As the crisis deepens

ACTS of terror and disruption in Balochistan have now become a daily occurrence and seem to be assuming new dimensions. On Monday, Quetta was cut off from the rest of the country when a bomb blast blew up the railway track near Sibi and derailed two bogies of the Lahore-bound Chiltan Express. Two other express trains could not leave Quetta. Similarly, saboteurs blew up gas pipelines on Sunday and Monday, and fired three rockets at the home of a Balochistan minister, who was away in Islamabad. The attack killed one man and injured eight others. The act of sabotage of the 30-inch gas pipeline in the Shahwali area on Sunday night was more serious as it partially disrupted gas supply to Punjab and the NWFP. No one has claimed responsibility for the Shahwali blast, but a caller claimed that the attack on the minister’s house was the work of the “Balochistan National Liberation Army”.

A pertinent point is the working of the plethora of security agencies the nation has, for which it pays for through its nose. There are so many of them under military and civilian control, but regrettably militants in Balochistan seem to be having a field day. This is not to deny the good work done by the security agencies in arresting some leading Al Qaeda men and sectarian extremists in other provinces. But in Balochistan we have been hearing about training camps for militants for years, but our security apparatus has failed to detect them. A guerrilla movement takes time to organize and develop, and military training is preceded by the establishment of cells and political indoctrination of the cadres. But our security agencies never got a whiff of this guerrilla movement that now looks like being engaged in a full-blown insurgency.

Ultimately, there has to be a political settlement of the Balochistan crisis. We heard so much of the talks held last year between two parliamentary committees and some Baloch sardars, but nothing concrete has come out. The issue needs to be looked at from two angles: one is the intransigence of some sardars with vested interests. They keep their own people as their serfs and feel that their stranglehold over the area is threatened by development projects that could liberate the Baloch people from serfdom through education, roads and electricity. However, the other and more genuine issue is provincial autonomy. This is not confined to Balochistan but concerns the other provinces as well. Last week, an all-party conference even of the ruling coalition partners demanded that a framework for “complete provincial autonomy” should be announced before the general election next year.

The question of provincial autonomy has been with us for decades, and various political parties have been demanding a revision of the 1973 Constitution. A change in the relevant constitutional provisions needs a national consensus in which rhetoric should have no place, nor can a framework be “announced” by a military-led government. The issue is serious and needs quiet work by constitutional experts for developing a consensus among all regional and mainstream political parties. It is only when a consensus has been achieved can the amendments be made through the constitutional process laid down in the Basic Law. It is often forgotten that political rhetoric and the use of provincial autonomy as a mere slogan have served inhibited a serious study of the issue and impeded the cause of smaller provinces.

Causes of the sugar crisis

THE reported decision by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to step in and check the rising price of sugar will have effect if action is taken against those behind the crisis — those who are involved in the hoarding of sugar, that has driven the price of this staple item up from Rs 21 a kilo a few months ago to Rs 42. The government did order the release of its sugar stocks to the Utility Stores Corporation (USC) which was directed to sell it at a controlled rate of Rs 27 per kilogram. This was only partially successful because the USC has a limited store network and secondly, store staff indulged in blackmarketing of sugar by diverting it for sale on their own. In addition, consumers have complained that USC stores were asking them to purchase other items in order to become ‘eligible’ for buying sugar. Such arbitrary measures defeat the very purpose of the government’s decision, which ostensibly was to provide relief to the common consumers of sugar and protect them from the hoarders’ cupidity.

Even the decision to import sugar from India has not brought down prices, primarily because the bulk of the imports is yet to arrive. The government’s response was belated and it still has not explained the delay in ordering release of its buffer stock in the market. Had that been done when prices began to rise, the crisis could have been averted to a great extent. Nothing so far has been able to loosen the grip of the hoarders which in this case are believed to be sugar mill owners. Several important politicians in and out of the ruling party, including ministers, own sugar mills. If the mills of such gentlemen were behind the crisis, keeping them in check or setting NAB after them will be problematic for the government. But difficult though it may seem, action has to be taken against hoarders, regardless of their position or influence, to stop the suffering of millions of Pakistanis. Only time will tell if the will to achieve this is there.

