New bearings of SCO

BEFORE turning to Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as promised last week, I need to clarify a point. Mr Zia Rizvi, a consulting engineer in far-off Toronto read the online version of my article Politics of pipelines (Dawn, November 14) and provided corrective comments on a matter of detail about the great pipeline connecting Kazakhstan to China. He wrote in his email that the Tengiz oil field was the sixth largest field in the world and that the pipeline in question crosses Kazakh-China border at Druzhba and terminates at Urumqi where China is building a refinery.

If China’s growing influence in Central Asia is perceived by some analysts as a potential threat to US interests, many others point out that its peaceful intent comes from a policy deliberately differentiated from and opposed to the methods used by the predatory powers that China itself had to contend with in the 19th and 20th centuries. The origins of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) are to be found in China’s deft diplomacy to settle the issues regarding its long borders peacefully and equitably with all its neighbours. India, by now, is the only exception to the success of this drive.

There was much concern in the newly-independent Central Asian states bordering on China about negotiating with it in a situation of great disparity but the process was relatively short and smooth. There was a dramatic reduction in military tensions generated during an earlier phase of the Sino-Soviet confrontation. Amongst the early agreements were the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions and the Treaty on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions. This aspect was the focal point of a period of confidence building that gave substance to the phrase ‘the Shanghai spirit’ after the first meeting of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in that city.

It is this spirit that sustained a remarkable stage-by-stage evolution in which improvement in bilateral relations and regionalization reinforced each other. Each stage represented a mini-transformation as the common agenda expanded from elementary confidence building measures to economic cooperation and eventually to a comprehensive architecture including collective security. A close study of the processes and mechanisms by which the original Shanghai Five progressed to a dynamic SCO sheds much light, by way of contrast, on why regionalism does not flourish in South Asia.

It was not that the formation of SCO was without initial ambivalence especially in Sino-Russian relations. Each of the two towering pillars of this construction aspired to be its dominant feature. Russia, in particular, had worked tirelessly on its project of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Even as it developed strong ties with China, it harboured a certain distrust of China, the echoes of which one heard from Tashkent to Vladivostok. Visiting this historic eastern harbour, one was told of a flood tide of illegal Chinese immigrants in terms reminiscent of anti-immigrant and racist political parties in France. Uzbekistan did not join the Shanghai project till 2001.

Before identifying the common good that would accrue from simultaneous membership of CIS and SCO, there was recognition of shared perils. The unravelling of the Soviet Union, an empire despite Lenin, brought to surface tensions buried under an authoritarian, one-party structure. Though given specific ethnic names, Central Asian states were far from being homogeneous. The native Kazakhs added up to no more than 40 per cent of the population of Kazakhstan. The country had the largest number of Russian settlers, especially in the urban areas, in the entire region. Tajikistan had 59 per cent Tajiks, 23 per cent Uzbeks and 10 per cent Russians. Uzbekistan has 70 per cent Uzbeks and a sizable Tajik minority. It cannot forget that 2.5 million Uzbeks live in the other Central Asian states.

The withdrawal of Soviet authority revived ethnic allegiances. Even more demanding for the new leadership, which was basically the local communist hierarchy dressed up as the new nationalists, was the need for managing an Islamic revival after 70 years of religious suppression. I have exchanged views at some length with leaders of Islamic movements of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (except Hizbul Tahrir which did not have much presence in my time) and found them more moderate than our own mainstream religious parties. But the ruling elite considered them as Islamic radicals. China had legitimate fears of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement destabilizing Xinjiang.

Russia and the Central Asian states also had to contend with drug trafficking, smuggling, illegal migration and organized crime mafias willing to sell anything from small arms to nuclear materials. The Shanghai states did not take long to create a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) and also adopted the ‘Shanghai Convention on Terrorism’.

