Unresolved issues

AT this time Pakistan faces not only a number of very difficult economic problems. It is also, once again, heading towards a political crisis as the two mainstream political parties have begun to drift apart.

The hope that was raised last year by the peaceful transfer of power from the military to a government led by civilians has given way to despair. The situation is producing a great deal of uncertainty and we know not only from Pakistan’s own experience but also that of many other developing countries that political uncertainty takes a heavy economic toll. Pakistan cannot afford to go on that route, especially when the economy is in such distress.

How Pakistan emerges from the economic crisis it now faces and how it progresses in the future would depend to a considerable extent on the quality of economic governance the state provides. The quality of governance at this time is less than satisfactory.

A number of issues remain unresolved. These include consensus on where executive authority should reside. Should the president and the presidency have most of the executive authority that, in the original 1973 Constitution, vested with the prime minister and parliament? Should the president be effectively the chief executive of the country with few checks on the exercise of power by him? How much power should devolve to the provinces and how much authority should be given to the instruments of local government? Should the local government institutions be autonomous in the way they exercise the deputed authority or should they be subject to oversight and control by governments at higher levels?

What is the role of the public sector in economic management? Should economic matters be left entirely to the private sector? What should be the role of the military in politics and economics? Should the military be totally under the control of the civilian authority?

Then there are a number of questions relating to the role of the judiciary and the design of the legal system. How should the judges to the various high courts be appointed? What kind of control, if any, should the executive and legislative branches of the government exercise on the judiciary? What is the most appropriate way of dealing with the judges suspected of indulging in irregular activities?

These questions are being asked not only in Pakistan; many of them are being raised in development circles as well. What kind of governance is needed to have a high rate of economic growth and to distribute more equitably the fruits of growth is a question on which consensus is still to develop among those who work in the area of economic development. There are two issues on which there is still not sufficient agreement to unambiguously guide policymakers. One concerns the amount of representation the citizenry must have in determining the direction and content of economic policy. The second relates to the distance between the policymakers and the people. Pakistan has a mixed record in both areas.

In fact, the various experiments undertaken in the country since it gained independence in 1947 impacted on the structure of the political system. How has the theory of governance developed over time, in what way have the changes in theory affected Pakistan, what is the current thinking on the subject and what options are available to Pakistan at this time are some of the questions that are important and which must be answered for Pakistan to ensure a better economic future for the country’s citizens.

Early in Pakistan’s existence as an independent state, some influential development economists began to wonder whether democracy was appropriate for promoting rapid economic growth. In the early 1960s, Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish development economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for the contributions he made to development theory, began to worry about the difficulties created by what he described as the “soft state”. These were formative years for the government of Gen Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military leader. The general was of the view that democracy had not served the country well. It had led to much bickering among different contenders for power. He wanted to introduce a system that would be reasonably representative but, at the same time, would lead to efficiency in governance. Some of his worries were shared by the academia at that time. This group of thinkers included Gunnar Myrdal.

Myrdal’s thinking and those who thought with him and like him had considerable consequence for Pakistan. Countries in South Asia “are all ‘soft states’, in that policies decided on are often not enforced, if they are implemented at all, and in that the authorities, even when framing policies, are reluctant to place obligations on people,” wrote Myrdal in his seminal three-volume study titled, Asian Drama. “This reluctance which derives from the economic, social, and political structure of South Asian countries as they emerged under the impact of colonialism and the fight for independence is then excused and, indeed, idealised.”

Ayub Khan drew comfort from this kind of analysis and established a system that limited democracy — he called his system “basic democracies” — while creating a number of institutions that improved the efficiency of the government in economic matters. The innovations introduced by the military president included a local government system that allowed people to choose their representatives at the lowest tier of the system, a system of economic planning and financial management that made it possible for the country to allocate the resources of the state according to well-thought-out priorities, and a number of quasi-autonomous corporations that handled public investment in various sectors of the economy.

The Ayub Khan system worked well in achieving high levels of economic growth. It did not do much to satisfy the wish of the people to find a voice in governance. The system was discarded but the country has not succeeded in replacing it with anything that was significantly better. While the country was struggling with the important task of developing the right system of economic governance, it failed to provide a voice to the people. Because of that it failed not just in political development. It was also not able to put the economy on a sustainable path of growth.

There is now consensus among those involved in the formulation and updating of the thinking on development that a representative system of government that fully involves people at all levels is a prerequisite of inclusive economic development. The present government would do well to let the people know exactly what it has in mind when it comes to providing them with good governance.

