The Saarc talk shop

MORE than two decades have passed since Saarc came into being as an expression of our region’s collective resolve to keep apace with the changing times and to evolve a coherent regional cooperative framework in an increasingly inter-dependent world for the socio-economic well-being of the peoples of its member-states. This promise remains far from being fulfilled.

What has gone wrong with Saarc is a question that keeps agitating our minds at all levels attracting discourse and scrutiny from practitioners of all sorts both within and outside our region. But no one would disagree that there is still a long way between Saarc’s promise and performance, and between its avowed goals and accomplishment. Indeed, Saarc has yet a long way to go before it can come of age.

We just had another “landmark” Saarc summit, the 14th in the 22 years of its existence. But questions abound on Saarc’s performance and its potential for any visible or meaningful regional cooperation in South Asia. The most pertinent comment came from the Times of India which editorially described the summit as a “super bazaar” and asked if this summit would also be marked by the “bumbling that's been a defining feature of this august association so far.”

If the statements made at the summit and its final outcome are of any indicative significance, the answer has to be in the affirmative. Another newspaper looked at the summit as yet another “mumbling jumbling” with member-states finding it hard to form a consensus on issues of relevance to all and finding it difficult to compromise owing to their own political needs.

In keeping with the Saarc summitry tradition, the New Delhi gathering was thus reduced to no more than a regional debating forum, a high-level talk shop, in which some spoke with conviction in their institutional and democratic strength, while others only read well-prepared statements with a theatrical accent and operatic tenor but without any conviction in what they were reading.

A journalist friend of mine called me from New Delhi to congratulate me for Pakistan’s “excellent performance”. He told me that the audience this time was giving marks for the elocutionary skills of the participants as demonstrated in the statements in the plenary and Pakistan stood out with unmatched distinction. Well, we ought to be proud of at least something. But it looked so artificial and theatrical.

In terms of the final outcome, we only had yet another high-sounding but low-yield declaration which according to the Indian foreign minister was a “comprehensive and forward-looking milestone”. But everyone else sees it as nothing more than a rehash of the same old and familiar reaffirmations and reiterations that have been made by our heads of state and government every year without ever meaning anything to the region’s peoples and masses, and the oft-repeated promises and commitments that have never been fulfilled or honoured.

There were no major actionable decisions on the future of the region in terms of the socio-economic well-being of its peoples. The only consensus decision emerging from the summit was on the dates and venue of the next summit which will be held in Male, the capital of the Maldives. And one concrete thing emerging from this summit is the decision to establish a South Asian University – a centre of excellence in higher education for which the host country, India, must be complimented.

It was also decided to celebrate the year 2008 as the Saarc “year of good governance.” Hopefully, the benchmarks for good governance in the region by next year will include abolition of dictatorships, civilian or military, in all forms and manifestations. Good governance in South Asia also needs greater allocation of GDP ratio at national levels to education and the social sector rather than escalating military budgets.

The planned $300-million South Asian Development Fund for regional poverty alleviation programmes seems to be a non-starter like all other funds in the developing world. If member-states could afford this huge sum, they might as well use it for poverty alleviation in their own countries. Saarc must not become an instrument of funds or aid mechanisms that always tend to cripple the nations’ initiative and drive and retard the urge for self-reliance.

In their statements, our leaders without exception, including the newcomer wizard in green robe from the Pamirs, were unanimously of the view that Saarc’s vision of genuine regional cooperation remains unfulfilled. They all agreed that their region was out of step with other regions of the world, and presented their own vision of a “comprehensive and forward-looking” regional approach.

Pakistan’s prime minister offered a five-point roadmap for Saarc’s recovery “to become a cohesive and effective body with boundless potential.” These included the requisites of “peace and security in the region, mutual trust and confidence, peaceful co-existence on the basis of sovereign equality, interdependence, and a level playing field for effective division of labour and production.” This is not a new roadmap.

Pakistan has been pursuing many similar roadmaps for the last 10 years. I recall the then-elected prime minister making similar proposals at the ninth Saarc summit in 1997. But in the absence of political will, all “practical and do-able” measures have remained unachievable and the much cursed trust deficit continues to obstruct a genuine regional approach.

