The question of sovereignty

CRISES are a part of the national diet. However, that does not mean that crucial national issues suddenly go away. At most, they recede temporarily. Pakistan’s sovereignty is one such issue.

It was on account of this that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani lately came in for a good deal of flak. His trip to the US clearly elicited far more negativism than he had evidently bargained for. It was, rightly perhaps, described as mismanaged, ill-coordinated — in short, something of a PR disaster. Above all, though, the prime minister came under fire for undertaking the visit without a specific mandate from parliament.

Members of the PML-Q were, as usual, at the forefront of the grandstanding at the expense of the PPP government. The cardinal grouse was that during his stay in the US, Gilani did not put up enough of a fight over the issues of the country’s sovereignty or its prime intelligence asset, the ISI.

Obviously, he had not been properly debriefed. Nor did he have the native guile to hold his own. However, even a more agile mind may have been at a loss as to how to handle some of the obfuscations and sensitivities inherent in the two issues adequately.

The question of Pakistan’s sovereignty is fairly complex. It has an elaborate history and a bit of a chequered past. The era of Cento and Seato and of course the infamous U-2, entailing some of the more notable compromises in this regard, comes readily to mind.

More recently, a kind of oxymoronic situation arose when, in the aftermath of 9/11, we acquired ‘key ally’ status in relation to the world’s sole superpower. To save ourselves from retribution at the hands of the US, we effectively put the integrity of our state on the line. Our long-fostered, if idle, dream of ‘strategic depth’ and considerations of sovereignty both went by the board.

Force majeure was invoked largely because of a possible chance of an economic bonanza such as had been reaped in the earlier anti-Soviet Afghan jihad.

The war on terror was cynically allowed to come home to Pakistan. That it was further permitted to come to stay is equally pertinent. With a touch of reversibility about their respective roles, terrorism and counter-terrorism became an accepted way of life. And if there are militant sanctuaries throughout our tribal belt today we have only ourselves to blame. Consequently, almost all expressions of dismay on the subject of sovereignty in the present context smack just very slightly of coy posturing.

The government-sponsored gambit of ‘appropriation’ with regard to the war on terror has likewise proven counterproductive. The shibboleth — ‘Pakistan’s own war’ — was far too independent and indeed wilful to have gone down particularly well with Centcom, the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House itself. Its glib exclusivity doubtless led to the US smelling a rat and intuiting its threatened ouster from strategic control over the region.

So, in a sense, such wild allegations as the CIA levelled against the ISI would already seem to have been on the cards. The charge as to ISI involvement in last month’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul which was responsible for numerous casualties was, quite obviously, a convenient frame-up. It would not make any sense for Pakistan’s intelligence network to have been complicit in a suicide bombing that was bound to have had the opposite camp leaping to implicate it. The act was gauche and ill-conceived and ultimately merely a rather crude form of ‘scapegoatism’.

At the same time, it is clear that the government of the day cannot be made to carry the can for the sins of an earlier dispensation. If militancy is alive and well rather than being on the run, that is the sole fault of our previous rulers. If they did not facilitate it, they certainly did little to stem the rot. Lal Masjid is a case in point.

Even today there seems to be a chilling irony about the fact that the remedy for that could have been nothing other than terminal. The extremists secreted there were wantonly allowed to be hoist on their own petard. So those governing at the time must at the very least be made to face the charge of collusion by default.

Certainly, the people of Pakhtunkhwa and indeed the nation at large must not be held to ransom on account of militancy indefinitely. The threat to the settled areas of Pakhtunkhwa is all too real even though the ‘quasi takeovers’ by various militant factions come across — hazards on the ground notwithstanding — as curiously symbolic and just a trifle surreal. It is also intriguing that since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the incidence of suicide bombings has perceptibly decreased despite the low frequency detonations in Karachi and the bloodier drama of Islamabad in early July. Given time, it is hoped that this enigma too will unravel.

Needless to say, vigilance is of the essence. The nation is alert. And while nobody believes that there are rogue elements in our ace intelligence network, common logic suggests that there are anonymous saboteurs and agents provocateurs at work in our midst.

Under the circumstances, what is the way forward? Security is not the preserve of a ruling coalition but a matter of national importance, one indeed that calls for time-bound guarantees on its part. If the current coalition is to succeed in providing these, it must look beyond the show-window of the one-time peace agreement or military operation at a possible long-term political solution.

But for this it must first — when the present clouds roll over — seek a convincing national consensus. Such an initiative would entail taking all key players on board including not just relevant tribal elders but also the country’s political parties and, with them, prominent members of civil society and the media and, of course, leaders of the lawyers’ movement. Then alone could our government hope to move ahead credibly towards reversing the cycle of destruction set in motion by those who both lacked in political wisdom and did not have the country’s good at heart.

