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| April 19, 2008 | Saturday | Rabi-us-Sani 12, 1429 |
Coping with the wheat crisis
Good, but should be better
OTHER VOICES - Bangladesh Press
Apologising to an ill-fated queen
Rule of law and heart of darkness
EVER noticed how everyone is apologising to everyone else these days? Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd elaborately offered his excuses recently to the Aborigines for having brought all those dreadful things like trains, hospitals, universities and books to their island.
NATION-states are like individuals and act on the basis of rational expectations. Rather, it would be fair to say that individuals may at times behave irrationally, making individual preferences based on personal whims and prejudices rather than rational choices.
THERE seems to be a welcome shift in America’s policy toward Pakistan following the establishment of a democratic government in Islamabad. The new policy, which obviously will take time to evolve because it is an election year in the US, puts emphasis on strengthening democracy and diverting aid into civilian channels. There are also hints that the US administration is likely to curb the frequency of drone strikes on suspected terrorist bases in the tribal belt because of the public outrage it causes in Pakistan. The Democrats already control Congress, and for that reason the new aid package proposed by Senator Joseph Biden stands a fair chance of making it through the intricate congressional process. The bill seeks a five-year $7bn package for Pakistan, including a billion-dollar ‘democracy dividend’ designed to convey in no uncertain terms America’s desire that it seeks a long-term engagement with Pakistan and that it does not believe in relying solely on an individual. Which obviously in this case means President Pervez Musharraf.
Whether by circumstances or by choice, the most fruitful periods of US-Pakistan relations have been those when this country was under military regimes. It is true that Pakistan threw in its lot with the US-led anti-communist alliances in the early fifties when this country was under a civilian dispensation. But the military part of the relationship was consolidated during the Ayub regime. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan coincided with Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship, and Washington buttressed his regime with plentiful doses of economic and military aid, some of it channelled to the resistance through the ISI. It took the terrorist strikes on Sept 11, 2001 for America to return to Pakistan again when the country was ruled by the military. Since the judges’ affair and the turmoil in Pakistan, voices in Congress and the US media have been demanding a fresh look at America’s policy toward Islamabad, and the proposed bill seems to be an expression of this desire. A substantial part of the annual $1.5bn aid is designed to strengthen Pakistan’s ability to fight terrorism, but the money will go to such civilian institutions as the ministry of the interior and the law enforcement agencies, especially the Intelligence Bureau and the FIA.
As a report released by the US Government Accountability Office says, militants are operating freely in the Pakistan-Afghan border region in spite of the $10.5bn aid so far given to Pakistan. There is no doubt force alone cannot do away with what basically is a political problem. The suicide bombings must come to an end, if we are to give a sense of security to our people. The shift in emphasis in the US approach, with greater reliance on strengthening Pakistan’s civilian institutions, seems supportive of the PPP-led government’s carrot-and-stick policy. One hopes the Biden bill will get the wholehearted support of the Republicans.
ONCE bitten, twice shy. Taking a cue from the nationwide winter wheat crisis that still continues to linger in parts of the province, the Punjab government on Wednesday placed curbs on the purchase of new crop by the private sector. With countries around the world applying controls on the movement and prices of cereals and grains to protect their citizens from hunger, Punjab’s decision should not surprise any one. The new procurement policy imposes restrictions on the buying of wheat even by flour mills, which have been asked to restrict purchases to up to three days of their milling requirements. The arhtis or middlemen have also been forbidden from making purchases for flour mills. Besides flour mills, only those who are issued licences by the food department will be allowed to procure wheat. The licence holders will be required to furnish details of their purchases to the food authorities. The decision reverses a five-year-old policy that allowed anybody and everybody to procure wheat from anywhere in the province and is not expected to go down well with multilateral donors who want the government to get out of the wheat market to minimise its burden of subsidies.
Private procurement of wheat has ostensibly been restricted to keep speculators and investors — blamed by the government for the wheat shortages last year — out of the volatile market in order to head off a repeat of the crisis. It was also feared by the government that it would not be able to procure the targeted 4.4 million tons of the commodity from the province if speculators and investors were allowed to manipulate the market. The decision has been widely appreciated because it is expected to bring some sanity to the market. But it has failed to improve the supply of flour in many parts of Punjab, particularly in Lahore and some southern districts, because of the district administration’s unnecessary involvement in the flour market. As wheat procurement in the province by mills, licence holders and the food department gains momentum in the next couple of days, the provincial government would do well to lift controls on the direct supply of flour from mills to the retail market. This can help end the artificial flour shortages in the market.
