The unforgivable war

The multitudes were out on the streets once again last Saturday, on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Their ranks appear to have noticeably dwindled since 13 months ago, when millions of people across the world marched against a looming war, many of them hoping against hope that the size of the demonstrations would make those bent upon belligerence pause to reconsider the ridiculous course on which they were about to embark.

It was a vain hope, but the manner in which the strength of popular feeling had been manifested was not lost upon anyone. Some of the largest anti-war turnouts were in countries whose governments had, in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, committed troops, or at least their moral support, to George W. Bush's pet project.

The streets of Rome were overrun by protesters. The sound of anti-war chants echoed in the hearts of Madrid and Barcelona. Sydney and Melbourne were first off the mark with enormous processions. London played host to the largest mobilization in its history. So on and so forth.

In the 13 months that have passed since February 15, 2003, those who opposed the war have been vindicated in almost every way. And, significantly, many among those who supported the invasion because they believed the Anglo-American propaganda about the threat posed to western civilization by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction (WMD), have been driven to change their minds.

A prominent case in point is former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, who in 2002 wrote a book titled Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq.

In an article for the Atlantic Monthly, he wrote earlier this year: "The American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface.... What we have learned about Iraq's WMD programmes since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed.

"The war was not all bad," he claims. "But at the very least we should recognize that the administration's rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we thought we knew in March 2003. It appears even more reckless in light of what we know today."

Last Sunday, Richard Clarke, who served as Bush's anti-terrorism coordinator, offered a telling account of the White House's almost surreal fixation on Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, concluding that the US president has "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism".

The "not all bad" aspect mentioned by Pollack, in the view of otherwise somewhat contrite liberals, hinges upon the fact that Saddam is gone. A horrendous dictatorship has been consigned to history. Interestingly, this point is what the most vociferous warmongers and their apologists also latch on to in self-defence. Their patent response to the burgeoning ranks of war critics is: If you had your way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

On the face of it, that is not untrue. Chances are that Saddam would indeed have still been the chief honcho in Baghdad but for the invasion. On the other hand, would he still have been in power had the West (and the Soviet Union) not supported him throughout his ill-advised and costly war against Iran - which happens to be the period when he committed his worst atrocities against fellow Iraqis? And would he still have been around had the US decided not to help him crush the Shia uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war?

Furthermore, who can say what Saddam's fate would have been, in the wake of the Iran and Kuwait fiascos, had Britain and the US not insisted on wide-ranging sanctions that strengthened the Baathist regime and weakened the Iraqi people (apart from being responsible for an estimated one million deaths) by increasing their dependence on the government?

Saddam was, no doubt, a tyrant, and his preferred method of supremacy was to inculcate fear. But by March 2003 there were no longer any particularly dangerous weapons in his arsenal (the supposed threat posed by which was the primary casus belli), and towards the end his regime was by no means as solid and cohesive as it was made out to be.

An uprising on the scale of the one that toppled Nicolae Ceausescu would probably have sufficed to usher in a new era in Iraq. It would have cost lives, but probably a fraction of the 55,000 reportedly consumed by the invasion.

That figure (whose accuracy cannot be vouched for, given that the occupation forces have categorically refused to count their victims), which includes military and civilian casualties, is a hundred times the level of American casualties. Needless to say, no American lives are likely to have been lost if Saddam's fate had been left to his compatriots.

And, quite possibly, no Spanish or Turkish lives either. For there can be no question that the occupation of Iraq has increased the terrorist risk globally. Although the military campaign was purportedly a part of the "war on terror", there was no dearth of predictions that it would fuel the fury and swell the ranks of those who look upon the West as their mortal enemy.

Such insights held no interest for the US and British leaderships. They devoted their energies to picking only what attracted them from the intelligence smorgasbord, no matter how unreliable the source.

Ahmed Chalabi's insistence that Saddam was not only close to achieving his nuclear ambitions but that proof existed of his links with Al Qaeda suited the Bush administration.

It chose to ignore the fact that even the CIA, after using Chalabi in the 1990s, had distanced itself from him after realizing he was too untrustworthy. The resourceful crook subsequently ingratiated himself with neoconservatives and Zionists; in 1997, the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs declared that it had been "working closely" with Chalabi "to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office and a subsequently democratic future for Iraq".

