Ending Fata’s isolation

THE territory known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is now hitting world headlines, mostly for the wrong reasons. Its socio-economic conditions and the violence that has come to be associated with its name testify to successive governments’ failure to address the problems of people living in the tribal belt. Even though part of Pakistan, Fata is governed not by Pakistani laws but by tribal customs and traditions, and the maliks — tribal elders — play a major role in it. The system was inherited by Pakistan from the colonial days, when the British let the tribesmen govern themselves by their own laws and customs provided they maintained peace. The officer representing the government was the Political Agent, who knew the area and its people inside out and used carrot and stick to sort out erring tribesmen. Regrettably, the coming of independence made little difference to the Fata people, for most Pakistani governments continued to follow the British policy, with the Frontier Crimes Regulation being the only law in operation.

Against this background, Ms Benazir Bhutto’s move to the judiciary deserves attention. In a petition to the Supreme Court, the PPP chairperson has pleaded that the Political Parties’ Act, 1962, be extended to Fata. The petition gives some valid reasons why this should be done. The absence of the political parties from Fata has kept the people depoliticised. Denied the opportunity of joining national parties, the tribesmen have little political freedom. Until recently, only maliks were given the right to elect Fata members to parliament, but an amendment in the relevant law now provides for direct voting for electing MNAs and MPAs. Nevertheless, in the absence of the political parties, the voters’ choice is limited and they have to choose between one malik or another. If the political parties are allowed to work in Fata, as the petition to the court pleads for, the voting pattern in the tribal belt is likely to undergo a major change.Traditionally, the maliks have dominated Fata’s political and social life. However, the rise of the Taliban and the inroads made by the foreign militants there have tended to erode the maliks’ position. Until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Fata was a place of tranquillity because the time-honoured system worked. The Afghan war, the rise of jihadi organisations, and the money and arms they received from America, Saudi Arabia and Egypt with Islamabad’s full approval completely upset Fata’s social equilibrium. The factories which were set up there since independence were closed down, increasing joblessness in an area which has very few economic opportunities.

Today, the scene is grim. Waziristan especially has turned into a safe haven for Al Qaeda, and there they are training suicide bombers and sending them outside Fata, even as far as Islamabad, to kill security men and innocent civilians to destablise a government whose policies they do not approve of. Pakistan has deployed 80,000 soldiers in the area, but that has not rooted out the militants and established peace. Basically, it is non-military means that will pay off, and not a “surge”. The government should concentrate more on the area’s economic uplift and utilise the services of right-minded maliks to isolate the Taliban and bring Fata into the national mainstream. The nation will await the court’s decision on this petition that seeks to focus on a major cause of Fata’s alienation from the rest of the country.

This high dropout rate

IT is doubtful that the concern of the Senate’s education committee over the high dropout rate in primary schools will prod the government into taking measures to stop this disturbing trend. Despite formulating various policies to bring improvements in this sector, decades of meagre spending on education and a number of socio-economic problems have combined to ensure that at 50 per cent Pakistan’s primary school dropout rate is the highest in the world. As pointed out previously in this space, the government has not delivered on its promise of raising education spending to four per cent of the GDP. The current level is a little more than two per cent, and even then, most of the funds are mismanaged as evident from the poor physical state of the schools and the abysmal quality of teaching. Efforts to rectify matters, as in Punjab, have been few and far between, with the result that the overall progress in education has been slow. This is especially true at the primary level which has been largely ignored as the government is focusing more on higher education. It has not realised that without a strong foundation, college and university-level students cannot be expected to compete with their peers internationally.

But it is not just limited spending and a shabby school environment that are leading children to drop out of school. Grinding poverty and the need to find employment to supplement family incomes are major reasons why they cannot continue with their studies. Here, too, the government has failed by not implementing its much-touted poverty alleviation measures that could have lessened the pressure on low-income families and allowed them to send their children to school. Child labour is an unfortunate reality, and while it may not be practical to do away with it altogether at this stage, the government could have introduced more programmes aimed at educating the young toilers. Serious note also needs to be taken of corporal punishment at schools — another major reason for the high dropout rate. A holistic view should help the government to take practical steps to slow down the dropout rate, but it all depends on how committed it is to this goal.

