Not another false start
US President George Bush has declared that he will soon announce a new initiative for the Middle East to bring peace to the troubled region. The contours of this new proposal remain vague, but it will take shape after the president’s meeting with two key players — President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who are currently in the US. While any new initiative should be welcomed, it is vital that it is based on justice for the Palestinians and the acceptance of their genuine demands, particularly statehood. Unfortunately, the general tenor of statements emanating from the White House suggests that the US might view the issue through the narrow prism of Israeli security concerns rather than from a broader perspective. The events of September 11 have created a paradigm that equates popular unrest with terrorism, isolates it from its context and treats it as a phenomenon that has neither a cause nor a history — a narrow definition that has been ruthlessly exploited by Sharon at the expense of the Palestinians.
President Mubarak has come to Washington with a new set of proposals that call for the immediate creation of a Palestinian state. He believes that the more contentious issues, such as the status of Al Quds or the fate of Palestinian refugees, can be set aside for the time being and discussed later. Prime Minister Sharon, meanwhile, comes with a single-minded obsession: marginalize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by ousting him altogether from the scene. Only days earlier, Israeli tanks had rolled into Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and reduced many buildings within it to rubble. This was yet another attempt to punish the ageing leader, whom Israel holds responsible for every act of violence in the area. After the most recent suicide attack, the Israelis mounted hit-and-run raids across the West Bank and inflicted a crude brand of collective punishment on the terrorized population.
While the White House continues to nominally back Arafat, it also heaps humiliation on him. After the latest suicide bombing, a White House spokesman had this to say about him: “In the president’s eye, Chairman Arafat has never played the role of someone who can be trusted or who is effective.” Meanwhile, the Israelis continue to get away with building Jewish settlements across the West Bank, in arrogant disregard of every recent accord brokered with the help of the Americans. If the US is interested in peace in this troubled region, it will have to be more even-handed and address both the problem of terrorism and the genuine grievances of the beleaguered Palestinian people. The creation of a Palestinian state is one necessary precondition for peace. It must also tell the Israelis to stop constructing settlements and force Sharon to drop his unhealthy obsession with Arafat.
The sum total of Sharon’s decision to bludgeon the Palestinians into submission and humiliate their leadership has only provoked more violence and proved self-defeating. The brutal measures he has pursued, far from quelling the resistance, has only served to radicalize it and driven some desperate Palestinians to retaliate violently. The US must look at the Israel-Palestinian crisis in broader terms and offer the Palestinians justice and hope for a better future. That is the best way to end terrorism and bring durable peace to the region.
Needlessly harsh
THE arrest of 33 cable operators in Karachi under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance is unnecessary and could have been avoided had the authorities followed the rules of the regulatory mechanism that monitors cable networks. In a series of advertisements last month, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) had warned cable operators that their licences would be cancelled if they violated certain guidelines set down in the licensing agreement between them and PEMRA. The extent of the penalty in these notices was clearly written as cancellation of a cable operator’s licence. The Karachi police seem to have overstepped the limits of their authority by arresting the cable operators under a law normally used for political dissidents. Surely, the correct step would have been that if certain operators had violated the PEMRA guidelines, their licences could have been cancelled. As for the claim that some of those who have been arrested do not even have a licence, the question remains: was it necessary to arrest them under such a draconian law? To arrest them under an ordinance that allows a person to be detained for up to thirty days under the vague charge of disrupting law and order smacks of mala fide intent given that our police are known for arresting people and releasing them after a bribe.
The city government now seems to have stepped in to “cut” the overhead cable wires of operators who have yet to pay a Rs 50 charge per connection. It would have been much better had these matters been settled before the cable operators were allowed to install their distribution networks. If the city government goes ahead with its plan of “cutting” overhead wires, the biggest losers will be the city’s several hundred thousand cable viewers. Given the host of problems that plague ordinary people, the last thing they would need is their television entertainment to be suddenly taken away. The authorities, especially PEMRA, would do well to proceed against errant cable operators according to the rules and regulations set down in the licensing agreement and not with resort to arrests, disconnections and other arbitrary methods.
Prison conditions
A REPORT about the overcrowded district jail in Dadu says that up to 50 per cent of the 260 inmates are suffering from various infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and hepatitis B. The prison was built in 1935 with the amenities to house only 70 inmates. According to the jail’s medical officer, some of the seriously ill prisoners require hospital treatment but no such facilities are available within the jail, and a request seeking permission to shift such patients to a nearby hospital is pending with the authorities. The report also reveals that the jail authorities have no budgets to purchase medicines and the few medicines that are available come in only by way of donation. The inspector-general of prisons must to look into the matter urgently and ensure proper medical attention for the ailing prisoners.
The sad fact is that conditions in other prisons across the country are not much different. Overcrowded prison cells and shortage or lack of basic amenities are among the long-standing common complaints. Highhandedness on the part of the jail authorities and outbreak of brawls among the inmates because of the scarcity of space and resources are also common. Conditions such as these have made the country’s prisons breeding grounds for hard-core criminals and drug addicts who run their rackets inside the prison walls, ostensibly with full knowledge of the jail authorities. It is time the government paid some attention to restructuring and reforming the way our prisons are run. The process can start by changing the inhuman conditions under which most prisoners are kept in our jails.