Defining demilitarization

IN an effort to comprehend ‘demilitarization and self-governance’ that has during the last two years, become Pakistan’s substitute for the Kashmiri right of self-determination, my last article (Dawn, January 9) was largely devoted to the process by which Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir was progressively denied the autonomy contained in the so-called instrument of accession, the Delhi Agreement and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

As this process compounded the tragedy of Kashmir, any reversion to autonomy, or a variant thereof, must be accompanied by credible guarantees that it would not be encroached upon, and that it would remain the primary dynamic for a final settlement acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir.

My article appreciated President Musharraf’s insistence on a vital linkage between demilitarization and self-governance. Sheikh Abdullah’s account in his autobiography of his arrest in Gulmerg makes it clear that it was a coup d’etat staged by the Indian army. From a Pakistani and Kashmiri perspective, it is, therefore, necessary to fully explore the concept of demilitarization. Like self-governance, it needs to be defined much more sharply than has been done during the last two years.

Meanwhile, Karan Thapar’s extended TV interview with President Musharraf has added to the fog surrounding the overt and covert negotiations on Kashmir. For one thing, what this relentless and well briefed interviewer said about the Indian version of these discussions contrasted sharply with President Musharraf’s sense of them. The Pakistani president did not conceal his disappointment with this divergence, or with the general Indian response to his ideas. Furthermore, the aggressive questioning elicited problematic replies on some key issues including joint control, the status of the Northern Areas and demilitarization.

The Indian foreign office lost little time in asserting that demilitarization and redeployment were matters of New Delhi’s sovereign discretion. Even more baffling was the entirely gratuitous announcement by the spokesperson of the Pakistani foreign office that Pakistan had no plans for unilateral demilitarization. Has this been suggested at all through the visible and not so visible channels in recent years? Dr Shireen Mazari of the Institute of Strategic Studies has tried to deflect attention from the real sources of the disarray of our Kashmir policy by attacking Mr Kasuri as “our somewhat confused foreign minister” who seems eager to please his “Indian constituency”. In view of Khurshid Kasuri’s formidable legal knowledge, this allegation is bizarre. His constituency, also, lies well to the west of the Radcliffe line.

There are two undeniable facts about the Northern Areas that cannot be compromised. Upon the lapse of British suzerainty, Hunza acceded to Pakistan on November 3, 1947, and Nagar on November 19, 1947. The states of Chitral, Swat, Dir and Amb acceded to Pakistan between November 24, 1947, and February 18, 1948. The accession of Hunza and Nagar is no less final and irrevocable than the four frontier states, or for that matter Bahawalpur (October 4, 1948) and Kalat (March 31, 1948).

Secondly, the popular and successful revolution that liberated Gilgit and a large part of Baltistan has sanctity that neither India nor Pakistan can easily deny or dilute. Kargil, with adjoining area to the east, was lost to the Indian army at the time but the rest of the Northern Areas were effectively defended. They have demanded complete integration with Pakistan since 1947. The people of these territories categorically reject any idea of Pakistan sharing control over them with India.

There is a complex history of the ‘militarization’ of J&K of 1947. Mountbatten discussed the question of accession with the maharaja as early as June 1947 and, according to Sheikh Abdullah, offered to bring in the Indian troops to his aid if he opted for India. So when the last viceroy rushed to the Delhi airport in October 1947 to personally supervise the dispatch of the Indian military contingent, he was virtually fulfilling a promise already made.

Earlier, the maharaja had unsuccessfully committed his 13,000 troops to the suppression of the Poonch revolt that was rapidly spreading to other areas. The revolt was a direct consequence of the planned ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Jammu. History would have been different if the Pakistan government had prevented the tribal incursion and if it had ensured compliance of the Quaid’s orders to General Gracey to intervene militarily following the landing of Indian troops in Srinagar. There were enough Pakistani officers to conduct this operation if the threat of the resignation of British officers was carried out. Far from triggering off a general war, such a confrontation between two subcontinental armies would have led to a speedy settlement through negotiations.

