Skirting the real issue in the Middle East

CONSISTENT with the unilateralism that characterizes the policy of the Bush administration, the offer of an interim state for Palestinians did not come as a surprise to the observers of the Middle East affairs.

The positive side of the Bush plan is the acknowledgement of the Palestinian right to statehood, a right which the previous American presidents never dared to publicly recognize. This is the gain the Palestinians have made in their heroic struggle for national liberation.

The fact that Ariel Sharon, now on a killing spree in Ramalla, Nablus, Qilqilia, Tulkrum, Alkhalil, etc., has welcomed the idea, albeit with conditions, showing that George Bush has been able to persuade the Israeli leader that the Palestinian uprising cannot be put down even with the use of the US-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships. In this there is a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that the will of the Palestinians to die for the cause is stronger than the occupier’s will to kill. Suicide bombs — moral or amoral — will continue to hit Israeli targets.

What George Bush has failed to understand, however, is that even if Arafat is removed from the scene and Israel’s state terrorism persists, the human bomb — the only weapon left with the Palestinians — will keep exploding and taking a heavy toll of lives, including those of the chosen few. The American plan is hedged round with conditions that are neither realistic nor acceptable to the broad masses of Palestinians. For instance, George Bush’s insistence on the removal of Arafat from his office, constitutional reforms and elections to the presidency, parliament and local bodies, as a quid pro quo of a Palestinian state, is tantamount to dictating to the Palestinian voters whom they should vote for and whom to reject.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Palestinians elect Arafat and his ‘coterie of corrupt politicians’, would the American president then withdraw his offer of a Palestinian state? Clearly, George Bush’s conditions are humiliating, unjust and undemocratic and hence unacceptable to the Palestinians. One may well question the American president’s right to decide the fate of Palestinians and millions of their Arab kith and kin inhabiting the volatile region.

Obviously, George Bush shares Sharon’s dislike of the Palestinian leader and has fulfilled his desire to see Yasser Arafat replaced by a more compliant leader. The Israeli prime minister is on record having publicly admitted that he regretted why he did not kill Arafat during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The American vice-president, Dick Cheney, told Sharon during his recent visit to Washington that as far as he (Dick Cheney) was concerned, Sharon could hang Arafat. George Bush’s demand that the Palestinians replace Arafat with some other leader has given rise to speculation that Sharon may feel emboldened to eliminate the Palestinian leader; so his days would seem numbered.

If this is how the American president’s plan about the change of Palestinian leadership is generally understood, it means that Yasser Arafat is faced with a grim choice: either quit or be killed. This is not politics of peace; it is mafia politics. On the other hand, indications are that even if the Palestinian leader wants to step aside, his people would not allow him to do so at this juncture.

The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Chinese government and the G-8 have rejected outright the American president’s demand for the removal of Yasser Arafat while British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said that the conflict in Palestine would not end as a result of the removal of the Palestinian leader. On the other hand, the Sharon- Bush move to dislodge Arafat has angered the Palestinians in particular and the democratic forces in general.

If one were to give an analogy from recent history, it would be like the American president demanding of the black population during the white minority rule in South Africa that the apartheid would be dismantled only when they elect some leader other than Nelson Mandela who was convicted of anti-state activities, including terrorism. Why doesn’t the White House understand that it would not be doing a favour to the Palestinians by conceding their right to self-determination but only giving them their due. It is a case of termination of illegal occupation and restoration of sovereignty to the people of Palestine.

The denial of their right or delay in the restoration of that right is blatant injustice. Therefore the Palestinian struggle for the establishment of an independent state within its legal frontiers is legitimate regardless of what the Zionists and their allies say. The frontiers of the Palestinian state were determined by the 1947 UN resolution that simultaneously defined the borders of the Arab and Jewish states.

Israel has stepped out of its bounds and annexed a considerably large portion of the territories of the Palestinian state, Syria and Lebanon. Since international law does not permit acquisition of territory by a conquering state, Israel must be made to return all the Arab territories it seized during the June 1967 war — namely, East Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, Sheba farm.

