Telling off Negroponte

TELLING Mr John Negroponte that the emergency will stay is not going to satisfy this nation. It is the people who want an end to the emergency independent of what America or the world thinks about it. Whether it is the deteriorating Swat situation or the political crisis that brought the US deputy secretary of state to Pakistan is not known. But it seems it was the nation which was President Pervez Musharraf’s target audience when he told Mr Negroponte that he was not going to reverse his decision on what looks like an indefinite continuation of rule by emergency. In any case, Mr Negroponte could not possibly go against President George Bush’s well-considered pronouncements in the wake of the Nov 3 decree. At every level, from the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the White House, Pentagon and State Department spokesmen, the Republican administration has made it abundantly clear that it cares little about a time-frame for the emergency. For record’s sake, of course, President Bush and Republican administration officials have expressed their concerns over the proclamation of the state of emergency, but all such declarations have invariably been accompanied by expressions of full confidence in President Musharraf’s leadership and his role in the war on terror. Mr Negroponte’s own performance at the press conference the next day in Islamabad gives a fairly good indication of where America stands with regard to civil liberties in Pakistan.

We agree with the president that law and order must be maintained. But equally important is the right of all political parties, elements and personalities to operate without any fetters and convey their policies and manifestos to the people without let and hindrance. This right to assembly, movement and free speech is an essential ingredient of campaigning without which the election will be hollow. The two things — peaceful conditions and campaigning — are not incompatible. The army, the Rangers, the paramilitary forces and the police can do their duty effectively even without the nation and the political system groaning under emergency rule. The president has admitted that he violated the Constitution by imposing emergency. Well, where do we go from here? The only way by which the effects of the emergency can be undone is to end it, lift the restrictions on the electronic media and then give an even playing field to all.

In the meantime, we request the president not to drag Pakistan’s nuclear assets into what essentially is a domestic political crisis. Initially, the president gave the war on terror as one of the justifications for imposing the emergency. Of late, however, the president has been referring to Pakistan’s nuclear assets falling into the wrong hands if he were not on the scene. Does the command and control system we have been hearing so much about for a long time stipulate that a given individual should be at the helm?

Drug menace continues

THE two areas where the frontiers of Turkmenistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet on the one hand, and those of the latter two and Pakistan converge on the other have been described by the UN anti-narcotics head as the new ‘Golden Triangles’. The final draft of the 2007 UN report detailing the drugs menace in the country has given figures that justify this description. Afghanistan, the world’s biggest supplier of drugs, has reached a point where it is exporting more than four billion dollars worth of narcotics — amounting to more than half the country’s GDP. As noted earlier, when the provisional findings of the report were made known, opium production is concentrated in the financially better-off provinces of the south — where the Taliban hold sway. The poverty-stricken but politically stable north-central region has managed to bring down the level of opium production with a number of provinces being declared poppy-free. Clearly then, the connection between violence and opium cultivation is far stronger than one between the latter and poverty.

While there is sense in taking poverty alleviation measures in the south, and offering farmers alternatives to growing poppy, it is the political situation that should be the primary focus of the Afghan government. The Taliban menace, that is fuelling the narco-militancy nexus, has to be tackled firmly, and the area made relatively violence-free so that government authorities and international agencies can carry on their development work with minimal hindrance. Unfortunately, while it is easy to blame Afghan and Nato troops for not curbing militancy, the vested interests of Afghanistan’s own politicians who reap considerable monetary profits from drug trafficking is also a factor in their failure. This is why Kabul has to take strong action against corrupt elements in the government, making an example of those who are found guilty of involvement. But since drug trafficking is not only Afghanistan’s problem, other countries, too, should work with Kabul to strengthen measures against drug barons and militant elements. This will only work when Afghanistan and its bordering countries implement a coherent strategy to stop drug smuggling by sharing intelligence and conducting joint raids on suspected venues.

Medical waste disposal

MEDICAL waste in the twin cities poses a substantial hazard to human health and the environment because of mismanagement and the lack of an efficient disposal system. Many hospitals, public and private, and other healthcare concerns like clinics, medical laboratories and pharmacies usually dump their waste carelessly in piles in the open, bury them in the ground nearby or, worse still, throw them into streams and canals. Although an incinerator is a necessity for every hospital, most hospitals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi do not have incinerators, either because of the cost of procuring them or paying for the service of these machines. The few hospitals which have incinerators have found their operation and maintenance a daunting task as is the experience of a public hospital in Rawalpindi that has an incineration facility shared by two other major government hospitals in the city.

