Joining hands politically

THE other day (March 15) Mr Asif Zardari told a newsman in Dubai that the PPP and PML-N might collaborate in contesting the forthcoming local elections. The day before Benazir Bhutto and Shahbaz Sharif agreed to work together for the restoration of democracy. The MMA has also been seeking the cooperation of PML-N to the same end. On the other hand, initial contacts between General Musharraf’s representatives and Benazir Bhutto have been made and talks between them may be held soon. We cannot say with certitude what exactly the future will unfold. But it is open to us to identify trends and speculate as to which way they will go. The observations concerning future developments that follow should therefore be taken only as statements of probabilities. I think they will materialize, but I am aware that they may not.

Barring the PML’s stunning victory in 1997, no single party won even a simple majority in the National Assembly in the elections of 1988, 1990, 1993, and 2002. As a result, the party with a plurality had to recruit supporters to produce a majority and form a coalition government. This state of affairs is not likely to change following any fair elections that may be held in the next year or two.

One may wonder who the likely partners in a feasible coalition, or an electoral alliance, would be. It may be assumed that while each group will want the maximum possible share of power in a future government, a degree of like-mindedness between the groups will more readily bring them together. Let us see where we might find such compatibility.

If the “mainstream” parties are allowed a “level playing field” in the next elections, the MMA may go back to its pre-2002 status, winning a dozen or fewer seats in the National Assembly. In that event, no major party may want to woo it as a coalition partner. But who would its suitors be in the unlikely event that it does about as well in the next elections as it had done in 2002?

At this time, some of its goals appear to be the same as those of the other opposition parties. They all want General Musharraf to quit the army chief’s office and the military to stay out of the nation’s politics and governance. They would restore the 1973 Constitution as it was before Musharraf’s coup, and allow the provinces a larger measure of autonomy. They criticize the present government for its failure to stop the spread of poverty, unemployment, and price hikes. They denounce the military’s campaign in Waziristan and its alleged operations in Balochistan.

The MMA’s stance with regard to Musharraf has lately become tougher.

It now wants him removed from both offices and says he and Pakistan cannot co-exist. It alleges that he has reduced the country to the status of an American colony, that he ridicules Islamic tenets, and that his government encourages obscenity.

The MMA’s opposition to military rule is a complex affair. It opposed Ayub Khan because, being secular-minded, he had no use for the ulema and their advocacies. They befriended Ziaul Haq because he professed to be a servant of Islam. They denounce Musharraf because he regards them as “obscurantists” and friends to extremism. It should be noted that historically they, as jurists, have never objected to generals becoming rulers. They have been singularly unconcerned with the procedure whereby a person might have taken power. The MMA’s current opposition to the military’s role in our governance need not then be taken as an enduring part of its political philosophy or even disposition.

Judging by a set of proposals that a conference of the ulema submitted to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1952, our Islamic parties would not limit an individual’s ownership of 1and if he had acquired it legitimately. The state may, however, regulate relations between the landowner and his tenants in order to protect them from oppression and exploitation. It may also limit industrial and commercial profits and individual or family stockholding, prohibit monopolies, assure a “living wage” to workers, encourage cooperation, rather than conflict, as a basis for industrial relations, and exclude union bossism.

The Islamic parties would, most likely, halt family planning and repeal the existing laws relating to polygamy, divorce, and inheritance; impart the Islamic outlook to students all levels and fields of study; abolish co-education; and segregate men and women in the workplace.

Where would the MMA look for partners? The political ulema are politicians as much as they are men of the cloth, and they are not all of the same mould. Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the JUI, for instance, appears to be rather pragmatic and amenable to compromise. It may be useful to recall that his party under the leadership of his father, the late Maulana Mufti Mahmood, did once become a coalition partner of Abdul Wali Khan’s socialist ANP in governing NWFP and Balochistan (1972-73).