Afghanistan’s admission into Saarc as its eighth member is a welcome development but as someone said in these columns, it is “no more than” redefining the geographical limits of our region and perhaps also” recognition of Afghanistan’s pivotal role” as a potential bridge between this region and Central and West Asia. Now with Afghanistan as member, it seems Saarc, like the Economic Cooperation Organisation, would become even more vulnerable to the vagaries of the turbulent and uncertain regional environment.

But the Saarc scenario is grim in any case. Two decades have passed since this organisation came into being as an expression of our region’s collective resolve to develop a coherent regional cooperative framework in an increasingly interdependent world for the socio-economic well-being of the peoples of its member-states. This promise is far from being fulfilled.

Saarc has neither improved the quality of life in our region, nor accelerated the economic growth, social progress and cultural development of its member-states. South Asia remains one of the world’s poorest regions with a closed economy, despite some progress towards trade liberalisation in the 1990s. Saarc’s intra-regional trade is less than two per cent of the GDP while its collective share in world trade remains just one per cent. Protectionism continues to limit mutual market access.

The vast majority of our people still live in grinding poverty and sub-human conditions. Economic growth indices, with rare exceptions, are static, if not going downward. With some notable exceptions, our countries also lag behind in developing genuine democracy, rule of law and good governance through universally acclaimed norms and principles.

Indeed, there is something fundamentally wrong with our approach which needs to strike a balance between our ambition, our region’s peculiar environment and our operational capacity. The debate on Saarc’s performance over the years has only highlighted the need for an enabling environment free of mistrust and hostility, without which no regional arrangement any where in the world has worked.

For an enabling environment, South Asia must be freed of tensions, military confrontations and escalating military budgets. Like Asean, Saarc should also have a regional political forum, called the “South Asia Regional Forum” which would be useful in reinforcing the process of “confidence-building, preventive diplomacy, and peaceful settlement of disputes”

But the India-Pakistan equation with all its ramifications is not the only factor that has adversely impacted on Saarc’s performance. Its capacity to deliver on its ambitious agenda has also been conditioned by its systemic limitations and operational handicaps.

Saarc needs to be re-oriented both structurally and operationally, enhancing its effectiveness as a dynamic vehicle of regional cooperation. This would require an attitudinal change both at the national and regional levels to move from our declaratory stance to an implementation mode equipped with the necessary means and resources. The foremost priority must be to ensure that we have our regional perspective clearly drawn, our goals and priorities pragmatically defined and our wherewithal appropriately geared towards the realisation of our declared objectives.

Saarc must adapt itself to the new realities even if it means the re-writing of its basic charter. All institutions are susceptible to change and improvement. Business as usual approach will not work. Besides political commitment and deeper engagement on the part of all member-states, a new result-oriented normative framework and operational culture consistent with our regional ground realities is needed. We need to move from the realm of ideas to actionable plans.

Sustainable development and poverty eradication must remain the over-arching goals of Saarc and demonstrate a more focused and result-based approach in the realisation of national development plans. Instead of setting up funds and food reservoirs as instruments of charity, we need to have a South Asian Trade and Development Bank to augment Saarc’s capacity as a catalyst in the economic and social development of the region and for promotion of intra-regional trade and Safta goals.

The realisation of the Millennium Development Goals must also be integrated with time-bound national development strategies. Trade must be viewed as a means of development and not an end in itself. While efforts need to be made for removing restrictive barriers to mutual trade and opening of markets in the region on the basis of fairness and equity, we must also ensure that the process of operationalisation of Safta remains linked with the region’s development strategies.

But most important is the need for an exceptional regional impulse to keep pace with the changing times. Our region needs a fresh democratic impulse to promote a culture of real peace, people-centred development, and undiluted democracy. This fresh regional impulse must spring from within South Asia with all member-states, even those that now have autocratic or unelected governments, committing themselves to democratic norms and pluralistic governance.

