I HAVE a clear memory of a terrible crime that was committed in southern Lebanon in 1978. Israeli soldiers, landing at night on the beach near Sarafand — the city of Sarepta in antiquity — were looking for “terrorists” and opened fire on a car-load of female Palestinian refugees.

It took the Israelis a day before they admitted shooting at the car with an anti-tank weapon, by which time I had watched civil defence workers pulling the dead women from the vehicle, their faces slopping off on to the road, an AP correspondent holding his hands to his face in shock, leaning against an ambulance, crying “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. I suppose all this is because of what Hitler did to the Jews.” Save for his remark, however, all I remember is silence. As if the whole scene was muted, sound smothered by the dead.

Yet I was running a tape recorder for part of the time, and when I listened to the old tape again a few days ago, I could hear many women, weeping, cars passing, honking horns above the shrieks of grief. My own original notes state, in my handwriting, that “a throng of women stood crying and wailing”. Yet all I remember now is silence. A child was on a stretcher, cut in half, a girl in the back seat of the car, curled in death into the arms of an older woman. But silence.

I was reminded of all this by an especially powerful interview conducted at Cannes with the Israeli director Ari Folman, who has made a remarkable film — Waltz with Bashir — about Israel’s later, 1982 invasion of Lebanon and about the “collective amnesia” of the soldiers who participated in this hopeless adventure.

Bashir Gemayel was the name of Israel’s favourite Christian Maronite militia leader who was elected president but almost immediately assassinated. It’s an animated film — a film of cartoons, if you like — because Folman is trying to fill in the empty space which the war occupies in his mind. Because he can’t remember it.

“I never talked about my army service,” Folman said. “I got on with my life without talking about it, without thinking about it. It was like something I didn’t want to be connected with whatsoever.” In one astonishing scene, Israeli soldiers come ashore in Lebanon — only to find that there is no one there. They are entering an empty country, washed clean of memory.

But Lebanon was not empty; more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all civilians, died in that terrible war, and at the end of Folman’s movie, the animation turns to reality with photographs of some of the 1,700 Palestinian dead of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, murdered by Israel’s Phalangist allies while the Israelis watched from high-rise buildings. It is Folman’s dream that this film should be shown in an Arab country — given the dotage and stupidity of most Arab ministers, that is surely a hope that will not be realised — but it did almost win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Amnesia is real. And it afflicts us all. But it is also a block to memory.

Take my old letter-writing friend, poet Don Newton. He dropped me a note the other day, asking why humans have to create wars and mentioning, at the start, that he remembered the Second World War and, in 1944, Germany’s V2 missiles. What grabbed me by the throat, however, was the penultimate paragraph of his letter, written with an eloquence I cannot match — and whose power and suddenness will shock you, as readers, just as it shocked me. This is what Don wrote:

“I saw some of my friends killed around me when I was 12, when a V2 punched into the road near where we were playing ... I was lucky and survived but ran over the road to find my father lying dead by our front gate. He looked for all the world like a grey, dusty broken puppet with his left arm laying next to him. It had been sliced off just above the elbow by a piece of shrapnel that had also cut through the oak gatepost behind him.

‘‘Strangely enough, that sight seems to have wiped from my conscious mind all but a handful of memories of him and those are mostly unpleasant in their associations, like the time I burst into the toilet when I was only six, to find him sitting reading a newspaper, and blurted out that my younger brother by a year had been run over. Peter died in hospital the next day without ever recovering consciousness. This ‘amnesia’ is, I suppose, a defence mechanism but I find it weird and unable to break. I am struggling to put this problem into a poem and, hopefully, when it is out on paper maybe the fog will clear?”

I find this letter — horror and the mundane inextricably, unbelievably mixed together — unanswerable. The V2 explosion turns into a father’s death, the interruption in the lavatory into a child’s death. And a poem to clear the amnesia? Only a poet could suggest that. I didn’t see my father die but I was sitting beside my own mother when she died from the results of Parkinson’s. My memory is clear — she choked on her own saliva because she could no longer clear her throat — and I do remember sitting by her body and thinking (and here I quote another Israeli, a fine and brilliant novelist), “I’m next!”

So I turned, of course, to a haiku in Don’s latest collection of poetry, The Soup Stone, called “Mum’s Death, 1982” — the same date as Folman’s Israeli invasion when he (and I) were trying to stay alive in Lebanon:

Just sitting, waiting, For your last slow breath.

Suddenly — it’s here. Which is about as close to death as you can get in verse. And there really is a silence at the end.

