Diplomats’ expulsion
WELL-WISHERS of South Asia the world over must now seriously doubt whether the normalisation process between Pakistan and India will continue. The mutual expulsion of diplomats at Islamabad and New Delhi is not an isolated incident that could be brushed aside. It comes in the wake of several other unpleasant developments that have all but scuttled the peace process that had been developing steadily over the last two and a half years. On Saturday, Pakistan expelled Indian visa counsellor Deepak Kaul after he was “caught red-handed while getting some sensitive documents from his contacts outside Islamabad. He later confessed that he was not a diplomat but an agent for Research and Analysis Wing, India’s intelligence arm”. Within hours, New Delhi had declared Syed Mohammad Rafiq Ahmad, Pakistan’s political counsellor, persona non grata and expelled him for allegedly indulging in activities “incompatible with his diplomatic status”. Regrettably, India chose to go public with the issue, even though Islamabad had suggested to New Delhi that the crisis be tackled behind the scenes. India also accused Pakistan officials of manhandling Mr Kaul. These are the first tit-for-tat expulsions since February 2003 when India expelled Pakistan’s deputy high commissioner in New Delhi as persona non grata, and come close in time to the Mumbai blasts of July 11 and their repercussions.
One immediate result of the Mumbai tragedy was the postponement of the two countries’ foreign secretaries’ meeting and the exchange of prisoners. This was, however, less damaging than the vicious atmosphere created by wild allegations levelled against Pakistan by the Indian side. The press discovered within hours that a Pakistan-based group was behind the carnage and the Indian government followed this up with the usual advice for Islamabad to “do more”. Pakistan’s offer of a joint probe was rejected by New Delhi, which failed to come up with any concrete evidence of the involvement of any Pakistan-based group in the act of terrorism in Mumbai. The secretaries finally met on the sidelines of the Saarc meeting in Dhaka last week, but what followed was a demonstration less of South Asian good-neighbourliness and friendship and more of a lack of trust and mutual hostility. India chose to raise the Safta issue — even though it was not on the agenda either of the council of ministers or of the standing committee — and accused Pakistan of avoiding the implementation of Safta. The relevant rules provide for taking up Safta matters at the bilateral level or, if that failed, to raise the issue at standing committee meetings. As pointed out by Bangladeshi and Nepalese delegates, the issue could be raised at the Saarc level only after the two avenues had failed to remove misunderstandings.
The two sides should now make a serious effort to stop the drift in their relations. Until recently, Islamabad had voiced concern over the activities of the Indian consulates in Afghanistan, accusing them of involvement in terrorist activity in Pakistan. Now, according to a Dawn report, Pakistan has informed Iran about similar activities by the Indian consulate in Zahidan. It is time the blame game stopped. Unless the two sides make a determined effort to keep pursuing the détente, there is a serious possibility that overreactions to minor irritants could do incalculable damage to the détente and take the situation to a point where it would be difficult for either side to pull back.
Rape, murder in Iraq
HORRIFYING war crimes have been a recurring feature of the US occupation of Iraq. Allegations of excesses by the US military initially centred on air attacks on civilian populations and the use of prohibited chemical weaponry, in particular during the November 2004 assault on Fallujah in which US troops shelled resistance fighters with white phosphorus and, possibly, napalm. April 2004 saw the release of shocking pictures, taken the previous year at Abu Ghraib prison. Subsequent revelations confirmed that the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib was not confined to male prisoners — at least two Iraqi women, it came to light, were sexually assaulted at the infamous detention centre. The pattern had been established and criminal abuse of power became synonymous with the American military. In occupied Iraq, it seemed that anything was possible, no matter how heinous. But the bar of barbarity was to be raised even further. Five US soldiers, one of them no longer serving, are now charged with the premeditated rape, execution and post-mortem mutilation of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmudiya, some 20 miles south of Baghdad, in March this year. According to a neighbour, the girl had earlier complained of unwanted advances by US servicemen stationed at a nearby checkpoint. After a bout of drinking on March 12, the five soldiers left their post, entered the girl’s house, and killed her parents and sister. At least two, and possibly three, soldiers then raped the 14-year-old, shot her and tried to cover up their crime by setting her body on fire.
It is possible that the soldiers’ lawyers will cite combat stress and fatigue as the cause of this latest crime, the fifth high-profile case involving the killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians by US troops. Before the incident came to light, one of the defendants, said to be a ringleader, had been discharged from the army following a psychiatric evaluation. But combat is always stressful and there can be no excuse for violating the rules of war. Moreover, the blame for these atrocities cannot rest solely with individual soldiers. The US army as a whole must be held answerable, especially the field commanders for not doing enough to maintain strict discipline and to keep the soldiers in line.