THE decision by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to block as many as 1.36 million mobile phone connections across the land is a case of better late than never. In terms of policy, individual registration was always a precondition for getting a connection. It was being openly flouted by telecom operators but the PTA, for reasons best known to the authority itself, chose to look the other way. What it is doing now is a vital undertaking in view of rising security concerns regarding the use of mobile phones as a means of communication and coordination between militants. It is good that a beginning has been made but there can be no doubting the fact that a whole lot more needs to be done. That the PTA, which claims to have ‘cleaned’ 85 per cent of old data, is unable to give either a date or a month or even a year up to which they have completed the verification process is something that has the potential to dampen mortal spirits and raise questions about the credibility of the claim. As for fresh connections, they are still available at non-franchise outlets like general stores and cigarette kiosks. The regulatory authority clearly needs to come down hard on such activity and take the errant telecom operators to task.
Also pending on the part of the PTA is necessary action to make its mobile phone anti-theft helpline functional. Set up in September 2006, it was meant to discourage mobile snatching, especially but not exclusively in Karachi, by jamming the stolen cellphone on the basis of its International Mobile Equipment Identification (IMEI) code that the victims were supposed to convey using the toll-free helpline (0800-25625). But more often than not, it remains dysfunctional which defeats the whole purpose of setting it up. It is no wonder that the scheme has had little impact, if any, on the street-crime scene. Now that the PTA has started showing some teeth, can one hope that it will set its own house in order sooner rather than later?
Truth dawns on adviser
Amar Desh
THE World Bank and IMF are not lenders. They are international loan sharks. They pile pressure on many countries to serve the purpose of a few. This is what finance adviser A.B. Mirza Azizul Islam said at a recent symposium organised by Unicef in Dhaka. The truth dawned on him, finally.
All that the lending agencies do is express concern over an issue .... Twin floods and cyclone Sidr ravaged much of the country but they did not provide much help.
....On a sad yet gentle note, he said: “Let’s hope for the best. What else can we do?” But it will be unfortunate for the country if the adviser can only express hope without finding alternatives.
The World Bank and IMF provide loans, with complex conditions attached, and the flow of funds to recipients is painfully slow. And there is no clear evidence that the recipients benefited much from the loan arrangement.
....How Bangladesh ran into trouble by taking loans from the two lenders with tough conditions attached is a long story.
It would have been a great help if the two agencies had provided loans to finance food purchases but they wouldn’t do so. However, a deal was underway to borrow more than $100 million to spend on agricultural training.
Reading between the lines, one can predict that the training project will be stuffed with foreign consultants and local bureaucrats and the funds meant for the project will end up in the hands of the consultants and the bureaucrats.
Is the adviser still hopeful?
....The food crisis has eased in Bangladesh. Prices of rice are declining, albeit slightly. We appreciate the fact that farmers have almost overcome the crisis with whatever little they have. The new harvest has just kicked off, which is expected to ease the problem. — (April 17)
— Selected and translated by Arun Devnath
The subcontinent and China are barred from this ‘apologetically correct’ list as they already had a more ancient and richer culture than the invaders and hence, happily as it were, stand unqualified for today’s much yearned for status as victims. But Europeans do beg pardon of Africans practically everyday, seeking redemption from similar horrid crimes they committed in their continent.
Contemporary pensée unique also ordains that the defiantly, individualistically unrepentant be punished. Jean-Marie Bockel, a French high official, was recently hastily transferred from the ministry of financial aid to Africa (euphemistically named ministry of cooperation) for having the temerity to suggest that the entire concept of doling out no-strings-attached money (at the expense of the taxpayer) was moribund and that he would soon personally be signing its death warrant.
Given the unbearably suffocating atmosphere these days of contrition and self-flagellation that has infested the entire European society, to the point that it is increasingly becoming unfashionable, practically a taboo, to speak of the achievements of a Newton, a Voltaire or a Goethe, museum curators in France took the unusually reckless step of apologising to a much maligned dead queen who had advised her people to eat cake if they couldn’t afford bread.