In the eye of the beholder

NEWS just in from Cornish, a sleepy little place in New Hampshire in the US, is that the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger, who turned 90 on the first of this month is well and busy writing, though he has no intention of having published whatever he has written in these past 44 years.

Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye still sells a quarter million copies a year. He published very little after that and his last known work remains Hapworth 16, 1924, a short story that appeared in the June 19 issue of The New Yorker in 1965.

This side of the Atlantic, however, writers tend to be not at all as world-weary as Salinger. Au contraire! Ask Atiq Rahimi, the Goncourt winner last November.

The Goncourt, by the way, is the highest literary prize in France. Created in 1896 according to the testament of Edmond de Goncourt, a rich, academic-minded nobleman, the honour is bestowed every year upon the author of a piece of literature in the French language. So far this invariably has been a novel.

A cash award comes with the prize. Originally 10 francs in 1903, the amount has been upped, ostensibly to suit today’s buying power, to a generous 10 euros. A far cry from the million euros’ Nobel literary prize, you’d say. Still, the Goncourt winner makes it up by watching the sales of his work shoot up astronomically at the bookshops.

Strictly going by the rules, the Goncourt can be conferred on a writer only once in a lifetime; but that is not to say that the stricture has been religiously adhered to always. The august award committee composed of 10 esteemed figures of French academia was once actually led down the garden path by the writer Romain Gary who had already been awarded the Goncourt in 1956 for Les racines du ciel (‘The Roots of Heaven’, also turned into a film with Errol Flynn in the lead). Gary came back in 1975 under the pseudonym Emile Ajar … and swept the Goncourt once more for his book La vie devant soi (translated into English as ‘Momo’). After having informed the committee about his irreverent farce, Gary took a teenager’s delight in giving out details of his prank during TV talk shows. Five years later he would place the barrel of his gun in his mouth, Hemingway fashion, and shoot himself. But we are digressing!

The latest Goncourt winner, a bedizened Afghan named Atiq Rahimi, is currently in the spotlight for much more than his literary merit. His flowing locks, his felt hat perched at a rakish angle on the forehead, his colourful scarves rivalling those of President Hamid Karzai and his twinkling green eyes behind modishly narrow, rectangular glasses have not failed to attract the media’s attention.

And to make sure things stay that way, at least for a while, Rahimi knows what to say when … and how to say it. Shortly after his award, an Anglo-French agreement was reached on repatriating illegal immigrants, many of them Afghans, from the Calais region along the English Channel. In a well-timed, Hamlet-like soliloquy, Rahimi declared to the media: “A magnificent slap after the Goncourt … but I say to myself, keep humble … you are nobody … good and ill fortune, glory, defeat … moments succeed one and another, one never far behind the other.…”

His book, Syngué Sabour, is written in the same fragmented style, all 150 pages of it. The title that may sound to some a rather laboured phonetico-grammatical accomplishment signifying “the stone of patience”, is kept as it is on top of the French text. The plot has to do with the pain of an Afghan lady whose husband, a bullet in his head, has been reduced to a vegetative state. Throughout the book the wife delivers a monologue in which she gives vent to her conjugal and religious exasperations, expresses sentiments about war and peace and speaks as an Afghan trapped in an impossible situation; subjects coincidentally major preoccupations today among human rights groups and the media in the West.“Noble sentiments, heart-gripping tales and in-vogue causes as sure-fire recipe for best-sellers,” remarks not without a hint of irony a comment in Le Figaro Magazine’s literary section entitled ‘Literature or marketing?’ The article also cites the example of another literary award-winning novel in 2008, a tear-jerker about a brood of handicapped children in a poor family. The comment woefully admits at the conclusion that the infamous ‘politically correct’ ideology has now succeeded in making its way into the heretofore staid world of literary awards.

Add to this the publishing houses, each getting its share of the cake in turns, and you are reminded of many more newspaper comments explaining why literary awards today have taken the populist bend and lamenting that the era of Victor Hugo and James Joyce is definitely over. Rahimi’s book, it is true, can be perused from cover to cover during one consistent metro ride from home to the place of work in Paris. Sentences are short, lines not more than six or seven words long. Some lines have just one or two words … so one hops effortlessly from page to page. The subject however is melancholy as the Afghan lady reminisces and administers medicine to her prostrate husband. Drop...by…drop!