The futility of war

IN The Republic, Plato described how civilised states should be governed but noted, “Only the dead have seen the last of war.”

Centuries earlier, Homer had shown how wars had transformed men into heroes. Shakespeare would show centuries later how wars brought out the worst in man.

In our era, martial courage would be famously extolled in an Urdu couplet:

Only the mounted warriors fall in battle

How will the toddlers fall that crawl on all fours?

This glossed over Gen Sherman’s experience of the civil war which left him convinced that “All war is hell”, something that John Keegan brought out to good effect in The Face of Battle. But even those who glorified war were devastated by the horrific acts that took place on 9/11. The US retaliation that came in Afghanistan was swift and decisive, widely welcomed by the world. The war to depose Saddam Hussein was not.

Of course, it appealed to the troops who were sent there to fight it. Unlike their counterparts in the Vietnam war, they were volunteers. Many had joined to extract revenge on the terrorists. Evan Wright, an American reporter, was embedded in an elite reconnaissance platoon of US Marines. In 2004, he penned a book about the invasion, Generation Kill, which is now being screened by a US TV channel to much acclaim.

Wright provides a view of the modern battlefield from the vantage point of these warriors. As they roll off into Iraq in their lightly armed Humvees they have only a vague idea of their enemy. They know he has no air cover and that his capability has been eroded by sanctions. But his army is equipped with several thousand tanks, artillery pieces and possibly nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Danger lurks in the vastness of the desert.

The marines are young men drawn from Camp Pendleton, California, on a par with the Navy Seals or the army’s Special Operation Forces. But their exposure to the outside world has been limited to jaunts south of the border. They are overflowing with hormones, profanities, machismo and tattoos. One has a broken smile because two front teeth are missing. Another has an ungainly appearance for which he has been nicknamed ‘Manimal’. Yet another is believed to have fled the scene of battle at Khafji during the 1991 Gulf war and is called The Coward. Their leader, who does not command respect, is called Captain America.As it marches into Iraq, this platoon, like the rest of the corps, is simply out to “Get Some!” No one has bothered to educate its soldiers about the local culture. So when they see their first Iraqi around 10 in the morning, they cuss him for wearing pyjamas in daylight. All enemies are “Hajjis.”

In the crossfire that ensues, innocent shepherds, villagers and city dwellers are killed. The marines watch helplessly as a shot-up boy dies in his mother’s arms and as a father carries his dead girl whose brain has spilled out to a roadside grave. A sheikh begs the marines not to rape his daughters while other Iraqis offer them boys as an alternative.

As the invasion progresses, large numbers of Iraqi soldiers surrender, many without a fight. The marines encounter long lines of Iraqi troops walking past them in civilian clothes. Many carry pink cards given by the American army units to whom they surrendered.

But the marines cannot afford to feed them. The soldiers have to be ‘un-surrendered’ to bypass the Geneva Conventions. The Iraqi soldiers complain that the fedayeen have formed hunter killer teams to take them out. However, the marines are unable to offer them protection and send them in the other direction, knowing that it means certain death for the deserters.

Evidence of Iraqi military incompetence abounds. Their armour waits until 10 in the morning to begin rolling out, at which time US combat aircraft take them out with consummate ease. In one night encounter, a T-72 tank is taken out by a single marine with a missile shot from less than 200 yards away. After a major battle with an Iraqi division, a US general says that his troops won not because he was brilliant but because his counterpart was stupid.

One marine officer acknowledges that if a foreign force went to the US, the residents would do their best to catch an invader and string him up. Yet, when a marine is killed, the others resort to taking their revenge on the nearby village. The air force is called in and thousand-pound bombs are dropped. The marines, from a distance, see Iraqi men evaporate before their eyes. In another encounter, a marine sniper is sent in to dispatch potential Iraqi spotters from a distance. As he sees them drop through his scope, he reminds himself to not take pleasure in the act of killing, since that would be counter to his Christian faith.

On the road to Baghdad, the marines relieve themselves under the open sky, day or night, and litter the roads with wrappers from their ready-to-eat rations. At night, they are haunted by visions of those that they have killed. Some marines fall victim to friendly fire, some are run over as they sleep by US vehicles and some, who can’t take it any more, step into a ditch and shoot themselves in the head. Even for the victors, war is one long ride through hell.

And yet, somehow, amidst all the chaos and destruction, the Iraqi farmer tends to his sheep and drives his herds through the US formations. Five years after the war, many of the soldiers who fought in the Iraq war are despondent. More than four thousand of their buddies are dead. They won the war but lost the peace. Along the way some of them burned villages in order to save them. The crazier ones just fired guns to blow things up. Even the sensible ones were anxious to “get in the game”, as if war was a game too good to miss out on.