The marathon debates at the United Nations are too well known to be recounted here. Suffice it to recall that Pakistan rightly insisted on demilitarization and the creation of a neutral authority in Srinagar to supervise the envisaged plebiscite. Earlier, in November 1947, the Quaid, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had personally proposed to Mountbatten in Lahore that tribal forces and the Indian army leave Jammu and Kashmir simultaneously. At the UN, there was agreement on the appointment of a neutral administrator for the duration of the plebiscite. On demilitarization, an insidious British move reduced the demand for a total withdrawal of Indian forces to just ‘the bulk of the Indian army’.

The crisis caused by this built-in imbalance was summed up succinctly by Sir Owen Dixon. “I ascertained from prime ministers (of India and Pakistan)”, he wrote, “that they considered that with such a plebiscite in view there was no longer any hope of agreement upon demilitarization or upon condition which would follow demilitarization or upon any course that would advance the position towards a settlement.” This assessment led to the Dixon plan for regional plebiscites. This plan was essential reference material for the Kashmir Study Group which in turn, seems to be the source of many of President Musharraf’s spontaneous proposals.

It is obvious that President Musharraf is thinking less of the fighting in 1947-48 and in 1965 than of the tragic conflict that began with the unprecedented Kashmiri uprising in 1989. It has been so costly in human lives that no peaceful solution can be negotiated today without bringing this warlike situation to an end. The Indian machine guns that Sheikh Abdullah saw on emerging out of his Gulmerg residence have claimed 70,000 Kashmiri lives. Whatever differences there be on the genesis of this conflict, differences that would remain irreconcilable, a future settlement must be built around demilitarization.

Four major considerations seem to impinge upon any meaningful discussion of demilitarization as a condition necessary and contingent to self-government. First, India has a legitimate fear since 1947 that its military withdrawal from J&K, especially the Valley, would precipitate total independence by popular revolution. New Delhi has a correct assessment of the alienation of the people from India. The Kashmiri leadership will have to provide an assurance that this is no part of their plans.

Secondly, leaders of all political segments and factions of J&K would have to reach a consensus on what they mean by self-government within or outside the Indian Constitution. The Mirwaiz has recently said that it lies outside it. Half the membership of the State Autonomy Committee I have referred to frequently in these two articles comprised the pundits of J&K who endorsed autonomy within the parameters of the original instrument of accession.

The authors of the report Kashmir dispute at fifty, 1947-97, an independent group sponsored by the Kashmir Study Group, noted that Kashmiri Muslim critics dismissed its work as “eyewash”, “purposeless” or “being done to crush our movement, to divert our struggle.” All this was prior to the advent of General Musharraf on the Pakistani scene. Perhaps it is time for Mirwaiz Farooq and Omar Farooq to deepen their dialogue and assure India with a shared interpretation of “self-governance”.

Third, India’s present international needs warrant that Ladakh is not demilitarized. The situation can change significantly as Sino-Indian rapprochement flowers. Similarly, political and juridical considerations make deployment of Pakistani troops in the Northern Areas a non-negotiable internal matter. While the Kashmir Valley can be completely demilitarized once the three parties to the dispute agree upon the contours of self-governance, India and Pakistan can work out an interim arrangement for stationing limited forces at mutually agreed cantonments in Jammu and Azad Kashmir. Once inter-relationships between Kashmiri states on both sides of the present Line of Control stabilize, New Delhi and Islamabad can proceed to dispense with this interim military presence.

Fourth, a guarantee by the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII, or by the five permanent members that no party shall try to change, by force or the threat of the use of force, the situation resulting from comprehensive negotiations between India and Pakistan, with full participation of the representatives of the Kashmiri people, would greatly contribute to peace and stability in the region.

A welcome new contribution to the discussion of the Kashmir problem is contained in a 68-page report entitled Kashmir — the economics of peace building by Ambassador Teresita Schaffer of the CSIS South Asia Programme, Washington. It is linked to Farook Kathwari’s efforts to formulate new ideas on Kashmir and aims at addressing “the lack of economic content in thinking on Kashmir”. Its value lies in proposing measures that could be undertaken in the absence of major political change and also subsequent “measures that could reinforce a long-term settlement and leave a more prosperous Kashmir integrated with the regional and world economies.”

