Rationality in religion

THE holy Quran is the supreme constitution and the source of all laws for Muslims all over the world. All our previous constitutions, including the much mutilated ones, assign sovereignty over the entire universe to Almighty Allah alone. And the people of Pakistan can exercise the authority within the limits prescribed by Him as a sacred trust.

Thus there is nothing to prevent the people and its representatives to exercise this trust for the greatest good of the greatest number. Change and renewal are the sine qua non for a civilization to grow and progress. A liberal interpretation justifying equal treatment of minorities, including women, falls within that ambit.

Unfortunately our bigoted and benighted approach has foreclosed all options of establishing a just, enlightened and egalitarian society, thereby inviting opprobrium of the West. Women have been relegated to the status of sub-humans by the regressive legislation imposed by General Ziaul Haq in the name of Islam, and continued afterwards for fear of offending the clergy.

The New York Times in its Op-Ed of November 27, 2002, by Thomas L. Friedman under the caption “Defusing the Holy Bomb” has highlighted the plight of the Muslims all over the world. In this article, President George W. Bush purports to address leaders of the Muslim world. In his words, all the problems afflicting the Muslims “have to do with the rise within your midst of a deeply intolerant strain of Islam....” He goes on to say, that the present situation of the Muslims “is a response to your failing states, squandered oil wealth, broken ideologies and generations of autocracy and illiteracy”.

The president advises the Muslim leaders that “the decent, but passive Muslim Centre must go to war against this harsh fundamentalism” instead of allowing the inevitability of a civilizational clash with horrendous consequences. Among the problems highlighted by him are “no faith will make rote memorization of ancient texts, separation of critical enquiry and dissent, subjugation of women and a servile deference to authority the recipe for anything other than civilizational decline”.

Friedman is not alone in condemnation of our mindset. It is time we took the criticism seriously. After all, we cannot design the world to order. Nor can we freeze ourselves in a time warp. Islam has no priesthood. The laws of inheritance and the value of their evidence negate the claim that women have better rights under Islam. Not only that, the claim to be one Ummah is far from a fact. We are divided among nation states. Even Arabs do not speak with one voice.

Resort to Shariah law is one such area, which evokes a negative response from the West, particularly the punishment like stoning to death. Without accomplishing much, such provisions offend against the sense of decency and justice of the West. Since these punishments are in actual fact not carried out, there is no wisdom in provoking the West into condemning our Shariah as a whole, and the Muslims.

Criminal law in Sharia falls under three separate categories: a) Hudood laws, known as Quranic offences; b) Qisas and Diyat, (the laws of homicide and hurt); and c) Ta’zir, (crimes punishable at the discretion of the judge).

Hadood Ordinance, including “The Offence of Zina” (rape) is one such piece of legislation, which cloaks brutality and requires a critical review. It was in 1979 that the military ruler Mohammad Ziaul Haq issued the ordinance, providing for punishment as ordained by the holy Quran under Hadd. This ordinance defined zina was as wilful sexual intercourse between two persons not validly married. Punishment prescribed for rape was stoning to death at a public place or punishment with whipping numbering 100 stripes at a public place and with such other punishments, including a sentence of death, as the court may deem fit.

The manner of stoning to death has also been prescribed in the ordinance. Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict may start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot dead, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped.

The age for the punishment is 15 years or above. If the offender is not an adult he may be punished with imprisonment for a term extending to five years and also by awarding whipping not exceeding 30 stripes.

To prove an offence, confession would be enough. In the alternative, four Muslim adult male witnesses (female witnesses have been treated as incompetent or unreliable) must give evidence. In case any of the four witnesses resiles from the testimony, the offender will still be punished, but with only 30 stripes and minimum of four years imprisonment.

In our feudal society, largely rural, women are treated as no more than a property and are usually punished to humiliate their male relatives. The law provides an opportunity for the convoluted sick individuals of our society to place a woman in such a position that even if she is raped, she is left to face charges of adultery. It is impossible for a rape victim to find four male witnesses to testify that she was subjected to rape. Her willingness is assumed by the mere fact of her pregnancy.

