Unending peace pretensions

ON February 21, 2007, India and Pakistan signed a “nuclear risk reduction” agreement in New Delhi which both countries rightly hailed as a major “confidence-building” measure. Apparently, this was the only visible and appreciable outcome of our foreign minister’s otherwise “controversial” visit to New Delhi which many people thought was “untimely” and “unnecessary”, taking place as it did immediately on the heels of the Samjhota disaster.

Besides witnessing the signing of this long-awaited agreement at the level of additional secretaries in the respective foreign offices of the two countries, our foreign minister also had a beaming photo-op with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee to gesture their “common” commitment to the ongoing India-Pakistan peace process, and to reiterate their unending peace pretensions.

Both countries condemned the cross-border train attack as an attempt to upset the peace process and vowed not to allow this process to be derailed. One hopes the message was not lost upon the “perpetrators” of the Panipat barbarity be they in India or elsewhere, and there will be no more attacks on the Samjhota Express which has been the only visible and “moving” sign of the otherwise immobile peace process for a back-channel “Samjhota” on Kashmir and other major outstanding issues between the two countries.

One thing is clear: the architects or the perpetrators of this tragedy were not Pakistanis because Pakistani “terrorists” didn’t have to cross the border to kill Pakistanis. They are taking a free “suicidal” toll almost every day in their own country by blowing themselves up and killing innocent people in public places, including police and security personnel. As for the Kashmiri militants, they will never target Pakistanis anywhere no matter how deeply disillusioned they may be with the recent governmental policy turnarounds on Kashmir.

Now what did the foreign minister achieve during his New Delhi visit? No one could deny the ability and seriousness with which our foreign minister must have advocated the need and urgency for results on Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek in the current dialogue process. But these issues were not specifically on the agenda of his visit which was primarily in the context of co-chairing with his Indian counterpart a regular meeting of the India-Pakistan joint commission.

No major outcome was expected from this routine, apolitical and essentially a bureaucratic event. A bonus dividend of the current India-Pakistan peace process did, however, come a few days later in the form of India’s unilateral withdrawal of tariff concessions which it had extended to Pakistan under South Asia Free Trade Agreement (Safta).

There were no decisions on liberalisation of the visa regimes, improvement of each other’s prisoners’ treatment and relaxation of restrictions on diplomats’ movement. Whatever understanding had been reached on these matters in earlier bilateral meetings did not take off. The Indians also rejected the idea of a joint probe into the Samjhota tragedy and offered only to share information on the investigation during the first meeting of the joint “anti- terror” mechanism to be held next month.

On the positive side, the most significant outcome was the signing of the long over-due agreement on “nuclear risk reduction measures” commonly known as NRRMs. One must recognise, however, that the signing of this agreement on February 21 was also not without significance. It was exactly on this date eight years ago, on the occasion of the Lahore Summit, that the elected leadership of the two countries had agreed to change the course of their history. They solemnly decided to “intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir” through an accelerated process of the composite dialogue. As nuclear-capable states after their tests, both countries were aware of the risks and responsibilities involved. They realised the need for mutual restraint, and in February 1999, they decided to work for conclusive measures in nuclear and conventional arms control in order to build mutual confidence and avoid the risks of conflict.

Among the three substantive bilateral documents on the whole range of their relations, a comprehensive memorandum of understanding was signed by the then foreign secretaries of the two countries in the presence of their prime ministers, which laid down a framework of mutual “nuclear risk reduction” and other confidence-building measures aimed at preventing the risk of nuclear conflict and unauthorised or accidental use of nuclear weapons.

The agreed measures were to be worked out by experts of the two sides in meetings to be held on mutually agreed dates before mid-1999, with a view to reaching bilateral agreements. That meeting never took place. Kargil derailed the process. It is the pieces of that process that are now being picked up. Nuclear risk reduction between any two nuclear-capable states is an indispensable confidence-building measure and an agreement as a follow-up to the February 1999 MoU was long overdue.

