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WHO buries the nation’s undertaker — the man who volunteered to inter the corpses of the unknown, the disowned? In other countries, the state usually shoulders that unpleasant responsibility. In Pakistan, Abdul Sattar Edhi made it his vocation. It was entirely fitting therefore that when he himself died on July 8, the state should have arranged his funeral.
Every Edhi centre and orphanage stands like an Ellis Island of succour. It proclaims louder than any plaque what is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, /The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”
Except that the Edhi Foundation did not offer US nationality. It offered cribs for Pakistan’s unwanted infants, homes to rejected orphans, ambulances to transport the injured, and mortuaries for the dead: a full service from the cradle to the grave.
Equidistant from Shias and Sunnis, he cared for both. Non-political, he stood midway between the MQM and the PPP when they conducted their political battles, drilled kneecaps (or worse), and then left lacerated, disjointed corpses for Edhi to reassemble.
Non-judgmental, he did not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, suicide bombers and their hapless victims, the parts from the whole. His eyes that had witnessed these atrocities he donated to be transplanted in others. The recipients are twice blessed — once by his gift, and again because he wished they would never have to see the atrocities he had.
Chilcot has confirmed what every sensible person suspected.
There are already movements agitating to nominate Mr Edhi for the Nobel Peace Prize, for it is human nature to link work with reward. Malala Yousafzai, who was awarded the prize for braving a Taliban bullet, has given him her vote. But the Nobel Committee should be forewarned that Abdul Sattar Edhi was, and is even more so now, beyond such accolades. Such belated laurels reek of stale recognition. His reward was service itself.
If any country needed the devotion of the late Mr Edhi more than sectarian-shredded Pakistan it was war-torn Iraq. Over the six years of US-led conflict there (ostensibly to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein), over 150,000 innocent Iraqis have died.
Now, a report prepared with excruciating patience over seven years (a year longer than the Iraq war itself) has been released by a retired civil servant Sir John Chilcot. He has confirmed what every sensible person had suspected — that US president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair conspired to invade Iraq without any rational cause, that there was no dependable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the invasion was without any legal justification.
Even Lord Prescott, then Mr Blair’s deputy prime minister, has now felt obliged to admit that the intelligence reports Blair’s compliant cabinet relied upon were no better than “discussions at receptions … and tittle-tattle, not hard evidence”. The Brutus thrust lies in Prescott’s disclosure that Lord Goldsmith (then Britain’s attorney general) had “verbally announced it was legal, but provided no documentation to justify it”. Bush/Blair adventurism was a modern reprise of William Randolph Hearst’s purported advice to his field reporter: “You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.”
Prescott’s belated admissions will undoubtedly augment the hordes of person baying for Blair’s blood. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who conducted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, sees no space for clemency. He has demanded that Tony Blair be tried for war crimes. It would be an ironical twist of fate. After his capture, Saddam Hussein had been tried in 2005
(and later hanged) for “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”.
In the unlikely situation that Tony Blair might be indicted for war crimes or genocide in Iraq, he might like to offer the same defence that the Japanese emperor Hirohito used in exoneration of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War. Hirohito pleaded “artistic differences” with US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Such fatal artistry has consequences that transcend borders, generations, time itself. Despair causes poets to scream remonstrances, as William Wordsworth did famously when he appealed in 1802 to a long-dead John Milton to salvage England. Wordsworth described it as “a fen of stagnant waters”. He ended with the appeal: “We are selfish men;/ O raise us up, return to us again,/And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!”
Tomorrow’s Britain, reasserting its insular ‘freedom and power’, is turning after Margaret Thatcher to another woman prime minister: Ms Theresa May, Cameron’s home secretary. The ruling Conservative party has selected her to head government for the next four or so years. She has no option now but to lead the UK out of Europe, even though she voted against Brexit. That makes her unique — the first female Moses to have voted against the Exodus.
The writer is an art historian.
Published in Dawn, July 14th, 2016
