— File Photo

The FAFEN Intent to Vote survey (2013) looks at voting behaviour and patterns from across Pakistan to gauge voting intentions. Out of 4,450 people interviewed countrywide, 67 per cent said they intend to turn up for the election while six per cent stated they would not and 0.2 per cent were not sure. The remaining 27 per cent did not respond.

The survey comprises demographic details including age, education level, monthly income, occupation and employment. Data is analysed according to gender and geographic location (provincial breakdown).Out of 2,430 people interviewed in Punjab, 1,681 (69.2 per cent) intend to vote; similarly out of 650 interviewed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 419 (64.5 per cent) intend to vote; in Balochistan out of 310 interviewed, 166 (53.5 per cent) said they would show up on polling day; in Sindh out of 940 interviewed and 601 (63.9 per cent) expressed their intention to vote; in FATA out of 90 interviewed 82 (91.9 per cent) said they would vote; and out of 30 interviewed in the Islamabad Capital Territory 21 (70 per cent) said they would vote. In Balochistan, only 53 per cent of respondents intend to vote in the election. This could be attributed to the current insecurity and terror attacks.

These numbers might change nearer the election because voting patterns are dependent on socio-economic and political factors, says Mudassir Rizvi, the head of FAFEN.

However, political observers note that the integrity of the voting exercise is better presented for this election leading to increased voter confidence. “It is important to create an environment that will enable voters to go to polling stations,” Rashid Chaudhry at FAFEN explains.

For this reason the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has announced a combination of practices, including the deployment of army personnel at certain polling stations in violence-prone towns and cities. “Enhancing voter confidence is important at this stage. Discrediting democracy campaigns doesn’t help because people will feel their popular leadership is not allowed to contest and so they may not bother to vote,” Mr Chaudhry adds.

Interestingly, the Chief Election Commissioner, retired Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim, says he estimates a 60 per cent voter turnout. “People are more conscious of their rights,” he adds.

While examining the provincial breakdown using gender demographics (those intending to vote), the survey indicates that 2,373 men intend to vote and 2,077 women want to cast their votes (only one woman was interviewed in FATA as opposed to 89 men from the same area: the survey findings state she expressed the intent to vote).

Regionally 91 per cent of men in FATA said they would vote; 79 per cent in Punjab; 76 per cent in KP; 69 per cent in Sindh, 67 per cent in the ICT and 64 per cent in Balochistan. In Punjab, it is noted that 1,312 women (60.6 per cent) said they will vote; while in KP 207 (40.1 per cent) intend to vote and 125 (38.4 per cent) women in Balochistan. The survey shows that women voter intentions decrease where increasing insecurity challenges mobility and also where tradition bars female voters from leaving their homes.

The highest numbers of people in this survey not intending to vote were in Balochistan (15 per cent). Again this could be because of a lack of security which analysts believe will become even more widespread come polling day. Political candidates aligned to secular parties remain vulnerable to Taliban attacks. A small percentage of respondents in Punjab (six per cent), KP (4.5 per cent), Sindh (four per cent), ICT (three per cent) and FATA (one per cent) do not intend to vote.

The survey looks at the intent to vote among various age groups with respondents aged over 55 showing a greater interest to vote than other age groups. Regional analysis presents a different picture. In the ICT turnout intentions among the18 — to 25-year-old group were the highest and lowest for those above 45. FATA has more people in 18 to 25 age bracket who said they would vote; least likely to vote were aged between 46 and 55. In Punjab, KP and Sindh, those in the 26 to 35 age bracket were most likely to vote, followed by those in 36-45, 18-25, 46-55 and above 55 groups. According to Unicef, Pakistan’s youth bulge is one of the largest in the world with 35 per cent of the population being 15 years or less. The ECP states that 47.8 per cent of voters are between 18 and 35, while 19.77 per cent (16.88 million voters) are under the age of 26.

Educational qualifications are significant to the intention to vote. Seventy-six per cent of respondents with a bachelor’s degree or higher qualification intend to vote. Sixty-eight  per cent of madrassah and primary level educated students say they will vote.

The FAFEN survey examines the relationship of respondents with their elected representatives implying that voting intentions could be based on past performances: only six per cent had contacted their elected leaders in the past three months and more than two-fifths of respondents claimed that promises for development made during the 2008 election remained unfulfilled.
When asked to mark three key issues affecting their lives from a list of 28, not surprisingly more than half of the respondents (55 per cent) ticked off loadshedding of electricity, unemployment (21 per cent) and poverty (seven per cent). An equal number (two per cent) showed concern about terrorism, unavailability of sound education and decent sanitation facilities.

A woman at a polling booth. – FIle Photo

ON March 31, in an unprecedented move two women — Badam Zari from Bajaur and Nusrat Begum from Lower Dir — filed nomination papers for the election.

A former district vice president with the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, Nusrat Begum is the first woman candidate from Lower Dir, a district where women voters were often barred in the past. Although these two candidates illustrate a positive change in pre-election Pakistan, electioneering remains a male contest. Indeed, women’s lack of voting rights remains a serious problem which begins with the low number of women who are registered as voters.

With 37.4 million female voters and 48 million male voters on the electoral register, ten million unregistered women, according to FAFEN is a glaring instance of gender disparity. They propose that the ECP along with NADRA, political parties and civil society organisations ensure that unregistered women are found and given identity cards. Political pundits believe it is too late for this election.

“The registration of women as voters is the biggest issue. Although non-governmental organisations have tried to minimize this deficit to an extent, NADRA requires valid documentation to prove a citizen’s eligibility for an identity card. Many women cannot produce these,” explains Rashid Chaudhry at FAFEN.

But a CNIC and registration of their vote does not address the entire gamut of problems facing women voters. The latter are also deprived of their vote because of tribal customs; inaccessibility; voter unawareness; collusion of political parties; general insecurity; displacement and migration, and the unavailability of male members of the family to accompany female voters to polling stations.

In conservative districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Balochistan, when it comes to women’s political participation, local political party representatives forge informal agreements to prevent women from voting. Bushra Gohar, the Central Vice President of the Awami National Party, believes that even if there is no such verbal agreement between parties, women do not come out to vote because of patriarchal traditions in Kohistan and certain areas of Mansehra.