Atiq Rahimi, who spent a part of his youth in a refugee camp in Pakistan, has been living in France for the past 24 years. Syngué Sabour is his fourth book in eight years but the first in French. He makes short-length movies too and takes a very strong position in favour of the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan: “The very idea that democracy is a western idea and that Afghanistan, in the name of respect for its ancient culture, should be allowed to linger all by itself in obscurantism is insupportable. This is intellectual neo-racism.”

To return to the book, it may make light reading, but Atiq Rahimi is in good company; the Goncourt was awarded in the past to the likes of Marcel Proust, André Malraux and Simone de Beauvoir.

And then, beauty after all, lies in the eye of the beholder!

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

Gaza’s economy in ruins

ISRAELI forces used aerial bombing, tank shelling and armoured bulldozers to eliminate the productive capacity of some of Gaza’s most important manufacturing plants during their 22 days of military action in the Gaza Strip.

The attacks, like those which destroyed an estimated 20,000 homes leaving some residential areas resembling an earthquake zone and more than 50,000 people in temporary shelters, destroyed or severely damaged 219 factories, Palestinian industrialists say. Leaders of Gaza’s business community — who have long stayed aloof from the different Palestinian political factions — say that much of the three per cent of industry still operating after the 18-month shutdown caused by Israel’s economic siege has now been destroyed.

Chris Gunness, chief spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said that widespread destruction of “civilian economic infrastructure” was a strike “at the heart of the peace process” because “economic stability is an essential component of a durable peace.”

While the main impact of the destruction is likely to be on the already politically fraught prospects of medium to long-term reconstruction in Gaza, it will not make efforts to help Gaza’s many stricken and displaced residents any easier.

It is those humanitarian relief efforts for which the main British aid agencies are appealing for help in the advertisement so far barred by the BBC. The Unrwa is meanwhile separately pressing donors for $345m for immediate repairs to homes still standing and to its own damaged premises.

The destroyed factories include: Alweyda, the biggest Palestinian food-processing plant and the only one still operating in Gaza until the war; Abu Eida, the largest, and now flattened, ready-mixed concrete producer; and the 89-year old Al Badr flour mills, which have the biggest storage facilities anywhere in the Strip.

The owners of all three said on Saturday they were proud of their close and long-standing contact with Israeli partner firms and suppliers. Dr Yaser M Alweyda, owner and engineering director of the demolished food-processing plant estimated the total damage to his plant at $22.5m and accused Israel of wanting “to destroy the weak Palestinian economy”. He added: “They want to ensure that we will never have a state in Palestine.”

The air and ground strikes have compounded the impact of the total 18-month trade embargo, which Israel imposed in June 2007 after the civil war between Hamas and Fatah ended in the collapse of the short-lived coalition between the two rival factions and Hamas’s enforced takeover of the strip.

Amr Hamad, executive manager of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, said: “What they were not able to reach by the blockade, they have reached with their bulldozers.” He added: “Businessmen are not connected at all to Hamas and are very pragmatic and open-minded.

“They are the last layer in Palestinian society who believe in peace and the importance of the economy. They also believe that the only economic link should be with Israel,” Mr Hamad said.

Meanwhile the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, told his cabinet that with “typical moral acrobatics” the “terrorist organisations” were trying to lay the blame on Israel, and that “the State of Israel did everything in order to avoid hitting civilians.” Israel would ensure that soldiers and officers who took part in the operation would be safe from any tribunals investigating them, he said.

At the Al Badr mills in Sudaniya, north of Gaza City, owner Rashed Hamada, 55, said the company had been making wheat flour for bakeries right up until the attack on Jan 10. He strongly denied that his compound had been used by Hamas gunmen, and said it was clear the production line itself had been the target.

“It seems that the father of the commander had owned a flour mill,” he commented ironically. “He knew exactly where to hit. The Israelis .... used to encourage me to expand production here. Now they have destroyed it. I don’t understand why.”

Standing beside mangled and incinerated refrigeration vans and the burned-out ruins of his food factory and warehouses, located for ease of access to Israel between the eastern Gaza City district of Shajaia and the border 650 metres away, Dr Alweyda said that as well as the production lines, 26 vehicles had been destroyed.

The company, sole Gaza agent for Israeli milk products company Tnuva, had managed to keep biscuit production going up until the outbreak of war. The Israeli military said that it was still investigating allegations of civilian casualties and property damage.

— © The Independent