Preserving rare books
AS if it wasn’t bad enough to lament the lack of public libraries in Karachi, the news that 20,000 rare books of the Central Archaeological Reference Library are under threat is indicative of how little importance is given to preserving our heritage. The books were recently shifted to another location making it the fifth time in a decade that such a move had to be made. This constant shifting has done considerable damage to an impressive collection that needs great care in its handling and preservation which, so far, has been sorely lacking. Each time the collection was moved, many books went missing or were damaged, showing the utter disregard for their preciousness by those responsible for ensuring the books’ preservation and care. There are many instances of theft of antiquities from museums all over the country, making proper care for their protection all the more important. This is especially so for rare and old books as they are an integral part of our history and culture and need to be preserved and protected.
All this seems to be lost on the authorities who argue that lack of proper accommodation for the books poses problems for them. If that is the case, they should press the government for a permanent place where these books can be housed in suitable weather-proof conditions safe from termites. The same news report mentions the shifting of 70,000 publications of the federal archaeology and museums department to the National Museum which is said to be infested with termites. This calls for immediate fumigation of the area to avoid further damage. The overall condition of the National Museum is pathetic, especially after the heavy rains and many items housed here are under threat. This too needs investigating. The sheer neglect of antiquities is appalling and those responsible for it deserve to be taken to task.
What’s Israel up to in Lebanon?
AS the intensity of Israel’s savagery against the Palestinians and the Lebanese increases by the hour, two questions are agitating many a mind: how could Israel ‘fight’ two wars simultaneously — in Gaza and Lebanon — and what is it that Israel seeks to achieve in Lebanon?
The answer to the first question is easy. Israel is not ‘fighting’ on two fronts; it’s merely decimating and pulverising two defenceless peoples in Gaza and Lebanon. There’s no element of a fight between a Goliath armed to the teeth, by the generosity of the sole superpower of our times, and two minuscule Davids, armed with only stones and brickbats (as in the case of the hapless Palestinians) or piddling Katyusha rockets (in the ‘arsenal’ of the much-maligned Hezbollah in Lebanon) carrying more pyrotechnics than payloads.
Arrayed against this pittance is formidable state-of-the-art weaponry — F-16s, helicopter gunships, 1000-pound ‘bunker busters’, napalms, sophisticated missiles, ‘smart bombs’ et al. You name any weapon worthy of being in the arsenal of a superpower and you can rest assured that Israel would have it, thanks to its mentors and partners in Washington. In more than 40 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy (whose demise was engineered, many suspect, because he wasn’t too enthusiastic about Israel’s then budding nuclear arsenal), Israel has received more than 110 billion dollars in military and economic assistance from Washington; the bulk of it in the form of military aid.
As if all this wasn’t enough for the partisans of Israel in Washington, Pentagon announced a ‘gift’ of $210 million worth of aviation fuel for Israel to help it “keep peace and security in the region” just as the Israeli warplanes and bunker busters were raining down hell-fire on the hapless civilians of Beirut. No wonder Israeli warplanes have been roaming the skies over Lebanon with such abandon in this age of costly aviation fuel; they can always count on their pipeline to the Pentagon.
Pentagon’s largesse was followed by the US ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s yet another veto to kill a Security Council draft resolution critical of Israel. In the years since the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, the US has exercised its veto more than 90 times; and each time in support of Israel, rendering the UN totally impotent to act as a referee between Israel and the Palestinian and Arab victims of its aggression.
A tail wagging the dog is always a funny situation. However, a pigmy state dictating the policies of a giant power isn’t funny but tragic, both for the superpower itself and for the world, too. In its unabashed infatuation with the Israeli agenda of expansionism in the Middle East, Washington has lost all its pretensions of being an honest broker, especially under its neo-conservative ruling elite.
The quest for a ‘final solution’ to the festering Palestinian question has dominated the agenda of Israel and its neo- conservative allies and mentors in Washington, especially since the cataclysm of 9/11 that facilitated the laying down of ideal conditions for reaching this much-desired end-result of nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In other words, the drafting of a joint Israeli-US agenda to hammer out a new political map of the region, favourable entirely to the interests of both allies, was undertaken in right earnest.
Branding the Palestinian struggle for liberation of their territories as an act of ‘terrorism’ was the first salvo under the new game plan. Yasser Arafat was corralled and incarcerated within the walls of his headquarters in Ramallah, eventually to die there three years later. In that period, the Palestinians were brutally pummelled by an unrepentant Ariel Sharon. His clear intent was to break the back of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. But he failed to extinguish the flame of freedom in the occupied territory, or Gaza, just as he had failed earlier in Lebanon in the 1980.
Even the death of Arafat, or the building of the neo-apartheid ‘wall’ on Palestinian lands didn’t bring Sharon closer to realising his age-old dream of getting done with a people who refused to fade into the shadows of history.
