Babri mosque: a tragedy and a symptom

SOMETIME during 400-500 BC, Valmiki had composed Ramayan, in Sanskrit language, depicting Ram, an Aryan Prince, as an ideal hero, embodiment of chivalry, loyalty, patience and justice. In 1575-76 AD, Tulsi Das wrote the Hindi version of Ramayan-Ram Charit Manas, in which he raised Ram to the status of an Avatar (incarnation) of Hindu god, Vishnu.

Tulsi Das did not associate the Babri mosque, which was constructed in 1528-29 AD, with the birth place of Ram. It is inconceivable that Tulsi Das would not have given vent to his grief if the very site where Ram was born had been ravaged and a mosque constructed there.

The Babri mosque controversy first cropped up just before the war of independence in 1857. After having consolidated their hold in Bengal and Bihar the British were keen to occupy Oudh but they were finding it difficult to do so because of the united resistance from Hindus and Muslims there. Therefore, they set out to incite a quarrel between the Hindus and Muslims by planting a false story of the demolition of Ram mandir and the construction of the Babri mosque on its ruins. They succeeded in creating a rift between Hindus and Muslims. Perhaps for the first time in the history of Oudh the two communities, living in complete peace and harmony, clashed over the mosque which paved the way for the British occupation of India.

Despite the friction that was created between them, the Hindus and Muslims mutually worked out an agreement settling their dispute. A piece of land, in the open yard of the Babri mosque was given by the Muslims to Hindus for erecting a platform there for prayers. This was a rare display of magnanimity and religious tolerance on the part of the Muslims.

The British were, however, dismayed by this demonstration of unity between the two communities and, probably at their prodding, a Hindu Mahant, Raghbir Das, filed a suit in 1885 in the court of the sub-judge of Faizabad, seeking permission to build a temple on the platform which was within the precincts of the Babri mosque. The permission was, however, refused and the appeals filed with the higher court against this verdict were also dismissed.

It may be noted that the suit filed by Raghbir Das did not claim title to the site where the Babri mosque stood. He only wanted to construct a temple in the vicinity of the mosque on the platform that had been put up there, in 1857, as a result of an agreement between the Hindus and Muslims.

For about a century all was quiet until the night of December 22, 1949, when some Hindu miscreants secretly placed the idols of Ram and Sita inside the mosque. The next morning hundreds of Hindus moved into the mosque and started praying there. The then prime minister of India, Jawaherlal Nehru, sensing the conspiracy behind the ‘miraculous appearance’ of the idols of Ram and Sita asked the Uttar Pradesh government to immediately remove them from the mosque and stop Hindus from entering it.

Nehru’s orders were not carried out, however. The district magistrate of Faizabad not only refused to remove the idols from the mosque but also declared it to be a disputed property and banned the Muslims from offering prayers there.

The belief that the Babri mosque was constructed at the site where Ram was born does not stand up to historical and archaeological scrutiny. Yet, in February 1986, the premises of the mosque, which had remained locked and closed to the Muslims since December 1949, were re-opened when, in full glare of media publicity, it was handed over to the Hindus after a district judge’s verdict in their favour. It is a well known fact that judge’s verdict came as a result of the then Prime Minister Rajive Gandhi’s personal intervention as he desperately needed Hindu votes. In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi also allowed a foundation stone to be laid for the construction of a Hindu temple near the Babri mosque.

Legal experts and political analysts are of the view that if, realizing the sensitive nature of the matter, the Indian government as well as the courts had handled it with prudence and alacrity, the tragedy of the demolition of the mosque would not have taken place. Evidently, in the post-independence era, the government and the courts in India adopted an unhelpful attitude towards the Muslims in their country.

The Indian deputy prime minister, L.K. Advani, has recently said that the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 by the Hindu zealots was a shameful act. He also said that the construction of Ram mandir is not on the agenda of his government. Advani’s statement is only a political gimmick to placate the Muslims in Gujarat who hold the ruling BJP responsible for their sufferings in the wake of Godhra train incident early this year which was masterminded by the ruling BJP to use it as an excuse to incite violence against the Muslims in the state.

