OIC move on Iran

IT IS indeed one of those statements that members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference issue from time to time to no effect. But this one, issued by seven of the OIC’s foreign ministers from Islamabad on Sunday, is timely, since the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme seems to be heading towards a climax. There is no indication from either Iran or the US that a revival of meaningful talks is possible for defusing the crisis. Iran has not shut the door on talks and insists on unconditional parleys. The other camp has offered to talk provided Tehran first suspends its uranium programme. The absence of negotiations has been aggravated by lack of flexibility on both sides. Iran has gone ahead, installing two cascades of 164 centrifuges at its Natanz facility and ignored the UN Council’s Feb 21 deadline, while the US continues to issue periodic warnings to Tehran about military action. Ignoring media reports that preparations for an attack on Iran are at an advanced stage, and that a Pentagon group is preparing for an offensive within 24 hours when the go-ahead is given, there are officially confirmed reports about the movement of American carrier groups into the Gulf.

Iran is already under two layers of sanctions — one by the US and the other by the UN — and the group of six is going to meet in London this week to decide further action, including the possibility of imposing new and harsher sanctions. Iran has already been living with the American sanctions, which, together with the recently imposed UN sanctions, have not had much effect on it. In fact, going by the Iraqi experience, sanctions do not hurt the regime; it is the people who suffer, but that does not deter the regime in power. We know that the sanctions against Iraq caused the death of half a million children, but that did not in any way make the Baathist regime change its policy. In the case of Iran, both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union have pointed out that sanctions are not going to solve the crisis: the situation demands combining “incentives with disincentives”.

Whether the OIC can play a meaningful role in moving the two parties away from confrontation is a big question. Given the OIC’s track record, it is unlikely that it will be able to assert itself sufficiently to defuse the situation. The meeting in Islamabad consisted of some of America’s most trusted allies, and observers have noted that Iran and Syria were not invited to the conference. What the OIC can do is to let the Bush administration know the feeling of the world Muslims on the threats to Iran, and, in case of war, the intensity of reaction among the Muslim masses — possibly a violent one which the “moderate” Muslim regimes will find hard to contain.

Fortunately, the OIC has supporters in Europe and America where peace groups are actively lobbying against another war in the Middle East. In London, there was a big peace rally. Media reports say seven generals and admirals in the Pentagon have threatened to resign if the threat to Iran was carried out. Whether it is Iran or the need for a Muslim initiative on Palestine, the OIC must not underestimate its potential and have the confidence to play a meaningful role in crises where Muslims are under threat or oppression.

A questionable proposal

THE government’s ‘land bank’ initiative is not without its merits. The stated aim of the scheme is to simplify the process of land acquisition, a move that planners hope will encourage foreign direct investment in Pakistan. A mechanism is to be devised whereby “unutilised” state land, including property belonging to the military, ports and railways, can be allotted to the private sector for commercial and industrial use. Addressing the acute housing shortage in the country is ostensibly also a priority. At the same time, private property may be purchased by the government under the Land Acquisition Act, thereby circumventing the problems posed by multiple titleholders and the pre-emption laws governing preferential or first rights to purchase. According to a recent World Bank study, nearly 80 per cent of respondents cited land acquisition and development regulations as a hurdle in the way of investment in Pakistan. Assuming honesty of purpose, this major initiative has the potential to facilitate investment and spur economic growth.

At the same time, however, the scheme is rife with the opportunity for graft, nepotism and unfair treatment of owners of private land forcefully acquired by the government. Optimal use of land is also a major concern given that industrial units may be allotted prime agricultural land, especially in Punjab. A case in point is the Punjab government’s decision last year to acquire some 1,200 acres of rich agricultural land near Sheikhupura for a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant. The owners were being paid a pittance and it also transpired that only 600 acres were required by the automobile manufacturers, with the rest earmarked for a luxury hotel and golf and race courses. Similarly, there is a danger that both state and private land may be parcelled out at nominal prices to favoured parties, which may then put portions of the acquired property to whatever use they see fit. This cannot be allowed to happen. Also, it must be ensured that a bare minimum of private land is acquired and the owners paid at market rates.

Why this frenzied approach?

