Iran for peace & cooperation
IRANIAN President Khatami’s three-day visit to Pakistan was in the nature of a reaffirmation of the close and cordial ties between the two Muslim countries. These relations came in for particular emphasis in the context of both bilateral and regional cooperation in various fields of common interests.
President Khatami’s decision to include in his entourage ministers and high officials dealing with matters concerning defence, economic cooperation and development in the fields of trade, agricultural science and technology, was apparently motivated by his determination not to let his visit be confined to mere protocol or pious declarations of friendship and cooperation.
Particularly significant was President Khatami’s concern for the need to remove tensions between India and Pakistan. He recalled that Iran was the first country which had contacted President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee last year to help lower tensions in the region. This was a reference to the situation arising out of New Delhi massing its forces on Pakistan’s border in the wake of a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament house and Pakistan responding to the action with defensive moves to meet any possible threat to its security.
In his joint press conference with Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali in Islamabad, President Khatami spoke of Iran having been widely seen as a quiet ‘mediator’ between Pakistan and India, strongly supporting a peaceful solution of the long-standing Kashmir dispute. He said: “We will do everything possible to work for peace and understanding between the two sides.”
The Iranian president specifically referred to projects which would transform the region from Central Asia to India, including the proposed gas pipeline from Iran to India across Pakistan forming an arc of prosperity. He recognized India’s reservations about the security of the pipeline passing through Pakistan but felt confident that these concerns could be removed. He felt that the project could even contribute to the strengthening of peace and stability in the area, besides bringing substantial economic benefit to all the three countries — Iran, Pakistan and India. He called for an early resumption of talks between Islamabad and New Delhi, saying that “there is nothing that cannot be resolved through talks.”
That both Pakistan and Iran looked upon President Khatami’s visit as an opportunity to further consolidate their traditional close ties by pursuing a specific development programme was evident from the fact that during the visit the two countries concluded three agreements to enhance bilateral cooperation. These relate to trade and cooperation in science and technology road development, transport, and plant quarantine.
Besides, a memorandum of understanding was also signed to further improve trade and economic relations. This would presumably be followed up at the next session of the Pak-Iran Joint Economic Cooperation. The two countries also have long-standing ties of culture and education. These could also be further strengthened following President Khatami’s visit.
The details of the bilateral agreement on defence reached during a meeting between the visiting Iranian defence minister, Vice-Admiral Ali Shamkhani, and Pakistan’s defence minister Rao Sikander Iqbal, have not been disclosed. Pakistan and Iran were once members of the US-sponsored defence pact — the Baghdad Pact — later renamed Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), in which Turkey was also a member. Even while not setting up a joint military command, as envisaged by the US, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey regularly carried out joint exercises and were partners in combined military planning.
President Ayub Khan disclosed at a press conference in October 1959 that Pakistan had been “insisting on a command structure for CENTO but that one difficulty was that the US was not a full member of the organization while Turkey did not feel the need for a joint command structure.” Incidentally, Iran was not a member of any other defence alliance.
According to Prof S.M. Burke, who has written a seminal work on Pakistan’s foreign policy, all the three Muslim members of CENTO began to cool off towards the western powers in the early sixties; Iran felt it had not received sufficient military hardware from its western allies; Turkey complained of unhelpful western attitudes in its trouble with Greece over Cyprus; and Pakistan “had the painful experience of watching its closest western allies, US and Britain, supply arms to India (1962).”
However, with the dissolution of CENTO, the ties of religion, culture and geo-physical proximity led to the three countries — Pakistan, Iran and Turkey — took the initiative of setting up the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD), basically for economic cooperation among them.
President Khatami’s observations about Pakistan’s nuclear programme were couched in carefully chosen language. He said that some countries were trying to exert pressure on Pakistan to abandon its nuclear programme but “we believe that these countries should press the Zionist regime in Israel that has announced to be in possession of more than a hundred nuclear warheads, which is a serious threat to the peace and security of the world.” The Iranian president then went on to say that Iran was pursuing a peaceful nuclear programme to meet its energy requirements. Lest he should be seen as encouraging Pakistan in pursuit of a nuclear weapons programme, he emphatically said: “We believe that atomic and nuclear weapons are not going to bring peace and security to any nation in the world.”