Wright does not moralise about the war. Nor does he tell us how the Iraqis viewed it. But what he does say proves the futility of war.

The writer is the author of Musharraf’s Pakistan, Bush’s America and the Middle East (Vanguard Books).

faruqui@pacbell.net

Gaza’s heritage

IT may seem an odd dilemma in a territory where more than half of families are living below an internationally defined poverty line, but Jawdat Khoudary is wondering whether there should be museum charges in Gaza.

As the owner and creator of the Stripis first purpose-built archaeological museum, he has no doubt that the most prized patrons, the organised parties of schoolchildren already starting to flock to it, must come for free. And having sunk a small fortune — he won’t say how much — into building this elegant and air-conditioned space overlooking the Mediterranean just north of Gaza City’s Shat refugee camp, he certainly isn’t trying to make money from it. But the 48-year-old owner of one of Gaza’s biggest construction companies worries that if he doesn’t charge a couple of shekels for individual entry, Gazans may not realise the value of their heritage as much as he does.

‘I believe in the importance of our roots, the importance of history,’ he says. ‘The nation that forgot its history will not have a good future.’ And what a history. This cultured but repeatedly fought-over and serially occupied maritime civilisation on the route from the Levant to Africa, is many millennia old, flourishing long before the blinded Samson pulled down the great temple of Dagon in the 12th century BC, killing himself and thousands of his Philistine captors.

The artefacts that Mr Khoudary has installed are only part of the personal collection he has built since telling his own bulldozer drivers and labourers — and local fishermen — 20 years ago that he would pay for anything ancient they find in the course of their work.

But even Mr Khoudary’s collection is only a small fraction of the dazzling archaeological treasures of the Gaza, those already dug up and dispersed amongst collections round the world, those plundered and stolen, and those still waiting to be excavated.

However, this half of that fraction is rich enough to make the trip worthwhile. It ranges chronologically from sun-dried clay pots and mud-brick wall fragments from a breathtaking 5,500 years ago to a single — relatively — modern curiosity: a confectionery tin decorated with the portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In between are hundreds of objects that testify to Gaza’s long and turbulent history from the early bronze age to the Ottoman Empire: heavy stone anchors and more recognisable Roman ones; ancient Egyptian alabaster plates; clay wine jars and Corinthian columns from the Byzantine period; oil, water and perfume pots, and a clay wheel from a [now reconstructed] child’s toy cart from the Philistine period between 1600BC and 1200BC; glass bottles from the Hellenistic age and miniature sculptures in ivory. And ‘a very important piece’, says Mr Khoudary, the clay coffin lid in the form of a man’s head from the 11th century BC.

The museum is partly designed to shed a ray of cultural light in the gloom of a blockaded, impoverished and war-damaged Gaza.

Mr Khoudary’s is the first attempt to establish a focal point inside Gaza to house treasures that would, in the past, have left it, which he points out, all started with the Ottomans and the huge, 10ft-high, 2nd century AD statue of Zeus from Gaza, which has pride of place in the Istanbul Museum. Then there were the stunning hoards of inlaid gold jewellery excavated during the pre-Second World War British mandate by Sir Flinders Petrie in Tell el-Ajjul. This was the old Canaanite capital, where Wadi Gaza is today, before it was overrun in the 15th century BC by the Egyptian Pharoah Thutmosis III and replaced with what is now Gaza City. The jewels, hidden from those Egyptian invaders, are now in the British Museum.

The story of Israeli archaeology in Gaza is complex, told in fascinating detail in a new book on the collection at the Israel Museum by Trude Dothan, its greatest practitioner, and the woman who between 1972 and 1982 conducted the scientific excavations at Deir el-Bala in central Gaza. These established that it had been, in the 14th and 13th centuries BC, a prosperous Egyptian or Egyptian-style settlement, including a large official palace with, in its later years, an artisansi village turning out the extraordinary, haunting, anthropoid coffins of the kind now in the Israel Museum.

Professor Dothan was not the first Israeli to excavate the treasures of Deir el-Bala. That was a privilege reserved for Moshe Dayan, after Israelis seizure of Gaza in 1967, whose was then Defence Minister, and is now acknowledged to have been a robber of antiquities on a spectacular and largely unchecked scale.

The professor describes how, knowing his ‘hobby’, she turned to him after finding that ancient burial gifts were flooding the antiquities shops of Jerusalem after the Six Day War. Having noticed they were too ingrained with desert sand to be ‘from Hebron’, as the dealers claimed, she asked Dayan if he had heard of an ancient cemetery in Gaza. Dayan insisted he did not. Three months later Dayan would arrange for Professor Dothan to visit Deir el-Balah under military escort — a trip that would start her on a decade of excavation.

