Poor state of education

THE Sindh Education Management and Information System’s (Semis) report on the annual census of the schools in the province is quite revealing. If it also reflects the pattern of school education all over the country, it is a cause of alarm. Three key issues which the survey report highlights are the low enrolment and high drop-out rates, the significant role of the private sector in education and the dismal physical state of the schools. The three issues are closely inter-related and have a profound impact on each other. More importantly, they are the basic cause of the country’s poor performance in the education sector. According to the report, only 44 per cent of primary age children in the province are enrolled in school. This is a very low rate, especially if it is remembered that we are supposedly striving for universal primary education by the year 2015 to meet the millennium development goals. Besides, the drop-out rate, which is glossed over in the report by using ambivalent methods of calculation, is much higher than what it is made out to be. From the statistics presented the drop-out rate happens to be 66 per cent from the primary to the secondary level. All this clearly establishes the fact that only a small percentage of our children are receiving some education. A large number who get enrolled simply drop out without learning anything.

The second important issue is the size of the private sector. It accounts for more than a quarter of the total primary school enrolment. If the government schools are not to take the responsibility of educating five to nine-year-old children who will? Since the private sector charges for its services, it is inevitable that private schools would be expensive and beyond the reach of the common person. Compared to the data on private schools compiled by the government in 2000, it appears that private education has not grown rapidly as one would like to believe. It is the cost of sending one’s child to a private school that deters a large number of people with modest means from admitting their children to private institutions. But the public sector has failed to expand proportionately to fill the gap.

What is most shocking is the state of the school buildings. A quarter of the schools have no buildings at all, more than half have no drinking water, nearly half are without toilets and practically all of them have no libraries or laboratories. If parents are reluctant to send their children to such institutions, can they be blamed? Technically speaking, teachers and textbooks determine the quality of education. But the physical condition is also important as it is an indicator of the attractiveness of a school for its students. It reflects on our peculiar mindset that we spend billions on the Army House and other such fanciful projects, but to have proper school buildings is regarded as a luxury. Most schools do not even have a laboratory or a library. All this signifies one of the two things. A large part of the money set aside for school facilities is pocketed by unscrupulous contractors and bureaucrats. Or the policy-makers seem to believe that education is something we can do without and that our students do not need laboratories and other such facilities. It is time the government shook itself out of this stupour and began taking education more seriously.

Extension of Kyoto

ENVIRONMENT ministers attending the UN-organized talks on pollution and climate control in Montreal last week have achieved two breakthroughs. One, the world’s biggest polluter, America, has decided to re-join the Kyoto Protocol, four years after it had pulled out of it citing disagreement with what it said was an unnecessary focus on carbon emissions caps. Two, agreement has been reached on extending the protocol beyond 2012 for a long-term plan for reducing carbon emissions. The US and a host of developing nations will now rejoin the open-ended talks designed to extend the pact beyond 2012. However, to see the US’s return as a great achievement would be overstating the success of the Montreal talks. The reason is that Washington has decided to re-join Kyoto only after its allies, Canada and the European Union, agreed to its condition that the talks to extend Kyoto beyond 2012 will not require the US to make a commitment on limiting carbon emissions. That is precisely why America had left the Kyoto Protocol in the first place so it appears that it had its way on re-joining.

It seems that environmentalists in general and the other members of Kyoto in particular are quite jubilated by this development because it is felt that George Bush’s successor may adopt a tough approach to UN-led efforts to check global pollution. But the US election is still quite some time away and a victory for the Democrats — who have always been less isolationist and more inclined to working with the UN — is by no means certain. The inclusion of developing countries in the new open-ended talks is a good thing, not least because pollution is becoming a serious problem in many such countries, a good example being our own. However, as our own experience with CEDAW (Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women) or the Convention of the Rights of the Child shows, being a signatory to a treaty does not necessarily mean compliance with it. Treaties like Kyoto can only achieve their objective of reducing pollution and improving the lives of ordinary citizens if governments enforce their provisions and abide by their guidelines.