Abuse of the ordinance in a society infested with feudal mindset is widespread. It is not unusual to persecute divorced wives or girls who refuse to accept the parent’s diktat. “Karo kari/siah kari” is used to justify murder of enemies as well as expendable female members of the family. Illiteracy, stark poverty and widespread corruption among the police and the magistrates make miscarriage of justice all but certain.

A staggering 70 per cent of the women prisoners in Pakistan are detained under the Hudood Ordinance, according to figures collected from various organizations. According to an earlier report of the Human Rights Commission (1993), around 75 to 80 per cent of all women prisoners faced charges under Hudood Ordinance. Suspects of Hadd offences are in most cases the poor and the illiterate. In Punjab alone out of 789 women prisoners, 387 were held under Zina Ordinance. Over the past two and a half decades, thousands have been sentenced under this ordinance, and many more are awaiting trial.

According to the Human Rights Commission, there were 717 reported cases of sexual violence in 1997 in Lahore alone; sixtyfive per cent of the victims were minor girls and 30 per cent were victims of gang-rape. According to this report, after every 12 hours four women were raped and one was gang-raped. The instance of rape increased three-fold in 1996 over the figure for 1995.

The female victim of rape is presumed to be guilty because pregnancy is proof enough. The first such case after the imposition of Hudood Ordinance was that of Fahmida who was a minor at that time. Another case was that of a minor Jehan Mira raped by two male relatives. She was herself sentenced to 100 lashes. Sahiwal’s Safia Bibi, unable to identify her rapist for being blind, was given a punishment of 30 lashes.

Then there was a recent case of Zafran Bibi of Kohat who was rescued from stoning to death as a result of national and international outcry. Nigeria is going through similar convulsions on account of a woman having been sentenced to death by stoning for having mothered a child out of wedlock.

Mukhtara Mai of Muzaffargarh (Meerwala), gang-raped by four tribals under ‘judicial’ retribution decreed by a tribal panchayat on June 22, 2002, is another case which would have attracted severe punishments for the victims under Hudood Law, had the case not received wide publicity both here and abroad. Jirgas or non-official courts routinely decide cases in rural areas and order execution, demolition of houses, expulsion from homes, stoning to death and the barter of girls through summary trials.

Meerwala is a village in Tehsil Jatoi, District Muzaffargarh in central Punjab. On June 22, 2002 a tribal jirga met and pronounced punishment of gang-rape by four persons on a 35-year-old woman named Mukhtara Bibi. She was taken to a nearby room when the assembly watched from the outside and four men went in and raped her and turned her out half naked. She suffered this fate because her accusers, belonging to a relatively more powerful tribe, suspected her 14-year-old brother, Abdul Shakoor, to have relations with one of their women, Salma. The punishment on Mukhtara Bibi was in addition to the punishment Abdul Shakoor received at the hands of the tribals who not only sodomized him but also cut him with knife and through the use of their influence had him jailed. Had the event not received wide publicity the criminals would have gone unpunished. Abdul Shakoor would still be in jail and Mukhtara Bibi condemned to eternal dolour and disgrace.

Human Rights organizations, including women’s organizations, have since raised a hue and cry against the Hudood Ordinance and its abuses. Since 1985, there have been a number of democratic as well as undemocratic governments and yet “the law” has not been repealed. All it requires is another ordinance by the present all-powerful ruler. After all, the ordinance is the embodiment of a general’s notion of Islamic law, which he promulgated without even involving various Ulema or circulating the draft. According to Dr. Faqir Hussain, former secretary of Pakistan Law Commission, it should have been repealed immediately. It has achieved nothing except bad name for the country.

But the courage required to undo the damage is circumscribed by expected fury of the clergy, and an insatiable desire to hang on to power for as long as possible. The good of the people is far from the minds of the rulers. It should not be difficult for an un-elected individual exercising absolute and untrammelled power over 140 million people of this country to undo the damage to half its population through an ordinance. The sheer number of ordinances issued lately for purely political purposes has put Wah Ordnance Factory to shame. Why not one more ordinance for a good cause?