One-third of the West
Thirty people are injured by a bomb in Bogota, in an incident that will become commonplace as Colombia’s seemingly endless guerilla war moves into the cities. (Thanks, Irish Republican Army, for showing us how the pros do it. Before, we just used to massacre peasants in villages.)
Two-thirds of Argentina’s population live in abject poverty a century after it was the world’s most popular destination for emigrants hoping to better their lives.
Then, per capita income in Argentina was $2,800 a year, among the highest in the world; now, it is down to $2,500, just ahead of Bulgaria.
It is a reasonably safe bet that in twenty years’ time Bulgaria, scheduled to join the European Union in 2007, will have three times Argentina’s average income.
Venezuela is entering its third week of confrontation between the populist president, Hugo Chavez, re-elected by a landslide majority less than three years ago, and the strikers in the state oil industry.
The strikers have the backing of the old political elite and desperate middle-class Venezuelans who fear that Chavez’s erratic attempts to do something for the poor majority will ruin what little is left of their own prosperity, and the battle may end up in the streets.
No other oil-rich country except Nigeria contrives to have such a huge gap between rich and poor.
Fidel Castro’s worn-out dictatorship is still hanging on in Cuba after more than four decades in power. Lucio Gutierrez, jailed after a failed coup two years ago, was elected president of Ecuador last month.
The crusading priest-politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide, overthrown by brutal generals in Haiti and then restored to the presidency after a long campaign by North American sympathisers, turns out to be just as incompetent and thuggish as his opponents always claimed. What is wrong with Latin America?
Most Latin Americans at the moment place the blame on neo-liberal economic policies imposed by Washington and the International Monetary Fund, but Latin America’s backwardness and political failure long predate the latest economic fashion. In fact, those neo-liberal policies did actually produce crude economic growth, which was quite high in the region during the 90s.
The problem is rather that this is the region with the highest income disparities in the world: per capita income of the top fifth of Brazilian households is more than thirty times greater than the bottom fifth. Poverty is so widespread that even if Latin American economies grew by 4 percent a year for the next decade, according to the World Bank, only half of the region’s people would be lifted out of extreme poverty.
That is longer than most people are willing to wait, so there is a region-wide revolt against the neo-liberal orthodoxy, with populist politicians offering vaguely socialist nostrums winning power in one country after another. Some, like Brazil’s president-elect Luis Inacio da Silva (‘Lula’), are serious and legitimate figures. Others, like Hugo Chavez, are charismatic charlatans. But the whole region is clearly changing course yet again, in another flailing, desperate attempt to escape its fate as the never-do-well country cousin of the West.
Latin America is part of the West, despite the ‘Third World’ rhetoric that has tended to obscure that fact for the past half-century.
By history, language, ethnicity and religion, it is just as much a part of the West as the United States or Italy. Its half-billion people account for fully a third of the total population of the West; they just happen to be the poor third. Why?
It cannot be the particular part of Europe from which they take their languages and political traditions. Spain and Portugal, Europe’s richest countries four hundred years ago, went through a long and painful decline as their empires withered, but today they are prosperous and democratic countries.
Nor can it be Latin America’s Catholic religious traditions: there is no longer any significant gap in prosperity and political stability between the Catholic south and the Protestant north of Germany, or between Catholic Ireland and Protestant England.
It can’t be the ethnic mix, either. A number of Latin American countries are almost entirely European in population, but the most successful ones, Mexico and Brazil, are also the most ethnically mixed: at least half of all Mexicans are part-Indian, and 40 percent of Brazilians are part-African.