In fact, the ECP at the local level becomes party to this. Reports of women voters being kept away during past general elections or local government elections in Malakand, Shangla, Buner, Bajaur, Mohmand, DI Khan, Lower Dir and other areas in Fata with the tacit understating of the ECP are not uncommon.

For instance, in the 2011 by-election in Musakhel, Balochistan, the ECP established a woman-only polling station but the male staff went on strike because they refused to work with women. The ECP had to relent.

“It is socially accepted that women should not vote and secondary ECP staff drawn from local communities did not want to deviate from local customs,” Chaudhry explains.

Similarly in the by-election in Shangla, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in January 2011, only about 90 of the 59,177 registered women voted. Women were stopped from voting at 69 combined polling stations and 14 female polling stations as part of an agreement between contesting parties, including the Pakistan’s Peoples Party and the ANP.
“There was evidence that all parties had finalised an agreement which had then been countersigned by the ECP,” says Gohar who had taken the issue to parliament.

Gohar explains that parties in KP believe that if they relinquish control of women polling stations, bogus votes will be polled because women’s identity cards have no photographs; it is easier to stuff ballot boxes with fake votes at women-only stations.

For most activists, such behaviour can and should be challenged by the state – if the colluders are punished, it can act as a deterrent, they argue.

The ECP must exercise its legal authority under the Representation of the People Act, 1976 to prevent women’s disenfranchisement by punishing and fining perpetrators, say constitutional experts.

“This Act gives the ECP power to declare results from any given polling station or constituency as null and void, if anyone there is barred from voting. If this law is not being followed, it reflects the lack of seriousness with which we approach women rights,” says Mudassir Rizvi, the head of FAFEN.

In May 2012, it was also recommended that the Commission be given the right to nullify results from constituencies where local parties have excluded women or where less than 10 per cent have voted and that presiding officers provide separate data on male and female voters.

However, not all experts feel that these recommendations can address the problem. For instance, many believe the 10 per cent quota will be met by proxy voting. But here too, some believe that further legislation can help.

“Thumb impressions with magnetic ink on voter lists can be biometrically scanned. This means NADRA can tell whether bogus votes have been cast and if proxy voting has taken place at certain polling stations. This can act as a deterrent or even be used as evidence during appeals. This would in turn help detect fraud [bogus votes] but the absence of legislation remains the main problem,” Chaudhry at FAFEN argues.

However, political parties have resisted such ‘measures’. For instance they have said that it would be difficult to implement the 10 per cent prerequisite with the existing security risks because of which overall turnout figures will be low.

However, not all political observers are willing to buy into this reasoning including Mohammad Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. He claims that the security situation was no different during the 2008 election. The only difference this time around, he asserts, is the increase in sectarian violence, especially between January and March this year, which was confined to certain pockets in Karachi, Hangu and Quetta.

“This time it will be difficult for political parties to stop women from voting because even religious parties in Malakand have agreed to bring women to polling booths for the first time. In Lower Dir, the ECP has six polling stations for women but now each union council has requested one polling station. The ECP can challenge the local leadership – with secular credentials but conservative mind-sets – if women are kept at home this time,” Rana says.

Local activists agree with Rana; according to them the disenfranchisement of women has little to do with militancy and everything to do with gender discrimination.
Chaudhry tells Dawn that he has already heard of an implicit agreement so far in Torghar, KP, a tribal area turned settled district. However, the Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim asserts that the possibility of rigging is nil. He is looking into positioning female military personnel at women’s stations in insecure districts.

At the same time, NGOs and other observers point out that a larger female voter turnout is expected because of an increased turnout at combined polling stations (which women can reach in the company of men); an increased number of polling stations; and accessibility (polling stations are expected to be no further than two kilometers in distance from homes under SC directions).

Last but not least is the support of the more conservative candidates who are counting on women voters. Take JUI-F’s Maulana Rahat Hussain who is set to contest from Shangla, KP (PK-87) and who has endorsed women’s political participation if they conform to veiling themselves and traveling with men. “In the 2002 elections, polling stations were accessible for women as they were established on roads. About 400 women voted at polling stations near Gomori, Shangla and 100 women voted for me at the Shahpur polling station in 2011. No religion stops women from voting.”

Pakistan’s political dynasties — approximately 100 families were represented in the recently dissolved or outgoing provincial and federal legislatures — dominate electoral politics. Survival also implies shifting alliances that are not uncommon: Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, is a member of the outgoing ruling coalition when once it served to legitimise Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s politics.

The business of family politics focuses on the inheritance of power, money, and real estate (or land). Political parties, especially in South Asia are controlled by family successors lending them personal identity and finance for political campaigns, and who have the ability to sacrifice when in opposition.

Dynasties, like the Bhuttos of Pakistan, and India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty often construct a mirage of democracy, where politics is not about party ideology or policy integration, and instead evolves around family lineage and kinship that provides legitimacy and loyalty. When the need for intra-party elections to end dynastic control is ignored for varied reasons and leadership is unavailable, it goes against the grain of a democratic system. Author Victoria Schofield says the way to end dynastic politics in Pakistan is to “stop killing elected leaders”.

Another argument claims that legitimising charismatic leaders in fledgling democracies and permitting women politicians to emerge is acceptable when the electorate is informed and when centrist parties need a recognisable face to draw votes.

In Pakistan, it is this system of family politics that has caused a crisis of leadership. Such crises have been followed by military interventions perpetuated in part by the failure of internal party democracy. Meanwhile, voters fail to question politicians for reneging on promises.

Pakistan’s alternating political dynasties — the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N — have shown that political office can be used for amassing wealth and power with minimum public service. When Oxford-educated Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s roti, kapra aur makan (food, clothing and shelter) became a popular socialist-democratic mantra, it was charisma that drew hundreds of diehard supporters whose families remained loyal to the Bhuttos in PPP constituencies.

Many loyalists were killed while forming a protective shield around Benazir Bhutto’s cavalcade when she returned after exile.

Her bodyguards came from a cadre of PPP supporters. However, second-generation loyalists from Lyari, the party’s Karachi-based stronghold, express anger at having been denied their right to education, healthcare and jobs,  revealing noticeably reduced support for its new leadership. Graffiti sprayed on bullet-pocked walls is indicative of a new-generation politicking that is partial to local gangsters with alleged political ties. This shift in traditional allegiances is the result of years of socio-economic neglect.