E-mail:sshusain@hotmail.com

As our population grows

THE UNFPA’s State of the World Population 2002 released last week should give much food for thought to policy makers in Pakistan. The first eye-opening information it gives us is that Pakistan’s population stands at 148.7 million.

The national census four years ago had put the head count at 130.5 million. If we accept the 1998 data as authentic — it was the product of a massive and costly exercise — the demographic growth has been phenomenal. That is not all. According to the UNFPA projections, Pakistan will have a population of 344.2 million in the year 2050 and we will be the fourth most populous state in the world after India, China and the US, in that order. What is most worrying in this mass of figures is the very high population growth rate (2.5 per cent) which is higher than many other heavily populated countries such as India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and China.

So the moot point is why Pakistan’s family planning programme has been such a failure? True, it is now explicitly recognized that population growth is very closely linked to the economic and social progress of a nation. But this has to be accompanied with a visible effort in the family planning sector because the two are very closely interrelated. Large families, apart from other factors, hamper economic development.

The UNFPA report specifically identifies investment in health, education and gender equality as being vital to creating an impact on the fertility rate of a country. It has generally been observed that the higher the level of education of the people, especially women, the better their health status and the less the social prejudice against women, the smaller is their family size. The statistics quoted for Pakistan in all these areas are so dismal that it comes as no surprise that the total fertility rate (the average number of children that would be born to a woman in her reproductive years) is dismayingly high at 5.08.

Pakistan’s failure to educate its citizens 70 per cent of women and 41 per cent of men are illiterate and provide them a modicum of health care has resulted in not producing the “population effect” on economic growth. But one single factor which has had the most profound impact on the fertility rate is the low status of women in our society. This has been documented regularly in reports published by many international agencies and the data produced have not registered much of an improvement over the years.

By not empowering women and giving them the dignity that is due to them, the state and society have virtually ensured the failure of the family planning programme. It is difficult to quantify the esteem and value of women in social and economic terms — housework and the unpaid labour of women are not a component of the GNP while in economically productive employment women invariably receive lower wages.

But the UNFPA report, and the earlier one of the UNICEF’s State of the world’s children, 2002, give data which clearly establish the social prejudice against women. This is reflected in the wide gender gap in education, health and other areas of life which logically should not have been there if women had not been discriminated against.

How does the low esteem of women translate itself into high birth rates? It has been found, especially in those classes of society which are educationally deprived, that the family and social pressures on parents to produce sons are immense. Sons are not only a status symbol and are the flagbearers of the family name, they are also regarded as an economic insurance, especially in old age. Given these attitudes, it is not strange that the size of the family is determined by the sex of the children the mother produces and in which sequence. Hence, it is plain that the two-children family norm promoted by the Population Division will never be popular until the girl child gains widespread acceptance — even when she does not have a male sibling.

While this is an important element in the success or failure of the population programme, another aspect to be considered is the contraceptive delivery system. Without adequate contraceptive prevalence (only 20 per cent in Pakistan according to the UNFPA), it is not possible to service the needs of the people.

The fact is that considerable awareness has been created over the last few decades through information, education and communication strategies of the family planning projects. Today it is said that 97 per cent of men and women have considerable awareness about contraceptives and the importance of the small family norms. A very large number of them even want to plan their families but do not have access to any contraceptive services.

This unmet need in Pakistan is a testimony to the failure of the population programme. The problem is that these are issues which are not addressed earnestly and no solution is sought for the challenges they pose. Where solutions are available, they are not explored because vested interests vehemently oppose any change in strategy.

For instance, the UNFPA, under its previous executive director, Dr Nafis Sadiq, had strongly recommended the merger of the health and population set-ups because investments in reproductive health are regarded as crucial accompaniments of investments in disease control. It is believed that it is cost-effective and credible to have health care providers who enjoy public confidence to look after the reproductive health and contraceptive needs of their clients without any extra investment. For many years this idea was resisted tooth and nail by the powers that be in Islamabad.