In the days following the 2002 elections, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain said repeatedly that his party (PML-Q) and the MMA were “natural allies.” Were they? Composed of defectors from its parent organization, the PML-Q is pre-eminently the “king’s party.” If it continues to be his party, there can be no prospect of its working together with the MMA whose opposition to the general has since become harder and more sweeping.

If appearances can be relied upon, Mr Nawaz Sahrif’s faction of the PML should be able to get along well with the MMA. Tutored partly in Ziaul Haq’s school, he is no stranger to the opportunistic uses of religion. He had support of the Islamic parties during his first term as prime minister. In April 1991, he got parliament to pass a bill “for the enforcement of the Shariah,” requiring all Muslim citizens to order their lives according to its injunctions. Intending to override the Constitution, it declared that the Shariah would thenceforth be the supreme law of the land. It authorized the government to make rules “for carrying out the purposes of this Act.”

Nothing was subsequently done to enforce the Shariah, probably because the framers of this law had never intended to do so. As if this exercise in hypocrisy was not enough, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, during his second term, sponsored the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution for the purpose, once again, of making the Shariah the supreme law of Pakistan. The National Assembly adopted it on October 9, 1998, but Mr Sharif’s government fell to a military coup before the Senate could pass it.

Commanding a huge majority in the National Assembly at this time, Mr Sharif did not have to placate the MMA or any other group to remain in power. Why then did he sponsor this superfluous amendment? It could be that taking the name of Islam in vain had become a habit of the mind, a routine. It is possible also that the move was intended to offset some of the embarrassing and troublesome situations in which he had been placed, such as his confrontation with the judiciary, emerging differences with the army, and charges of unmitigated corruption against his government.

Given their past experience, an alliance between the PML-N and the MMA cannot be ruled out. Much will depend on whether they perform well enough in the next elections, and that will depend on whether the Sharifs are able to re-enter politics, and lead their party. Note also that the “togetherness” being forged between the PPP and the PML-N will work as an impediment to the latter’s partnership with the MMA, for the PPP does not want to have anything to do with that body.

There has been persistent talk of General Musharraf’s government wanting to open windows to the PPP and, once in a while, there is reference to approaches made to the PML-N. These moves are being made in response to the widespread feeling in the country, and abroad, that the “mainstream” parties must be allowed back if extremism and terrorism are to be contained. It is not clear at this point what the terms of a rapprochement between the present regime and these parties will be. It may turn out to be easier to reach an understanding with the PPP than with the PML-N.

A few of the difficulties in the latter case may be noted. The PML-N has been virulent in its denunciations of General Musharraf which may have intensified

his personal disapproval of the Sharifs.

Its attitude towards religious “obscurantism,” or even extremism, is problematic. Any deal that allows the Sharifs to return will probably have the effect of destabilizing the PML-Q, which has been the

general’s loyal and obedient agent to

date.

The PPP, like several other parties in the country, is essentially pragmatic in outlook, standing slightly to the left of centre in its policy orientations. While disapproving of the military’s participation in governance, it will probably soft-pedal the issue. If it sees that the prospect of its returning to power, or a share of it, is contingent upon General Musharraf’s acquiescence, it will not oppose his continuance in office beyond 2007, provided that it can be done within the bounds of law.

It will not undo the privatization that has already been accomplished, but it will probably want to be circumspect and selective in advancing the process. If

this assessment of the PPP’s disposition is correct, its alliance with the PML-Q would be a whole lot simpler to work out and maintain than any other possible combination.

All of the above is predicated on the assumption that the next elections will be fair and that the civil and military bureaucracies will leave the electoral process alone. In that event the PPP will likely win more, and the PML-Q fewer, seats than either of them did in 2002. The two of them could form a stable government at the centre with Benazir Bhutto, or a nominee of hers, at its head. At this stage, it may be prudent to leave the provincial governments out of this speculative discourse.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. E-Mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

Where time stands still

MY home in Beirut has been a timebox for almost 30 years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room. I came to Lebanon in 1976 when I was just 29 years old, and because I have lived in this city ever since — because I have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years — I felt I was always 29.

Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning papers in Beirut and The Independent, a day late, from London. My landlord Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his 70s, lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be.

The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. One founded a brewery and became a millionaire. They have married, had children. Some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper obituaries — for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning — I notice how the years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own.

When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives and deaths of Great War veterans like my dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable 10 years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly “1946” is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women — spies and soldiers and statesmen and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries myself.

And still I was 29. I could look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon had a brutal history but it had been a place of great kindness to me. It taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of friendships, of fear, of books read past midnight — long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains — there had always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to.

How many times have I sat on the flight deck of Middle East Airlines’ old 707s — from the Gulf, from Egypt, from the Balkans or other parts of Europe — and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean “like the head of an old sailor” and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 1-18 and known that, in half an hour, I would be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I can send Abed to his family and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. Yet I am surrounded by so much history that an individual age seems to have no meaning.

The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflect that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea froths and gurgles opposite my balcony.

I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at the most green-draped of tombs in the Omayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb: “Saladin, we have returned.”

A friend gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period — they may well have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon — and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or the Nato warships sliding into Beirut bay.

When the doomed multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian fighters from Lebanon — and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre — I counted 28 Nato vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon.

And one night, I saw a strange luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only a minute afterwards realized that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

War gave a kind of symmetry to Beirut. The smell of burning garbage became a symbol of summer evenings. The wartime electrical cuts would have me racing on foot up and down floors without elevators — war keeps you fit, I once churlishly remarked to a friend.

I remember once, flying off to Geneva to see a beautiful girl (by chance, sitting next to me, was a certain Ahmed Chalabi, but that’s yet another story), feeling that Switzerland, where I couldn’t throw a cigarette packet out of a car window, was unreal, false, a bubble of luxury in a cruel world. Reality, normality, would be back in Beirut with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire.

I was in this city on the very last day of the civil war, following the Syrian tanks under shellfire up to Baabda. In conflict, you never believe a war will end. Yet it finished, amid corpses and one last massacre — but it ended, and I was free of fear for the first time in 14 years.

And then I watched it all reborn. The muck along the Corniche below my balcony was cleared and flower beds and new palm trees planted. The Dresden-like ruins were slowly torn down or restored and I could dine out in safety along the old front line in fine Italian restaurants, take coffee by the Roman ruins, buy Belgian chocolates, French shirts, English books. Slowly, my own life, I now realize, was being rebuilt. Not only did I love life — I could expect to enjoy it for years to come.

Until, of course, that Valentine’s Day morning on the Corniche just down from my home when the crack of a fearful explosion sent fingers of dark brown smoke sprouting into the sky only a few hundred metres from me. And that was the moment, I think, when the beautiful dream ended, as it did for tens of thousands of Lebanese. And I no longer feel 29.— (c) The Independent

Bishkek spring

VLADIMIR PUTIN has moved swiftly to accept the outcome of Kyrgzystan’s “tulip revolution”, which followed the “orange” and “rose” revolutions that have changed the political geography of Russia’s “near abroad”. But metaphors should not become masters of thoughts and while there does seem to be a domino effect, starting from Tiblisi in Georgia, via Kiev, to the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, there are significant differences between them. Kyrgyzstan, a small country of great beauty and extreme poverty, has long been the most promising of the five Central Asian “stans” that won their independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. Now it seems to have been propelled suddenly towards a better future, though — alarmingly — one sullied by violence as well as an orgy of largescale looting.

Opposition protests were triggered by what appeared to be blatant rigging of the recent elections, in which all but six of the 75 parliamentary seats went to President Askar Akayev, his family and supporters.

The demonstrations that forced him to flee were motivated by a wish for less corruption and more democracy, even if clan rivalries played a role too. Mr Akayev was more liberal than other regional leaders, former communists who simply changed their hats; but that did not make his increasingly authoritarian style and nepotistic practices - his wife owned Biskhek’s biggest shopping centre - any more acceptable.

