EU: wallowing in crises

LIKE any other family, the 25-nation European Union is accustomed to dealing with regular spats and misunderstanding between disaffected clan members. But veteran EU insiders warn that the current crisis facing the bloc is probably the worst in the history of the often-feuding family.

The squabbling is expected to come to a head when EU leaders meet in Brussels on June 16 and 17 to try and set the bloc back on course following the damage wrought by the twin rejections of a proposed new EU constitution in recent referendums in France and the Netherlands.

EU policymakers, seeking to quell growing popular disenchantment with Europe, face the added challenge of coming up with quick responses to public fears on issues as diverse as globalization, unemployment and enlargement.

The EU summit is expected to take a much-awaited decision on the future of the treaty. But an outbreak of acrimonious public bickering over EU finances — and especially how to deal with Britain’s 20-year old budget rebate — has now added to leaders’ woes. In addition, there is growing concern that the political turmoil will take its toll on the single European currency. The euro plunged to an eight-month low against the dollar last week, reflecting growing concern at the future of EU economic reform efforts and worries at the possible unravelling of European monetary union.

A decision on the constitution — and how to reignite public support for the Union — will top the agenda of the Brussels meeting. However, with only a few days to go before the summit, agreement on the fate of the constitution remains elusive. The problem is that while most EU leaders agree that the treaty is mortally wounded, there is no accord on how and when to bury it.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been arguing in favour of a period of reflection saying leaders should push the “pause” button. However, Blair’s stance and his decision to put British referendum plans on ice has been roundly condemned by French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder who say the show must go on.

Luxembourg’s prime minister and current EU president Jean-Claude Juncker have also said efforts to secure public approval of the treaty must continue. Juncker has said he will resign if Luxembourg voters reject the treaty in a referendum in his country on July 10.

Discord over the treaty is not the only problem facing EU leaders, however. Fireworks are also expected between Blair and Chirac over Europe’s future economic direction. Blair had made it clear that he intends to use the UK presidency of the EU, starting on July 1, to make a case for liberal economic reforms. The British premier is expected to argue that deregulation is the only way Europe can tackle unemployment and boost flagging growth.

But the French leader, whose relations with Blair have never been easy, is expected to refute such talk, contending just as fiercely that the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” economic agenda is one reason the EU constitution was thrown out by French voters.

The row over economic policy is expected to be poisoned even further by disagreements over how to fund the Union from 2007 to 2013. Juncker is pressing for a quick deal on finances at the EU summit, hoping that such an agreement will send a message of reassurance to an increasingly Euro-sceptic public. But many in Brussels fear that the spectacle of 25 leaders fighting — once again - over cash will only serve to spotlight current EU chaos, not inspire confidence.

Juncker has tabled a compromise proposal for a seven-year budget worth 870 billion euros or 1.06 per cent of the EU’s collective gross national income (GNI). This is lower than the European Commission proposal for a budget worth 1.026 billion euros, representing 1.21 per cent of GNI. But the Luxembourg premier is hoping it will meet the austerity requirements of the blocs richest nations, including Germany, France and Britain.

Chances for a budget breakthrough rose recently after Germany — the EUs biggest paymaster — promised more flexibility on rich nations’ initial demands that the budget should be no higher than one per cent of the Union’s GNI. But prospects for a deal fell again after France and Britain became embroiled in an acrimonious public row over how to deal with the British budget rebate negotiated in 1984 and now worth 4.6 billion euros a year. Britain won the rebate because it argued it was paying too much into EU coffers compared to what it received in return in areas such as agriculture and EU development funds.

Times have changed, however. Austerity is the name of the game across the Union. And Britain is no longer one of the EU’s poorer members but the bloc’s sixth richest nation. Striving to secure a compromise, Juncker suggested this week that Blair should agree to freeze the rebate. Chirac immediately upped the ante, however, by asking that Britain make “a gesture of solidarity” and accept a cut in the rebate.

Blair riposted with an emphatic “no”, arguing that Britain had paid two and a half times more into EU coffers than France over the past 10 years. He said the very reason the rebate existed was because otherwise the British would be contributing an “unfair proportion” to EU coffers. In a pointed barb at Chirac, the British premier added: “The reason for the unfairness is because the spending of Europe is so geared to the Common Agricultural Policy.” France is a major beneficiary of EU farm spending.

