DAWN - Opinion; September 04, 2008

Published September 4, 2008

Utterly inhuman

By I.A. Rehman


AS if the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s disappearance more than five years ago was not horrifying enough the discovery of her 12-year-old son in a Kabul prison has brought out the utterly inhuman plight of the involuntarily missing persons.

Soon after Dr Aafia’s enforced disappearance it became known that she had been picked up in March 2003 along with her three children in Karachi, that her name figured in a list of people wanted by the FBI, and that she was suspected of helping an alleged terrorist.

A report appearing in this newspaper on May 29, 2004, quoted an interior ministry spokesman to the effect that Dr Aafia had been handed over to the US a year earlier. Dr Aafia’s family claims to have pursued the matter in the US and mentions a case in which Dr Aafia was suspected of involvement in the smuggling of precious stones. But the matter was dropped when the key witness did not depose against her.

Nothing was heard of Dr Aafia for several years. Her case was among scores of others that were heard by the Supreme Court in 2007. It was only in July this year that Dr Aafia was reported to have been arrested in Kabul after getting a bullet in her abdomen in a ‘police encounter’. She was arraigned in a New York court shortly afterwards. Much later came the disclosure that her son was in a Kabul prison, followed by an Afghan government announcement about his early repatriation to Pakistan. His case raises issues of the Pakistan government’s moral and legal responsibility of a more serious nature than was done by Dr Aafia’s disappearance.

One does not know about Dr Aafia’s innocence or guilt. In her case Islamabad will be accused of failure to ensure her treatment in accordance with Pakistani, US and international humanitarian laws. But there is no doubt about the innocence of the child who was only seven at the time of his disappearance. Islamabad knew of his disappearance but made no attempt to save him from the trauma that can completely destroy the stoutest of human beings.

And what about Dr Aafia’s two other children — a daughter and a second son, who were four and one in 2003? Are the children that may be presented as Dr Aafia’s actually her children? Even the eldest of them, Ahmad (12), may be unable to tell what he has gone through, or to relate himself to his family. A DNA test reportedly conducted by US experts may be the only basis to link him to Dr Aafia. His ordeal has features of extraordinary bestiality.

The list of Pakistani victims of their government’s extra-legal excesses is quite long. Since disappearances are by their nature shrouded in mystery nobody has an exact count of the missing persons. The Balochistan chief minister has now raised the number of the missing persons in his province alone to more than 1,000.

The authorities’ callous and irresponsible attitude towards disappearances can be seen in a number of cases. Ali Asghar Bangalzai, a poor tailor of Quetta, was picked up on Oct 18, 2001 — which makes his case one of the earliest instances of enforced disappearance in Pakistan. His arrest by an intelligence agency was confirmed by one Iqbal Bangalzai, who had been arrested along with him but was soon released. His detention was confirmed by senior police and military officers. One officer asked for the detainee’s clothes and promised to deliver them to him. Hafiz Husain Ahmad, an MNA then, confirmed all this and Bangalzai’s name was first on the list of disappeared persons filed in the Supreme Court by the HRCP. Can there be any doubt about his illegal detention? Scores of other cases have been documented.

The previous government’s callousness was reflected in Musharraf’s rhetoric. He rubbed salt into the wounds of the missing persons’ families by arrogantly dismissing duly documented statements about them. In March 2007 he declared that the missing persons had joined jihadi groups and added: “I am deadly sure that the missing persons are in the control of militant organisations.”

The judiciary has been lambasted for taking up the disappearance cases. It is only guilty of a rights-based approach to the habeas corpus law. Many habeas corpus petitions were dismissed when the authorities named in the petitions denied the charge and bailiffs did not find the detainees at the places mentioned. By and by the courts realised that cases of disappearance could not be casually shrugged off. This development was welcomed not only by human rights activists but also by all those who believe in the progressive evolution of laws. The state had many months to mend its ways before it resorted to the foul declaration of Nov 3, 2007.

Ironically enough, the judiciary was axed and humiliated after Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry had offered the government a handsome opportunity to resolve the matter by regularising the disappearances. All that was required of the government was to come clean as to who was being held by whom and on what charge. Even now nobody is asking for anything more. Continued rejection of this demand is tyranny of the worst variety.

In July last Amnesty International produced evidence to prove that the Musharraf government “resorted to a variety of means to avoid enforced disappearances being exposed. These tactics included denying detention takes place and denying all knowledge of the fate and whereabouts of disappeared persons; refusing to obey judicial directions; concealing the identify of the detaining authorities, for example by transferring the disappeared to other secret locations; threatening harm or re-disappearance and levelling spurious criminal charges to conceal enforced disappearances. But the sources cited in this report point to the identity of the detaining authorities and to several locations where people are believed to have been secretly detained. A dangerous lack of accountability for acts committed by the intelligence services is also highlighted in these sources, together with evidence of pressure put on the judiciary not to use all its powers to provide redress”.