The Bush plan does not talk about that. It is of the essence of a settlement that the boundaries of the Palestinian state should be defined but the American president only requires Israel to return to the position it held as on September 28. He would, perhaps, leave the contentious issues, that is, East Jerusalem, borders, Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees and water resources to an international peace conference which he had once proposed.

An international conference could be a step in the right direction but it seems that the American president wants to set the parameters of its deliberations. With the exception of the US, there is a broad consensus among the world powers that Israel should withdraw from all the occupied Arab territories and a full-fledged — not an interim — sovereign Palestinian state should be established without further delay.

George Bush is brazenly partisan when he denounces the armed struggle of Palestinians as terrorism and wants an immediate end to it. What he has failed to understand is that it is Israel’s occupation which is countered by popular resistance.

The UN General Assembly passed a resolution on July 29, 1980, calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied Arab territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state by November 15, 1980, and if Israel refused to withdraw, the Security Council should apply economic sanctions against it. Twentytwo years have passed since then but Israel continues to occupy the Palestinian and Arab territories. The Security Council has not acted: should one blame the Palestinians if they have launched a war of national liberation?

An honest man

I was in a Wendy’s the other day and saw a man at the salad bar. He looked familiar so I said, “Aren’t you Diogenes the Cynic philosopher?”

“You got it right, buster.”

“What are you doing here?”

He held up a lantern. “I’m looking for an honest man.”

“Any luck yet?” I asked.

“No,” he said sadly. “It’s much harder than I thought. I am sure there are honest men out there. It’s just that I have been unable to separate the good ones from the dishonest ones.”

We sat down at a table. I said. “Did you look for one in the FBI?”

“No luck. There were so many agents turning on each other that I couldn’t find a candidate.”

“Surely the White House would have one honest man.”

“They might, but unfortunately it is an election year and they have been ordered into damage-control mode.”

“What about priests in the Catholic Church?”

“I don’t know who committed abuse and who didn’t. Since I am a professional cynic, it is hard for me to separate the chaff from the wheat.”

“What about lawyers?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find one,” he replied. “Their job is to defend their client no matter what it takes. If they don’t, they could be disbarred.”

I then said, “Did you find anybody on Wall Street?”

“You have to be kidding. It turns out that there are a lot of them who don’t know the truth when it’s staring them right in the face. You won’t find an honest man on Wall Street because, if he is, he won’t make any money.”

“And you can say the same thing for accountants.”

“They can’t be honest because they have to find ways to keep the clients from paying taxes and then shred the evidence.”

“I imagine you never found one in the medical field among the drug people and HMOs.”

“Forget it.”

I told him. “I think you’re being too cynical of our institutions. If you eliminate the graduates of the Harvard Business School, you will narrow your search in no time.” Diogenes put on his sack cloth coat and picked up his lamp.

I asked, “Where will you go now?”

He replied, “I’m going down to Houston to see if I can find an honest man at Enron.”

I said, “Lots of luck.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Budget: on a wing & a prayer

HISTORICALLY, budget estimates in Pakistan have invariably tended to be so wide of the eventual outcomes that it becomes difficult to treat a budget speech as a major event. Large supplementary demands during the course of the year make a mockery of the budget estimates presented at the beginning of the financial year.

Nevertheless, now that the federal budget for the year 2002-03 has been unveiled this article will attempt to briefly review it from the point of view of its impact on economic activity, the reliability of its revenue estimates considering that it was almost Rs. 55 billion short of its estimates for last year, and the fairness with which this year’s proposals burden different segments of the population.

The most noteworthy features of the budget for the current financial year are:

a) It is essentially a conservative budget aimed at fiscal stabilization, signalling that we will now have to be content to live with low rates of growth for some time to come, as is evident from the average GDP growth of just over 3 per cent in the last three years.

b) It places great faith in both the resource generation potential of the economy and the tax collecting efficiency of the revenue authorities through administrative measures, thereby setting itself rather ambitious targets for both tax and non-tax revenues. This is the weakest part of the strategy adopted by the budget. The finance minister seems to be clutching at straws and there is every reason to believe that not long into the year, the government will have little choice but to resort to the traditionally, well honed, instruments like an increase in the rate and extension in the coverage of GST and revision in the petroleum surcharge, which has already been effected, even before the ink on the budget documents had dried up.

