Do we want more dams or Pakistan?

ON September 24, 2003, a well attended seminar was held at Peshawar on the current crisis relating to the construction of the Greater Thal Canal and the Kalabagh Dam. The speakers, who were well known leaders of the three smaller provinces, were unanimous on the point that one province, even though with an overall majority population, has no right to impose its edict on the other three provinces.

The underlying rationale in support of this proposition is that the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun people have their own historic identities stretching back for many millenniums, their own lands, economies, cultures, traditions, languages and all else that is required to make them separate nations. This they were until the British conquest merged them into the mosaic of nations that became British India.

They opted for Pakistan on the promise of “autonomy and sovereignty” contained in the Pakistan Resolution. Thus whereas they have surrendered a part of their “autonomy and sovereignty” to the Central entity for the formation of a Muslim state, they have not conferred upon Punjab the right to rule over the other three nations and impose its will on them. If this is not the case then the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun people did not gain independence in 1947 but merely changed masters, which is absurd.

Of course, the above premise did not take hold after the emergence of Pakistan because its author, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a sick man who died about one year after independence and after him began the rat race for power which continues to this day. The foremost task of constitution-making could not be performed and governments fell like dry leaves in autumn.

In the end it took nine years and military rule to produce a result of sorts. In the process all norms of true democracy, justice and fair play were abandoned and the fundamental concept of “autonomy and sovereignty” of the provinces, being the promise on which Pakistan is based, got deeply buried. Corruption, treachery, betrayal and lies now constitute the backbone of our political system and it is when life has become impossible that we have woken up to the reality.

The hegemony of Punjab, backed by the military-bureaucratic axis, has cost the country so dearly as to change its geography. It is on this very issue that the larger part of the Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh while the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun people remain under the constant threat of military action. Democracy based on majority rule works only in a nation state where the ruler and the ruled are all the same and there is no cause for complaint on that count.

But in a multinational state like Pakistan, it cannot and has not worked. This is the lesson of history of which we are reminded by the break up of not only Pakistan but also the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, and we are witness to continued bloodshed as in India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Sudan etc.

The forced construction of the Thal Canal and Kalabagh Dam backed by threats of crushing and chopping off the heads of those who oppose, has turned out to be the last straw. It’s not water alone, the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun people are in revolt against the loot of their other resources and incomes as well carried out only to feed Punjab and Islamabad while their provinces remain starved and thirsty ghettos. The three have given their verdict against not only the Thal canal and Kalabagh dam but also dominance and exploitation and are out in the streets for its enforcement.

So what is Islamabad going to do? Send in troops and carry out a full scale massacre as was done by Zia in Sindh in 1983? Not really. This government is an anachronism which cannot find a solid foot-hold. It has been unable to enforce its laws and policies in any sphere of life. It cannot control crime and has backed down on its declared intent of ending smuggling, gun-running, drug trafficking etc. It has even taken a U-turn on its much trumpeted accountability by bringing into the assemblies and government corrupt and dishonest people who were the targets of its own Ehtesab.

The manner in which it has conducted local elections, referendum and general elections is quite pathetic. Its police reforms and the district government system, which is the brain child of foreign consultants, who know nothing about our rural life and a general who was never deemed fit for a command post in the army, has failed and is a punishment for people.

Thus even if madness prevails and force is resorted to, which section of the population does the government feel will stand by it in an adventure against the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun peoples? Certainly not the turncoats, and self-servers that fill its lobbies. For true to their calling, they will go in search of who is coming next. If this is not bad enough then let us not forget the situation on the borders: Troops are already deployed on the Afghan front, the Indian border remains volatile and the situation in Kashmir is far from relaxing.

As for our American sponsors, they only use military governments in Pakistan but never come to their aid even in times of war. Besides, the Americans have already bitten off more than they can chew in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact they are choking on it and want Pakistan to help.

Hence, President Musharraf’s second trip to the USA in quick succession to the picnic at Camp David. No Sir, the only course open to General Musharraf is to yield in his confrontation against the Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun people. He must show wisdom and foresight in this and suppress those who are egging him on over the precipice for their own selfish ends.