Although Downing Street has said Blair did not want to get into a “macho stand-off” with his fellow European leaders, British diplomats said Chirac’s focus on the British rebate was a ploy to divert public attention from the French leader’s own fragile standing following the French “non” to the EU treaty last month. Blair’s advisers fear that Britain is being lined up as a scapegoat if next week’s summit fails to agree to the next EU budget framework. Chirac’s critics also note that while he is demanding an effort from Britain, the French leader was sticking to his guns on the amount of money Paris receives from Brussels in the farm sector.

Officials in Brussels warn that the in-fighting is hardly likely to impress European citizens — or the EU’s foreign partners. Juncker has warned that Europe’s international reputation is at stake. There is special concern that anti-EU hawks in the American administration are rubbing their hands in joy at the EU turmoil, believing that the crisis will put an end to any talk of the EU becoming a future “counterweight” to the United States. Washington’s official line remains, however, that the US wants a strong Europe as a partner. Foreign diplomats in Brussels say they have been warning their EU interlocutors that the bloc must not turn inwards or go into a prolonged introspective period.

Leaders also have to grapple with development aid questions in the run-up to the G8 summit in Gleneagles on July 6. In Brussels last week to lobby the EU top brass on aid, Irish rock star Bono challenged EU leaders to forget national politics and open their wallets to boost development aid for Africa and stop thousands dying every day in “stupid poverty”. “The message to EU leaders is: don’t blow it. This kind of momentum doesn’t come every year,” the U2 lead singer, a leading campaigner for debt relief, told a news conference.

Giving a helping hand to Africa may help revive public support for a strong European Union, Bono said, adding that lack of popular support for the constitution showed that many in Europe “do not dream the European dream with us.” He stated, “There is a lack of vision. Solving problems in Africa can be a chance to create a new belief in Europe.”

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bono, recognized that Europe’s political problems were no reason to “neglect our work in other areas.” He said, “We have to compare our problems to those of others. 25,000 people are dying each day of hunger and thirst in Africa. And there are enough resources to solve the problems. Our problems are nothing in comparison to that.” What Barroso failed to say, however, is that there is a vacuum of real EU leadership at the moment.

For all his decisiveness in the face of adversity, Juncker’s ability to make friends and influence people is hampered by the fact that he hails from one of the EUs smallest states. The French “no” vote has dealt a humiliating defeat to Chirac while Schroeder’s position is weakened by a spate of regional election defeats in recent months.

Berlusconi remains as ever on shaky ground and Blair, despite his brave words over leading Europe towards prosperity, is not considered to be a “mainstream EU politician” and so far has shown little enthusiasm for questions related to Europe.

The European Commission, meanwhile, is struggling to reassert its authority but Barroso has so far been unable to rise above the fray and take over the mantle of EU leadership. The stakes are high, however. If no deal is reached by the end of next week embattled EU leaders will be left squabbling over the bloc’s finances, in addition to the continuing uncertainty over the future of their constitution.

Europeans have always managed to work their way out of seemingly intractable difficulties in the past. But dealing with two crises at the same time may prove to be too much even for the bloc’s battle-hardened leaders.

Problem of police excesses

“WE have orders to strip you in public and teach you a lesson”: thus, reportedly, a woman police officer spoke to Ms Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, on May 14 in Lahore.

She and other human rights activists had gathered to organize a “mixed” marathon for the purpose of highlighting the issue of women’s rights. When they declined to disperse, the police beat them up, dragged them around, tore their clothes, baton-charged them, took some 40 of them away to an interrogation centre. The victims included, besides Asma Jahangir, Hina Jilani, Iqbal Haider (a former federal law minister), and Azra Shad.

Police brutality can, and does, take any number of forms: beating with fists, batons, rifle butts; kicking with heavy boots; flogging; choking, electric shocks, emitting shock through a stun gun (which incapacitate the subject); and various restraining mechanisms; “hogtie” which means tying a person’s hands to his ankles behind his back; sleep deprivation; sodomizing and rape, among others. Applied strategically and repeatedly, any of these measures can cause death. The police do occasionally resort to straightforward killing, by simply shooting a person down.