BASANT is no more a joyous celebration of spring, nor kite-flying a harmless sport, thanks mainly to excessive commercialisation of the festival and excessive official involvement in the whole affair. The frightening levels of chaos and lawlessness in society yet again made their presence felt when wayward kite enthusiasts were let loose for 24 hours to make merry with all restraints pushed aside. At least a few of the 10 lives lost over the weekend extravaganza in Lahore could have been avoided if many of the 5,000 policemen deputed to enforce kite-flying rules had not been diverted to perform VVIP duties, guarding high-level dignitaries, including President Musharraf. But the blame must be shared equally by all involved — the general public, the parents, opinion leaders and members of civil society, for their lack of social responsibility. The apathy towards preventing loss of human life was also a reflection of this government’s preoccupation with presenting itself as ‘enlightened’ and ‘moderate’. It is neither. For those who have lost their near, dear and little ones to stray bullets, killer twine and accidents, it is no solace that Lahore managed to keep its annual festival alive — without having ensured public safety. The failure of all concerned to keep Basant a harmless affair is astounding.

We have time and again argued for preserving the traditional joyful spirit behind the spring festival. The challenge is to ensure that kite-flying does not become a killer sport by restricting it to a frenzied 24-hour time limit, and one to be enjoyed by desperados alone who use the contraband twine to play havoc with innocent lives. To avoid road accidents you do not ban driving but make sure that reckless driving is not permitted — a point lost on the authorities concerned.

Strong delusions, weak memories

MAURICE Papon, lowered into his grave along with his precious Legion d’honneur recently, proved what many Arabs have long suspected but generally refuse to acknowledge: that bureaucrats and racists and others who worked for Hitler regarded all Semitic people as their enemies and that — had Hitler's armies reached the Middle East — they would ultimately have found a “final solution” to the “Arab question”, just as they did for the Jews of Europe.

Papon's responsibility for the 1942 arrest and deportation of 1,600 Jews in and around Bordeaux – 223 children among them, all shipped off to the Drancy camp and then to Auschwitz – was proved without the proverbial shadow of a doubt at his 1998 trial.

Less clear were the exact number of Algerians murdered by his police force in Paris and hurled into the Seine in 1961. Of course, he was not tried for this lesser but equally unscrupulous crime. He organised the police repression of the independence demonstration by 40,000 Algerians; in the cities of Algiers and Oran and Blida and other areas of modern-day Algeria where this atrocity festers on among elderly relatives, they say that up to 400 Algerians were massacred by Papon's flics.

Some historians suggest 250. Papon preferred to claim that only two were killed – in much the same way as he later insisted at his trial that he did not know the fate of the Jews he dispatched so efficiently to Drancy and onwards to Poland.

The same was always claimed of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He it was who fled to Iraq during the Second World War, escaped again after the British crushed the pro-Axis government that had taken power in Baghdad and who ended up in Nazi Berlin, shaking hands with Hitler and working enthusiastically for the Third Reich's propaganda machine. From Hitler, he obtained a promise that “when we (the Germans) have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived – and you can rely on my word.” Haj Amin gratefully recorded how Hitler insisted that the “Jewish problem” would be solved “step by step” and that he, Haj Amin, would be “leader of the Arabs” after entering Egypt and then Palestine with the Italian army.

More than a decade ago, I spent much time researching the life of Haj Amin – whose portrait with Hitler hangs in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and whose body lies buried scarcely two miles from my home in Beirut – and met members of his surviving family. I even met the last – now dead – survivor of his Berlin entourage who believed that Haj Amin did not know the fate of the Jews. To this day, I don't believe this.

In July, 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, he was complaining to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that rather than allow Europe’s Jews to emigrate to Palestine, “if there are reasons which make their removal (sic) necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control (sic again!) as, for example, Poland...”.

Haj Amin went on to encourage Bosnian Muslims to join the SS Hanjar division, a fact which Serbia's bloodthirsty militiamen never failed to remind me when I covered their own fascist-style war against the Muslims of the Drina Valley in the early 1990s.

Three months before he died, the old man met in Beirut one of Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants, Abu Iyad, who later wrote of their meeting: “Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to (British mandate) Palestine... I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races.

“Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule.” Haj Amin's granddaughter Alia also told me of his later conclusions. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs – he knew this. But what could he do?”

All this came back to me recently when I received a remarkable letter from Toulouse in my Beirut mailbag. It was a response to an article I wrote last year about Irene Nemirovsky, whose magnificent, Tolstoyan novel of the Nazi occupation of France was unfinished when Irene was herself sent to Drancy and on to the crematoria of Auschwitz. My article earned a stiff call of complaint from the press attache at the French embassy in London.