Kyrgyzstan’s remoteness, small size, the absence of a supportive diaspora and the sheer speed of the protests meant they attracted only limited interest from western governments, though Mr Akayev, thinking of Ukraine, did warn “foreign political consultants” to stay away. America’s main concern, for all George Bush’s freedom rhetoric, is likely to be keeping its airbase near Bishkek, set up to watch China and pursue the “war on terror” in nearby Afghanistan.

— The Guardian, London

The question of aging and immigration

GOOD news on the economy was in short supply as European Union leaders met in Brussels on March 22-23 for an annual review of efforts to spur growth and jobs across the 25 nation bloc. The EU governments may have stopped squabbling over reforming the eurozone stability pact, but heavyweights Germany and France are demanding an end to efforts to liberalize the service sector and several “old” EU states are haranguing the bloc’s “new” central and eastern European members over allegedly unfair tax and labour competition. Meanwhile, according to chilling data from an array of sources, the bloc is no way near meeting its four-year old objective of becoming the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010 and playing catch-up with the US and Japan.

European business leaders warned recently that EU growth rates were on the way down, falling from an estimated 2.5 per cent in 2004 to 2.2 per cent in 2005. “These economic forecasts remain disappointing given the performance of our main competitors such as the US (six per cent), India (six per cent) and China (eight to nine per cent),” said UNICE, the federation of EU industries.

In fact, the US economy is 20 years ahead of that of the EU, warned another study issued as a “wake-up call” for the bloc’s leaders by Eurochambres, a pan-European small business organization. “The EU’s current performance in terms of employment was achieved in the US in 1978 and it will take until 2023 for Europe to catch up,” the organization warned.

The news from the EU’s own executive commission is equally bleak. Europe is set to turn into an old continent, with a sagging economy and a shrivelling population unless it tackles its new demographic challenges, the European Commission warned recently.

Over the next quarter century, the EU will lose 20.8 million, or 6.8 per cent, of its working-age population while the population of elderly, those 65 years and older, will surge by half because of better health. “There has never, in Europe’s recent history, been a period of sustainable economic growth without population growth to create opportunities for investment and consumption,” the study said. One way to counter the losses is immigration, even though the influx of foreigners has been linked to a rise of right-wing extremism in many EU nations. “Ever larger migrant flows may be needed to meet the need for labour and safeguard Europe’s prosperity,” the study said. It called on EU leaders to assess the options of boosting the intake of legal immigrants

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is doing something about at least some of these problems. In plans unveiled in Berlin recently the German leader announced plans to cut the tax rate paid by businesses in Germany in a bid to stem the flow of companies leaving the country and taking advantage of more favourable rates in eastern Europe.

The corporate tax rate in Germany would be slashed from 25 per cent to 19 per cent, Schroeder told the German parliament. He also announced a two billion euro investment in transport infrastructure to boost the ailing construction sector in Germany. The measures come as Germany’s unemployment rate climbed to 5.2 million, a figure which Schroeder said, “must depress us all”.

Brussels is also trying to help EU businesses by launching an assault on regulation and red tape. Presenting the initiative recently, Industry Commissioner Gunter Verheugen said he aimed to put an end to the perception of the European Commission as a “bureaucratic monster” and boost Europe’s business environment.

Giving examples of some of the regulations Brussels could consider scrapping, he said the EU did not need to fix packaging sizes for coffee containers. A key priority he said would be the simplification of the vast body of EU law to make life easier

for small businesses and for

people to set up their own

companies.

The commission’s drive to liberalize the cross-frontier movement of service providers is, however, provoking a storm in Germany and France. Both Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac have warned Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso to drop the liberalization plans which they said would lead to unemployment in their countries.

The proposals are also causing angst among European socialists and trade unions — and have provoked an even bigger rift between those in favour of reform and liberalization and those who want to stop the bloc from drifting away from its more traditional values, including job protection and the safeguard of social rights.

