Our invisible citizens

ATTITUDES can be disturbing. Adil is a 16-year-old boy with a mental disability. He used to attend a school for special children. He is mostly non-verbal, has an IQ of a six-year-old and is not yet toilet-trained.

Adil’s parents do not have a diagnosis to explain his disability. “Knowing the cause makes no difference because he will still not be normal,” explains his father.

Ineffective medical, therapeutic and behavioural intervention which saw a worsening of Adil’s behaviour over time erased his social life almost entirely. Even his mention in public is avoided by his family. And so Adil remains an ‘invisible’ citizen of this country.

But he is not alone. According to UN estimates, Adil numbers amongst the 10 per cent of our population with mental or physical disabilities — and among those who are rarely seen or heard of in mainstream schools, the workplace or society.

The 1998 census which put the figure of persons with disabilities at 2.49 per cent stands revised in the light of the government’s more recent estimates of four to six per cent. However, given that data collection has been limited by the narrowly defined scope of disability for purposes of the census besides the fact that many births are unregistered and many disabilities, including those resulting from accidents, conflict and natural disasters, are unreported, the UN estimation is likely to be a more accurate one.

While the typical Pakistani family hails the birth of a child, particularly a son’s, as a divine blessing and look upon him as one who will be their pillar of support in old age, the birth of a child with a mental or physical disability is perceived by the family as spelling doom for more reasons than one: there is the moral and financial burden of having to provide lifetime support to the child, the social stigmatisation of the family and the feeling that a disabled child is an expression of divine wrath. These are only some of the challenges that must be confronted.

Such negative perceptions about individuality, religion and society explain the deep-rooted bias towards disability in our communities.

Mainstream schools cite an individual’s inability to cope with academic work as grounds for refusing admission to a child with a disability, forgetting that education is not just about academics but also about instilling values and discipline and teaching social interaction. Untoward attention from onlookers nudging one another or staring rudely turns a family outing with a disabled child into an emotional ordeal. Relatives and friends feel no embarrassment when their typically developing children mock and mistreat a disabled child whose hapless parents look on without a voice in defence of their child.

The social verdict is thus pronounced almost unanimously on Pakistan’s disabled community — unequal persons worthy of isolation, pity, victimisation or exploitation with little or no entitlement to education, employment or participation in society. More often than not and as mentioned above, the financial resources, educational background and exposure of the family are crucial in shaping the life of a child with a disability.

Disability and not individuality defines the child in the minds of many uneducated and poverty-stricken parents who either mistreat their child or force him to run away from home. Or they abandon him and let him grow up in a shrine or shelter where he remains vulnerable to abuse. Parents such as Adil’s, who possess limited financial means to access the required treatment and therapy, prefer not to waste money on a child who will never be ‘normal’ and find it easier to ‘imprison’ him at home.

It is an insignificant number of families that are blessed with wealth, education and broad-minded thinking and are unlikely to be influenced by social prejudices and religious misconceptions in their attitude towards and upbringing of their child. These few families perceive their child as equal to any other who must be loved, nurtured and respected. To help surmount his challenges, they invest time, money and energy in their child by providing the relevant treatment and assistance.

The child is often integrated in a mainstream school that promotes inclusive education. With an individualised educational plan (IEP) modified on the basis of his individual abilities and implemented by a resource teacher paired with that child within the classroom setting, the child has a better chance to learn and socialise like his typically developing peers.

It is generally believed that children with disabilities who are included and encouraged from an early age to play, work and interact with other children are likely to maximise their potential and abilities and significantly catch up with their peers.This is the essence of an inclusive society as found in North America and many European countries and as advocated by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol, an international treaty passed by the United Nations in December 2006 not yet signed by Pakistan.

The convention is the first comprehensive legal instrument that promotes the rights of persons with disabilities worldwide. It provides for their acceptance as part of human diversity and preserves their right to dignity, autonomy and non-discrimination. The convention makes a “paradigm shift” by redefining disability in terms of physical and social barriers erected by society which prevent the disabled community from having equal opportunities in society, and advocates their removal.

It also prescribes physical adaptations such as the building of ramps and lifts in public places and envisions an inclusive society where disabled persons have an equal opportunity to access education in mainstream schools and employment in the workplace. Moreover, it recognises their right to make decisions on the basis of free and informed consent and participate in political decision-making.

