Why this ambiguity?
THE nation will heave a sigh of relief over Mr Shaukat Aziz’s denial of reports that the country was heading towards emergency or another spell of martial law. Talking to Dawn at the Governor’s House, Lahore, on Wednesday, the Prime Minister termed such reports as “speculative and untrue”. A categorical denial of these reports was needed not merely because sections of the media have been writing about it in a way that was scary but also because some government functionaries have been hinting at such possibilities. At least one federal minister — Sheikh Rashid Ahmad — and a chief minister — Arbab Ghulam Rahim — are on record having said that martial law could be imposed if President Musharraf was not re-elected president. On Wednesday, the prime minister was careful in his choice of words, and in spite of what appeared to be a denial of the “speculative” reports, he said that emergency rule was not being considered “at the moment”, though the Constitution allowed such an option. In spite of these denials, rumours will continue to circulate, creating doubts about the future. Some time back, President Musharraf had himself denied such reports, but the fact that rumours and speculations are still rife show that the people are not sure about what lies ahead. One major reason why such rumours gain currency is that the government itself seems determined to keep the people guessing. What it gains from this policy of hide-and-seek is hard to understand. But one would like to ask the top echelon leaders why they have decided to keep the nation on the tenterhooks. Indeed, why is not the government coming up with a definite election schedule?
On Tuesday, while launching ‘Vision 2030’, the president emphasised the need for maintaining political stability to ensure economic progress. We have had occasion to comment on ‘Vision 2030’ and pointed out that the goal it had set for itself —“well-ordered and inclusive society, where imbalances resolved by the continuation of an ancient order are resolved and national wealth is shared equitably” — was laudable. However, we made it clear that the Vision stood “a chance of success and acceptability by the people of Pakistan if it is implemented by governments which are democratic in character and motive”. This holds good for all issues and challenges facing Pakistan. Basically, today’s Pakistan is a victim of political and constitutional ad-hocism. There is — ignoring the Yahya and Bhutto years — an unfortunate 11-year cycle: the pre-Ayub political era (1947-58), the Ayub era (1958-69), Ziaul Haq’s 11 years (1977-1988), the Benazir-Nawaz era (1988-1999) and now the Musharraf regime, which seems determined to go beyond 11 years. Saviours have come and gone but the end-result is that today Pakistan does not have democratic institutions and a workable constitutional framework.
Since the military takeover of October 1999 the country has seen a higher rate of economic growth, and there have been some progressive pieces of legislation. But there is no evidence yet that we are anywhere near democracy as it is understood the world over – more so because the government continues to temporise with the general election. This is one reason why rumour mills are working overtime, and the government seems to encourage them by refusing to come out with an election schedule. Finally, there is a need for muzzling some PML leaders, among them Chaudhry Shujaat and Sheikh Rashid. Both are a big source of rumours because of the way they talk.
Recovering the ‘disappeared’
THE Supreme Court’s drive for the recovery of missing people believed to be in the custody of the intelligence agencies is yielding results. On Tuesday, the court ordered the release of two men, one of whom was produced in court. Aleem Nasir, a German national, said that he had been arrested by the ISI at Lahore airport more than a month ago and was subsequently harassed and interrogated. He has been luckier than most detainees who have been subjected to extreme torture as in the case of suspected Al Qaeda operative, Saud Memon, who was produced in court last May on a stretcher and in an unrecognisable state after having been in the ISI’s custody for two years. By pointing out on Tuesday that the ISI was not a law enforcement agency, the Supreme Court has once again drawn attention to the need for setting operational parameters for the agencies that seem to be answerable to no one for their actions. The Ministry of Defence said last year that they were not under its “operational control”. If so, then it must be made clear who they take their directions from so that their independence is curtailed and government control over them is tightened. Otherwise, there will be no end to arbitrary detentions and custodial torture, and the agencies will continue to hold ‘suspected’ political and religious activists incommunicado for long periods.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that while it is engaged at the moment in “providing instant relief to the complainant”, the role of the intelligence agencies would be considered later. Hopefully, such a process will not be put off indefinitely, for, although there has been progress in recovering the ‘disappeared’, people continue to go missing and are presumed to have been picked up by intelligence operatives. Fortunately, the families of the disappeared have been agitating consistently for the recovery of their missing relatives, and this has not gone unnoticed by human rights groups and civil society that, of late, has been more actively questioning acts by the government and its related agencies that violate the Constitution.
