Opposition strategy

WITH a general election due next year, it is disturbing to realize that the opposition still lacks a comprehensive strategy for it. Qazi Hussain Ahmed even talks of boycotting it. Notwithstanding the all-party conferences which are convened every now and then, there is little that unites the opposition in terms of a common strategy for challenging the present military-led government in the polls. There is a lot of bad blood among opposition parties themselves. There is little love lost between the MMA on one side and the PPP and the PML-N on the other. The former, though under a different name, played a major role in destabilising the Benazir and Sharif governments and never tired of appealing to the army to “do its duty”. As for the PPP and PML-N, they are intrinsically incompatible, no matter how much both may feel united in their joint opposition to the Musharraf regime. The army has been persecuting the PPP since Gen Zia’s days and had consistently worked for the Sharifs, patronized them and played a major role in keeping them in power — until Oct 12, 1999. To think that the PPP and the PML-N will bury the hatchet and form an electoral alliance is an unlikely prospect, although efforts in this direction continue, as indicated by the Benazir Bhutto-Shahbaz Sharif meeting in Dubai on Friday.

As for the ARD as a group, it goes to the credit of the government that it has driven the secular alliance to seek a working arrangement with the MMA. Initially patronized by the generals, the MMA has its own agenda and tends to look at Pakistan’s domestic scene through its foreign policy obsessions characterized by extreme hostility to the Musharraf government’s role as an American ally in the war on terror. It forgets that, while the PPP and the PML-N, too, may find fault with the nuances of the Musharraf government’s foreign policy and criticise its conduct of military operations in Waziristan, both want to be on America’s right side. This rules out any large opposition grouping that could unitedly challenge the ruling PML-Q. Where the MQM — which dons the opposition mantle whenever it suits its purpose, despite being a PML ally — is concerned it is sure to guard its constituencies in southern Sindh and will have no inclination to ally itself with any party.

The opposition should utilize the time between now and the polls in drawing up realistic manifestoes that should aim at the people’s welfare, instead of focussing on the narrow and one-time affair of forcing Gen Musharraf to give up his uniform, the presidency or both. So much needs to be done by way of fundamental reforms. Politically, constitutionalism and federalism have to be restored, and the military forced to stand back. Social and economic problems are also a major challenge — but no party has come up with a feasible scheme for improving the people’s lot. Violence is rampant in Pakistan, but by their behaviour some parties seem to encourage it for achieving political aims. Both the ruling parties and those in the opposition would do well to think in terms of long-term policies for the benefit of the people instead of focussing only on short-term goals that do not serve to give the people a better life.

Deadly minefields

APART from highlighting the gravity of the political unrest in Balochistan, the death of 28 people in a landmine explosion in Dera Bugti on Friday underscores the dangers of the terrain where the increasing use of anti-personnel mines by insurgents is leading to death and destruction. Landmines already constitute a grave risk to the lives of the people living in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that border on Afghanistan. The area is strewn with unexploded ordnance (UXO) laid during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and, over the years, hundreds of civilians have succumbed to their deadly presence. Those who have survived have been crippled for life, losing one or more limbs. In contrast, the government claims that de-mining operations have been carried out along Pakistan’s border with India, and the existing mine locations have been marked and fenced off. Clearly, this has not been possible in areas where it is difficult to detect mines implanted by non-state actors who have drawn no distinction between settled and non-populated areas.

One of the few producers of anti-personnel mines in the world and with reportedly the fifth largest stockpile of this lethal weaponry, Pakistan has cited security concerns over its inability to sign the international Mine Ban Treaty of 1997. Even if it does not plan to do so out of political considerations, the government has a responsibility to its citizens — to protect their lives and property. De-mining operations are expensive, especially as many mines are unmapped and cannot be detected easily. But high-risk areas must be identified and fenced off to limit the number of casualties, a great many of whom are children attracted by the innocuous looking devices lying on the ground. Besides this, there is a need to spread general awareness about mines and to provide artificial limbs and medical treatment to those who have been crippled by them. But perhaps the greatest challenge is to stop rebellious elements from laying their hands on mines that are frequently used to target government personnel and property. It will require a concerted effort by the military and intelligence agencies to apprehend those who are supplying as well as those laying these deadly devices as part of their political strategy.