Aid for flood victims

IT is alarming that there is little improvement for the people affected by the floods in Sindh and Balochistan. On Monday, scores of affected victims took out a protest rally in Shahdadkot after a 12-year-old boy died of gastroenteritis at a camp. They said that a lot of people were still awaiting relief and also argued that the sum of Rs15,000 as aid was not enough for them to rebuild their houses. The government may have a lot on its plate but it cannot shirk from its responsibility of ensuring that aid reaches over 300,000 people who are still in need of it in both provinces. An estimated two million people have been rendered homeless, having lost their life’s possessions — they need to be taken care of and rehabilitated. That a boy died in a camp of an illness that is treatable, provided it is detected early, is an indicator of how grave the situation is. It is imperative that medical aid is dispatched to areas still uncared for. People in Balochistan have always felt ignored by the federal government and that sense of neglect has only been heightened for lack of care. This can still all be changed if the government changes track and focuses more on helping flood victims.

Relief items like food, medicines and tents are still urgently needed as is clean drinking water which is vital for preventing water-borne diseases like gastroenteritis. The government must provide food to victims for the next three months as families have lost all means to feed and shelter themselves. At the same time, it must work on a rehabilitation strategy that can see families get back on their feet as quickly as possible. One hopes that multinationals with corporate social responsibility programmes which have stepped forward and offered relief will continue to do so.

The terror of their ways

AT Australia’s Brisbane airport last Saturday, a young doctor by the name of Mohamed Haneef boarded a flight bound for India. Four weeks earlier he had been taken into custody at the same airport while attempting to do exactly the same thing, and he remained incarcerated until last Friday.

His ordeal wasn’t extraordinarily traumatic by the standards of the “war on terror”. This crusade has for nearly six years now provided a context for appalling human rights violations.

Quite apart from their moral aspect, the means deployed by the United States in particular have generally proved counterproductive. Revelations about routine torture and the so-called rendition flights, whereby captives are flown to countries that have even fewer qualms about third-degree methods than the US, can hardly be said to have dampened the urge for violence.

In the current issue of the London Review of Books, John Foot offers a detailed account of the misfortune that befell Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian cleric with no known terrorist connections who had been granted refugee status by Italy. He was kidnapped from a Milan street in February 2003, beaten, driven to a US air base and flown to Cairo, where he was subjected to months of harsh physical abuse.

The Observer last Sunday carried details about the “extraordinary rendition” of Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident of Iraqi origin, who had apparently helped the MI5 to keep an eye on Abu Qatada, a particularly turbulent cleric. He was humiliated by his American captors, who took him first to Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo Bay. After four years of incarceration without charge, he was freed last March.

The exact number is unknown, but it is commonly believed there have been thousands of such cases. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a majority of detainees at Guantanamo are, if not entirely innocent, then at worst peripheral supporters of the erstwhile Taliban regime. US military lawyer Colonel Stephen E. Abraham, who has become one of the most vociferous critics of the detention programme, says charges are commonly based on generalisations.

According to a report in The New York Times, he said intelligence reports often “relied only on accusations that a detainee had been found in a suspect area or was associated with a suspect organisation”. Some prisoners are described simply as jihadists, with no elaboration — including an Afghan who confessed during a tribunal hearing that he had indeed been a jihadi, but only back in the 1980s, during the US-backed jihad against the Soviet Union. When a clarification was sought from the tribunal’s presiding officer, he responded: “We don’t know what the time frame was, either.”

It is not entirely inconceivable that Dr Mohamed Haneef could have ended up at the US-occupied zone in Cuba had he chosen to seek employment in America rather than in Australia. There is no question that his rights were violated, but it’s worth remembering that there are places where the absence of evidence against a suspect does not automatically entail exoneration.

Even the Australian authorities made a clumsy attempt to lock him away on undisclosed grounds, but it proved unsustainable in the face of legal ridicule.

Haneef was initially detained a couple of days after the abortive attack on Glasgow airport on June 30. He had, it was said at the time, been apprehended while trying to flee to India on a one-way ticket. It was insinuated that he hadn’t mentioned his travel plans to the Gold Coast hospital where he was employed as a registrar. The vital piece of evidence against Haneef was that a mobile phone SIM card in his name had been found at the scene of the crime in Glasgow, and Kafeel Ahmed, one of the would-be perpetrators, happened to be his second cousin.After he had been interrogated by police, it was claimed that Haneef had no explanation for his one-way ticket, and that he had admitted sharing a home with Kafeel and his brother Sabeel Ahmed. A search of his Gold Coast flat yielded photographs of key landmarks in the area, and at least one newspaper, quoting police sources, hinted that Haneef may have been planning to bomb a local skyscraper.

