The real moral lesson
AMIDST the deeply felt sorrow and concern at this month’s earthquake tragedy, strange voices have also been heard seeking to deflect the people’s attention from facing the catastrophe and preparing for the future. It has been suggested that, because of our evil ways, we somehow invited the calamity. Since we lead allegedly licentious lives, divine wrath has been unleashed on us to punish us. One maulvi has threatened a campaign against television in the Frontier, vowing to smash TV sets. An otherwise sober and respected leader of a religious party has said the earthquake hit us because there was dancing and singing on Independence Day. One letter writer suggests in our correspondence columns that calamities have always come in the wake of transgressions of moral rules and principles. Somewhat similar views were expressed here after the Katrina disaster in the US when it was suggested that the Bush administration was being punished for its aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and for its inimical polices towards the Muslim world.
A problem inevitably arises. If Katrina was punishment for Mr George Bush, why did nothing happen to him while hundreds of poor black residents of the slums of New Orleans were killed, displaced and made shelterless? If the October 8 earthquake was meant as retribution for those who dance, why were the lives of thousands in the remote areas of the north who have no time for the frivolities of their urban cousins shattered so cruelly? Why were innocent children buried under collapsed school buildings, killed, maimed and orphaned? Many mosque imams and venerable community leaders must also have lost their lives.
Man has challenged nature in innumerable ways. He has polluted the atmosphere, denuded the forests, misused the earth’s water resources, practised an economic system that creates poverty and thus promotes disease and deprivation. The greenhouse effect is now a depressing reality. Not every catastrophe that occurs can however be blamed on man’s depredations. But certainly these have made this planet of ours seem less hospitable. It is on ensuring how we can be less unjust to nature and our fellow beings that attention should be concentrated —and immediately of course on how we can help the men, women and children left bereft on the cold and desolate reaches of Kashmir and the Frontier.
The elitist power structures now in place almost everywhere have an in-built apathy towards the plight of the economically and socially deprived, who almost invariably suffer the most in natural calamities — earthquakes, cyclones, tornadoes, floods. A certain steel-heartedness has become ingrained in our systems of governance. This misses the element of human suffering involved in the more ferocious of nature’s visitations and also affects our response to such upheavals. The outpouring of sympathy and help after the earthquake has been both generous and moving. But governments and societies have to become more caring, more concerned about those who, even in normal times, are without shelter, water, medical assistance, schooling and acceptable means of sustenance. The devastation caused by natural calamities would be less if people were better housed and communities were better organized. This is the real moral lesson to be learnt from the tragedy that has struck us.
A Saudi NSC
THE establishment of a national security council seems to give another indication of the desire for political reforms in Saudi Arabia. Even though the elective principle is still nowhere to be found in Saudi Arabia, the NSC would seem to share the powers so far reserved exclusively for the monarch. Headed by King Abdullah himself, with Crown Prince Sultan as deputy chairman, the NSC will enjoy wide powers and has a very active secretary-general in the person of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was Riyadh’s ambassador in Washington for 23 years. The NSC’s powers will include the right to declare emergencies and war, take action to protect the kingdom’s political, economic, military and social interests and — more important — the power to investigate security agencies. The last point is significant in the context of King Abdullah’s vow to destroy Al Qaeda and “its work of the devil”. He has also promised to let women drive; women have also been allowed to take part in elections to the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and a cinema is going to be opened in Riyadh after 20 years. However, measures like these are not going to satisfy the growing demand of the middle class for political reforms.
The slump in prices — prior to the current boom — had created massive unemployment and led to increasing demands for popular participation in running the country’s affairs. Those in the forefront of the struggle for reforms are middle class professionals, university professors, intellectuals, journalists and a new class of educated women conscious of their rights. Unfortunately, the princes who rule the kingdom have created no system through which the people could be associated with the affairs of the state. The king has pledged to fight Al Qaeda for “30 years if we have to”, but this job will be a lot easier if the king made the people his ally against terrorism. At the moment, it is a war between Al Qaeda and the aging princes. The king has a difficult task before him: he has to enforce reform without causing any social upheaval.