Although the health policy announced in 2001 by the Musharraf government accepted in principle the rational approach proposed by the UNFPA, the service infrastructure and budget continue to be segregated.

Taking the broader picture one must ponder not just the consequences of this short-sighted approach to the population sector. It is more important to analyze the causes of this mindset. Some of the factors leading to a high population growth rate are pretty palpable notably, poverty, social backwardness, economic underdevelopment and low status of women. Each of these accentuates the others and collectively they make their impact on the population growth rate.

It is, however, interesting to note that the countries which are not doing too well in the population sector also lack political maturity and democratic institutions. This is not by sheer coincidence. The political will and commitment a government displays in promoting the social well-being (which would include family planning) of the people is directly linked to the fact of its political power base. If it is a democratic and representative government rooted in participatory traditions, it would be under popular pressure to adopt policies which promote social welfare and advancement of the citizens. Its dependence on popular votes in a democratic dispensation would make it impossible for it to overlook popular needs.

In undemocratic societies it suits the vested interests to perpetuate high population growth rate and the concomitant poverty. People mired in poverty with large families are so hopelessly trapped in the survival struggle that they have no time and energy to participate in political life. They cannot sustain movements which destabilize unpopular governments. In states with low literacy rates and poor education levels, governments can be exploitative and oppressive because the citizens lack the education and skills to challenge the government with a poor human rights record.

From the UNFPA’s report one can identify the high fertility rate countries as the ones which would never qualify as models of good governance. For instance, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Bhutan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and occupied Palestinian territories in this region have TFRs of more than five. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa also have high TFRs.

With all the socio-economic factors so closely interlinked in a vicious circle, a calculated effort is needed to break it. Whether the political government will have the time and commitment to attend to issues such as population growth, gender equality, education, health care, we will have to wait and see.

Since demography is so directly concerned with numbers and statistics, it should be pointed out here that practically all the data given by the UN agencies differ from what the government sources give out. Needless to say, the government paints a rosier picture. Some of the figures stated by the UNFPA are also believed to be too optimistic. For instance, the maternal mortality rate of 200 per 100,000 births as stated by the UNFPA is challenged by professionals in the field. Dr Sadiqa Jafari, the chairperson of the committee on maternal health, says that from her experience she finds the rate is actually much higher but is under-reported in the absence of any scientific system of data collection.

Art in exile

NO country of the world has suffered so much devastation human, physical, intellectual and even spiritual during the last twenty years or so as Afghanistan. It was never a rich country, but its people, although most of them poor, were accustomed to an easy-going and contented existence.

Hunger and deprivation were not common, there had been no colonizing European master to siphon off natural resources, internecine war was unknown despite the tribal system, and the Afghans lived without exciting envy on the part of the neighbours to enslave them. Most of all, they were proud of being Afghans and, unlike us, were genuinely ready to die for their liberty and independence.

After these words, a brief history of modern Afghanistan seems called for, but this is not an occasion for that. Suffice it to say that at first widespread destruction came from the communist invasion and the jihad against it, and then, paradoxically, at the hands of the jihadis themselves. They were kind enough to spare human lives and the country’s infrastructure but became the enemy of all that is culturally beautiful and necessary for ordinary men and women from an aesthetic point of view.

Only that art and music, so limited in concept that it is mind-boggling, were permissible which the Taliban approved of, while the sight of women was taboo. Education too suffered at their hands since it was circumscribed by their narrow view of it. Nothing in known history has done so much to give Islam a bad name in the modern world as their policies and principles. At times it appeared as if there was no hope for the country, but Fate did turn a corner, although Afghanistan’s most cherished attribute of national unity was badly affected by the very circumstances that came to its rescue.

This piece is basically about art in Afghanistan which was a great sufferer. The communist regimes were not averse to it, but they didn’t like anyone who didn’t agree with them, so all such Afghans fled to Pakistan. The Taliban were opposed to both art and its practitioners, so the artists too fled to Pakistan. It is a magnificent story how they continued to paint and draw in exile and make a living, and how they held exhibitions and even sold their work, assisted and encouraged by humanitarian organisations from various parts of the world.