For me, any steps that enhance the autonomous capability of the people of Kashmir to facilitate a solution of this intractable problem deserve careful consideration. An economic dimension to the ongoing conversations would complete the triangle together with demilitarization and self-governance. I will return to this just-published report after educating myself further. But meanwhile, I will suggest it to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to ask a specialist like Mr Shahid Javed Burki who knows the regional and global economies alike to formulate concrete proposals that his government can use to expand the India-Pakistan dialogue. Insofar as some of these proposals would have a Saarc ambit, they would be all the more useful.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

Neither enlightened, nor moderate

ONE doesn’t hear the phrase ‘enlightened moderation’ as much as one did a couple of years ago except, of course, in a negative sense.

It crops up occasionally when a detractor links the phrase to President Musharraf’s famous quote to the Washington Post about the lengths women in Pakistan go in order to obtain visas and asylum. Or when one is referring to the president’s alleged reluctance to completely rein in the extremists in his country.

But this is not really the issue. What one finds a little curious is that none of the long-haired intellectuals who contribute to the newspapers and make regular appearances on television fail to point out at the time that the expression ‘enlightened moderation’ somehow doesn’t gel. At the risk of being accused of splitting hairs, enlightenment cannot be moderated. Either one is enlightened or one is not.

One can’t help getting the feeling that the bright spark in the president’s camp who drummed up the phrase had probably come across the reference of British historians to ‘enlightened despotism’ and oriental despotism and decided to do a bit of creative surgery. He might have even experimented with reversing the two words and calling the new slogan moderate enlightenment, which is, in fact, precisely what it is. But the phrase just doesn’t sound right.

Once the new ideology was firmly in place, it had to be marketed. The government’s public relations machinery did its bit. Learned tomes were published in the newspapers. And the television viewer was taken on a lazy stroll through the talk shows with a predictably smirky voice-over and comments from media invertebrates who tried to explain what the president really meant by enlightened moderation.

It was felt necessary to let the United States and the rest of the world in on the Neue Weltanschauung and this was accomplished by a highly respected opinion moulder, Jack Rosen. While introducing President Musharraf in a New York hotel on September 17, 2005, he italicized the scourge of terror and quoted from the president’s speech: “The unfortunate reality is that both the perpetrators of these crimes and most of the people who suffer from them are Muslims.” Then he offered a vision of an alternative, which he called ‘enlightened moderation.’ He proposed a new Islamic society based on pluralism, openness, and tolerance, in order to reach what he called “socioeconomic uplift — to drag ourselves out of the pit we find ourselves in, to raise ourselves up by individual achievement and collective socio-economic emancipation.”

Curiously enough, two years after the dramatic announcement, the average citizen in Pakistan is none the wiser. Retrogressive laws which continue to militate against the rights of women are still firmly in place. The rapists who took centre stage in the media trial of the decade have still not been punished. Panchayats and jirgas are still operating with impunity and are making the appropriate noises; and it’s still business as usual in the madressahs.

Rosen put it better than most commentators when he tried to put across President Musharraf’s point of view. But he omitted to mention the fact that Pakistan has an appalling record of heads-of-state who believe that the only rule ideally suited for the citizens of this country is one-man rule by unelected men in battle fatigues who believe that advancement in administrative rectitude can be achieved by destroying the civil service introduced by the British.

Actually, if one thinks of it, the ideals of pluralism, openness and tolerance that President Musharraf talks about are all there in Britain. And one wonders if this tolerance has something to do with the fact that the country has a monarchy which provides a secure background against which political change can take place without destabilizing society. The great value of a hereditary monarchy, a number of loyal supporters believe, is that it reminds them of their history.

In 1918, the saying about the sun never setting on the British empire still rang true. Britannia ruled the waves, and the rule of law was supreme. When the foreign office pointed out that there was a political vacuum in Europe, opportunities were created for some unlikely monarchs. Astonishing as it may sound, C.B. Fry was offered the crown of Albania and Lord Rothermere the throne of Hungary.

In 1945, with political solar eclipses about to take place, Britain was no more in a position to repeat the offers made after the First World War. Not many people probably know this but the monarchy came close to being abolished. Richard Crossman wrote in his diaries that the thing that held back the Labour government from instigating a republic was the realization that on a popular vote Monty would have been Britain’s first president, which has always seemed a pretty good reason for keeping the Windsors.

