Reinventing the OIC

IN the year-long run-up to its extraordinary summit in Makkah on December 7-8, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which had emerged in 1969 as a collective response to an arson attack on Masjid-i-Aqsa, has had a bad press. There was a litany of its failures. Ironically, the most trenchant criticism came from the Muslim rulers themselves. Unfortunately, there was not much evidence of any deep introspection on their own role as the decision-makers.

The climax came with President Musharraf’s demand that the OIC should not only be radically restructured but should also be given a new name. It was a call for not just a reformation but for reinventing the highest Islamic consultative body.

There have to be compelling reasons, as, indeed, contingent expectations, for advocating such a dramatic disconnect with the OIC’s past. The reasons must go beyond bureaucratic and budgetary imperfections which, arguably, were amenable to correction. The average Muslim would rightly suspect that there must have been an inherent weakness in the mission statement drawn up by the founding fathers. In seeking a revolutionary revamping of the ummah’s representative body, Pakistan must be inspired by a new vision, a new strategic choice.

The Makkah summit has published a spirited declaration. It is reinforced by a 10-year action plan that addresses key areas of our collective existence. These documents resonate well but beg the question if the ummah is now happily free of the factors that frustrated the lofty ideals spawned by the first gathering of its leaders in 1969.

The organization was born when Israel had just embarked upon the project to convert the spectacular gains made by it in the six-day war into Greater Israel. Islamic unity played a role in the UN General Assembly refusing to legitimize Israel’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem. But this unity came under strain as the United States increasingly threw its weight behind Israel and demonstrated in 1973 that it would never permit an Arab army to defeat Israel.

When it broke rank, Egypt was barred from the OIC, leaving it even weaker. In the course of time, Egypt returned to the fold and also got back its lost territory. But the predicament of the Palestinians was in no way alleviated by the collective efforts of the OIC. It remained an ineffectual debating club. Can we now expect a new unity of purpose that would prevent such failures in future?

The factors which led to the OIC’s failure in bringing to an end the Iran-Iraq was were not very dissimilar. I assisted late Ziaul Haq in more than one of his missions to Tehran, Baghdad and Jeddah undertaken by him as a member of the summit-level Ummah Peace Committee. Countless hours of consultations did not make a dent in the epistemological wall between the belligerents.

Iran was still perceived as a militant exporter of its revolution to Arab lands which justified the pouring of billions of dollars by Arab states into Saddam Hussein’s war machine. On its part, Iran remained convinced that it had been invaded as part of an American blueprint to topple the Islamic regime in Tehran.

On the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt made frantic efforts until the last minute to avert this catastrophe but there was no worthwhile collective Islamic initiative to assist them. President Musharraf now rightly proposes the establishment of OIC mechanisms for intra-Islamic conflict prevention and resolution.

Does his proposal reflect a confidence that the 200-year old legacy of internecine and fratricidal wars waged in the interest of alien powers has finally been laid to rest? Should the Arab-Islamic “street”, as the western media dub it, now feel assured that Muslim rulers would not, henceforth, provide assistance to outside invaders seeking regime change, appropriation of strategic economic resources, military bases for global hegemony and, if necessary, redrawing of political maps in their part of the world?

What brought the Muslim states together in Makkah on December 7 was not so much the threat of conventional conflicts like the Iran-Iraq war as the fear of anarchy created by the recent drift of history. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, and in most cases, they cannot even call the threat by its real name. There is worldwide consensus that 9/11 was the real watershed of the present events. The Islamic people know only too well that it was a mighty blowback of policies deliberately pursued by the United States over a long time and that it was cynically seized by Washington’s neo-conservative power elite to launch the latest enterprise of global conquest and dominance.

The Islamic world is divided between those who found safety in aligning themselves with this enterprise and those who, being at the receiving end of this imperial adventure, had no choice but to resist. The fact that the US has been too careless to make a credible distinction between the war on terrorism and a war on Islam itself has compounded the dilemmas on both sides of this divide.