But it is never too late. The foreign ministries and concerned officials of the two countries must be complemented for accomplishing this task. Interestingly, this agreement, along with a number of other agreements, had been in the works for several months and apparently their texts were finalised some time ago. An understanding on signing the nuclear risk reduction agreement was reached during the foreign secretary-level talks in New Delhi on November 14 and it was subsequently endorsed at a meeting between the two foreign ministers in Islamabad on January 13.

But India chose to schedule the signing of the agreement during our foreign minister’s visit to New Delhi on February 21, the date of the eighth anniversary of the Lahore Declaration and of the MoU on nuclear confidence-building measures. If it was a coincidence, it must have been an ingeniously choreographed diplomatic “coincidence” which diplomats are often required to plan and execute.

Apparently, the Indian authorities organised this “coincidence” only to signal to Islamabad their preference for institutionalised constitutional procedures rather than individualised approaches in dealing with Pakistan. Perhaps, it also signified their respect for the “bilateral agreements” concluded with Pakistan’s elected political leadership on the occasion of the Lahore Summit eight years ago.

Somehow we in Pakistan are allergic even to mentioning of the Lahore peace process in our official statements or websites as if it was a disaster. Certainly, it was not a disaster. It was a process negotiated with India not with “heads down” but with “heads up” committing both countries to conduct their relations on the basis of sovereign equality and reciprocal dignity without compromising on our fundamentals. It was a great opportunity for durable and dignified peace in our region which we squandered. Eight years have gone down the drain since then.

In 1999, there were no extremist groups or “suicidal terrorists” either in India or in Pakistan to derail the peace process negotiated between two democratically elected civilian governments. Every one says Kargil was a debacle. In less than a year after their overt nuclearisation, Kargil not only derailed the Lahore process but also brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a full-scale war which some feared might have plunged the world into its first nuclear exchange.

The West blamed Pakistan for the crisis and considered India as the aggrieved party. Even after Kargil, the region remained under dark war clouds. While the world was focusing on the post- 9/11 campaign against terrorism, India in a blatant show of brinkmanship moved all of its armed forces to borders. Intense diplomatic and political pressure by the US, in coordination with other G-8 countries, averted yet another threat of a catastrophic clash between the two nuclear capable states.

A ceasefire unilaterally announced under pressure by the Musharraf government at the LoC in November 2003 led to the resumption of the stalled India-Pakistan dialogue in January 2004. By that time, we had become a “pivotal” player in the US “war on terror” and a non-Nato US ally in exchange for a monetary package of three billion dollars to be disbursed in equal annual instalments over a five-year period in exchange for the services to be rendered as the “ground zero” of the US war on terror.

The January 6, 2004, Islamabad joint statement thus became the basis for the new US-prompted bilateral approach on the India-Pakistan chessboard. Under this agreement, for the first time in our history, Pakistan accepted its responsibility for cross-border infiltration and formally undertook not to allow its territory for any such activity against India. We were under pressure then and remain under pressure now to follow a new “peace paradigm”.

Since the beginning of this dialogue in 2004, India continues to implicate Pakistan in every terrorist activity on its soil and even interrupted the composite dialogue after the Mumbai blasts blaming them on Pakistan. In our anxiety to have the dialogue resumed, we rushed into signing an unnecessary agreement at Havana on establishing a joint anti-terror mechanism. This gives India another tool to manipulate the dialogue as it did after the Mumbai blasts.

The peace process that we are following now is no longer about resolving our disputes with India or redressing our grievances over India’s transgressions in Siachen and Sir Creek. This peace process is now all about “terrorism” which has become our bete noire and which we have undertaken to fight, first on behalf of the US and now on India’s behalf.

In making a paradigm shift in our Kashmir policy, President Musharraf has taken no one into confidence, not even his handpicked cabinet or the Kashmir Committee in the marginalised parliament. Major political parties remain completely in the dark on Musharraf’s vision of the future of Kashmir. At an all parties conference on Kashmir in Islamabad last month, the chairman of the Kashmir Committee was conspicuously absent. He dared not cross the “curb line” drawn by one man.

In this political chaos and uncertainty, peace pretensions will take us nowhere. Peace with India, peace in our tribal areas, peace in Balochistan, indeed peace among ourselves as a nation will remain elusive as long as we do not fix our fundamentals. We are at a critical crossroads. We have gone through many disasters, political as well as military, in our history. We cannot afford any more debacles or accidents.

