Regulating democracy

WHAT is common in the creation of a committee to screen the ruling party’s parliamentarians for a new term, the organisation of an election cell in Punjab, the ‘disappearance’ of the PPP- Patriots, and the new parliamentary rules of conduct? The answer is: the working of a democratic system regulatory authority. The omens are unsavoury.

All parties scrutinise, or should scrutinise, the performance of their parliamentary representatives at the time of examining their request for party tickets in a new election. Traditionally this has been done by bodies all parties describe as parliamentary boards. The scheme is supposed to work like this: A board studies the credentials of candidates seeking the party ticket in each constituency, including the sitting member of a house as well as new aspirants to elective office. The board may award the party ticket to the sitting legislator or may dump him in favour of a new candidate. At least in the bad old days before independence there used to be an appellate board to hear the cases of all those who were aggrieved by the decision of the first parliamentary board.In the course of vulgarisation of politics in Pakistan, and elsewhere too, deviations from this scheme may have become common, and the parliamentary candidates’ selection may have been reserved for the party supremo, but democratic politics knows no other way of choosing party representatives for any assignments.

The criteria for selecting party candidates for elected bodies is not written in any manual. To an extent a good candidate is a person who understands and is committed to his/her party’s manifesto and has appreciable support in the constituency he/she wishes to represent. There may be other considerations, some in accord with democratic norms and some others repugnant to them. But the exercise is quite different from ACR writing by bureaucrats, and it is fairly transparent.

The committee reportedly set up to open dossiers on the ruling party parliamentarians is quite a different fish. Apparently, instead of a party outfit, it is an official entity, paid for by the state, and accountable to the government only. And its functioning is secret. Whatever the objectives of the exercise, and it is not difficult to imagine what these can be, the whole approach is anti-democratic. It amounts to regulating elections in a manner alien to democratic politics. It reveals the same thought process that had earlier given us some ugly concepts such as ‘controlled democracy’ and ‘guided democracy’.

No dissimilar is the premises of the high-level election cell created in the Punjab province. Any political party may create a cell to prepare constituency profiles, identify established vote banks in the country, and analyse the success/failure of candidates in preceding elections. This is good politics. The same cannot be said, however, about an election cell created by the state and functioning secretly. Something could be said in its favour if its findings were meant to be offered to students of electoral politics, research scholars, media persons and the public at large.

That cannot be the purpose of a secret undertaking. Since the people can recall the working of similar cells on the eve of and during general elections in the past, it is impossible to dismiss the thought that the present cell has been established to continue tits predecessors’ mission, that is, to manipulate elections in favour of the entrenched establishment. Regulated democracy begins with regulated polls.

There is nothing surreptitious about the disappearance of one of the establishment’s auxiliary companies known as PPP-Patriots. Their merger with the PML (Q) may be likened to formalisation of a partnership into a more popularly acceptable bond.

For all political purpose, the worthies concerned have for years been in the camp they have now notified as their permanent address. But for this they have had to add some adverse remarks to those they had attracted in 2002. The worldly-wise are offering several explanations – that as PPP – Patriots they could receive no accommodation with the present masters of Punjab or that they would have become homeless in the event of government’s understanding with the flock from which they had broken away.

There may be some substance in these theories but a more decisive cause of the awakening of the honourable patriots seem to be the regulatory authority’s known discomfort with diversity and its insistence on gathering its forces under a single or unified command.

What has revealed to the people the most easily recognizable (so far) portrait of the democracy regulatory authority is the adoption of a new code to punish parliamentarians who can be so ill-mannered as to violate the rules of decorum, make noise (unauthorised, that is ) in the holy chamber, and criticise the president, the armed forces or the judiciary. The message is: the dictum that democracy is a messy affair does not hold good in Pakistan, here will be grown a thoroughly sanitised brand of democracy in which nobody is out of step, nobody stirs, and nobody raises his/her voice higher than a whisper. Regulated democracy, in plain words.