Reflecting the will of a single personality as leader is indicative of the failure to share power at the provincial/district level or even within various tiers of the party structure. If experience and responsibility are about effective leadership then emerging political leaders — Bilawal Bhutto, Maryum Nawaz, Hamza Sharif — should not be turned into party bosses overnight but given space to learn to deliver basic rights, so that the masses from the lower- to middle-income voting population do not fall for the usual rhetoric and promises.

As a student at Oxford University, Bilawal Bhutto was a “readymade” politician, although his mother had wanted her son to experience the world before he entered politics.

Conversely, at 42, Rahul Gandhi has recently entered the political fray as the vice president of India’s Congress party and a plausible candidate as prime minister for the election in 2014. Aside from the fact that he is older, a silent political force and a reluctant leader who doesn’t divulge much and behaves unlike other political leaders, travelling distances to visit the downtrodden, the difference between both men is that one has been educated to follow the “family business”; whereas the other has been slow to come to the political frontline and has yet to show his cards.

Sonia Gandhi’s reasoning for her political upbringing excepting family losses is unknown. Working in his mother’s shadow, Mr Gandhi has prompted criticism as younger party workers have shown more dynamism.

So far Bilawal has shown insufficient visible hands-on political acumen besides performing at an induction speech and travelling with his father. His mother, who had wanted to enter the Foreign Service, had to adopt a political role out of lack of choice when her father was pushed out of politics.

Political dynasties often appear tenacious because they survive on personality and the desire to hold on to power through family rather than support new entrants on merit. After all, women with dynastic associations have become powerful leaders having had the opportunity which otherwise might not have occurred. It is when politicians are not accountable and the political system unresponsive to voter demands (because of wealth and corruption that comes with anointed leaders) that dynasties are at odds with democracy.

Historically, voter lethargy has brought independent and often right-wing political entrants. The democratic dynamic has become a family affair in South Asia requiring accountability, and educated heirs to understand the socio-economics pitfalls in their countries.

The writer is a senior assistant editor at the Herald.

razeshtas@gmail.com

Nadeem Aslam’s new novel shifts between Afghanistan and Pakistan, narrating post-9/11 stories of love and war, brilliantly exploring trauma and tragedies that are traced to historical circumstances.

“History is the third parent,” reads the opening sentence to The Blind Man’s Garden, in which Aslam continues to traverse territory similar to that of previous works, including The Wasted Vigil (2008). That novel was set in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and had militant radicalisation at its centre. Similar thematic threads — militancy and terrorism, conservative attitudes towards women, religious justifications of honour crimes — have appeared in most of Aslam’s novels, evidence of his understanding of how the world works, how women are forced to suffer patriarchal traditions and the effects war leaves in its wake.

The Blind Man’s Garden explores the aftermath of conflict through the lives of ordinary people who become victims of an ugly war that uproots their happiness. Much of it is about the perils of living with bombings, torture, disappearances, beheadings and terrorism. The novel is set in Heer, an imaginary town in Punjab, where portions of the plot unfold slowly, often quietly, amid an exquisite garden surrounding a house that has seen much sorrow. We follow the sadness of Naheed who waits for years for her lover, of her mother Tara and her sister-in-law Yasmin, of the family’s elderly patriarch, Rohan, who is blinded as he attempts to rescue the son of a bird-catcher from the prison of a warlord in Afghanistan. Aslam knows his backstory. There are references to warlords selling prisoners to the Americans for money, the torture of young boys for information, drone attacks on Taliban compounds obliterating families, patronage for Arab insurgents by rogue military officers.

Rohan’s sons Jeo and Mikal (the latter is adopted) travel secretly to Afghanistan to help the wounded (“wishing to be as close as possible to the carnage of this war”) while their families and lovers are left to pick up the pieces when death and destruction slowly take over. Jeo is killed (his wife Naheed is unable to visit the graveyard because local female vigilantes forbid women from praying at graves) while Mikal is taken prisoner by a warlord, unaware that his brother has died. And so begins his search that further sucks him into a war in which he has no interest. In the wake of 9/11, hundreds of young men travelled from Pakistan as jihadi fighters recruited through religious schools. Other global recruits also joined the Taliban insurgency because they prescribed to Al Qaeda’s world view, despite the apparent differences in the goals and modus operandi of the Afghan Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s fighters. Pakistan’s new generation of fighters were often boys too young to fight, as Mikal notes while crossing the border in a bus packed with first-time insurgents. There are detailed, harrowing scenes of boys being raped in Taliban compounds and descriptions of American-led torture (interrogations that Bagram and Guantanamo prisoners are known to have suffered) that Mikal narrates. When captured by the Americans in Afghanistan, they photograph him against a height chart, shave his head and beard and interrogate him at an unnamed prison. When he is unable to answer whether he’d spent time in Sudan or had links with the man who blew up an American airport, he is put into a sleep deprivation cell and beaten, arms shackled to the ceiling — Mikal becomes the character we see interrogated in a secret prison for information in Zero Dark Thirty. This novel could easily be termed Aslam’s best: executed with perfection, with an understanding of territory and of ordinary emotion, and with the ability to numb the senses. There is an emotionally charged sentence that runs through a page when Mikal imagines being derided by an American interrogator for “being worthless, for the disaster that is his love for Naheed, for not being able to help Jeo, for Pakistan and its poverty … [for] his nation where the taps don’t have water, and the shops don’t have sugar … his disgusting, repulsive  country where everyone it seems is engaged in killing everyone else … a land of revenge attacks.”

As anger and unrest caused by the war escalate, the narrative progresses with gripping scenes inserted at intervals alongside stories belonging to Naheed and Tara. The question is whether Mikal will make it back to Naheed before she is married off a second time and whether life will be worth rebuilding after all that has been suffered. At moments the novel resembles a war thriller in which one of the most intensely drawn characters struggles to untangle himself before he can get to his love; a Heathcliff-like dark character with hidden virtue. Escapades with death, prisoners, guns, trucks and a bullet used to replace a fuse in the headlights of a van that can overheat and fire into the driver are all packed tightly into the story.