That goal has now partly been achieved. Chalabi has little interest in democracy. The convicted embezzler, who as a member of the US-imposed Iraqi governing council is in charge of economic affairs, has promised American firms that there's a killing to be made in Iraqi oil.

He has also admitted supplying false evidence to the US. The Pentagon nonetheless intends to pay him $4 million over the next year. For what? To supply "intelligence".

It is thanks to Chalabi and his ilk that American troops were genuinely surprised at not being showered with flowers and sweets during their conquest of Iraq. They had been told that the Iraqis would welcome a foreign occupation - and they were gullible and ignorant enough to believe it. One year on, it is strange to hear the likes of Paul Wolfowitz blame the continuing violence in Iraq on "foreign fighters".

Yes, there are indeed too many foreign fighters in Iraq. The vast majority of them are in American uniform. Recently a much-publicized opinion poll purportedly found that most Iraqis are glad to have been invaded. That's an intriguing result - but it lacks perspective in the absence of details about the sample and how it was chosen, as well as the circumstances in which the interviews were conducted.

It could be a long time before truly representative estimates of Iraqi public opinion become available, but reports suggest that many among those who were thrilled to see the back of Saddam are increasingly resentful about their arrogant occupiers.

The occupation will, of course, not end after Iraqi sovereignty is supposedly restored at the end of June, and efforts are afoot to obtain a new UN Security Council resolution that would effectively sanction continued American over lordship.

The Spanish election results have helped to refocus attention on involving the UN in determining Iraq's future - without any apology, of course, for the numerous occasions on which it was decreed irrelevant.

With an interim constitution of dubious value in place, elections are supposed to take place towards the end of this year or in early 2005 - with the US keen to ensure that the "wrong people", the sort who might insist on true political and economic sovereignty, don't win.

That, after all, is what was wrong with the scenario of Saddam being overthrown by the Iraqis: no entry point for Halliburton or Bechtel and, furthermore, quite possibly a nationalist government as hostile to Israel as the Baathist regime.

A plan to dominate the Middle East has been in the works since the oil crisis of the 1970s. The 1991 war offered an opportunity to establish a foothold. That has now been consolidated.

The ideologues currently in control of the White House are guided by the sort of psychotic perversity that led Ariel Sharon to assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday. They have gone too far, but that isn't going to stop them.

That is why it would have helped if Saturday's crowds had been larger. All over the world, politicians who connived in the aggression against Iraq, who systematically lied to their people, are scrambling to save their jobs. Their discomfiture ought to be compounded at every opportunity.

Iraq is not the only issue: what is at stake is the fate of the world in the 21st century. The conditions are ripe for changes to be instituted via the ballot box, as has happened in Spain. Should that road to regime change be obstructed, it will become necessary to consider alternatives.

e-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net

No end to corruption

The lack of check and balance within the district government system has made it vulnerable to criticism despite the presence of the DCO and the district Nazim. There is no authority or mechanism within the system itself to check all tiers of the local government, including district, tehsil and union council. This flaw has paved the way for irregularities and misappropriations at all level of the district government.

The fiscal scandal of the district council complex tax had come to limelight when District Naib Nazim Javed Khan Qaisrani raided the contractor's camp on the premises of tehsil offices in Jan 2004. He caught the contractor red-handed while pocketing illegal district council complex tax on behalf of DG Khan tehsil authorities.

It is worth mentioning that neither the district nor tehsil authorities took any action against the contractor who had been embezzling the tax for the last two-and-a-half-years. Instead, the contractor was only directed by the tehsil Nazim to discontinue the practice immediately.

Now, who will fix the responsibility of pocketing illegal tax for such a long period? The contractor made it publicly that he had obtained the contract of collecting property tax and district council complex tax by giving a bribe to the authority concerned.

Regarding the deteriorating law and order situation, the district Nazim never exercised his powers to inspect the police station. On the contrary, the district Nazim admitted before pressmen on his birthday that he had demanded extra security from the police after receiving threats from the Jaafar Gang last year, but the police overlooked his demand.

* * * * *

A seminar on the population welfare for the registered medical practitioners was held on March 16 at the local THQ Hospital.