Let us take note of some amusing statements made by privileged citizens in justification of the new code. It has been said that criticism of the armed forces and the judiciary is already prohibited in the Constitution and now only president has been added to them. The statement can easily be assailed. The constitutional provision under reference is contained in Article 63 (g) and it runs as follows:

“ 63. A person shall be disqualified from being elected or chosen as, and from being, a member of the Majlis-i- Shura (Parliament) if

(g) he is propagating any opinion, or acting in any manner, prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan, or the sovereignty, integrity or security of Pakistan, or morality, or maintenance of law and order, or the integrity or independence of the judiciary of Pakistan, or which defames or brings into ridicule the judiciary or the armed forces of Pakistan.”

While invoking this provision to justify the new rules of procedure, two points need to be noted. First, democratic opinion has never accepted this sub-section, as well as the other eligibility tests for members of parliament arbitrarily devised by Gen. Ziaul Haq. The restrictions on parliamentarians interfere with their responsibilities as defenders of public interest. Now they are being made liable to arbitrary punishment Hence democratic opinion has consistently demanded repeal of the clauses added to Articles 62 and 63 by Gen. Zia

Secondly, the authors of the new rules of procedure seem to assume that any criticism of an institution, such as the judiciary or the armed forces, amounts to defaming it or bringing it into ridicule. The proposition is simply preposterous.

It has been argued that the Speaker has been given additional powers to control unruly conduct by parliamentarians in order to ensure peace and proper decorum in the house during a presidential address. The lack of such guarantees is said to have been the main reason that General Pervez Musharraf has not addressed the parliament he himself brought into being. What this matter involves is a strategy for dealing with opposition elements in the parliament. Assuming for the sake of argument that those who created noise or sought to disrupt presidential address in the past violated a sacred code of behaviour, the question is whether threats of punishment is the only way to deal with them. The democratic system does provide for resolution of such matters through government-opposition negotiations and issue-based understanding. Unfortunately, however, authority in Pakistan seems to believe that those opposed to it are only fit to be put on the chopping block.

Much has been said in denigration of the popular modes of political expression the people have followed for decades. For them politics means congregation in open space, processions, slogan-mongering in streets, and the excitement of thrust and counter-thrust in political fencing. The regulatory authority wants to put an end to all this, all that gives democracy its colour and vibrancy. This is a recipe for depoliticisation of society. And

we are already witnessing the result of this operation.

Democracy does not suffer decline by being noisy and messy, but the imposition of garrison discipline will surely choke it to death. This country needs more and more articulate, even angry, defenders of the rights of the poor and the marginlised and not tongueless models of obsequiousness that react neither to the rapacity of the privileged nor the despair of families driven to suicide by hunger and want.

There must come a day when a Pakistani citizen does not have to cry out ‘chali hai rasm keh koi na sar utha kai chaley.’

Loose screws

THE 9/11 conspiracy theory is back, in a much more virulent form, and normally sane people are being taken in by it: I am getting half a dozen earnest e-mails every day telling me I must see a film called "Loose Change." It has been around in various versions for almost two years, but it now seems to be gathering converts faster than ever.

Well, I have seen it, and I concede that it is a much slicker, more professional product than other 9/11 conspiracy films, and therefore more seductive. But the argument is pure paranoid fantasy, and it is rotting people's brains.

There have always been two versions of 9/11 conspiracy theory. The lesser version held that the Bush administration had advance intelligence of Al Qaeda's plans, but chose to ignore the warning because the attacks suited its purposes. The greater version insisted that there was no Al Qaeda involvement, and that the attacks were carried out by the US government.

Until recently, the greater version was largely confined to the Arab world, where many people are in complete denial about any Arab involvement in the atrocity. Very few Americans took that version seriously, though many wondered whether the intelligence lapses had really been accidental.

Even the lesser conspiracy would have required the complicity of half a dozen very senior people who received the intelligence and decided to ignore it: the heads of the CIA and the FBI (George Tenet and Louis Freeh), the national security adviser (Condoleezza Rice), the secretaries of defence and state (Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell), plus of course Vice-President Cheney and perhaps President Bush. It would also have required the permanent silence (or silencing) of a dozen lower-level intelligence analysts who knew that the senior people had seen the information.