She later discovered that he had already acquired not only a notable collection of scarabs from Deir el-Balah but also ‘enormous quantities’ of anthropoid coffin fragments and nine complete lids, all of which he was restoring at his home in Tel Aviv. The coffins would be included in the large portion of his vast collection which sold for $1m to the Israel Museum after his death.

Much had been looted not only by Dayan but also local Bedouin by the time she finally began her dig. Professor Dothan’s achievement was to excavate and catalogue professionally — and so protect for the future — many of its treasures. And for this Mr Khoudary — who worries that details of Israeli excavations in 1991 at the ruins of a Byzantine monastery near Nusseirat were not so published — is greatly appreciative. ‘What she did was to save part of our history,’ he says.

The Deir el-Balah treasures now in Jerusalem could one day become for the Palestinians what the Parthenon Marbles (Elgin Marbles) are to the Greeks. Professor Dothan herself muses that it would come as ‘no surprise if the Palestinians demand the return of all artefacts removed’.

While this is Mr Khoudary’s dream for his embryo national museum, he knows that Gaza would have to see some stability first. ‘One of the purposes of my project is to alert the international community to the need for our heritage to be protected from political disputes,’ he says. He cites, as an immediate example, the fact that the Jerusalem-based Ecole Biblique, which has given him much help with the museum, is inhibited from excavating in Gaza ‘because if they get permission from [the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority] in Ramallah they will be boycotted here and if they get permission here [from the Hamas de facto government] they will be boycotted in Ramallahi.

Mr Khoudary will not be deterred in his long-term ambitions for the museum, to look ‘carefully after the history and heritage of Gaza, to protect it for the next generations’.

— © The Independent, London

Happiest countries of the world

THE United States National Science Foundation recently published a happiness survey involving 97 countries. Two simple questions were asked.

These were, “Taking all things together, would you say you are happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy?” and “All things considered how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” In total 350,000 people were surveyed, and this was done under the direction of Prof Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan, USA.

The survey showed that the top 10 happiest countries were: Denmark, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and Sweden. The lowest rating went to Zimbabwe. The US ranked 16th on the list.

The University of Cambridge conducted a happiness survey in 2007 of 15 European nations. Again Denmark topped the list with Portugal and Italy at the bottom. The UK ranked 9th.

The University of Leicester under the direction of Dr Adrian White, a social psychologist, conducted a large happiness survey involving 178 countries in 2006. They rated the top 10 in the following order: Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, The Bahamas, Finland, Sweden, Bhutan, Brunei and Canada. Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi were at the bottom of the list.

If we co-relate these findings, most countries on the top of the happiness list are the so-called welfare states, with Denmark being the unanimous first choice. However, Denmark also has a high suicide rate and it is difficult to explain this contradiction.

What are the ‘welfare states’? The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines them as countries in which the government plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. This role is based on providing citizens equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a satisfactory life. In specific terms this means free or subsidised education and health, government housing where needed, old-age pensions and unemployment benefits.

Surprisingly, an early version of the welfare state appeared in China during the Song Dynasty in the 11th century. Wang Anshi (1021-1086), chancellor of the imperial court, believed that the state was responsible for providing its citizens the essentials for a decent living which covered agricultural loans, proper wages and pensions for the aged and unemployed.

It is important to realise that in the welfare state these benefits are not provided as an act of charity but are regarded as the legitimate right of the citizens of those countries. Islam also upholds the concept of the welfare state and places the responsibility of looking after the people on the rulers. In fact this is true of all major religions which emphasise the importance of social welfare rather than personal enrichment.

A few other general conclusions can be drawn from the surveys. One is that wealth per se does not confer happiness and people are prepared to pay high taxes, as in Denmark, if they are certain that their money would be properly spent. Freedom is more highly rated than money, and it is freedom in all kinds of ways. Political freedom as in a democracy and freedom of choice and movement. Equality is also an indicator of happiness, along with social and religious tolerance.

The University of Cambridge survey points out that the countries with high levels of happiness also report high levels of trust in their government, the police and the justice system. Something which is clearly lacking in Pakistan.

A recent BBC survey found that 81 per cent of the UK’s population think that the government should focus on making the people happier rather than wealthier. The feeling of contentment that comes in a society which looks after the basic needs of its citizens, rather then leaving them to fend for themselves against the vicissitudes of life, is what people generally want.

A leading American psychologist, Prof Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, suggests that richer countries do tend to be happier than the poor ones, but once you have food, clothes and a home then extra money does not seem to bring greater happiness. The People’s Party of Pakistan is therefore on the right track in using the slogan of roti, kapra, makaan but has yet to deliver on it. Hence the dissatisfaction that prevails in the country at present.