Most of these countries made their first attempts at democratic revolution in the early nineteenth century, no later than most other parts of the West. They have never been cut off from the intellectual and political trends that swept the rest of the West. And you really can’t blame the Americans for it all. “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States,” said Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz a century ago, but Mexico is now enjoying a pattern of growth that will make it a serious rival to Germany in less than a generation.
So what is the real reason that Latin America doesn’t work like the rest of the West? I’m afraid I have no idea. Tell me it’s corruption, military coups, poor education, and I’ll just ask you why they persisted in Latin America long after they declined elsewhere in the West. The one consoling thought is that Brazil and Mexico, the countries that seem likeliest to escape from the pattern, make up over half the total population of Latin America.—Copyright
South Korea: a vote against the US
FOR over fifty years the Korean peninsula has been divided along the 38th parallel into two Koreas, North and South. The irony is that this division had nothing to do with the Koreans themselves: it originated solely in the post-Second World War rivalry between America and the Soviet Union.
Today, as Koreans attempt to end their long-running segregation, their efforts are again being jeopardized by external interests — not the cold war, but George Bush’s ‘war against terrorism’.
The development of North and South Koreas after the Second World War, and especially after the Korean War (1950-53), could not have been more different. The North, under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, pursued a course of ‘isolationist communism’: centralized state control, self-reliance, no democracy and virtually no contact with the outside world. The result was economic disaster, a country unable to feed its own people. But Pyongyang also pursued a course of military strengthening: it maintains one of the largest active duty armies in the world, has a sophisticated missile capability and an advanced nuclear weapons programme. This produced the incongruity of one of the least developed nations in the world posing one of the biggest threats to regional (and global) security.
When they split, South Korea lagged behind its northern sibling both industrially and militarily. But by pursuing an open economic policy — encouraging foreign investment, manufacturing for export — it soon steamed ahead of North Korea and today it is the world’s thirteenth largest economy. Seoul’s conventional military strength is now also more than enough to stave off an attack from the North. The only real threat it faces from Pyongyang is that of nuclear/chemical/biological weapons assault.
For years the South’s approach to dealing with that threat was based on security: strengthening its own military, and depending on the US to protect it. Half a century on from the Korean War, 37,000 US troops remain stationed in South Korea. In 1997, however, Kim Dae-Jung was elected president of South Korea. He opted for a novel strategy to deal with the northern threat: reconciliation.
Kim Dae-Jung’s ‘sunshine policy’ was based on the principle of convergent interests: Seoul needed security, Pyongyang needed food. Dae-jung reasoned that the carrot of economic assistance could remove the stick of nuclear weapons -especially after the end of the cold war and the loss of Soviet (and Chinese) assistance to the North. His reasoning was not entirely novel. In 1994 the US, Japan, the European Commission and South Korea concluded an Agreed Framework with the North. Under this Framework, Pyongyang would halt its nuclear programme in exchange for two light-water nuclear reactors and 3.3 million barrels of heavy oil every year.
Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy bore early fruit. The year 2000 saw a historic summit between the two Korean presidents in Pyongyang and moving scenes of long-separated relatives being reunited. The talk then was of a graduated interaction — cultural links, economic ties, some sort of confederation — leading eventually to one Korea. All the signs pointed to re-integration of the North in the international community. Just this year Pyongyang made the astonishing confession that it had kidnapped Japanese citizens to train its spies.
Left to themselves, North and South Korea would probably have made further progress on the path to reconciliation. But then came George Bush. His entry into the White House brought a rapid halt to Korean reconciliation. He humiliated Kim Dae-Jung when they met in March 2001 by dismissing the ‘sunshine policy’ (even though it had won the Korean leader the Nobel peace prize). Soon after 9/11 he made his pace-setting speech in which he lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran in an ‘axis of evil’.
Bush also stated publicly that he did not trust Kim Jong Il. In November, following Pyongyang’s confession that it had not halted its nuclear programme (seen by many as a sign of North Korea’s willingness for dialogue) the American president announced the freezing of the 1994 Framework (way behind schedule anyway). He also put pressure on Japan to suspend its aid to the stricken country.