Despotism is now largely an archaic concept in the social sciences, mostly supplanted by concepts like totalitarianism and authoritarianism. However, like the expressions absolutism and tyranny, despotism is used in political rhetoric to describe governments which exercise arbitrary and apparently total power.

One of the casualties of Enlightened Moderation is the civil servant. But he has also suffered in western democracies. In Britain, the senior civil servant is a figure of fun; the idea that the man in Whitehall might know best is regarded across the political spectrum as an absurd anachronism. In France, economic stagnation is sometimes blamed on the once-mighty mandarin. The implication here is that the country would be better off under US-style MBAs.

But this unofficial system has been breaking down for some time, as the elected executive has overpowered the mandarinate as well as the legislature. In parliamentary democracies like Britain, the separation of the roles of head of government and head of state helped to restrain plebiscitary populism for several generations after universal suffrage was adopted, as did the strict rules and conventions on government behaviour guarded by senior civil servants.

However, by the late 20th century, as many have observed, prime ministers like Thatcher and Blair were behaving like presidents, while US presidents were behaving like kings. The increasingly powerful mass media, instead of acting as constraints on plebiscitary populism, have tended to act as cheerleaders for it.

In both parliamentary and presidential democracies, the chief executive has been elevated from first among equals, in a parliamentary cabinet or a US-style departmental cabinet, to the status of a monarch. The demotion of cabinet ministers and, indeed, the cabinet itself has been accompanied by the aggrandizement of the presidential or prime ministerial court. In Britain senior mandarins who tried to fight this trend, Ian Bancroft under Margaret Thatcher, Robin Butler under Tony Blair were sidelined. So may be ‘moderate enlightenment’ still has a chance in the Islamic republic.

After Sharon, which deluge?

WHEN German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann suffered a fatal heart attack in 1929, part of his legacy was a historical riddle: Was he the one man who might have prevented the collapse of the Weimar Republic and preserved peace in Europe? Or were his efforts to bring about European reconciliation in the 1920s merely a tactical manoeuvre by an unreconstructed German nationalist?

The stroke that felled Ariel Sharon a week ago could leave us with a similar riddle. Was Sharon the one man capable of bringing a lasting peace to the Middle East on the basis of a “two-state” solution? Or were his efforts to find a modus vivendi with the Palestinians merely a Machiavellian device by an intransigent foe?

As I write, Sharon is in a coma. Even if the doctors can restore him to consciousness, his political career must be regarded as over. So we may never know what his next move would have been. We can only hope that his departure from the political scene is not followed as swiftly as Stresemann’s was by first economic and then political disaster.

Just as Stresemann was a fire-breathing German nationalist before 1919, so Sharon was for most of his political career the scourge of Palestinians and their supporters. And yet, again like Stresemann, Sharon has pursued an apparently quite different course in the closing phase of his career. He has committed himself to the creation of a Palestinian state. He has taken seriously the American-initiated “road map,” supposedly the route to an enduring peace. And, perhaps most impressively, last August he pulled the Israeli settlers and troops out of Gaza and part of the West Bank.

Was all this the result of some kind of conversion? It seems unlikely. Each concession he has made has been a unilateral act, designed solely to enhance Israel’s security. He has done nothing that might have enhanced the standing of the Palestinian Authority or the so-called quartet — the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — of would-be mediators. The Palestinian state as conceived by Sharon would be a stunted reservation, without the eastern part of Jerusalem, surrounded by an Israeli-controlled fence.

Sharon, far more than Stresemann, has all along been an immovable object disguised as an irresistible force.

The situation in Israel today is, of course, very different from that of Germany in the 1920s. The Israelis have won their wars but are still menaced by their more populous neighbours. The Germans had lost a war but remained a threat to their less populous neighbours. Israel is a small state, about the size of New Jersey, with a population of just over 6 million. Germany was still a big power, even after defeat, with the potential to get even bigger.

Nevertheless, there are some illuminating resemblances. Israel’s democracy shares many common features with the Weimar Republic’s, in particular the system of proportional representation and the consequent endless haggling over coalitions. Anyone who wants to understand the implications of Sharon’s departure from the scene needs to start here.

Less than two months ago, Sharon stole a march on his political rivals by seceding from the Likud Party and setting up a new party, Kadima (“Forward”). It was a masterstroke. He took with him not only the Likudniks most loyal to him but also Shimon Peres, the former Labour Party leader, leaving the rump Likud with his old rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, as leader, and Labour with the inexperienced trade unionist Amir Peretz. Sharon looked set to win this March’s elections by a wide margin.