A long article by Tim Howells, reproduced in full by one of our English-language newspapers under the engaging title ‘How western governments use terrorism to control the world’ surveys some literature on the phenomenon of terrorism in our time. Predictably, Afghanistan figures prominently amongst the theatres where the CIA and Pentagon, reportedly, fostered terrorist activities.

The article recalls Zbigniew Brzezinsky’s disclosure that well before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, “the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahideen warlords and to influence militant Islam in the region” with the objective of forcing the Soviets to invade, i.e. “to draw them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire”. What turned it into a whirlwind that swept the Russians away was the legendary efficiency of Pakistan’s intelligence services.

Retribution was a natural reflex when Frankenstein struck New York on 9/11. But there was a fateful decision to call it a global war on terrorism (GWOT). The neo-conservative ideologues that did all the thinking for President Bush divided the world on Manichaean basis. This mythical war needed an enduring enemy.

The easiest justification for this war of opportunity was to postulate a widespread complicity of Muslims and then, through an engineered deterioration of discourse, the complicity of Islam itself. More recently, President Bush has reverted to blurring the distinction between terrorism and Islam. Belatedly, the Makkah declaration reflects the anguish of Muslims by voicing “our feelings of stigmatization and concern over the growing phenomenon of Islamophobia around the world as a form of racism and discrimination.”

Why President Musharraf and some other Muslim leaders accepted this Manichaean division of Muslims into terrorists and moderates continues to be problematic. Pakistan was already facing the Afghan blowback but there was still some middle space for a policy mix of law enforcement and mediation with the help of mainstream Islamic parties that abhorred terrorism. A vociferous adoption of the US war on terror as our own war as a self-proclaimed frontline state destroyed the middle space. The resultant polarization hangs like a dark shadow on the future.

There is no ambiguity as to where Islam stands in the matter. Its energetic engagement with history is as valid as its transcendence of time and place. The two blend in a moral vision which applies to human conflict as well. War is no less subject to ethical restraint than any other human activity. Islam does not tolerate injustice. Nor does it encourage capitulation to a predatory aggressor. It accepts, as Muslim thinkers have emphasized, the concept of a just war (jus ad bellum) but also insists on justice in war (jus in bello), which means an unquestioned acceptance of a moral framework for the armed conflict. There is no place in Islam for the mindless terror witnessed today. The world of Islam must engage in a deep dialogue with other faiths and cultures to counter the deliberate distortions of its key concepts including Jihad. Its governments have to do the same without the defensive self-mortification they have indulged in since 9/11. Things have gone wrong horribly because the fight against a few thousand terrorists has been framed as a global war, a mantra repeatedly uncritically by Muslim states. Using the term vaguely and emotively, the “Islamists” have been cast into the principal opponents of the American imperium and the inter-linked project of globalization.

The Islamic resistance, almost entirely in the hands of non-state actors, has fragmented and proliferated into violent entities outside any institutional control. Jonathan Randal, the author of a book on Osama bin Laden, made the wry comment that the United States “maddeningly dominated the globe but refused to set right the festering Palestines and Kashmirs.”

Instead of acting as an echo chamber of a false, propagandistic narrative of terrorism, the Muslim states should offer an alternative discourse, a discourse that heals and does not make the world even sicker than it already has become. There is no lack of analysis by Muslim thinkers from Malaysia to the Maghreb of the factors underlying terrorism in Muslim societies. This analysis does not become state policy because of the vested interests of the elites that rule our lands. The adoption of OIC’s 10-year action plan implies a broader, more inclusive, power base as the promised revolution in education, health, trade and investment would inevitably become a dynamic for democracy and greater participation of people.

Without the success of this plan, Muslim rulers will continue to face insurgencies and terrorism. Depending on American military muscle can prolong the status quo but not save it. Iraq has shown that even the United States finds it difficult to fight what is euphemistically described in our times as asymmetrical warfare.

