IF you live in Karachi and are fed up with the traffic jams being caused around the city due to security for the so-called IDEAS defence expo, take heart. At least the arms and ammo festival has a catchy slogan: arms for peace.

If there isn’t enough irony in those words, consider how the prime minister used the occasion to remind the country that besides security, poverty alleviation and education are also important priorities.

The irony was in the fact that even as he spoke these words, students and faculty of at least three different universities were delayed for class because access routes leading to their facilities were shut to provide security to the delegates attending the expo.

If an arms and ammo festival can disrupt the education of our youth, belittle the efforts of our university teachers, disrupt the commute of millions of people in this city and cause thousands of delayed arrivals for schoolchildren, then it really makes one wonder what sort of peace these arms are securing for us.

One simple fact needs to be made clear to the merchants of death who have descended on our beleaguered city to put their ghastly wares on display: arms do not make peace, they make war.

Peace is a hard-won state of affairs that grows out of the creative energies and innovative capacities of the human mind. A durable and meaningful peace grows out of bonds of mutual interdependence that tie us together. It is built on an awareness of our shared humanity irrespective of differences in language, skin colour or belief.

Those who have descended on Karachi to put their ghastly wares on display must remember: arms make war, not peace.

Peace is a product of the mind, not of arms. Besides destruction, the only thing arms have ever given to this world is fear, and that kind of peace must be unacceptable to us in this day and age.

What is also unacceptable is the massive disruption to the daily life of a city of more than 15 million people. Many living within a large radius of the expo are forbidden from driving their vehicles altogether, meaning they are locked in their own homes while the expo continues, or have to venture out on foot to buy groceries from a great distance.

Karachi cannot host this sort of disruptive congregation for very long. Let’s suffer through it this one last time. But let’s also agree that no more of these vulgar guns and ammo festivals should be held in our city.

I’ve seen banners erected on intersections advertising small firearms as if they are children’s candy. It’s obscene that handguns should be advertised on the streets of a city where people are constantly afraid of being mugged at gunpoint with a weapon precisely of the sort pictured in these advertisements.

This city has known too much conflict to believe that arms beget peace. And as a more practical matter, Karachi is not equipped to host this sort of event and it should not be forced upon its citizens in the future. The security requirements for the delegates are too strident for the city to manage. Perhaps the Convention Centre in Islamabad can be used from next year onwards. And can we please change the slogan?

It’s also worth asking what exactly has been achieved by the last six such expos. On their own website, for example, the expo authorities claim a growth in the number of countries participating, growing numbers of delegates attending, and growing amount of floor space rented out for the exhibition as indicators of success.

That’s very nice. Let’s leave aside the matter that all these numbers appear to plateau out around 2008. Since the purpose of the whole event is to arrange buyers for Pakistani produced military hardware, may we know the dollar amounts of orders booked at each of these events since 2000? Why is that information not disclosed?

It would be interesting to see if the growing amount of money invested in holding these affairs, as well as the monetary cost of the disruption is in any way being offset by growth in foreign exchange earnings from orders booked at the expos. If there is no increase in the dollar value of the export orders being arranged through these expos, then what is all the fanfare for? Is it in reality just an elaborate PR exercise?

At a time when our exports are already under severe stress, it’s worth asking whether our priorities are in the right place. Why throw such enormous resources into promoting defence exports and disrupt the life of an entire city when our more bread-and-butter exporters are having a difficult time convincing their buyers to come to Pakistan at all?

Might we get better results in terms of foreign exchange inflows if the same energies were invested in promoting our apparels and readymade garments? How about our software industry, still under $1 billion per year in exports, but with plenty of potential to grow? We need to ask why we’re seeing such a Herculean effort for the promotion of defence exports but not for civilian products, where the bang for the buck is a lot greater if you’ll pardon the metaphor.

In a sense, the whole exercise to showcase our defence exports is a microcosm of what ails our economy. The disruptive impact on the lives of millions of people is brushed aside casually. The commitment of resource to a venture that has little potential for growth is emblematic of the waste that accompanies overdeveloped defence sectors. The absurd slogan — ‘arms for peace’ — reveals how the country has marched behind empty rhetoric beyond the limits of what its own resources can bear. The disruption, the waste and the mindlessness all speak to the core dysfunctions that have hobbled our country for far too long now.

The writer is a member of staff.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain

Published in Dawn December 4th , 2014