But Kadima was in all but name the Sharon Party. It now resembles “Hamlet” without the prince. Can his deputy, Ehud Olmert, fill Sharon’s shoes? Can anyone?

There is another resemblance between the Middle East today and Central Europe in the 1920s, and that is the role of demographics. After World War I, there was simply no getting around the sheer number of Germans in Europe — and particularly the millions who lived in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. They were the seeds from which World War II grew.

In the Middle East today, demography works against Israel. Not only are the Israelis outnumbered by the hostile Arabs outside their borders, the population trends within Israel and the occupied territories are running against them.

According to the forecasts of Arnon Sofer of the University of Haifa, by 2020 Jews will account for only 42 per cent of the total population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Alongside a Jewish population of 6.4 million, he predicts, there will be three million non-Jews inside Israel’s 1967 boundaries, 3.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and another 2.5 million in Gaza. Even the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics forecasts that by 2020, Arabs will account for 23% of the population of Israel and nearly a third of those ages 14 and under.

To draw another inter-war analogy, Israel’s predicament is strongly reminiscent of the Ulster Protestants’. Both Israel and Northern Ireland are, after all, legacies of British imperialism, the former descended from the Jewish “national home” proclaimed in 1917, the latter descended from the partition of Ireland four years later.

In both cases, those descendants face relative demographic decline today. In both cases, those who question the legitimacy of the original colonization have turned to terrorism. In both cases, their more moderate representatives claim to embrace the ballot box, while the extremists hang on to their bombs.

The difference, of course, is that the Ulster Protestants have scarcely any friends abroad, whereas the Israelis can still regard the United States as the principal guarantor of their continued existence. And that is perhaps the most important point of all.

Just 26 days after Stresemann’s death, the Wall Street stock market crash marked the end of the Roaring Twenties. In the ensuing crisis, the flow of millions of dollars in US loans to Germany ended, turning an already serious recession into a catastrophic depression.

Yet it is almost impossible to imagine a comparable event that would cause American financial support for Israel to dry up. Even if an American president drastically cut official aid - which Europeans always claim would force the Israelis to make bigger concessions - the effect would be muted because so much American assistance to Israel (roughly a third) comes from private donors.

Of the three key variables in the equation, then, one is wholly unknown, and that is the identity of Sharon’s successor. All we know of the other two is that demography is the big minus for Israel; the United States is the big plus. With the immovable object of Sharon out of the calculation, which of these two will prove to be the irresistible force? That is the real riddle of the Middle East today. —Dawn/Los Angeles Time Service

Africa’s tinderbox

AFRICA’S next war could be between two countries already in the middle of a devastating drought: Ethiopia and Eritrea. They are also bordered by violence and instability; to the east lies a deeply fractured Somalia, to the west is Sudan, Africa’s poster child for genocide.

It won’t take much of a spark to set off a bloody explosion between Eritrea, which has one of the biggest armies on the continent and spends a whopping 13.4 per cent of its gross domestic product on its military (the United States spends 3.3 per cent), and Ethiopia, a larger country from which Eritrea seceded in 1991. Yet the United Nations may be poised to light a match.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently said the organization would have to reconsider its options for monitoring the demilitarized zone between the two countries and that it may pull the peacekeepers out entirely. That could lead to the resumption of a war that ended in 2000 after killing more than 70,000 people. Such a war could increase the flow of weapons to armed groups throughout the region.

The United Nations is reacting to Eritrea’s restrictions on helicopter flights by monitors and its expulsion of 180 peacekeepers. The no-fly order, which came after Ethiopia massed extra troops near the border, makes it impossible to effectively monitor the DMZ that was created after the peace deal of five years ago. Leaders on both sides continually threaten war, though both say they won’t be the one to start it.

The tension stems from a small border town, Badme, which both countries claim as their territory. Badme might be the pretext, but the more likely reason both countries are girding for a fight is that a war would be a distraction from constant poverty and political protest. The leaders of each nation hope to unite their people against a foreign foe, so the people spend less time protesting their own governments.

—Los Angeles Times