I don't believe that happened because I don't think that Tenet, Rice, Powell et al. would have deliberately plotted the deaths of thousands of Americans. I don't believe even Dick Cheney would have done that. And I note that there has been no inexplicable wave of sudden deaths among junior intelligence analysts in Washington.

I do believe, however, that 9/11 served the purposes of the neo-conservatives and their allies in the Bush administration. They were already planning to attack Iraq, as part of a larger plan, dating back to the late 1990s and the Project for a New American Century, to re-launch Pax America and re-establish American hegemony in the 21st century world. I agree that they were adroit in seizing on 9/11 as a way of enlisting popular support for their project. But that's all.

I cannot absolutely refute the lesser conspiracy theory, but I find it extremely implausible. The greater conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is just plain loony -- and yet more and more people are falling for it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate the impact of a well-made film.

"Loose Change" confidently asserts that the twin towers were brought down by carefully placed demolition charges, not by the fires ignited by the planes that hit them; that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile and not by a plane at all; and that the fourth "hijacked" plane, Flight 93, did not crash in a field in Pennsylvania but landed at Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again.

What about all the calls that the passengers on Flight 93 made on their phones? Their voices were cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and the calls to their relatives were faked. The FBI was in on it, the CIA was in on it, the US Air Force was in on it (except, of course, those USAF personnel who were killed at the Pentagon), and North American Aerospace Defence Command was in on it (but they kept the Canadians in NORAD out of the loop.)

The security companies guarding the World Trade Centre were in on it, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in on it, the Federal Aviation Administration was in on it, NASA was in on it, and the Pentagon was in on it. At least ten thousand people were in on it. They had to be, or it couldn't have worked. And more than five years later, not one of them has talked.

Nobody has got drunk and spilled their guts. Nobody has told their spouse, who then blabbed. Not one of these ten thousand accomplices to mass murder has yielded to the temptation for instant fame and great wealth if only they blow the whistle on the greatest conspiracy in history. Even the Mafia code of silence is nothing compared to this.

In normal times you wouldn't waste breath arguing with people who fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of "Loose Change" claim that their film has already been seen by over 100 million people, and looking at my e-mail in-tray I believe them. It is a real problem, because by linking their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration's deliberate deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion of Iraq, they bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush administration. --Copyright

The spin cycle runs dry

IN the end, even the jurors believed that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was a fall guy for his more savvy and connected colleagues in the White House, many of whom tried to use elite members of the media to cut the legs out from under an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's Iraq war policy.

The problem for Libby, though, is that there is no recognized fall-guy defence under the law. No matter how important or powerful they are, no matter how many cohorts get off scot-free, the Joe Schmo left holding the bag is usually in trouble.

That's just one of the relevant takeaways from Tuesday's verdict in Libby's federal perjury and obstruction of justice trial in Washington. Another is that, no matter how dry, dense and technical the law may be, it still can from time to time stop cold even the most flamboyant spin that bureaucrats, officials and politicians have to offer. Libby's lawyers were still spinning Tuesday after the verdict, but their words were as empty as their client's defence turned out to be.

There is no mystery to the result here. A jury of seven women and four men convicted Libby because Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald strongly presented a strong case. Government witnesses were focused and likable and, most of all, appeared trustworthy — even the journalists who were dragged kicking and screaming to the witness stand. All of them helped convince the panel from many different angles that it was legally inconceivable that Libby could have simply made a mistake when asked under oath by federal agents, prosecutors and grand jurors what he knew about Valerie Plame and when he knew it.

Jurors also convicted Libby because the defence case that his lawyers offered was porous and weak. In all likelihood, the panel doomed him to prison partly because he didn't haul himself to the witness stand and explain to jurors how he reasonably could have forgotten the details of a special project — the political and perhaps personal destruction of Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson lV — so soon after being so heavily involved in it. They said with their verdict that they wanted more from Libby's lawyers. More witnesses. More evidence. More compelling reasons to vote "no" on conviction. They got none of these things.