In Pakistan and several other developing countries not only those accused of crime but actual or potential opponents of the regime in power may also become targets of police brutality. The object is to inflict physical pain and humiliation upon them to obtain confessions or, in the case of political dissidents, to deter them from pursuing the course of action upon which they are embarked. Torture within police stations may result from a streak of sadism in the personalities of certain officers. But the more plausible reason is that the police resort to torture as a substitute for the investigative techniques and facilities which they lack.

It may be assumed that in dealing with political dissidents the police act on the instructions of their political superiors, that is, the politicians in power. This is not to say that the chief minister of Punjab or the district nazim of Lahore ordered the police specifically to tear the clothes of Asma Jahangir. He may have asked them only to “teach these troublemakers a lesson,” but there can be little doubt that in doing so he knew quite well how the police would proceed in performing their commission. It follows that the ruling politicians are accomplices of the police and prison officials so far as the abuse of their opponents is concerned.

International and local human rights organizations report that police and prison officials resort to brutality, in varying degrees, in a great many countries. Constitutions and laws forbid it: the Constitution of Pakistan (Article 14), for instance, provides that the “dignity of man” shall be inviolable, and that “no person shall be subjected to torture for the purpose of extracting evidence.” But governments, for the most part, choose not to enforce these prohibitions.

Some of the local and state police, sheriffs and their deputies, and federal agents use “excessive force” in dealing with persons in rural, suburban, and urban America. In July 1998 Human Rights Watch documented cases of police brutality in 14 of the larger cities, including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In a speech on April 15, 1999, Attorney-General Janet Reno acknowledged police brutality as an ongoing problem in the country.

Large police establishments usually have a unit, called “Internal Affairs,” whose function it is to investigate wrongdoing by its officers, including use of excessive force. But its workings are cloaked in secrecy and rarely do complaints against an officer result in his dismissal or demotion, let alone prosecution. He may not be penalized even when the case against him has been proved in civil proceedings and the court has awarded damages to the aggrieved party to be paid by the city government. Police departments are likely to claim that abuse of suspects and others is an “aberration” committed by a “rogue” officer, and that only in exceptional circumstances.

The situation in this regard is much the same in Great Britain. While the great majority of the British police are not given to violence, a small minority will bully the suspect or hit him to get a confession. Torture of suspects and the accused is frowned upon, but political and departmental superiors are reluctant to punish or discipline those who perpetrate it.

It should be noted also that, more than the native white folks, the victims of police brutality in Britain, America, and Western Europe are likely to be persons belonging to ethnic minorities (blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Turks, and since 9/11 those deemed to be fundamentalist Muslims).

The incidence of police brutality in India is probably as high as in Pakistan, and in the two countries taken together it is much higher than that in most western societies. Severe beating of accused persons during interrogation at Indian police stations is a routine practice. The station house officer maintains a list of “bad characters” in his area. When a serious crime occurs and the perpetrator is not readily identified, some of the persons on this list are hauled in on the assumption that they have either done the deed themselves or they know who may have done it. They are then given the proverbial “third degree” to extract information from them. The same goes for suspects and those whom the victims may have accused of the crime.

Groups of persons, as distinguished from individuals, may also become targets of police oppression. On July 20, 2002, more than a hundred policemen entered the village of Khedi Balwadi in Madhya Pradesh, without prior notice or warning. They had come to get the village vacated to make way for a dam that was to be built in the vicinity. They dragged residents out of their homes, beat men and women who resisted, separated mothers from their babies, and took them all away to a resettlement centre 75 kilometres away where no medical assistance was provided to those whom the police had injured.

A new custom has begun in both India and Pakistan. The police bring in a suspect and offer not to torture him if his relatives will pay them an appropriate sum of money in return for their self-restraint. One may recall the much publicized case of Mohammad Alam in West Bengal in 1995: he had been arrested for a petty violation and tortured to death after his mother had refused to pay Rs 4,000 in bribe. In a recent article in this newspaper Nafisa Shah reports that the same practice is widespread in prisons in Sindh.