Paradoxically the incineration of hospital waste is not free of hazards given the emission of potentially hazardous air pollutants, including toxic gases, particulates and ash, particularly when the conditions of combustion are not properly controlled. Thus many modern incinerators now include energy-recovering facilities that reduce emissions. But most of our hospitals already find getting and maintaining an ordinary incinerator beyond their reach what to speak of such modern mechanisms. What needs to be developed is a form of centralised healthcare waste disposal system, which is under consideration by the Capital Development Authority along with the Pakistan Environment Protection Agency. Under this system, healthcare waste will first need to be segregated at source to reduce the amount requiring special handling. A fifth of hospital waste has been found to be hazardous, the rest being general waste which can be disposed of in the normal way or recycled, if it has not been contaminated. The hazardous waste will be collected from all hospitals to be transported to a billion-rupee scientific landfill on the outskirts of the capital. Here it will be treated and disinfected before being disposed of. But until such a system is put in place and the landfill site developed, our healthcare facilities will need to ensure that their hazardous waste is disposed of in a responsible manner that poses the least danger to human health and the environment.

Going the Gandhian way?

WHO ever dreamt of the Gandhian spirit finding a home in Pakistan 60 years after the people of this part of the subcontinent had dismissed it as melodrama by the Hindu Bapu in favour of their Muslim Quaid’s rejection of mixing religion with politics?

Exactly that many years down the road Pakistan is an autocratic Islamic republic and India a democracy not ruled by Hindutva. History has its own way of rebounding.

Today, as thousands of educated Pakistanis resist the red-eyed monster of emergency rule yet again, with all its colonial trappings of state violence unleashed against law-abiding, unarmed civilians, the comparison cannot be lost on a people waylaid on the path to their promised destiny – one of independence from oppressive rule. The generation matured over the past decade marked by media freedom and rejection of obscurantist Islam is ill-equipped to understand the realpolitik associated with successive dictators who have ruled Pakistan since independence.

The Gandhian non-violence associated with the people’s ongoing struggle for the restoration of the rule of law is history in the making. This is a generation that has not seen the cunning antics of Ziaul Haq at the height of the Afghan jihad against Soviet occupation forces there, nor the shrewd maneuvering earlier by Ayub Khan of America, which propped up the two dictators against the then home-grown opposition, with Leftist leanings, in the Cold War years. The fear in Washington, then, of Pakistan falling to communism was as unreal as the threat today of Al Qaeda/ Taliban getting their hands on our nukes.

What brought the Soviet Union down was an erosion from within; what will burst the bubble of the Islamists here will be the lack of public support for their medieval agenda.

Despite the regime’s overstatement of emerging threat from fundamentalists, the fact remains that in a country dotted with millions of mosques and thousands of madressahs, there has only been one Lal Masjid and no more. Why? Because the Lal Masjid was allowed to go to the extreme it went to; a similar strategy has been at work behind what appears to be an Islamist insurgency in Swat now, when in reality it was born of tribal smugglers being subjected to state law.

The MQM’s popularity with the urban middleclass in Karachi and that of the secular PPP, the ANP and a host of nationalist parties elsewhere in the country are natural barriers against any feared advance by Islamists. The latter were able to appropriate only such territories where the state had willingly ceded its authority to them, ostensibly to keep the West in fear of an Islamist advance; and where the state is now seen as fighting America’s proxy war against its own people. The millions inhabiting the rural hinterland ridicule the mullah today just as much as can be found in traditional folklore and even the classics in national languages.

The students agitating for civil liberties on elite-school campuses in our cities, holding placards with pro-democracy slogans written on them and arranging candlelight vigils for those the regime has put behind bars, are truly global citizens. They cherish the same values of personal and collective freedom and their right to know as their counterparts elsewhere in any civilised society. Peaceful hunger strike camps are reminiscent of Gandhi’s braths (fasts) which morally defeated the brute force of the colonial state. That same state backed by its oppressive, arbitrary laws is brought back to life in Pakistan every time emergency rule is imposed.

When peaceful youngsters today see unarmed lawyers, rights activists and politicians being roughened up, humiliated and arrested for demanding what the Constitution guarantees them, they add their voices to the emerging new consciousness against dictatorial rule. The crackdown on those who believe in non-violence as a means to pursue their political ideals and a right to decent life contrasts sharply with the tolerance the regime has shown towards those who have taken up arms against the state, all in the way of God, and to subjugate the people to their own narrow-minded, puritan interpretation of religion.

Something has to give, for never before was this kind of informed, urbane consciousness brought to street protests. These people have not taken the law in their own hands, even though the law, as we knew it before the Nov 3 PCO and the imposition of emergency rule, has been thrown to the wind and the pitch queered for the forthcoming elections.