When last year’s momentous change came about in Afghanistan, many of them, specially those old enough to feel nostalgic about the homeland, decided to go back, but others, the younger lot, who can be said to have grown up here, wanted to remain and work in an atmosphere that was more conducive for the development of their talent and maturing of their artistic sensibility. This caused distress in families, but then they consoled themselves with the thought that home, whether Pakistan or Afghanistan, was not far off.

The heart-warming story of Afghan art in exile needed to be recorded and told to the world. It was not an easy task, requiring devotion and research, as also scholarship and hard work. None of the exiles themselves had the resources to do that. But in the universal eagerness to help Afghanistan stand on its feet again, UNESCO took the initiative to sponsor an illustrated directory of the country’s refugee artists and details about their lives and their work. The project was generously aided by the embassy of the Netherlands in Islamabad.

Fortunately it was able to get the help of a notable exile, Professor Ghulam Mohiyuddin Shabnam Ghaznavi, a renowned artist/painter and a former teacher in Kabul University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, who commendably undertook the assignment, gathering works of art from all around and preserving them in a consolidated form. So says Ingeborg Breines, UNESCO’s director based in Islamabad, hoping that the publication would make a significant contribution to the process of reconstruction and reconciliation of the Afghan society and help in restoring the belief of the Afghan artists in themselves. To this one may add that when an independent country is shattered, this belief in oneself becomes the most important requirement for the people.

As Professor Ghaznavi says in the preface, “War destroys society and its fundamental elements of civilisation, such as its culture and its artistic product... It has caused the collapse of many civilisations which have never recovered... Fierce fighting compelled our people to leave the motherland. Tens of thousands of families have become homeless and gone to America, Australia, Europe, Africa and various Asian countries... Artists who seek refuge outside the country seem to suffer more than the ret in view of their sensitivity.”

Afghan Refugee Artists is a beautiful book, printed in Islamabad and containing innumerable reproductions in colour of the 54 artists included in the album, including a few women. There is a photograph of each artist, along with three or four of his works, a short history of his life, education and artistic attainments, as also a message from him. I can imagine the happiness and self-confidence that this must have given to the exiled artists, most of whom have had to adopt other vocations in order to feed themselves and their families. A truly brave lot, I must say. I have been visiting the exhibitions of Afghan art held in Islamabad during the past ten years, mostly with the assistance of the cultural sections of foreign embassies, as also encouragement from the Pakistan National Council of the Arts. The artists have mainly kept to themselves, though they have interacted with local artists, especially in Peshawar where most of them have passed their exile. I have no idea how many of them have opted to go back after last year’s momentous change in Afghanistan, but even if all of them return I am sure they will carry an imprint of Pakistan’s art scene on their future work.

Like all their countrymen, the artists of Afghanistan are nameless heroes, and just as the terrible conditions in the country have given strength to the nation as a whole instead of depressing it, one hopes that the artists too will use their courage and determination to bring about a cultural renaissance among their people. I would like to see them visiting Pakistan often to renew their links. More than that I wish batches of Pakistani artists could go and see the ravaged country for themselves and further cement those links. Maybe our ministry of culture is able to view this suggestion positively.

The costs of war

THE latest round of estimates of the cost of a potential Iraq war has rekindled the mistaken suggestions that bubbled up last September. Then, Lawrence B. Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser, guessed that a war might cost $100 billion to $200 billion; lately various think-tankers and economists have scribbled on the backs of envelopes and produced similar numbers. This exercise has prompted debate about whether this is a lot or a little.

It’s only 1 per cent or 2 per cent of U.S. annual output, not much compared with the 15 per cent of GDP that the nation devoted to the Korean War or 12 per cent for the Vietnam War.—The Washington Post

The return of Dr Death

IN A conversation with a reporter during last month’s Nato summit in Prague, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s spokeswoman Francoise Ducros reacted in a way most people around the world would find it easy to sympathize with when the name of George W. Bush came up. “What a moron,” she said.