The new government has inherited this terrible charge-sheet and its continued failure to do justice to the disappeared will amount to a confession of its culpability. The cases in the Supreme Court have been in limbo for 10 months. The government must petition the courts to resume hearing of the missing persons’ cases, tell the commissions set up by it to expedite their inquiries, and let the people know all about the Pakistanis transferred to foreign jurisdictions and the steps taken to protect their legal rights. It has many urgent matters on its plate but nothing can be more urgent than the restoration of the illegally detained persons’ right to liberty.

What, no utopia after Musharraf?

By Sayeed Hasan Khan and Kurt Jacobsen


GETTING what you want, Oscar Wilde remarked, can be as much a tragedy as not getting what you want.

Nawaz Sharif some day may come to appreciate this exotic western wisdom. Anyone who imagined that Musharraf’s departure would improve daily life in Pakistan one iota was sadly mistaken.

An utterly Alice-in-Wonderland political scenario since February has pitted two billionaires, whose fortunes were obtained, each other suspects, by rather questionable means, against a solid career soldier who, whatever his faults and glaring missteps, seems to have failed to feather his own nest in the traditional manner.

From the start the world press, out of routine laziness or pure ignorance, equated the ejection of Musharraf with the epic ousting of a Ceausescu or an Idi Amin or, one hopes one day, Robert Mugabe. Therefore, the major parties — mostly Sharif’s, really — were celebrated abroad for dumping the former dictator because, so the storyline goes, all dictators are alike in their vices, and all democrats are alike in their virtues.

What then has this single-issue zealotry accomplished? Now that Musharraf has gotten the heave-ho, which was fun while it lasted, the squabbling parties face the distressing fact that the public now will have no one to blame for the escalating internal mess but them.

Musharraf, a useful distraction, soon will be missed even by his very worst enemies. If the parties revert to the same inside-dealer style in play before Musharraf, they hardly will find themselves hailed in the streets. One of Sharif’s few accomplishments during his last inglorious stint as prime minister was to laboriously build a case against Zardari, then arrest and imprison him. Zardari has shown admirable forbearance. Since democracy formally returned, food and energy prices have been punishing all but the super rich while Taliban activity has crept up to the edges of Islamabad. The western powers — with the known quantity of Musharraf gone — are clearly nervous.

Musharraf declined to exploit Islam for political gain. He remained a sincere secular leader — Ataturk was his hero — although he was tentative when it actually came to implementing those secular principles. Sharif, by contrast, openly courts religious fundamentalists. Less commendable on Musharraf’s part was his installation of clueless army personnel in too many civilian posts, to no good effect for anyone. But his handling of the judges was indeed woeful and, finally, politically fatal.

Wily Sharif clearly was a financial backer for the former chief justice’s restoration both as a hammer blow against Musharraf and ultimately against Zardari too. Sharif must be extremely proud that he whipped up the public atmosphere into a hostile one that made Zardari buckle and go along with the pretty pointless impeachment. You didn’t need a political genius, however, to tell you that Zardari would drag his heels so as not to reappoint an unpredictable foe like Chaudhry to the Supreme Court.

The stock market is down, so that makes the news. Public finances too are in their usual parlous state. Less newsworthy is that Pakistan remains a country with a per capita income slightly over $500 annually. A third of the population is classified as absolutely-no-doubt-about-it poor, with the next third not doing enviably well either. Almost 50m people scratch by on two dollars a day or less. Half the population is illiterate. As much as half the population has no access to safe drinking water, let alone healthcare of any kind. These people need attention. So far there is little sign that they will get any.

The race for the presidency is the next distraction. Zardari is a shoe-in and soon we will see if as president he will relinquish to parliament all the powers that Musharraf wielded as president. Power, when in one’s own hands, no longer seems so obscene. Sharif certainly will not be thrilled if an elected Zardari retains Musharraf’s presidential powers. Indeed, the People’s Party may have missed an opportunity at this dangerous time when, in the interest of soothing the western regions, it could have backed a smaller party’s candidate from the Frontier or Balochistan for president.

The NWFP government, for example, is allied with Zardari and could patch up the broken down peace treaty there. Neither an NWFP or Balochistan candidate — lacking a nationwide constituency — would be tempted to abuse his presidential powers.

One can find pragmatic secularists among the leaderships in the Frontier and Balochistan like Mengal or the Awami National Party leader Asfandyar Wali. These savvy people can deal with local problems that neither the army nor political figures outside the provinces can manage. The war against terrorism can be won only through strategic reconciliations.

Fazlur Rehman’s party ruled the Frontier province before the elections but lost to secular forces. Yet he is still in parliament and has much sway over the madressahs. The agitation of the Taliban has taken the complicated form of Pakhtun nationalism. Baloch nationalists plus a section of pragmatic ulema is the best combination to sort out the problems.

