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| January 17, 2008 | Thursday | Muharram 07, 1429 |
A divided community?
Rise in poppy crop
A contested legacy
OTHER VOICES - Middle East Press
AS the elegies to Benazir Bhutto pour in, one can tell from the tone of the requiems how debatable her legacy and memory will remain in the public imagination. In life she continued to be a deeply conflicted personality, straddling the liberal progressive and the deeply feudal worlds without a murmur of a conflict of interest.
THERE is enough insecurity gripping the country without the government ratcheting up the fear factor. A case in point is the ‘security advisory’ made public on Tuesday by Brig (retd) Javed Iqbal Cheema, the interior ministry spokesman who has done so much in recent weeks to further dent Islamabad’s flagging credibility. His statement that all politicians ‘across the board’ are now under threat of attack is ill-advised to say the least and only adds to the perception that no atrocity is unimaginable in a country where no one should feel safe. At a time when the government should be reassuring the public and searching for answers to the myriad questions torturing the soul of the nation, it is instead adding fuel to the fire for reasons that defy ready explanation. What purpose, if any, does this statement serve? If the government is indeed concerned, as it ought to be, about the welfare of leading politicians, why couldn’t the latter be advised behind the scenes in one-to-one meetings with interior ministry officials and security experts?
The views aired in Tuesday’s press briefing also do not sit well with Brig Cheema’s comments on Jan 1, when he had singled out politicians who are supposedly on a terrorist hit list. Originally restricted to six persons, this list has somehow become open-ended in the course of the last two weeks. Perhaps incompetence is to blame or a tendency to shoot from the hip and ponder later. In his defence, the interior ministry spokesman claimed that the earlier statement “was only for a specific time and today there is no specific threat and the security advisory [is] for all politicians as a precautionary measure.” In the absence of a ‘specific threat’ surely there was no need to publicly raise the stakes even higher. It would have been better to err on the side of discretion and personally advise politicians on how they can improve their security. As for the public which is also at risk when bomb blasts take place, the government’s security experts would do well to issue advisories about precautions that people should take to ensure their safety.
With the waters so muddied as they are today, it is not surprising that public sentiment is veering sharply towards conspiracy theories. Instead of official ineptitude, many see cold calculation and the work of hidden hands that wish to thwart any attempt to take the country back on the road to democracy. Ms Bhutto’s assassination was of course the cruellest blow. According to a Gallup poll released on Saturday, 48 per cent of Pakistanis believe that government agencies or politicians allied to the regime were behind Ms Bhutto’s murder. Bomb blasts in Lahore and Karachi have since reinforced the view, however skewed, that the perpetrators wish to engineer a postponement of next month’s elections. The government should be working overtime to counter this impression instead of adding to public despair.
THE Pakistan Bar Council’s (PBC) decision to lower the level of boycott has run into serious opposition from the NWFP Bar Council. On Tuesday, the latter appealed to bar associations and councils throughout the country to reject the PBC’s decision and continue their boycott of the courts. The Frontier lawyers’ anger at the PBC decision was evident from their claim that ‘government agencies’ had compelled the PBC to take that course. They also burnt the copies of the resolution passed by the PBC in Islamabad on Monday. While announcing its decision to restrict the boycott to Thursdays and to an hour daily, the PBC resolution said its decision did not amount to a recognition of the ‘PCO judges’ and that its motive was to mitigate the litigants’ hardships — a very valid objective.
The lawyers’ countrywide movement, touched off by the presidential reference against Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on Mar 9 last year, is a glorious chapter in the history of the national intelligentsia’s struggle for the supremacy of law and freedom. Its struggle led to the restoration of the ‘non-functional’ chief justice to his position and gave a new strength to the superior judiciary — a vibrant and independent judiciary which, as it turned out, could only be de-fanged through the imposition of emergency and the promulgation of a temporary constitution. All this was possible because of the unity shown by the legal community and the courage demonstrated by many judges in not taking an oath under the Provisional Constitution Order. This unity must continue if the lawyers’ struggle is to succeed in creating a body politic governed by law.
Some disturbing developments, however, deserve to be taken note of. It is quite possible that not all lawyers will agree with the PBC’s decision. But the best course for them would be to seek a consensus through an internal dialogue rather than public mudslinging which will serve to divide the lawyers and hurt their cause. The PBC has a point. The long period of boycott hurts the clients rather than the government. After all the majority of the cases lying unattended in the courts are not constitutional petitions. There are bail petitions, cases seeking relief in matters affecting people in mundane but troublesome ways and so on. If the lawyers will not attend courts the people will continue to suffer. We hope the legal community will maintain unity in its ranks and continue its protest albeit without hurting the public.
