North Korea’s nuclear gambit

COMPARED to the nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan in 1998, the underground nuclear explosion in a northern mountain region of North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) on October 9, 2006, registered rather limited seismic signatures. The political and strategic shock wave it has generated is easily bigger.

It has been described as the epicentre of a new and deadly arms race. It is also widely seen as the most serious challenge to American hegemony in the Pacific since the United States crushed imperial Japan in 1945. By any criteria it is a grievous blow to international non-proliferation and counter-proliferation regimes.

It is also the beginning of a long and bitter debate on how and why DPRK crossed the red line despite grave warnings that the United States and its regional allies would not tolerate the nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Weeks before the mid-term elections that may change the balance of forces in the US House of Representatives and possibly also in the Senate, Democrats describe the North Korean test as a major failure of President Bush’s policies.

Impartial commentators call it a failure of nearly two decades of atomic diplomacy. Across the globe, many analysts also remind us that the North Korean nuclear programme could have been terminated by negotiating appropriate terms and conditions.

Nations aspiring to nuclear capability in the face of strong antiproliferation instruments have generally resorted to elaborate denial and deception. In comparative terms, Pyongyang fell back on this strategy only sparingly and often notified its progressive steps in advance. The regime also signalled periodically that it was willing to compromise on its nuclear ambitions on the right terms from the United States. Spurts of nuclear activity alternated with voluntary or negotiated freezing of projects.

Way back in August 2003, CIA concluded that North Korea had produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests. There is scant information about the test of October 9 but a significant change in the global nuclear map has taken place. Asia seems to have outpaced other regions of the world in redrawing it. India, Pakistan, China and North Korea add up to a hefty part of the global population facing the profit and peril of nuclear weapons. Even if Israel, which is lean in area and population but large in nuclear arsenal, is counted as a western nuclear outpost in the Middle East, the Russian state has an authentic Asian personality. There are many reasons why so many Asian states have embraced this option of extreme danger and crippling costs. But amongst them must be a deep reluctance to accept discriminatory regimes and, more importantly, the failure of the international order to resolve contentious issues in Asia.

The Korean peninsula was the theatre of a brutal war in the 1950s; it also has bitter memories of along Japanese occupation that ended only in 1945. The relentless pursuit of regime change in North Korea and Iran has also accentuated the quest for nuclear deterrence.

There was a relatively short period in the 1990s when the idea of nuclear nonproliferation seemed to have acquired some traction. Russia and the United States had concluded strategic arms reduction treaties and cooperated in retrieving nuclear weapons from the erstwhile Soviet states. Nearly all the UN member states had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and quite a few had also acceded to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). India did not sign the NPT but demanded global disarmament. Pakistan campaigned for a nuclear free zone and a zero missile regime in South Asia but retained the right to go nuclear if India went ahead with nuclearisation.

But then things starting unravelling as various international instruments were seen to be selective and discriminatory. The leading nations reduced the number of warheads but compensated for it by developing a new generation of more lethal weapons including usable bunker buster tactical nuclear devices. The United States Senate refused to ratify the CTBT but expected the rest of the world to sign and ratify it. Pakistan was heavily sanctioned but Israel was permitted to accumulate a large nuclear arsenal.

In May 1998, Pakistan followed India in becoming a declared nuclear power. More recently, the Indo-US nuclear energy accord demonstrated that international nuclear regimes continued to be selective and discriminatory. The case of North Korea raises the question of whether the current practice of using intimidation to force aspirants to nuclear technology to abandon it altogether really serves the cause of non-proliferation. North Korea has lived with American sanctions for its entire history but evidently the broadening and deepening of these sanctions has been counter-productive as Pyongyang’s growing insecurity accelerated the quest for nuclear deterrence. It is a valid question to ask if it would not have been better to let North Korea return to the mainstream of the nations with fully safe-guarded nuclear reactors supplied by the West.

DPRK did make periodic efforts to break out of isolation by making a deal with the major western powers, particularly the United States, short of a regime change. It acceded to the NPT in April 1985. In 1992-93, the IAEA carried out six inspections of its facilities. In March 1993, DPRK expressed its frustration with the continued hostility shown by the United States and gave a 90-day notice to withdraw from the NPT. A day before the expiry of this period, it suspended action on withdrawal. When it finally left the NPT and expelled IAEA inspectors, it had gone through a tortuous and unsuccessful negotiating process.

In 1994, an agreed framework was negotiated with elaborate reciprocal obligations. Pyongyang was to freeze graphite-modulated reactors, and all nuclear activities including fuel fabrication and reprocessing. In return, it would get a package of nuclear energy especially two US supplied nuclear power reactors, economic assistance and diplomatic support. By October 2002, North Korea was accusing the United States of reneging on its commitment. In 2003, North Korea increased pressure for a deal with the US by firing missiles towards Japan.