The letter, in slightly ungrammatical English, was written by Nemirovsky's only surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, and I hope she will not mind if I quote from it: “Allow me to present myself: I am the girl of Irene Nemirovsky ... and I wanted to thank you for having spoken so well about my mother. This book caused a certain awakening of the consciences undoubtedly but according to what you teach me from the attitude of the French embassy when one evokes the memory of the Jewish children assassinated with the complicity of the authorities of the time, I realise that the memory is really diluted very easily and which that opens the door with other massacres innocent whatever their origin.

“It is thus with emotion and gratitude that I want to send this small message to you. I am now 77 years old and I nevertheless live the every day with the weight of this past on the shoulders, softened by happiness to see reviving my parents, and at the same time as them, I hope to make revive all those of which nobody any more speaks. PS: Sorry for my very bad English!”

It would be hard to find more moving words than these, a conscious belief that the dead can be recalled in their own words along with that immensely generous remembrance of other innocents who have died in other massacres.

And that extraordinary image of the “dilution of memory” carries its own message. This, of course, is what Haj Amin suffered from. Papon, too, I imagine, before they buried the terrible old man some days ago.

— (c) The Independent

A Japanese lesson for China

A RISING Asian power is an export juggernaut and enjoys prodigious growth fuelled by high savings and investment rates. Its rapidly modernising industries threaten an ever greater swath of industry in Europe and the United States.

Its formidable central bank reserves and burgeoning account surplus lead to claims that its exchange rate is being unfairly manipulated. Its financial system is bank-centric, heavily regulated in favour of domestic institutions and closely tied to government and industry. Rapid productivity growth holds down prices, but its asset values rise sharply.

Key congressional leaders in Washington demand radical action to contain the economic threat. Diplomats warn that public bashing is unproductive but make clear that economic issues are a crucial part of the bilateral relationship. Delegations of senior U.S. officials engage in "dialogue" with their counterparts about the many aspects of their economic policies that promote imbalances, warning of the congressional demons who stand ready to act if "results" are not achieved quickly.

All of this describes what is happening in China, and with our relationship with Beijing, today. It also describes the Japanese economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before its lost decade of deflation and considerable deterioration in global prestige. Although there are obvious differences, notably China's much lower level of development, the similarities are striking enough to invite an effort to draw some lessons from the Japanese experience.

The definitive history of Japan's dismal decade has yet to be written. But most observers would agree that key elements included the bursting of stock market and land bubbles, the resulting problems in the financial system, the collapse of aggregate demand as banks stopped extending credit and the difficulty of moving from export-led growth to domestic-led growth once consumer and business confidence was lost.

In retrospect, Japanese officials made several important policy errors. In order to avoid further yen appreciation in the late 1980s, they followed easy monetary and financial policies that gave rise to huge asset price bubbles and expansions in credit, which set the stage for the downturn.

At the same time, they failed to encourage a shift to domestic demand-led growth at a moment when consumers were enjoying record increases in wealth. And they allowed problems in the banking system to fester. The result was that Japan was not well positioned to prevent or address the serious problems of the 1990s.

This suggests that if China is to sustain rapid growth and not repeat Japan's mistakes, it must fix the policy roof now, when the sun is shining. Allowing inevitable currency appreciation and spurring domestic demand by encouraging consumption is much easier now when the economy is at the edge of overheating than it is likely to be in the future when it cools off. It has been estimated that seeking to maintain the current exchange rate could require as much as $400 billion in reserve accumulation in 2007, which would almost certainly lead to rapid asset price inflation as renminbi are printed to buy dollars. And there will not be a better moment to fix problems in the banking system.

These lessons for Chinese economic policy contrast sharply with those drawn by observers in and out of China who attribute Japan's deflation and consequent poor performance to its willingness to accede to American pressure for currency appreciation. This alternative view offers no explanation for Japan's asset bubble and collapse, and no theory about what measures would have spurred domestic-led growth.

Another lesson of the Japanese experience is the need for modesty regarding economic diplomacy. Events and national and political decisions, not international communiques, shape economic outcomes. The effect of events beyond the control of governments — the collapse of Japan's asset markets, information technology's spur to U.S. productivity, the Asian financial crisis — dwarfed the diplomatic debate.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service