The reporter in question took the outburst in his stride and did not mention it in the despatch he filed. But another journalist who had overheard the remarks used them as the basis for a front-page report.

In a damage-limitation exercise, Chretien found himself making excuses for both Ducros and Bush. His aide, he said somewhat disingenuously, had actually been defending the US president. Who, he added, “is my friend. He is not a moron at all.” In a letter to the editor, another Canadian apparently concurred when he wrote: “Francoise Ducros’s ill-considered comment is a grave and unforgivable insult to morons everywhere.”

Chretien was initially reluctant to accept Ducros’s resignation, but when the Iraqi newspaper Al Thawra pounced upon the remarks, noting that “Bush has become the most hated person in the world .... who is given all sorts of bad names, especially in the West”, he realized he would have to let her go in the interests of US-Canadian relations, which have lately been fairly cool anyway.

Like other reasonable governments in the West, the Chretien administration has not blindly aligned itself with the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes and all the rest of it. Which may help explain why Canada unlike Britain and Australia has thus far been spared the unwanted attentions of Al Qaeda and its bloody-minded subsidiaries.

Meanwhile, there continues to be considerable concern in the US over how a remarkable series of intelligence failures facilitated the abominable atrocities of September 11, 2001. That is not an area Bush and his closest subordinates have been keen to explore. After all, acknowledging that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were among the organizations that, unwittingly or otherwise, aided and abetted the terrorists does not exactly suit the administration’s purposes.

As pressure grew for a commission of inquiry, someone in the administration to whom the Ducros description could aptly be applied came up with the idea of naming as its head someone with a well-deserved reputation for concealing secrets. The self-ordained Bismarck of his generation, whose policies are deemed responsible for millions of deaths. And, to boot, a certifiable liar.

Enter or, rather, re-enter Dr Henry Kissinger.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Kissinger, despite arriving in New York at the age of 10 with his parents, remarkably never lost his Mittel-European accent. It is certainly possible, though, that the guttural effect was deliberately cultivated as part of his persona.

During his tenure as a high-level academic, Kissinger served as an unofficial consultant to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but it was with the advent of Richard M. Nixon that he came into his own. Even before Nixon named him his national security adviser (the slot currently occupied by Condoleezza Rice), Herr Doktor had played a crucial role in scuttling negotiations with North Vietnam, since a peace deal under a Democratic administration would have dealt a blow to Nixon’s chances of securing the White House.

Nixon had contested the 1968 presidential election on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. His and Kissinger’s strategy for achieving that end was an escalation of the war effort rather than a negotiated withdrawal. Carpet-bombing accounted for hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, to say nothing of the strategy of razing villages to the ground to “save them” from communism.

In time the offensive was expanded to include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos — which not only violated US laws but paved the ground, in Cambodia’s case, for the subsequent supremacy of the murderous Khmer Rouge. (It is worth noting, as an outstanding example of Washington’s realpolitik, that although the ideological compulsions that drove the Pol Pot regime to wipe out up to a third of Cambodia’s population were supposedly derived from the communist tradition, after Vietnam had liberated Phnom Penh, the US and its allies displayed few compunctions about feeding, training and arming Khmer Rouge guerillas through much of the 1980s.)

When peace talks with Vietnam eventually did get under way, Kissinger was the chief US negotiator. His efforts to secure a face-saving deal for the obvious aggressor were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. To his enduring credit, the Vietnamese co-recipient, Le Duc Tho, turned down the offer to share the prize with a mass murderer. Kissinger had the gall to accept. The Nobel occasion provided the cue for the satirical American singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer to suspend his career. “It was at that moment that satire died,” he noted. “There was nothing more to say after that.”