Character complexity and intimacy is something Aslam says he does deliberately to move the imagination. Much of the action in this novel has a fulcrum in Rohan’s character, a retired school teacher whose former school, Ardent Spirit, has been taken over by “thugs with Korans,” and under the influence of former military generals, turned into a breeding ground for jihad. His religious convictions are complex: Rohan refused medication to his dying wife because she had denounced her religion and when she died, he burned all her paintings. But he still prays for her soul and condemns militant Islamists when they take over a school and kill teachers. Poetic language and rich imagery work well with emotions portrayed through landscape. Flora and fauna, as also observed in Aslam’s previous novels, are described with magical finesse: “moths that look like shavings from a pencil sharpener”.  As Rohan slowly goes blind, Naheed paints over each flower so that he is able to see a glimmer of colour when he walks through the garden with the assistance of a wire that runs through its length. Characters like Rohan and Naheed and the lesser explored Salomi and Yasmin are fixed on the novel’s landscape, barely changing course or repenting but not accepting of their lives. Rohan frustrates as a character who is accepting of his fate and that of his country as it changes course.

“What strange times are these, when Muslims must fear other Muslims,” says Tara. The clash between extremist Islam and liberal narratives is apparent in Pakistan today and Aslam’s characters in this novel serve as a direct reminder that we haven’t learnt the history lesson that this and previous conflicts might have taught.

The reviewer is a staffer at the monthly, Herald

The Blind Man’s Garden

(Novel)

By Nadeem Aslam

Knopf, US

ISBN 9788184001099

384pp. Rs895

His eldest daughter recalled, “He was our sole breadwinner. He was like my friend and mentor. My brothers, both in their 20s, don’t have jobs. My sisters go to college.
Why did they kill him?”

The resurgence of militant violence has been the most dangerous fallout for Pakistan in the ‘war on terror’. Suicide bombings, religious militancy, sectarian and ethnic killings have resulted in thousands dead over the last decade.

In 2011, as per the online database South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), a little over 3500 people were killed in terror attacks in Pakistan. In 2012, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, 2,050 people were killed and 3,822 injured in incidents of terror, a difference that some may think indicates a decrease in violence.

But given the sudden rise in everyday attacks by non-state actors in the absence of security, major cities (and Karachi tops the list) have witnessed increased pre-election violence since the start of this year.

Whereas loss of life is assessed and medical costs for injuries considered, the surviving women and children are the invisible casualties of Pakistan’s militant warfare.
Bearing the burden of conflict, they have lost what they possessed and family members they cherished. They struggle for years after the tragedy becomes a memory.

Government compensation for families who lose relatives in terror attacks is half a million rupees, but after the Abbas Town bombings in Karachi, the compensation figure reached one and a half million rupees. Whether this money reaches the victims’ families is not known. What is a given is that rebuilding homes and lives and overall security is a long-term project.

When families fled Swat during the government operation against the Pakistani Taliban and flooded refugee camps, many were left penniless. Widows and orphans were left to fend for themselves in circumstances where the male breadwinner was no longer around to support the family. They had to rely on relatives and charities.

There have been reports of widowed women in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa being sold to the highest bidder through sham marriages and forced into prostitution in cities such as Karachi. Contingency plans to protect women are hardly a priority for the government. The latter has failed to identify issues that must be considered as policies are formulated for compensation and assistance.

As fighting in the tribal areas increased with military operations targeting insurgent groups and the war gained momentum, communities in the tribal belt endured the backlash. Violence has been perpetuated through militant groups and the military’s counterterrorism operations, alleged forced renditions and disappearances, largely involving men, in this region.

In North Waziristan, the negative impact of drone attacks on civilians has led to severe economic hardship and psychological trauma. Waziris have been given government compensation but locals explain it isn’t sufficient given the loss of income — their livelihoods depend on small businesses, foreign remittances and agriculture — and long-term medical bills.

With minimum infrastructure and investment in socio-economic projects, and little access to information from within, Pakistan’s tribal regions have a low literacy rate (Taliban violence against schools also deprives children of education). By some estimates, female literacy is as low as three per cent in certain parts.

While information on civilian casualties from strikes is hard to come by, the New America Foundation, a non-profit public policy institute, puts the number of casualties in double digits every year since 2004 except in 2012. A nine-month research project called Living under Drones conducted jointly by Stanford and New York universities concluded that the number of high-level targets killed as a percentage of total costs is low and strikes facilitate recruitment by militant organisations.

The same report also confirms the lack of access to women in Fata which makes speaking directly to them about their experiences impossible. Pakhtun traditions find it inappropriate for men to provide names of women killed in drone strikes or for women to travel long distances to claim compensation or for medical attention.

In March 2011, a drone strike on a jirga gathering in Datta Khel, North Waziristan was believed to have killed more than 40 people. A fact-finding mission discovered that it was mostly community elders and government representatives who had been killed.

In this instance when survivors shared their stories, it was discovered that nearly all the fatalities comprised heads of households — elderly tribal leaders who received government stipends, ran small businesses and supported families of six to eight children.

The sons of those killed cannot find employment locally because of the lack of opportunity and money. This is one of the reasons why it is common practice for young Waziri men to work away from home, with many in the Middle East.

The World Bank’s Gender Equality and Development Report 2012 attributes gender inequality to women’s work effort being underused, and having no control over household incomes whether through their own earnings or savings.

Using education to create choices is critical at a time when the country’s biggest problem is terrorist violence. Forced to re-evaluate their lives, it is mandatory that women and children receive backup support through planned contingency programmes in the wake of terror attacks so that they are not left helpless after losing the male heads of families.

This is what the Pakistani government should be looking at as the world observes International Women’s Day.

The writer is senior assistant editor at Herald.

razeshtas@gmail.com

At an individual level, it may not be too difficult to fashion ourselves into advocates for what we believe in, whether it’s condemning the slaughter of Balochistan’s Hazaras or speaking in support of women victims of crime. We could use social media to rally support or contribute in other ways towards bringing change; but rarely has civic action, without the requisite numbers or the sustained action, resulted in reforming the socio-political landscape.

