Fewer death penalties

THE marked drop in executions in the United States during the past two years is cause for some cheer among opponents of the death penalty. In 1999, 98 persons were put to death; so far this year 48 have been executed, with another 14 scheduled to die.

The decline, which began nationally in 2000, is particularly notable in states that had been the most active executioners. Texas, which executed 40 persons last year, has executed only 12 in 2001, with six more scheduled to die. Virginia, which executed 14 in 1999 and eight last year, has killed one and plans one more execution in 2001.

Part of the drop can be explained by the morbid demographics of death row. Before Congress and the courts curtailed federal court review of state convictions, death cases took long periods of time to reach executions, and a backlog of cases developed.

Once Congress gave states the green light in 1996, however, the more aggressive death penalty states began clearing that backlog, creating a spike in the number of executions. To some extent, the current decline reflects the natural drop following that spike.

But other, more encouraging factors are also at work. After the exoneration of several death row inmates, judges in several states appear to be examining cases more carefully. In addition, fewer death sentences are being handed down, a function of abolition of parole by a number of states and the consequent ability of jurors to ensure that a sentence of life in prison means what it says. —The Washington Post.

A war of infinite patience

I WAS in Washington, DC. on September 11. President George W. Bush was not. The vice-president in the White House had gone deep underground. The Capitol building had been emptied of its elected legislators.

The streets gradually filled with traffic flowing in an untimely homeward direction as offices closed and their occupants began returning to the suburbs, to retrieve their children prematurely from schools. The capital of the United States was in a state of quiet, orderly panic. People did whatever they had done the day before, only earlier. Until the president returned to the White House in the evening, control of the capital seemed to lie not with the administration but with the media. In the absence of a visible president, television was king.

In one way, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on Sept 11 were the single most devastating and tragic act of terrorism in modern times. They shook the civilized world out of its complacent reverie. It was a man-made earthquake at another seismic level that aimed at destroying what it regarded as the twin temples of commerce and the Pentagonal monument to militarism.

This invasion of America’s privacy exposed what many pacifist civilians have long suspected — the inherent vulnerability of the modern military machine. Within living memory, the German pilot Rust did that by landing his light aircraft undetected in Red Square. The Chinese dissenter did it by standing unarmed before an on-coming tank in Tiananmen Square. And an American undergraduate did it by putting a flower stem in the barrel of a university campus during a protest against the Vietnam war. Each had caught a snoring giant off-guard. The difference between them and the holocaust on Sept 11 lay in the gruesome scale and the lethal significance of this latest act of faceless defiance.

History was unmade on September 11, just as it was dismantled on July 28, 1914, when Princip assassinated the unsuspecting Archduke Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo. With that single lethal bullet, a pre-1914 world, a protected world of insulated monarchies and sacrosanct guaranteed borders, lapsed into uncontrolled turmoil.

Similarly, the attack on America has exposed that it is no longer an island race, protected on one shore by the Atlantic and on the other by the Pacific. The United States of America has been brought forcibly within the ranks of the Third World. It has been condemned to experience the same disruptions to its way of metronomic life, the same divisive tensions, and the same sense of continuing insecurity that bedevils the daily lives of Third Worlders.

After President George W. Bush returned to the White House and retrieved the reins of his government from the hands of the TV anchorpersons, his tireless efforts to mobilize domestic support mirror the energy normally expended during an election campaign. The frequent polls showing an American public massed behind him belatedly confirm his post-election claim to the presidency more unequivocally than the ballot boxes did.

With Al Gore redundant as an adversary, he has found another target closer to his own generation. What Saddam Hussein was to his father President George Bush Senior, Osama bin Laden has become to the son. And unsurprisingly, he has repeated the same war strategy. Strike at the man, not at the public; precipitate political change at the top by strafing the bottom.

Will such a strategy work in Afghanistan when it failed in Iraq? It is a fact that the UN-led international coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait could not evict Saddam Hussein from the presidency. It is not improbable that the US-led coalition may find itself similarly thwarted in Afghanistan, for Afghanistan is not simply another unstable Muslim country whose governments can be wished away. Afghanistan is the quicksand of history, as the British discovered in the 1840s and again in the 1870s, the Russians in the 1980s, and the Pakistanis in the 1990s. If Afghanistan is a quicksand, its people are an aggregation of quicksilver, mercurial molecules of ethnic groups.

Their commitments are essentially tribal; their nationality seasonal. Many of the Pakhtuns are Afghan during the summer and Pakistani during the winter. They have learned how to moult with the seasons, to adapt to their natural environment. And it is perhaps one of the harshest on earth, through no fault of its population. For Afghanistan has never ceased being treated by outsiders as the bear-pit of the region. An enduring lesson that history has taught the volatile tribes of Afghanistan and every gratuitous invader is that their true enemy is not the people but the terrain, just as Hitler was defeated as much by the Russians as by their geography.