TB in quake-hit areas

ANY progress in the fight against tuberculosis in the country is likely to be offset by the spread of the disease in northern Pakistan where TB cases in the quake-hit zone are on the rise. In the NWFP alone, 710 TB cases have been recorded in five districts over a period of three months. This figure is likely to grow, given the state of displacement of the residents which has exposed them to overcrowding and unhealthy living conditions — an ideal setting for the TB bacilli to breed and infect large numbers of people. What has aggravated the problem is the fact that many laboratories and diagnostic and health facilities were destroyed in the Oct 8 quake as were patient records and drugs. Health authorities have a difficult task before them since they would have to start from scratch and rebuild medical facilities in areas that record 40,000 new cases of TB each year.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease and, without treatment, one patient can infect up to 10 to 15 people. Keeping this mind, the disease has to be prevented from getting out of hand in the quake-hit areas, where, in addition to congested living conditions, the level of immunity among the people is very low. As health authorities work out a plan to combat the disease in these areas, they must, at the same time, institute a vigorous awareness campaign to educate the people on the importance of timely treatment and the risks of stopping medication halfway through the course. It must be impressed on them that unsatisfactory adherence to a drug regimen can give rise to a virulent strain of bacteria that cannot be eliminated by the usual cocktail of drugs and that would require far more expensive therapy to eliminate.

Something rotten in the state of Denmark

PRINCE Hamlet of Shakespeare’s immortal play declared, “There is something rotten in the State of Denmark”. He might have added, “rotten, in perpetuity”. By deliberate design and fully aware of the consequences, a well read newspaper in this tiny state of 5.4 million individuals decided to cause deliberate and calculated insult to the faith of about 1.3 billion Muslims — a quarter of all humanity — by publishing sacrilegious cartoons.

These cartoons can be likened to acts of terrorism. Shockingly, Denmark stood by the offending newspaper’s refusal to apologize. Newspapers in France, Germany and Spain added boiling oil to the fire by reproducing this blasphemy.

All this has been defended by Denmark and other European countries in the name of freedom of the press and to “test the limits of tolerance” of their Muslim minorities. How would Catholic Spain or Bavaria react to newspaper cartoons showing His Holiness the Pope in bed with a prostitute? Did the courts in France last year not ban a depiction of the Last Supper by an artist who replaced the Apostles with scantily clad women? And more recently, did the courts in Austria not sentence to a prison term a well known British historian, who expressed doubts about the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust, even after the person had partly apologized?

“Would cartoons mocking dwarfs or blind people be published in respectable European newspapers?” asks Oliver Roy, the noted French scholar on Islam, in a recent Newsweek article. We have since learned that the offending paper Jyllands-Posten had rejected cartoons on Jesus on grounds that they were likely to offend Christian sensibilities. Therefore, to suggest that the European concept of freedom of the press is analogous to a licence is a bit of self-serving nonsense. Indeed, these are benchmarks of probity well respected by the European press.

Muslims in most parts of Europe today are being mistreated as the Jews were a century earlier. Just as the fascism of the last century in Europe had an anti-Jewish dimension, the neo-fascism of today in Europe has an anti-Muslim bias.

There are 200,000 Muslims in Denmark — about 3.7 per cent of the population. Most of them are Danish citizens. Over 90 per cent arrived as economic, political or religious refugees. It must be conceded that until the ‘80s Denmark was considered one of the most friendly and generous countries to foreigners of all origins.

What happened? As in most European countries, only a tiny proportion of the Muslims in Denmark assimilated with the native population. Brian Nikkelsen, the Danish minister for cultural affairs, declared, last summer, “In Denmark we have seen the appearance of a parallel society in which (some) minorities practise their own mediaeval values and undemocratic views”.

Since 1987 Muslims have been denied permission to build mosques in Copenhagen. And there are no Muslim graveyards in Denmark. Dead bodies have to be flown back to home countries for burial. Apart from the UK, where Muslims have better social and civic rights, including the right to build mosques, burial places and purdah for women, by and large the lumpen Muslims in Europe suffer social, cultural and economic disabilities and are treated more or less as second class citizens. They live in self-confined ghettos.

How did this come to pass?

Viewed in historicity ever since the mid-19th century when Karl Marx declared, “that religion is the opiate of the people,” in the Soviet Union and later the People’s Republic of China — both founded on the Marxist thesis — the practice of religion was officially frowned upon. In early Stalinist times persons going to places of worship were described as retarded individuals. Later, worship was brought under state control and used as a state instrument to discourage the practice.