The western nations did not look unfavourably at this stage of growing coordination; it was readily conceded that the Shanghai process was not directed against any other power or grouping. The next milestone is the summit of 2001 which announced the transformation of the Shanghai Five into the SCO, with Uzbekistan as the latest member. Formally launched the following year, the SCO has an area of more than 30 million square kilometres and a population of 1.45 billion. China was certainly the engine that drove the next phase of economic cooperation.

Economic cooperation was the main theme of the 2003 SCO summit. Russia which had the advantage of a headstart in this field has had to compete with China, which seems to have adequate resources to inject into the regional economic activity. Since both the states have a special focus on the energy sector, the sense of alarm in the West discussed in the article (last Monday) has increased exponentially.

Meanwhile, the SCO states have their own heightened security concerns. The American military presence in Central Asia was accepted as the price for toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But there was a wave of apprehension as Georgia in December 2003, Ukraine in December 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in April 2005 underwent regime changes in the so-called “colour revolutions”.

The crackdown by the government of Uzbekistan in Andijan in May 2005 illustrated the nervousness about internal stability. The head of Russia’s prestigious Council for Foreign and Defence Policies, Sergei Karaganov, was reported to have made the following comment: “Washington wants to expand democracy, which it sees as a panacea for all social and geopolitical evils. But it is clear to us that any rapid democratization of (Central Asian) states will lead to chaos.”

On their part, China and Russia are not unmindful of long-term ramifications of the growing number of American bases in the macro region of which the SCO states are a part. The broad sweep of the US 2002 national security strategy, the subsequent democracy doctrines and the physical presence of US troops in Afghanistan, which has Bagram and Shindand air bases to offer, played an important role in putting an accent on the SCO’s security orientation.

By no means a military alliance that could be compared with Nato as yet, the SCO did undergo a subtle change in its mission statement as a result of the Tashkent declaration issued after the summit in 2004 and, more explicitly, after the latest summit of the summer of 2005. The Tashkent declaration noted the “completion of institutional establishment period” of the SCO and projected a fresh resolve and capacity to engage collectively with a wide range of political and economic issues.

The summit declared that the threat of terrorism or “regional conflicts and crises” can and should be found on bases of multilateral cooperativeness without division of states into various categories, and with adherence to international law. Only such an approach, the six heads of state asserted, will provide international stability in conditions of globalization. The 2005 summit held at Astana (Kazakhstan) went beyond stating the case of multilateralism and multi-polarity. The Astana declaration contained the following: “Considering the completion of the active military stage of anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan, the member-states of the SCO consider it necessary, that respective members of anti-terrorist coalition set a final timeline for their temporary use the above-mentioned objects of infrastructure and stay of their military contingents on the territories of the SCO member states.”

Uzbekistan has already asked for the US military base on its soil to be vacated. Vigorous diplomacy by Washington prevented Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan from repeating this snub but in both cases, the American military presence is balanced by augmented Russian military contingents. On November 4, a protocol establishing a “contact group” between SCO and Afghanistan was signed in Beijing. The Tashkent declaration had made a specific reference to observer status for other states and international associations. The Astana summit had Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia as observers. Pakistan’s desire to join the SCO as a full member was widely noted.

The media dramatization of the SCO’s Astana summit sending a signal to create a rival eastern Nato should not be taken literally. But it certainly embodies the will of a large part of the world and its population to resist unipolarity, especially in post-2001. The SCO’s basic strategy will continue to be the consolidation by 2020 of a common space for a mutually beneficial exploitation of natural resources, and a much freer movement of capital, technology, goods and services. Led by the United States, the West can profitably work within the paradigm of cooperation and competition. Washington needs to recognize the perils of exaggerated unilateralism that it has pursued in recent years.

For Russia, the SCO offers an effective hedge against its further decline. For countries like Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, China’s undisputed influence in this organization provides an opportunity for greater equilibrium in their international relations. It is not easy to be definitive about the limits of India’s new-fangled strategic partnership with the United States and how it would play out in Central Asia. But the growing strength of the SCO may discipline its own imperial instinct and convert it to a more inclusive and equitable view of multilateralism. Isolating Islamabad may not continue to be a game worth playing. Pakistan will stand to gain if such a happy trend takes roots in New Delhi’s strategic thinking.