There was further escalation when it cancelled the inter-Korean agreement on keeping the peninsula free of nuclear weapons. While it drew up a list of concessions as a pre-condition of continued participation in the six-nation talks, Washington’s policy under President Bush hardened and started moving towards demanding compliance without a substantial quid pro quo. In August 2003, Pyongyang had asked for a non-aggression pact. Now, in October 2003, the United States, Japan and South Korea were willing to offer only security guarantees provided it dismantled its entire nuclear programme and, under IAEA verification, got rid of nuclear material. There were no attractive economic incentives. Pyongyang reacted by accelerating the extraction of plutonium from spent fuel rods. The stage was thus set for the present explosion.

North Korea’s delivery systems should not be under-estimated despite known hiccups in developing them. It has about 500 Scud missiles with ranges between 300-500km with 700-1000kg payload. The liquid-fuel Nadong missile has a range of 1300kms. North Korea has made considerable progress in developing Taepodong I and II three-stage missiles, precursors of inter-continental missiles capable of reaching the west coast of the United States.

It was easy to include North Korea in the infamous “axis of evil” and threaten it with preemptive war. But it is extremely hazardous for South Korea and the 37,000 US troops stationed on its soil to invade North Korea. Washington can punish DPRK only by making existing sanctions much harsher. Japan has already imposed unilateral sanctions for six months and South Korea is under pressure to give up it ‘sunshine policy’ of alleviating North Korea’s economic problems.

Given its fragile economy, North Korea will pay a heavy price but would the world be able to cope with a failed nuclear state? This is uncharted water with no precedents to guide decision-making. No other new nuclear weapon state ever presented the danger of ‘loose nukes’ as would North Korea if it was destabilised. Neither China nor Russia would want instability at this tri-junction of nuclear weapon capable states of vastly different social and political capacities.

Japan has a new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who is less squeamish about building military power. It will not be easy for him, or for that matter for the United States, to decide if the present policy of cautious ‘militarisation’ can be extended to a strategic decision to let Japan use its advanced technology and plutonium stockpile for building nuclear weapons. If Japan does opt for nuclear weapons, an intense arms race will follow.

It may be naive or wildly optimistic to suggest that North Korea’s gambit to use nuclear technology for a trade-off with security, respect and economic opportunity in the mainstream of nations can be revived despite the explosion of October 9. But it may be worthwhile to explore this possibility. The stakes now are so high and available options so fraught with risks that one may still hope that after an initial period of sabre-rattling, the world community may try to persuade the United States to work for a Korean rollback to create a nuclear-free peninsula that does not face any external threats and sanctions.

There are precedents such as South Africa for an acceptable and comprehensive settlement of nuclear issues. At the end of the day, the international community may find it better to offer North Korea a larger package of incentives than it had sought in 2002-03 to reduce nuclear risks and the disarray in non-proliferation regimes.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Iraq war’s human cost

THE final indignity, if you are an Iraqi who was shot for accidentally turning into the path of a US military convoy (they thought you might be a terrorist), or blown apart by a car bomb or an air strike, or tortured and murdered by kidnappers, or just for being a Sunni or a Shia, is that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair will deny that your death happened.

The script they are working from says (in Mr Bush’s words last December) that only “30,000, more or less” have been killed in Iraq during and since the invasion in March, 2003.

So they have a huge incentive to discredit the report in the British medical journal “The Lancet” this week that an extra 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion in excess of the natural death rate: 2.5 per cent of the population. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” said Mr Bush, without giving any reason why he didn’t.

“It is a fairly small sample they have taken and they have extrapolated it across the country,” said a spokesman of the British Foreign Office, as if that were an invalid methodology. But it’s not.

The study, led by Dr Les Roberts and a team of epidemiologists from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was based on a survey of 1,849 households, containing 12,801 people, at 47 different locations chosen at random in Iraq. Teams of four Iraqi doctors — two men and two women — went from house to house and asked the residents if anybody had died in their family since January, 2002 (fifteen months before the invasion).

If anybody had, they then inquired when and how the person had died. They asked for death certificates, and in 92 percent of cases the families produced them. Then the Johns Hopkins team of epidemiologists tabulated the statistics and drew their conclusions.

The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the pre-war death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002-March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the US government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculate that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the pre-war and post-war death rates over a period of forty months is 655,000 deaths.

More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths — but the sample is big enough that there is a 95 per cent certainty that the true figure is within that range. What the Johns Hopkins team have done in Iraq is more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology “excellent” and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: “You can’t be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark.”

This is not a political smear job. Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect. “The Lancet,” founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. These numbers are real. So what do they mean?