Actually, Marie Antoinette never uttered those words, but on that later...
Breaking away from tradition, the Grand Palais in Paris asked opera director Robert Carsen to employ his theatrical expertise for recreating in an exhibition circumstances of the ill-fated queen’s brief existence. The result is a moving tour de force that carries you through imaginatively lit portions enriched with background music that attempt to revive the idyllic childhood, a carefree youth and the abrupt tragedy of the queen’s life that ended at age 37.
Readers who have seen Sophia Coppola’s film on Marie Antoinette will be surprised to learn that despite the swept-up mass of blond hair the doll-like, snub-nosed Nordic beauty of Kirsten Dunst has little to do with that of the real queen whose many paintings and statues in the exhibition show her with an aquiline, almost Oriental nose, slightly protruding eyes and a short upper lip that imparts her countenance an ever-present sulk. In a few likenesses she is seen smiling and looks beautiful.
If Marie-Antoinette was fond of expensive jewellery and clothes and had surrounded herself with silverware, porcelain and exquisite furniture, that’s no surprise. What queen doesn’t?
The point the current exposition makes is that the Austrian princess, a child of Emperor Francis I and Queen Maria Theresa and married to France’s Louis XVI at the age of 14, could possibly not have been the monster the revolutionary, fin-de-siècle French literature makes her out to be.
In one of the letters, part of the exhibition, addressed to her mother in French, she worries over the high price of bread and the difficulties it was causing to the people. There definitely is no hint here of the opprobrious suggestion of turning to cake-eating.
On the contrary, there is ample evidence in the exhibition that the queen was fed up with the tedious ritual of court life at Versailles and had prevailed upon the king to allow her to indulge in simpler pleasures at Petit Trianon, quite unpretentious compared to the royal palace and built a generation earlier at the orders of Louis XV for his favourite mistress Madame de Pompadour. Here Marie Antoinette and her children dressed simply, invited non-royals to garden parties and staged plays which the queen often wrote, directed and did roles in.
To give herself and her children the feel of rural life, she had 12 cottages and a windmill in rustic French style built around the house. Nine of these cottages survive today.
The section relating to life in Petit Trianon is artfully lit with original furniture pieces and subtle background music lending an air of authentic intimacy to the scenes. Carsen says while putting together the show he was more interested in the emotional impact, much like in theatre, rather than in a visual line-up of objects as in an art gallery. In that objective he has marvellously succeeded.
As you take the spiral staircase below, you are in for a shock. The pastel walls, the soft lighting and the baroque music disappear, yielding to chilly half-darkness and deathly silence. The stairs end at a façade of shattered mirrors recalling the unmistakable scars left from cobblestones thrown by an enraged mob.
Displayed here are also the sordid pamphlets penned by revolutionaries attempting to prove that Marie Antoinette was a spendthrift and a per-vert who deserved the sobriquet ‘Madame Déficit’ that they had invented for her.
The annus horribilis preceding the revolution that came about in 1789 had already deprived the queen of whatever courage she had left to face these calumnies. The death of the dauphin at age seven, a totally trumped up accusation of having ordered an outrageously expensive diamond necklace and the particularly harsh winter which had resulted in soaring bread prices that were naturally blamed on the extravagances of the queen, all contributed heavily to her fall from the people’s graces and to her eventual arrest and trial.
The infamous necklace, quite ugly as a matter of fact, is part of the show, as is a plethora of exhibits that revive the misery and despondency of the queen’s final hours; the simple white cotton dress she wore at the moment of her beheading on Oct 16, 1793, as well as Jacques-Louis David’s sombre sketch of her in this dress just before the execution.
As for cake-eating, the quote can actually be traced back to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in his turn was citing Queen Maria Theresa of Spain, decades before Marie Antoinette: “If there’s no bread, give them the crust of pâté”. The infamous phrase was later adapted by revolutionaries to suit the bread crisis in order to malign their favourite victim.
If you happen to be in Paris before June 30, don’t miss the show. The Metro station for Grand Palais is Champs Elysées-Clémenceau on Line 1.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
But nation-states, representing the collective wisdom of the multitudes, are less likely to do so.