Tragic road accident
THE death of 29 people in a road accident in Azad Kashmir’s Neelum valley on Monday speaks volumes about the dismal condition of roads in the region on the one hand and negligence of the concerned authorities responsible to ensure the road worthiness of public transport. True, the Oct 2005 earthquake played havoc with the network of roads in northern parts of the state but one wonders why over the last 22 months the government has not been able to improve their condition to ensure safe travelling for its citizens. As far as the treacherous Neelum valley road is concerned, its several portions, including the one where Monday’s tragic accident took place, were wiped out during the devastating earthquake. These stretches were carved out of landslide-prone steep mountains weeks after the quake but their dangerous state continues to pose a threat to the lives of all commuters. While very little attention seems to have been given to improve the condition of Neelum valley road, the AJK government has awarded a hefty contract for improvement of a 28-kilometre stretch of the road between Kohala and Dhirkot.
The second thing that the AJK authorities have been overlooking is the fitness of vehicles plying as public transport. Monday’s accident was the outcome of a technical fault which was casually removed by the driver and which later spelt disaster for its passengers. Residents say most of the vehicles which are being run on different routes have either outlived their normal life or have been locally altered to accommodate the maximum load beyond their actual capacity. It should serve as an eye opener for the AJK government to re-determine its priorities and ensure that all outmoded and faulty vehicles are taken off the routes so that any further loss of life in such incidents is averted.
High cost of ‘special relationship’
IS George W. Bush ready to pounce on Pakistan to “smoke out” accused Al Qaeda members, regardless of what Pakistanis may say about it? President Bush coyly refuses to rule out unilateral US military action. His movie macho man posturing, as tiresome as it is to disenchanted people around the planet, still plays well with his hardcore constituency of ruthless high-rollers and provincial zealots.
Bush made the surly remark mostly to fend off Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama who made similar threatening noises, before he rapidly backed off. Bush’s remark, interestingly, raised far less fuss than rumours of Musharraf’s toying with a declaration of a state of emergency.
The bitter irony is that it may well be true that Musharraf entertained such extreme measures so as to mollify the US in the first place. The US Congress was pressing for more “toughness” in exchange for aid, seeing the Pakistan government’s peace deal in North Waziristan, for example, as tantamount to making a safe haven for Al Qaeda.
Musharraf had to placate US congressmen, but how? One could not consciously devise a more confusing array of signals than that which the US sent to Pakistan lately. As always, to what extent the US follows through on intervention or aid depends not on the situation on the ground in Pakistan but on what the Bush administration judges it needs to do to pander to its domestic political support.
Bush’s ratings at home are nearing rock bottom — as low as the disgraced Nixon after he resigned — so there is precious little for him to lose among the non-moneyed classes. Instead of caution, the record indicates that the man who treated the 2000 election — when he lost the popular vote — as a massive mandate for him will continue blithely carrying out the radical reactionary Republican agenda.
Hence, one still cannot cross out Iran as a US target no matter how crazy such an attack would be. In politics, unfortunately, an action which the majority regards as sheer insanity can be deemed a brilliant coup by powerful sub-groups who gain by it.Bush demonstrates a chronic cluelessness, a lack of any sense of the damaging implications of his truculent remarks (and actions) abroad. The problem is that, despite the gory quagmire of Iraq, and economic doldrums for the average American at home (60 per cent say the economy is awful), his key advisors still assume that military coercion or judicious bribes will enable them to prod everyone into line with their plans, no matter how daft they actually are. Some of his key associates have already started abandoning the sinking ship.
If Bush and Brown really were to bombard Pakistan’s northwest areas, Pathan forces would be driven to unite with religious zealots in mutual pacts of resistance. That will help to demolish secular influences in those areas. Fundamentalists are in government in the Frontier and in Balochistan today, precisely because of indiscriminate actions aimed at anyone alleged to be sympathetic to the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
Joining Al Qaeda is not like enlisting in at your local army recruiter. They don’t issue membership cards. If you think you are Al Qaeda, you are. Unfortunately, if any overly imaginative authority thinks you are Al Qaeda, you are as well.
This arbitrariness suits Bush perfectly because he needs to generate enemies to justify preordained policies. Pakistan would be a loser if it does everything the Bush regime wants. That’s okay with Bush. America as a whole would be a loser too, but Bush doesn’t care about America as a whole. It is a small class of wheeler-dealers whom he heeds. In politics, there is no tragedy — even or especially of 9/11 proportions — that will not be turned by cynical operators into an opportunity to pursue a self-serving agenda.
