Distant millennium goals

NEXT week, 180 heads of state/government will meet in the UN for a summit to reaffirm their commitment to the millennium development goals (MDG) which they had adopted in 2000. This meeting is billed to be a historic one for mankind since the UN members will be reviewing the progress they made towards the goals they are expected to meet by 2015. All the goals have far-reaching implications for the survival of mankind. Thus the eradication of poverty, the achievement of universal primary education, the promotion of gender equality, the reduction of child mortality, the ensuring of environmental sustainability and others are issues of great significance as they can change the quality of life for millions. They envisage greater equity, social justice and respect for human rights. This in turn will impact on the political, strategic, security and socio-economic stability of states, including the industrialized and rich ones. Given the interdependence of nations in the globalized world of today, it is now widely recognized that poverty, under-development and oppression in one part of the world inevitably affects the remaining parts as well.

The MDGs are time-bound and lay down quantified targets so that progress can be measured. The summit will mark the 10-year countdown to 2015 by which time the goals should be achieved. Will they be? The UNDP, which released its annual Human Development Report on Wednesday, pointed out that “if the current trends continue, the MGDs will be missed by a wide margin”. It laments that instead of seizing the moment, the governments are stumbling towards an easily avoidable human development failure. This is indeed a pity because the world today has the technology and facilities to reach these goals. Regrettably, what it lacks is the political will. This failure can have grave repercussions because, according to reports by different bodies, the disparity between the rich and the poor — between nations and in nations — is growing. This means that there is greater injustice in the world today which will lead to more violence and instability.

In Pakistan, the focus is on the president’s visit to New York and his planned talks and diplomatic exchanges on the sidelines of the UN Assembly meeting. But this is the time to evaluate our progress towards the MDGs. In some sectors the country has done well and seems set to attain its goals — if the statistical indicators given by the UNDP are accepted as being authentic. Thus those living in extreme poverty will be better off. Similarly, the goal of cutting by half the ratio of people deprived of clean water and sanitation also appears to be within reach. But in other areas Pakistan is lagging behind and it seems unlikely that we can reach anywhere close to the goals. The most dismal record is in universalising primary education (primary school enrolment being only 59 per cent today), saving the lives of the under-five children (103 out of 1,000 of whom die) and reducing maternal mortality (an appalling 500 per 100,000). As for gender equality, it is still an elusive prospect. The ratio of girls to boys in primary school is 0.74 today. This is the year when as many girls should have been in school as boys. It would be good if the government releases for public information the MDG country profile it surely must have prepared for this occasion.

Iran: talks must continue

PAKISTAN has vital stakes in a peaceful settlement of Iran’s nuclear imbroglio. Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri reiterated the country’s position on the issue when he met Mr Ali Larijani in Islamabad on Wednesday. Iran’s top nuclear negotiator’s visit comes 10 days before the International Atomic Agency’s crucial meeting in Vienna. The meeting may consider referring the question to the UN Security Council. The entire issue has assumed added importance following the electoral victory of Mr Mahmoud Ahmedinjad in July’s election. The new president has declared forcefully he accepts no restrictions on Iran’s right to pursue a peaceful nuclear programme. Last month Tehran resumed uranium conversion and removed the seals at its Ispahan plant. This prompted Britain, France and Germany to break off talks with Iran, which is a pity, because the Iran-EU talks had served to keep the issue out of the UNSC. If the IAEA’s board of governors decides at its Sept 19 meeting to refer the issue to the Security Council, the US would use the opportunity to have sanctions slapped on Iran. As news reports say, one of the purposes behind Mr Larijani’s visit is to solicit Islamabad’s support against US-led sanctions.

Far more dangerous than the sanctions are the threats which Israel and the US have from time to time hurled at Iran, warning Tehran of military action. It will be a bad day for the Middle East if either Israel or the US carries out this threat. With Afghanistan reduced to rubble by more than two and a half decades of civil war, Pakistan would hate to see another of its neighbours falling victim to aggression. For that reason, Pakistan has made repeatedly clear that it wants a peaceful solution of the nuclear issue. The best course would be to urge its European friends and Iran to resume negotiations on the nuclear question. A referral by the IAEA to the Security Council will only complicate things. The US may not necessarily succeed in imposing sanctions, because not all of the other permanent members agree with Washington on the issue. In any case, Iran has shown it is quite capable of putting up with sanctions.