Another Islamic summit has produced another magnificent declaration. It is yet to be seen if Muslim states are willing to accept changes in power structure that this planned holistic encounter with modernity will bring about, or opt for a linear, militaristic brand of counter-terrorism demanded by outside powers. Never before in history was the statesmanship of Muslim rulers put to such a severe test. The talisman we await is not the change of name of the OIC but a transformation of antiquated ruler-subject relationship. The plan of action will wither on the vine unless this transformation takes place.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

An instrument of oppression

Last Tuesday all progressive and enlightened elements in this country, even those who preach enlightened moderation, should have flown their flags at half mast, after the National Assembly demonstrated once again that when it comes to repression and obscurantism this body has no equal.

A representative of the MQM, Kunwar Khalid Yunus, whose leader has often spoken out against the iniquitous feudal system and crimes committed against women, tried to push through a bill in the National Assembly proposing amendments to the offence of Zina. This is the most contentious part of the Hudood Ordinance’s of 1979 — Ziaul-Haq’s great “gift” to the land of the pure. It requires a rape victim to present four male witnesses to substantiate her claim — otherwise she can be convicted of indulging in fornication or adultery or face punishment for lying.

To understand how frightfully one-sided and pernicious this law is, and the illogical limits to which it can be stretched, one is reminded of the case of the blind girl who was criminally assaulted a number of years ago. The press did its bit to publicize the rape. And so apparently did the judiciary. The prosecutor pointed out that the girl was in no position to identify her rapist because she was blind. The rapist was acquitted because there were no witnesses. The girl was arrested because, according to the law, she had committed adultery.

And the onlooker in the gallery pointed out that even if the victim had possessed the gift of sight she would never have been able to substantiate her claim because rapists are not normally in the habit of making a public exhibition when assaulting a victim. It couldn’t get more bizarre than that.

A month after the incident was reported in the press, a lady journalist happened to be sitting next to a former judge of the Supreme Court at a function in a local hotel. After listening to the usual assortment of corny Punjabi anecdotes which revolve around the members of a tribe of hirsute warriors, the conversation suddenly drifted to the violation of the blind girl.

Rising to the occasion the former judge held forth in his inimitable style. While regretting the incident he did make oblique references to the possibility that the assault might not have been a totally unpleasant experience for the blind girl and that the latter might, in fact, have been a willing victim. The four ladies at the table were, of course, appalled. But they chose to remain silent. The jurist was, after all, merely reflecting what the average male has been taught to believe — that in Pakistan women don’t have any rights, just obligations.

It does remind one of that scene from Richard Attenborough’s remarkable film on the great sage, when General Dyer was being interrogated by members of the Hunter Commission on the instigation of Secretary of State Montague. The judicial enquiry followed soon after the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, in which 50 Gurkha soldiers under the command of General Dyer fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition for 15 minutes on a screaming, terrified crowd of 10,000 unarmed men, women and children, a large number of whom were peasants who had come to Amritsar from neighbouring villages to celebrate the Hindu Baisakhi spring festival.

When Dyer was told that there were women and children in the massive crowd who might have required medical assistance, the soldier said, with a straight face, that aid would have been provided, if the children had so requested. The head of the commission, Lord Hunter, then said: how does a wounded child ask for medical help when bullets from 303 rifles are flying all over the place? The answer is he doesn’t.

In a more modern setting, like Pakistan circa 2005, how does a woman who has been locked up under Clause 10(2) of the contentious ordinance, and who has been languishing in the Karachi Women’s Prison for two years along with her son, because she happened to have sat on the same bench as a male stranger in a government hospital, seek justice? The answer once again is, she doesn’t.

There have, in fact, been times where even a section of the press has treated zina cases as one of the occupational hazards of life in a developing country. This is possibly the only country in the world with the pretence of a democratic system where the legislatures, consisting of people who make the laws, are officially militating against the rights of 50 per cent of the population, aided and abetted by an equally retrogressive police and judiciary.