— © The Independent

WHEN the curtain finally drops on the epic decade-long political drama being played out in the country, it is likely that many of the major dramatis personae presently occupying centre-stage will not be visible in the last scene. If this tragicomedy has to have a happy ending, some extremely bold and out-of-the-box changes in the script and the character of the principal actors in the drama will have to be effected.

All the principal actors in this increasingly sordid drama have adopted extreme positions, which are unacceptable to others. None of them has the right to hold the nation and its progress — indeed its survival — hostage to the achievement of their specific aims and objectives, however worthy they may seem in their own right.

The widely-held perception is that the principal source of the stalemate is the president and if he is persuaded or forced to give up the office whose entitlement he has lost both legally and morally, all else would fall into place within the framework of the current parliamentary structure. Unfortunately, despite the fact that it seems self-evident, there seems to be little chance that this much hoped-for outcome will materialise without fracturing irreparably not only the political and social fabric but also the economic sustainability of the nation.

It is not entirely clear where the present incumbent of the presidency derives his strength from, as most of his former supporters, both external and domestic, including his political followers, military brass and US Congressmen, have abandoned him one by one, at least in public. Surprisingly, he does not seem to be as vulnerable as he did in the first flush of electoral results three months ago.

Whether it is a secret deal with the United States or the PPP or some as yet unknown factor that is sustaining him is hard to discern. A prime suspect of his strength is the time-tested ploy of divide-and-rule which he has used with dexterity in the past with the aid of his minions who are embedded deeply in the ranks of his enemies.

Perhaps, his most potent weapon is the fear that he may yet take further desperate action transcending his Nov 3, 2007, misadventure which has remained unchallenged. Remote as it may seem, the possibility of its being undertaken — even if it fails to succeed — can’t be entirely discounted. Fortunately, Gen Kayani’s reported meeting with him is likely to have pre-empted this scary possibility. Whether he would walk out of the exit door of the COAS house into oblivion or settle in the presidency for some more time to test his feline luck remains to be seen. Gen Kayani may well be letting the horse escape before the barn door is firmly locked.

What about the other players in the grand political theatre being enacted presently? While none of them is hated or distrusted as strongly as Gen Musharraf, the political record of the leaders of the two major political parties is hardly unblemished. However, they have undoubtedly suffered under vicious military regimes of the past, as well as at each other’s hands and have considerably redeemed their reputations by their conduct during the last elections.

But for their tenacity, besides the exemplary courage of Benazir Bhutto, the country would not be anywhere near the cherished goal of democracy as it is today. However, they need to give serious thought to whether their continued occupation of the active leadership of their respective parties — which is burdened by their yet unredeemed political past — does not hinder progress on the road to democracy.

It would serve that cause much better if they passed on the baton to a new generation of politicians more inclined to the transparent and democratic functioning of their respective parties. They could greatly help matters if they allowed their party legislators to vote through secret ballot on such issues as the restoration of the judges, impeachment of the president and other constitutional issues which have stood in the way of their coalition’s effective functioning.

They need to display some measure of statesmanship and self-sacrifice to get the country out of the present logjam, which is incalculably hurting those whom they pretend to lead. As senior statesmen, they could well devote their time to promoting a democratic culture in the country and developing a code of ethics which would make politics resemble less a game of Monopoly with all the country’s assets on the stakes-board.

The fourth principal actor in the drama is the chief justice who has been the rallying point of the present struggle for democracy. But for his courageous stand on March 9, 2007, the country would not have been able to push military dictatorship into the corner in which it finds itself now. He, his brothers on the bench he headed and the legal community have made tremendous sacrifices in terms of time, money and personal comfort, as well as life and limb. They — along with the chief justice — too, however, need to reassess their strategy and ponder whether the pound of flesh they are insisting on would not paralyse the entire body politic and the economy.

Should the chief justice announce that he would himself voluntarily resign after the judges are reinstated in accordance with the Murree declaration and after the invalidation of the Nov 3, 2007, emergency and PCO imposition, the way would be cleared for an objective debate on a non-person-specific constitutional reforms package, the need for which is universally recognised. His larger-than-life figure can now hardly fit in the chambers of the apex court and needs to be accommodated elsewhere in the national arena.

The ‘minus-four’ formula broadly outlined above, undoubtedly sounds utopian and innocent of realpolitik which continues to drive the destiny of our nation. However, if the situation continues to drift in the direction of chaos, the time for such utopian ideas may soon come to allow Pakistan to move unfettered on the road to democracy and to achieve the fulfillment of the rights of its people.

While each of the four may have played important roles in the past, they must realise that they are now much more of a distraction than the inspiration they once were.

syed.naseem@aya.yale.com