A country’s standing in the comity of nations always corresponds directly to its own political, social, economic and strategic strength. Our foremost challenge in this situation is not what we are required to do for others’ interests; it is what we can do to serve and defend our own national interests and to safeguard our national assets and values. To survive as an independent and self-respecting nation, we don’t need multi-billion dollar aid packages. There is no price for a country’s sovereignty and independence.

Yes, for a country domestically as unstable and unpredictable as ours, there cannot be many choices. Today, as never before, our options are limited. But our choices are not. In the ultimate analysis, our problems are not external. Our problems are domestic. We can still make a choice for putting our house in order. Let us rise above personal interests, and together regain our lost sovereignty and independence.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

How to stop genocide in Iraq

THOSE who support remaining in Iraq increasingly can be heard invoking the spectre of genocide as grounds for staying. Sen John McCain (R-Ariz) warned that, if US troops leave, “You’ll see a bloodletting in Baghdad that makes Srebrenica look like a Sunday school picnic.”

Some defenders of President Bush’s approach, having backed the Iraq war from the start, have now settled on genocide warnings after each of their original justifications for being in Iraq — weapons of mass destruction, terrorism prevention, energy diversification, regional stabilisation and democracy promotion — has crumbled one by one.

Other proponents of remaining in Iraq are not, in fact, looking to redeem their own faulty judgment. They are genuinely frightened that, as ferocious as the civil war there has become, a US withdrawal could unleash an all-out slaughter. With increasing numbers of civilian corpses piling up every day, they have reason to worry.

Although critics of withdrawal do a masterful job of painting a grim picture of the apocalypse that awaits, they offer no account of how US forces in Iraq will do more than preserve a status quo that is already deteriorating into wholesale ethnic cleansing. Although more than 115,000 US troops have been in Iraq for the last four years, about 3.8 million Iraqis have fled their homes and at least 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing each month. It would be nice to think the surge of troops to Baghdad would help to staunch the flow. But with only one-third of the new troops on duty at any given time in a city of six million people, they will have no more success deterring the militias intent on carving out homogeneous Shiite or Sunni neighbourhoods than US forces have had to date. About 74 per cent of Shiites polled and 91 per cent of Sunnis — the people who have the most to fear from genocide — would like to see US forces gone by the end of the year.

Unfortunately, many of those who favour a US exit have recklessly waved off atrocity warnings or taken to blaming Iraqis for their plight. What is needed to stave off even greater carnage than we see today is neither assuming massacres won’t happen nor suspending thought until the surge has demonstrably failed in six months — at which point other options may no longer be viable.

Rather, we must announce our intention to depart and use the intervening months to prioritise civilian protection by pursuing a bold set of measures combining political pressure, humanitarian relocation and judicial deterrence.First, although it has a familiar and thus unsatisfying ring to it, the most viable long-term route to preventing mass atrocities is to use remaining US leverage to bring about a political compromise that makes Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds feel economically stable, physically secure and adequately represented in political structures.

This is consistent with the position of leading US generals and the members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, who have stressed that there is no military solution to Iraq’s meltdown and urged the administration, the Iraqis and regional players to reopen broad-ranging political negotiations.

Instead of simply lining up behind Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government in the hopes that it will one day decide to stop ethnic cleansing, recent withdrawal proposals in Congress use the leverage of the proposed redeployment to press Iraqis to reach a political solution. A plan put forth by Sen Barack Obama (D-Ill) has come under neoconservative fire for setting a target departure date, but it provides for flexibility to suspend the US drawdown if Iraqis meet the key economic, political and security benchmarks they have committed to achieve this year. The plan would also retain some US forces in Iraq and the region to help deter atrocities by sectarian militias and aggression from Iraq’s neighbours.

However, if this political pressure fails and US forces remain unable to stave off an ever-widening civil war, the US should go further and announce its willingness to assist in the voluntary transport and relocation of Iraqi civilians in peril. If Iraqis tell us that they would feel safer in religiously homogenous neighbourhoods, and we lack the means to protect them where they are, we should support and protect them in their voluntary, peaceful evacuation — a means, one might say, to pre-empt genocide in advance of our departure.