In the 1960s the euphemism, “encounter,” came into vogue in India because of the frequency with which the police killed an individual allegedly in an exchange of fire with them. The encounters were fake for the most part, and they were generally understood to mean that the police had simply shot an undesirable person dead instead of going through the trouble of arresting him and building a viable case against him in court.

During the last 15 years the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) has surpassed all others in respect of custodial killings and extra-judicial executions. According to one report, nearly two thirds of the killings in “encounters” in India occur in UP. An human rights activist, Sanjay Vijavargiya, in Lucknow estimates that on average six extra-judicial executions take place in the state every day.

Uttar Pradesh seems to be ahead with respect to other forms of police brutality as well. In an opinion in 2001, the Allahabad High Court found it necessary to make the following observation: “A large number of petitions are coming up before this court with allegations that the police are behaving like bandits, thieves, rapists, and petty criminals.... It is high time that the police start behaving in a civilized manner.”

A bit of rough handling (pushing and shoving) of suspects and accused persons happens in all jurisdictions. But one may ask why most of the police in India and Pakistan, and some of them in western societies, resort to brutality. We will have to look beyond the fact, mentioned earlier, that lacking modern investigative techniques and facilities, the police employ torture as their principal means of obtaining information.

It is probable that like much of the rest of the society, the police have not absorbed the notion of the inherent dignity of the human person. As mentioned above, the majority of those at the receiving end of police brutality in western societies belong to low-income minority groups. In India, and Pakistan they come from lower castes and/or they are relatively poor. They are held in low esteem to begin with, and they are regarded as scum of the earth, deserving of no sympathy whatever, when they are believed to have committed crimes. It is more than likely that men from the upper classes, who have committed “white collar crimes (fraud, embezzlement, etc.), are not beaten up in police custody.

We must also consider the prevailing attitudes towards crime and punishment. The police do not see crime as a symptom of any kind of mental illness that needs to be treated. They may be aware of the idea of extenuating circumstances (for instance, extreme poverty as a reason for theft), but they do not let it influence their treatment of the accused. Nor do they see crime as an aberration and the perpetrator as someone who is to be reformed. Crime is simply evil, and while punishment may serve as a deterrent to other potential law-breakers, it is first and foremost retribution. The evil-doer must be made to suffer.

That is how divine punishment works also: the divine purpose in consigning the grievously wicked to hell is not to reform them, or to deter mischief on the part of others; it is to give the persons concerned what they deserve. Our police figure that they should do the same here: punish the alleged culprit all the way, first at the police station and then in prison, even if the divine scheme is not to be followed in any other respect.

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

Costly experiments in administration

THE Local Government Ordinance of 2001 under which the district governments and lower councils have worked for the past three years has been amended through another ordinance which, like the original ordinance, has been drafted by the federal government but promulgated by the four provincial governors instantly and without deleting or adding a word — the Constitution just does not permit them to do it.

The plethora of amendments looks larger than the ordinance itself and will need, it seems, some sweating hours by scribes and proof readers to produce an intelligible text of the new law to reveal the extent of the change in the system. But an important point needs to be made straightaway.

Each provincial government has chosen to give effect to the amendments through an ordinance instead of an act of the legislature. They could have convened the assemblies if they were not in session to debate and pass the amending law. In fact, they waited for the assemblies to be prorogued so that the governors could promulgate the ordinances.

For the federal government to draft the law is understandable because the local government system is controlled by the president though the subject is provincial. But each province should have debated the draft law in its own assembly and sought the president’s approval to changes thought necessary in its peculiar circumstances.

A justification existed for promulgating the original law in the form of an ordinance in 2001 for the provincial assemblies then stood dissolved in pursuance of the October 1999 military takeover proclamation. Now they are in existence and do not have much legislative or other work to occupy them. The assemblies in turn should have circulated the draft law to elicit public opinion and, going a step further, an appropriate committee of each assembly should have also heard the viewpoint of the special interests like the bar councils and service associations which are not represented in the legislatures.

Regrettably, the same secretive approach has been followed in radically altering the law as was done in making it. It is a bizarre way of introducing a system which is intended to serve the people at the grassroots to be imposed on them from the top. The original system in three years of its operation had proved to be generally divisive and impracticable in parts. The law then was made by a bureau headed by a retired general incorporating the ideas of General Musharraf. The extensive amendments now made represent the wishes of the provincial chief ministers. The public was ignored then as now.