The seminar was organized by the Population Welfare Department to involve doctors in the population welfare campaign at the district level. District Population Officer Huma Mehdi, Dr Tanveer Fatima, surgeon Mujtaba Ali Siddiqui and Dr Faizullah Khan dilated upon various contraceptive techniques.

They also spoke on the grave socio-economic situation of the country particularly in developing areas like Rajanpur district where half the population was living below the poverty line. They said the law and order situation was getting worse due to unemployment and low literacy rate.

Speakers also told the audience that 48 per cent population in the district was under 15 years, which was alarming.

* * * * *

Urs celebrations of Hazrat Sultan Sakhi Sarwar has commenced at the shrine of the saint, some 33kms from here in Sakhi Sarwar town, which will continue till April 13. Devotees are facing varied problems because the new rest house could not be completed at the shrine in time.

Minority: a flawed axiom that dictates our lives

Do we realize that we didn't think of India's Muslims as a minority in the Mughal period or earlier, during the Delhi Sultanate era, even though Muslims were always numerically fewer than non-Muslims in the subcontinent? One reason for this anomaly in our perception, at least partly, stems from the fact that 'minorities' is a relatively new concept and it relates to a social group's proximity to empowerment-political and economic empowerment- or the absence of it. It has little to do with numbers.

Thus, Hindus in Kashmir, or Muslims and Christians in the rest of India are the more familiar, cliched minorities, but what about the dispossessed Muslims in Kashmir or the socially marginalized Hindus across India? The nuance is too fine, bordering on the subtle, for any ham-fisted analyst to divine.

But it remains the living reality nevertheless. Maulana Maududi, the late Amir of the Jamaat-i-Islami, had inadvertently accepted something he would not want to admit when he told the Munir Commission, which was considering the issue of Ahmadis in Pakistan, that he would not mind if India's Muslims were treated as 'mlecchas' and 'shudras'.

The maulana's argument was surgical. Since non-Muslims would live in the Islamic state of Pakistan as 'zimmis' or second-class citizens, it logically followed that Muslims in a non-Islamic state, namely India, should also be made to suffer for the indiscretion of living in the wrong place.

The treatment of Indian Muslims prescribed by Maulana Maududi tallies with the recipe offered by Guru Golwalkar of the quasi fascist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, when the latter declared in 1939 that Muslims should not be given even citizen's rights in India.

And the reality of India today would really not disappoint either of the two worthies. Yes, there have been a few small but crucial changes. The ' mlecchas' and the 'shudras' of yore have found a means of social mobility, partly through legally backed affirmative action and also through a political re-positioning of their leaders like Ms Mayawati.

In contrast, the Indian Muslims, with their increased reliance on medressah education and with a growing role of the mullahs foisted on them as leaders, with the patronage and connivance of the state, have seen a continuous slide in their lot. The result is an apolitical stance, a completely de-ideologized drift.

This suits the state. Neither the Muslims nor the Dalits really have any defined opinion on issues like economic reforms, privatization, or on the increasingly pro-market annual budget.

There are two possible reasons for this listlessness on key national issues. The first is that the shrinking job market is not affecting them because they didn't have any jobs to begin with. This is as true of the Dalits, as it is of the tribes-people or Adivasis, and of course the Muslims.

Very much like the bulk of India, which works on a kind of economic and financial autopilot, the Dalits, the Adivasis and the Muslims belong to the numerically overwhelming lot who eke out a living one way or the other, with self-employment, odd- jobbing in the so-called unorganized sector, but with no involvement of the state.

For example, at the height of Dr Manmohan Singh's economic reforms in the early 1990s, I visited a village in Bihar where I met members of a caste called Musahar. These people live by catching mice in the farming fields, which make their staple diet.

They were unaware of Dr Singh's budget of the previous day. When someone explained that a budget was an instrument that uses taxes to affect the prices of cigarettes and bidis, one of them remarked: "So far there has been no tax on the mice we catch. Thank the Lord for that." Similarly large chunks of India were out of Dr Singh's loop. Today the finance ministers have changed, little else has.