Not only did the Palestinians refuse to submit to Tel Aviv, they also committed the ultimate ‘sin’ of electing Hamas, a terrorist party in Washington’s and Israel’s lexicon, to power, early in January this year, in response to George W. Bush’s clarion call for democracy in the Arab world. What the Palestinians didn’t understand was that they were supposed to exercise their democratic right by only acting within the parameters laid down for them by Washington.
The policy planners of the US and Israel rushed to their common drawing board as soon as the last ballot had been counted in the Palestinian camp, bringing Hamas to power as the dictates of democracy demanded. The unthinkable had happened and the Palestinians had to be punished for their ‘folly’ of electing a ‘terrorist’ outfit. So unabashed were these policy planners, and their leaders, that they openly talked of drawing up a joint strategy to drive Hamas out of power. Starving the Palestinians was declared fair and legitimate. All aid to the Palestinian Authority was cut off, and Israel clamped a virtual blockade of Gaza. Even the incapacitation of Sharon, the architect of expansionism, didn’t dampen enthusiasm in Tel Aviv or Washington to implement the plan.
However, an excuse, or ruse, had to be invented before the full force of the Israeli punch could be unleashed against the Palestinians. Neither of the allies had forgotten what Alexander Haig, Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan, had advised the then Israeli defence minister, Ariel Sharon, in 1982, when he went to Washington to receive America’s green signal for his planned invasion of Lebanon to weed out the PLO. Haig directed him to find a convincing alibi for the world. An abortive attempt on the life of the Israeli ambassador to Britain was quickly laid at the door of the PLO and Lebanon was invaded with impunity and Washington’s full blessings.
On this occasion the fuse was lit with the ‘abduction’ of the 19-year old corporal Gilad Shalit, on June 25.
The world’s memory may be short but not that short as to forget that the ‘tit’ of Shalit’s abduction was in response to the ‘tat’ of a day earlier, June 24, when a Palestinian doctor and his son were snatched by the Israelis from Gaza. Few in the outside world would even remember that thuggery or know the names of the Palestinians grabbed and imprisoned by the Israeli intelligence. There is no trace of the Palestinian abductees. But for the recovery of the corporal, Israel has been tearing Gaza upside down, and inflicting collective punishment of a most ruthless kind on its 1.4 million inhabitants.
The same medicine of horrendous collective punishment is also being administered on the Lebanese, because Hezbollah dared to upset the apple cart being arranged by the Israelis and the Americans. Hasan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, is now the latest candidate fit to be made another horrible example of, in the mould of Arafat and Saddam Hussein, in order to knock the fear of Israel into the hearts of those Arabs who are still unprepared to accept the reality of the Jewish state as the sentinel of Pax Americana in the region.
Why George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who desperately aspires to be a worthy successor to his mentor Ariel Sharon, are so furious with Hezbollah isn’t so hard to explain. They thought they had taken care of Lebanon for good following the mysterious assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri last year. They were quick to blame the murder on Syria, although the jury is still out on it. But Syria was hounded out of Lebanon in its wake, exactly according to the game plan chalked up by the two allies. Everything was going according to a plan, until Hezbollah spoiled it.
The hawks in Washington, synchronising every move on the political chessboard with their Israeli counterparts, think they can still make the best of a bad situation by inflicting maximum punishment on Hezbollah, for daring to stand up to Israel; on the Lebanese people, for refusing to discard Hezbollah as their only line of defence against Israel; and on the Lebanese government, for not kowtowing to Israel and not denouncing Hezbollah.
Though belatedly, the European countries have started to speak in support of a ceasefire in Lebanon, Washington is still resisting it in order to give as much time as necessary to its ally to finish the job. But the real task, which both Israel and the US want to accomplish, is to somehow entice Syria and Iran to jump into the fray. Bush, in particular, has no qualms about pointing the finger at Syria for its ‘involvement’ in Lebanon, and blaming Iran for arming Hezbollah. He has given a carte blanche to Olmert to pound Lebanon to smithereens. He is at one with Olmert to seek not only a ‘final’ solution in Palestine but also ‘dismantle’ Hezbollah, something that Sharon couldn’t do in a quarter century.
So, the best UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan can do is to make barely audible murmurs of protestations in support of an international force to be sandwiched between Israel and Lebanon — something that looks distant and unfeasible at the moment. Israel, and its American mentors, must have their full pound of Arab flesh before the guns fall silent in Palestine and Lebanon.
And what about the reaction in the Arab world? The silence of the lambs reigns there and stays there. The Arab people may shed all the tears they have over the plight and persecution of their brethren but that doesn’t bother their rulers, whose fealty to Washington is beyond reproach.
The writer is a former ambassador.