The administration must help secure asylum for those Iraqis — and there are millions who fit this bill — who have a “well-founded fear of persecution”. At the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ conference scheduled for April, which will be attended by Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the United States, the overburdened countries of first asylum (Syria is sheltering one million Iraqis; Jordan has taken in 700,000) must be persuaded to reopen their gates to fleeing Iraqis. And western countries must dramatically expand the number of resettlement slots for Iraqis. Astoundingly, the US took in just 202 Iraqis last year and, although the maximum for this year was recently raised to 7,000, this is still not sufficient.

Finally, if we are serious about preventing further sectarian horrors, the US must send a clear signal to the militias and political leaders who order or carry out atrocities that they will be brought to justice for their crimes. That means offering belated US support to the International Criminal Court, the only credible, independent body with the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity and genocide.

Many of those who say US troops should stay in Iraq to prevent genocide are the same people who for political reasons refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the calamity unfolding on our watch. The same people who modelled a war on best-case scenarios are now resisting ending a war by invoking worst-case scenarios. But after years of using the alleged needs of the Iraqi people to justify US political postures, it is long past time to use the leverage we still have to actually advance Iraqi welfare.

The writer is a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

Putting hatred on a map

WHY are we trying to divide up the peoples of the Middle East? Why are we trying to chop them up, make them different, remind them — constantly, insidiously, viciously, cruelly — of their divisions, of their suspicions, of their capacity for mutual hatred? Is this just our casual racism? Or is there something darker in our western souls?

Take the maps. Am I the only one sickened by our journalistic propensity to publish sectarian maps of the Middle East? You know what I mean. We are now all familiar with the colour-coded map of Iraq. Shias at the bottom (of course), Sunnis in their middle “triangle” — actually, it’s more like an octagon (even a pentagon) — and the Kurds in the north.

Or the map of Lebanon, where I live. Shias at the bottom (of course), Druze further north, Sunnis in Sidon and on the coastal strip south of Beirut, Shias in the southern suburbs of the capital, Sunnis and Christians in the city, Christian Maronites further north, Sunnis in Tripoli, more Shias to the east. How we love these maps. Hatred made easy.

Of course, it’s not that simple. I live in a small Druze enclave in the west of Beirut. But my local grocer and my driver are Sunnis. I suppose they have no business to be in the wrong bit of our map. So do I tell my driver Abed that our map shows he can no longer park outside my home? Or that the Muslim publisher of the Arabic edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation can no longer meet me at our favourite rendezvous, Paul’s restaurant in east Beirut, for lunch because our map shows this to be a Maronite Christian area of Beirut?

In Tarek al-Jdeidi (Sunni), some Shia families have moved out of their homes — temporarily, you understand, a brief holiday, keys left with the neighbours, it’s always that way — which means that our Beirut maps are now cleaner, easier to understand. The same is happening on a far larger scale in Baghdad. Now our colour-coding can be bolder. No more use for that confusing word “mixed”.

We did the same in the Balkans. The Drina Valley of Bosnia was Muslim until the Serbs “cleansed” it. Srebrenica? Delete “safe area” and logo it “Serb”. Krajina? Serb until the Croats took it. Did we call them “Croats”? Or “Catholics”? Or both on our maps?

Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide the “other”, “them”, our potential enemies, from each other, while we — we civilised westerners with our refined, unified, multicultural values — are unassailable. I could draw you a sectarian map of Birmingham, for example — marked “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” (there not being many Christians left in England — but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line streets between “black” and “white” communities but The Washington Post would never publish such a map.

Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with Brooklyn, Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian, Catholic, Jew, Wasp. Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French and non-French Canadian Montreal (the front line at one point follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where “Little Italy” is now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim, of course. But we don’t draw these Hitlerian maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste, something “we” don’t do in our precious, carefully guarded civilisation.