Zardari was refreshingly frank when he told the BBC that the Taliban had the “upper hand” at the moment and that the war against terror was being lost. The whole point of Bush’s war on terror is to fight it in such a way as to go on losing it for as long as possible, thereby creating many more highly motivated enemies than ever before, which justifies a growing repressive American domestic apparatus and the breakneck shovelling of public money into defence contractor pockets. Indeed, Bush and Cheney seem to view Pakistan as a civic model to which to aspire.

What will the American strategy be in the near future? America doesn’t know quite how to get out of the Afghan quagmire. The Americans trained the Mujahideen to drive out the Russians in the 1980s. Now they need Russia’s help to enable them to exit Afghanistan even as they cynically condemn Russia as the aggressor in Georgia. Will the PPP strive to bring about an economic structure in Pakistan which enables it to escape dependence on America or the IMF?

Otherwise, you have to make concessions to whoever is in office there. US policy towards a comparatively minor player like Pakistan hardly changes no matter who occupies the White Office.

An aggressive Putin

By Simon Tisdall


IF one man stands between the EU and a lasting resolution of the Caucasus crisis, that man is Vladimir Putin. As Europe’s leaders struggled to agree a response to Georgia’s enforced partition ahead of Sept 1’s emergency summit in Brussels, Russia’s gun-toting prime minister was pictured strutting across the Siberian taiga, wearing camouflage and a tough expression, doing his familiar “Action Man” impersonation.

Putin’s controlling hand has been in evidence since fighting erupted last month. He flew immediately from Beijing to visit Russian invasion troops at staging areas on the Georgian border. It was Putin who muddied the waters with talk of legitimate Russian peacekeeping operations and unsubstantiated claims of genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is Putin who now mocks talk of EU sanctions and hints at diverting Russian oil and gas from Europe to China.

But for the most part Putin has used his hand-picked presidential successor, Dmitri Medvedev, as frontman in fielding international outrage. While Medvedev dealt with French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s frantic mediation efforts, fought the PR battle through stage-managed interviews, and took the flak for Moscow’s recognition of South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, Putin deftly pulled the strings.

Medvedev’s stand-up role as a sort of home-grown “useful idiot” seems to have freed Putin from the constraints facing a head of state, allowing him greater freedom of action. Backroom manipulation appears to suit the former KGB spy. But he has gained a taste for headline-grabbing, too, as shown by his Siberian tiger shoot and his black arts propaganda skills in turning the tables on the Bush administration.

“We know there were a lot of US advisers in Georgia. But [they] should be on firing ranges and teaching centres — but where were they? They were in the zone of military operations,” Putin told German television. “That pushes one to the conclusion that the US leadership knew about the action that was being prepared and moreover probably took part in it.

“If the US leadership has sanctioned that, then I have the suspicion that it was done specially to organise a small victorious war. And if that didn’t work, then to create from Russia the appearance of an enemy and unite the [US] electorate around one presidential candidate.”

Putin went on: “In a significant way the crisis was provoked, including by our American friends in the course of the elections struggle ... this was the use of administrative resources in a deplorable way to provide advantage to one of the candidates, in the current case from the ruling [Republican] party.”

That the man who between 2000 and 2008 emasculated Russia’s democratic institutions, silenced media and business critics, and eradicated independent centres of political and civil power should complain about “administrative abuses” will strike many as ironic. But that is not the main issue. The idea that US neo-con warriors were somehow responsible for a full-scale Russian invasion of a tiny neighbour appeals greatly to western apologists. More generally it plays on anti-American sentiment in Europe. That was Putin’s calculated aim.

There is no evidence to support such a conspiracy theory. But his words sent a chill. They revealed how implacable his hostility has become to what he sees as Washington’s quasi-imperial unipolarism, expressed most obviously through Nato’s eastwards expansion. Putin’s utter determination, aggressive style and deep cynicism suggest a comfortable, or even a mutually tolerant relationship between Russia on the one hand and the US and European allies such as Britain on the other is improbable.

Putin would probably never have become a friend. But his enmity might have been avoided if western leaders had listened at the beginning. Speaking at the Genoa G8 summit in 2001, Putin urged the US to forego missile defence and cooperate instead on constructing new post-cold war global security structures. Nato’s expansion was fuelling insecurity on Europe’s edges, he said. Specifically he called for a “single security and defence space” in Europe to be created either by replacing Nato or having Russia join it as a full member.

He was ignored. And although this in theory is still Russia’s position, with Putin and his US counterparts no longer on speaking terms and relations under severe strain, the chance for collaboration has been missed. In Washington a new leader may bring a new approach. But Putin and Putinism, part Bush era collateral damage, part Russian dysfunction, seem set to go on indefinitely.

— The Guardian, London

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