Not surprisingly, the peace prize did nothing to temper Kissinger’s tendency to confuse belligerence and imperial arrogance with diplomacy. In the lead-up to the award, Kissinger had been up to his eyeballs in efforts to unseat the elected government of Chile’s Socialist president Salvador Allende; success took the shape of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. But what came to pass on that dark day had been set in motion years earlier, even before Allende’s assumption of power.

In 1970, the constitutionalist head of Chile’s armed forces, General Reni Schneider, was resisting pressure to mount a pre-emptive coup d’etat. He had to be removed from the scene, and the hired killers who did so on a Santiago street were armed with US-supplied weapons. The murder returned to haunt Kissinger two years ago, when Schneider’s relatives filed a suit against him in a US court, implicating him as a key instigator. Two days later, on the 28th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup, Osama bin Laden’s shock troops struck, and the case against Kissinger vanished from the headlines.

His hunting grounds extended well beyond Indochina and Chile, of course. He was known to be enthusiastic about Operation Condor, which was jointly mounted during the 1970s by right-wing military regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina and was aimed exclusively at kidnapping or killing political opponents in exile. Among the targets was General Carlos Prats, Pinochet’s predecessor as Chile’s army chief. Like Schneider, he too had refused to stage a coup. Junior officers forced him to resign shortly before Allende was overthrown; he subsequently went into exile in Argentina, but was hunted down in 1974. It may have been a case of pure vindictiveness; on the other hand, it is also possible that Prats had to be eliminated because he knew too much.

When in 1978 Kissinger, by then a private citizen, was invited to Buenos Aires by military ruler General Jorge Rafael Videla, he praised the junta for having done “an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces”. In Argentina, the number of left-wing opponents eliminated by the regime ran into the tens of thousands.

True to form, Kissinger was also on exceptionally good terms with other military dictators around the world, and an enthusiastic proponent of extermination campaigns. In December 1975, for example, Kissinger, then serving as the secretary of state whom Gerald Ford had inherited from Nixon, found himself and Ford closeted with General Suharto on the eve of the Indonesian strongman’s invasion of East Timor. Suharto brazenly sought US “understanding” in the event of finding it “necessary to take rapid or drastic action”. Responded Ford, during whose tenure foreign policy was entirely Kissinger’s domain: “We will understand and will not press you on the issue.” Kissinger, ever practical, added: “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” With deniability on his mind, he also suggested that Suharto should launch his offensive after he and Ford were back in Washington.

At least one-third of East Timor’s population was wiped out in the invasion that followed a crime that went unredressed for nearly 25 years.

The same sort of “understanding” had earlier been extended to General Yahya Khan’s campaign of genocide in East Pakistan. In the related confrontation with India, Kissinger had infamously advised Nixon to “tilt towards Pakistan”. He subsequently described Bangladesh as a “basket case” a description he would undoubtedly be prepared to extend to East Timor, were anyone to seek his opinion.

Yahya also served as the conduit for Washington’s opening to China, which changed the complexion of the cold war; in 1971, Kissinger used a trip to Islamabad as a cover for a secret visit to Beijing. The formal recognition of China by the US was long overdue, of course, but it took the shape not of a concession to reality but a means of putting the Soviet Union in its place. Since then, Kissinger’s attachment to China has grown to the extent that even the Tiananmen Square massacre failed to interfere with his lucrative role as an apologist for the regime in Beijing. As far as Pakistan is concerned, he threatened Z.A. Bhutto with dire consequences for pursuing a nuclear programme. Although he was out of power by then, July 5, 1977 and April 4, 1979, must have afforded him considerable satisfaction.

Of course, the same could arguably be said of other ghosts from the past who now make up the core of the Bush administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, for starters. It could certainly be said of Iran-Contra scandal veterans John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams and Otto Reich. And of the more recent recruit Brent Scowcroft.

If Bush had set out to offend international opinion, he could not have done much better. His crusade to resurrect the worst elements of recent Republican administrations has reached its apogee with Kissinger’s appointment. Dr Death’s return to semi-official prominence is an insult to all Americans not least to the memory of those who perished on September 11. And it constitutes a perturbing omen for the rest of the world, too.

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com