Analysing political violence

ECONOMISTS have begun to claim some of the territories that did not really belong to them. They are taking their analytical prowess to areas which were regarded as the preserve of political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists. Of the several domains into which they have taken their analysis the most interesting is the use of violence for gaining political objectives.

Why is it that in some societies, disputes often result in great violence, sometimes even in civil war? This is an area of considerable interest to the people of Pakistan where regime changes have occurred following violence in the streets.

The country may be heading towards one such episode again. What would it take to arrest the fast plunge into a state of political anarchy and chaos?

Economists believe that compared to other social scientists they are better equipped to handle questions such as the following: what produces armed conflicts within some societies?

They have begun to supply answers by using the techniques employed for understanding economic trends. A great amount of data from a number of countries is examined to see whether relationships exist among different variables, and complicated models are used to determine the relationships among different variables using the computational powers of new computers.

One excellent example of the advances being made is in the area of cross-disciplinary studies: to determine, for instance, how economics influences politics and how politics, in turn, affects economics.

Using political conflict as a dependent variable — an event that just does not occur on its own but is dependent on a number of “happenings” — economists have sought to relate political change to a large array of developments that occur in societies.

The make-up of a society has a number of independent variables to which political developments can be related. These include features such as ethnic composition, religious and sectarian differences, differences in cultures and differences in the languages spoken by large segments of society.

Sub-Saharan Africa was the focus of much of the investigation that has been done recently. The attention on Africa was produced by the question: why was the continent not responding positively to the enormous amount of policy attention it was receiving accompanied by large flows of official capital? This has become a legitimate area of academic and policy research. It has yielded three different conclusions.

According to one, espoused by economist William Easterly, the African governments need to get their policies right. They should receive financial support only after they have shown that they can use these efficiently and responsibly.

Jeffrey Sachs, another American economist, has come up with the opposite conclusion. He believes that Africa is caught in a “poverty trap”.

The lack of appropriate amount of financial resources means that African societies remain underdeveloped, with poor human and physical resources. This produces a situation which the international financial markets, now the largest single source of money for the developing world, do not find attractive.

Capital, therefore, does not become available, and backwardness persists. The only way to get out of this trap is for the international community to provide a large infusion of capital to get the countries to begin to move towards development.

Paul Collier, a British economist, has thrust himself into this debate by concentrating his attention on an altogether different developmental variable: political violence.

He has come to the conclusion that political violence is another kind of trap in which many developing countries are caught, sometimes for reasons of history, sometimes because of their geography, sometimes because of their endowments, sometimes because of the way they have developed their economies and sometimes because of the way they have invested in their human capital.

Of the many questions that have been raised by the academia there are many of interest for those who study Pakistan. For instance, do conflicts result when there are many ethnic groups in society that compete for political and economic space?

The answer is that multi-ethnic societies are not necessarily more prone to political violence than those countries that are more homogenous. To take one example, Somalia is about the most ethnically homogenous country in Africa and yet it has known more political violence than any other country in that continent.

The more recent example of Iraq suggests that ethnic and religious differences are difficult to reconcile in the absence of institutions that can serve as intermediaries.

That institutions can help to bring together very diverse communities into one nation is provided by India which is an example of a country where ethnic diversity and the use of more than a dozen languages has not resulted in much violence.

The only political violence that the Indians have had to deal with is on account of the centuries old conflict between Muslims and Hindus which have not been resolved by the partition of British India on religious grounds.

While the Indian political system has helped to create a common ground among people of very different ethnic backgrounds, it has not been able to satisfy the aspirations of those belonging to different faiths.

What has been the impact of uneven economic development on political violence? Should we expect greater violence in societies where the fruits of economic growth are captured by a few people and where significant economic differences develop among different regions?

Pakistan’s political history suggests that economic developments can create great political instability. This happened towards the end of the era of President Ayub Khan when there was a widespread perception that the fruits of the extraordinary economic expansion during this period were harvested by a few influential families.

The perception is that the model of development adopted in the 1960s created wide disparity of income between the two regions of Pakistan, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, leading to the country’s breakup. In both cases, the aggrieved resorted to violence to achieve their goals. The East Pakistanis challenged Pakistan’s military and eventually won independence for themselves.

The West Pakistanis were able to send the military back to the barracks, hoping that they were ushering in a period that would allow the citizenry as well as different provinces in the country the opportunity to participate more fully in the affairs of the state.

The fast moving events of 2007 have once again brought the country to a moment of decision. What happens in the next few days, weeks and months will determine whether Pakistan will move towards political violence or draw lessons from its history as well as the experiences of other countries to build institutions that can absorb the shocks that all societies receive periodically and, also, to set in place a model of economic development that has the means to reduce societal tensions.

