Shots in Falluja will echo around the world
Guardian leader comment
CONVINCING Iraqis that US soldiers are there to help them will be all the more difficult after the shocking events in Falluja, west of Baghdad. Preventing already widespread popular opposition to the American military presence turning into concerted armed resistance will also be increasingly problematic unless the US army can explain why it was justified in opening fire on a crowd comprising a large number of children and teenagers, killing at least 13 and wounding 75.
Local residents said that the children were protesting at the occupation of their school by the US soldiers and that the Americans started firing when a rock was thrown. The shooting reportedly went on for half an hour. People were hit by bullets, shrapnel and possibly by heavy machinegun rounds. Ambulance crews said they were also fired on.
A US officer at the scene, Lieutenant Christopher Hart of the 82nd Airborne Division, was quoted as saying his troops were defending themselves against an attack by two gunmen on a motorcycle and had at first tried to disperse the demonstration with smoke bombs. He claimed some people in the crowd may also have had guns. But this does not begin to explain the severity and duration of the incident. Lt Hart could not say for sure how many people his men had killed.
His vagueness is not surprising. On the basis of the known facts at this point, the Americans appear to have acted with staggering recklessness, turning a residential area full of kids into a murderous free-fire zone. Whatever rules of engagement they supposedly observe clearly did not work. Whatever force was required to ensure their own safety, the degree of force actually used appears to have been massively disproportionate.
Even though the war is over, US soldiers continue to kill Iraqi civilians almost every day, for a variety of reasons. But Falluja’s tragedy is of a different order of magnitude. To prevent more such disastrous incidents and stop the security situation deteriorating further, an inquiry must be urgently held, preferably with UN oversight and with reference to the Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying forces.
For reasons of law, morality and self-interest, our (UK’s) relentlessly self-righteous government has a clear obligation to demand that its ally comply. Meanwhile, 82nd Airborne units should be withdrawn from Falluja. If necessary, they could be replaced by better-disciplined British troops.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
The civil-military divide
“Politicians have played their innings and have been bowled out on zero and have no place in Pakistan...” - Chief Executive (May 1, 2001)
THE above excerpt from a statement by President General Pervez Musharraf was on my mind when I went to attend the president’s media briefing on April 24. I wanted to seek his views on the civil-military divide and see whether there might have been any change in his perception. I tried to raise the issue, but my question was lost in the babble of louder voices and longer arms raised.
A difficult, tense and quite often hostile civil-military relationship has been the bane of the country and society from the very outset. Politicians, generally unseasoned, impulsive and lacking in mature judgment, would create an environment conducive to outright military take-over or covert manipulation at the level of the military high command. Every time the chips were down, politicians (no matter how few) would ‘approach’ the army chief to act as a cat’s paw to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
The military, for its part, almost invariably entertained a deep-seated distrust, bordering on contempt, for the political leadership and the political process itself. The military high command would tend to substitute ‘politics’ for ‘patriotism’ in the aphorism (Dr Johnson’s?) that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Historically, none of the army chiefs could rival Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, the architect of martial law, in contempt for the political leadership. He would look at the gentleness of character, modesty, and kindly behaviour of a politician like prime minister Khawaja Nazimuddin as signs of indecision and ineffectiveness.
General Ziaul Haq would view the country’s highest law, the constitution itself, as little more than a load of rubbish he could dump when he pleased. The high point of his contempt for the politicians (after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution) was reached when he dismissed his own hand-picked prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, whose sin was, first, to protest against the generals’ ostentatious lifestyle and, second, his stand on making public the findings of the inquiry committee report on the Ojhri Camp disaster of April 1988.
General Musharraf’s commendable act in making good on his promise to hold elections as ordained by the Supreme Court notwithstanding, his mistrust of the political leadership and politics remains a trait shared with the military high command.
He may be right to reject a comparison with his three forbears, Ayub, Yahya and Zia. ‘I am myself....!’ he would proudly proclaim. Any similarity to Ayub’s later years and his dismal fall in March 1969 would probably now be anathema to Musharraf. Worse still would be anything analogous to Yahya and Zia.
Comparisons are proverbially odious. They might appear to be so in the present case. Musharraf’s three years in power and the grave external and internal challenges he faced put him in a category without a precedence. However, the very uniqueness of his standing as a strong army chief and head of state also confronts him with a challenge, so formidable as to impact on the very foundations and fabric of civil society now and for the future.
What kind of a civil society ours is today and what it would be like at the end of the rest of Musharraf’s period in an indeterminate timeframe remains an enigma. Will it be weaker or stronger, ailing, or restored to a reasonable degree of good health and vigour? A quick and not necessarily a mature answer would be weaker rather than stronger, losing both in health and vigour.
If the last over half-a-century of direct military rule (under or without martial law as at present) and indirect military intrusions (at the commander’s own will or under pressure/persuasion of political forces) be any guide, our civil society is (even if relatively) weaker today than it might have been in the first four years of Pakistan’s emergence - 1947 through 1951.