Finally, the convention holds the promise of becoming the voice of advocacy that can draw Adil and others like him from the fringes of society into the mainstream but only if Pakistan joins the ranks of the 130 nations that have signed the Convention. The time for parents, families and support groups to lobby for Pakistan’s invisible citizens is now.

The writer is a lecturer for the University of London External LL.B Programme

sadiamumtaz@gmail.com

Insecurity at all levels

IF there is safety in numbers, then why should 160 million Pakistanis not feel secure? And yet never before has there been such a heightened awareness of our national and personal vulnerability.

Minorities such as the Ahmadiyya and Christian communities feel threatened by an intolerant majority; the majority feels insecure from one and another. Our assassins today are not foreigners with unpronounceable names; they emanate from among us.

One can understand therefore why, following the suicide bomb blast outside the Marriott hotel in Islamabad on Sept 20, our government should have constituted a high-powered committee to formulate a national strategy to curb terrorism. The committee was required to submit its report within three days, which is roughly the same time that will elapse between the writing of this article and its publication in Dawn.

Government committees usually take longer to deliberate on issues such as national strategy. The very complexity of the topic invariably consumes months if not years, rather than days.

Following the 9/11 attack in 2001, for example, the US government issued its National Security Strategy on Sept 17, 2002. Its revision came almost four years later on March 16, 2006. Both documents were unequivocal in the expressed determination to “actively fight terror”. The 2002 strategy acknowledged that the US could not build “a safer, better world alone”. Its plan therefore was to rely upon “alliances and multilateral institutions” to augment its strength, hence the US-Nato coalition in the war on terror.

The 2006 strategy declared that the US intended to be primus inter pares, to be primus even when there were no pares. “We must maintain a military without peer,” President George W. Bush warned the terrorists, aware no doubt that the Kremlin and Beijing were also eavesdropping.

Bush’s resolve to “fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country” needs not only a strong military but also a powerful, omnipresent navy. For the first time in America’s history, the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have produced jointly a Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power, released in October 2007.

Belatedly recognising that the oceans cover three quarters of our planet and therefore make neighbours of us all, the US intends to use its formidable sea power to “help friends in need and to confront and defeat aggression far from our shores”.

To those who wonder what the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was doing in our neighbourhood, the maritime strategy provides the answers. The US aim is to “employ global reach, persistent presence, and operational flexibility inherent in US sea power”. This will be characterised by “regionally concentrated, forward-deployed task forces with the combat power to limit regional conflict.” Our own security strategists might like to factor in the defence of our vulnerable 1,064 km long southern coastline. The UK National Security Strategy, issued in March 2008, is an update on a policy first developed in 2002. It looks at global cooperation in more benign terms. It talks of “an interdependent world”, and even though it concedes that no state threatens the United Kingdom directly, it does apprehend threats which could affect the UK directly and/or undermine international stability. The new UK view of security has broadened from the “traditional focus of foreign, defence and security policies” to include “threats to individual citizens and to our way of life”.

The French government white paper on national security, issued in August 2008, focuses on five strategic functions: knowledge and anticipation, prevention, deterrence, protection and intervention. Germany despite being “one of the safest countries in the world” feels threatened by “terrorism, organised crime, energy by resource dependency, the proliferation of WMD, regional conflicts, failed states, migration, pandemics and epidemics”. Everything, except latent neo-fascism.

Russia’s security concerns are from weak state structures on its periphery, economic vulnerability and socio-economic degeneration within. China’s post-Cold War apprehensions are macroeconomic instability, domestic social and political instability and regional instability.

With such a formidable array of international preparedness, it might be useful to examine whether such military bludgeons are in fact the right weapons with which to defeat an amorphous enemy such as international terrorism. Are we using swords to duel with wraiths?

Who are these spectral terrorist groups? Unlike freedom movements such as the IRA or the Kenyan Mau Mau or the South African ANC, modern insurrectionists wear no labels. The Australian security apparatus posts a list of 19 terrorist organisations. Most of them appear, disappear and then reappear. Take the Ansar al-Sunna (formerly the Ansar Al-Islam). Listed by the Australians on March 27, 2003, it was re-listed on March 27, 2005, and again two years later on March 27, 2007. These organisations follow “the balloon principle”. Squeezed at one end, they emerge elsewhere. No one knows under what pseudonym it operates today or where.

