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| April 14, 2008 | Monday | Rabi-us-Sani 7, 1429 |
Costs of violence
Better late than early
OTHER VOICES - North American Press
The FCR controversy
Democracy, the women’s way
AFTER the newly-elected prime minister announced the repeal of the colonial Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), several political entities and analysts surprisingly voiced a number of reservations as to the viability and plausibility of the intent of the FCR abolition. Two apparently crucial issues have been raised in this debate.
DEMOCRATISATION literature suggests that transitions to democracy can be rapid (and free), or gradual (‘pacted’ or result of a deal, usually based on elite-level negotiations).
INFORMATION Minister Sherry Rehman’s tabling in the National Assembly of the Pakistan Electronic Media Authority (Amendment) bill is a welcome step. It seeks to undo some of the harm that was done to democratic and state institutions and independent media organs under the controversial provisions of the Provisional Constitution Order promulgated by President Musharraf on Nov 3 last year after he, acting as Chief of the Army Staff, imposed emergency rule. The restrictions clamped on the electronic media resulted in the government virtually pulling the plug on independent news channels that were seen as errant. The move invited global denunciation, but that did not stop Pemra from keeping many channels off air — some for weeks. When they did come back on air, certain popular talk shows and their hosts were banned from appearing on TV. The amended Pemra Ordinance empowered the regulatory authority to shut down TV channels, imprison and fine channel and cable operators and cancel their broadcasting permits if they were seen to be violating the amended, stringent provisions of the ordinance. The latter included a ban on live coverage of events with any sensitivity attached; it was seen by civil society and the public at large as a move aimed at gagging the media, thereby denying citizens their right to information — all in the name of binding the media by a government-enforced code of ethics.
That said, after the imminent repeal of the restrictions imposed under the amended Pemra Ordinance, the onus of laying down a code of ethics and abiding by it will rest on the shoulders of media organisations, which is only fair. But the agreement to act with responsibility and what that entails must only evolve from discussions and dialogue held among media organs. The debate must bind the government to accepting the public’s right to information without hindrance, and any law that may be framed by parliament to guaranteeing that right. The government can start by revisiting the Freedom of Information Ordinance of 2002, whose provisions have yet to be implemented. The absence of mechanisms in operation, whereby credible information can be obtained on the government’s working by the media and the public, hampers the process of evolving a consensus on any code of ethics by media organs.
The electronic media and the press in Pakistan have braved many a virulent assault on their functioning. They have resisted and endured, equally, attempts by successive governments or political parties at curbing their role. There can be no compromises made on the people’s right to information and on the media playing the watchdog in the public interest. This, indeed, is the starting point in setting out to restore democratic institutions and to take them further.
RECALL for a moment the malevolent days of the early nineties when Karachi became a killing field. Besides the enormous human toll in terms of lives lost and psyches scarred forever, Karachi suffered massively on the economic front as well. This in turn inflicted further human misery in the form of joblessness or underemployment. The fear that came to shroud the city triggered capital flight as a number of businesses went north in search of operational stability. Real-estate holdings were also liquidated by many among the more privileged and that money too left the city, helping create jobs in other parts of the country. Fortunately, Karachi’s unmatched resilience ensured a social and economic revival in due course. An uneasy peace between bitter foes — and this is significant — also played a part in rehabilitating the strife-torn city.
Karachi still descends into chaos from time to time but there is no comparison with the near-ceaseless violence of the early nineties. Still, the warning signs are there and can be ignored only at our peril. The city’s business leaders have already said as much, stressing that the need of the hour is amity between the PPP and the MQM, the parties that dominate rural and urban Sindh respectively. Therein lies economic, social and mental well-being. The alternative does not bear contemplation. Each day scarred by violence will transport yet more bodies to the morgue and cost the city billions of rupees in lost productivity. Estimates of losses incurred as a result of violence and shutdowns vary depending on the revenue streams included in the calculations. In 2006, the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimated that a one-day strike deprives the city and the country of over a billion rupees in revenues and exports. The current KCCI president puts the figure at Rs14bn but this massive sum takes into account taxes and duties, production and export, as well as losses incurred in commercial markets. According to the KCCI’s calculations, Karachi suffered ‘corporate losses’ to the tune of Rs80bn in just five days during the mayhem that followed Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. None of this enhances Karachi’s value as a destination for foreign and local investors. Consider also the massive damage caused to public and private property on days of extreme strife, as well as the plight of daily-wage earners.