Apart from communism’s denigration of religion, which at times bordered on blasphemy, post-modern affluence nearly finished the job begun by communism. Today, less than three per cent of the population in the West goes to a house of worship more than once a year.

The clash of civilizations is all too palpable? The question is how should we in Pakistan react to it?

Let us again recall a bit of history. After the War of Independence of 1857, which was spearheaded by the Muslim soldiers of the East India Company, Muslims by and large opted out of the social, economic, cultural, educational and political life of British India. For about 40 years they were in a state of hibernation. The Hindus went exactly in the opposite direction. They joined a lead in intellectual and economic power which exists to this day.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s wake-up call to the Muslims, late in the 19th century, with the founding of a seat of modern learning in Aligarh, seen in retrospect was too little and came too late. Nonetheless, it was a heroic attempt. The founders of Pakistan — the Aga Khan, Allama Iqbal, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan — were western educated Muslims and the spiritual children of the Muslim renaissance movement of the late 19th century.

The Anglo-Muslim culture was bitterly resented by the traditional Muslims, schooled in religious madressahs with a smattering of understanding of the Holy Writ. As is well known, the traditionalists opposed the creation of Pakistan, envisaged by its founders as a ‘homeland for the Muslims’. Their demand was and remains for an Islamic state, as interpreted by themselves. One such attempt made by General Ziaul Haq remains controversial to this day.

The apotheosis of the traditionist-literalist ruler was Mulla Omar of Afghanistan who could not suffer the fact that for nearly a thousand years Buddhism was a vital part of Afghanistan’s religious and cultural heritage. The Great Buddha of Bamiyan was literally bombed and pulverized on his orders. This insane act not only caused deep distress to the millions of Buddhists in China, Japan and South-East Asia but also worldwide. It showed Islam as an intolerant religion, which it is not. This, followed by the events of 9/11, sidelined the legitimate grievances of the persecuted Palestinians and Kashmiris and instead, focussed world attention on acts of terrorism widely believed as being perpetrated by Islamic militants in different parts of the world, particularly the West.

Today, western Europe has over 18 million Muslims. Insofaras I have seen of Pakistanis in the UK, their intercourse with the locals is minimal. A large percentage — mainly women — has neither learnt the language nor interacts socially with the locals. Hitler mentions in his “Mein Kamp” that his intense hatred of Jews had its origin when, as a youth, he witnessed a procession of Jewish priests, clad in black clothes and fully hirsute, proceeding to the synagogue. This was his perception of evil incarnate, an abscess in the German body politic, a wasting disease which had to be eliminated.

The majority of Pakistanis living in the West today are in the UK. Pakistanis living in the West should be encouraged to leave their physical and mental ghettos and join the broad stream in their country of adoption, on the principle that in Rome do as the Romans do, and if this be unacceptable to them, return to their homeland. Let them take a cue from the example of western women working in Pakistani NGOs who wear local outfits and dutifully cover their heads with dupattas.

Muslim women wearing burkas, hijabs and headscarves in the West merely provoke the susceptibilities of the uncultured semi-literates. Our literalists insist on scarves etc. on the grounds of alleged western promiscuity. Wrong. If anything, there is as much promiscuity in Pakistan below the surface of things as there is in Europe above the surface.

In striving for a high moral ground, which is seldom attainable, our society wears the mask of hypocrisy: western society may appear scantily clad, but, it is far less hypocritical. The torrents of human desires ranging from the sacred to the profane, are the same everywhere: dam these torrents and you end up having a cesspool of hypocrisy.

To sum up: the Judaic, the Far Eastern civilizations (Japanese, Chinese, Korean), the Slavic and the Hindu civilizations have had the bitterest of wars and ideological quarrels with western civilization in the 20th century, yet at the dawn of this era, all four civilizations are recipients of tradeoffs with the West and have been co-opted in more or less in a mutually beneficial inter- and intra-relationship. These civilizations are at the cutting edge of today’s most advanced technologies in the information field, bio-technology, pharmaceutical and nuclear sciences.

The weakness of our civilization is manifest in the fact that the West today has attacked what is holiest and most sacred to us — the personage of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) — and is refusing to offer a clear, unqualified apology. Our enemies must be rubbing their hands in glee that we express our anger at this sacrilegious act by killing our own people and destroying our property, homes, buses as cars, and by a inpetitious process, inflicting heavy cosses on our economy and the education system.

The writer is a member of the National Assembly.

Email: murbr@isb.paknet.com.pk