The government will rely more on petroleum surcharges and on income from PTCL, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), and other public sector enterprises also suggests that there is a plan to privatize these organizations. In the case of the SBP it is difficult to imagine how the dividend targets set for the SBP will be met if it is to fill the huge hole of seven billion rupees in Allied Bank before it can be readied for privatization.

c) The government has been timid in its approach. Our fate seems to be to continually muddle through reforms by attempting to chip away at inefficiencies here and there but never chopping them in large chunks. For instance, the government is simply unable to bite the bullet to retrench its employees.

A slowing down is now unmistakable in almost every sphere of economic activity, and a cause for anxiety on the macro-economic front has not diminished. While the satisfactory weather situation portends an improvement in crop output, clear indications exist of recession like conditions in industry. Sagging growth provides few signs of enduring improvement. And this budget will have a limited positive impact on this situation, which, as has been repeatedly argued by many a commentator, is characterized by an economy sputtering to come out of a low level equilibrium of growth.

Employment opportunities are not going to grow because of low investor confidence. Other than the traditional issues of political insecurity, poor law and order, cost of credit, energy and fuel, and lack of consistency in, or predictability of, government policies, lack of profitable ventures are continuing to keep investment sluggish. And this low return on capital is a situation unlikely to change in a hurry.

Some of other budgetary proposals inviting criticism are as follows:

a) The main brunt of the budget will fall on the middle-income groups with the increase in GST on edible oils and the phasing out of the electricity subsidy by December 2002. This writer had argued against the imposition of GST on essential food items like ghee, edible oil in these columns, particularly if the scope of GST is not being extended to cover the services sector so as to document the transactions of lawyers, transporters, engineers, consultants, accountants, etc.

By failing to bring the services sector into the net and expanding the base of GST by withdrawing exemptions, the government has lost the moral high ground. Therefore, it cannot seriously expect that people who will view the taxation structure as continuing to be unfair in its scope and will see their purchasing power further eroded after this budget, would go into a trance on discovering that the foreign exchange reserves have crossed the $6 billion mark by the end of June 2002.

b) The issues of sales tax refunds due to exporters has still not been addressed, although their duty drawback rates have been lowered. This writer is of the view that all revenue targets should be fixed in gross as opposed to the practice of setting them in net terms — a practice that has created an incentive not to process GST refunds and delay duty drawback claims.

c) There are large under-utilized capacities available and reduction in duties on plant and machinery is not a particularly relevant concession for those struggling to enhance capacity utilization.

d) If we accept the argument that utility prices have to be revised owing to the rising costs of imported oil required to run WAPDA’s thermal power stations, how do we explain the need to raise the price of gas which does not have to be imported but whose revision is prompted by door conditionalities and the need to make these enterprises attractive to private investors?

This is not to suggest, however, that there are no laudatory aspects to the budget. Some important changes have been introduced and these include minimization of the discretionary powers of tax authorities, fewer new budgetary measures, an attempt (although a very weak one) to reduce procedural and other irritants to business, especially in respect of the labour levy for EOBI, rationalization of the import tariff structure, round-the-clock facilities for exports, changes in tax rules for facilitating mergers of financial institutions and the reduction in the number of SROs from 120 in the year 2000 to 30 now.

The severest constraint faced by the Pakistan economy has been the relative stagnation of domestic savings and investment; this insufficiency of domestic savings is also having its repercussions in the external sector. Consequently, Pakistan’s budget deficit is inherent in its dependence on aid. Commitments on aid imply that the government must plan to spend more than it earns to accommodate the disbursements of external aid. The size of the deficit, therefore, is determined less by the budgetary management skills of the government and more by the actual commitment and disbursement of aid by donors. In fact, if disbursement procedures improve and aid utilization becomes more effective, the deficit increases. In other words, the deficit will automatically come down if external aid is not forthcoming. The impact this will have on the growth rate is another matter, however.

To this extent, therefore, combined with the limits that have been reached in export volumes owing to global demand for our exportable products growing at barely one per cent per annum, the balance in the external account is also an artificial construct determined by the volume of aid disbursements. A restraint imposed by western countries on capital inflows from Third World countries that has improved the flow of remittances into Pakistan, lack of counterpart rupee funds to finance donor assisted projects, the sluggish demand for imports and lower development activity have contributed to weak aid utilization and a narrower external resource gap.