Whatever the formal identity of such terrorists, one thing is certain. Terrorism is not a pensionable job. Despite the statistics, though, not all of them meet a violent end. A study was conducted recently by Martin Libicki and Seth R. Jones of the Rand Corporation. After examining 649 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, it finds that they cease for two major reasons: “members decide to adopt non-violent tactics and join the political process (43 per cent), or local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members of the group (40 per cent)”. It concludes that “military force has rarely been the primary reason how terrorist groups have ended (10 per cent)”.

Those charged with preparing our own national security strategy will no doubt take into account the experience of other countries, especially since we are their co-partners in the war on terror. What we need to reassure them is that we are on the same side, that we are victims more than protagonists, and that we recognise that national security is a national risk that affects 160 million. A strategy, even if it can be produced within three days, has no hope of succeeding if it postulates only national security and ignores private insecurities.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

The threat from within

PAKISTANIS have risen to the occasion when faced by challenges: the 1965 war and the earthquake of 2005 are cases in point. Pakistan is once again faced by an existential challenge by groups that go by the generic name of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The audacity and effectiveness of the latest attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad proves that the capacity of the militants to cause havoc is increasing over time. It has had disastrous consequences for our fragile economy, the morale of society and for the image of the country.

What is to be done? Integrated strategic planning on how to combat this menace at the national level has been missing. The government’s response has been local rather than national, in fact that of a firefighter: send in the army or the Frontier Constabulary to Swat and Fata, and the police will take care of the problem in the cities.

Unless the terrorists are isolated through the mobilisation of public opinion against the mass murders of innocent civilians, the war cannot be won. Public support is critical for winning an asymmetric war, but no effort has gone into mobilising it in a systematic and methodical manner.

There is a crying need to build a consensus on the issue amongst the political parties, media and civil society; the challenge and threat to the country is too big for the government to deal with on its own. The calling of an in-camera joint session of the parliament to discuss foreign policy and national security issues is a step in the right direction. The role of the ulema and religious leaders of all persuasions is central to winning public support. Fatwas and khutbas from every mosque on Fridays must declare these mass murders and suicide bombing as going against the tenets of faith. A similar mobilisation of the media and civil society is also needed.

What is preventing the all-out mobilisation of the nation is a misapprehension that we are fighting America’s war and not our own; this confusion is further compounded by the naïve assumption that ‘no Muslim could have carried out the bombing of the Marriott’. As swathes of Pakistani territory are overrun by militias and warlords defying the writ of the state, enforcing their own rough and ready laws, beheading our security personnel at pleasure, Pakistanis must ask whether any state can survive this state of anarchy.

What if the Americans and the Nato forces walk away from Afghanistan, will these self-styled militias disappear? Baitullah Mehsud or Maulana Fazlullah are fighting an ideological war to change the nature of the Pakistani state and society, and are not about to ride into the sunset with the departure of the Americans. The more pusillanimous our response, the more audacious and deadly will be their attacks. Their power comes from the power to destroy, and their worldview is both violent and nihilistic.

The second problem is that of administrative incompetence. Given the scale of the terrorist threat that the country is facing, we need a specialised section of the police service, or a different force altogether, trained and equipped for confronting this dreadful menace. Our cops manning the check posts in Islamabad are sitting ducks and an easy prey for the next terrorist who decides to strike.

As for our intelligence agencies, they have been kept busy by successive governments in monitoring the opposition, and must change their focus. It is time that we stopped being in denial and realised that the threat emanates from within, and therefore is more dangerous. That a six-wheel dumper could be driving around in the Red Zone laden with 600 kg of deadly explosives is a testament to the laxity of the system. As it transpired, some cop did alert the authorities, but it was too late.

Despite the relatively recent experience of major fires in the National Assembly and the Shaheed-i-Millat Secretariat, and the millions allocated to the fire brigade for equipment, the fire brigade failed to deliver. People including the Czech ambassador died trapped in the fire. Did Marriott have its own emergency plan? As the CCTV cameras showed, its own security staff was scurrying around confused, with one of them vainly attempting to extinguish the fire in the truck’s engine with a toy-like fire extinguisher. Do these four- and five-star hotels have fire exits in their buildings? Does CDA have regulations for all the buildings in Islamabad to have fire exits, and are they ensuring that those regulations are implemented? The questions are many and the answers few, but here is an opportunity for the administrations of all the cities to get their act together.

This war will not be won by tanks and gunship helicopters alone. The government must make a national level strategy to mobilise opinion and isolate the enemy; and maintain a well-oiled administrative machinery to deal with terrorist attacks. Once we accept that this is not going to be a six-day war, we can and will overcome. The alternative is being “bombed into Stone Age”.