Protecting rights of the disabled

IT is about time we bring about a change in our understanding of various forms of disability and catch up with the rest of the world. So far, let alone public representatives and state functionaries, even organisations working for the disabled view disability from the narrow prism of the charity model.

This is why there exists a patron-client relationship between not only such organisations and state institutions, but also between the disabled and disability organisations.

Granted that we the disabled, on whose behalf I write, are the poorest of the poor in the country. Granted that we have long accepted the pittance you have given us in the name of charity. Granted that we have been lumped together under the umbrella of ‘disabled people’ and have never been seen as students, teachers or citizens with impairments and with special needs characterised by the individual nature of our disabilities. Granted that you have failed to appreciate the fact that disability is not within us but is out there, in the physical and social environment in the shape of barriers that you have failed to eliminate.

Despite all this, we, the disabled, remain optimistic that you — parliamentarians and state functionaries — will be able to rectify past mistakes with some guidance from the disabled. The singular failure due to which the disabled are largely nameless, faceless and unaccounted for is your inability as our rulers to put the legislative framework to protect the rights of the disabled in place.

The starting point has to be the signing of, but not limited to, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Not only do we have to sign and ratify the UN Disability Convention, we also need to protect the rights of the disabled through a comprehensive act of parliament.

What are the principles of the conventions and the obligations of the state parties? What are the possible reasons that have compelled Pakistan to drag its feet on the issue of signing the disability convention which was available for signature on March 30, 2007?

Eight principles as enunciated in the convention are: (a) respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy including the freedom to make one’s own choices, and independence of persons, (b) non-discrimination, (c) full and effective participation and inclusion in society, (d) respect for and acceptance of the differences displayed by persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity, (e) equality of opportunity, (f) accessibility, (g) equality between men and women, (h) respect for the evolving capacities of children with disabilities and respect for the rights of children with disabilities to preserve their identities.

Had it been a case of simply proclaiming adherence to these principles alone, our rulers would have signed the convention long ago. I have seen them wax eloquent on disability issues contained in these principles. The devil for them lies in the details; states that ratify the convention will be required to ensure their current and future legislation and that policies are consistent with its articles. The foremost requirement would be for them to treat disabled people on the same basis as other citizens.

Furthermore, the convention makes it binding on the state parties to put these principles in force through concrete steps that involve, among other things, allocation of resources to help remove those barriers in the physical and social environment due to which a person becomes disabled in the first place.

For example, if we sign the convention, it would be binding on the state to ensure that all universities have ramps so that students on wheel chairs could exercise their right to education on an equal basis. Similarly, students with visual impairments will have to be provided with matter in alternative formats such as Braille and text books recorded on cassettes or computer diskettes and screen reading softwares with which they can perform computer tasks.

Many disabled people have already joined mainstream life and are productive and functionally active citizens, thanks to their family resources and support from their own organisations. However, these are lucky exceptions. According to World Health Organisation figures, ten per cent of the total population comprises disabled people that are scattered throughout Pakistan. Only the state has the outreach and resources to access the majority of the disabled population.

As there are no free lunches in this world, society is already paying a heavy price by perpetuating their dependence. Let alone the human rights criteria, even when we apply the cost-benefit ratio, we will come to the conclusion that societal benefits from an independent and productive disabled community will far outweigh the costs involved.

If we are really serious about providing an accessible and barrier-free environment to the majority of the voiceless and vulnerably disabled people, state functionaries, public representatives and disability organisations will have to bring about a paradigm shift in the way they have approached disability issues. More importantly, organisations working for the disabled will have to redefine their ‘patron-client’ relationship with state institutions and its functionaries.

It has to be replaced with an association based on the principles of equality that is backed by relevant legislative framework. To ensure its implementation, such a legislative framework will need to have binding linkages with international law which can only be ensured by signing and ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The writer is a rights activist based in Islamabad.

zahid@cpdi-pakistan.org

Lessons of the long march

THE great show of solidarity with the judiciary from June 10 to 15 ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Nothing can be more offensive to the leaders and organisers of the long march than being blamed for turning back from their commitment to lay siege to the corridors of power till they achieve their objectives. They never promised that.

But, scepticism about the efficacy of the whole strategy of the long march has crept into the minds of at least some of the leaders at the top of the movement itself, apart from others from the media, the political class and civil society.