Protecting the environment

WHAT is the use of having detailed legislation for the protection of the environment when those who are supposed to enforce it do not do so? This point came in for a sharp rebuke for the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) by a Sindh government adviser on environment. The environmental body was especially castigated for the poor performance of its officials and ordered to monitor factories and vehicles contaminating waterways with untreated effluents and spewing toxic fumes in the air. While this admonition is not expected to have the intended effect on SEPA, the agency should ask itself why, in all its years of existence, it has not been able to enforce the National Environment Quality Standards and bring down the level of air, water and soil pollution. If anything, unplanned urbanization and development has caused pollution to increase, especially in the major cities, exposing citizens to serious health risks.

SEPA may be handicapped by lack of funds and shortage of technical expertise — not surprising since the federal government woke up to the problem of environmental degradation very late in the day and still does not give the issue the priority it deserves. But what is keeping the agency from playing a more positive role in those areas that do not require large expenditure or in-depth technical knowledge? For instance, even if there are not enough funds to conduct research on various environmental problems, efforts can still be made in mobilizing public support for cleaner living surroundings and enhancing community awareness of the dangers of pollution. Similarly, pressure can be applied on industrialists to cut down on toxic emissions from their factories and on traffic authorities to fine vehicle owners with faulty exhausts. Intelligent planning and a more pro-active attitude by SEPA could go a long way in reducing the level of pollution.

Grappling with the ghosts of Russian history

RUSSIAN television planned last week to mark the 50th anniversary of a turning point in Soviet history with a documentary. For reasons that are not very clear, the project was abandoned before it could be aired. “I don’t feel they want very much to mark this date,” commented Rada Adzhubei. “One of my friends wanted to make a film about it, but then he was told, ‘It’s safer not to.” The only references I hear on the radio to my father are comic ones...”

Adzhubei’s father was, once upon a time, the head of the Soviet Communist Party, and the event in question is a four-hour speech he delivered to the 20th party congress on February 25, 1956. The unscheduled peroration was a blistering indictment of his predecessor Josef Stalin.

Although the assumption that the excoriation was an individual initiative on the part of Nikita Khrushchev that shocked the party hierarchy as much as it rocked the rank-and-file membership has long been discounted, it is still referred to as the “secret speech”. That’s because it had been decided not to publish it. “We cannot let this matter get out of the party,” Khrushchev had noted. “We should not give ammunition to the enemy; we should not wash our dirty linen before their eyes.”

There is, however, some anecdotal evidence that Khrushchev at least was not particularly averse to making it known internationally that he had given the party’s dirty Stalin a thorough going-over. John Rettie, a Moscow correspondent at the time for the Reuters news agency, recalls being offered details of the speech by a Russian acquaintance who, he is convinced, worked for the KGB. What’s more, he strongly suspects that this was done at Khrushchev’s behest.

Rettie’s scoop — because of Soviet censorship, he filed his report from Scandinavia, and did so anonymously — was overtaken before long by the full text of the speech, which was leaked to Israeli intelligence by a source in Poland and subsequently delivered to the CIA. It was published in The New York Times, and Britain’s The Observer devoted almost an entire edition to Khrushchev’s words. In the Soviet Union, the complete text was not published until 1988, the heyday of glasnost.

No one with even a vague idea of the realities — or even the fantasies — of the Stalinist era can seriously wonder why Khrushchev’s 26,000 words were of earth-shattering significance to both friends and foes of Soviet communism. Stalin, after all, was no ordinary party leader. He was deified by millions of Soviet citizens. Likewise in the eyes of millions of communists and fellow travellers in the rest of the world, he could do little wrong.

It may seem mind-boggling now, but at the time the show trials whereby he had eliminated virtually every potential political rival were taken at face value by many communists. Reports of purges and other forms of mass repression that appeared in the West were frequently dismissed as propaganda by those who didn’t want to believe them. This wasn’t all that hard to do, because there was indeed a great deal of propaganda on both sides, intended either to discredit communism as cruel, morally degenerate and unworkable, or to hail it as the way of the future, incomparably superior to capitalism. All too often it was a no-holds-barred contest.

Then, in February 1956, Stalin’s successor personally delivered the coup de grace to the red tsar’s reputation, in effect admitting that for nearly 30 years the Soviet Union had been ruled by a ruthless and paranoid megalomaniac. The consequences of this moment of truth were bound to be profound, and they ranged from heart attacks among members of Khrushchev’s audience to, within months, moves towards democratization in parts of Eastern Europe.