So back to the news of the day: a series of bombings across Pakistan have killed some 120 people — journalists, a human rights activist whose Twitter profile reads ‘My religion is respect’, civilians, Frontier Corps personnel, women, children, members of the Hazara community.

Last year was the bloodiest for Pakistan’s Shia population, Human Rights Watch reports, reminding of the callousness and apathy of law-enforcement authorities that have failed to take action against rising sectarian violence. Many question the failure of the state to provide security to communities living in fear and the answer isn’t hard to come by.

More disturbing is political inaction when it comes to investigation and prosecutions. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom says that “more than 400 Shia have been killed in the past year. The violence was tragic and predictable. The government must take action to protect all its citizens”. Tolerating violence threatens stability, when the institutions of democracy — parliament, the judiciary, media — remain passive towards corruption, sectarianism and extremism.

If the government has failed to act, why has civil society failed to raise its voice? One could argue that civil society has been restricted and controlled, and has been unable to develop into a concerted national movement that feeds off activism and the will to fight injustice. This could be because activism is an elite preoccupation in many underdeveloped countries. When starving, unemployed and worried about the safety of their family, civil society is unable to protest or chant slogans or coin radical tweets.

The effort at best has been sporadic. For instance, in 2011, the Karachi-based Citizens for Democracy, a coalition of 80 civil bodies, ran a campaign when in a single day it obtained 150,000 petitions demanding an end to violence and protection for minorities. Little followed that effort.

The paucity of groups with common agendas — or the inability of these groups to come together — along with an elitist, exclusive model with individual projection as the key driving force, and limited financial resources — keep civil movements, which should be the nucleus of any democracy, at bay.

Activism here is not broad-based or effective. This is unlike India’s vibrant civil society where even moderate voices have demanded and won rights for squatters, labourers, women and low-caste communities. Here civil society briefly united during the 2007 lawyers movement, assisted by the free media but again with negligible staying power.

Historically, the failure of getting diverse groups to converge on one platform is attributed to differing ideologies and missing national will. Social movements liberate to provide opportunities; something that hasn’t happened for Pakistan. The legacy of the Soviet-Afghan war eroded liberal platforms; uneasy political alliances and military interventions proved detrimental to pro-resistance movements. Periods of military rule gave rise to fragmented movements led by leftists, communists, progressive writers. Resistance was crushed by the state, although some underground movements based on political ideologies managed to sustain themselves.

Conversely, the language movement in East Pakistan lent Bengali identity its impetus and became a forerunner to the nationalist movement, and subsequently the 1971 war and independence for the country’s eastern wing.

Here, in the 1980s, when the women’s movement emerged with the formation of the Women’s Action Forum, civil society was propelled into action by Zia’s draconian Hudood laws. Women’s rights were not a government priority, and unfortunately regressive societal attitudes overall did not help the cause of the handful who lobbied for change. It was much later that women parliamentarians would win popular attention, spearheading pro-women bills despite religious opposition.

For civil society to extend beyond pockets of protest groups to more advocacy-based initiatives that are funded and long-term, act as a watchdog over the government and participate in policy creation (through awareness campaigns, research, community activation), a more cohesive national movement is needed. Pakistanis must take ownership of their issues. This is a challenge indeed given the large percentage of people living below the poverty line in a country that is at a crossroads, and that stands divided in its fight against extremism.

What is also disturbing are the varied differences that civil society shows to matters that, as human rights violations, should prompt strong, collective action. In May 2012, an amateur video emerged from a conservative district of Kohistan of four women singing and clapping and a couple of men dancing. We don’t know if the women are alive or have been shot after a tribal jirga condemned the participants to death for their celebratory disposition. Civil rights groups haven’t protested on a larger scale for justice for these men and women. But when in October, a schoolgirl from Swat was shot and injured by the Taliban, the attack forced condemnation from politicians and activists, with global shock at this brutal assault.

It seems that traditional practices and beliefs suffice as justification for crimes committed and for uneducated, poor victims being incarcerated or murdered for committing blasphemy. Those who have shown solidarity against religious bigotry and violence have been murdered. Real civil activism will become a high-risk strategy when it comes to the final push for saving democracy.

The writer is a senior assistant editor at the Herald.

razeshtas@gmail.com

Gaddafi’s poster being used as a doormat – Photo by AFP

Historically the Arab Spring might have left its mark by successfully ousting dictators, but not without a legacy of weak new governments and the rise of political Islam. The mechanism of change drawing on civil resistance — strikes, protests, rallies and the use of social media — first came into action, according to reports, more than two years ago on December 17, 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, set himself on fire, igniting a revolutionary spark in the Middle East.

The success of a new Libya — the country held its first general elections since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in July 2012 and voted in a new 200-member General National Congress — is what drives the focus for most Middle East experts, noting that in Libya, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, moderates have been voted into government. This might explain Libya’s success post-Arab Spring in the short term. The new government, however, will not only be required to rebuild state institutions and draft a constitution but contain and disband the scores of powerful and armed militias threatening to bring factional rivalries and corruption to the fore in the absence of a coordinated national army and police force. The killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi last year by an Al Qaeda linked group is evidence of these rogue militias, some with associations with Islamist organisations, others operating like mafia groups threatening security. Then there is also the fact that Libya sits on the largest oil reserves in Africa worth $120 billion; something that Gaddafi had effectively used as a bargaining chip with Western governments, as he worked to rehabilitate himself. Though it has been projected that Libya’s GDP could rise by 59 per cent in 2012, there is fear that tribal patronage and regional interests based on decades of oil-based patronage politics could hold the economy back. Only economic reforms would ensure the efficient management of oil reserves, say experts.

Reporting for Channel 4, journalist Lindsey Hilsum made four trips to Libya in 2011 to report the conflict and follow the stories of many Libyans — those who supported Colonel Gaddafi right until the end and those who returned home after decades in exile in the hope that they would contribute to the changes that the revolution might bring.

In Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution, Hilsum not only draws on her reportage of the uprising, but also charts Gaddafi’s historical trajectory, his political projects and socialist, revolutionary appeal and why his philosophies did not endure beyond the Arab Spring. Throughout the book, there is discussion about what led Libyans to dissent against the regime and demand the fall of Gaddafi at all costs; why families of prisoners incarcerated at Abu Salim prison for decades, many hundreds dead and buried in unmarked graves, protested until they got justice; and why educated, exiled professionals returned in the midst of the uprising to take up arms or assist in other ways critical to the development of the opposition as a political force. Many Libyans were angry at the West in the advent of 9/11, accusing the British and Americans of collaborating with the regime by ‘rendering’ dissident Libyans who were tortured by Gaddafi’s men. MI6 and the CIA helped Libya track down their enemies in the West with Mark Allen, the MI6 director, writing that it is “the least we could do,” notes Hilsum.

Sandstorm is fast-paced, descriptive and held together by interviews with ordinary people, rebels, government officials, former Abu Salim prisoners and young activists — all this is evidence of Hilsum’s experience as a television correspondent. Her analysis of the track record of Western governments and their relationship with dictators — something critical to the future of the Arab Spring countries — lends greater context, reminding how Western governments, especially France, the UK and the US, which had once rehabilitated Gaddafi, altered their image of him dramatically when it suited their purpose. His isolation was also in part because he provided the IRA with semtex used in attacks in Ireland and in Britain. Also, his government was financially supportive of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Yet this strange trajectory from “enemy to friend and back to enemy again had no parallel in modern history,” according to Hilsum, with the British and the Americans conveniently forgetting the olive branch that had at times been extended to a “brutal dictator”. Earlier, former US president Bush had said that “oldhostilities need not continue forever”.

What changed the Libyan landscape for the West in the post 9/11 period is familiar, as in Egypt during the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but reminds us that if the West and Gaddafi shared a symbiotic relationship at the advent of the ‘war on terror’, he too skilfully parlayed his weapons programme and compensation for the Lockerbie bombings for international acceptability. So, in essence, even if his political fortunes swayed with international currents, Gaddafi was a savvy player. But as the chips fell, Libyans suffered the brunt of this vacillating liaison, their country without a proper political infrastructure or identity, an unregulated economy, poverty and poor education and health care. Gaddafi, the last of his generation of Arab dictators, believed that he should remain in his position because he never ruled; it was the people who ruled, and he was simply the guide. From the start, his charisma and control might have won him friends in high places (John McCain tweeted about meeting Gaddafi in Libya in 2009, “Late evening with Col. Gaddafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya — interesting meeting with an interesting man”) but he would support any group, country or even individual who “challenged what he saw as colonialist or imperial power”. Hilsum meets Mukhtar Nagasa, the son of a diplomat, who had studied The Green Book (the Gaddafi edicts) at school. He tells her that Gaddafi and Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser were “like rock stars to us”. As a work reading somewhere between second-hand socialist ideas and more original ‘thoughts,’ the Green Book, was so fetishised that gigantic versions were constructed in concrete across Libya. For example, it read: “It is… unreasonable for crowds to enter playgrounds and arenas to watch a player or team without participating themselves” — if this decree was carried out, it would have killed off Libya’s sporting life for good.

Gaddafi wasn’t innocent of the allegations against him at home: the massacre at Abu Salim is an example. In 2001, Hilsum writes, even though Abu Salim families were given death certificates from Libyan authorities, they were not informed under what circumstances their relatives died and their bodies were not returned. Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanussi is held responsible for the murder of 1,270 men at the notorious prison but he could not have been put on trial and sacked because he was married to Gaddafi’s wife’s sister, Fatima, explains Razia Sholeh, who spoke fondly of Gaddafi as the “Guide” for whom both she and her husband worked. Hilsum quotes her: “‘We are a family country,’ she said. ‘That’s how it works in Libya.’” According to Razia, if al-Sanussi had been sacked, his tribe would have rebelled. After Gaddafi’s death, Razia, who is also married into the extended family, fled for Tunisia. In 2004, Gaddafi allowed Amnesty International into Libya for the first time and he admitted that “something had happened at the prison”. In the mid-2000s, his son Saif al Islam adopted a moderate stance, forming a charity and development foundation, aware that “human rights were a major problem”.

In Sandstorm, the Brother Leader, as Colonel Gaddafi was also known, comes across as a man who towards the end of his political career inhabited a strange world of a corrupt family dictatorship, where his detractors were tortured and executed in prisons, and abroad and even publicly. As most dictators, he became so eccentric that “by 2011 he seemed like a character from an old movie that no one wanted to see again…his dyed black hair grew longer and wilder, while his face grew more distorted by Botox, like a sinister Middle Eastern Michael Jackson.”

That history taught Libyan leaders little to nothing is the focus of this narrative. Ironically, Libya’s past that had led to the 1969 coup ousting King Idris — also known to have banned political parties and enjoyed reliance on the British and Americans — was no different to the new order patronised by Gaddafi. The outcome of both the monarchy and Gaddafi’s regime was the same: Libyans suffered “years of neglect” without a strong state and economy. For both leaders, Western imperialists played the role of big brother (Gaddafi may have stood his ground more defiantly) when they felt the need to exert geographical influence or renew relations to set up gas exploration projects in North Africa.

The strength of such narrative reporting can be found in the stories Libyans tell. A former aircraft engineer for Libyan Airlines had two sons who both fought in 2011. Hilsum meets him at his Misrata home where he tells her: “I feel ashamed, because my generation was hopeless. No one thought the young people had this courage and wanted to die for this country.”

The reviewer is a staffer at the monthly Herald

Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution

(POLITICS)

By Lindsey Hilsum

Faber and Faber, London

ISBN 159420506X

288pp. $17.99

The debate about whether British and American service-women should encounter direct combat on the frontlines remained undecided for over 10 years. The reasoning:
women do not possess the physical and psychological stamina required in a combat zone, so they remain barred from the infantry, Special Forces and most ground artillery units. They can lead male troops on the battlefront but not fight alongside them.

But since 2001, women have proven indispensable, especially when it comes to interacting with and searching local women (and their homes) in conservative and unfamiliar cultures, in particularly in Afghanistan’s Helmand province where the British control military operations.

“You think you may never come back,” are the words of a young British Female Engagement Officer (FEO) drawn from female volunteers across the British army. She and others are receiving specialised language and cultural training to forge relationships with Afghan women in the most volatile parts of Helmand which the forces are preparing for 2014. Their job includes securing the roads around Helmand because security is vital to quelling the insurgency and for economic impact; searching for IEDs; and pushing out on foot, patrolling local villages to gauge the extent of Taliban influence.