The march was a genuine outburst of anger against a series of illegal actions taken by President Musharraf from March 9 till Nov 3, 2007. It was a tribute to the intellectual, organisational and financial commitment of the lawyers’ community to the noble cause of the restoration of the judiciary. The march exhibited a superb sense of collective leadership, and a sense of shared responsibility on the part of the leaders and their followers. The picture fitted the frame.

But the question is, to what end? This has been answered in multiple ways by people from within and outside the march. The leadership replied on a positive note; it believes that the objective of building pressure on the powers that be on the judges issue has been achieved. But, some lawyers, many journalists and a large number of participants from the civil society interpret it as a lost opportunity. In hindsight, one finds two things missing in the whole spectacle: firstly, there was no strategy to achieve the goal of putting the judges back in the courts in the form of either a sit-in or a blockade, or lobbying as a pressure group or conducting negotiations. Second, there was no policy on the target of the long march, whether it was the President House or Parliament House or Army House.

In terms of strategy, the black coats’ movement failed to devise a plan beyond a show of street power. No sit-in was on the agenda, possibly because it would have been difficult to sustain it after a while in terms of numbers, momentum and newsworthiness. To lay siege needed a commitment of a much-higher order, such as in the case of Shia activism in 1980.

In the weeks and months before the march, the leaders of the movement had consistently lobbied but failed to elicit a favourable response from the government. Similarly, no elaborate preparations were made to enter serious negotiations with the PPP leadership. In the absence of a strategy, it boiled down to a shot in the dark with a hope that sheer numbers on the street would deliver.

In the light of a long delay in the restoration of judges, protagonists of the cause wanted to put their entire weight behind the long march to achieve their objective. Others, especially from the media and political parties, cautioned the lawyers against measures that could weaken parliament and harm democracy. The leadership seemed to take two steps forward and one step back.

Who was the target of the long march? President Musharraf did it all. But, he was already relegated to a secondary role in the power structure. He could not bring the judges back to their positions even if, in theory, he wanted to do so. Why was parliament projected to be the target? Was a new law to be passed or a new amendment sought? It was amazingly naïve to target the parliament. In the end, even the parliament was not really targeted, unless gathering in the parade ground can be construed to mean that.

Prime Minister Gilani was conspicuous by his absence from the political scene altogether. It was a tacit recognition of the fact that the chief executive did not carry authority of his office with him. He was neither a part of the controversy nor the target of public anger. The lawyers’ leadership comprehensively missed out on delineating the target of their great show of discipline, commitment and solidarity.

In the first phase, the movement upheld what was essentially a legal cause. The case in the Supreme Judicial Council, later Supreme Court, against rendering the chief justice non-functional remained a constant point of reference in the movement. Lawyers were able to make a common cause with the civil society, the media and to some extent the political community.

In the second phase after the emergency, when sixty judges were sent home in an overtly extra-constitutional measure, the movement widened its scope to join the political parties in protest. The third phase after the formation of governments in the centre and provinces from April onwards obfuscated the whole situation. Partners of yesterday stood opposite each other. Partners within the coalition spoke with two faces.

What will happen now? Will the bar associations be able to mobilise lawyers and the public at large within a few weeks or months? Loss of momentum on June 15 is critical in this respect. People saw no tangible gain after their huge mental and physical input. PPP lawyers are caught between two loyalties. Meanwhile, other issues such as inflation and shortage of food items and electricity are potential competitors when it comes to attracting people’s attention and energies.

All this poses a great challenge to the leadership of the legal fraternity in terms of its credibility; and the judges’ issue is staring it in the face. Will it or will it not deliver on this count? Will it reconcile with half-way measures such as the provision for 29 judges of the Supreme Court and other ‘soft’ provisions in the envisioned constitutional package? Will the movement be overtaken by events? Alternatively, do lawyers have other strategies up their sleeve to restore the judges to their rightful positions, and the country to a respectable position in the comity of nations?

Iran’s N-programme

“A NUCLEAR armed Iran is incredibly destabilising. It would be a major blow to world peace,” stated President Bush at a press conference in Paris during his farewell European tour last week.

United States’ hostility towards Iran dates back to 1979 when the Islamic Revolution toppled the monarchy in Iran. The US was declared the ‘Great Satan’, its embassy was ransacked and 52 members of the US diplomatic mission were held hostage for 444 days. Since then, hardliners have dominated the politics of Tehran and Washington, and neo-cons in the Bush administration are spoiling for a showdown with Iran.