THE chief of the Punjab anti-narcotics force (ANF) has expressed serious concern at the alarming increase in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. This is bound to affect Pakistan adversely. Heroin, which is produced from poppy, enjoys a lucrative market in the West as well as in Pakistan which happens to be a favourite route for the drug smugglers. It is estimated that 36 per cent of Afghanistan’s total heroin output passes through Balochistan’s porous borders. The opiates that enter Pakistan are to a great extent consumed locally which further adds to the woes of the administration that is burdened with the additional task of combating drug addiction. According to the ANF chief, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan registers a 20 to 30 per cent increase every season. With an export value of $4bn, the illicit crop accounts for 53 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP and is helping finance the Taliban insurgency in that country. Not surprisingly, the head of Nato’s Afghanistan mission, expects another year of ‘explosive growth’ in poppy production. Hence Nato plans to step up the counter-narcotics fight from this year.
Pakistan’s predicament stems from Kabul’s failure to contain the continuing rise in the cultivation of the lethal flower. Unfortunately the ANF does not have adequate staff to check the illegal trade of opiates passing through Pakistan. Currently, the ANF has only 2,400 personnel — a strength that is not large enough to monitor all the traditional smuggling routes and to set up pickets and conduct raids on hideouts. The ANF hopes to raise its strength to 3,100 soon but this does not appear to be a substantial enhancement that would improve its performance considerably. One would expect the federal government to create conditions in which the ANF is able to play its role in an effective manner. It is also important that the police are actively involved in the task of cracking down on drug smugglers and pushers.
She challenged stereotypes of what ‘good’ Pakistani women of her class and generation could do and contested the public/private space divide but kowtowed to the constant personal theatre of the dupatta and the prayer beads. In death she even becomes the elusive Salome of the seven veils in our popular imagination, with her obituaries giving tantalising hints to what was her real self.
From a flighty young woman who consumes paperback romances and speeds past us in her yellow MG searching for the closest Baskin Robbins she turns into a thorn in the side of a military dictator, a serious foe indulging in a decade long struggle to keep her father’s name and political legacy alive. She is at times the workaholic campaigning long hours through pregnancies, a diligent politician surviving on four hours of sleep and then a much-maligned name with corruption and nepotism cases brought up against her and her coterie. Every day the international press busies itself bringing in a whiff of intrigue and scandal, tears and laughter to the tale.
She came in at a time when the Pakistani military high command held control on women’s mobility, their choices, and legal freedoms. This ranged from the repressive laws passed by their regimes to the ‘instructions’ given from time to time by the military elite (as compared to now when they gloat over how they have single-handedly ‘empowered women’ through the Women’s Protection Bill, blatantly ignoring the long years of struggle, protest and lobbying that women’s groups in Pakistan went through.
And now their attempts to stay in power have impeded the mobility, physical and otherwise, of so many women working for civil liberties in Pakistan.) So even with Zia dead and buried, the life, worlds and images of the ‘immoral’ and ‘good’ women remained in public perception.
The Jamaat-i-Islami then explained their verbal gymnastics, (of Fatima Jinnah yes, Benazir Bhutto no) as the need of the (then) times “based on time-bound temporary needs and involuntary conditions...that they accepted (Fatima Jinnah) under the demand of collective need and as an ‘acceptable evil’.”
And while none of us went as far ahead as buying a gun a la the later Maulvi Sarwar and the unfortunate Zille Huma, didn’t we all contribute to the evil by allowing our clerics, friends and family to question whether Islam allowed Benazir Bhutto to be the head of state? Didn’t we all keep a close eye on her hairline and whether her dupatta slipped off or not?
So Benazir too redefined herself with her “dramatic entry into motherhood” as Sohail Inayutullah puts it. As a single woman, heexplains, Bhutto would always be situated by the critics in the land of female archetypes, that of the Amazon or hero, and later as the daughter of a Great Man, her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It was as a mother that she finally found political success, for this because in a nation afraid of female sexuality, of sexuality as such, an Amazon could never last.
And now with her contested legacy and the unexpected ‘political will’ it is as quite possible that she is reduced to the mother-figure who has encouraged a new chapter of dynastic politics. And is this how the Pakistani populace will be finally comfortable with her legacy? A brave mother who lays down her life trying to bring democracy to her electorate family and offers her first-born to carry on? A dutiful daughter who only stepped out of home to avenge her father’s death?
There is many a ubiquitous query regarding what her assassination means for young Pakistani women trying to access the political arena. But in the seeds of this question and the guiding spirit of her political will lies a political commentary of the state of affairs for the Pakistani citizen in 2008. In Pakistan today – and the way our society functions who can survive, irrespective of gender and generation, as an individual?
