Educational decline
THE Federal Public Service Commission has set some kind of record this year. In the competitive examination it held in August for recruitment to BPS-17 posts, only 7.5 per cent of the candidates have cleared the written test. Not that in earlier examinations the results were spectacularly better. In the 2004 exams 8.3 per cent of the candidates had passed. This is quite shocking as well as a cause for serious concern. The poor showing of the civil service candidates in their examinations — supposedly testing the cream of society for the most prestigious jobs in the administration — is a sorry reflection on Pakistan’s academic performance. About 15 years ago nearly a third of the candidates managed to pass the written tests. This shows how rapidly the country’s education system is sliding into a state of decay. It is depressing to ponder the implications of this deterioration. The civil servants who will be selected after psychological tests and the viva voce from this limited pool — the choice is restricted to only 276 this year — will not necessarily be the best. With the administration in the hands of people who are academically poor and professionally inept, one can well imagine the state of the country in the years to come.
The government should take serious note of this. In fact, the Federal Public Service Commission should be asked to submit a report on the academic standards of the candidates who appear for its competitive examinations. This should help the civil services academy in Lahore, which trains our administrators and diplomats-to-be, to streamline its courses accordingly. Copies of this report should also be sent to Dr Ataur Rahman, head of the Higher Education Commission, and all the education ministers, both federal and provincial. It is time our education decision-makers were shaken out of their apathy. It is a pity that the government has failed to realize what its failed education policy is doing to the country. By shifting to the private sector the onus of imparting good and proficient education, the authorities have ensured that only a handful of youth who come from privileged and affluent families will actually emerge as highly educated. They don’t seem to be interested in government jobs. The impression one gets is that the civil services are no longer as coveted as they used to be at one time. This time 5,920 had filed their exam forms but only 3,678 actually appeared. Twenty years ago it was normal for over 5,000 to sit for these examinations.
No country can progress if the bulk of its population remains ill-educated with no knowledge and understanding of important issues that determine the fate of a nation. The productivity of a people, their social cohesion and political awareness depend on their level of education and their capacity to understand and assess the pros and cons of issues. Besides, the falling standards of education create a vicious cycle. With the administrators, educators and policymakers being the products of this system, they can hardly be expected to improve the prospects for the next generation. As for the products of private universities, they prefer to keep away from the public sector institutions which cater mainly to the needs of the common people. The elites know how to fend for themselves. This dichotomy must end. Good quality education is the right of every Pakistani child, be he rich or poor.
The spirit of service
LET there be no misgivings about people’s spirit of sympathy and help as witnessed in the earthquake scenario. While the National Volunteers’ Movement was launched one month after the tragedy, the fact that Its second batch of volunteer students left for quake-hit areas on Monday from Lahore shows that the spirit to aid people in distress has not lessened. Time will tell how effective the NVM proves to be but details of their progress should be made known for it may encourage those otherwise reluctant to join a government-sponsored body. This is particularly necessary given that people have little faith in the government and would prefer to work with NGOs whom they trust — as was witnessed when scores of them turned up at disaster areas to help and relieve distress. Any relief effort needs a well organized mechanism in place to harness people’s energy and efforts to the maximum advantage. But as one waits to hear of the NVM’s progress, the moment is ripe for people at large to do some serious introspection about how to infuse in the youth a desire to participate in community service. Let us also say to those who cannot go to quake-hit areas that they can still assist the needy in their own hometowns.
Volunteers should not be seen as a group to use only in times of human disaster. Organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides which inculcate a spirit of aiding those in need have become virtually obsolete and need to be revived herewith for they have much to contribute in community services. There are some schools which make it compulsory for their students to visit and work with special children in various homes, thus giving them a sense of responsibility and desire to help others. Mr Edhi bemoans the fact that he has little success in recruiting people to volunteer their time to his organization. There are many obstacles to reviving the concept of doing community service but they are not insurmountable for all it requires is ingenuity and a will to see the plan through.
