Sick unit owners seek concessions

The owners of sick units of the local industrial estate have urged the government to review the package for the revival of their factories. They impressed upon the government functionaries that to increase industrial production, they should be granted maximum facilities.

They demanded that the relevant government departments, including Water and Power Development Authority like the State Bank which provided concessions for repayment of their loans, should announce a liberal policy towards them.

According to the owners, the government's policy will be that sick units may avail themselves of the concession of 50 per cent payment of their total Wapda arrears while the remaining amount will be paid in three instalments.

Surcharges and fixed charges will also be included in the defaulting amount. But, the owners of sick and idle units have demanded that the electricity surcharge and fixed charges should be waived off and the defaulting amounts recovered from them in three instalments.

They have offered that if this is was not acceptable to Wapda, the defaulters should be given a chance to pay only 10 per cent of the defaulting amount while the remaining arrears should be realized in three instalments.

Local industrialists have also asked the government that the under-trial cases of loan recovery should be withdrawn from the banking courts to promote a better relationship between the owners and banks, which should initiate a dialogue for the recovery of loans.

They have proposed that new power connection charges should be waived off by Wapda, and the transformers purchased by factory owners be declared their property.

Currently, several industrial units are lying idle due to which their owners are facing economic problems and the workers are jobless. The government has adopted various measures to tackle unemployment and price-hike, but so far it has been unable to get the desired results.

Bahawalpur is a backward area. Industry is already facing crisis here due to the non-cooperation of financial institutions and government departments. Therefore, the situation demands that the local units be revived by granting them maximum incentives.

If the industries department, Wapda, banks and other relevant departments look into the legitimate demands of owners, the latter will be able to revive their units and play their role in strengthening the economy.

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Electioneering is gaining momentum for the bypolls on 102 vacant seats of UC Nazims, Naib Nazims, general and reserved seats of councillors and women in Bahawalpur district.

Scrutiny of nomination papers is in progress, and various rival groups have accelerated canvassing.

Although the election will be held on a non-party basis, the political parties, including the opposition's PPP Parliamentarian and PML-N, are out to field their respective candidates. But the majority of candidates is reportedly leaning towards the PML-Q with whose support they feel they would be able to capture the seats.

The break down of vacant seats is as follows: Bahawalpur tehsil 21, Ahmedpur East 13, Hasilpur tehsil 13 and Khairpur Tamewali tehsil 27. These include the slots of UC Nazims 7, Naib Nazims 2, Muslim general councillors 18, women general councillors 20 and Kissan, workers and minorities 54.

The four union councils of Ahmedpur East tehsil and two of Bahawalpur tehsil are important and tough contests are expected there. In Ahmedpur East tehsil, federal parliamentary secretary for science and technology Makhdoom Syed Ali Hasan Gilani vacated the seat of Kulan union council Nazim, while Sardar Aamir Yar Warren, parliamentary secretary (former PPP and now patriots) vacated the Nazim seat of Kotla Musa Khan UC.

Besides, MPA Sardar Khalid Mahmood Warren and Mr Rehmani, PML-Q general secretary, Bahawalpur district, vacated the UC Nazim seats of Dhoorkote and Mudpeerwah, respectively.

Now all these four stalwarts have finalized their groups to field their own men. However, it is surprising that the Ahmedpur East's influential political figure and former MNA Nawab Salahuddin Abbasi has not so far jumped into the fray to support the candidates of his choice.

Perhaps he is preoccupied with the issue of the distribution/devolution of the property of his late grandfather, Nawab Sir Sadiq Mohammed Khan Abbasi.

In union councils No 1 and 27 of the Bahawalpur city, there might be a direct encounter between PPP (Parliamentarian) and PML-N candidates, who are now allies in ARD.

The UC No 1 Nazim seat fell vacant when PPP's Syed Tathearul Hasan resigned to contest the Punjab Assembly seat as a PPP candidate, but lost. Similarly, the then UC 27 Nazim, Malik Iqbal Channar, vacated his seat to contest the Punjab Assembly seat from a PML-N ticket and was elected.