The path to self-reliance, therefore, seems to derive from decisions taken externally over which we have little control, economic depression within the country and ineffective disbursements of aid rather than any conscious effort to reduce dependence on aid.

The writer is former finance minister, Punjab.

A blow to American education

IT’S been quite a week of extremes for the courts and religion in the United States.

A federal appeals court said God couldn’t be mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance; now a closely divided Supreme Court held that spending public money to pay tuition costs at religious schools was constitutional and did not violate the separation of church and state.

The appeals court decision regarding the pledge was more silly than threatening; the high court’s voucher ruling, however, has serious implications. Public money should not be used to promote proselytizing and religious training, key parts of the mission of any religious school.

Any parent in a shaky, failing or crowded school district would welcome the chance for a good alternative. But what if the choice were only between public and religious schools? The latter are the schools most likely to accept public vouchers, which provide a paltry sum compared with the yearly tuition at most independent private schools. In Cleveland, whose voucher programme the high court majority approved because it allowed students a choice among religious, secular and even better-rated suburban public schools, the reality is that 96 percent of participating students attend religious schools.

As voucher programmes expand, as they are certain to under this ruling, who will oversee the quality of voucher schools? A recent study of California charter schools, which are a welcome alternative to regular public schools, found that in districts that did not rigorously oversee their operations some schools were outright frauds and others were at best poor money managers. A Fresno charter school did not pay its teachers for three months. A chain of charter schools failed to do state-required background checks. Now that religious schools have, in effect, federal protection, states may be reluctant to provide, or be constrained from providing, rigorous oversight.

A widespread voucher programme would siphon off the involved parents and striving students who keep up the pressure for progress. No private schools need accept or keep a student with a troubled discipline history, increasing the concentration of violent or disruptive students in public school classes.

Limited voucher programmes, triggered by continued failure in a particular school or schools, have their place. They are a goad, a sword over the heads of ineffective principals and uncaring bureaucracies. But voucher proponents, who see the gates opened by the Supreme Court, envision this sort of choice everywhere and for all students. The economic might of the United States was built on universal public schooling, an egalitarian ideal that sometimes falters in reality. But if public schools become the refuge of those with no alternative because their parents are indifferent or they can’t get in elsewhere, a binding force in American life will be lost. Temples, madrassas and various churches will teach in their preferred ways, and too many charlatans will find that the religious tent protects them as well. —Los Angeles Times

Gujarat: where is justice?

NO school bus stops here to pick up children. No postman comes here to deliver letters by name. It is no longer on the beat of the media. Rioting makes news, not the absence of it; relief or rehabilitation is a mundane story. Even after four months of carnage, thousands of victims in Gujarat have no home, no hearth and no work.

Refugee camps, where they took shelter when their houses were destroyed or burnt in broad daylight, are being shut. Some have tried to go back to the places where they lived to rebuild their tenements — and lives. But the hostile neighbourhood has forced them to return. They cannot stay on where they are today — in unhygienic conditions. The government says that its “work” is over. What are the states for if they cannot look after the people who are ruined by the government’s failure to protect them?

The victims have no place to go. They feel helpless and abandoned. Yet the prime minister had promised them ample compensation and quick rehabilitation. They have received some money as a grant. But it is too small to be considered compensation and too meagre to help them make a beginning.

Are they victims of prejudice or politics or both? They have come to believe that they are the sacrificial lambs state Chief Minister Narendra Modi used to polarise society. On this premise he seems determined to go to the polls in September or October, six months ahead of schedule. The BJP, his party, expects to reap the harvest from the poisonous seeds Modi has sown.

“If it is a question of vote, please disfranchise us,” many inmates of refugee camps say. This is probably the strongest denunciation of a system, which claims to be democratic and secular. Muslims constitute 10 to 12 per cent of the electorate in Gujarat. Still the BJP insists on playing the Hindu card.

The elections are some months away. The problem of victims is immediate: how do they pick up the thread and from where? They would like to go back to the shops they had and to the houses where they and their forefathers lived. But many in the majority community do not want it. The administration could help but quite a bit of it is contaminated. And at the helm of affairs is Modi who is far from repentant. His new antic is to open a school of ahimsa (non-violence)!