How this can be done and what economic theory teaches us are questions for the column for next week.

It’s the principle that matters

THERE are two debates raging in our press at this — oh alright I’ll use the favourite buzzword being bandied about these days — ‘seminal’ time in our country’s tortured history about the so-called, much rumoured, and even more written about “deal” between Benazir Bhutto and General Musharraf aka The Commando.

One of the debates is between what have come to be known as the transitionists and the transformationists, and the other is between those who support

Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif and those who are dead set against them.

First, the transitionists vs the transformationists. Simply spoken, the transitionists say there should be a deal between the two because they are both ‘liberals’ (whatever the devil that means) and because getting rid of Musharraf at this fraught time would invite a hard-line general, and therefore the obscurantists, into power; because keeping Musharraf on side means you have the army on side (in the so-called ‘war against terror’), meaning in turn that it will not “sulk” in its barracks and conspire against the elected civilian government because it has been removed from a position of pre-eminence, perks and all; and that it is essential to have the army’s goodwill and cooperation to help fight the good fight.

They also say that a transformation from army to civil rule is not possible because of “structural” problems and that the only way is through a gradual transition.

Lastly, they imply that the tranformationists are anti-American and, therefore, want to get rid of Musharraf.

The transformationists, amongst whose number I count myself, are of the view that the time is here for civil society, made up of the mass of the Pakistani people and their political parties, to send a clear message to the army high command — not ‘armed forces’ kindly note, because the Pakistan army rules the roost in this country, the air force and navy being auxiliary services at best — that enough is enough and that it will never again be permitted to presume that it has the answers to our country’s problems; that it will never again be allowed to kick out elected governments making the world look at Pakistan as if it were a jungle mainly populated by beings languishing on a rather low rung on the evolutionary ladder.

More than anything else, that the time is here for the brass hats to be told the army is but another department of the government of Pakistan, no more, no less.

Amplifying the fact, of course, that not only has the country always become more fractious and divided under army rule, the army has suffered a decline in its professional ability whenever its brass has taken the responsibility of running the country onto its broad shoulders: witness among countless others the most recent Waziristan and Tarbela fiascos, nay catastrophes.

“Structures” did they say? What great structures has the brass erected in the country? If anything, it has demolished the structure of the state completely, introducing a hybrid which is neither horse nor donkey basing its assault on the maxim, “What do bloody civilians know that we don’t know better?”

Among so much else, look at the way in which the political wallah in the tribal areas was shoved aside by the army, handing to its own officers the responsibility of day to day dealings with the tribals and landing the country in the right royal mess it is in.

As for the Americans, I, for one, certainly feel that more sense and fairness should be brought to the struggle against extremism, and that mere gung-hoism and shooting from the hip, cowboy-style, will

hardly help. We are, after all, talking about our own people, dash it.

While it is hoped that this article will trigger a debate on the conundrum in all of the word’s aspects, I shall concern myself today with the argument that Benazir should make a deal with Musharraf because he is a ‘liberal’, forming what some within the American administration have called the ‘dream team’, which will then move the country in a more liberal direction and fight the madcaps who are running around everywhere you look.

As far as I am concerned, it is the principle of the matter that is important, not who is making the deal with whomever. And that principle is that politicians, particularly those who head large parties, should not make deals with army dictators, full stop.

For not only would this be akin to giving the army brass yet another of those proverbial inches, it will take Pakistan back many steps from the heady place where it finds itself as a result of the standoff between the dictatorship and a courageous Chief Justice and his supporters from the bench, the bar, and civil society.

This surely is the right time for Pakistanis too to stand and be counted among the world’s civilised people, who for one, vote governments in and vote them out at the end of their tenures without the dark and threatening shadow of their own army looming in the background.

A little about those who criticise this or that political leader for being corrupt, venal, inefficient, whatever. The fact of the matter is that the present dispensation is no better, in any way at all!

Corruption is at an all-time high; there are serious insurgencies going on in two of the most strategic of the country’s provinces; everyone is at everyone else’s throat; flour, that most critical of food for the poor, is not to be had even at 40 per cent higher than the government’s prices(!); and law and order has never ever been worse than it is now.

I can only suggest to those who see no good at all in Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif who, like it or not, are the country’s main political leaders that they not vote for them. Indeed, if they find no one in Pakistan’s politics worthy of their vote, they could form a new political party. More strength to them I say.

I have to end on the note that I am bitterly disappointed at the way in which Saudi Arabia has colluded with the army junta in the kidnap of Nawaz Sharif, a twice-elected prime minister of Pakistan, and his shameful spiriting away to Jeddah.