Reining in the warlords
WHILE the official results of last month’s parliamentary elections in Afghanistan have been postponed, it is clear that the front-runners include a number of warlords who rule large swathes of Afghan territory outside Kabul as their personal fiefdoms. As pointed out by one woman, who recently won a seat in Afghanistan’s national assembly or Wolesi Jirga, these local leaders, who have their own private militias, are responsible for reducing the country to a state of ruin. The 25-year-old woman, Malalai Joya, had raised hackles at a political forum two years ago when she criticized the warlords and said that they should be tried by an international court for their crimes. In reiterating her sentiments the other day and declaring her resolve to disarm the unruly elements, she was echoing the feelings of many who have suffered years of civil war and political destabilization on account of the regional chieftans.
There is much to be done by the government in Kabul and the international peacekeeping forces stationed in Afghanistan to check the power of the warlords who have taken the law into their own hands. They have been criticized for human rights abuses, for corruption and for the narco-trade whose resurgence after the fall of the Taliban has caused international concern. Many of the militia commanders have also proved a bane for returning refugees who find their dwellings and land usurped by armed men, and are consequently made homeless. It is not clear whether President Hamid Karzai will be able to keep these elements in check even when many of them become members of the assembly. But if the goal is peace and the rule of law, no effort should be spared by the government and foreign forces to rein in the warlords, disarm them and make them answerable for their criminal deeds.
Damascus in the dock
The level of Syrian entanglement in Lebanon’s affairs was not in question, but it seemed important not to lose sight of the fact that there were also various other strands in the Byzantine world of Lebanese politics, and it seemed conceivable that one of these may hold the key to the assassination.
Above all, given the amount of pressure Damascus was already under at that time, not least from the US on account of its supposed support for Iraqi insurgents, for Syrian officials to involve themselves in the murder of a prominent foreign politician seemed like an incredibly stupid thing to do: it didn’t, after all, require a particularly astute mind to realize that Syria had nothing to gain — and a great deal to lose — from being implicated in Hariri’s death.
It turns out that we were wrong. The preliminary findings of a United Nations inquiry into the murder, led by a German investigator, Detlev Mehlis, suggest that the murder was part of an elaborate plot hatched by senior Syrian officials in collaboration with the Lebanese security services and figures close to President Emile Lahoud. Although the investigation has been extended until mid-December and Mehlis has been at pains to point out that his report is not conclusive, it is highly unlikely (although not impossible) that the initial findings will turn out to have been entirely spurious.
There was a spot of controversy last week when a few names — including those of President Bashar Al Assad’s brother Maher Al Assad and brother-in-law Asef Shawkat — were removed from the report before it was made public, but Mehlis insists this was done only because the evidence against the figures concerned is uncorroborated, and his team did not wish the presumption of innocence to be compromised.
While the report effectively accuses Syria’s long-time foreign minister Farouq Al Shara of lying to the inquiry, it does not appear to shed any new light on the role, if any, of interior minister Ghazi Kanaan, who purportedly committed suicide earlier this month. The official Syrian line is that Kanaan ended his life because he couldn’t bear the thought of the forthcoming slur against his name and that of his country, but that less than convincing scenario was overshadowed by the suspicion that either he did himself in because his role in the Hariri affair was about to be exposed or Assad’s coterie chose him as a scapegoat with the intention of eventually confessing that there was indeed a Syrian hand, but that Kanaan — who had served for two decades as his government’s chief point man in Lebanon — had acted alone.
Predictably, Damascus has denied all the accusations and insinuations contained in the Mehlis report, but indicated its willingness to cooperate with the inquiry. Equally predictably, the US has pounced upon the findings as possible cause for Security Council action, with George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and John Bolton all feigning ignorance of the sort of measures that might be contemplated.
It is, of course, hardly a secret that regime change in Damascus has long been on the neo-conservative agenda in Washington, not so much because of Syria’s supposedly porous border with Iraq (a problem that could easily be dealt with if US and puppet Iraqi forces were properly in control on the other side) as its nuisance value to Israel.
With the largely artificial crisis over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology simultaneously being cranked up, one could be forgiven for fearing that nothing has been learned from the Iraqi experience and that further conflicts in the Middle East may be initiated in the coming year. That may not be a terribly far-fetched scenario, but it remains unlikely that any more combat fronts will be opened in the near future, if only for logistical reasons.
In both cases, referral to the Security Council could lead to rebukes, threats and, possibly, sanctions — a more likely prospect in Syria’s case than in that of Iran. For, unless incontrovertible evidence emerges of Iranian attempts to manufacture nuclear weapons, Tehran can rely on a Chinese or Russian veto. The same cannot be said for Syria, the ranks of whose friends have sharply dwindled over the years.