So, what exactly did Khrushchev say? He started off by reiterating a theme that had echoed throughout the congress: a critique of the cult of personality. “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics,” he noted. Vladimir Lenin figured time and again in his discourse, partly as a paragon to measure Stalin against. But he also found it useful to bring up a letter Lenin had written to the party’s central committee in 1922, suggesting that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary, which had been suppressed at the time.

Stalin’s despotism came next: his refusal to consult his colleagues, contrary to Leninist tradition, and his marked tendency towards repression, which invariably entailed one of two options for the victims: elimination or internal exile. Possibly in order to guard against his diatribe from being characterized as a Trotskyite backlash, Khrushchev was at pains to point out that Stalin had dealt admirably with the “Trotskyite-Zinoviev bloc” and the “Bukharinites”, as well as with class enemies. The problem was that he had continued with his tactics long after the Left oppositionists and Right deviationists (jargon of this nature was commonplace in communist discourse) lost their influence.

Many of those persecuted as “enemies of the people” — all too often they were executed after being tortured into signing confessions — were passionate communists, Khrushchev pointed out: “of the 139 members and candidates of the central committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons ... were arrested and shot”. He cited many individual cases, but perhaps the most devastating part of the indictment was his denigration of Stalin’s role as a war leader: not only because the ranks of the Red Army had been purged and intelligence about an impending Nazi attack was disregarded, leaving the USSR criminally under-prepared, but also because Stalin became catatonic in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion, fearing that all had been lost.

Various other errors, miscalculations, human rights violations and deviations from Marxism-Leninism were cited, and Khrushchev tried to explain away the reluctance or inability of party stalwarts to challenge Stalin during his lifetime by claiming, in effect, that they were too petrified to even contemplate a confrontation.

This cowardice cost the Soviet Union dearly, but it was a natural enough reaction to the intolerance of the times. It has been said that Khrushchev’s speech was driven by a desire to clear his own name, given that he had, under Stalin, played a leading role in the waves of repression. That’s unlikely, given that it would have been all to easy to carry on in Stalin’s vein. Breaking away from that morbid model took courage, and those behind the move may well have been motivated by an urge to rescue the Bolshevik project from the excesses of totalitarianism.

Khrushchev later noted that he needed to get all this out of his system not least because his own arms were “covered with blood up to the elbows”. His true motives can, of course, be debated endlessly, and probably inconclusively, but the need to redeem himself, to metaphorically wash the blood off his hands, seems to me as reasonable an explanation as any that history is likely to yield.

Stalin’s policies are believed to have resulted in untold millions of deaths. Many of the survivors walked out of the gulags into a less oppressive and less claustrophobic Soviet Union. “My life changed,” recalls Marina Okrugina, now 95. “I got a decent job and pension. We former prisoners were very thankful for Khrushchev’s bravery.”

The thaw that followed Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin allowed a restricted cultural reawakening, but when Soviet tanks crushed Hungary’s push for breathing space later in 1956, it served as a reminder that the system that had allowed Stalin to concentrate all power in his hands very much remained in place. For thousands of communists in the West, the unnatural demise of Imre Nagy’s government proved to be the last straw. Like the invasion of Afghanistan two decades later, the intervention in Hungary followed a vigorous debate within the party; in both cases, the hawks won.

Shortly after Khrushchev reinvigorated the de-Stalinization process in the early 1960s, he was swept aside and more or less written out, along with his speech, from Soviet history. However, thanks in part to his own initiatives, he lived in obscurity but relative peace until he died of old age. The drab and uninspiring neo-Stalinism of the Brezhnev era never veered anywhere close to the levels of repression that the moustachioed dictator had favoured.

According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “I don’t think a concept like perestroika could have appeared” without that liberating act of apostasy.

In Russia nowadays, it is not uncommon to blame Khrushchev and Gorbachev for the demise of the USSR. The allegation may not be entirely without merit. But to assume that the alternative, the Soviet Union of Stalin and Brezhnev, was indeed the best that the Russian Revolution could have led to, as many anti-communists have long held, amounts to a wholesale indictment of the Bolshevik project.

In fact, the Soviet Union did have its redeeming features, and I would count Khrushchev and Gorbachev among them. The fact that, according to a recent opinion poll, 50 per cent of Russians today regard Stalin’s role in their nation’s past as either “very positive” or “somewhat positive” suggests chiefly that the teaching of history has not improved since 1991. A far more rational approach to memories of the tyrant emerges in the recollections of the aforementioned Marina Okrugina. “When Stalin died in 1953,” she says, “we closed the door tight and danced with joy.”

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com