Plight of the under-trials

A PICTURE in this newspaper’s metropolitan section shows dozens of under-trial prisoners waiting in the compound of the district courts premises in Karachi, waiting for the hearing of their cases. Thankfully, a large tree provides some shade to these people. The scene depicted by this picture could very well have taken place in either Lahore, Quetta, Rawalpindi, Peshawar or any district headquarters in the country. The fact, unfortunately, is that under-trial prisoners are often treated as common criminals by the police and prison officials, in spite of the fact that they have not yet been found guilty and sentenced. There have been instances of gross miscarriages of justice with some under-trial prisoners spending more time in jail awaiting their cases to be decided than if they had been found guilty and given the maximum prison term for the crime that they were being tried for.

The lack of facilities and personnel (such as judges, and police guards and vans to transport the under-trial prisoners to and from court) needed to facilitate prompt disposal of cases is an issue that has often been commented on by the Pakistan Law Commission and by senior members of the judiciary. But despite that, the problem remains the same in terms of causes and magnitude, which only means that the lofty words of intent made in this regard are not reflected in any major change in the trial and treatment of under-trial prisoners. First, society’s and especially the government’s attitude towards under-trial prisoners has to change. Two, substantial progress needs to be made in increasing the number of judicial officers and in having enough police guards and vans to ferry the prisoners to court and back to facilitate regular hearing of cases. Three, the tendency by lawyers to frequently seek adjournments because they are busy in other cases, or by government prosecutors not to show up at all — all this needs to be firmly checked.

Oil prices & Iraq war

CONTRARY to anything you may have learnt from sections of the right-wing media, the current price of oil is not a Muslim-Arab conspiracy to destroy civilization. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than market-economics coming home to roost.

If the price of a car can be subject to market forces there is no reason why the price of a national resource should be subject to charity. Russia, which is a very Christian country, has not offered to sell its oil at thirty dollars when the market price is around seventy. It is a well known axiom that the victor lays down the law, or at least defines the meaning of ‘justice’. But such behaviour is not sustainable because it will be challenged — effectively. The conversion of the victim into the monster is an old tactic. As the English proverb puts, give a dog a bad name in order to hang it.

The problem, of course, is not the fact, but the perception. As I write this column, I have before me a list of facts listed in this morning’s Asian Age. It is therefore an arbitrary or accidental list; if I had written this piece yesterday, the list would have been different. The list was distributed not by the Al Islamic Jihad News Agency but by Associated Press, which sends out a package titled ‘Today in History’. According to AP, September 3 was a pretty tough day in world history. On September 3, 1189 Richard I was crowned King of England, a few months before he left for the Anglo-French crusade against Saladin. In 1497, Isabella of Spain married Manuel, King of Portugal: one of the conditions of the marriage was that Manuel would have to expel all Jews from his kingdom.

In 1609, Henry Hudson, looking for India, discovered Manhattan. In 1791 the French reversed their revolution a little bit and created a constitutional monarchy. In 1879 the Afghans massacred a British delegation in Kabul, leading to the second British-Afghan war. In 1904 Japan defeated Russia (the first Asian nation to defeat a European army in modern times). In 1939 Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany and in 1945 Singapore returned to British possession that day.

In 1950, said AP, surely quoting from its archives, “Several Viet Minh terrorists assigned to kill US minister to Indo-China Donald Heath (were) arrested”. I hope that the Viet Minh suspects (they had only been arrested, not convicted, were called “terrorists” because they were allegedly on an assassination assignment rather than because they belonged to the Viet Minh, because at least in my book a guerrilla fighting for the liberation of his nation from a colonial occupier and imperialist is a nationalist rather than a terrorist. (That is why I have such high regard for George Washington.)

Check out what happened on September 3, 1497. Five years before, in 1492, Granada had fallen to the Castilians, ending 781 years of Arab rule over various parts of the Iberian peninsula. What was the foremost priority of the new Catholic rulers? The expulsion of Jews, who had lived peacefully under Muslim rulers for nearly eight centuries.

But do an opinion poll and the overwhelming majority will believe that Muslims have been the enemies of Jews for 1,400 years. Try pointing out that Jews were given a place of dignity for four hundred years after being expelled from Spain and Portugal in the Ottoman empire and eyebrows will rise. I can’t help adding that Richard I had a peculiar sense of humour: one of the things that made him laugh was watching teeth being extracted from ageing Jews.

Such mischaracterization fits in with the portrait of Islam as a religion of war, spread by the sword etc., etc. (If it had been spread by the sword there would have been no Christians left in Spain.) The few war verses of the Quran are lifted out of context and hammered into the collective consciousness of the world. A handful of stupid, or evil, clerics spewing nonsense — whether in India or Britain — are turned into the evidence required to demonize a whole community, which is a bit like saying that all Hindus share the disturbed thought-process of a fire-breather like Togadia or Singhal.