It may be recalled that Advani, who, in 1990, led the campaign to build a temple at Ayodhya, is among several ministers in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government who are accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation of inciting the crowd, which included the BJP workers, for tearing down the mosque in December 1992. According to the daughter-in-law of Advani, the conspiracy to demolish the Babri mosque was hatched at a meeting which was presided over by her father-in-law.

It is also no longer a secret that the Ram mandir project enjoys the blessings of Advani. In 1990 he had embarked upon his Rath Yatra (Chariot Caravan) to collect the so-called holy bricks to construct Ram mandir. On that occasion, Advani had declared that the Hindu community could compromise on the question of the birth place of Lord Ram in Ayodhya and the construction of a mandir there. In 1991, Advani had also publicly declared that the construction of the projected Ram mandir would proceed despite the Supreme Court’s decision against doing so.

The BJP’s election manifesto also clearly states that the party is committed to facilitate the construction of Ram mandir. However, at present the BJP does not enjoy a majority in the Indian parliament and is only one of the components of the National Democratic Alliance. It is, therefore, not in a position to fulfil its election promise. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee is, however, on record having said that if the BJP is returned to the Parliament with an overwhelming majority it would fulfil its promise of facilitating the construction of Ram mandir. Incontrovertible evidence is, however, available that the present BJP rulers are clandestinely helping the construction of the projected mandir in Ayodhya.

Politically the Babri mosque question was of no relevance to the people of India. However, the successive governments in India revived the issue for their own political ends. They intentionally created an atmosphere in the country which turned the potential hatred against the Muslims into an orgy of violence and bloodbath.

In the so-called secular but Hindu-dominated India the Muslims neither enjoy the equality of citizenship, as guaranteed in its constitution, nor a full sense of security which India claims to be fundamental and sacrosanct. However, in India such pretensions remain merely pious hopes.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

What next for the INS?

THE passage of the homeland security bill represents a positive step in the reorganization of America’s federal government to fight the war against terrorism. But the new Department of Homeland Security will not cure all the ills of all the agencies it will absorb.

On the contrary, as critics have pointed out, there is a risk that some of these agencies’ traditional functions will suffer in the shuffle. This is true of the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Customs Service, among others, all of which deal with many issues other than homeland security.

Of most concern is the Immigration and Naturalization Service, an agency that has long been considered dysfunctional and that now, after being sharply criticized for its visa policies following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is demoralized as well.

In principle, nothing is wrong with moving the agency out of the Department of Justice, where it has languished, or even dividing it in half, as the bill proposes, the better to separate its enforcement functions (border control, deportation) from its “benefits” functions (green cards, naturalization). It’s hard to argue that a badly functioning agency would be better off unchanged.

Moreover, the bill adds a few new elements — an ombudsman, a Bureau of Citizenship — that could make immigration policy function better over time. The real trouble lies elsewhere: in the lack of political will to make the department function as it should.

For the truth is that the weaknesses of the INS reflect the country’s hypocrisies and ambivalence in the debate about immigration. Americans like to celebrate, in the abstract, their history as a nation of immigrants.—The Washington Post

Silence of moderate Muslims

MANY in the US have been baffled by the apparent silence of moderate Muslims since the events of September 11. Other than initial condemnations of the attacks by prominent Islamic scholars in the Middle Eat and in the West, many Muslims appear to have acquiesced in the hijacking of their religion by extremists like Osama bin Laden.

The moderates, that is those who reject on principle the use of indiscriminate violence to achieve political ends, have yet to level a systematic critique of the radicals in print or on air. There are some notable exceptions to this, namely such persons as Khaled Abou el-Fadl of UCLA who have been forthright in condemning radical Islam; but his voice, and those of others like him living in the West, has yet to echo in the Muslim world itself. Instead, many, perhaps the majority of Muslims have voiced scepticism and even denial about the involvement of their co-religionists in the attacks.