The writer is a former foreign secretary. Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

Compassion fatigue

THE latest buzzword in the aid industry — compassion fatigue — refers to the psychological exhaustion said to be induced by endless appeals for money and sympathy. If charity begins at home, then compassion fatigue begins when it comes to places far away.

In an interview this week, the head of the UN development programme offered it as the explanation for the pathetic response to the humanitarian crisis following the earthquake in Pakistan and Kashmir. So debilitating has the new ailment become that this week the Department for International Development launched a campaign aimed at tackling compassion fatigue by showing that small changes can make a big difference.

It is as though we have all been signed up to run the marathon for charity but find ourselves out of puff before we even reach the halfway mark. But it is not necessarily our fault. In her seminal 1999 book, Compassion Fatigue, the American academic Susan Moeller laid the blame for the condition at a very different door. “Why,” she wondered, “despite the haunting nature of many of these images, do we seem to care less and less about the world around us?”

Moeller’s answer was that it was the fickle glare of the media, rather than our innate selfishness, was to blame for our dwindling reserves of kindness. At least when it comes to international disasters, she argued, our compassion tends to be selective and framed by both fashion and the prevailing political and economic interests. Only after the Gulf war, for example, did the massacre of the Kurds at Halabja become headline news, because only then could it be squeezed into the prevailing categories of good versus bad.

Formulaic media coverage, she argued, encourages us to be spectators at a pantomime of powerlessness. Images of starving children stare back at us and implore us to do something, emotions win out over analysis and within days the whole humanitarian circus has moved on and pitched up somewhere else. What starts with the noble aim of engaging our attention ends up numbing our senses and rendering us indifferent. If our consciences are full up, argued Moeller, it is only because of the mawkish pretend-compassion in which the media package bad news.

Perhaps we are suffering from an orgy of conspicuous caring rather than an overload of charitable requests. Big businesses, wealthy individuals and celebrities now compete with one another to show that they care. We can even outsource our consciences to corporations — buying Tesco vouchers for our local school, for instance. The business of giving is powdered with schmaltz and glamour and dressed up as entertainment. Maybe those homeless Pakistanis did not exhibit enough gut-wrenching decrepitude, or enough pizzazz.—Dawn/Guardian Service

Careful with Syria

IN the United Nations’ looming confrontation with Syria, it’s hard to define the best strategy but easy to identify the worst one: the imposition of general economic sanctions that would hurt the Syrian people while allowing the ruling elite to grow even richer.

That’s my strongest impression from a visit to Damascus. Broad-brush sanctions would disrupt Syria’s contact with the West at the very time it’s most needed and would alienate ordinary Syrians who need reassurance. They would undermine a process of political and economic change here that, if it continues, will gradually create a new Syria. “If you want to save the Syrian regime, then use economic sanctions as in Iraq,” a European diplomat told me. A Syrian intellectual confided that in his view, “The regime is dying for sanctions.”

You can feel the tension building here after President Bashar Assad’s defiant speech last week about the UN investigation of Syria’s alleged role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The Syrian leader said he would cooperate with the UN probe led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, but his tone was so strident that several Syrians said he was almost daring the United Nations to impose sanctions.

Until Assad’s speech, there had been hope that he would break with an inner clique, including his brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, whom Mehlis suspects was involved in Hariri’s killing. French diplomats here spoke of a “Juan Carlos option” — in which Assad would assume a benign role as head of state, in the model of the Spanish king, while a new government reformed Syrian political and economic life. Those hopes were never very realistic. Assad is in effect the chief executive of a family business, and he’s hardly likely to throw his relatives overboard.