Karachi’s traffic mess
THE traffic mess in Karachi has gone past the breaking point, as the events of Sunday night in a congested city neighbourhood show. After two accidents involving a rashly driven truck and an inter-city bus killed a motorcyclist and a pedestrian in the area, residents took to the streets to vent their anger. A law and order situation developed and four trucks, including three that were not linked to any accident, were burnt down by an enraged mob. This isn’t the first time that angry passersby or pedestrians have taken the law in their own hands and tried to punish errant drivers. While such acts cannot be condoned, it has to be realized that they would not be happening so frequently if the traffic police were doing the job assigned to them.
Given that over two-thirds of all fatal traffic accidents in Karachi involve heavy vehicles (they constitute only five per cent of the total number of vehicles), it should have been obvious to the traffic police that the focus should be on the close monitoring of the movement of heavy vehicles and to ensure that their drivers abide by traffic laws. For example, prohibitions have been announced several times barring heavy vehicles such as trucks, trailers and dumpers from major roads during peak hours but they were never enforced. What then is the general public to think, but that the traffic police have been paid to look the other way? Then there is the very important issue of licensing. It is common knowledge that drivers of heavy vehicles have licences issued from other parts of the country. In any case, a licence can be obtained in Karachi too without having to take any test if the right price is paid. Apart from progress on these issues, the traffic police need to improve their conduct so that the public trust them to impartially enforce traffic laws.
Forward, but in which direction?
In the dock was an Israeli army officer identified only as “Captain R”. As the verdict was read out, he reportedly turned in tears to the public benches and said, “I told you I was innocent.”
He evidently was, in the eyes of the court. And what had he done? Oh, nothing much. A year or so ago, he had shot a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl in the head. Then, as she lay dead, he emptied his magazine into her body. That’s routine procedure, apparently. It’s called “confirming a kill”. The girl, Iman al-Hams, had strayed close to an Israeli army post near Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp. A soldier in a watchtower had accurately described her as “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. Her schoolbag had already been riddled with bullets, and it did not explode.
Knowing all this, Captain R had nonetheless deemed it appropriate to use the power at his disposal to cut short an innocent life. Just because he could, apparently. And just because Iman happened to be Palestinian. He had subsequently told his troops that he would have acted in the same way even if the girl had been three years old.
An initial military investigation concluded that the captain had “not acted unethically” — which proved too much for some of the soldiers under his command, who began telling the truth to the media. That’s when the captain was charged. Not with murder, mind you, but with minor offences such as illegal use of his weapon and conduct unbecoming an officer. The court’s message to the Israeli army is fairly unambiguous: in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are fair game.
Let’s not forget which country we are talking about here: this mortifying abuse of human rights occurred not in some obscure Arab backwater ruled by an unenlightened hereditary despot, but in what is frequently held up as an exemplar, the only democracy in the Middle East.
As of last week, a new element of unpredictability has been introduced into that democracy, with the prime minister breaking away from the party he founded 32 years ago and launching a new (Zionist?) entity by the name of Kadima. That translates as Forward, which comes across as a positive sounding name. But, in fact, that depends entirely on the road that is taken. And that is a bit of a problem as far as Ariel Sharon’s intentions are concerned: no one is quite sure of the direction in which he intends to take Israel.
His exit from Likud was foreshadowed at the time of the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, because some factions within the party were bitterly opposed to the removal of Jewish settlements from the territory. Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu resigned from Sharon’s cabinet over the issue and sought to challenge him for the party leadership, but was temporarily thwarted. He is now seen as the man most likely to be elected party leader, but that may not take Netanyahu anywhere close to the power he craves if, as some predict, Likud is reduced to a rump at the next elections, likely to take place towards the end of March 2006.
The Labour Party, too, has a new leader: trade unionist Amir Peretz, who defeated Shimon Peres in a recent ballot. It is speculated that Peres might join Kadima; Sharon has already won over 14 sitting Likud MPs and one Labour minister. His dramatic move was precipitated by Peretz’s announcement that he was pulling Labour out of the ruling coalition, depriving the Sharon government of its parliamentary majority.