Only the recklessly inflammatory can prefer the politics of confrontation over peaceful coexistence. It is said, and rightly so, that the business community has a soft spot for military regimes because of the ‘stability’ and ‘continuity’ dictatorship offers to the purely money-minded. It is time for the elected representatives to pull together, work as one as they have vowed to do despite some recent setbacks, and change mindsets across Sindh.
AN early marriage is a costly social contract; the greatest expense being the lives in question. Official statistics show as many as 58 per cent of Pakistan’s rural women get married before 20 years of age. It would not be unfair to say that 20 may be pushing it as in our rustic recesses 18 years is over the hill. Projects on the hazards of child marriage, such as a recent street theatre by the Society for Human Rights and Prisoners Aid in Islamabad, must be lauded but the government cannot be absolved of doing precious little to confront this custom on a larger scale. Communal reasons may be many but their origins lie in the archaic conditioning that sees the girl child as an economic burden. As Unicef research proves, child marriages are most prevalent in the developing world. For the most part, misinterpretations of religion, traditions and ignorance are to blame. Education is perhaps the best deterrent as women with an educational background are less likely to enter marriage as adolescents. They know its perils well — impaired reproductive health, raised risk of maternal deaths and infant mortality, increased poverty, poor post-natal care and inadequate medical access and support. More importantly, they can exercise their right to choice.
The health department and human rights groups must recognise that a marriage that involves an under-18 is a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Such alliances deprive women and children of basic rights — health, education, social empowerment, and employment. Campaigns to battle age-old concepts that propel parents to educate sons and not girls must be aggressive. Community forums can be used to inform rural clans about enabling girls to be as gainfully employed as men to ease economic pressures and delay early marriages. Media initiatives, workshops, public seminars and street theatres must be a synthesis of religious logic and modern advantages to reach wider audiences.
Adrift on Iran
The New York Times
IRAN’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made another blustering claim this week: that his scientists are tripling the size of their nuclear fuel programme. The fact that it made barely a diplomatic ripple is another reminder that all of the major powers are appallingly adrift on one of the major security challenges of the day.
What makes it more frightening is that pretty much everyone agrees that Iran is moving closer to mastering the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon. As for why the big powers can’t come up with a strategy for containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there are a variety of explanations.
In the case of Russia and China, the former sells Iran nuclear technology and the latter buys Iran’s oil. They are more interested in demand and supply than a showdown. Britain, France and Germany have been tougher, but they also have business interests to protect and are wary of pushing a major oil producer too hard at a time when oil is already more than $100 a barrel.
President Bush has more than enough bluster. What he hasn’t shown is the diplomatic skill to steel his partners’ spines — or a willingness to look beyond his own stubborn rhetoric and ideology and offer Iran a serious set of incentives to try to bring it in from the cold. He is also distracted by his misadventure in Iraq.
Mr Bush has insisted that he would not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Well, it probably won’t by the time he leaves office. But it has made far too much progress, and the world is becoming dangerously more comfortable with the idea of a nuclear-capable Iran.
The United Nations Security Council has ordered Tehran to suspend its fuel programme and passed three sets of sanctions to punish its defiance. Russia and China have short-sightedly blocked tougher action that might actually force Tehran into serious negotiations.
The big players — the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — are scheduled to meet later this month in Shanghai to discuss the problem. They need to agree on a list of new sanctions with a lot more bite: a ban on dealings with major Iranian banks; a ban on arms sales; a ban on new investments in Iran. They need to warn, credibly, of even tougher sanctions to come.
At the same time, Washington needs to make Iran a serious offer to talk about everything, including security assurances and diplomatic and economic relations if Iran is willing to give up its fuel programme and cooperate fully with inspectors. Mr Bush is going to have to send someone a lot higher ranking than the American ambassador in Baghdad to deliver the message. Sadly, there’s no sign anything this sweeping is being considered in any of the big power capitals. Despite Mr Ahmadinejad’s bombast, Iran’s programme is having serious technical problems. There is still time for creativity and courage. We’re waiting. — (April 11)
Firstly, some political analysts and leaders have suggested that the FCR incorporated a substantial component of the customs and traditions of the people living in Fata, and hence its repeal would provoke the people of the area to go against the government of Pakistan. Secondly, the abolition, according to these observers, would create a legal vacuum which might be filled by militant and fundamentalist Muslim organisations.
The Frontier Crimes Regulation was first introduced in the 1840s and modified in the 1870s to be finally enacted in 1901 on the apparent assumption that the tribesmen living in the southwest of the province (later called the NWFP) needed special treatment because of their peculiar circumstances. The colonial masters also believed that socio-political institutionalisation of the area comprising the tribal agencies could be used as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and British India. The identity of the region was linked more to geo-strategic interests than the customs and traditions of the tribesmen.