The Kalabagh Dam and Greater Thal Canal must be abandoned. There will be no complaint from the people of Punjab as they will not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The Seraiki people have already disowned these projects and declared that the Greater Thal Canal is not for their benefit but for a well-known privileged class of super beings. Together with this there could be a full-scale reassessment of the powers that the centre has usurped and what remains for the provinces. The powers taken away from the provinces and conferred on district governments has caused such a chaos as to make good governance impossible. Pakistan lies in the provinces where the people are and not in the marble palaces of Islamabad where only the bureaucracy and the generals sit.

Thus, the bulk of power should vest in the provinces. There has to be an honest and genuine devolution beginning from Islamabad to the Union Councils. Let the provinces make policies suited to their own circumstances even though they are different from each other. This is how the things are in the most powerful and prosperous states of the world such as America, Canada and Australia.

In any case Islamabad has failed to run the country and has indeed made a total mess of it. It should only be the seat of the Council of Common Interests and deal with matters prescribed for it in the Pakistan Resolution which relate to the solidarity and security of Pakistan, together with interprovincial disputes.

Pakistan needs a new constitution based on an outlook which takes into account the sentiments and aspirations of those leaders who created the country and provided the basis of a system to run it. The Sindhi, Baloch, Pushtun Front was set up in 1985 to propagate this truth but perhaps we had not suffered enough at that stage to care.

Now, per force, things are moving in the same direction and all must give their blessings to the trend if Pakistan is to be saved. Those who believe that the country will break unless a powerful stranglehold is maintained on the provinces are in fact advocating what Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan practised. It only expedited the break up of Pakistan.

This also raises the important question that if a country can be held together only by force is it worth holding it together at all and how long can it be held in this manner when even mighty empires of Changez, Halaku,, Taimur, Napoleon, the British, Hitler and others have crumbled. Let the provinces breathe. Do not bully and badger them. Let them live as equals and let them be masters of their own destinies. This will be the urgently needed cementing factor that Pakistan needs.

The writer is chairman of the Sindh National Front.

Special counsel is overkill

PRESIDENT Bush is right. The Justice Department, not a special counsel, should in-

vestigate allegations that an administration official illegally leaked the name of a

CIA employee whose husband had authoritatively disputed White House claims that

Iraq attempted to buy uranium ore in Niger.

Neither an appointed special counsel nor a new independent counsel act — which Sen. Joe Lieberman, a presidential candidate, is calling for — would be helpful or desirable.

The Independent Counsel Act, which Congress allowed to lapse in 1999, was a bad

idea from the beginning. Until they were put out of business, prosecutors under this act conducted open-ended investigations that wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, harassed elected officials and produced scant prosecutable crimes.

— Los Angeles Times

Living in a complex world

PAKISTAN — and by that I mean a variety of policymakers working out of Islamabad — must plan for the country’s economic and political future in a world that has, of late, become extraordinarily turbulent. President Pervez Musharraf addressed this issue in a wide-ranging conversation with a group of thinkers and opinion-makers in Lahore a few weeks ago.

According to press reports, he talked about the enormous complexity of the world in which Pakistan must learn to conduct its foreign affairs. Many analysts are tempted to ascribe this complexity to the changes wrought by the event that has generally come to be referred to as “nine-eleven.” That, of course, is a short hand for the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and on the Pentagon near Washington. Nineteen suicide bombers were involved in that incident, all of them Muslims in their twenties and thirties. Fifteen of these were from Saudi Arabia.

Nine-eleven was a defining moment for the world — in particular for the United States — for many different reasons. For some it signalled the start of the clash between two civilizations, one Islamic and the other western, that had been predicted by Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard University political scientist. For some others it was the manifestation of the anger and frustration felt by a large number of reasonably well educated young men who saw little future for themselves in the stunted and depraved societies in many countries of the Islamic Middle East.

That the young men who committed that crime were all Muslims did not indicate that the Huntingtonian clash had indeed begun to take place. These young men had directed their anger at the United States for the reason that it was America’s support that kept in place the regimes they had come to detest.