In Khairpur Tamewali tehsil, the group led by MNA Mian Riaz Husain Peerzada, who is opposed to district Nazim Tariq Cheema, has a strong hold on tehsil politics as Riaz's nephew is tehsil Nazim and it is hoped that in the byelection too his men may sweep.

Pacification woes

As a visibly rattled US administration comes ever so reluctantly to terms with the utter ruin of its pre-invasion vision of Iraqi masses hailing their Anglo-American liberators, the acute dilemma for George W. Bush is whether he can 'bug out' of Iraq with his political hide intact or else 'stay the course' in a meat-grinder occupation and somehow get re-elected this year, which, despite his huge campaign war chest, is no sure thing.

Neither option looks terribly appealing to fretful Republican Party hardliners who had plotted and pushed the disgraceful Iraq venture all along. Tough questions at last are surfacing regularly in the American mass media about the politically crafted data that served as flimsy evidence about Saddam's WMD.

Were US leaders deliberate liars, or else unwitting fools of their intelligence agencies? Which would you hurry to cast your ballot for? You see Bush's problem.

The Bush administration simply cannot pull out without installing its own reliable functionaries in Iraq to look after US corporate and geopolitical interests.

That is one reason why Secretary of State Colin Powell signalled that the US may back off a commitment to turn local power over to Iraqis (of any description) this summer. So what is the anxious White House to do? Why resort to more force, of course.

In the blinkered and truculent neo-conservative world view, the obvious response is to resurrect the glorious counter-insurgency programmes of yesteryear, which have been lovingly reinterpreted by right-wing scholars as a parade of proud success stories, including even the immense military intervention that so miserably failed: Vietnam.

So, according to these starry-eyed cheerleaders, counter-insurgency tactics, expertly deployed, assuredly will suppress the wide-scale Iraqi resistance in short order, or at least before the November election.

Winning, it is said, covers a multitude of sins, and so does the rewriting of history which is always an ongoing project of powerful elites, who thereby often wind up fooling themselves as much as others.

Some $3 billion of last year's Iraq appropriation budget in the US was earmarked to bankroll covert military and paramilitary teams in Iraq and elsewhere.

You don't need a military genius to tell you that these lethal measures will encompass not only armed Iraqi 'rebels,' as the Pentagon calls them, but just about any nationalist opponent of the US occupation, even non-violent ones.

"They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro told reporter Robert Dreyfuss of American Prospect magazine last month.

The CIA presence is increasing and is to be augmented by elite counterinsurgency units such as Delta Force and the Navy SEALs. Their ultimate objective, though, is to establish an Iraqi security force loyal to the US.

Local militiamen are mostly drawn from Iraqi exile groups who have plenty of long-nursed personal grudges to settle. Revenge killings of real or perceived Baathist loyalists already afflict Iraq.

Almost from the moment that the last helicopter fled from the roof of the US Saigon embassy in 1975, there has been a roaring trade in upbeat accounts depicting American counter-insurgency campaigns as brilliant benevolent enterprises.

One beholds with growing nausea the flow of deliriously deluded revisions of the Vietnam conflict which insist that the US ironically pulled out in January 1973 just as the war was going entirely America's way.

According to a prolific batch of pugnacious scholars, the US through its wise and tenacious application of land reform and police state tactics really had won the Vietnamese' hearts, won the Vietnamese' minds - and didn't know it. Imagine that. Force must be shown to work, at least on paper, for if it does not, then what are all the epauletted and think tank bullies to do?

One awfully typical example is a book, entitled Phoenix and The Birds of Prey, wherein the giddy author Mark Moyar describes the CIA-guided Phoenix assassination programme of 1967-72 as nobly intentioned, faultlessly conceived, and astonishingly accurate.

Only the 'bad guys' supposedly got hit. The Phoenix estimate for 'neutralized' enemy varies from 28,000 to twice that many, which is lot of 'precise' killings. But Phoenix wasn't as discriminating as conservative ideologues portray it.