To some, America’s present reaction seems akin to that of a lumbering enraged giant, blinded in its twin eyes, groping in the dark, battling against an enemy it cannot see but only sense, for its declared adversary — terrorism — by its very nature is furtive, insidious and shapeless. The night air strikes at predetermined targets within Afghanistan may do wonders for improving the marksmanship of American gunner pilots or testing the accuracy of missiles, but they can do little to reassure the homeless Afghan widow who cannot rationalize why her husband should have been a casualty to one war and her children the sacrifice to another. For her, home is an unending Stalingrad.

The present bombing of Afghanistan to the subsurface levels of suspected bunkers may ferret out the Taliban. But they could conceivably also cause Afghanistan to implode within, rather as the WTC towers did. Can such an implosion be contained though as it was in Manhattan’s Ground Zero or will it overspill across its boundaries and also damage its neighbours?

Pakistan, as one of Afghanistan’s combustible neighbours, has a genuine cause for concern. Its foreign policy towards Afghanistan, conducted since 1947 at the behest of everyone except its own electorate, lies in tatters. Afghans must be listening incredulously to our officials demanding a government in Afghanistan that is representative of the tribal mix, just as Kashmiris must be confused by our stance that we are prepared to die for their right of self-determination but not fight for the right of self determination for ourselves. They must pity us, as Khalil Gibran did a nation whose leaders are either still in the cradle or in the grave.

After cotton, Pakistan’s leadership is its only reliable export. The leader of each of the three major political parties lives abroad. The chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party, Benazir Bhutto, waits for that tide in the affairs of women that taken at a flood hopefully will enable her to make a third attempt at governance. The former head of the Pakistan Muslim League, Mian Nawaz Sharif, is kept voiceless in gilded captivity by his Saudi benefactors. The third, Altaf Hussain of the MQM, speaks to his followers from the safety of Muswell Hill, as a naturalized British bridegroom might communicate with his distant beloved — via an international phone line. The relevance of each is diminishing by the day, because the utility of their very electorate itself now stands eroded. Any expectation Pakistani public had that through the external pressure of the Americans or the Commonwealth they might be handed back the ballot box in 2002 has all but evaporate. One hundred and forty million voters have been relegated to the position of becoming 140 million witnesses to their own irrelevance.

It would be tempting to think that the latest round of courtship between the United States and Pakistan heralds yet another period of lucrative cohabitation. There will be the inevitable opportunists, some who must have already opened offshore accounts in expectation. There are others, though, who can foresee that the physical presence of American troops on Pakistani soil, the use of our bases, the disregard of our airspace, and the contemptuous dismissal of the opinions of 140 million souls who will have to live for countless generations with the consequences of this present conflict, can only be to our ultimate cost and at our unaffordable expense.

Wars, like love affairs, can begin abruptly. They rarely end with equal suddenness. The Senior President Bush had named his Gulf War ‘Infinite Reach.’ His son named his war on terrorism ‘Infinite Justice’. It might need to be renamed in the circumstances ‘Infinite Patience.’

The surprise winners in the WTO

OF the many obstacles facing the WTO, the biggest is a myth — the myth that developing countries are losing ground in the world trading system, and risk further impoverishment and marginalization if a new trade round is launched. Like many myths, this one grows in authority and conviction the further it departs from reality.

We are told that the developing countries’ share of world trade is declining; that their exports face the highest tariffs and most protected markets in the world; and that they lack the ability to influence or change a system that is inherently biased in favour of the rich and powerful.

We owe it to developing countries — as well as to the WTO — to re-examine this myth in light of some facts. One fact is that developing countries are not losing out in world trade, despite what the WTO’s critics say. The opposite is the case. Over the past decade, developing countries have consistently outperformed industrialized countries in terms of export growth — an average increase of almost 10 per cent a year, compared to 5 per cent for the industrialized countries. And trade among developing countries is growing more quickly than trade with the industrialized North.

Last year alone, developing-country exports rose by 15 per cent — three times their GDP growth — the best rate of growth in five decades. Even with the current global economic slowdown, developing countries are expected to show much stronger trade growth this year than the industrialized economies.

It is true these numbers demonstrate the average performance among developing countries; some are doing better, some worse. Even so, sweeping claims about poor-country “marginalization” distort what is really going on in world trade. For example, the forty-nine Least-Developed Countries saw the dollar value of their exports rise by 28 per cent in 2000 — some $34 billion — the second year in a row where they exceeded the world average. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Madagascar and Nepal all saw their exports soar in the 1990s — matching or even exceeding China’s impressive performance.