For some others still “nine-eleven” was the product of envy focused on America, the most successful economic power at the beginning of the 21st Century. America was the new world’s new hegemon. There was a growing feeling among many people in the world, not just in the Muslim countries of the Middle East, that the United States’ remarkable economic progress was achieved at the cost of underdevelopment in many parts of the world.

The leaders and the citizens of the United States needed to be reminded that the growing disparity in wellbeing between America and the rich industrial countries of the West on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other could not be sustained. Such disparity certainly would not be tolerated. It needed a desperate act of the type committed on September 11, 2001, to focus the attention of the rich countries on the growing inequalities in global incomes.

To these explanations for nine-eleven we should add the one common to the countries from which most of the suicide bombers came.

This was centred around the belief that America had been singularly insensitive to the frustration felt by the Palestinians and their supporters at the support it had provided Israel. According to this view, Israel was a new imperial force intent on usurping the land that had belonged for more than a thousand years to the people of Palestine.

They saw the battle for this land as an unequal conflict since America had thrown its economic and political might in favour of the Israeli usurpers.

President George W. Bush’s use of the word “crusade” to describe the war he was about to launch against international terrorism soon after “nine-eleven” was particularly unfortunate.

It simply reminded the Muslim world of the eight wars fought by the Europeans between the 11th and 13th centuries to wrest from them the control of Palestine and its holy sites.

Nine-eleven is one of those events in history whose meaning will continue to be debated for decades if not for centuries. Historians will continue to differ for as long as history gets to be written. However, it is our belief that the state of flux that we notice today in international affairs would have manifested itself even if nineteen young men had not hijacked four planes and guided three of them into the buildings in New York and near Washington.

The turbulence that people who guide the destinies of countries such as Pakistan must contend with would have surfaced in some other way even if “nine-eleven” had not happened.

Those who are currently in policy-making positions in Islamabad, charged with the awesome responsibility to work for improving the country’s economic situation, must develop a sound appreciation of the way the world is changing around them. This change is rapid. It can seriously disorient. There are two ways of looking at it. First, in terms of a general theory of international development. Second, in the context of the interests of the many countries whom Pakistan must deal with. Some of these countries are in Pakistan’s immediate neighbourhood. Some are not so near; with many of them Pakistan does not share borders and yet their influence is strong and their reach is long. America belongs to the latter group.

I have written before in these columns about the interface between economic development and foreign policy. I have also written quite extensively about the way America’s view of the world has considerable relevance for Pakistan’s citizens and policymakers.

In a number of previous articles, I have analyzed the intense debate that is proceeding in America about the way it should conduct itself in world affairs. With the article today, I begin a more systematic analysis of the circumstances that are reshaping the global order and the way this change will affect not only Pakistan but also the half a dozen countries that have an important bearing on Pakistan’s future.

This series is similar to the one I began with the article that appeared in this space on July 27. That article analyzed Pakistan’s evolving trade relations with America. There will be more articles on Pakistan’s commerce with other countries. The foreign policy series will follow a similar approach with occasional contributions on Pakistan’s relations with a number of countries — in some cases not just countries but regions — of considerable import for the country’s future.

Today, I will deal with what is best described as the general theory of foreign affairs as seen from the perspective of the opening years of the 21st century.

I begin by raising a question which is simple to ask but not easy to answer. Why is there such a great deal of flux in international relations, in the way various countries of the world and various world regions are currently looking at and dealing with one another?

One answer to this question is that the world — in particular the countries that have the economic and military strength to influence what happens in places well beyond their borders — is in search for a principle that would help underpin the new world order. For as long as that search continues, the world would not settle down to some kind of relatively peaceful existence. To lend some substance to this argument, it would help to go back a little into history.

For a couple of centuries — from about the middle of the 18th Century — the shape of the world was defined by an intense economic competition among the nations of Western Europe. The Industrial Revolution that began in England but then fairly quickly spread to a number of countries across the English Channel brought exceptional economic and military strength to the European states. They used that strength not only to increase the control of the various ruling classes over their own citizenry. The powerful European state that grew out of the Industrial Revolution also provided it with the means to bring under its control the less advanced places in the world.