In a wise article in the Guardian of July 23, the Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney, says about Tony Blair’s Britain: “Muslims who preach hate are to be deported and subject to new restrictions, Charles Clarke (British home secretary) announced in the Commons on Wednesday. So what would the home secretary have to say about stuff like this: ‘Blessed is he who takes your little children and smashes their head against the rocks’?

“Or this: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths... Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun... The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.’ No, this is not Islam, it is the Bible. And there is a lot more where that came from. Why, then, are so many commentators persuaded that the Quran is a manual of hate — compared to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is very tame stuff indeed.” The good Reverend also points out that Samson could well be considered the world’s most famous suicide-missionary.

The temptation is alluring, but it doesn’t help to blame Islam for the sins of Muslims. Just as no one in his right mind would blame Christianity for the deeds or misdeeds of Robert Mugabe today or Augusto Pinochet yesterday.

Clever politicians like Tony Blair, who arrived in India on Tuesday, are always correct in their remarks, even while they encourage just that little touch of hysteria in mass media that will deflect attention from the correct diagnosis of their problems. Blair’s problem after the suicide bombings in London is to explain how young men, born in liberal, modern, progressive Britain could behave like children from a Palestinian refugee camp. It is an extremely pertinent question, and the answer lies not in Islam, but in Tony Blair’s mirror.

Like a good politician, Blair has found his scapegoats, including one cleric who looks like a made-for-tabloids leftover pirate from a Peter Pan movie. But if he wants to know the truth, which I do not believe he does, he would be better advised to watch television news instead of Friday sermons. The war in Iraq comes home to Britain every day on television. The dangerous anger of those young men was not aimed against Britain, but against a government and its decision to go to war and occupy Iraq behind a gauze of lies.

This does not make their violence acceptable. Killing innocents is a crime in any text (and specifically forbidden, incidentally, in the rules prescribed for a legitimate jihad). But neither does their crime exonerate Blair from his crime. Blair is not paying for his sins. His country is.

It is no accident that the Conservatives have an old candidate with a new message in their party’s leadership contest, Kenneth Clarke. The new message is direct: the war in Iraq is among Britain’s costliest mistakes. Clarke is an old-blue Tory, and a businessman (he is vice chairman of British American Tobacco). The only thing radical about him is the suede he prefers for his shoes. Conservatives are traditionally more pro-American than Labour. Clarke would not have made Iraq an issue if it did not have bounce. There was an inevitable spurt of support for Blair after the bombings. Good politicians always benefit from a crisis, and Blair is among the best at his game. But the fizz can leak as fast as it builds up.

The Arab-Israel war of 1973 changed the place of oil in the world’s economy. Opec has not looked back. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq has been the principal reason for the price of oil touching seventy dollars a barrel and remaining in stratosphere. War does not come cheap. George Bush and Tony Blair look steely when anyone mentions the number of soldiers who have died fighting for their misjudgments, and indifferent when Iraqi casualties are speculated. Nemesis appears in more than one form, sometimes as a child’s haunting coffin, and sometimes as a mother’s tent near your holiday home. Both Bush and Blair have fought their last election. Their successors will go broke paying death duties.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

Hands across the sea

HARROWING images from the disaster created by Hurricane Katrina along America’s Gulf coast have been beamed round the world and generated offers of help from likely and more unlikely quarters. Nato and European allies have pitched in with medical teams, aircraft, tents, blankets, generators and cash.

RAF planes are ferrying ready meals from Brize Norton. Germans who remember the 1948 Berlin airlift have been generous. Israel and Russia have promised aid, as have poor Bangladesh and Honduras.

But the hand of friendship has also been extended by Iran, a star member of George Bush’s “axis of evil”. Even North Korea has expressed sympathy. Fidel Castro held a minute of silence to honour the victims and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez offered assistance and cheap oil — though he was rebuffed after calling the president “a cowboy”. Suffering in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama has moved many far and wide.

If some foreigners see the US as a friend in need, very many others, like many angry Americans, have focused on the ugly reality exposed by the hurricane: that its main victims are black and poor and have been left in conditions more familiar from the worst scenes of third world deprivation than from the richest country on earth.

The slow and chaotic response to the emergency has highlighted the immense gap between what the French call American “hyperpower” and the government’s ability to cope with this unprecedented catastrophe.

—The Guardian, London