Female soldiers contribute to the ‘white picture’ — a phrase describing the effect that FEOs contribute to thorough information-gathering, understanding local populations’ needs and motivations for intelligence purposes, and to win hearts and minds.

The phrase is also the title for photographer and former Royal Air Force officer Alison Basker-ville’s documentation of women in combat after her six-week embed with the British forces in Helmand.

Revealing the alternate view of life on the frontline for women, the photograph exhibition reminds us that female soldiers, whether fighting for the hearts and minds of Afghan women (and men) or fighting alongside their male colleagues, are expected to react to threats as trained soldiers. For new warfare, there must be new rules, say military analysts and that’s where women soldiers face the toughest challenges.

Tall and spirited, Captain Anna Crossley, 31, a nurse at Londons UCL hospital is photographed in full military gear against a mountainous backdrop near Camp Bastion.
Fluent in Pushto after an 18-month tutorial, Crossley — who will return to Afghanistan next year — says: “It’s like any other job; like driving a bus.” Lieutenant Jessica French speaks colloquial Pushto; she has spent six months going into villages in Helmand talking to women and earning their trust, and has decided to go back in 2014 to continue with her role Local Afghan communities, especially women, find it difficult to understand the concept of a female soldier who speaks their own language but is unmarried, so most female soldiers explain they have a ‘Helmand husband’.

Capt Susanna Wallis, a Royal Signals officer and trainer, is photographed at a parade at the Kabul Military Training Centre: she has pushed for female recruits to graduate alongside men.

In Helmand, “it’s a tough world” the women concede, with male and female soldiers living side by side and facing similar situations. Military commanders on the ground now concede that women are as capable when out on patrol or flushing out insurgents. Fear must be nonexistent, as Lt Jessica French writes: “Fear, You must trickle through me, let me sleep yet wake me in the time of need.”

Recommendations in a US Department of Defence report to Congress reviewing laws and policies restricting women in the military states that the “elimination of gender-restricted assignment” is critical, making it essential for women to be allowed to serve at the battalion level of direct combat units. Women soldiers have been shot at and killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan but because they — especially American women — aren’t officially meant to be exposed to the fighting, they are denied certain disability benefits.

Recent studies suggest that deployed women are more than twice as liable to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as male colleagues. In the UK, the Ministry of Defence bans women from serving in units where they are “deliberately required to close with and kill the enemy face-to-face”.

But even as no one questions the toughness and competence of female soldiers — most deployments include foot-patrols through the streets of volatile towns and villages, serving as gunners on vehicles, disposing of explosives and driving trucks down bomb-riddled roads or even conducting raids in disregard of official policy — the militaries of the UK and US are not ready to adopt and change policies to include women across the full military spectrum.

Women are allowed to serve alongside men in Canada (which recruited women for its infantry), Israel, Italy, Australia and New Zealand, but it was only this year that American service-women were inducted into key military positions (in the Marine Corps) that were earlier reserved for men.

With more than 225,000 women deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan according to official estimates, women comprise 15 per cent of the US armed forces with many serving unofficially in combat roles. Almost 150 American service-women have lost their lives.

Baskerville talks of the women she befriended as being equal to male soldiers when deployed on the ground. But “women are also pacifiers and able to use the right language to engage others through sharing their personal experiences about what it’s like to be a woman in combat”.

The determined look, captured in a photograph, of the head of the department of women’s affairs in Gereshk in Helmand is telling: “It all starts with education. If we can teach these young girls that they have a right to be free then perhaps we can change things for the next generation of women for Afghanistan,” says Gullali Sheraz, who is the head of the Department of Womens Affairs in Gereshk in Helmand.

The writer is a senior assistant editor at the Herald.
razeshtas@gmail.com

Independent rights groups have pointed out that the majority of women in police custody are subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Given this situation, the lower echelons of the police force can hardly be expected to look upon domestic violence, rape, incest and ‘honour’ killing as punishable offences. This is not only because of cultural biases or ignorance. Incidents of violence are also disregarded when money is exchanged or there is pressure from influential officials to not register a complaint.

Unfortunately, the question is not merely one of an insensitive force. When police fail to immediately register a rape victim’s complaint, crucial and potentially incriminating evidence is lost. Meanwhile, written complaints often go against the victim who must endure humiliating questioning by policemen who could blame her for instigating a rape attack.

Victims of violent crime — gang-raped and brutally beaten, others stripped and physically abused, young teenagers sexually abused by fathers, uncles and brothers — often remain silent, recognising perhaps the obstacles in their fight for justice. The social taboo attached to such crime further deters them from reporting it. The justice system fails female victims, often re-victimising them in court by incriminating them as ‘loose’ women.

Given this scenario — the social disgrace faced by raped women, a police force that does not care — laws to protect women are only useful if implemented with legislative awareness and mindset change. Legal experts claim the majority of cases go unreported or are covered up despite all legislative changes and the pro-women lobbyists in parliament. Beyond that, only five per cent of rape cases end in convictions.

In the Mansehra case, demands for a judicial commission headed by a high court judge have had no results even though the district police officer has openly admitted that members of his force are culpable. A key witness, a female police officer, is missing after the police initially brought the young victim to her home for a night in the absence of a women’s cell.

The media is also partially to blame in this as it highlights aspects that contribute to sensationalising the crime. Irrelevant reporting about the victim’s past, comments on her character, profession or clothing, is unethical and compromise the victim’s safety. In the Mansehra case, for instance, the reason the victim was on her own was unclear. Some sections of the press described her as a ‘runaway’, given that at a media briefing she said that she had left Karachi with her fiancé but he disappeared. While describing her as such is bad enough, the fact that she was made to recount her ordeal at a public press conference is worse. Not only did the authorities fail to protect her identity as a minor, she was indirectly made out to be responsible for her suffering.

Most victims of such crime are denied justice through the courts, often forced to live in the same locality as the alleged rapist or sent into exile with their families. Perpetrators with political backing are freed in most instances, even threatening the victim and her family. When two women were raped in December 2010 in Karachi’s Defence area, the incident was so callously
portrayed by police, government officials and sections of the media that rights activists were up in arms.