Passing a book stall in New York this week, I spotted the iniquitous Time magazine and there on the cover — and this might truly have been a 1930s Nazi cover — were two cowled men, one in black, the other largely hidden by a chequered scarf. “Sunnis vs Shi’ites”, the headline read. “Why they hate each other.” This, naturally, was a “take-out” on Iraq’s civil war — a civil war by the way, that America’s spokesmen in Baghdad were talking about in August 2003 when not a single Iraqi in his worst nightmares dreamt of what has now come to pass.

Buy Time magazine, dear reader, turn to page 30, and what will you find? “How to Tell Sunnis and Shi’ites Apart.” Helpful, uh? And after this, are columns of useful, divisive information. “Names,” for example. “Some names carry sectarian markers … Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman … men with these names are almost certainly Sunni. Those called Abdel-Hussein and Abdel-Zahra,” (I have never in met an “Abdel-Zahra” by the way) “are most likely Shi’ite.” Then there are columns headed “Prayer”, “Mosques”, “Homes”, “Accents” and “Dialects”, even — heaven spare us — “cars”. The last, for those readers not already reeling in disbelief, tells us which car stickers to look out for (spot a picture of Imam Ali and you know the driver is Shia) or which licence plate (Anbar province registrations, for instance) means a probable Sunni driver.

Thanks again. I don’t know why the American military doesn’t just buy up this week’s edition of Time and drop the lot over Baghdad to help any still ignorant local murderers with easy-to-identify targets. But will Time be helping us to identify America’s deeply divided society (who has most rubbish in their gardens in Washington, which bumper stickers to look for in Dearborn, Michigan)? Will they hell.

I, too, am guilty of playing these little sectarian games in the Middle East. I ask a Lebanese where he or she comes from, not to remember the mountains or rivers near their home but to code them into my map. But I easily come unstuck. The man who tells me he comes from the Lebanese south (Shia) turns out to live in the southern Druze town of Hasbaya. The woman who tells me she’s from Jbeil (Christian) turns out to be from the town’s Shia minority. Oh, if only these pesky minorities would go and live in the right bit of our imperial, sectarian maps.

And we go on talking to our Sunni monarchs in the Middle East — we listen to their raving about the “Shia crescent” — no wonder we hate Shia Iran so much. And we go on dividing and scissoring up the lands, and printing more and more of our racial maps and I do wonder most seriously if we wish to promote civil war across this part of the world, and you know what? I rather think we do.

© The Independent

A corrosive compromise

The physical architecture of government has been transformed over the past decade. Across Whitehall, light, bright open-plan offices have replaced gloomy corridors of power, promising access and transparency. Two years ago, the implementation of Freedom of Information suggested it was not just the buildings but the whole attitude that was opening up. A new contract between government and citizen seemed on offer: a kind of coming-of-age gift, reflecting trust and respect. The act — itself a weakened version of what was originally proposed — suggested understanding that openness is not a threat to better government but an incentive to it. This week consultation ends on proposals that will so severely curtail access to information that the act will be all but torn up.

There were always going to be costs associated with FoI, and it is surprising that the government has only just woken up to them. They include the financial expense of retrieving requests, as well as the political embarrassments that litter the road to greater public understanding. Using FoI this newspaper has broken 50 stories, including the number of NHS trusts facing bankruptcy, the way drug companies woo the health service and the bias in EU subsidies to favour large over small farms.

The warning bell for the act sounded on its first anniversary. The constitutional affairs secretary, Lord Falconer, claimed it was being used to pursue trivia, such as the amount of toilet paper used in his department. Citizens, he implied, could not be trusted with the gift they had been given. A review was commissioned. It highlighted the costs, particularly of the few complex applications, and last October the government proposed two changes. First, requests from particular individuals or organisations — even where these were on unrelated subjects — would be aggregated and capped. If workable (which we doubt) this could, for instance, result in BBC journalists being refused information on the grounds that too many of their colleagues had made other requests. Secondly, there would be a cost ceiling that would price the time spent thinking about a request and reading the material associated with it. Costs above the ceiling could be rejected. Unfocused requests can indeed result in reams of paper having to be checked for exempt material. But costing thinking time can have no purpose other than restricting access to information.

— The Guardian