Elphinstone, Caroe, Curzon and Churchill, to name a few, took pains to construct the image of the people and geography of the area in such a way that it would suit their interests to first use it as a bulwark against Czarist Russia and later on against the Soviet Union, not to speak of Afghanistan.
The colonial masters, and later on the indigenous elites, have been successful in convincing the tribal elite of their ‘distinctive culture’ and ‘peculiar customs’, besides stereotyping tribesmen as ‘unruly, aggressive, untamable, and ungovernable’, needing a legal dispensation. This dispensation actually gave the bureaucracy and tribal elite a blank cheque to manipulate the area and the people of the area the way it suited their interests.
Sections of the FCR, both substantive and procedural, not only violate the UN Charter and the Human Rights Charter but also transgress all civilised norms of governance and litigation. Sections 2, 8, 11, 21-27, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40 and 42 give the political administration and the tribal elite wide-ranging powers to execute justice in a way that defies all civilised norms recognised globally.
These pertain to the method of choosing jirga members, who have to advise the political agent on matters of litigation. They empower the executive to banish a hostile tribe. The executive can sanction the construction of a tower, village or hamlet, or remove a family from the place of their residence. It specifies the mode of arrest and detention of a person to guarantee compliant behaviour.
The executive is given the power to impose fines. These sections of the FCR clearly violate the internationally agreed upon principles of human dignity. Not only do these sections violate the UN Charter, they also violate the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24 and 25 of the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan.
The areas, South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Kurram Agency, Khyber Agency, Bajaur Agency, Mohmand Agency and Malakand Agency that comprise the Fata region have been sidelined and are perceived to be static in every respect, though several changes have been introduced in Malakand Agency post-1947. The upper layer of the socio-political structure of Fata has been kept intact with the use of sheer force exercised by the executive and tribal elite.
But the lower tiers of society have undergone tremendous changes in the last century, especially in the post-1947 period. A large cross section of the population educated its younger generation in the urban areas of the NWFP, Punjab and Sindh. They ultimately got a place in state institutions, including the civil and military bureaucracy. A large section of the population went abroad to the Middle East, Europe and America. Another sizeable majority entered the business world and generated capital inside and outside Fata — even if one avoids the mention of the drug trade and gunrunning during the Soviet-American war in Afghanistan.
A strong and sizeable middle-class has thus been created over the last several decades in Fata. This middle-class is conscious and aware of the progress of civilisation that the rest of the world has witnessed.
Keeping the pre-civilisation legal code intact has certainly helped religious radicals spread their tentacles across the length and breadth of Fata. The insistence of the ruling elite of the pre-1947 and post-1947 years to keep the FCR intact has created a void in society that has not been filled. The FCR itself is an anomaly in the present age of enlightenment and information. Its abolition is essential to fill this void.
The people of Fata will welcome the move to a great extent and will not ‘rise against it’ as feared by some political figures. The situation on the ground in Fata indicates that both the tribal elite and the political administration have become virtually irrelevant.
The process of abolition of the FCR is, however, negotiable. Experts on the subject suggest a three-step procedure. In the first step, the Political Parties Act of 1964 would be extended to Fata besides amending the FCR to establish the Peshawar High Court as an appellate court. The second step would introduce a functional Agency Council for every agency to legislate for the areas falling within its jurisdiction.
There is also the need to introduce a holistic development planning approach for all the seven agencies of Fata. This step is crucial keeping in view the deprivation of the people of Fata for a whole century. Education, healthcare, infrastructure development and resource management might be considered priority sectors to be addressed with immediate effect. Fata’s share in the NFC award, the construction of a ‘Grand Trunk Road’ to connect the agencies with one another and the markets, as well as the establishment of a chamber of commerce and trade are the minimum necessary steps for the federal government to take.
In the final phase, all agencies should be integrated with the NWFP and the regular laws of the land should be extended there.
The writer is a political analyst based in Islamabad.
khadim.2005@gmail.com
While the hope is for a consolidated democracy at the end of any transition, sometimes they also get stuck in the ‘grey-zone’; that is, a hybrid system with the trappings of electoralism but not democratic in real terms.
To avoid this trap, commentators on both sides of the transition debate consider the continuity of Gen Musharraf’s presidency as an obstacle to the consolidation of quality democracy in the future. Thus his presence serves neither those who support a transitional process to democracy and definitely not those seeking rapid political change.