Some trials are hard to explain. This one wasn't. And it was never destined to be. Legally speaking, the case was a simple one. United States vs. Libby was always more about politics than law; more about how the witnesses and evidence would play in the court of public opinion than in the courtroom. That is what makes Tuesday's verdicts even more disheartening to White House officials and their supporters. Not only did Libby lose the legal case against Fitzgerald, the White House lost the political case on the talk shows and online blogs and everywhere else where people care about such things.

So now we move to the next phase. Even as they prepare a no-doubt futile motion for a new trial and look for grounds for an appeal, Libby's lawyers also will begin preparing their client for his sentencing in June. Some legal observers believe that Libby somehow will avoid prison for these crimes.

I am not among them. US District Judge Reggie alton is likely to sentence Libby to a prison term that is at least twice as long as the prison sentence Martha Stewart received when she lost her federal perjury and obstruction of justice case in 2004. — Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

Playing sectarian card

DESPITE the horrific failure of its adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, the US is now said to be preparing to attack Iran. Meanwhile, all disputes in the Middle East have suddenly turned into sectarian conflicts and Iran is portrayed as the main culprit.

Nothing now seems comprehensible to the western media and political establishments unless seen through the prism of Iranian ambitions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and even more distant conflicts such as Somalia and Darfur. Opponents of Iran and of whomever Iran is thought to support in the region no longer want us to see US interventions as the main issue — let alone the primary cause of the mayhem enveloping the entire Middle East.

The claim that sectarianism is driving conflict across the Muslim world could not have gained currency had it not been for the manner in which Saddam Hussein was executed. Only a few weeks earlier a poll in Egypt, whose Muslim population is almost exclusively Sunni, ranked Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas’s Khalid Mish’al as the three most popular figures (two of the three are Shia).

The staged lynching of the former Iraqi leader, whom the Americans and their allies have long portrayed as a Sunni dictator, drastically changed perceptions. Millions of Sunnis around the world saw the hanging as a contemptuous Shia act, as an insult by an ungrateful minority whose existence today is testimony to the majority’s tolerance.

Since then some Fatah zealots in Palestine have labelled the Sunni Hamas as “Shia” because the movement was promised financial aid by Iran. Some Sunni elements in the ruling coalition in Lebanon have justified their opposition to Hezbollah — despite its role in the country’s victory against Israel — as necessary to stop the expansion of Shi’ism in Lebanon. Rumours about the conversion of Sunnis to Shi’ism in Syria spread like wildfire, though without proof. Some Sunnis have also condemned Iran for allegedly carrying out Shia missionary activities in North Africa and Sudan.

Of all the hot spots in the region, Iraq is the only place where sectarian tension has tipped over into bloody conflict. But that only happened in the aftermath of the invasion. The US and Britain, having failed to come up with any evidence to justify their aggression, claimed that their aim was to rescue the Shia majority from Saddam’s Sunni regime.

In fact, there is no census evidence showing the Shia as a majority nor was there any credibility to the claim that Saddam’s regime was Sunni. It was secular and nationalist, and the ruling Ba’ath party was believed to have more Shias in its ranks than Sunnis. Thirty-two of the 52 names on the US most-wanted list were Shias, and Saddam punished whoever rose against his regime, irrespective of religion or ethnicity.

Despite the US-Shia alliance that brought his rule to an end, sectarianism did not become serious until the US-led occupation replaced Saddam’s regime with one based on quotas, a process destined to divide Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines. Then came the destruction of one of the most venerated Shia shrines in the overwhelmingly Sunni city of Samarra in February last year. The bombing provided the pretext for the Mahdi army and Iranian-backed interior and defence ministries militias of the Iraqi regime to go on the rampage, driving Sunnis from their homes in Baghdad and slaughtering them. Since then no less than a hundred Iraqis have lost their lives each day in unprecedented sectarian strife.