An unverified news report from India that implied Haneef had been the local leader of a now banned Islamist student organisation back in Bangalore was cited as corroborating evidence of his complicity in terror.

The circumstantial evidence against him was hardly overwhelming, yet the authorities pressed the charge of “reckless support” for terrorism. A Brisbane magistrate, unimpressed by the government’s case, set reasonably lenient conditions for bail: in her opinion, close surveillance would suffice to prevent Haneef from posing any kind of danger to society.

Taken by surprise, the Australian government improvised a strategy to keep Haneef imprisoned: the immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, stepped in to say that as the doctor’s work visa had been cancelled, he would be confined in an immigration detention facility.

Predictably, this desperate measure provoked outrage from the legal community, civil rights groups and even a section of the media. By then the case against Haneef had well and truly begun to disintegrate.

As far as the SIM card went, it had some credit left on it when Haneef was about to leave Britain last September to take up the Gold Coast job, so he had given it to one of his cousins; contrary to the police claim, it had been found not in the jeep that crashed into a Glasgow airport barrier but in Liverpool, hundreds of kilometres away.

Nor was it true that Haneef was trying to slip out of Australia without informing his employers: he had taken leave and was travelling to Bangalore to be with his wife and their daughter, who had been born just a few days earlier.

When one of his lawyers released a transcript of Haneef’s police interview, it turned out that he had perfectly reasonable explanations for every circumstance that could be construed as suspicious, including the one-way ticket. He wasn’t particularly close to his second cousins, nor did he live with them. The photographs of “possible targets” were no more than tourist snapshots.

Furthermore, it turned out that while the British police had indeed tipped off their cousins down under after finding Haneef’s SIM card, they considered him at best a peripheral figure in the Glasgow and London investigations.

Eventually, Australia’s chief prosecutor stepped in to put an end to the sorry saga by withdrawing all charges. However, Haneef’s visa wasn’t restored, and when he flew out of Brisbane the following day, Kevin Andrews said the doctor’s decision to leave the country “actually heightens than lessens my suspicion”. Haneef’s lawyers aptly described his comments as “beyond bizarre”, particularly since the minister had said a day earlier that Haneef had no choice but to leave Australia.

The lawyers intend to pursue efforts for the restoration of the doctor’s visa, which was withdrawn on the grounds of his “unsuitable character”. Even if they don’t succeed in that, they should be able to win him substantial compensation in view of the damage to his career prospects. After all, the investigation was bungled at more or less every step, prompting the Queensland premier, Peter Beattie, to compare Australia’s federal police with the Keystone Cops.

It is widely assumed, however, that the police were under a great deal of government pressure — although it is the government that has been blaming the police for misinforming it, while the police have suggested it’s all the fault of Scotland Yard. The buck, clearly, doesn’t stop anywhere.

Haneef’s Indian nationality probably came in handy: chances are a Pakistani passport-holder wouldn’t have got off so lightly, given the reputation Pakistan has acquired as a terrorist hub.

The Manmohan Singh government intervened on his behalf at the highest level, and Canberra is disinclined to alienate New Delhi. Apart from the prospect of uranium sales, Australian universities play host to thousands of Indian students, and Indian doctors and information technology specialists account for a substantial proportion of their respective professions in Australia.

What’s significant is that the Haneef affair has backfired on a government striving hard to shore up its dwindling support ahead of elections that are due to be held within the next six months. Six years ago, Prime Minister John Howard employed subliminally racist rhetoric against a boatload of refugees to increase the size of his majority.

Over the years, his government has, much like its British and US counterparts, squeezed every possible political advantage out of the terrorist threat. Such tactics are often difficult to counter, because the threat does exist. Crying wolf invariably elicits a Pavlovian response from ill-informed segments of the population, but this time around the tactic was a miserable flop.

Although opinion polls over the past seven months have given the Howard government much to worry about, it has scored consistently well in the national security category. After the Haneef fiasco, that may cease to be the case.

Meanwhile, by chance or by design, the Labor opposition has played its cards well. It has now called for an inquiry, but while the saga was unfolding it remained conspicuously silent. That seemed unconscionable at the time, but the net result is the impression that the government stumbled and injured itself without any extraneous assistance.

The injury has further reduced the ruling conservative coalition’s chances of clearing the forthcoming electoral hurdle. It seems likely that a few months down the road, Dr Mohamed Haneef will be able to derive a spot of satisfaction from his small but not insignificant role in John Howard’s downfall.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com