights” as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon and for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution 194, and the “ acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since the 4th of June 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital”.
In spite of near universal support for this plan, Israel had destroyed it systematically, a process in which it felt encouraged by the indifference to the Middle East peace process shown during the first six years of the Bush presidency.
With a growing recognition in the United States of the need to re-engage with it, a recognition brought about by the fiasco in Iraq, it was incumbent upon the Arab states to revive the 2002 plan as the most promising framework for a final solution . It envisages the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a peace agreement with Israel, and the establishment of normal relations in the context of a comprehensive peace.
Taken together, the Makkah accord that led to the national unity government of the Palestinian people and the Riyadh declaration should make a deep impact on the situation of impasse between the two sides. Israel’s argument that it has no negotiating partner loses all validity.
Hamas has undertaken to show respect for all past agreements. Such ambiguity as it still maintains does not stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state on the basis of the ground realities of June 4, 1967, and, therefore, a two-state solution. On the question of refugees, it cannot be expected to modify its known stand on the right of return prior to negotiating a comprehensive peace.
The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, a globally acknowledged Arab statesman, has said that “if Israel refuses, that means it does not want peace; then (the issue) goes back into the hands of the lords of war”.
The initial reaction of Israel was predictably dismissive. Subsequently, comments from Israel reveal an increasing realisation that its stock response would take away the veneer and show it up as the only state obstructing a Middle East settlement.
The Riyadh summit has energised the Israeli peace lobby that wants to seize the opportunity to achieve true security for their country by entering into serious negotiations without further prevarication. Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has now tried to put his own spin on the Arab summit in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
He has expressed satisfaction that a bloc of states is emerging that “understands that they may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem”. Describing it as a revolutionary change in the Arab outlook, he has indicated willingness to participate in a regional conference that “would support direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.” Israel’s defence minister, Amir Peretz, concedes that the Arab initiative can provide the basis for negotiations on a permanent status agreement “with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas”.
When it comes to the use of convoluted language that can be interpreted in all kinds of ways, Israel’s politicians have no equal. They are willing to attend a regional conference that supports negotiations but are they pledging themselves to final status talks that were the lynchpin of the Oslo process? Do they want to make peace with the Palestinian people or with Mahmoud Abbas?
The main reason underlying the studied ambiguity of Israeli statements is not difficult to state. The present leaders of Israel will continue to link settlement with a further land grab on the West Bank.
They are confident that they will persuade the United States that the issues in the Middle East are not as yet ripe for a solution. They will continue to argue in Washington that the failure of the Iraqi invasion and the enhanced role of Iran entitle them to unquestioned American support in stalling the Arab initiative.
A quick survey of Arab opinion shows serious misgivings about the Arab summit succeeding in bringing about a strategic change in American thinking. The next few months will reveal the real intent of the United States’ effort to promote frequent contacts between Mahmoud Abbas and Israel. It will be a great pity if the renewed Arab plan is made to wither on the vine as was done after its first appearance in 2002.
The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.