The casus belli is Iran’s nuclear programme which has been declared “a threat to global security”. Bush has repeatedly vowed that Iran will not be allowed to become a nuclear power and that the US will employ “all options” to frustrate Iranian ambitions.

The US has declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil” and “an outpost of tyranny”. A number of economic sanctions have been imposed unilaterally as well as by manipulating the Security Council. Not content with these punitive measures, the Bush administration has continually kept Iran under pressure with threats of use of force. The sabre rattling has continued despite growing evidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is not weapon-oriented. Both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in reports have confirmed that US allegations about Iran’s atomic goals have been overblown. The report states that Iran appeared “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Iran would be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon some time during the 2010-2015 timeframe”.

Iran’s repeated assurance that its nuclear ambitions are not weapon-oriented and that it has the right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it signed in 1968, to follow a peaceful nuclear programme, have been dismissed with disdain, both by the US and Israel.

Bush and his policy planners, however, have not been subdued by the report. In October 2007, Bush talked of the spectre of the Third World War or a nuclear holocaust if Iran succeeded in obtaining nuclear weapon capability. The US continues to pursue this line and has rejected all explanations from Iran.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in a recent article in The New Yorker, disclosed that the White House has reached a decision on a broad bombing raid with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities. There have also been reports of Israel, with the blessings of the US, planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, as it did on June 6, 1981 against Iraq. At that time, Israeli warplanes penetrated deep into Iraq and succeeded in destroying Osirak nuclear reactor.

Last week, Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former IDF chief, declared that “If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it”. Israel has been encouraged, making its intentions so explicit since Bush has realised that with his second term coming to a close, there is hardly any success in the avowed objectives of his foreign policy. The Iraq invasion has proved a disaster. The number of American soldiers killed has crossed 4,000 and there is no exit strategy in sight.

The situation in Afghanistan remains highly uncertain and volatile. A proxy attack on Iran by Israel is thus the joint agenda of the US and Israel and would serve their mutual interest. The US President has been warned by his own allies against such a venture, either directly or through its surrogate, Israel. The European Union shares the view that Iran’s pursuit of enrichment poses a potentially great threat to international peace and security but is opposed to any military strike which will inevitably destabilise the Middle East, disrupt oil flows or, at the least, cause a massive increase in oil prices.

For Israel, June 6, 1981 aerial attack against Iraq provides an ideal precedence. The Israeli government had launched a sustained campaign to publicise its fears of Iraqi nuclear programme. After the attack, Israel declared that under no circumstances would it “allow the enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our nation”. Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, later explained Israel’s doctrine of strategic deterrence, “We cannot afford the introduction of the nuclear weapon. For us, it is not a question of balance of terror, but a question of survival. We shall therefore have to prevent such a threat at its inception.”

To justify its Osirak attack, Israel cited Article 51 of the UN Charter which grants each member state the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack.”

Israel is likely to repeat the same strategy in case of Iran. Iranian rhetoric of “eliminating Israel from the global arena”, and that “Israel is doomed to disappear” and must be “wiped from the map”, has provided Israel an opportunity to portray Iran as a threat to Israel’s very existence and hence a legitimate target for any pre-emptive strike.

The 1981 attack on Iraq did invite international condemnation and the UN Security Council, through its resolution 487, condemned Israel’s attack as a violation of the UN Charter but refrained from imposing sanctions against Israel. The scenario might not be different this time around. The international climate, seething with interfaith acrimony, post-9/11 global instability and volatility, impotence of the Muslim world in the face of Israel’s continuing genocidal policies in Gaza, and uncritical support of the US administration to Israel’s policies, offers Israel an ideal environment to strike against Iran with limited and acceptable consequences.

Israel’s aerial attack last September on the Syrian nuclear site at Al-Kibar is a pointer in that direction. The Israel attack has been a mystery and the US and Western media have also let it pass with little coverage or comments. Syria, to avoid humiliation, has denied having any such facility. This conspiracy of silence has encouraged Israeli policy makers to follow suit on Iran.