Poor malaria control

THE lack of progress on controlling the rising incidence of malaria in the country is quite upsetting, considering that Pakistan joined the WHO-sponsored Roll Back Malaria (RBM) initiative in 1999 when the number of cases reported annually was about 90,000. That figure has now risen to 125,000, and despite periodic measures announced by health authorities to curb the spread of the dreaded disease, there has been virtually no success in bringing down this number. In fact, as the authorities are realizing to their horror, cases of other mosquito-transmitted diseases like dengue fever and falciparum malaria that attacks the brain are also on the rise. It is difficult to see a substantial reduction in the number of patients of these diseases unless there is a committed effort to eliminate mosquito-breeding grounds. This is essential in view of the fact that malarial parasites are becoming drug-resistant, and traditional medication like chloroquine are no longer as effective as before.

Unfortunately, one rarely witnesses municipal authorities spraying stagnant pools of water with insecticide or health officials advocating the use of mosquito repellents, insecticide-treated netting or even appropriate clothing. The result is that the average family, living in dirty surroundings that make ideal breeding grounds for all manner of disease-causing organisms, has little idea of how to guard against mosquito bites. With this basic awareness lacking, what exactly has the RBM achieved in so many years? And what are the reasons for Pakistan’s lagging so far behind the 2010 target when statistics are expected to show a decline of malaria cases by 50 per cent? Perhaps it is about time health authorities seriously reviewed the progress made on RBM and accounted for the funding — much of it from foreign sources — spent so far on malaria control.

Losing the war against errors

THIS is how “extraordinary rendition” appears to operate. A suspect is pounced upon by US agents or local proxies, and interrogated.

This can happen in any part of the world, but people are more likely to be preyed upon in countries that are subservient to the United States. (Unfortunately, that sort of relationship appears nowadays to be the rule, with just a handful of exceptions.) If the interrogation doesn’t yield the desired results, the suspect is transported to another country keen to curry favour with Washington.

The choice of destination is not random: it is restricted to nations whose security agencies have a high success rate in loosening tongues. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Syria have been mentioned among the favoured destinations. Once a suitable confession has been extracted, the suspect may end up at Guantanamo Bay, or at an even less accessible US-operated prison in some other part of the world. These are referred to as black sites. Their existence is not officially acknowledged by Washington, but it also is not denied. Like their inmates, these detention facilities exist in a kind of limbo.

Some of these suspects live to tell the tale. There are likely to be others who do not: where torture is the norm, death in custody is an unremarkable occurrence. Mamdouh Habib was one of the lucky ones — although in the light of his ordeal he could be excused for not considering himself particularly fortunate.

The Australian citizen was, like so many other suspects, arrested in Pakistan. He claims he was flown to Egypt, the country of his birth, where he was a guest of the government for six months. The wide-ranging hospitality included being beaten and hung from hooks, shock treatment with an electric prod, and a range of threats that seemed all too real: drowning, electrocution, rape by dogs. He “confessed” that he had given training in martial arts to the 9/11 hijackers.

He ended up in Guantanamo Bay, which may almost have seemed civilized by comparison. Earlier this year, he was freed without charge (and without apology) and allowed to return to his family in Sydney.

In a number of other cases of this nature, the victims of abduction have related remarkably similar tales.

Last week there was a brief flurry of excitement across Europe amid reports that hundreds of CIA flights, presumably related to cases of extraordinary rendition, had passed through European airports. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due to visit, and many a pundit pontificated on how European leaders would whisper a few home truths into her ears, making it clear that such behaviour was reckless and unacceptable.

In the event, it didn’t prove too hard for Rice to persuade Nato and European Union leaders in Brussels to shut up and put up. The flights they were complaining about had helped to save lives in Europe, she announced, and no one demanded any proof. Rice’s aura of hubris was relatively subdued in meetings with heads of state such as Germany’s Angela Merkel. The US does not believe in or connive at torture, she said without blushing.

That would have been a welcome statement were it not such a blatant lie. Since last year it has become increasingly obvious that what the world saw of goings-on at Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg. Lately, the US itself has admitted that it is holding prisoners to whom the Red Cross is denied access. It does not say where. Reports have mentioned detention centres in Poland and Romania — and the former has vowed to look into the allegations. Although it’s hardly a secret that Washington treats former members of the Warsaw Pact virtually as American satellites, it is nonetheless hard to believe prisons could be maintained on Polish soil without the government’s knowledge.