Two-thirds of a million Iraqis have died since the invasion who would almost all be alive if it had not happened. Human Rights Watch has estimated that between 250,000 and 290,000 Iraqis were killed during Saddam Hussein’s twenty-year rule, so perhaps 40,000 people might have died between the invasion and now if he had stayed in power. (Though probably not anything like that many, really, because the great majority of Saddam’s killings happened during crises like the Kurdish rebellion of the late 1980s and the Shia revolt after the 1990-91 Gulf War.)

Of the 655,000 excess deaths since March, 2003, only about 50,000 can be attributed to stress, malnutrition, the collapse of medical services as doctors flee abroad, and other side-effects of the occupation. All the rest are violent deaths, and 31 per cent are directly due to the actions of foreign “coalition” forces.

The most disturbing thing is the breakdown of the causes of death.Over half the deaths — 56 per cent — are due to gunshot wounds, but 13 per cent are due to air strikes. No terrorists do air strikes. No Iraqi government forces do air strikes, either, because they don’t have combat aircraft. Air strikes are done by “coalition forces” (i.e. Americans and British), and air strikes in Iraq have killed over 75,000 people since the invasion.

Oscar Wilde once observed that “to lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To lose 75,000 Iraqis to air strikes looks like carelessness, too.

—Copyright

Pamuk’s noble prize

ORHAN PAMUK, the Turkish novelist, is an inspired choice as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. He has been justly praised by the Swedish foundation for his sensitive treatment of the “clash and interlacing of cultures” as seen from his native Istanbul, where he writes in an apartment overlooking the Bosphorus, the strait that divides both the city and the European continent from Asia.

Pamuk’s great strength, in acclaimed works such as Snow and My Name is Red, is conjuring up his country’s past. This has got him into trouble with his own government, which prosecuted him earlier this year for “insulting Turkishness” because he raised the taboo issues of the Armenian and Kurdish victims of the state Kemal Ataturk founded.

By coincidence this most prestigious award was announced on the very day the French national assembly voted to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915 — a move which has infuriated Ankara and will feed suspicions of European prejudice towards the only Muslim candidate for EU membership. France boasts a large and active Armenian community which lobbied long and hard for recognition of the mass killings by the Ottomans during the first world war and for legislation that mirrors penalties for denial of the Nazi Holocaust.

Supporters of the law are doubtless motivated by a sincere desire to redress a 90-year-old injustice. No one can deny the suffering of Armenians (Hitler once asked scornfully who remembered them) but it does not occupy a place in European history analogous to the racist, industrial-scale extermination of the Jews in Germany, France and elsewhere, where Holocaust denial has been a crime for many years. Furthermore, some in France are quite clearly exploiting the issue to prevent Turkey getting into the EU, despite Jacques Chirac’s formal commitment to see it in the club.

—The Guardian, London

The decline of theatre

THERE was a time when the theatre tradition was alive and kicking in Karachi. Hardly a week went by without some group or the other exploiting its skills to luxuriate in the contrasting textures of comedy, farce, tragedy or social comment. Not all the plays produced the same heightened sense of excitement or interest. But at least they were there and members of the public were offered a choice.

One remembers a particularly productive week in the 1970s when the theatregoer could choose between catching a glimpse of Sophocles or Miller or a number of productions of the home-grown variety — candidly histrionic and heartfelt pieces often laced with exceptional prose. But all that seems to have changed. These days one has to search for a play, and even if one is lucky enough to make an unexpected discovery, it usually takes twice as long to get to the location, given the state of the roads and the traffic.

In fact, what one finds most depressing in the cultural life of Karachi these days is the gradual disappearance of not just the reading habit but also what once used to be a vibrant theatre tradition. It is a sad reflection of how material progress and raw thrusting consumerism appear to have replaced the creative instinct and set the tone for the lifestyle of the future. A brief recall might help to bring back lots of memories.

This writer fondly recalls a performance which he saw many decades ago that not only stirred his interest in theatre in Pakistan, but also demonstrated how capricious and unfair reviewers can be at times. It came about quite by accident when he happened to be in Lahore on an exceptionally cold December evening.

A group of eager students from the English department at Government College were staging in the university auditorium Chekhov’s play The Sea-Gull. Directed by F.S. Aijazuddin, the cast included a talented young student by the name of Shamim Ahmed. Almost everybody who saw the play was full of praise for the acting, the direction and the choreography. This writer also thought that F.S. Aijazuddin had done a splendid job.

There was, however, one dissenter — Safdar Mir, a journalist who contributed literary articles to The Pakistan Times under the penname of Zeno. He didn’t talk about any ‘purple patches’ — a phrase which had, at the time, found favour with Pakistani reviewers who were entrusted with the onerous task of commenting on theatrical performances which were being staged from time to time.

But he did write the kind of review which suggested to the cynical reader that the people who took part in that production would have probably been far better off if they had been doing something useful like cracking walnuts over a log fire. The next day at an indoor tea party held in honour of the cast, Zeno stalked F.S. Aijazuddin and tried to engage him in conversation.