Is the political field giving us the assurance that every individual can have an equal opportunity to excel? There is something twisted about the whole structure that prejudices against young, energetic political aspirants and more important individuals who have ‘unblemished’ personal histories where financial and public conduct is concerned.
What has happened to the populist People’s Party that it has set to create a dichotomy of an ‘elite’ groomed to lead and those that do not have the birthright to have such aspirations? This is something that cuts across gender lines and one has to realise this before evaluating the state of (women) affairs in our country in the days after Bhutto.
It is about time that we petition of our political parties to respect and acknowledge capable individuals who want to bring about change. It is about time that they assure and respect a process of accountability. And I ask this not of the PPP alone, there is a blatant disregard to a Pakistani citizen’s struggle for realisation when it comes to the convoluted party politics in any of the political groups. And an Abdul Rashid Ghazi of the ill-fated Red Mosque has to announce to William Dalrymple that his is an agenda of bringing about social justice.
“We want our rulers to be honest people” – perhaps a thought shared by many silent spectators in Pakistan who lean towards the far-right and the militant after seeing what those professing to be left and secular did for the populace.
For once there has to be some across the board mechanism that political parties start awarding and commending public service rather than political gymnastics; of finally bidding goodbye the seasonal and the fair weather party member. Why is it that we are asking the same questions in the sixth decade of our existence; by now our political parties should have long outgrown the existential angst of their early years.
However at this point in history we are asking of the PPP to do so, for it stands at a political juncture where it can restructure itself afresh to weed out nepotism. And this can be done in no other way than to start respecting and rewarding personal accomplishments rather than genealogy; to recognise an individual’s contributions to society rather than their family lineage. We bear the young Bhutto-Zardari no ill will and his time will come. But let it be a time when he can tell us not what his grandfather did for the country, and his mother for the nation, but what he can do for Pakistan and Pakistanis.
‘Taiwanisation’ of Cyprus
The International Crisis Group (ICG) has written a new Cyprus report, “Cyprus: Reversing the Drift to Partition” in which it was stressed that a new and major effort, encouraged by the United Nations and European Union, should be made to resolve the so far intractable Cyprus problem, warning that “If no settlement is found, the process referred to locally as ‘Taiwanisation’ will inevitably speed up, consolidating partition.”
…Turkish Cypriot leadership has been stressing its commitment for a “pro-settlement resolution.” The Greek Cypriot side has been stressing that its target remains to be a united Cyprus. But, the problem remains to be ‘what is a united Cyprus?’
…requires an answer to the question of ‘political equality’ first. That term, which after years of struggle by Turkish Cypriots, finally has become part of the UN jargon.
Any effort to resolve the Cyprus problem is doomed to fail as long as Greek Cypriots continue to approach Turkish Cypriots as a minority.
“Greek Cypriots will experience growing international toleration of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, loss of significant land that would have been returned by the North in any settlement, permanent stationing of Turkish troops, acceleration of a Turkish Cypriot building boom on Greek-owned properties, and the arrival on the island of more Turkish settlers. Turkish Cypriots will experience slower development; a tougher struggle against criminal elements taking advantage of their isolation; and indefinite suspension of many of their rights as EU citizens. Turkey will face a troubled atmosphere in a wide range of its dealings with the EU and in NATO, making it much harder for its leaders to pursue additional economic, legal and administrative reforms.”
Let’s hope that this realistic assessment of the ICG helps Greek Cypriots understand what’s at stake… (Jan 14)
Bush’s historic moment
…Arab misgivings are deep about Bush’s ulterior motives for his multi-leg tour…. Thus neither the time element nor the prevalent circumstances are in favour of Bush, who will be widely remembered for doing irreparable harm to this region. Kicking off his eight-day trip in his traditional ally, Israel, last Wednesday, Bush cited a ‘historic moment and a historic opportunity’ for clinching a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel. But he made clear he would impose no terms about either side, widely seen as a reassuring signal to Israel, which is notorious for stalling negotiations with anti-peace moves. Bush, who hankers after a diplomatic triumph in the Middle East to overshadow his bloody debacle in Iraq, must face this moment of truth.… He has to give up his glaring bias towards Israel and pressure it into reversing its anti-peace moves. If not, his talk about a historic moment will always sound … mere lip service. (Jan 13)
Bus journey is long
The public bus experience of a Gulf News reporter, as published on Sunday, shows that it is still a long way to go before public transportation becomes the preferred choice to go around Dubai.
A simple trip from a Deira station to Safa Park took him over three hours. The delay actually was not about traffic congestion as much as it was about the lack of operational planning….It is obvious public buses in Dubai will not serve the thousands of regular commuters without having special lanes on the main road to beat the traffic. However, actual and accurate information on bus routes is essential to maintain a proper service.
There is also an urgent need to increase the number of buses…. (Jan 14)