Even the short-term consequences of this ongoing political realignment are unclear as far as the moribund peace process is concerned. The Moroccan-born Peretz says he is keen on an agreement with the Palestinians, but it appears his focus will be on social reforms in Israel — which in turn suggests he may not be particularly popular in Washington. His vote-winning abilities are also untested. Sharon, on the other hand, says he’s glad the Oslo process is dead, but that he is prepared to follow the roadmap. Which cannot possibly be true, because he has been instrumental in violating its injunctions against the expansion and consolidation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Land for peace, says Sharon, has ceased to be a goal. Security for independence is now the only game in town. He has not spelt out what this means, but it appears to imply only a partial withdrawal from the West Bank, with the Palestinians being offered a take-it-or-leave-it option of trying to establish a state on incontiguous scraps of territory. In such circumstances, “independence” can only be a cruel joke.
And that, incidentally, is the best-case scenario — unless Peretz comes to the conclusion that the only honourable way out for Israel is to accept the UN’s resolutions on Palestine, and manages to win majority support among his compatriots. But that is about as likely as an American pullout from Iraq by Christmas.
Should Sharon succeed in forming a government after the elections in March, it is rumoured that he will promptly seek final-status negotiations. The resumption of talks would, on the face of it, be a positive development, but if he lives up to his reputation as the Bulldozer, the dire consequences will bring Israel neither peace nor security.
Last week the Israeli government branded the British Foreign Office “unrelentingly pro-Palestinian” following the leak of a confidential document, prepared for an EU foreign ministers’ conclave, which accused Israel of seeking to annex Arab east Jerusalem. But that is hardly a secret. Far more telling is the fact that an ostensibly independent western government feels so intimidated by Israel and the leverage it enjoys in Washington that it feels obliged to ensure that even obvious truths such as this can only be whispered behind closed doors.
More surprising still was the decision by the BBC’s governors to uphold a complaint of bias against a reporter called Barbara Plett. Her indiscretion? Describing Yasser Arafat’s penultimate journey last year in an edition of ‘From Your Own Correspondent’ — a radio segment in which reporters offer a relatively personal, and therefore necessarily subjective, observations — she had the audacity to confess that “when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry ... without warning”.
One can only wonder whether a similar reaction to the demise of, say, Yitzhak Rabin or Ronald Reagan would have elicited a comparable reprimand.
By far a more interesting leak, meanwhile, was of a top secret British memo purportedly relating to a conversation in April 2004 between George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in which the latter apparently talked the US president out of attacking Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. The White House has sought to laugh off the controversy generated by this disclosure, with spin doctors telling reporters off the record that George W was only joking (which kind of confirms the memo’s veracity). One of the reasons no one at Al Jazeera is laughing is because they remember that the network’s offices in Kabul as well as Baghdad were bombed by American forces.
The British government has issued no denials, but has threatened serious action under the Official Secrets Act against any newspaper that reproduces the memo. Which reinforces the authenticity of the document. At the weekend The Observer quoted sources who had seen the memo as saying that Bush was clearly serious.
In a fairer and less unipolar world, Blair would have been able to claim credit for thwarting a monumental atrocity. But as things stand, he feels obliged to shield the self-ordained saviour of western civilization from accusations of monumental stupidity.
Even puppets can have more of a spine, as the first interim prime minister of occupied Iraq, Iyad Allawi, proved by complaining in an interview with The Observer that the human rights situation in his country is at least as bad as it was under Saddam Hussein. Allawi, who worked as a thug for Saddam before fulfilling the same role in the service of the CIA, is believed to be placating the Sunnis ahead of next month’s elections, but his indictment of the prevailing anarchy is nonetheless an embarrassment for his erstwhile sponsors.
Predictably, his charges were dismissed by another puppet, Jalal Talabani. Of far greater interest were the comments of Abdul Aziz Hakim, who told The Washington Post last week that the Americans were guilty of not giving Iraqi government forces enough weapons and sufficient leeway to decisively tackle “the terrorists”. He made it sound much like a plea for an all-out civil war. Hakim is the leader of the largest party in Iraq’s parliament. It’s called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — and if that nomenclature has a familiar ring, it’s only because the organization was born and nurtured in neighbouring Iran.
Much like Israel and the Palestinians, the direction in which Iraq is headed remains indeterminate. If going forward entails fulfilling most of Hakim’s wishes, the Americans may soon find themselves sorely regretting the fact that they’ve burned so many of their bridges.