Besides, while Iran could, if necessary, at least offer a coherent argument in defence of weaponization, Syria’s involvement in Hariri’s assassination, if conclusively proven, is utterly indefensible. Whatever else one may think of Hariri’s tenure as prime minister, he certainly had every right to hold the opinion that Syria should disentangle itself from Lebanon. It has been reported that the Damascus leadership, including Assad himself, intimidated Hariri on this account.
Furthermore, several Lebanese public figures with anti-Syrian views have met violent deaths in the months since the Valentine’s Day explosion. And, although Syria pulled out is forces in the wake of the popular uproar over the fate of Hariri, it seems substantial sections of the Lebanese military and intelligence hierarchies remain beholden to Damascus. In August, four generals were taken into custody at Mehlis’s instigation.
The so-called “cedar revolution” — essentially a collective manifestation of popular angst following Hariri’s death — appears, meanwhile, to have more or less fizzled out. The broadly anti-Syrian alliance that gained a parliamentary majority in elections earlier this year has been unable to dislodge the pro-Syrian President Lahoud, whose tenure runs until 2007. Lahoud has been indirectly implicated by the UN report, but has thus far been able to count on the support of two disparate power blocs: the Muslim militant organization Hezbollah and the Maronite Christian constituency of controversial former general Michel Aoun.
What lies ahead for Lebanon is unclear, but the findings of the Hariri inquiry could prove to be a watershed of sorts.
That may be even more true for Syria, the workings of whose secretive regime remain an enigma. Bashar Al Assad had no previous political experience when he succeeded his father, Hafez Al Assad, five years ago. The latter had ruled the country for 30 years, morphing from a promising radical nationalist into a repressive autocrat at the helm of Syria’s Ba’ath party. There was little love lost between him and his Iraqi counterpart, Saddam Hussein; Syria not only supported Iran in its drawn-out war with Iraq, it also joined the coalition put together by Bush the Elder for the 1991 Gulf war.
Bashar came to power with the promise of political reform on his lips, but it appears he has been obliged to defer to daddy’s associates, who have restrained any possible impulses towards liberalization. There is no clear-cut evidence that the regime is on the verge of imploding, but it may not be able to survive sanctions combined with a bit of subversion. Unrest could have intriguing consequences, not least in view of the conditions in Iraq. The latter’s disenchanted Sunni minority could be tempted to make common cause with Syria’s Sunni majority, and the arbitrary boundaries delineated nearly a century ago by European diplomats could eventually be redrawn.
A viable restructuring of the Middle East cannot, however, take place for as long as Iraq remains under foreign occupation. This month’s constitutional referendum in that country was somewhat prematurely hailed as a monumental achievement; allegations of discrepancies and possible fraud surfaced shortly thereafter, more or less guaranteeing that it would no longer be feasible to portray a positive result as a triumph. Many experts anyhow view the document as a recipe for trifurcation.
In terms of spin, the strategy was to pump up the self-congratulatory volume during and right after the vote, and thereafter to create a sizable distraction, in the hope that the counting process would not attract too much scrutiny. That distraction was billed as “the trial of the century” — a highly presumptuous appellation, given that the century still has 95 years to go. The main defendant was none other than Saddam, accused of ordering the death of 143 villagers following a 1982 assassination attempt against him.
This particular crime has been chosen to kick off the proceedings because, apparently, it is easier to prove. Other, more heinous, instances of barbarity will come later. One can only wonder whether there will be any point in that if Saddam is sentenced to death on the basis of the first charge. Actually, it’s not much of an if. “Saddam should be executed 20 times,” Jalal Talabani told Al Iraqiya television last month, apparently unworried by the fact that he may thus be sharpening the suspicions of those who feel a fair trial is not possible in an occupied country.
And Talabani is in no great rush as far as ending the occupation is concerned. At a press conference in Washington last week, he promised never to demand a US withdrawal without first seeking Washington’s permission.
There can be little question that Saddam has a lot to answer for when it comes to crimes against the people of Iraq. A demonstrably fair trial would nonetheless be welcome. And in an ideal world, Saddam and his henchmen would be joined in the dock by the leading lights of the Bush and Blair administrations.
Email: mahirali1@gmail.com