The subject of the European expansion into Africa, Asia and Latin America has been well researched. Those who wrote about European expansion into Africa, Asia and Latin America after the empires had collapsed and the former colonies had become independent states tended to see the colonizers as exploiters. However, more recently historians such as Niall Ferguson of Oxford have begun to put a new gloss on the subject, something I touched upon in an earlier article. (Dawn, “What America is reading?” July 1, 2003.)

But the point that needs emphasizing in the context of today’s discussion is that the growth of European domination of the world’s less developed regions brought about some stability in international affairs. That lasted for more than a hundred years. It was eventually disturbed by a European nation that felt that it was operating in an unequal world. That nation was Germany.

The European empires were built by Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Two economically powerful nations — Germany in Europe and America in the New World — did not participate in this process. The United States made some forays beyond its borders. It conquered the Philippines and Cuba. It also put forward the Monroe doctrine in 1823, one of the many principles for the conduct of foreign policy spelled out by American presidents to define their nation’s conduct in international affairs.

James Monroe, America’s fifth president (1817-1825), let it be known that his country would not look with favour at any attempt by other nations to create a presence in what it considered to be its backwater. That was defined broadly as the western hemisphere. This notwithstanding and not including the incorporation of Hawaii and Puerto Rico into the United States, Washington was content not to establish its sway over other lands. It eventually withdrew from the Philippines and Cuba.

Germany acted differently. It made a half-hearted attempt to acquire some real estate in Africa and for sometime dominated the areas that now make up Tanzania. However, its main focus was to face the economic challenge posed to it by the European colonizers by overwhelming them in the European continent.

This led to two world wars, each fought mostly in Europe and in each Germany was soundly beaten by a coalition that, interestingly, included America.

The Second World War extracted a heavy economic toll from the nations of Europe that had relied on empire building as one of the main sources for their growth and development.

One by one the Europeans relinquished their empires and set free the people over whom they had ruled for centuries. The process of decolonization ended the organizing principle around which the world order of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries was constructed. But the world did not have to wait for long before another organizing principle surfaced: the containment of communism.

Is the tail wagging the dog?

FIRST to matters of great personal sadness, the deaths of Hashim Raza and H. K. Burki. Both, in their way, were institutions, both in our conventional calculations of years, well past the Biblical life-span of three score years and ten.

But both were relevant and more than ever we needed them as role-models, to remind us of a value-system that once prevailed and which now lies in tatters.

Hashim Raza was a civil servant of great distinction but he was also a man of letters and whenever I met him I felt that he had missed his vocation. He should have been a teacher.

H. K. Burki was a former Pakistan hockey captain but I knew him as a journalist and he had fallen on bad times because he had refused to compromise on his principles. A weed that will bend will not break. . He did not bend but neither did he break. He endured the hardships even as the years crept up and his health deteriorated.

Whenever I went to Islamabad, Farooq Mazhar (who too has passed on) was my host and H. K. Burki was a mandatory guest at dinner and each time it seemed like a re-union of old comrades, the arguments, and they could be heated, underlining the bond that existed between us.

We are not rich in people of integrity and old world values and the deaths of people like Hashim Raza and H. K. Burki have made us poorer or, even worse, more lonely.

It may come as something of a surprise to the American public that it is not their country that is the world’s sole superpower. It is Israel. It is Israel that is dictating the agenda in the Middle East.

No candidate in the forthcoming elections in the United States can dare to make a statement that can be remotely considered evenhanded when it comes to Palestine.

It has become apparent that Iraq was invaded according to the plans drawn up by think-tanks that are either Israeli funded or who draw their inspiration from the intelligence input of the Israelis. Every public reason for going to war stands discredited. And every day sees a shifting of the goal posts. The shock and awe has gone as has the triumphant arrogance of the victors.

What remains are Israel’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological which is seen as a sacred cow and Israel’s land-grab no different from Nazi Germany’s lebensraum, the breathing space that was needed for the natural development of Germany as a nation and which justified the annexation of its neighbours. The plan for the conquest of Iraq may have seriously gone wrong but the master-plan for a Greater Israel is on track.