(Did I hear someone say ‘structures’)? Is the American administration under the Cheney/Dubya combine so fearsome that the Saudis threw all caution to the winds?

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk

Crowd politics in Pakistan

IN THE Kafkaesque world of Pakistan’s politics we may also measure crowd-power not by the crowds that turn out but by the measures taken to pre-empt their formation. By those standards, Mian Nawaz Sharif’s potential as a crowd-puller is amazing.

Why then no demos, no backlash or rampaging from a mass of frustrated PML-N supporters when they were denied access and their leader deported? Easy. They too, though a little differently from the PPPP, subscribe to transitional politics, and are too savvy to offer pretexts for emergency. But of course that is putting a spin on things. And people recognise spin.

Is people power menacingly manifest in the streets the only language that breaks the Kafka dream?

What resonance has crowd politics in Pakistan? Two instances of military dictatorships and crowds immediately come to mind: the crowd that gathered to greet Bhutto’s daughter in 1986 in Lahore; and the cross-Punjab cross-Attock crowds that honoured the Chief Justice of Pakistan through the summer.

The size of the first crowd surprised the government — remember there had been no reaction in the streets when Bhutto was hanged. But from Benazir’s point of view, apart from providing a record for the history books (like the world’s first Muslim woman prime minister) what practical effect did the mass turnout have? Elections in 1988 were accidentally affected.

If Benazir had sought to seize the moment in that unique popular homage, might it not even then have been categorised as dangerously transformational and dealt with as such?

Yet, in 2007, once the legal fraternity had come out in spontaneous endorsement of the rule of law (which again was unexpected because previously so much had been taken without demur) and with common people lining the routes to say ‘thank you Judge Sahib’, the government was stymied.

International public opinion, to say nothing of the international legal fraternity, could not be openly flouted without unsustainable international censure. Also, forcing the common people to go/stay home would have given them an unforgettable demonstration at the grassroots level of their government in action all along the plains of the Punjab and all the way to Khyber. It would have had electoral costs.

But the government was on the alert and where desert geography and distance demanded that the Chief Justice fly to Karachi he also had to fly back without leaving the airport. What splendid military use of terrain. Planes must be lucky for General Musharraf. Despite a legal ruling, Nawaz Sharif was sent away.

The general reaction is that the hot-air balloon of the Sharif PML-N has been punctured. Furthermore its helmsperson stands guilty of having violated Bedou norms and mores. In a Kafka world, it is safer to violate constitutions. The spin is that people have been put off after they learnt he had lied about an agreement.

Actually, Pakistanis are quite pragmatic. Supporters understand the circumstances from which the agreement offered a way out. They understand the compulsion to return. Although the welcome that-never-was shows the inadequacy of the PML-N) party structure when it cannot have the use of official administrative facilities, which are now at the disposal of the PML-Q and the MQM, it would be a mistake to equate that weakness with a lack of electoral support.

The PML-N vote-bank is sizable and liable to grow. And there is no arguing that the APDM oppositional platform is more representative than the ARD one. But in a Kafka world, the electoral cards are well shuffled and the jokers are taken out of the pack before dealing.

Poor Ms Bhutto. No matter how genuine the turnout for her advent (which has now been heralded from the four corners of Pakistan if not the earth) in the untransformed merely pre-transitional Kafka world she is joining, Kafka’s enthralled millions will inevitably suspect that even if not quite a government candidate she is the most acceptable leader of the surrogate opposition.

The PPP MNA of the future promises to be both patriot and parliamentarian in a fragrant fusion for the true essence of democracy as blended by General Musharraf.

The only problem with that nostrum is that it leaves all the real problems untouched and festering. General Musharraf can bail out but in a floundering ship of state all he seems intent on saving is his own position.

Lessons from Sept 10

SOME political and media wizards are visibly dismayed by the public default in preventing the second exile of Mian Nawaz Sharif on Sept 10. They feel that, incensed by the pervasively bad governance by an arrogant and high-handed Gen Musharraf, the people should have braved the security restrictions to swarm Islamabad airport.

These expectations arose from the post-March response of the people in support of the Chief Justice of Pakistan I share their feelings, but differ with this verdict. The people have, once again, behaved as rightly as they should have. Their mental and emotional antennas (carved out of sheer sincerity) can instantly differentiate between the diverse wave-lengths of a non-functional Chief Justice martyred by an anti-people system and a two-time ex-prime minister who was, and continues to be, a part of that system.

Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry cut his umbilical cord with the system on March 9 with his own hands and irreversibly rebelled against it with a new call for the rule of law. The judiciary thus became an outsider and hence an instant darling of the people. Nawaz Sharif is merely challenging General Musharraf with his old rhetoric without disowning the system.

