End of the line?

FEW should have been surprised by Gen Musharraf’s resignation last Monday. The writing on the wall had become clear many days earlier.

The significance of the coalition government’s coup de grâce is quite evident but time alone will tell whether this marks only the end of a single career or whether it can be taken as the end of the line for extra-constitutional regimes.

The wave of exultation that swept the country following Gen Pervez Musharraf’s resignation can easily be appreciated. For the first time in the country’s history a usurper of state power had been obliged to quit through a constitutional process, an indirect expression of the people’s will.

Previously public pressure in the streets had forced the all powerful Field Marshal Ayub Khan to withdraw from the presidential contest and to demolish the system he had flaunted in the face of unarmed democrats. But the people were cheated out of their final victory by his confidant of long years — Gen Yayha Khan. The latter was in turn toppled by his comrades-in-arms after a political and military debacle for which all of them were collectively responsible. Gen Zia defied public indictment till the heavens issued summons he could not evade. What happened on Monday was unprecedented.

Mr Pervez Musharraf’s exit has given the people the feeling that it was they who decided the matter in the polling booths on Feb 18, numerous complaints of unfair means to thwart their will notwithstanding. They wished the change in the presidency to have occurred soon after the new government was installed. However, it is no use blaming the coalition leaders for delaying the proceedings against Mr Musharraf by four months. One may give them the benefit of the doubt — that perhaps what became possible in the middle of Aug 2008 could not have been accomplished earlier. If wearing down the powerful Musharraf lobby was their strategy, it clicked and they are entitled to claim credit for that.

There is no need to rebut Mr Pervez Musharraf’s long apologia but it may be necessary to save the gullible from being misled by the train of his arguments. The address was like an accused’s statement in his own defence. He did not say a word about the 1999 takeover, the sack of the judiciary, the missing persons, the so-called emergency, or the manipulation to secure his own re-election. By building his defence wholly on claims of economic development he betrayed his inability to comprehend the dynamics of democracy.

England owed Churchill far more than Musharraf could ever claim to have done for Pakistan but the people declined to allow him another term in power soon after the war had been won. Mrs Indira Gandhi’s ‘feats’, such as the conquest of East Bengal and the Pokhran nuclear test could not save her from a humiliating defeat at the polls.

Even if Mr Musharraf’s claims of development can be entertained, for the sake of argument alone, no trade-off between development and self-government is permissible in any civilised code. To argue to the contrary is to put a cross on humankind’s struggles against colonialism. The colonial power built more roads and educational institutions than all the self-appointed rulers of Pakistan put together. Does that mean we were wrong in asking for independence? The harm done to the people’s minds and souls by dictatorial regimes is comparable to colonial depredation. Both cause infinitely greater havoc than the good claimed by their advocates. Authoritarianism is singularly virtueless.

The problem with Mr Musharraf was his failure to see why his continuance in office could not be countenanced. The simple fact is he had become a symbol of the people’s bondage in their own land. He himself wrote the script of his downfall with the misadventures of March 9 and Nov 3 last year. No ruler can afford to ignore the limits of arrogance.

It is quite obvious that Mr Musharraf’s devoted friends at home and abroad, excluding the hatchet men reared by him and the so-called constitutional experts who were out to prove they were not worth their salt, stood by him and saved him from a worse denouement. Who did what over the last few weeks is now a part of history. The country needs a complete break from the past. All eyes must now be on future.

The ruling coalition partners cannot afford to lose any time on barren name-calling or futile posturing. No scapegoat is there now on whom they can fasten their sins of commission and omission. The exit of a common adversary should not make the coalition partners neglectful of the need to strengthen their mutual understanding. Nobody should have any illusions that the crises Pakistan faces today are beyond the capacity of any single party or any narrow-based alliance to solve.

They will not be overcome until all political groups pool their wisdom and resources and launch a concerted and coordinated campaign to salvage the state. From now on the ruling parties will be subjected to stricter tests not only by the standards of efficiency but also with regard to the norms of integrity, austerity and concern for the have-nots.

The immediate challenges before the coalition government, even while it sorts out the most urgent issue of the judges’ restoration, are mostly related to the people’s basic interests. The militants who are abusing the religious sentiments of certain groups for their political ends pose a threat to the people’s fundamental rights and no effort must be spared to beat off this threat.

The state must guarantee all its citizens and other persons present in the country security of life, liberty, privacy and basic freedoms. The entire population is clamouring for relief from poverty and the rising cost of living and merely telling them the causes of their misery is like rubbing salt into their sores. They must be offered relief beyond populist gestures that are fast losing effect.