Every crime, every atrocity, every brutality that Saddam Hussein has been accused of has been committed by the Israelis. The late Edward Said wrote in the newspaper al-Ahram (13-19 February):” But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba’athists of has been the stock-in-trade of every Israeli government since 1948 and at no time more flagrant than since the occupation of 1967.

“Torture, illegal detentions, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlements, economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses; all these, it should be noted with emphasis have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative per capita spent by the US government on its own citizens.”

At the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, Geoff Hoon paraded an Iraqi couple who had been tortured by Saddam Hussain’s regime, had fled and they were now planning to return to Iraq. Geoff Hoon of all persons whose own political career awaits the findings of the Hutton Inquiry. Why did he not parade a grieving mother of a dead British soldier killed in an illegal war, the reasons or justification for which have been shown up to be, not honest errors of judgments but calculated falsehoods.

Bush no longer talks about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Instead he is having to grapple with a security leak which led to the outing of a CIA undercover agent. Tony Blair, on the other hand, remains defiant and still insists that weapons of mass destruction will be found. This has now become a conviction for him, rooted in faith. Geoff Hoon in his speech held up the increase in Britain’s defence budget as one of the achievements of the Labour government!

Iraq has been turned upside down in the search for weapons of mass destruction. The latest theory doing the rounds is that Saddam’s own scientists had led him up the garden path and were producing dummy weapons and pocketing huge sums of money.

Another theory is that Saddam Hussein misled the world that he had WMDs whereas he had none.

Are these theories meant to exonerate those who went to war in the firm belief that he had these weapons? After all, he was such a treacherous man, he was quite capable of a double bluff. Or he was suicidal and invited his own destruction and that of his country? It wouldn’t surprise me if Saddam too is hoping that the WMDs will be found. He would then be seen as a genuine threat rather than only as a murderous tyrant. He would have a more ‘honourable’ place in history, like Ariel Sharon.

UN needs radical reforms

THIS year’s UN session started on a sombre note. Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself set the tone in his annual report by depicting the gravity of contemporary challenges and presenting the case for “radical reform” of the UN to make it capable of meeting those challenges.

According to him, “events had shaken the international system and he was not sure “whether the consensus and the vision” expressed in the Millennium Declaration three years ago was still intact. The world leaders, assembled at the millennium summit in September 2000, had tried to give a new direction to the UN for adapting this organization to the needs of the 21st century.

The new millennium regrettably has not started well. The world remains afflicted with the same problems as experienced in the preceding century, perhaps in their acutest form. Poverty, hunger, disease illiteracy and larger socio-economic asymmetry continue to represent the global malaise. Terrorism, violence and conflict remain ascendant bringing death and suffering to innocent people.

What aggravates this bleak scenario is the growing inability of the international community to respond to these challenges with unity of purpose. There is no global consensus on major peace and security issues or on how to address them. The US military action against Iraq this year, in spite of strong opposition within the Security Council (and also within and outside the US), has left the UN deeply divided.

The disillusionment over the UN’s performance is not a recent phenomenon. During the cold war years, the UN was seen to be one of the main arenas of the clash of ideologies and political confrontation between the two hostile blocs. The end of the cold war had provided an opportunity to revert to the concept of collective security and acceptance of the UN as an instrument of international legality.

But what actually happened was further erosion of the UN’s credibility and authority. Global security concept was replaced by security arrangements at regional and sub-regional levels (NATO, Euro-defence, Balkans, Mediterranean security etc.). Today, the UN is no longer the sole meaningful arbiter on issues of global relevance and importance. Washington, not New York, is the focus of world attention for actual decision-making on these issues.

It must be acknowledged that the UN has played a seminal role in evolving global consensus and cooperation on major socio-economic issues and has built, through a series of high-level conferences and summits since the 1990s, a normative framework of internationally agreed goals and commitments towards poverty eradication and sustainable development. The UN has also served as an effective inter-governmental forum for “dialogue and decision” on the whole range of global development agenda with the engagement of all relevant stakeholders, including multilateral institutions and civil society.