The new rise in his popularity brought about by this challenge gets badly eclipsed by this association. In the public perception he remains, like Benazir Bhutto, a deal-prone wrestler in the arena of the system which thrives by destroying the rule of law.

With General Musharraf as its current chairperson, our governing system was carved out by the unholy mullah-military-wadera alliance. It has a track record for first creating, grooming and installing custom-made prime ministers, and then hanging, assassinating or sending them on repeated exiles. It has the distinction of unquestioningly exalting all civil or military delinquent cronies, regardless of their legal, financial, moral or even patriotic shortcomings.

It prospered and matured by a devious use of force, guile, deceit, disinformation and falsehood, and devoted itself to exploiting the evil side of Pakistani human resource. It has the strange peculiarity of breaking its own country to stay in power. Due to overflowing confidence, it has now run its course and is about to collapse under the heavy weight of its own cumulative misdeeds, arousing fears that it may take down the country with it.

More than 100 political parties have remained an integral part of this system in keeping the people of Pakistan out of the loop of governance. These parties always strengthened the anti-democratic forces in the country and have never allowed democracy to enter their own ranks. They have been fully dictatorial within and without.

Other negative features of political parties, including the PML-N, are (a) the nominations of office-bearers, (b) freely dished out patronage within the party, and (c) freedom to loot and plunder when in power. The people have remained helpless victims of these “principles” for more than half a century and, in utter disgust, have ceased to participate in political activity. Active voting in elections (including rigging as birthright) remains depressively low, around 20 to 30 per cent of registered votes.

Our political culture thus revolves round avarice and self-interest, instead of commitment to issues and principles, and the membership of parties has shrunk to beneficiaries, opportunists and hangers-on, who are not willing to suffer for a cause. That is why these parties have failed to start any significant movement during the last eight years in spite of many winning chances.

All these factors were operative in the performance of the PML-N on Sept 10. The day was full of lessons for those who are willing to learn.

The first was the most glaring, that, in spite of its crumbling edifice, the system is obstinately bent on staying in power by the ruthless use of all means, fair or foul. The rulers have exactly the same mindset today as they had in 1971, and the nation should be mentally prepared to get much bigger shocks than the theatrical episode of Sept 10. The day marks the escalation of a long and open war between the dug-in system and the disorganised civil society on the issue of good governance.

The second lesson was painful — that more than 100 political parties would not be able to mobilise the nation for this “war of good governance”. Their heart is not in this war because of their own preference for power at the cost of the rule of law during the last 60 years. The people know this, and will not be enthusiastic in responding to their call due to their low credibility, non-democratic personality cults, closed door double dealings with the system and dubious links with the military dictator.

The third was a lesson of hope — that the vacuum of political leadership will force civil society to create an alternate leadership. Benazir Bhutto, the leader of one major party, is openly or secretly crossing over to the other side under an announced or unannounced deal. Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the other major party, is located and gagged at a safe distance in Saudi Arabia.

It may be a blessing in disguise for the bewildered people to look to the post-March initiative of the lawyers’ community for providing an entirely new alternate leadership. Luckily, there is no single towering personality in this fraternity to dominate the scene. The galaxy of recently discovered stars are, therefore, bound to develop collective leadership, thus paving the way for new democratic traditions.

The fourth lesson was significant for being in line with the eternal laws of nature, which never lets things be static in this world. New ground realities are being constantly born in reaction to the old. This lesson is meant for the 100-plus political parties, but there is scanty data to believe that these opportunist leopards will change their spots. Their support for the post-March peoples’ movement was, at best, only secondary and imitative.

What is the nature of this change? So far, it is in the warming-up stage. Since March 9, civil society has been shedding its 60-year old inertia and sliding into a state of flux. The system’s repression will give further momentum to its self-discovery and enhance the muscle power of the people. Matters will then snowball under inexorable nature, and the change will go on, taking its own time in proportion to our participation.

The fifth most important lesson for Mian Nawaz Sharif, and for all political parties, is to realise that the nation’s current state of flux is the last chance for them. If they do not change with it, they will go down with the currently crumbling system.

They should now let the people and democracy enter the closed castles of their political parties and operate with open votes instead of crafty nominations. They should understand the basic truth that undemocratic dictatorial parties cannot bring democracy. They should learn to be with the people, and their cause, and the nation will reciprocate with as spontaneous a welcome for Mian Nawaz Sharif as it persistently extended to Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.If the political parties do not learn from these lessons, our fast changing common man will himself elect new leaders from among his own ranks.

masudmufti@hotmail.com