While the contending forces compete on this important structural issue, the critical question is whether we are moving towards an enduring genuine democracy or not. It is not merely whether political parties will co-habit, survive or break but rather the concern is over quality rather than stability. Is the new government going to qualitatively deliver democratic rights and be accountable in the process or not?
Particularly over the past year, non-state actors have garnered a renewed awareness and consciousness of their democratic needs and wishes. It is neither accurate not appropriate for party leaders to presumptuously announce that it was politicians and not the lawyers’ movement or civil society that pressed for a democratic regime change. This is petty and reveals lack of wisdom and historical amnesia over what makes for quality democracy. In fact, the representatives need to keenly and inclusively learn from these civil sectors to understand the demands for new visions of citizenship, rights and participation from the polity.
Historically, women activists have learned two hard lessons that transitions from dictatorial to democratic regimes have taught them. First, that their contributions to political change are often subsumed, if not outright rendered invisible, with regard to the ‘larger cause’ of a male-defined democracy. Second, that unless they consolidate and demand fast-track gender specific rights quickly in the post-transition period, they are unlikely to benefit from democratic spaces or opportunities in the long run.
Some argue that Gen Musharraf’s rule was a liberalised authoritarianism rather than an outright dictatorial regime. Still, we maintain that the reformist agenda of non-democratic regimes such as his are symbolically liberal, yet simultaneously help consolidate and deepen existing conservative gender relations.
Also, political rights have undoubted benefits in the long run for women’s equality, yet unless these are consolidated by women’s equal participation in policymaking, they remain merely tokenism. On this count then, under the Musharraf-Aziz government, women’s progress remained a presidential political whim rather than a substantive socio-economic policy for women’s empowerment.
Recognising that a truly gender-responsive democratic agenda would require both descriptive and substantive changes, the women’s movement and particularly the Women’s Action Forum (with its lived and documented experience of pro-democratic activism and struggle for women’s rights for nearly 30 years) is shifting its focus to a more pro-active and accountable government on women-specific issues.
The Karachi chapter of this secular organisation is in dialogue about setting an agenda for the legislators in Islamabad to take imminent policy decisions as part of their effort to institutionalise democratic norms. While the new government seeks corrective action against authoritarian wrongs on other issues, it must also urgently redefine the militaristic and patriarchal norms that have defined our democratic governments. Such a remedy has to go beyond the numerical or visible representation of women.
As politicians speak of institutional reform, the practical steps that must inform state machineries must be taken with a consciousness that under non-democratic regimes some suffer more than others. These groups — women, ethnic, provincial and religious minorities, persecuted and disappeared, those in conflict zones, victims of elite economic policies — must be a priority when formulating policy.
Given the proven record of a credible and respectable National Commission on the Status of Women, the fact that its recommendations were only partially taken up by the last government, merely diluted its strength and relevance. The movement insists the NCSW must become an autonomous and independent body. Its functioning should be broadened by mechanisms that retain its consultative role but also recognise it as a commissioner of proposals that should be followed fully in spirit and legislation.
Other pressing institutional recommendations from the women’s movement include recognition of the women’s ministry as a crucial centre that can redefine the very nature of democracy. Its policies should focus exclusively on equality of opportunity and participation of women. Sadly, women are often the first casualties of gender-blind social and economic policies in both authoritarian and democratic regimes. Ideally, instead of just one women’s ministry, there could also be ‘strategic cells’ within government departments that implement a national gender policy across the board.
This ministerial slot should no longer be considered a ‘soft’ post. A section of the women’s movement is proposing that credible associates of the progressive women’s movement, such as parliamentarian Bushra Gohar (ANP), be considered for this ministerial position. Soon after entering the parliament, Ms Gohar was seen taking her role in the women’s movement seriously, as she participated in a street protest against the recent implementation of a qazi order to stone to death a couple in Fata.
Experience shows that it is extremely difficult for women within mainstream parties to rise above party loyalties and challenge and pressurise their own (patriarchal) leadership on contentious issues. However, it is only courage such as this that can promise to deliver any semblance of progressive and democratic change.
There also needs to be clarification from all those who masqueraded as democrats over the past five years. The movement is calling upon all parties that comprised the MMA (particularly their women members who have held pro-Hudood ordinance demonstrations for the first time in Pakistan) to be held accountable for its miserable record on governance in the province.
The women’s movement has tirelessly campaigned for and supported a ‘critical mass’ of women’s representation in parliament. It is now time for us to see the difference that women (and men) with democratic credentials can bring to the quality of women’s equal rights and, hence, to sustained democratic rights in Pakistan. n
afiyazia@yahoo.com