The protesters do nor carry firearms or even latthis; they intend no harm to public or private property. Many just stand in the street, with their lips taped, not even shouting angry slogans against their tormentors. The state’s furious response to this civilised way of registering protest exposes the gap that exists today between a modern public sensibility and the medievalism inherent in autocratic rule.

Erstwhile government ministers and PML-Q leaders are facilitated by the official machinery to run their election campaigns, while opposition leaders are barred from holding similar rallies. Seeking to restore order out of this state-orchestrated chaos entails living in a fool’s paradise and pretending that all is well, and will end well. The emerging new sensibility among the youth attaining the age of 18 this election year, and wishing to exercise their right to vote, cannot be insulted for long. If the conspiracy is to incite peaceful civilians to violence and then call off elections, because “the country is more important than democracy”, then the people’s resolve to stick to non-violent means of protest so far has damned and doomed that plot.

Will the bearded brigade, acting on cue from their backers and benefactors, now rise up to the occasion and bring violence to street protests? The decision earlier by Benazir Bhutto not to join the APDM, with its heavy rightwing component, was right. The motley crowd that makes up the movement failed miserably to even show up on Sept 10 when Nawaz Sharif was swiftly packed off to Saudi Arabia following his brief transit at Islamabad airport. Secular parties should be looking at the emerging student bodies who, even without a central or a local leadership, are keeping up their peaceful protests for regaining the pre-Nov 3 freedoms.

The biggest disappointment for these young people, like that for the generation before them, is to see America soft-peddle and go along with an anti-democracy, anti-people, regime – one that unashamedly relies on brute force to curb dissent. The closure of independent news channels, the packing up of a judiciary not seen as a partner in perpetuating ill-gotten power, the arbitrary arrests of dissidents and threats of clamping down on the press, are all trappings that hark back to the colonial state.

What remains to be seen is that whereas the pre-independence colonial might began to melt before the high moral stance taken by Gandhi’s non-violent movement — or closer to our time, Nelson Mandela’s similar weapon against the apartheid tyranny — whether the emerging non-violent struggle for civil liberties in Pakistan will have the desired effect on our junta. The process can be delayed and more hardship endured by the people in its course, but in the end, it is the unarmed people who win, and the guns which are confounded.

OTHER VOICES – Sindhi Press

Is our country entering a new political phase?

THERE seems to be very little chance of a Benazir-government dialogue, especially after the crackdown on PPP activists and their leader’s house arrest. Ms Bhutto too has ruled out the possibility of talks with the government.

Things began to change from Nov 9 to Nov 13, which led to a number of complications in the political scene. In the new scenario, PPP stands in direct opposition to the government.

After Bhutto’s arrival on Oct 18, there were high expectations that things would move according to a set formula, elections would be held and that PPP would play an important role in marking a smooth transition towards democracy. However, recent developments have dashed these hopes.

PPP’s stand is that it will not go in for a dialogue with the government and elections under emergency are unacceptable to the party. However, Bhutto’s strategy for such elections remains to be seen and many believe that it will determine the course of future politics in Pakistan. The question is, as PPP’s role is important and if it succeeds in bringing other opposition parties into its fold, what will be the validity of the upcoming polls? In this case, the government will have no other option but to revoke the emergency.

The only way out of the current imbroglio lies in some positive steps, beginning with taking the political parties into confidence. — (Nov 16)
Ibrat

Distribution of jobs on political quota basis

CHIEF Secretary, Sindh, (CS) was removed…, as the Sindh government wanted to fill thousands of vacant posts before the end of its tenure. A number of appointment letters were issued without the fulfilment of legal requirements.

The Chief Secretary… issued a letter to all secretaries to follow the rules and fulfil all legal and procedural formalities before recruitment. He stated that jobs under the purview of Sindh Public Service Commission should be referred to the commission and no secretary should sign orders or bypass it. After this directive from the CS, unfair recruitments came to a halt but the Sindh governor and chief minister removed him.

Throughout its tenure, the incumbent Sindh government doled out false promises to unemployed youth. Countless applications were solicited by many departments and tests were conducted only to be cancelled by political expediency. This led to an alarming increase in unemployment…and now at the end of its term, the government wants to recruit on political basis again…

According to the proposed formula, 60 per cent of the jobs will go to the coalition partner from the urban areas, 30 per cent are reserved for the ruling PML-Q, and the remaining 10 per cent are for the bureaucracy and others. The constitution provides a separate quota for rural and urban areas, but not on a political basis… — (Nov 17)
Kawish

— Selected and translated by Sohail Sangi