Now the Americans and their Arab allies in the region seem convinced that their Iranian adversary is the real winner from the occupation of Iraq. The threat to US interests has been compounded by the refusal of the Iranians to abandon their nuclear programme. The US-Shia alliance in Iraq has backfired on America. Now, as the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches, a US-Sunni alliance seems to be in the making to pave the way for an attack against Iran. It is widely believed in the region that the meeting in Jordan on February 20 between Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and the intelligence chiefs of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates was aimed at preparing the ground. The idea appears to be for the Sunni world, which until recently would have been opposed to any attack on Iran, to see the merits of a US strike. The role of Washington’s friends in the region would be to portray Iran as the real threat to both Arabs and Sunnis. The best climate for achieving such an objective is sectarianism not only inside Iraq but across the region.

But the new US-Sunni alliance is likely to backfire, as the US-Shia alliance did. If one of the latter’s repercussions was a Sunni backlash, wait and see what an Iranian-backed Shia explosion of anger will do to our world. And the anger will not be confined to Shias. The US-Sunni alliance is in fact a coalition with the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan — which falsely claim to represent Sunni Islam and are loathed by their populations — along with their backers in the west.

If Iran is attacked, it is highly unlikely that the Sunnis will be indifferent; just as they stood by Hezbollah last summer, they will stand by Iran. The attempt to create a US-Sunni alliance has already failed to convince most Sunnis that Iran — rather than the US — is the real enemy. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is the director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought and the author of “Hamas: Unwritten Chapters.”

Giving up oil

LIKE eternal sunshine or perpetual motion, a world beyond oil is something that sounds delightful but implausible. Society has become so addicted to the black stuff that the habit seems permanent.

But if that turns out to be true then all the bold talk about tackling change means little. Technologies such as carbon capture and fuel efficiency may reduce the harm that oil use causes — but any gains will be wiped out by economic growth around the world. As David Miliband argued in a speech on Monday, "the goal could not be clearer: for reasons of energy security and climate security, take the carbon out of our fuel supplies".

That demands a transition as quick and massive as the shift from coal to electricity and oil at the start of the last century. In 1914 oil was only just beginning to emerge as a universal fuel; by 2014 it should, if Mr Miliband's words mean anything, be in decline.

Could it happen? Politicians, in Europe at least, are beginning to act as though it might. Mr Miliband argues that the pressure to change will become unavoidable, not just because of climate change but because of uncertainty about where future oil supplies will come from.

The North Sea, once Britain's bright hope for a post-coal economy, has only a few years of large-scale production remaining. But since oil is cheap and easy to use it will be incredibly hard to give up, especially since the biggest benefit of new fuels — lower carbon emissions — will be shared with future generations. Past changes in energy technology have made life easier for the people who use it; this switch might make things harder and more expensive.

That is why citizens, governments, international bodies and companies have to create the change together. The Stern report showed that the economics of limiting climate change are compelling, but markets will not find a solution on their own. Mr Miliband argues that the issue is one that only radical progressives, sensitive to the distribution of the costs, can tackle. "To be pro environment you have to be pro market solutions, you have to be pro government intervention and you have to be pro a Europe of reform and innovation," he said yesterday (though David Cameron might agree). He enthused about electric cars, progress in Sweden, and the role of the EU as a building block towards a global response.

As a technical presentation it was as convincing as the performance Mr Miliband gave to the cabinet last week, which left ministers in no doubt about the inadequacy of Britain's response so far.

But it was less reassuring as evidence that the British government is about to take the policy decisions that would put a post-oil economy in place. As Mr Miliband said himself, "words like 'transformation' and 'radical change' are used frequently in politics".

By the end of 2007 it will be clear whether or not world leaders are serious. The EU's test will come later this week, at a European council meeting which should see its 27 members agree to a 20 per cent cut in their combined carbon emissions.

Britain has played a constructive role in this, and in the EU's offer to take the cut to 30 per cent if other states, such as the US, agree.

In June the G8 will try to match this, and in December the UN will begin the process of setting targets that run beyond 2012, the limit of the Kyoto agreement. The international mood is shifting, not just in the United States but in countries such as China and Australia, where this autumn's general election will be dominated by the environment.

Mr Miliband's task is to put Britain in the lead. Next week's climate change bill aims to put backbone into policy; published in draft, it must be strengthened by parliament before it becomes law in 2008. Dreaming of a future beyond the oil age is easy. Getting there will be painful.

— The Guardian, London