Above all, a continuous, frank and purposeful dialogue with the citizens must be maintained at all possible levels because, if nothing else, the government won’t survive without the people’s active support, nor will it be able to ensure that it has seen off the last of the praetorian adventurers.

Thoughts of a US-hater

AT 67, André de la Roche stands ramrod straight and a full head taller than one’s idea of an averagely tall person.

Hard labour here at his ancestral vineyards by the Loire river in central France has imparted this mild-mannered Parisian intellectual a lean, muscled physique.

The descendant of an old aristocratic family, André now refuses to return to the capital which he says is being taken over by the Americans, as is the rest of the world for that matter. A surprising conclusion, given today’s weak dollar, you’d say!

Can he be described as an America-hater?

Caressing a plant on which shiny, translucent grains are forming already, André turns back to look at the sky, deeply browned fingers shading his eyes and the winegrower’s worry written large across his bronzed forehead. Will the blazing midsummer sun turn his fine white Sauvignon grapes too sweet by harvest time end September? Then he shakes his head and smiles.

“You know, it makes me sad to think I admired America once. But that was the Gary Cooper America, the ‘yep ‘and ‘nope’ America where action took precedence over glibness of the tongue and solitary adventure and creativity, whether intellectual, artistic or scientific, held sway; as do today vulgar video clips, inarticulate Internet blogs and clowning on TV.

“That America is gone forever. Its putrefaction began with an organised campaign of guilt and self-flagellation in the sixties and the process was complete by the end of the decade. Nietzsche held great civilisations did not go down the drain because of foreign invasions; it was inner rot that made them fall apart, like an over-ripened fruit. That is exactly what happened to America, the Big Country, Aaron Copland America!

“Promoting peace through free trade was President Woodrow Wilson’s proud dream, the essence of his triad. That was globalisation without self-righteousness thrown in. But the core of today’s Yankee onslaught is hypocritical pseudo-moralising that is very, very dangerous for world cultures. For, what are human societies without the gift of atavistic memory, without traditional values?

“Look at what is happening in France, once the most refined place on earth. Our kids spit out four-letter words inspired by hoodlums of American suburbs, a culture propagated in rap songs on MTV. Children today dress in baggy jeans with seats dragging on the floor and in T-shirts with profanities proudly emblazoned on them — bought at thousands of American franchise shops that litter every neighbourhood of every European city.

“The earliest McDonald’s joints in Europe opened two decades ago with Bach and Mozart playing in the background. Once confident of selling their trash to our young, they hastily abandoned classical music. Today remote European cities have American-style supermarkets with Snoopy Doggy-dog blaring on the loudspeakers.

“Added to the cultural terrorism, there is also the semantic terrorism. As college students, I remember, we used to discuss our social, political issues entire days, often entire nights. If someone disagreed with the others he had to explain why and everyone tried to grasp his line of thinking.

“Today the greatest American gift, not just to Europe but to the world, is political correctness. A single PC edict can grind an entire philosophical argument in its tracks, a steel shutter falling over an enlightened dialogue! Once you are branded a ‘reactionary’, a ‘sexist’, a ‘homophobe’ you better shut up or risk exclusion.

“When the Americans say they are trying to bring democracy to the people of Iraq or Afghanistan, don’t fall for that. There is no such thing as ‘people’ in the American mindset. We are all consumers. Youthful consumers of videogames, iPods and hamburgers. Female consumers of single-mom literature and television garbage such as ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Sex & the City’. Baby-boomer consumers of Viagra. You name it.

“I have lived in Morocco and Egypt and have travelled to countries like Algeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I know in what high regard a woman is held in a Muslim household, what means respect for the elders and how hospitable and generous to a total stranger can be a Bedouin or a Pathan. My heart bleeds every time I learn of a bombing in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. People are paying a heavy price to keep the Madonna-Microsoft-McIntosh-McDonald’s monster at bay!

“You perhaps wonder why I include Microsoft and McIntosh in the list. After all, they are only technologies. Yes, technologies pushing people around the world into consuming more and more American poison.”

By this time we are heading towards André’s house, our bicycles rolling effortlessly downhill. On our right the tiny figure of a Scottish collie describes lightening circles around a herd of brown goats, expertly urging them to continue their climb up the steep green pasture. In the valley below to our left, shimmer in the sun the Sancerrois vineyards in inexhaustible patterns like an arrangement of carpets, their green harmony broken here and there by dark clusters of oaks and poplars and red-tiled roofs of ancient farmhouses.