Eventually, by means of some adroit manoeuvring, the director was cornered. Zeno started the dialogue with an apology. He said that he had been unduly harsh in his criticism and that he shouldn’t have written some of the things that he had. F.S Aijazuddin straightened up to his full height and said, “Not at all my dear fellow. You have every right to express your views. After all, an amateur actor deserves an amateur reviewer.” Unfazed the gang at Government College carried on the grand tradition and the English department has been coming up with plays to this day.

This is not to suggest that Karachi did not have its share of theatrical productions. As the late Hameed Zaman once pointed out in a comprehensive article, the histrionic tradition in this port city started long before Partition and had its genesis in the nascent Parsi Theatre which drew most of its inspiration from the Bombay stage. In those days productions were full of lampooning and horse play and female parts were played by male actors, as in the Shakespearean tradition. Most of the plays were performed in Gujrati, but in the fullness of time the Parsi Theatre also staged plays in Urdu because of the wider acceptance of this language.

To give the reader an idea of the vibrancy of Parsi Theatre one has to only look at the pages of the Zoroastrian Club’s golden jubilee souvenir which was published in 1932. The record is a little sketchy, but reliable, and is simply brimming with accounts of plays performed in both Gujrati and in Urdu.

A significant development took place with the arrival of Khwaja Moinuddin in 1950. He subsequently started The Drama Guild which produced Mirza Ghalib Bunder Road Per. This was a hugely successful and hilarious commentary on changing times and cultures. It influenced a number of playwrights and was re-staged years later. After the advent of Khwaja Moinuddin, theatre in Karachi increasingly became a vehicle for political and social expression.

A number of talented producers, directors and actors associated with the stage emerged during the next 40 years and made their mark on the audience. There were people like Ali Ahmed, the great Shakil, Kamal Ahmed Rizvi, Rafi Peer, Talat Hussain, Anjum Ayaz, Shoaib Hashmi, S.M. Saleem, Ibrahim Nafees, Mohammed Yusuf, Subhanul Yunus, Khaled Ahmed, Uzra Butt, Yasmeen Ismail, Mahmood Ali and Sigrid Kahle and Hannelore Baunher who brought August Strindberg to the stage, and Unver Shehryar whose ‘Nemani dramas’ in the early 1970s saw travelling troupes of natak or nautanki casting their spell over rural audiences.

The foreign cultural missions also did their bit and chipped in. Who could ever forget the contributions of the Gripps Theatre of the Goethe Institut, the Alliance Francaise, the British Council who put up at least one play a year, the American Centre, Friendship House and the Little PAC Theatre of the PACC?

There was, however, an outstanding impresario — Zia Mohyeddin — fresh from the London stage, who provided a visual allegory for his successors to follow. He is a national treasure and will always occupy a prominent place in the cultural history of this country.

Zia Mohyeddin is a highly accomplished actor and taught others how to overcome the handicap imposed by the absence of microphones. Irrespective of the part he played, whether it was Hamlet or Macbeth, Othello or plain Mister Pickwick, he always gave the role his best shot. His great strength lay in the way he managed to summon his deepest understanding of the human condition, each time he stood poised between action and contemplation.

But what makes this actor so special is that he is equally proficient in Urdu. The Marsias that he used to deliver in Lahore every year were vignettes of sheer delight. The absolute stillness of the audience, as he opened the textures with lyrical clarity, without any conscious imposition, always managing to avoid excessive sentiment, was a tribute to a distinguished performance.

There is another national treasure that one doesn’t hear very much about these days — a highly urbane and cultured individual — who was never afraid to speak his mind, even though it eventually cost him his job. His name is Aslam Azhar. The last that one heard of him was that he was hibernating in Lahore. But anybody who had even the vaguest association with Pakistan Television will acknowledge the tremendous contribution he made to that institution. He gave the organisation a proper direction and a sense of purpose. He demonstrated a heightened sense of how a television station should be run, and how the chaff should be sifted from the grain.

There were, of course, a number of other talented directors, writers and actors who tried to make their own bid for immortality and whose efforts were directed mainly at English speaking audiences. Imran Aslam is one of them. He produced and directed a clutch of successful plays and soon established himself as a leading impresario. For a time he flirted with the comedies of Dario Fo, with their double entendres and witty asides. It was, in fact, in one of the Dario Fo escapades — The Accidental Death of an Anarchist — in which the actor Talat Hussain gave, what this writer believes, was his finest and most memorable performance.

Another is Sheema Kirmani whose Tehrik-i-Niswan productions took street theatre into the slums of Lyari. One must also include in this category Sohail Malik whose repertoire is quite impressive and Marianna Karim of the old Grammarians who inspired the old lads and lasses to perform every year to full house performances.