Adding to the pressure for reform, the commission said recently that failure to implement economic changes could cost the EU around 800 billion euro. The combined effects of various reforms could be a growth increase of 0.75 per cent per year, resulting in between seven and eight per cent over ten years, it added.

While the data clearly calls for urgent action by governments, the two largest EU economies are moving forward very slowly. Schroeder’s agenda for reform in Germany has been plagued by public and trade union protests every step of the way. And with a public referendum on the new EU constitution set for May 29 in France, President Chirac is in no mood to make any move which could fuel popular discontent.

There is some good news, however. A recent report by the Centre for Economic Reform, a London-based think-tank says that Sweden, Denmark and Finland have “regularly matched or even bettered the US in surveys of global competitiveness” and are, in short, “world class economies”.

A thin view of ‘life’

WHAT does it mean to be pro-life? The label is thrown around in American politics so blithely that you’d imagine it refers to some workaday issue such as a tax bill or a trade agreement. Might the one good thing to come out of the rancid politics surrounding the Terri Schiavo case be a serious discussion of the meaning of that term? To begin with, why did Congress feel an obligation to turn Schiavo’s tragedy into a federal case? President Bush’s answer was compelling: “In a case such as this, the legislative branch, the executive branch ought to err on the side of life.” You don’t have to be a religious conservative to agree with that or to worry about prematurely allowing someone to die. But what, exactly, does “a case such as this” mean? Does it refer to one that received widespread publicity and became a major national cause for the right-to-life movement? Does it refer to one in which the parents and the spouse disagree?

There are countless decisions made every week when a family member removes someone they love from life support. Just over a week ago, a 5 1/2-month-old baby named Sun Hudson died after doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital removed the breathing tube that had kept him alive. It was removed over his mother’s opposition under the provisions of the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush.

Democrats such as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida have been arguing that Bush’s decision to sign the bill aimed at protecting Schiavo’s life is inconsistent with his earlier decision to sign a law designed to rationalize the way end-of-life decisions are made.

But leave that aside and just ask why Schiavo’s case was a national cause and Sun Hudson’s wasn’t. I am sure there are medical and moral distinctions to be made, but honestly:

How many bills would Congress have to pass to ensure that in every close medical call around the country, we “err on the side of life”? How many courts would have to be involved? That’s why it’s not surprising the Supreme Court decided yesterday to stay out of this controversy.

Whether or not signing that Texas bill puts the 1999 Bush at odds with the 2005 Bush, the act of approving it was an acknowledgment that end-of-life issues in an age of advanced medical technology must be confronted, however wrenching they are. Facing up to those questions and drawing distinctions is especially important for those — and I’m one of them — who oppose doctor-assisted suicide.

How has Terri Schiavo’s care been financed? The available information suggests that some of the money came from one of those much-derided medical malpractice lawsuits and that the drugs she needs have been paid for by Medicaid.

The irony has not been lost on Democrats. Just a few days after most Republicans in both houses of Congress had supported cuts in federal funding of Medicaid, here they were erring “on the side of life” in a single case. The same issue has come up here in Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush, a strong supporter of keeping Schiavo alive, has been proposing cuts in Medicaid spending.

Republicans cry foul when any link is made between the Schiavo question and the Medicaid question. “The fact that they’re tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality,” harrumphed Dan Allen, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But what’s disconnected from reality is refusing to accept the idea that health care is about life issues and money issues.

People who lack access to health care because they can’t afford insurance often die earlier than they have to — with absolutely no national publicity and with no members of Congress rising up at midnight to pass bills on their behalf. What is the point of standing up for life in an individual case but not confronting the cost of choosing life for all who are threatened within the health care system or by their lack of access to it?

What does it mean to be pro-life? As far as I can tell, most of those who would keep Schiavo alive favour the death penalty. Most favoured allowing the assault weapons ban to expire and oppose other forms of gun control. The president makes an excellent point when he says we “ought to err on the side of life.” It’s a shame how rarely that principle is put into practice.—Dawn/Washington Post Service