Our destination, a sturdy 15th century brownstone mansion, suddenly comes into view at the turn of a winding path under a row of lilac bushes. At the sight of a woman in a straw hat, wrestling with a huge white canopy that she is trying to set over a lunch table in the cobbled, sunwashed frontyard, André smiles: “That doesn’t mean I hate all Americans.”

Noticing us, Jenny gives up her struggle and says in her American-accented French we better wash up if we want some refreshment and lunch. She asks her husband if he would prefer to eat in the sun.

De la Roche has nothing of a Rhett Butler about him. Should a cinematic reference be indispensable, with his jutting chin and close-cropped, steel-grey hair he looks a bit like Georges Marchal, the French actor famous for his performances as Roman emperors, gladiators and generals in the Italian extravaganzas of the 1960s.

As he heads toward the hand-pump, André stops and looks back, offering his wife a chiselled, three-quarter profile. “Frankly speaking my dear,” he rumbles in heavily-accented English, “I don’t give a damn!”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

Curfew America

THE police state has not arrived quite yet but it may feel like it to the residents of some American cities, where a handful of embattled mayors and police chiefs are imposing strict and sometimes sweeping curfews as a last resort to quell new waves of gun violence this summer.

“We must do this because we cannot and will not tolerate innocent people, especially children, to be victims,” insists Eddie Perez, the mayor of Hartford, the capital of Connecticut, where a night-time curfew was introduced last week and will remain in effect for a month for those under 18 years old.

Nor are there any apologies from the authorities in Helena-West Helena on the banks of the Mississippi in Arkansas, small pockets of which are under a 24-hour curfew that all ages must respect. Police are enforcing it, moreover, with night-vision goggles and M16 military rifles.

In Hartford, the centre of America’s insurance industry, the approach is not quite as militaristic. Children found on the streets between 9 pm and 5 am are approached and escorted by officers to their homes. Most nights since the curfew came into effect last Thursday have seen only a dozen or so picked up.

But there was nothing softly-softly about the violence that prompted Hartford to take such action. Two weekends ago, 11 people were shot in three different attacks, the worst at the annual West Indian Parade in the city’s North End, which left one man dead and two children hurt. A toddler in a pushchair was grazed by bullet on her leg. A seven-year-old boy remains in hospital with serious head wounds.

Much of the city cannot believe it either, yet 150 shootings have been recorded this year In summer, bored teenagers have little to do but wander the streets. Gangs mark out turf. Insults are traded and revenge is taken.

While curfews sound like they belong in war zones or natural disaster areas, they have long been a popular tool of US police departments. And it is in the dog days of summer, when humidity and violence seem to join hands, that they most often come into vogue. For the duration of the school holidays this year, for instance, Baltimore has an 11 pm curfew (midnight on Fridays and Saturdays) for children under 17. Those who violate it are taken to a school until a parent or guardian picks them up.

It is a trend the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), does not welcome. The group “opposes juvenile curfews because they’re essentially a violation of fundamental rights of innocent people,” said David McGuire of the Connecticut ACLU. “Curfews essentially are placing an entire demographic, in this case, youth, under house arrest for the inappropriate actions of a few.”

Residents of Connecticut’s north end, however, tired of the shootings, seem mostly to support the curfew, though few believe it alone will solve the larger problems of young people with little to do, attracted by gangs and lacking discipline. “We need to keep the young people off the streets,” says Ms Johnson on the front steps of her home. “And the parents need help. The law is the law.” Taquana Quan, 18, standing outside Burger and Pizza Land on Barbour Avenue, where two other men were shot on the same weekend, also supports the mayor’s decision. So does his cousin, Shantay Taytay, who is 21. They have had enough. “This dude pulled a gun on me last week to take my bike. We are moving to Atlanta, the whole family.”

“We’ll see if it works,” says Barbara Shannon, who lives across from the restaurant and said she starting praying when she heard the shots. But it will not be enough. The problem lies in the upbringing of the teenagers, she says, mostly by single mothers. Indeed, of all the households with children in Hartford, almost 70 per cent are headed by single parents. And nearly always they are the mothers. “Babies are having babies and kids are having kids,” she asserts confidently. “And the mothers are always looking to have fun. They don’t make time to look after their young ones.”

And what of the young targets of the curfew, such as Rackwon Hicks, who is hanging out with a cousin and two friends on the front steps of another dour brick apartment building on Barbour Street?

He is 10 years old and says staying at home after 9 pm is not an option. His mother is there. “I just can’t be there, that’s all. They can’t coop us up like that, it’s not right.”

— The Independent, London