South Asia needs to have a regional “social contract” guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and basic rights to their citizens, including their inalienable right to choose or change their government through an independently cast ballot, and which establishes the power and duties of the government and provides the legal basis for its institutional structure. Only then will our peoples be able to harness the full potential of the South Asian region and join the worldwide quest for economic growth, political stability and sustainable development.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Women and the judiciary

IN the post-modern set-up, women can celebrate their entry into male authorised enclaves and challenge discrimination on the basis of sex in a court of law. Allegations of gender bias, while dismissed by many as hackneyed attempts at unmerited stature, are too serious to remain of demeaning value. Does

that make women serious contestants of previously unchallenged male authority?

In certain parts of the world, where post-modernism has run its course, women are strong contenders. In other countries, where it is more of a physical than a sociological theme, the reluctance to accept women in a homogeneously male environment presents itself in one form or another. The judiciary is one area where there is a strong male bias.

Based on research done in Scotland, an article published in The Journal in July 2000 and entitled, ‘Still a Glass Ceiling for Women Solicitors?’, reproduced sentiments of female lawyers who believed that the sources of gender inequity in law were threefold — networking, child care issues and vestiges of sexism.

The comments of one of the women solicitors interviewed for the article made way into the address of Justice Linda Dobbs, delivered to the Association of Women Solicitors on the occasion of the International Women’s Day in March 2007. Justice Dobbs, who had broken through one of the toughest glass ceilings by becoming Britain’s first African Caribbean black high court judge in 2004 quoted the solicitor’s sentiments from the article: “We’ll know we’ve made it when there are mediocre women in senior positions as…. there are enough mediocre men there. Women have to be exceptional at everything to get there....”

In the Muslim world, judicial diversity is still a remote idea, primarily promulgated by governments to soften the conservative image broadcast worldwide of Islam and to comply with anti-discrimination provisions in international law for quick political leverage.

Eager for his share of international plaudits for judicial diversity, the Egyptian government of Mr Hosni Mubarak appointed 31 female judges on March 14, 2007.

Before their appointment by the head of the supreme judicial council, Ms Tahani al-Gibali was the only woman raised to the level of a judge in 2003 by a presidential decree. Becoming the first female judge of Egypt did not mean she had authority to adjudicate civil or criminal court cases. Her role as a judge was strictly limited to the high constitutional court.

The 31 appointees have yet to be assigned courts, but it is fairly clear from the criticism of conservative religious elements that they will be shunted off to the family courts.

These hardliners have condemned the decision of Egypt’s supreme judicial council and feel it goes against the Quranic injunction of the testimony of two women equalling that of one man. Mr Yayha Ragheb Daqruri, an Egyptian judge and president of the judges’ syndicate, has opposed the appointment of women judges in the strongest terms and has called it a contravention of the Shariah. Other arguments rest on the objection of female judges sitting alone with men. But the most outlandish of them is the adverse effect a ‘pregnant judge’ would have on the ‘judiciary’s prestige’!

Surprisingly, going against the extremists’ opinion is the ruling of Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, a leading Egyptian cleric heading the Muslim world’s most important centre of religious learning, Al-Azhar. He has passed the ruling that “there is nothing in the Quran that bans women from becoming judges”.

Though the move by the Egyptian government has slightly taken the edge off Mr Hosni Mubarak’s widely criticised social and political reforms, women rights activists think the decree is not profound enough. The 31 judges selected from state prosecutors “exclude defence lawyers and civil servants”.

In her ‘Will Women Judges Really Make a Difference’ speech in 1990, Bertha Wilson, the first woman to sit as a Canadian supreme court judge, said that “women view the world and what goes on in it from a different perspective from men, and women judges, by bringing that perspective to bear on the cases they hear,

can play a major role in introducing judicial neutrality and impartiality into the justice

system.” But what would Justice Wilson make of the lack of

diversity in the judicial appointments process in Pakistan?

While Pakistan has yet to appoint a female Chief Justice to the superior court, Justice Fathima Beevi became the first woman judge of the Supreme Court of India in 1989. And in 1991, Leila Seth became the first woman in India to sit as the Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh.

On the home front, the gender parity dictum is mortifyingly hollow to merit any comparison. From the time of the appointment of the first Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Sir Abdur Rashid to the Acting Chief Justice Rana Bhagwandas, Pakistan has had 22 Chief Justices of the Supreme Court and not one of them has been a woman.