By Israel’s reckoning, the circumstances will never be more propitious. It is time that Iranian leadership learns that discretion is the better part of valour and rhetoric is not an instrument of diplomacy. It will be advisable to recall the bellicose statements of President Nasser against Israel that led to the June 1967 disaster. Iran should not allow history to repeat itself.

For Pakistan, the stakes are very high. Besides creating further destabilisation in the region and its attendant consequences, the US, which remains wary of Pakistan’s nuclear status, would step up the pressure, already mounted on the pretext of the fear of these nuclear assets falling into the hands of extremists.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Angry mothers of soldiers

The story that shocked her most, Esther Wilson says, was the mother who bought a pair of boots for her boy serving in Iraq. The ones he had been given were useless, the woman said; they were melting in the heat, her son was getting foot rot.

So she bought him a new pair. Only she couldn’t afford to post the two together. She had to send one, then wait till the next benefit payment had come through to send the other. “I just thought, this is amazing,” Wilson says. “Those young men are out there, being brutalised, fighting, their lives in danger, getting shafted every which way — and we’re not even giving them decent boots? How come we’ve none of us heard about this? How come no one gets to know?”

Thanks to Wilson’s new play, Ten Tiny Toes, a few more people will now get to know. Not just about the boots that desperate mothers are sending to their sons — British troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — but also the T-shirts, the foot cream, the plasters, the soap, the bottled water, the teabags. The kind of things you could be forgiven for thinking a 21st-century army might be able to provide.

What Ten Tiny Toes mainly shows, though, is what happens to a very ordinary, loving family from northern England, when a distant war suddenly comes into their living room and, as Wilson puts it, “the cracks appear”; what becomes of a woman when the love and pride she feels for her son is matched only by her fear for his safety — and her unshakeable belief that the cause for which he is risking his life is wrong.

It is gut-wrenching stuff.

“I cried,” admits Lily, who watched the play the other night with a group of fellow army mothers whose conversations with Wilson helped provide its raw material. Lily’s son, who she does not want to name for fear of upsetting him further, has done three tours of duty in Basra.

Ten Tiny Toes was born after Wilson’s previous script — she was the lead writer on Unprotected, a widely praised verbatim docu-drama based on more than 1,000 interviews with residents, politicians, police, clients and workers in the Liverpool sex industry — won the Amnesty award for Freedom of Speech at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival. Born in north-west ngland, Wilson, who has spent most of her life in Liverpool and has two grown-up sons, was an actor and university drama teacher before winning a BBC playwriting bursary five years ago. After Unprotected, Liverpool’s Everyman theatre was interested in more of her work.

She began putting out feelers in the summer of 2006, and the response was “massive, and amazing. I had mothers telling me they were trawling army surplus websites to buy essential gear for their sons. Mothers whose boys had lost their lives were telling me that while it wouldn’t make them cry any less if they knew their sons had died in a noble cause, it would at least make them feel better. It was honest, raw. Authentic.”

Wilson says she worked hard not to portray just “the standard liberal view” of the war. “I tried to take a rounded view. There are lots of people who really do believe that what we’re doing in Iraq is right, and that viewpoint is properly represented in the play. In the end, what I decided to do was focus on one family, and see if we can’t make connections to a wider world.”The inspiration for Wilson’s remarkable play is a unique group of mothers “who channel all that anger, all that rage, into an unending search for truth and justice. I was humbled by meeting them. They are immensely strong women, resilient and witty and sometimes very funny. It wasn’t a miserable experience at all, far from it.”

Perhaps most upsetting of all is that the mothers’ vocal opposition to the war and persistent attempts to lobby ministers in the Westminster parliament for better equipment and a full withdrawal often cause problems for the sons. “Often the response is: stop talking about what you know nothing about — you just don’t understand, that kind of thing,” says Wilson.

Even if mothers supported their boys going into the army, are proud of them, “Their response is: I have to do this. What else can I do? I can’t sit around till he comes home in a bodybag.”

And does this warm, heartfelt, at times searing work have a campaign message? Wilson is not sure. “Maybe it’s just about people who love.”

At bottom, perhaps, the unanswered question behind Ten Tiny Toes is whether these mothers’ determination to fight, rather than surrender and move on, is the only way they can cope with such an impossible burden of fear, anger and grief. “That, nobody can tell,” she says. “But maybe that’s the great thing: out of this horror they may achieve something good. Through what’s happened to them, they have found a real, forceful political voice.”

—The Guardian, London