The unabashedly imperialist neoconservative agenda has made the US regime unpopular with everyone who is not on its payroll. Bush is divinely indifferent. The arms trade, especially in the Middle East, is roaring along. Corporate profit rates are double the rate they were during Clinton’s prosperous years. The rich grow immensely richer.
In the US, as journalist Pierre Tristram points out, rightwing policies since Reagan shift what amounts to 400 billion dollars a year — about $3,000 per earner — from the pockets of wage and salary earners into profits. If these policymakers were ordinary pickpockets you’d jail them. Speaking of which, the drug problem is used to justify the American Right’s construction of a profitable “prison state” where much of the lower class has done time. Everyone else lives in a suffocating culture of surveillance.
Need we mention oil prices and what they mean for living standards of ordinary people? If this is how American elites treat fellow citizens, what do they care about Pakistan?
The apt saying in Pakistan is, God preserve us from our friends. Like the soothing myth of a “special relationship” between the US and Britain (which is contingent on the UK complying with US desires), there is no Pakistani-American friendship in any guaranteed sense. Friendship and aid is dished out insofar as it suits the US establishment, regardless of the particular party in power. Some governments, though, are more brusque than others when wielding power.
Tony Blair belatedly found that there was dangerously little to be gained by backing the utterly disingenuous US invasion of Iraq. Blair would still be prime minister but for his foolish calculation. Heeding the obvious lesson, Gordon Brown is inching as tactfully but firmly as possible towards full withdrawal from Iraq. Brown ultimately may decide to pull out of Afghanistan too.
A suddenly “special relationship” with the US suited General Zia as he creamed off funds earmarked for the most feudal forces in the Afghan war against the Soviets. Russia and Afghanistan are what they are today because of US and Saudi largesse at the time. Splashing foreign money around Pakistan brought a pestilential deluge of weapons and drugs and blind fundamentalism.
A few grabbed the bulk of the proceeds while everyone else coped with the noxious consequences. The revived US alliance also suited Musharraf perfectly in the immediate 9/11 aftermath, lifting Pakistan out of pariah state status.
In a high-security climate, with censorship and fear rampant, counterproductive foreign policies are good things because they reproduce conditions under which the Right happily rules. Failing is what they do best. What is rational for the country as a whole is not rational (that is, profitable) for the elites in charge of them. The whole point of ultra-patriotic displays is to cloak this divide so as to prevent questions about it, and no one does it better than the American mass media.
Secretary of Defence Robert Gates talks about staying in Iraq for 30 years. Here is the “permanent war” that governments crave even as they pretend that they don’t relish the power and impunity that go along with it. The Democratic US Congress — which answers primarily to donors, not voters — continues even now to go along with the executive branch power grab. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, elites expertly manage to induce the lower 80 per cent of the population “to pay any price, bear any burden” to maintain someone else’s riches.
The Bush regime — busy bilking its own citizens — has done little for ordinary Pakistanis except to stir up internal turmoil which it then blames exclusively on Al Qaeda. In India as well, one side of the nation, as public relations shills brag, is “shining” while, on the other, a civil war rages in more than 100 districts. The Indians are cosying up to the US too and they do so by humouring the US Republican vision of a savage world where those who rig markets ride roughshod over hapless majorities.
If a third of the South Asian subcontinent can be refashioned into a consumer culture at the expense of the other impoverished two-thirds then so be it. Is this not the logical outcome of the world order that Bush is driving all countries to adapt everywhere? But one cannot do anything about it until one recognises the sublime horror of what is really happening.
Slow road to justice
THIRTEEN years after the start of majority rule in South Africa, Adriaan Vlok has become the first ––and so far only –– senior politician from the former white regime to be convicted of apartheid-era crimes.
With four others, the ex-minister of law and order admitted trying to murder an anti-apartheid activist in 1989 by poisoning his underwear with a nerve agent. On Friday he got a suspended prison sentence.
For some, the Vlok case has raised fears of a belated witch-hunt and a reopening of divisions that many had hoped to see healed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose monumental documentation of atrocities by both sides in the conflict was published in 1998.
The commission’s achievements are still debated; many feel it did not fulfil its promise. But it was never really in a position to deliver a total solution: those who confessed and made a public admission of their crimes could be granted amnesty. Those who did not, however, remained open to prosecution. The prosecution of Mr Vlok is perhaps best viewed in the spirit of reconciliation that was established by the commission.
––The Guardian, London