The net effect of the Bush administration’s hawkishness was — predictably — to push the North back into isolation and an aggressive mood. Pyongyang recently announced that it would have to restart one of its suspended nuclear programmes in order to generate electricity for its people. It followed through on that by removing surveillance equipment at the Yongbyon plant.
With the removal of international assistance — the carrot — it has nothing to gain by giving up its nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, it has everything to gain by pursuing the nuclear option: it can use nuclear weapons as a stick to force the international community to help its starving people. A shunned North Korea is thus more likely to develop nuclear weapons. That simple logic is, unfortunately, too complex for the Bush administration to understand.
It is, however, all too well understood in South Korea. In the recent presidential elections, the Korean people made clear their rejection of the Bush ‘strongman’ approach, and their support for the reconciliatory ‘sunshine policy’ initiated by Kim Dae-Jung. He was barred from standing for a second term by the constitution, but his successor candidate for the Millennium Democratic Party, Roh Moo-Hyun, won the presidency with 48.9 per cent of the vote. Roh’s rival, Lee Hoi-chang, supported the American ‘no deals with the North’ policy.
The overt issue defining the presidential contest was what strategy to follow to deal with the North Korean threat: reconciliation or rejection. But the underlying issue was American involvement in Korean affairs. The election result showed clear resentment of American policies towards the Koreas and of the damage done to reconciliation prospects by the hawkish Bush administration. Anti-American sentiment was exacerbated by the acquittal by a US military tribunal of soldiers whose armoured truck had crushed to death two young Korean schoolgirls. The run-up to the election saw unprecedented anti-US demonstrations on the streets of Seoul.
Roh Moo-Hyun is the second political leader in recent months to win power by campaigning on an anti-US platform, the first being Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder. Roh focused on American policy towards Korea and only hinted at disapproval of the wider US war against terror, but this was the primary focus of Schroeder’s campaign. In its pursuit of the war against terror, the US is increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood of regional and global conflict. The result is that more and more countries across the world now see Washington, rather than Al Qaeda, as the major threat to peace and stability. This was the message that came out of Berlin, and that has just been echoed in Seoul.
The lives of millions of people on the Korean peninsula were for years blighted by an external conflict: the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Indigenous efforts to end their suffering have now been jeopardized by another external conflict: the US war against terror. Roh Moo-Hyun’s victory offers renewed hope for Korean reconciliation. One hopes he succeeds.
A call for brainy research
LIKE most humans, scientists have long believed — even before the evidence was in — that language is a skill unique to their species. In many centuries of debate, however, they have been unable to agree on anything else about the nature and evolution of language.
The disagreements became so intense in the 19th century that the Linguistic Society of Paris, in a desperate attempt to deflect the rhetorical sticks and stones, went so far as to ban university debates about the “inconclusive topic.”
In a review of the linguistic controversy published in the Nov. 22 issue of the journal Science, Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch of Harvard and Noam Chomsky of MIT suggest that most inquiries have failed because they began from the naive premise that a skill as complex as language can be localized in a single region of the brain.
Hauser, Fitch and Chomsky are too polite to catalogue the failures of their colleagues, such as the now-discredited “phrenologists” of the early 20th century, whose thinly scientific attempts divided the brain into areas responsible for noble traits like literacy and despised ones such as “destructiveness” and “secretiveness.” Their ideas were twisted by the Nazis to justify racial hatreds before and during World War II.
Phrenology — high-tech style — has reemerged with modern neural imaging devices now in most academic psychiatry/neurology departments. Using scanners with acronyms like CAT, PET and SQUID, modern science has valiantly tried, but failed, to localize the seats of language and consciousness.
Rather than just disdaining the past, the authors of the Science article look to the future, calling on scientists to stop searching for what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the homunculus — a “little man” in the brain that dutifully assembles speech and sense of self.—Los Angeles Times