If Liaquat’s assassination was the first stone cast at the glass house of democracy, Nazimuddin’s dismissal in April 1953, the dissolution of the constituent assembly in October in 1954, and finally the proclamation of martial law (not to speak of any number of other serious political crises involving the military in aid of civil power) may well be likened to so many potshots taken at civil society, to leave it with bleeding wounds.
The task for General Musharraf will be to evaluate the impact of his rule and strategy on the state of civil-military relations, and civil society as a whole, in the next five or six years.
As Musharraf himself said, his job would be to serve as a bridge between the civil and military. It would be for him and his team to choose between ‘a hollow plate’ bridge and a solid, steel frame of a structure.
Furthermore, will it be left to military engineers to build the ‘interactive’ bridge to their own design and specifications and let civil society simply oversee it? The question needs to be closely examined and clearly answered.
The writer is a retired Brigadier of the Pakistan Army
In defence of Al-Sahaf’s elusive words
There was a story by a DPA correspondent the other day ridiculing Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad al-Sahaf’s elusive vocabulary and his beaming, pathetic bluster. I would venture to say that the story is in poor taste as it makes no mention of the gang rape of English language by the Anglo-American combine in continuing to call an invasion a “war” and an occupation of a sovereign country, a “liberation”.
Sahaf was only trying to keep his fallen people in good cheer to their last breath in freedom but what the Anglo-American coalition was doing and continues to do, long after Sahaf’s brave voice has been silenced by the aggressors’ nauseating harangues on their captive media is the callous, not collateral, damage to the sanctity of language that in the word of Marlowe “no virtue can digest”. As “images of thought” words are to be handled with asceptical care since they “decay with imprecision” as Eliot warned. Calling an occupation a liberation is no small imprecision. It is sending the Queen’s English into a reverse spin.
Gloating over the dying rhetoric of Sahaf, the DPA correspondent shows not only his insensitivity but reflects in a way the general turn in opinion in the West that has taken place after the conquest of Iraq. The vulgar thrill of “victory” has vindicated the aggression as Mr Blair said, and swamped the moral froth of the anti-war picnickers.
The roads are now empty of the million marchers but one wonders what happened to the fate of the dozen or so human shields who had taken up position in Baghdad to save the civil population from bombing by coalition aircraft and missiles. If they have not already been bulldozed against the targets they were trying to protect (like that “silly” American girl, Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by the Israelis into the wall of a Palestinian home some weeks back), have they found any place on this Planet to return to and hide their shame? Since BBC and CNN and other channels have no time to investigate where these young people have all gone, will it be safe to assume they have all been put aside in some dungeon of Baghdad as enemy collaborators?
It is said that it is in moments of crisis that a person’s or a people’s true character is revealed. In how one reacts one sums up one’s net losses and gains. Into this goes your Shakespeare, your Bible, your Ghalib, your Harvard, your Hiroshima and your Vietnam. What you have been doing becomes your limb. Ultimately your choice reveals your real value system. Man alone is moral. The sum of his civilization, his culture, his urbanity, art, sciences, learning, scholarship, erudition and philosophy is crystallized in his moral response to a situation. This would show how much of the animal has become a human since its birth.
Those who have read Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov would remember the profligate rake Mitya, the eldest of the Karamazov brothers. He has ruined his life in gambling and debauchery, but he loves the noble and serene Katya, who is just his opposite. He knows he is not worthy of her but that does not diminish his passion for her, which she inflames by scorning his love. It so happens destiny one day places her at his mercy. She needs 5000 roubles to save her father from dishonour. Mitya has recently got that much money but this is all he has or will ever have. She comes to his lodgings and stands there looking more irresistibly beautiful in her precarious situation. There was his chance to disgrace her for her haughty behaviour, but “I just stood there and for maybe three, maybe five, seconds stared at her with a terrifying hatred, with the kind of hatred that is only a hair’s breadth from the maddest, most desperate love...I didn’t keep her waiting for long...then I...handed it to her, opened the door leading to the entrance, stepped back, and bowed to the waist, with the deepest and most sincere reverence — and I mean reverence! Her whole body shuddered. She looked at me intently for a second, turned terribly pale, as pale as a sheet, and all of a sudden knelt down and bowed to the ground to me, like a simple Russian woman and certainly not like a finishing school graduate. Then she jumped up and ran out.”
This act of Mitya’s makes him Dostoevsky’s most memorable of heroes. At the critical moment he makes a moral choice. He refuses to take advantage of Katya’s vulnerable position. He had the power but he refused to use that. In that refusal the essential goodness of his character is crystallized. This is what we need to understand when the might, glory and spectacle of western power overwhelms us and we feel small and inferior and cringe for crumbs of wisdom from Berkeley and Harvard. That wisdom, that civilization, that culture has long been on show for all to see and understand its true nature. Call it generosity, openness or lack of sensitivity, the West, like a good stripper, has been revealing more than it has been hiding. The rush on securing the oil wells of Iraq has revealed how much they care for libraries and museums of an ancient civilization. And while one may admire the clever articulation of diplomats and spin doctors and skillful details of embedded reporters, the crudeness of mentality and crassness of perception spills over when Sahaf is called a joker by straight-faced factotums of the super civilization.