Then Gen Musharraf, whose scheme it was, at least listened though he didn’t change his mind. Gen Naqvi to whom he assigned the task of spelling out the system in detail only harangued. Neither of the two was aware of the realities of life, nor had experience of civil administration. The system as it now stands thus represents a crude compromise between President Musharraf’s ideas then and the demands of raw political power now. The people were at the receiving end then as they are now once again.

The motivation in introducing a local government system that is unfamiliar to the people and the public servants alike was two-fold: first, to destroy the structure of the civil service with the commissioner and deputy commissioner as its visible targets who, as General Musharraf then put it, act like “kings but do nothing”; and, second, an urge to bring the district governments with their elective character and wide-ranging functions under the control of the centre and thus to detract from the authority of the provincial governments or, taking another view, to check provincialism.

The amended law does not curtail the powers or functions of the nazims but has placed them under the control of the chief ministers and that is what really matters. The chief minister now can overturn the order of a nazim, suspend him and, after going though certain motions, remove him altogether.

A nazim will have to be either extremely foolish or headstrong or highly principled to defy the chief minister or to act contrary to his wishes and put his office, won with great efforts and at high cots, at risk. Clashes between the nazim and the chief minister or their partymen, relatives or cronies would be inevitable and frequent as they are built into the system.

The chief minister lays down the policy and supervises all those functions at the provincial level which the nazim performs in his district. If the writ of the chief minister doesn’t run in the districts then all he can do is to sit and sulk in his office and so would scores of ministers and hundreds of parliamentarians. That was indeed the case for the past three years which drove all the four chief ministers to mount forces to bring the nazims under their effective control.

The president must have been persuaded to give in because to secure his place in politics he needs the support and goodwill of the chief ministers, ministers and members of the assemblies and not of he nazims, naib nazims and councillors.

The reality on the ground over the last five years has changed. The president created the nazims to clip the wings of the ministers and members of the assemblies and to destroy what he considered an overbearing but good-for-nothing bureaucracy with deputy commissioner as its glamorous but worthless representative. Now he had to cut the nazims to size to appease the parliamentarians and other politicians at the national and provincial levels.

The cost of this exercise in realpolitik has been heavy. A stable bureaucracy has been shattered. True, its calibre and conduct were on the decline but the institution was still familiar. The ordinary folks knew where to go seeking attention our justice. If someone did not know where to go he would go to the deputy commissioner. If there was a “king”, there were also many others who were servants and ready to help without going into the niceties of law and without waiting for orders from above. This quality in all public servants, it seems, has been extinguished for all times to come ever since Gen. Musharraf considered the top-ranking among them as arrogant and worthless and his acolyte Naqvi refused even to hear their viewpoint.

Now a nazim, howsoever just or impartial he might be, is after all a politician contending against more powerful politicians who may be bereft of either virtue. This political contest has made it all but impossible for a civil servant to be neutral and follow the rule of law and proprieties. Siding with one or the other has also its hazards for today he might be working in a district and tomorrow at the provincial capital. It is therefore not surprising that the list of officials awaiting posting or on special duty (which means getting paid without work) is getting longer.

The devolution plan and more particularly the creation of district governments has made politics much more acrimonious than it ever was. Take a situation where a chief minister suspends a district nazim because he is seen to be “abstaining wilfully” or “failing to comply” with his directions. Before the chief minister can dismiss him an inquiry has to be conducted by the provincial local government commission.

Now imagine the tension generated in Karachi by such contemplated action where the nazim is a front-ranking leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, the chief minister is the president of a faction of the Muslim League and the minister who is the chairman of the local government commission belongs to the MQM. Karachi will be lucky to escape a bloody strike or riot but the ethnic stress will last long enough for the administration to go to the dogs.

Whatever remedy is now applied, the problem would only get worse. The prudent course would be to go back to the point in the year 2000 when a zestful Musharraf launched his untested “grassroots democracy” and start afresh on the principle that politics must be kept out of administration and development down to the village level. Field Marshal Ayub Khan continued with his “basic democracy” for too long and went down with it. General Musharraf should act faster and thoughtfully to avoid such a fate.