In 2005 in Sui, Balochistan, a doctor was raped and brutally beaten. When she reported the incident, she was placed under house arrest, the evidence was apparently tampered with and the accused, a captain in the army, was acquitted. Eventually, she was forced into exile with her husband.

In other similar crimes, the law-enforcers are complicit because of their inaction, even though legally the punishment applicable can be life imprisonment or death. Last month, a 63-year-old woman and her sister older by two years were locked up and disrobed by five men in Muzaffargarh. Tied to a motorbike and paraded naked, their ordeal was filmed on cellphones.

Some officials say that the lack of police intervention confirms their complicity, but the police claim that because the family involved was influential in the district, they feared violent reaction.

When crime goes unreported for fear of reprisals, when victims have no confidence in the lower district courts, and where the traditional feudal order runs a parallel policing and justice system, education about legal rights must become a priority. Failing to register a complaint should hold severe repercussions for the police, especially in rural areas where accessibility is problematic for victims. An implementing and monitoring group (equipping women’s police stations with resources and knowledge) working in tandem with the women’s ministry and the National Commission on the Status of Women must sensitise the police to protect women.

Teaching people to respect women’s right as equal citizens, even within culturally acceptable parameters, would require institutionalising gender information in police academies and for law and policy students. Grass-roots education campaigns targeting the semi-literate involving district and religious leaders could lead to altering mindsets. Reforming district courts, because the judiciary is where the buck stops, will result in higher conviction rates.

Re-examining the national judicial policy must be a priority for the next government. Women’s integration is important for the political economy; this may be impossible in its entirety given the position of the religious right, but efforts in this regard could reduce the violence that women suffer.

The writer is a senior assistant editor at the Herald.

razeshtas@gmail.com

But, although the Afghan constitution maintains equality for both men and women, it appears that women’s short-lived gains are sliding back. With women jailed for running away from forced marriages, pressured to compromise by religious leaders, with no recourse to legal protection, it appears that women’s voices are being muffled.

If women’s concerns are ignored at international conferences where billions of dollars are pledged for security and their rights unrepresented at discussions with Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, will women become collateral damage in post-war talks with the Taliban?

As Nato forces prepare to hand over security to Afghans, a rising insurgency has destabilised a fragmented government preparing for a 2014 election. It is in this powerful, patriarchal space dominated by politicians — former warlords, communist leaders and the Taliban — with blanket amnesty from war crimes that women parliamentarians push their agendas and make alliances.

The Single Transferable Vote System favouring factionalism, party fragmentation and individualism does not support female candidates. An independent candidate within this system requires resources and support networks for a successful campaign, something women lack.

Forming a consistent voting bloc with loyalties is difficult but necessary for legislative policymaking. Making alliances with conservative male parliamentarians is pragmatic for mobilising votes on women’s political issues and decreasing gender-based discrimination. In a highly polarised parliament, outwardly adversarial towards women’s rights, female parliamentarians have united to lobby for gender units in key ministries.

“It’s important to have women within parliament because they raise certain issues that men may not be able to, like the gender budget, one of the policies based on the Afghan National Development Strategy. It took 10 years to plan for women’s advocacy, empowerment and education. In such an underdeveloped country, it was difficult to convince the government, but after four years we succeeded,” parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai explained.

Out of the 249 seats, 68 are guaranteed for women in the Wolesi Jirga (Lower House of parliament) Security conditions prevent women parliamentarians from travelling to lobby their constituents. Most received votes based on their support for girls’ education — often without financial resources and with opposition from warlords and religious leaders.

A former parliamentarian from Farah province, Malalai Joya wears a burka to disguise her identity having survived six assassination attempts. She lives in a series of safe-houses knowing the Taliban want to kill her.

Thrown out of parliament in 2005 after comparing it to a stable of warlords and drug barons, Joya said: “I am ready to die but I won’t compromise with them. Hundreds of women and children have been killed by the Taliban and now they invite them to talk. We don’t even have a caricature of democracy.”

Joya is outspoken but like other women parliamentarians has been offered no government protection after raising controversial issues. “I don’t value this mafia parliament of lawbreakers; warlords responsible for our country’s situation. They are the most anti-women people in this society who brought our country to this state. They intend to do the same again. I have said that parliament is worse than a zoo for which I was suspended. Some even threatened to rape me.”

As the country’s former chairwoman of the defence committee, Barakzai won her seat from Kabul province; over 100 women candidates registered. “Even my husband, whom I supported, was a candidate from Kabul running an election campaign worth thousands of dollars, but he lost. I worked on my street campaign, not expecting to win. It’s your support that gets you the vote and not your money,” said the former journalist and underground teacher who organised girls’ schools during Taliban rule.

Even with 35 per cent of women politicians in the Lower House; a law on ending violence against women; and 2.4 million girls back in school, progress for women remains precarious.

According to the Gender Development Index, Afghan women have some of the lowest indicators in the world. The average life expectancy for a woman is 44 years, and in rural provinces between 30 to 90 per cent have no access to healthcare.

The Taliban have attacked schools in the conservative south and east, and are alleged to have poisoned children. In May, the Afghan Ministry of Education said that 550 schools in 11 provinces with Taliban support were closed down.

Saima Azizi Sadat elected twice from Parwan province as an “education campaigner”, survived an assassination attempt in 2007. As director of education in a province, with more than 200 schools, that is “40 per cent Taliban and where girls’ education was hardly a priority”, Sadat has opponents.

“We don’t support the Taliban coming back with their old policies even if they join the government. They will need to follow the constitution. But they might negotiate peace and then go back to their old ways.” Sadat has had to make compromises with the Taliban. In 1999, she was struck unconscious by the Taliban when running French-assisted secret schools for more than 600
girls.

For Afghan women, peace is a process and should not be a deal. According to Barakzai, “We need women to give legitimacy to the government. Nations find their own way. We need to build procedure, and elections are the only way for women to participate. No matter who the next president is, good or bad … we need to continue the democratic process. The Taliban will never come back as a regime. No way. No chance.”

The writer is a senior assistant editor at the Herald.

razeshtas@gmail.com