Likewise, travelling earlier this month to Amethi, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi's parliamentary constituency, and neighbouring Rae Bareilly, Mrs Indira Gandhi's former pocket borough, I came across countless similar incongruities that would appal the uninitiated.

In my ancestral village of Mustafabad, on the outskirts of Rae Bareilly, lives Chandrakali, a pleasant woman approaching 60, of the Mehtar caste, people who carry refuse from your homes.

Though legally abolished the practice of scavenging persists even in Ms Mayawati's Uttar Pradesh. Ms Chandrakali visits nearly all the Muslim households in the village, cleaning and carrying their rubbish. Seemingly liberal Muslim family members would humour Chandrakali, inquire after her daughter who is a member of the village panchayat thanks to caste reservations.

But they would not let her touch their pitchers of water or cooking utensils. She would be given food from outside the verandah, not allowed to step inside.

Muslims practising untouchability, something they regard as a Hindu sickness, reminds me of what I witnessed in Pakistan. I met several Hindu families in Karachi, all living in squalor, and fear - fear that their women were unsafe, that they were easy prey to predators with social clout. The Christians of Yuhanabad, a veritable ghetto near Lahore, voiced similar sentiments.

In India today there is an essential difference in the situation of the minorities from what exists in Pakistan or Bangladesh. For example, the Dalits in Mustafabad have retaliated to their institutionalized humiliation by the village Muslims by surrounding the ancestral cemetery of the Muslims with their own ramshackle dwellings.

The Dalits today flex their muscles with the upper caste Hindus even more stridently. "Tilak, Tarazoo Aur Talwar, Inko Maro Jootey Chaar," goes Ms Mayawati's slogan.

Give a shoe beating to the Tilak, the vermilion mark on the forehead symbol of Brahmins, the Tarazoo, the weighing scales of the Baniya trader, and the Talwar, the sword of the Rajput, the warrior caste. This is the Dalit's battle cry.

In Amethi, I met women of different castes, Rajput, Dalit and Muslims huddled together in a room at a school run by Sonia Gandhi, where they would come from long distances to get lessons in various job-giving skills, like embroidery, stitching, bamboo work, earthworm breeding.

But only a lowly Paasi woman would do the bamboo work, no matter how ornate and beautiful the result. For Rajput women to sit together with Dalit women in a classroom was a sign of improvement in the hidebound caste system.

But it was equally evident that they were all dispossessed women. They were all redefining the term "minority" since they all felt they were the real minority.

* * * * *

Indian cricket team, please pay attention. Shattered by India's loss to Pakistan in the second one-dayer, a 40-year-old cricket fan in Chhatisgarh reportedly hanged himself to death.

Dhaniram, from a town near Raipur in Chhatisgarh, hanged himself in the woods near his house on Tuesday night, hours after India suffered a 12-run defeat in Rawalpindi. Police recovered a note from the suicide spot in which Dhaniram accused the Indian players of lacking commitment.

Book by Altaf launched

KARACHI: A book containing articles by Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain was launched at the Arts Council of Pakistan on Monday. Titled Pakistan ki azadi key pachas sal: kya khoya, kya paya (Fifty years of Pakistan's freedom: failures and achievements), the compilation contains the articles written in the 1990s.

Mr Hussain observed that the articles "tell the people their real history." In a telephone address, he told the audience at the Arts Council that history had been distorted by vested interests.

Sindh governor Dr Ishratul Ibad said that the Urdu-speaking community had played an important role in the freedom movement and the creation of Pakistan. He said a just social order was needed for the development of society and the country.

Literary critic Dr Farman Fatehpuri heaped praises on Mr Hussain's articles, and said they were "thought-provoking, stimulating and logical." "These articles have been written in excellent prose. They are not common newspaper columns; they are literary pieces of great merit," he observed.

Mr Hussain's book, which was called "an invaluable record of history" by speakers, contains introductory notes by Dr Farman Fatehpuri, Karachi University vice-chancellor Dr Pirzada Qasim and poet Mohsin Bhopali.

Those who also spoke included newspaper columnist Jamiluddin Aali, journalist Mahmood Sham and Dr Pirzada Qasim Raza. Mohammad Ali Shaikh, Khushbakht Shujaat and Aamir Liaquat Hussain compered the well-attended function and offered comments on the book.