When confronted with the negligible number of women in the judiciary, one can hardly take seriously the oft-repeated strain of General Musharraf’s government that it has inducted a historic number of women into the local government and parliament.

Statistics taken from the Provincial Bar Councils indicate that, Punjab has a total of 45,000 licenced legal practitioners, Sindh follows with 14,000, the NWFP has 3,000 and the province of Balochistan rates the lowest with only 1,772. The state of Azad Kashmir has 2,000 licensed legal practitioners. Despite this number only five women since the country’s independence have made it to the superior courts’ benches.

Lack of judicial diversity is evident in the present composition of the superior judiciary. The 17-judge Supreme Court of Pakistan (including the Acting Chief Justice) has no female judge on its bench.

The Lahore High Court has 35 sitting judges but not one of them is a woman. The same applies to the Balochistan and the Peshawar High Courts. The former has five judges and the latter 14 without a single woman sitting as a judge.

An exception to the superior courts’ all-male composition is the Sindh High Court, which has inducted two women, Ms Yasmin Abbasi and Ms Qaiser Iqbal, as justices.

It was not until August 1994, during the government of Ms Benazir Bhutto, that five female judges were promoted to the superior courts. Justices Fakhrunnisa and Nasira Iqbal were from the Punjab, Talat Yaqub and Khalida Rashid Khan were appointed as judges of the Peshawar High Court, while Justice Majida Rizvi became the first woman in Sindh to sit in Karachi’s High Court. Except for Khalida Khan, who is currently serving as a permanent judge of the United Nations Tribunal, the rest retired without being promoted to the rank of Chief Justice.

The Musharraf-led government’s false promises of gender diversity were challenged when the ruling of the Supreme Court that “the most senior judge in the High Court and Supreme Court has a legitimate right to become the Chief Justice of the respective court” (PLD 2002 Supreme Court 939) was violated.

In 2002, Justice Fakhrunnisa had become the senior-most judge of the Lahore High Court and should have been rightfully made the Chief Justice, but her position was filled by a male judge.

Justice Fakhrunnisa (retd) accused the government of gender bias and criticised it for taking seven months to fill the Supreme Court vacancies, which should have been filled within 30 days to prevent her entry into the most superior judicial bench of the country.

Had women been part of the process of judicial appointments, history might not have been too dependent on the ‘doctrine of necessity’. As Justice Bertha Wilson deduced, women do have a different perspective from men.

But for once their exclusion from the Supreme Judicial Council, preparing to give a decision on the ongoing saga between the government and the suspended Chief Justice of Pakistan, is nothing short of merciful.

The sustenance of judicial diversity runs parallel to respect for the judiciary. An absence of that essential component can only lead to its decline.

Truth about free speech

LAILA AL-ARIAN was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls – monitored, of course – and he was growing steadily weaker.

SAMI Al-ARIAN is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest against the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloguing al-Arian's little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel's lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian's family was driven from Palestine in 1948 – and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring "to murder and maim" outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in "Palestine". He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.

Al-Arian's $50 million Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in – wait for it – a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian's lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian – who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation – found Moody talking about "blood" on the defendant's hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonoured and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America's torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a "contract interrogator", who has bared his soul in the Washington Post – all praise, here, by the way to the Post – about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation "facility" of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning "by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes". Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. "A man with no face stares at me ... pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realise the screams are mine."

Thank God, Fair didn't write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about ‘The Mark of Cain’, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant's play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 "Servicepersons" – by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis.

As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra – I suppose we must always refer to his demise as "death" now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it – and who knew all about Mousa's fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it's really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It's to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country's schools.

Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Entitled ‘Voices in Conflict,’ Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others – including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq – to create their own play. To no avail.

The drama might hurt those "who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak", proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High's principal. And – my favourite line – Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure the play would provide "a legitimate instructional experience for our students".

And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty's point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller's ‘The Crucible’ were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded – that it wasn't their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare's ‘Titus Andronicus,’ a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honour killing. It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A "legitimate instructional experience" if ever there was one. — © The Independent, London