From guns to green belts in Lebanon
BEIRUT: The first thing you need when you want to call on Hezbollah is not a flak jacket but a photograph. This is what the lady from the hotel explained. “You take the photograph to the Ministry of Information then you go to see Ibrahim X at this address” — she had scribbled it out in Arabic — “and he will pass you on to Ghassan Y who will take you into Haret Hreyk”.
Haret Hreyk is the part of southern Beiruit occupied, in ascending chronology, by Shia Muslims, the Hezbollah militia, and a great deal of destructive Israeli ordnance. It was curious that accessing it required no more protocol than a bus pass application.
City Photos, just off the city’s corniche, supplied eight passport-sized prints for $6 (£3.21)— good value for spies, as technicians camouflage the tell-tale skin blemishes that intelligence agencies routinely rely on. A portrait of Rafik Hariri, the late former prime minister of Lebanon, hung on the office wall.
As Mr Hariri is, rightly or wrongly, generally supposed to have been assassinated by the Syrians, Hezbollah’s patrons, it felt wiser not to disclose any travel plans. An hour later, the cosmetically-enhanced image had been stapled to an A4 form by a vivacious secretary clad in diamante-studded denim and dagger-toed shoes. Her Armani-shirted boss in his office off the Ministry of Information’s spartan “Press Roo” [sic] was creditably relaxed about expediting contact with an organisation that effectively views his employer — the Lebanese government — as a waste of Middle Eastern space.
After a half hour taxi drive and a clamber up four flights of a dowdy office building, the newly minted pass was presented to a Hezbollah representative. Ibrahim and Ghassan had vanished, but Ms Z, a graceful figure with feline eyelashes, a fashionably cut black coat and chic, Hermes-style, blue-striped headscarf, made a charming substitute.
The Islamo-bourgeois face of the 24-year-old Party of God was not entirely unexpected. As well as contributing two ministers and 14 elected members to Lebanon’s precisely-calibrated administration, Hezbollah runs a slick satellite TV station (al-Manar, broadcasting from an unknown location after Israeli jets flattened its Haret Hreyk studio) and a highly-professional PR division. The road in from Beirut airport is lined with expertly crafted illuminated posters of smiling children and unruffled fighters, overlaid with the punchy ‘Divine Victory’ slogan.
The billboards for Pepsi and Tropicana look drab by comparison. The hearts and minds operation has its hiccups, though. A colleague and myself were abruptly requested to return tomorrow. Ms Z was unmovable for five minutes, then, just as abruptly, relented — we could go to “the tent”, after all, but no questions must be asked and no photographs taken. Mystified, but grateful for small mercies, we were soon sitting with one other journalist inside a long cinnamon-coloured marquee facing Dr Naim Bilal who was happy to field questions from any quarter. A stocky, bearded member of Hezbollah’s central council with a pin-striped brown suit, tan slip-ons and excellent murmured English, Dr Bilal was keen to portray his colleagues as something akin to the armed wing of Friends of The Earth.
“We prefer the European media to come to Lebanon to see directly what happened,” he said.” Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation; it is a civilian movement, not a state within a state, but an NGO.” Compensation of £32,000 had been paid to the surviving owners of the 5,500 Haret Hreyk apartments destroyed by the Israeli assault.
In addition, Dr Bilal explained, Hezbollah had agreed with the government that a core element of the master plan for rebuilding Haret Hreyk would be the provision of parks. “We want to make the suburb breathe,” Dr Bilal declared. “There should be less traffic, more green.” Dr Bilal did acknowledge that this particular NGO, credited with developing the suicide bomber among other things, had been involved in the recent deaths of Israeli civilians. He shrugged: “You can’t compare, though.” Of the 1,200 Lebanese killed in the 34-day war, 80 % had been civilians, he said, whereas only 20 % of Hezbollah’s victims were non-combatants. “Hezbollah is concerned about human rights,” he insisted.”
Dr Bilal organised a car tour of the area. In the two months since hostilities ended, Hezbollah wrecking crews have done an impressive clean-up job, but the familiar iconography of urban devastation, from Stalingrad to Manhattan, lingers: lop-sided tower blocks stare down on acres of shredded concrete, buckled metal and ragged mattresses. Demolition teams still toiled like diamond miners in the giant craters gouged out by bunker-busting bombs.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Like rain after a bitter drought
Tuesday's victory against Sri Lanka was welcome relief. Like rain after a bitter drought, it was certainly badly needed. The players needed it to reaffirm their identities as international cricketers rather than drama artistes; the board needed it too, in the hope of drawing attention away from its own miseries; and the fans yearned for a change in the acrid taste left by controversy and scandal.