It’s hard to find a Syrian who doesn’t want Assad to remain at least as a figurehead. He’s a symbol of stability for a country nervously watching the carnage in Iraq. Sami Moubayed, a Syrian analyst, is probably right when he tells me that “the president would win in a landslide if there was an election.” But I doubt that Syrians will permanently ransom their political futures to an Assad clan that doesn’t deliver economic and social change.

I talked with one of Assad’s friends, Col. Manaf Talas, a senior officer in the Republican Guard and son of the former defence minister. He agrees that Syria wants reform but insists: “You need time. You need years. There’s a generation you have to push forward.” He argues that Assad is still the reformers’ best bet, but many Syrians have given up on Assad as a change agent.

Syria is a country in ferment. People talk politics here with a passion I haven’t heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They’re writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s. Internet cafes are scattered through Damascus, allowing people to constantly share news and gossip. The security forces have been arresting dissidents, but that doesn’t stop people from talking. Indeed, the only thing that could really put a lid on this society would be the strangulating effect of sanctions.

You never quite know what’s behind someone’s front door in Syria. That’s part of the mystery of this country. Take the tiny eight-room hotel where I stayed in the Old City. There’s not even a name on the door to mark the entrance to the Beit al Mamlouka, as the hotel is called. But inside is a 16th-century Oriental jewel box — frescoed-ceiling rooms gathered around a courtyard of marble fountains, fishponds and flowering trees. And the place has wireless Internet service, to boot.

The right policy for this ripening nation is one of engagement — not of the regime but of the Syrian people. The United States should send its ambassador back to Damascus, despite the government-organized demonstrations taking place almost every day near the US Embassy. America and France should broaden their outreach to Syrian dissidents, human rights groups, artists, professors — indeed, almost anyone who’s willing to talk with outsiders.—Dawn/Washington Post Service

Helping victims of violence

By Anwer Mooraj IN the days when Ayub Khan ruled the roost, and the 22 families set up their baronetcies, draconian press laws were introduced to keep at bay journalists who had not yet recovered from the long hangover of the Tamizuddin Khan years.

A censorship was imposed which, while it prohibited criticism of the president, also inhibited journalists from commenting too freely on contentious local issues like too much power being vested in one person, and the customs and conventions which were prejudicial to women.

And so some writers, who all their lives had been specializing on political themes, overnight became experts on art, music, theatre, cinema and the kind of flora and fauna that one comes across at the base camp of Mount Godwin Austin.

Those who did not have the gift of versatility, and couldn’t adapt, tried a little subterfuge. They decided to go international. In order to save themselves from going completely insane, they vented their spleen on governments that practised insensitive and corrupt administrations thousands of miles away from home.

The hawks in the ministry of information knew what the lads were up to. But it was a little difficult to haul up a chap and give him the water torture when he hadn’t said a word against the field marshal or the corps commanders and spent his time spewing out venom against Nigeria or Sierra Leone or the Boers who practised apartheid. Africa has always been a fertile ground for this sort of thing. It has an appalling record of dictators and human rights violations, and their despots often come in for much of the flak. It was the Pakistani political writer’s way of expressing disapproval of dictatorship and repression in any form. He just used the third party approach.

Protest against repression was also expressed in another medium, and cinema buffs heralded with a touch of serendipity Jamil Dehlavi’s first film, a black-and-white quickie entitled The Towers of Silence which, this writer believes, is still the maverick director’s most creative work. In between the cinematic tricks, the erratic flashbacks and the brilliant close-ups the message about religious intolerance was loud and clear. The work did come to the notice of a member of the inquisition in Islamabad. Fortunately, he found the strip of celluloid a little too high brow for his taste.

Something similar was attempted by the Polish director Andrej Wajda, in his Man of Marble. This was a truly remarkable film in which Wajda expressed the feelings of the Polish people who wanted to be liberated from the influence the Soviets exercised on the local communist mandarins. The Polish censors knew something was afoot. But as the winds of change had started to blow across the Vistula, they chose to ignore the message.

