Not impressed

FEW Pakistanis will be impressed by Washington’s continuing emphasis on working ‘with’ Islamabad, as evidenced by John Negroponte’s latest visit here. The move contrasts sharply with civil society’s urge to work ‘on’ Islamabad. State violence targeting those who have been protesting peacefully against the suspension of civil rights, erosion of the judiciary, curbs on the media and one man’s quest to concentrate all power in his hands, pitches the state against a Gandhian spirit in action. The moral high ground from which this peaceful battle for the restoration of the rights of law-abiding people is being fought cannot be ceded to American diplomacy. This, whilst fanatic militants get a free hand to spread Talibanisation in parts of the Frontier and the adjoining tribal areas, which is as much of concern to civil society here as it supposedly is to America. Before the imposition of emergency General Musharraf was seen and accepted as talking to the people rather than talking at them. It has since been a case of absolute authority going to one’s head and taking the better of him. If the Americans cannot wake up and smell the beans, let it be their problem. Their soft-peddling on the degree to which they can convince the general to ‘allow’ his people democracy will add more voices to that universally despised term in Washington, the anti-America feeling, and which in Pakistan is restricted to jihadists so far. The alienation of moderate, secular and educated Pakistanis from the general’s reworked recipe for transition to democratic rule is complete. To see the US stick it out on the wrong side of the fence will not win the latter any approval with the people of Pakistan.

Gone is the time when General Musharraf could be thanked for announcing the election date, for his promise to hold fair elections under an independent election commission and on a level playing field. The composition of the caretaker government put in place by him dispels all such claims of fair play — long before it is put to the test on the election day. Elections held under emergency rule and regulations, which can be bent to facilitate erstwhile ministers to hold public rallies when opposition leaders are arrested and barred from doing so under the same rules, is a game plan all too familiar. It is amazing how clichés like ‘pre-election rigging’ refuse to lose their meaning. The firefighting done by American diplomats in recent days, such as securing the release of Ms Bhutto and rights activist Asma Jahangir, for instance, will lend little credibility to the election process which Pakistanis are now convinced is deeply flawed and doomed to failure, as we speak.

Unless emergency is lifted, all political parties are consulted in the constitution of a new caretaker administration, the judiciary and the freedom of the media restored and army uniform doffed, the general stands little chance of redeeming himself at this stage. With each passing day of the people’s non-violent, pro-democracy struggle for the restoration of civil rights, the general and his American backers are losing more and more moral ground with a nation they both profess to be trying to save from tipping over the precipice.

Flouting the law

THE problem lies in enforcement. Despite its shortcomings, the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act 1997 provides a number of tools for addressing many of the country’s environment-related problems as well as violations of existing laws. Rules and guidelines pertaining to biohazards are a welcome recent addition to Pepa, though a specific framework for tackling the growing and serious problem of persistent organic pollutants is yet to be devised. On one front, though, there are no grey areas whatsoever: work cannot commence on any large project without assessing its impact on the environment, and only then can clearance be issued by the relevant provincial environmental protection agency. Depending on the size, cost and nature of the project, its sponsors must undertake an initial environmental examination and/or an environmental impact assessment. This, in essence, is the law as it stands under the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act 1997 and the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Review of IEE and EIA) Regulations 2000. Violations, however, are rife. For the most part, ‘development’ remains divorced from sustainability while influential parties interested only in short-term profit continue to flout the law at will. The provincial and federal environmental protection agencies appear helpless in all this courtesy a combination of apathy, lack of resources and the clout of vested interests. When the government itself chooses to scorn environmental rules and regulations, expecting action from the EPAs is perhaps a forlorn hope.

It was reported on Friday that construction work is already under way at a steel mill in the Port Qasim industrial zone even though no EIA has been carried out by the foreign sponsors of the project. Nor have they bothered to obtain a no-objection certificate from the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency, which in any case is not possible without an EIA. Moves are also afoot to develop upscale recreational and housing facilities in the coastal areas of Sandspit, Hawkesbay and Manora — again without carrying out an impact assessment. Last year the twin islands of Bundal and Buddo were parcelled out to a UAE-based developer without any concern for the environment or the fulfilment of legal formalities. Even where EIAs have been conducted — as in the case of the Karachi elevated expressway or an underpass planned for Lahore — the exercises were little more than a rubberstamp formality, with all objections by civil society ignored. It seems that environmental laws in Pakistan exist only on paper, which is hardly surprising given the general lawlessness crippling the country.

Adverts unbecoming

IT seems that the Election Commission’s draft code of conduct for the next polls has already been consigned to the rubbish bin. The guilty party is the ruling coterie which is answerable in these testing times not to the people or any institution but only to itself. True, the code is yet to be formalised but it would have been in the fitness of things — and in keeping with official claims of a smooth transition — for the government to abide by the recommendations of its own Election Commission. But then decorum in official quarters, like rule of law elsewhere in the country, is in short supply. Under the guidelines for ‘general conduct’, the poll code states without ambiguity: “No advertisement, notice or announcement paid for from public funds shall carry the explicit or implicit reference, name, designation or photo of any public functionary or holder of a state or public office to project him/her as the originator, sponsor, promoter or organiser of any scheme, project, progress, ideology or vision.” These directives have been thrown out of the window by government functionaries at both the federal and provincial levels. After a brief lull, the official campaign of self-aggrandisement is now producing a fresh flurry of advertisements extolling the achievements and ‘vision’ of government functionaries of all hues and stature.

Poor taste and violations of the draft code aside, these advertisements are a criminal waste of public funds. The exchequer is being treated like a private till which can be dipped into at any time and to whatever extent to bankroll image-building in the run-up to the elections. Granted that the government can use all the damage control money can buy, but these efforts must not be funded by the public. As it is the next general election promises to be short on credibility and such brazen misuse of power further erodes public confidence.