It was delivered with the classic Pakistani flair and flourish. Brandishing the longest of long handles, Abdul Razzaq firmly planted down his back foot, got his front foot out of the way, and swung his bat in a mighty arc to send it straight over the boundary for the winning runs. Treated to a tenacious fightback and a thundering finale, the fans collapsed in a heap, exhausted and spent, savoring the aftertaste.
Not many teams would have battled like Pakistan did. Already deprived of their regular captain and batting icon, and then losing the services of two of the world's best strike bowlers virtually overnight, they could have easily given up and gone down with a whimper. It adds to Younis Khan's growing captaincy credentials that he channeled resentment and despair into grit and morale, and did not panic when the Sri Lankans were threatening to cross 300. His command and poise inspired the all-rounders, who put their hands up and ably stepped into the void left by the specialists. Although several leading experts – Ian Chappell and Imran Khan among them – champion the role of specialists, it seems possible that Pakistan's current string of world-class all-rounders could form the backbone of an excellent limited-overs side. One definition of a world-class all-rounder is someone capable of turning a match on the basis of either batting or bowling alone. Razzaq and Afridi have fulfilled this criterion comfortably, but now so, too, do Shoaib Malik and Mohammad Hafeez. Pakistan's all-rounder selection headache has become worse, but it's the kind of headache you'd like to have.
Both Shoaib Malik and Mohammad Hafeez are determined professional soldiers with a sharp presence of mind, an airtight defense, and an intelligent eye for picking the gaps. They can minimize risk as easily as they can slog boundaries to push the scoring rate.
Malik and Hafeez are also both accurate dot-ball offspinners, capable of drying up the runs with insistent, penetrating deliveries that have been modeled after their hero, Saqlain Mushtaq. That is a huge talent to claim descent from, because Saqlain founded a suffocating style of offspin that could choke his victims in the death overs. No less a personage than Shane Warne has included Saqlain in both his Test and limited-overs dream teams. "I can't remember anyone taking him on successfully at the end of an ODI innings," writes Warne in his autobiography.
Still, whether four quality all-rounders can propel Pakistan to the Champion's Trophy title is anybody's guess. This is because the ICC Champion's Trophy has always been a bizarre tournament. If the World Cup is the celebrated scion of the global cricket family, the Champion's Trophy is its maverick stepchild. It is a tournament that has never been won by Australia, one of the best teams in history, yet it's been won by New Zealand, who have never won any other limited-overs competition.
One-day international games are best played on flat, 260-270 pitches, but in the Champion's Trophy this year everyone is struggling to cross even 200. The late monsoon was bound to cause this, we are told. At the same time, another climatic twist – the dew factor – can't decide whom to help and whom to thwart. It helped Pakistan chasing against Sri Lanka, but made absolutely no difference to West Indies, who stunned Australia despite the wet ball and took a hat-trick to boot. So this year, too, the tournament is hell bent on upholding the game's inherent unpredictability. With Eid around the corner and cricket being cricket, this basically means that a feast is in store.
As we await Pakistan's next match – on October 25 against New Zealand at Mohali – we are left to lament how much more festive this feast would have been were Mohammad Asif and Shoaib Akhtar still at the table.
Nandrolone is an anabolic steroid, a synthetic hormone that can increase the power and bulk of muscles. It is widely used by athletes in several sports and has been detected numerous times in urine samples of Olympic participants. It provides an unfair physical advantage, and its use is therefore illegal and punishable. Its use is also stupid and self-destructive, because with repeated consumption the drug induces side-effects that jeopardize virtually every major organ of the body.
According to the medical literature, some wiggle room exists in defending against the charge of nandrolone use, because vigorous exercise and the use of certain over-the-counter health supplements can also potentially cause the urine test for nadrolone to turn positive.
The Pakistan Cricket Board had no choice but to come clean with this, and the investigation must now run its course. If the tribunal finds them guilty, the PCB will have to balance the players' interests and the sport's in choosing the penalty. Whether they took it knowingly or unknowingly, punishment is necessary because the use of this substance is banned. If they took it unknowingly from some alternative source, perhaps the punishment should be greater, as would befit a colossal case of misjudgment.
Of course, investigating Asif and Shoaib merely addresses half the problem. Justice demands that we somehow also find a way to investigate the PCB and its officials, whose failure of leadership has led to these events.