Dehlavi’s second film, The blood of Hussain, in which a white stallion rises like a phoenix out of the dust and debris of a demoralized and defeated people, was not too popular with the authorities in Islamabad. It was seen as a rather crude attack on martial law, which of course, it was, and was not heard of until it was shown in a private screening many years later.

Regrettably, this innovative filmmaker never produced a documentary on the millions of Pakistani women whose lives are circumscribed by traditions that often enforce extreme seclusion and total submission to men. Or on the hordes of women who have been tortured, brutalized, battered and beaten, and that too, in a country that calls itself an Islamic republic.

In these days of ‘controlled democracy,’ with a military oligarchy calling the shots, one would have expected a horrendous amount of censorship. But the press has, paradoxically, enjoyed considerable freedom. Many writers who had strayed from the field of politics, gleefully returned to the fold, and are once again commenting on the foibles and shenanigans of the people who keep coming up with novel ways to mismanage and misgovern the country.

The only problem is that the people who matter and who are in charge don’t take the slightest notice of what is being written, and carry on doing what they have been doing for the last six years. While those who do take notice, can’t really do very much. And so the repression against women continues unabated and issues which desperately need to be addressed and tackled continue to remain a festering sore.

The continuous attacks against women in this country inspired Amnesty International activists to come up with a report on Honour Killings in Pakistan. It is a detailed account of the attempts that are made on a regular basis by men with homicidal tendencies to snuff out the temporal existence of members of the opposite sex.

The premeditated murders which are committed have, in the overwhelming majority of cases, nothing whatsoever to do with either honour or chivalry. When domestic squabbles and tribal vendettas do not result in death, they frequently leave behind scores of victims — women and children — who are abused, mutilated, burned and scarred for life.

It was the helplessness of these women and the hopelessness of the situation that inspired a few dedicated and selfless volunteers to provide a shelter for the unfortunate victims of violence. That is how the Panah Shelter Home came into existence. Human Rights NGOs forked up around five million rupees and got the place going.

Panah accommodates victims of domestic violence by husbands, in-laws, and parents, escapees from Darul Aman, victims of a forced marriage, sexual abuse, incest or forced prostitution; or just because they happened to have been roaming on the street and had nobody else to turn to.

It has been in operation for four years and some of the statistics that the managing committee has compiled are quite illuminating. During the period 2002 to 2004, 197 women and 116 children were admitted, making a total of 313 inhabitants. There were 25 minors, 125 women between the ages of 18 and 30, 43 who fell into the 31-45 range and four women who were over 45 years of age. Fifty-five of the women were single, 134 were married and eight were divorcees or widows. Sixty-one of the women had brought their children with them.

The composition of the inmates is also interesting. While 92 of the women are illiterate, which is not at all surprising, there are also 25 graduates, five post graduates and a couple of doctors. The majority of women, 107 to be exact, who sought shelter were referred to the committee by NGOs like HRCP, Madadgar, PAWLA, War against Rape, CPLC, the Aurat Foundation, Tehreek-e-Naswan, and SOS Village.

The other 90 women were referred to the committee by relatives or concerned citizens, police stations, lawyers and judges, old residents of Panah, high commissions and consulates. Sometimes even the woman herself.

The shelter has a pretty successful track record and their rehabilitation and resettlement figures are quite remarkable. Fifty-two khula cases have been filed or granted, legal aid has been provided to 40 women, 43 of them have been reconciled with their spouses or parents, 21 have been provided with employment and independent accommodation, and some have been provided with travelling expenses and bail money. The committee even arranged it so that four of the girls could marry men of their own choice.

Panah also increased its sphere of activity by providing both legal and police help to victims of violence and by liaising with shelter homes in other provinces. There are also plans to start gender sensitivity workshops for the police and government officials. The people there know they will be judged by the results they bring in. And these have been quite remarkable.