And yet, the federal law minister, Mr Wasi Zafar, has the gall to tell the world that “women in Pakistan enjoy complete liberty and respect, especially when compared to those in western countries.” Of course, he’s not including those village women who, in order to assuage the appetites of lascivious old landlords, have been made to parade in public in the nude; or women who have had acid thrown on their faces by sons of former governors; or women who are raped on the instructions of panchayats to settle old scores and end up being abandoned by their families; or women who are brutalized because they are suspected of infidelity; or the teenagers who are still traded off like cattle to conclude the requirements of an antiquated stone-age custom called vani. It is also not very clear which western countries the minister was referring to. Could it have been Germany, Sweden, Norway, Holland and Denmark?

Kunwar Khalid Yunus of the MQM, who presented the case for the amendment to Section 8 of the ordinance, certainly needs to be congratulated for his courageous step. The bill didn’t go through. But he has managed to demonstrate that the people at the helm of affairs who claim to represent the government of Pakistan have tunnel vision and will go to extraordinary lengths to uphold the hallowed traditions of a group of ultra conservative clergymen who though they still adopt the posture of an opposition party appear to have completely mesmerized the treasury benches.

It is now widely believed that the Hudood Ordinances were introduced by the military dictator Ziaul Haq to court Saudi Arabia’s support and favour for his acrimonious rule and to ensure that the country would be provided with cheaper fuel. And so it came to pass, as the scriptures would have put it that out of a total of 57 Muslim countries only Pakistan and Saudi Arabia clung to the Hudood law.

But though most writers trace the genesis of this near apoplectic state of paranoia to maintain the status quo on the military strongman, the seeds had already been sown by Mr Bhutto, the last civilian strong man who had a unique opportunity to turn his country into a secular, progressive welfare state. Instead, in a desperate attempt to get the clergy off his back he took a series of retrogressive steps and excommunicated a religious sect. Now he is also being accused of stoking the fires of racial hatred which led to the ultimate dismemberment of the eastern limb of the country.

The MQM’s attempt to shine a beam or two on the stygian shadows that fall on the treasury benches represents the most recent bid to accord women the rights and respect that one would come to expect in an Islamic society. There have, however, been other brave souls who did their bit for posterity. Last year, Sherry Rahman of the PPP tried to push through a bill on honour killing — the scourge that continues to present Pakistan abroad as a mediaeval fiefdom where people still practise a stone age culture.

Well, the sagacious, learned and just guardians of the state put on their purple skull caps, deliberated through three torturous readings, the scissors in their hands clipping furiously at certain words and passages, until what emerged was a moth-eaten document which wasn’t worth the paper on which it had been printed. The upshot of it all was that the ‘honour’ killers are still carrying on doing what they do best, demeaning women and decimating at the rate of a thousand a year, the female population in the middle and lower classes with impunity. It is time the National Assembly started to function a little more responsibly. Only then would Mr Wasi Zafar’s statement have any meaning.

Outsourcing the torture

“METTERNICH comes close to being a statesman; he lies very well,” Napoleon once said of the Austrian aristocrat who dominated European diplomacy for a generation. By that demanding standard, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not come close at all.

Her four-country European tour was originally intended to rebuild US-European relations that have been badly damaged by the Iraq war, and especially to welcome a new German government whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, wanted to kiss and make up with the Bush administration. But then came the furore about the alleged torture of terrorism suspects and the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency used the airports of America’s European allies for the “rendition” of those suspects to places where the torture could be done more conveniently.

Rice’s failure to lie convincingly about the torture accusations — the US, she said, “does not tolerate, permit or condone torture under any circumstances” — was not all her fault, for she is continually undermined by other parts of the administration. Vice-President Dick Cheney publicly insists that the CIA be exempt from the ban on “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and the CIA goes on using such techniques as “waterboarding” (strapping a prisoner to a board and immersing his head until he believes he is drowning) even while the State Department condemns other governments that use the same technique.