A similar sense of disbelief must be extended to protestations from western European governments that they know nothing about the rendition flights. That sort of ignorance would be tantamount to gross incompetence. A willingness to turn a blind eye to US actions is by far a likelier explanation, and implausible deniability is the risk many of them are willing to take. This extends even to governments that had a decency to take a stand against the war in Iraq. Germany, for instance, agreed not to make a noise about Khalid Masri, a German citizen abducted while holidaying in Macedonia, with the collaboration of the Macedonian authorities, simply because his name resembled that of someone believed to be an acquaintance of one of the 9/11 hijackers.

Masri spent five months in an Afghan prison before being unceremoniously dumped back in Europe, once the CIA realized he had nothing to do with any sort of terrorist activity. And the US ambassador in Berlin asked the Schroeder government not to make a fuss. It complied. Now the American Civil Liberties Union has taken up his case and is suing the CIA on Masri’s behalf. Italy, meanwhile, has been somewhat more robust in its response to the abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a street in Milan. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation and torture.

There are likely to be many other innocents caught up in this dimension of the so-called war on terror, which all too often looks like a war on human rights. But such tactics don’t make a great deal of sense even when there is indeed reason to suspect persons of terrorist involvement. If there is any evidence against them, surely it can be used in a court of law.

Torture, apart from being morally reprehensible, has limited practical value: a person being subjected to excruciating pain will, in most cases, “confess” to anything. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for instance, responded to the barbarism of his interrogators by telling them what they wanted to hear: that Al Qaeda had received assistance from Baghdad in preparing from 9/11. For the Bush administration, this sufficed as “proof”.

It is fortunate that Britain’s highest court of appeal, much to the dismay of the Blair administration, has had the decency to rule that any statement obtained via torture is legally inadmissible as evidence. Guantanamo Bay and the CIA-operated prisons in Europe and elsewhere suggest that the ruling clique in Washington does not have the US legal system entirely under its thumb. That falls in the gratitude-for-small-mercies department, but it does not prevent the administration from breaking its own laws.

Extraordinary rendition does not mean that US does not itself practise torture, even if it tries to avoid doing so on American soil. Some survivors have spoken of an American presence in Egyptian and other torture chambers, which is by no means implausible. As for the black sites, we may one day find out what really goes on over there. What we already know is that contentions to the effect that such tactics are making the world a safer place do not stand up to serious scrutiny. In fact, the reverse is a likelier consequence.

Attempts by the US to cover up the most heinous aspects of its behaviour, meanwhile, suggest that the perpetrators are conscious of their wrongdoing. Which means Harold Pinter might have been slightly off the mark in saying, in his much anticipated lecture upon receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, that the US “no longer sees any point in being reticent or devious”, even though it is difficult to argue with the overall thrust of the celebrated playwright’s remarks.

Ill-health prevented Pinter from travelling to Stockholm to personally receive the honour, but he emerged from his hospital bed to record a video that can be viewed over the internet at www.nobelprize.org. It is a remarkable excoriation of US foreign policy in the post-World War II phase, with particular reference to Nicaragua. And, of course, Iraq: he aptly describes the invasion as “a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. “How many people,” he asks, “do you have to kill before you qualify as a mass murderer and a war criminal?” Then he goes on to offer the International Criminal Court of Justice the address of a leading suspect: No.10 Downing Street, London.

Not Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, because the White House occupant has not ratified the court. Unfortunately for him, he cannot de-ratify the American people, the majority of whom have now woken up to the fact that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, if not a crime. That majority does not include the Democratic Party.

After conservative congressman John Murtha, who is likely to have put up to it by senior military officers, called for an immediate pullout last month, and was supported by House of Representatives minority leader Nancy Pelosi as well as Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, a number of Democrats offered the opinion that this was a dangerous tack that could lose them votes in next year’s congressional elections.

On the available evidence, these lawmakers are behind the times: public opinion is more advanced. They desperately need a wake-up call such as the following: “For misleading the American people and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them, [George W.] Bush deserves to be impeached and .... put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.”

That quotation comes not from Harold Pinter but from Martin van Creveld, a leading Israeli military historian who happens to be the only non-American whose writings are on the required reading list for US military officers.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com