The second claim — that rich-country markets are more closed and protected, while developing countries are being forced to open up — is also a distortion. It is certainly true that many developing-country exports continue to face significant barriers in rich country markets.

Too often the products in which developing countries are highly competitive are the very ones that confront the highest protection. These include not only agriculture exports, which often face insurmountable barriers, but also many industrial products such as textiles and clothing. These barriers — maintained by the world’s richest countries against some of its poorest — are quite simply indefensible.

However, what is not true is the common assertion that industrialized countries are more closed or more protected than developing countries. The average bound tariff for the United States is just 3 per cent, for Europe it’s 3.6, and for the industrialized countries as a whole it’s under 4 per cent. In comparison, the average bound tariff for developing countries is over 12 per cent. And while developing countries slashed their tariffs by an impressive 20 per cent during the Uruguay Round, developed countries cut theirs by even more, almost 40 per cent.

This helps explain why, each year, developing countries claim a larger and larger share of the industrialized world’s imports — from 15 per cent in 1990 to almost 25 per cent in 2000. Over half of Japan’s manufactured imports now come from developing countries. For the United States, the share is 45 per cent and rising. These trends do not reflect that altruism of the industrialized countries so much as their self-interest — a realization that imports from the developing world are key to low inflation, rising productivity and increased living standards.

The third claim is that developing countries lack a voice and leverage in the WTO. How then to explain that so many “development” issues are now at the top of the WTO’s agenda? From being a fringe issue a generation ago, the debate over how to better integrate development priorities into the trading system has moved to the centre of the preparatory process for the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference — and its resolution will largely decide whether new negotiations are launched in Doha.

Developing countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa are in the forefront of countries defining the parameters of the WTO’s future work programme — their ministers, ambassadors and officials are among the most effective and influential trade-policy practitioners in the world today.

Indeed, the idea that a new round of negotiations must be a “development round” is now almost universally espoused — from Clare Short, UK minister of development, to Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, and Horst Kohler, managing-director of the IMF. All of this is evidence of a new, more assertive role for developing countries in the system.

Why? Because the WTO has emerged as one of the most important international institutions for development. Developing countries already account for a third of world trade, up from a fifth in the 1970s. At current trends, their share will grow to well over half of world trade in the next twenty-five years, redrawing the economic map of the world in the process. They need stronger multilateral rules, not weaker ones; more trade liberalization, not less.

Already a third of the cases before the WTO’s dispute settlement body are brought by developing countries. They have gained significantly from trade liberalization under the Uruguay Round and, according to one study, would realize some $200 billion if remaining trade barriers were halved in a new round. That is three times what the developing world receives in overseas aid and eight times what poor countries have so far been granted in debt relief.

All of this is to the credit of the developing countries themselves. Steps they have taken to open up their economies and encourage competition have created new incentives to find lower-cost inputs and to seek new markets abroad. Their embrace of technology has reduced communications and transportation costs, making it easier to access world markets. And their participation in unilateral, regional and multilateral liberalization has contributed greatly to the growth of world trade and integration.

The biggest change is in attitudes. More and more, developing countries have come to see protectionism as a self-inflicted wound. It not only punishes consumers, grossly inflating the price they pay for necessities like food or clothing, but it also handicaps exporters and entrepreneurs, who can’t hope to compete in world markets without access to world-priced inputs, efficient services, and modern technology. Trade liberalization is key to developing countries, not just because it opens markets, but, more importantly, because it makes their own economies stronger and more efficient.

It is a fact that the developing world would be much worse off without the multilateral trading system. It is also a fact that the trading system can be greatly improved. Many critics — even some supporters — have spoken out about the inequities in the system, and they are right. Inequities exist. This is precisely why we need a new round of trade negotiations. There is no other way to change the rules of the WTO. No other way for developing countries to translate their interests and demands into real changes to the trading system. No better opportunity for developing countries to use trade reform and capacity-building as tools of growth and poverty reduction.

Defining and refining rules for trade — keeping the system relevant to a fast-changing world economy — will always be work-in-progress. Governments will never stop and say they have finished, that they are satisfied.

The challenge is to secure balanced progress that reflects common interests.

Governments must feel committed, not coerced. They must see justice in the WTO agenda and national advantage in pursuing it. But they must also be reminded of the achievements. More has been done to address poverty in these last fifty years than in the previous five hundred. Since 1960, child death rates have been halved in developing countries; malnutrition rates have declined by a third; access to safe water has improved dramatically. While the current UN Millennium Declaration targets show that there is still a long way to go, and we need to keep in mind that trade is just one contributor to the progress that has been secured, we should not lose sight of the important role the multilateral trading system has played.

The question is how we share this gift of opportunity and do a better job as an institution designed to serve our member governments.

The writer is Director-General of the World Trade Organization.