In 1971 Barton Osborn testified before US Congress that over a year and a half as a Phoenix agent he "never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation." Osborne termed Phoenix bluntly a 'sterile, depersonalized murder programme.'

Yet, according to rightwing scholars, only 'guilty' Viet Cong were 'terminated with extreme prejudice' (an infamous bureaucratic euphemism of the era) whilst the allegedly passive peasantry were left undisturbed.

Pacification is hardly the endearing or effective strategy that conservatives like to believe. A Pakistani civil servant recalled visiting Saigon in 1959.

The US build-up was in its early stage but Yanks were becoming conspicuous in the sweltering streets. One afternoon he wryly asked a pretty bargirl if, because of their big spending habits, she were pro-American.

She startled him by breaking into tears. She explained that she, like most city people, had families back in the villages and no one knew from one day to the next if their relations had escaped American strafing and shelling.

Later, in 1966, on a peace mission one of us met an extremely elegant Vietnamese woman in Saigon who taught English at the University. (It was fairly easy to obtain a visa to Vietnam because Pakistan sided with the US, as it does today.)

When asked if it were possible to meet Viet Cong members, she bridled at the term, which the South Vietnamese regime derisively used to designate the resistance, and replied politely, "What do you mean? Do you mean a member of the Vietnamese liberation army? Then I am a member of the Viet Cong.

Everyone here is a Viet Cong. During the day I teach English and during nights I work for liberation." Asked if she felt disheartened living in these grim wartime conditions, she replied that these were the only conditions she knew since she was born during the Japanese occupation. Always war. She had seen many counter-insurgency programmes come and go.

By no means is counter-insurgency doctrine a purely western device. In pre-independence India the British installed plenty of interrogation centres for political prisoners and a particularly notorious one was the Mughal fort at Lahore where such eminent leaders of the independence movement as Jaya Parkash Narain were interrogated and suffered physical abuse.

Later, Pakistan inherited this colonial setup and much too seamlessly worked it into the vile system from which Hasan Nasir did not manage to emerge alive.

A dark period of Iraqi history

Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.

Al Qaeda has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though Al Qaeda is a Sunni-only organization. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an Al Qaeda operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.

Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind the recent carnage in Baghdad and Karbala, despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi survivors.

But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think that their own actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of civil war so intense that the Iraqis will go along with any plan the United States produces for Mesopotamia.

I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among France's Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim - the FLN against the ALN - which led to half a million dead souls.

And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin, Monaghan and Dundalk in 1974 which, as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer link, via Protestant 'loyalist' paramilitaries, to elements of British military security men. Pakistan has a history of sectarian conflict - for which the British, historically, are not blameless - so the slaughter in Quetta may well be unconnected with Iraq.

But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly coordinated. The same brain worked behind them. Was it a Sunni brain? When the occupation authorities' spokesman suggested that it was the work of Al Qaeda, he must have known what he was saying: that Al Qaeda is a Sunni movement, that the victims were Shias.

It's not that I believe Al Qaeda incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard, why they want to keep on emphasizing the danger of civil war.

Let's turn the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement which is fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq, 60 per cent of the Iraqis, against them? The last thing such a resistance would want is to have the majority of the Iraqis against it while fighting the world's only superpower.

So what about Al Qaeda? Repeatedly, the Americans and the new American-trained Iraqi police force have told us that the suicide bombers were "foreigners".

And so they may be. But can we have some real names, identities, nationalities?

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has talked of the hundreds of "foreign" fighters flooding across Saudi Arabia's "porous" borders. The American press have dutifully repeated all of this.

But who are the bombers? Where are the identities? Which countries do they come from? And since the Iraqi police keep announcing that they have found the passports of the bombers, can we have the passport numbers?

We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi history, in which dark and sinister events will take place. But an occupation authority which should regard civil war as the very last prospect it ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting 'civil war' in our ears and I worry about that. Especially when the bombs make it real. (c) The Independent