Peace is possible

LIKE so many Palestinians of his generation, Sari Nusseibeh looks back at years of struggle that have achieved precious little. His entire adult life has been spent in the shadow of conflict with Israel and it is difficult to find even a glimmer of optimism that it is going to be resolved any time soon.

Yet Nusseibeh, a prominent intellectual and philosopher, believes it could be. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, should, he argues, launch a new peace process at the forthcoming Annapolis conference — and then campaign among their respective electorates for a mandate to negotiate a final peace settlement.

An appropriate response to this might be “bukra fil mish-mish” — a colloquial Arabic phrase that roughly translates as “pigs might fly”.

It is easy to demolish his rosy scenario: each leader may fail to deliver; each risks being hobbled by opponents on his own side. Olmert has to win over hawks opposed to evacuating settlements and dividing Jerusalem. Abbas’s enemies in the Islamist movement Hamas, now running Gaza, accuse him of selling out to the Zionists. And any progress could be nipped in the bud by a Palestinian suicide bombing or Israeli air strike.

All true, Nusseibeh agrees mildly. But, he insists in an interview, success is still possible.

“If you think about it, when we talk about politics and history and how events unfold, sometimes we talk as if it’s all about metaphysical forces. We assume, like in this case, that there are objective impossibilities. I am a pragmatic philosopher. And when you look a bit more closely you realise that in the final analysis it’s not so complicated. It can be reduced to the actions of a person, and that person can in fact make a lot of difference.”

Nusseibeh is soft-spoken, tweedy and academic. But the professorial style is misleading: conversations about Kant provided him with cover from Israeli eavesdropping when he was involved in the first intifada (uprising), producing the clandestine leaflets that shook the occupation to its core.

He may never have fired a shot or thrown a stone in anger, yet his ideas are a powerful antidote to fatalism and the (increasingly widespread) argument that after 40 years Israel’s control over the West Bank, its Palestinians caged into disconnected bantustans, is now an irreversible reality.

“Things could work out if people put their minds to it,” he says. “My faith is in the power of people to write history. One of the tragedies is that we very often sit back feeling that we have no power and that all we can do is express our optimism or pessimism.”

Nusseibeh is no Palestinian everyman. Born into the privilege and wealth of one of Jerusalem’s oldest Muslim families, he studied at Oxford before teaching at Bir Zeit University.

With an English wife and a fancy foreign education, he cut an exotic figure in other ways. Having grown up literally on the post-1948 front line - when the Jordanian and Israeli parts of the city were divided by minefields and barbed wire — he ventured across them, curious to explore the new reality.

When most Palestinians were reeling from their stunning defeat, he worked on a kibbutz in Israel and discovered that the enemy had a human face.

“Until 1967,” he writes in his memoirs Once Upon a Country, published in Britain this week, “we had hardly existed in the minds of these fine people. This absence wasn’t a product of malevolence or ill will. Physically, we simply weren’t part of their world, with most Arabs having been cleared out 20 years earlier. Morally speaking, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us.”

Unusually for any Arab or Muslim, Nusseibeh recognised that Jews had emotional claims on the holy land (their roots in Jerusalem ‘existential and umbilical’), and refused to see Zionism as just another facet of western colonialism, or to ignore the role of the Nazi Holocaust in forging Jewish nationalism.

“Isn’t the ability to imagine the lives of the ‘other’ at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” he asks.

Even so, there were limits to empathy: he taught at the Hebrew University in Israeli west Jerusalem before the grim and sometimes brutal reality of living under military rule - facing a young soldier at a roadblock who might have been one of his own students - forced him to retreat.

In his Bir Zeit lecture hall he realised early on that Islamist students were hostile to the dawning understanding among Palestinians (many of them ‘graduates’ of Israeli prisons) that there had to be two-state solution to the conflict.

The Israelis, though, foolishly encouraged the groups who were to become Hamas as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the rest of the PLO.

Nusseibeh’s book is fascinating on the relationship between West Bankers and the PLO leadership in exile, describing the peremptory Armani-suited apparatchik who tried to control grassroots activism on the campus.

Even when becoming the organisation’s representative for Jerusalem, harassed by Israeli agents and doing time in prison (accused, absurdly, of spying for Iraq) he remained semi-detached - an intellectual uncomfortable with the intrigue and short-term thinking of ‘professional’ politicians.

Over the years Nusseibeh’s independence and his advocacy of co-existence and dialogue attracted suspicion, hostility and death threats — though none intimidating enough to crush his sense of duty to speak out.

Now back on campus as president of Jerusalem’s al-Quds university, he is openly critical of Fatah for provoking this summer’s Hamas coup in Gaza.

But there is, he suggests, still an argument to win, if Abbas can make a case for light at the end of the negotiating tunnel.

“The thing is not to try to change their ideology, but to win the people over to one’s own side. The relevant issue is not whether the ideology exists but how much support it has.”

In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, with its bus bombings, martyrs and Israeli re-conquest of the West Bank (“a catastrophic, slapdash brawl...a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness”) Nusseibeh teamed up with Ami Ayalon, the dovish former head of Israel’s Shin Bet secret service, to try to galvanise the majority of people on both sides who say they want to live in ‘two states for two nations’ - but doubt whether it can ever be achieved.

Nusseibeh’s faith and determination that it can be rings through. And if this is the triumph of hope over bitter experience it is still inspiring to hear it.

“In retrospect people will feel it was stupid to spend so much time over dividing this piece of land,” he muses. “I’m not saying it’s easy to reach a mathematical solution, but such a solution does still exist. I’m not saying that it’s guaranteed. It’s a question of deciding in which direction to walk.” — Dawn/The Guardian New Service