To turn the tide flowing in favour of the Congress was the task entrusted to him when he was sent to Ahmedabad from Delhi where he was the BJP’s general secretary. Being an RSS pracharak (publicist), he had learnt only one lesson: how to play on the imaginary fears of Hindus against Muslims to communalize society. He would have created a Godhra train incident if it had not happened. The tragedy is that some Muslims played into his hands. Modi probably knows that the Gujaratis would one day realize what harm he has done to their economy — and their image. But that will take time. At present, he wants to cash in on the atmosphere of prejudice, suspicion and fear he has built.

This can be well imagined from a letter that a Muslim gentleman has written to me: “Not long ago, I would walk up to the nearby post office to send my letters and pick up fresh fruits and vegetables on my way back. I liked the leisurely talk with the Hindu vendors. Now my servant does all that. I am afraid to go out even in a car. I prefer to stay at home. But that is not life.”

Many Muslims have begun to migrate to other states. Some of them, who had come from UP in the wake of the Babri masjid’s demolition, have gone back. But the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is trying to spoil the atmosphere by reneging on its earlier promise. It has refused to accept even the court’s verdict on the mandir-masjid controversy. The prime minister’s statement that the BJP had never deviated from the mandir agenda had created confusion. But the BJP’s reiteration to honour the court’s decision has saved the situation.

So have the NGOs working in Gujarat. They are the only rays of hope in an otherwise murky scenario. All of them are Hindus. They have been looking after the refugee camps from day one. Hindus have contributed lakhs of rupees and some of their organizations have adopted the Muslim villages, razed to the ground during the riots. Indeed, all this has given the victims a feeling that they are part of the Indian nation.

Yet Hindu fundamentalists have not relented in any way. They had planned a series of rath yatras in the next few days. The Muslims had responded positively when they cancelled the Muharram ceremonies. But the sponsors of rath yatras were adamant. It took the National Human Rights Commission’s strong statement to make them come down from their resolve. Former Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan also appealed to the prime minister to stop the yatras. Such pleas hardly matter to a party that is out to divide the nation.

New BJP chief Venkiah Naidu is going still further. He said the other day on a TV network that he would ask the BJP ministers to spread the party’s message. He does not realize the implications of the statement. External affairs minister, finance minister or, for that matter, any other minister is that of the country. True, he belongs to a party but in a notional sense only. Otherwise, it will be mixing politics with the state. Venkiah Naidu’s emotional burst clouds his vision.

The BJP chief should have taken a leaf out of America’s contemporary history. Both the Senate and the Congress unanimously passed a resolution to condemn ‘bigotry and violence’ against Sikh American citizens in the wake of the terrorist attack on September 11. The resolution was co-sponsored by 39 Senators and 131 Congressmen and signed by President Bush to make it a law. The resolution regrets that many Sikhs “who are easily recognizable by their turbans and beards, which are required by their faith, have suffered both verbal and physical assaults as a result of misguided anger” after the September 11 attacks.

An American who killed a Sikh soon after the attacks was prosecuted and executed within a few months. But in India, where 3,000 Sikhs were massacred in Delhi alone, the culprits have not been found till today, even after 18 years. Nor has parliament passed any resolution to condemn the large-scale murder. We have had a plethora of commissions to find out who were the guilty. One commission is still sitting in New Delhi.

The “ethnic cleansing” in Gujarat looks like meeting the same fate. The commission appointed to find out the guilty is yet to begin its work in right earnest. The senior member, Justice Nanavati, is busy with the commission on the Sikhs’ massacre. That the BJP appointed him is not a coincidence. In the commission on Sikhs’ massacre he is to pinpoint the Congress responsibility. In the Gujarat case, he will be finding out the culpability of the BJP. Quite a feat!

The Congress government never allowed the truth about the Sikh massacre to come out. The BJP will see to it that the truth about Gujarat remains hidden. The party has already given a clean chit to Modi. India’s tragedy is that convenience has the better of the rule of law. Politics and crime have become the two sides of the same coin. Where is justice? Or is there anything called justice?

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.