The current Iraqi situation and world community’s visible disappointment over UN’s helplessness in playing a wider role in the post-war Iraq are a proof of how much the world expects of the UN in preventing conflicts, peacemaking and peace-building efforts besides coordinating humanitarian relief and development activities.

Despite its failures and constraints, the UN remains mankind’s “last best hope” and must be strengthened as an effective, representative, transparent, and accountable world body capable of fulfilling its Charter role meeting the challenges of global peace and development.

The world leaders, at the Millennium Summit, had pledged to spare no effort in strengthening the UN and making it a more effective instrument for pursuing the common goals. On his own part, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been able to accomplish, during his first tenure, significant reform streamlining the system of UN peacekeeping operations and restructuring of the UN administrative set up.

At the opening session of the General Assembly, the Secretary-General announced his intention to establish a high-level panel of eminent persons “to examine the current challenges to peace and security and to recommend ways of strengthening the UN through reform of its institutions and processes”.

The UN now faces its moment of truth. The world has changed drastically since 1945. The UN itself has expanded manifold both in its membership and structure. Its ubiquitous role now extends to virtually every aspect of human activity and life. With the growing complexity and magnitude of global challenges including recurrent threats to and breach of international peace and security, the UN needs radical changes in its approach and capacity to manage these challenges.

The UN needs reform that would make it stronger, more representative and more effective inter-governmental organization. The democratic principles of “sovereign equality and one-state-one-vote should be the basis of its strength and participatory character.

This would require restoration of the primacy of the General Assembly as the chief policy-making organ of the UN which should be involved in all decisions of global relevance and impact, including the appointment of the Secretary-General. In cases where the Security Council is prevented from acting effectively, the General Assembly should be able to operate under “Uniting for Peace” authority and adopt mandatory resolutions concerning global peace and security.

The reform of Security Council is a complex issue and has been the subject of protracted discussions at the UN for over a decade now. The vast majority of the UN membership would like to see the Security Council democratized through comprehensive reform encompassing its enlargement, decision-making including the question of the veto and the Council’s working methods.

While there is a consensus on the increase in the non-permanent category of its membership to make it more broadly representative of the international community as a whole and of the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world, the overwhelming majority of the UN members is against expansion in the permanent category. Similarly, there is strong opposition to the continuation of the veto power which is considered anachronistic to the Charter principle of sovereign equality of states.

The question is why should not the permanent category of membership in the Security Council be abolished altogether? It is an anachronistic remnant of World War II and negates the inclusive and participatory character of the UN. If the UN reform is to make the Security Council more broadly representative of the international community, it must redress the anomalies of the past by abolishing the vestiges of power and privilege in the Council. What is needed is an increase in the number of non-permanent seats to make the Council more representative, effective and legitimate in the eyes of all peoples of the world.

If the current veto-wielding powers do not rise above their “national interest” and are not ready to give up this “power” at least at this stage, the use of veto, pending its elimination altogether, needs to be curtailed only to Charter’s Chapter VII decisions and its validity be linked to at least two negative votes (or one-fifth ratio of whatever is the revised number of elected members) from the non-permanent category.

No country, however powerful or dominant, should resort to unilateral armed intervention. It violates moral and multilateral norms and solves no problems. In confronting global challenges, as has been most recently borne out in Iraq, collective action based on collective interest is the only viable option which must be pursued under the aegis of the UN Security Council.

The UN must also facilitate peaceful settlement of disputes through non-selective recourse to Article 33 of the Charter, which lists various modalities of seeking a peaceful solution. The possibility of assigning special role to the presidents of the General Assembly and the Security Council as well as the Secretary-General in crisis prevention and conflict resolution may be considered. The three could be enabled to act independently at the request of any member state or on their own volition, within the framework of Chapter VI of the UN Charter concerning peaceful settlement of disputes.

A global peace force should be established to act on the authority of the Security Council or in its absence, of the General Assembly, for maintenance of peace. Similarly, a global police force could be created to intervene in civil conflicts and to help post-crisis stabilization measures. The current Iraqi situation could be an appropriate case for such deployment under UN authority.

The writer is a former foreign

secretary and now Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the UN.