Over the summer, I travelled extensively throughout the Middle East and South Asia, visiting Islamic scholars, mosques, madresshas, bookstores and cassette shops as well as watching many news programmes and TV interviews on the numerous local and satellite TV stations. In bookstores, for instance, I found considerable material on Osama bin Laden, but most of it is either in praise of the man or situates him, and the events of 9/11, in some conspiratorial scheme hatched by the US military and “a secret force” within the US that is led by Jews. The perception of the events of last September is nicely summed up by a Saudi employee of the Muslim World League who said to me: “In sum, the entire events of September 11, and all that has ensued therefrom has had but one aim: the weakening and destruction of Islam.”

A few people I met expressed satisfaction at the damage inflicted on America as a result of the attacks and were unabashed in their open support for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda movement. A Muslim jurist from Deoband in India, for example, went so far as to state that “should it be proved that Osama was the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, he would not be punished under Islamic law since his actions were the result of an independent legal opinion issued by top jurists (ijtihad).” I also met Muslim moderates who invariably condemned the radicals for defaming Islam and stated that the latter did not represent the Islamic mainstream. Most moderates, however, demurred when I asked them whether they had openly aired or published their views. How does one account for their silence?

The immediate reason for this silence is that Al Qaeda, through its repeated attacks (the bombings of embassies in East Africa, the Cole in Aden and 9/11) along with the military reaction these have provoked from the United States, has been successful in instilling in the minds of Muslims that the US is the principal political enemy of the ummah, or the worldwide Muslim community. Moreover, this has been confirmed by the perception that the US extends unquestioned support to the policies of the government of Israel in the on-going Palestinian Intifada as well as the present talk of a US invasion of Iraq.

Muslims perceive themselves to be under direct military attack and on a number of fronts. An Indian Muslim scholar from Nadwat-ul-Ulema, the famous seminary in Lucknow, expressed this sentiment by stating that “a worldwide anti-Muslim alliance has been formed and is headed by the US. It runs in an arc from Hindu fundamentalist India, through China and Russia and ends with Europe and the US in the west. The effect is to encircle and choke the Islamic world.”

Throughout my travels I noted a marked, and unprecedented, level of hatred not only for the policies of the United States but for many of the values it stands for. Confronted with a formidable foe, Muslims have chosen not to wash their dirty linen in public by engaging in mutual recriminations and polemical exchanges — mosque sermons, television and radio stations are more than ever insisting that Muslims remain steadfast and united against the common enemy; some clerics, mainly Shiite, are even advocating a consumer boycott of all goods manufactured by US-based companies.

Posters and fatwas (religious opinions) urging such a boycott were plastered all over West Beirut in July. For this reason, any criticism by Muslim moderates or others, such as the secular nationalists, of the radical viewpoint is depicted as betrayal of the cause of defending the ummah.

There are also historical reasons for the silence of Muslim moderates. Simply put, the moderates in the last half a century have been progressively relegated to the intellectual and political margins of Islamic society by a new breed of Islamic political activists — otherwise known as Salafi or Wahhabi.

The Salafis, of whom Osama bin Laden is one, are crude literalists in matters of religious interpretation and perceive most of the values of western modernity to be antithetical to Islam. Often they are not steeped in the traditional religious sciences, and they promote a simplistic and utopian vision of Islam, which they claim to be “authentic” and opposed to the western social and political values that threaten the Islamic order.

Salafis have risen to prominence since the early 1970s for a number of reasons:

1) Muslim states have throughout the twentieth century co-opted, mainly through government employment, moderate Islamic scholars. As a result these scholars have become the official mouthpieces of their respective governments, providing Islamic justification for whatever policies are adopted on a given issue. Some of the most important examples of this are the fatwas that the Mufti of Egypt has issued permitting peace with Israel; another relates to the permissibility of using contraceptive methods in family planning. The effect has been a serious loss of credibility for the moderates in the eyes of many Muslims.