In today’s world, relations among the comity of nations are strictly based on selfish motives rather than altruistic intentions. Self-interest more than ideology dictates the terms of bilateral or multilateral relations. However, we in Pakistan continue to live in a world of our own. We naively expected an American armada to rescue a disastrous situation in East Pakistan. Similarly, we were shocked when the Americans left us to our own devices after winning the war in Afghanistan.
On what basis did we expect to be rewarded on both occasions? Didn’t both the parties benefit from their mutual relationship? The partnership was no doubt between the unequal but there is no doubt that the weaker party also benefited from it.
From the 1950s onwards, we intermittently befriended the US, not out of love, but because our national interests were aligned. The US needed Pakistan for its fight against communism and we provided it with a safe haven. Pakistan needed US aid and military hardware to advance its geo-economic interests and we did that. In the 1980s, Pakistan wanted to save itself from being sandwiched between two hostile countries, while the United States engaged the Soviet Union indirectly in a nose-bleeding war for the latter and also had the opportunity to avenge its defeat in Vietnam. On both occasions, it was self-interest that brought us together.
No doubt, the US acted in a short-sighted manner when it left the Afghans in the middle of a civil war. Here it was clearly lack of judgment on its part to behave in such an uninterested fashion. The consequences of this decision were faced not only by the Afghans, their neighbours and the US but also the world at large. It is a historical fact that the US once again engaged with Pakistan and Afghanistan when its own interests were at stake there.
However, total faith in self-interest as a guiding principle can make the arena of international relations similar to a place where the law of the jungle prevails: “might is always right”. In such a scenario, no legal or moral value has universal currency. Take the example of justice or the rule of law. We know and hear ad nauseum about its significance in society. This is given paramount importance in the national life and character of all industrialised western countries. (This does not mean others do not care about it.)
Despite the presence of a sound and dynamic judicial system at home, these countries did not hesitate to invade another country for reasons which we later found were doctored by them. The rule of law is supreme in their countries but they do not desist from using secret bases and hideouts in other countries to torture prisoners. They are also silent, when due to spatial and linguistic twists, prisoners of war are denied rights admissible to them under the Geneva Conventions and incarcerated without trial for long periods of time.
Today’s international order, devoid of any universal value, reminds one of The Heart of Darkness where hiding behind purely materialistic motives, a part of the world puts on the mantle of a missionary to ‘civilise’ the inhumane, barbaric and unenlightened other part of the world. Where the darkness actually lay and who needed to be civilised is not even a matter of conjecture. Today’s world
does not seem to be much different either.
In a replay of history, we are talking about the ideals of democracy, justice and the rule of law which the so-called civilised world wants to ‘export’ to the ‘other’ world. Some countries historically behaved and still continue to behave as if they have exclusive right over these ideals. However, their open support for dictators around the world shows the fallacy of their much-trumpeted love for them.
The events of 9/11 became the catalyst that brought the genie out of the bottle. The whirlwind became too strong to resist. The American public, convinced through threats of a clear and present danger, was made half-heartedly to go along. The bitter pill has only been coated with a sweet layer of exalted ideals.
What is not understood is that foreign occupation is breeding hate and terrorism which is used as an excuse for further repression and further use of force. This new version of democracy under occupation has sickened the people of countries that have been subjected to it and have forced them to reminisce about safe though less free days under a repressive dictatorship.
This vicious cycle of foreign occupation, repression and terror leading to more repression can only break with the departure of elements that are seen as occupying forces by the people of the country. Only the universal application of democracy leading to and leading from justice and the rule of law will allow the ‘elected’ rulers to step outside the siege of mercenaries and/or fortified Green Zones.
When a country goes to war to protect its vital economic interests, it does not enable its citizens to live peacefully. In fact, it encourages them to make war more violently. Oil rather than wheat or rice has been a cause of international conflict today. (Water may be an exception in the future.) The holy grail of the civilised world has unhindered access to oil and the immediate reward of war are billion-dollar contracts. Notions of democracy, justice and the rule of law are a major casualty, notwithstanding the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives.
What we need today is universal acceptance of certain values that are applicable both nationally and more importantly, internationally. These exist but need to be accepted and implemented in both letter and spirit by every nation. This will not grant hegemony to one nation or sets of nations over the others but will ensure the emergence of a safe and peaceful world where we all can live in amity.
The writer is a visiting Fulbright scholar from Islamabad, currently based at the University of Florida.