Since almost all of this activity takes place beyond the borders of the United States, there is not much that its opponents can do about it through the American justice system. Moreover, the CIA and the US military usually outsource the more extreme forms of torture to other governments (the Abu Ghraib abuses were an aberration) in order to evade direct legal responsibility. But that does involve flying detained suspects around the world in planes owned or chartered by the CIA, and the flight logs of these aircraft show that they have landed hundreds of times in European Union countries — which may legally implicate those countries as accomplices to torture.

The flights were presumably carrying Muslim detainees between the US-run prison camps in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, other secret CIA camps that allegedly existed in Poland, Romania and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, and places like Egypt and Syria in the case of those destined for major torture or death. Thousands of detainees may have been carried on these “ghost flights” over the past four years, and Lawrence Wilkerson, a former US army colonel who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 until early this year, told the BBC last week that between 70 and 90 prisoners have died in “questionable circumstances.”

As the revelations about secret CIA prisons in Europe and CIA shuttle flights through EU countries grew — at least 210 stops in Britain, 50 in Ireland and 437 in Germany — EU political leaders were forced to demand explanations from the United States. For two weeks Condoleezza Rice denied US wrongdoing but mostly said nothing, which was certainly the best strategy in the circumstances.

The European governments could satisfy their own public opinion by loudly demanding answers, and the US saved everybody embarrassment by not giving any. But then Rice lost her patience and told the truth.

Speaking in Washington just before she left for Europe, she defended the renditions as a necessary part of the US “war on terror.” She made it absolutely clear that the US government had the knowing cooperation of the relevant EU governments, or at least of their intelligence services, in these shuttle flights. It must have felt very satisfying, but she will regret saying it before the end.

What she said was completely true, of course. You can’t have all those flights going through the airports of sovereign states without the knowledge and permission of the host governments, even if they choose not to inquire too closely into what the planes are carrying. By highlighting their complicity in the renditions, Rice made it very likely that there will now be judicial or parliamentary inquiries in these countries to probe the extent to which their governments knew — or chose not to know — what was going on.

The uproar will probably be greatest in Germany, where the former socialist government led by Gerhard Schroeder had publicly broken with the Bush administration over the invasion of Iraq. It’s not all that surprising that it tried to repair some of the damage by turning a blind eye to the ghost flights, but the manifest hypocrisy of its behaviour will create huge pressure in Berlin to uncover the truth, and it may yet break Angela Merkel’s brand new “grand coalition” government.

There will be public inquiries in other countries, too, and a constant flow of new information about the illegality and cruelty of the American gulag that will undermine the already failing authority of the Bush administration. By telling the truth and insisting that European governments share the blame for the policy, Condoleezza Rice has opened a can of worms that her colleagues at home would have preferred to keep shut.—Copyright

The great default

IT’S BEEN three months since hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, and it’s probably safe to guess that most Americans, preoccupied with Iraq or Christmas shopping, didn’t mark the anniversary.

Not so for the hundreds of thousands of people whose mortgages are due, following a 90-day extension, on houses that are uninhabitable or nonexistent. This week the Federal Housing Administration announced that it would continue to pay such mortgages for some 20,000 homeowners in Louisiana as well as four other states — as long as they have FHA insurance and as long as they live in their homes or intend to live in them within 12 months.

According to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, HUD wants the families to “concentrate on putting their lives in order without having to worry about making mortgage payments.”

Now comes a much bigger test: Does the federal government, or anyone else, feel the same compassion for the hundreds of thousands of people who do not have FHA insurance or who are not in a position to move back into their wrecked homes within the year? Best estimates are that some 205,000 homes in Louisiana were destroyed and 35,000 more were badly damaged.

An attempt by the AFL-CIO and community groups to negotiate an extension for those homeowners fell apart this week. That means banks may be about to foreclose on hundreds of thousands of properties, some of which have no resale value right now. The consequences of such a mass foreclosure include the collapse of the local banking business (whose presence is also needed to help restart the Louisiana economy), years of legal wrangling, a halt to the reconstruction of properties that have no clear ownership — and financial ruin for thousands of people.

—The Washington Post