2) The political and economic failure of the secular nationalist policies of most of the Arab states, combined with a strong-armed authoritarianism that has regularly brutalized ordinary citizens. In response to this, mosques have become the only centres of opposition to the regimes in power, and these have come to be dominated by a younger and more militant generation of Islamists, inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

3) Perhaps the most significant factor in the silencing of the moderates has been the accrual of vast sums of petro-dollars by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms, all of whom have spent billions of dollars on the propagation of Salafi Islam, the tradition that has been dominant in central Arabia (a.k.a. Najd) since the mid-seventeenth century. By contrast, the traditional centres of Islamic education have been starved of funds and have consequently not been able to recruit or to educate a generation of dynamic scholars who might rise to the intellectual challenge posed by the Salafis and the authoritarian regimes that dominate the Muslim world.

While in India this past August, I noted that the Saudi government was still active in subsidizing the creation of schools that subscribe to their interpretation of Islam as well as providing scholarships to young students to study the religious sciences in the Kingdom’s universities. The influence of Saudi Arabia in altering the religious landscape of the Muslim world over the last three decades cannot be overstated. In Yemen, for example, Salafi proselytizing and funding has considerably undermined the traditional sects of Islam, the Zaydis as well as the Shafiis. The Zaydis, for instance, are practically extinct.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in Pakistan, where South Asian forms of Islam, namely certain Sufi mystical practices, have come under severe attack by Salafis. Likewise in India, the Hanafi scholars of Deoband and the Nadwa often deprecate traditional Indian Islamic beliefs and practices, preferring Saudi-inspired ones instead. Even more important has been the ability of the Saudis and the Gulf states to buy most of the Arabic media outlets where any criticism of Salafism is strictly prohibited and all religious discussion is censored.

I noted, however, that this form of religious censorship might be receding finally, perhaps as a consequence of 9/11, and as an indication of this I saw a number of non-Salafi Sheikhs interviewed on such TV stations as Iqra, MBC and al-Jazeera. The change, if one can call it such, remains hard to discern except for the learned or the seriously devout who can follow the references and allusions of the sheikhs.

Faced with this Salafi onslaught in the Muslim world, it is not surprising that some of the more dynamic moderates, men such as Tariq Ramadan and Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid to name only two, have found refuge in the West, and that Muslims born in the West should be in the vanguard of moderate Islam, scholars like Hamza Yusuf and Nuh Keller. But being in the West is itself a major factor of marginalization, for among other things, those in the West do not share in the everyday concerns and travails of Muslims in the heartlands.

More significantly, it is clear that the Salafi message resonate with particularly modern concerns Muslims have about their role in the world and their disenchantment with aspects of western modernity. The certainties that Salafism posits in answering questions, its lack of nuance in viewing the world, and its success in projecting a muscular and robust Islam, all account for its contemporary appeal. Until and unless moderate Muslims are able to provide some of the same, they will remain on the sidelines of an on-going debate about what it means to be Muslim and how to define the contours of a modern Islamic identity.

The writer is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, USA.

E-mail: bernard.haykel@nyu.edu

Bush’s return to the UN

THE new Bob Woodward book “Bush at War” tells us that the Bush team has been at times quite rattled by the criticism of its policies towards Afghanistan and Iraq. That gives me comfort.

As a long time proponent of the thesis that the pen in the end is mightier than the sword it is good to know that some of the scribblers’ darts have found their target. Thus we critics should keep up our good work, particularly when we are so convinced the policy from Washington is both wrongheaded and counterproductive.

Yet and but. Perhaps for now we should be a little quieter. The United Nations has spoken and it has spoken at its highest level and with an amazing, almost unprecedented, unity on a matter of such dire consequence. Is not this what many of us in the critical camp have always yearned for — life being breathed into the moribund institution of the UN?

I think it is, and the fact that for decades now the UN has been kicked around like a political football shouldn’t inhibit us today for seeing what a transforming event has taken place and what a chance it offers to put the UN into a central place in our political life for the next few decades, and perhaps even longer.

Over Kosovo, the Clinton administration (supposedly a pro-UN administration, but clearly, since its duplicitous and misleading behaviour over the UN operation in Somalia, in practice the reverse) blithely walked right round the UN and unilaterally lead the Nato bombing campaign, one that probably triggered the massive ethnic cleansing it said it was attempting to forestall.

With the bombing of Afghanistan the U.S. likewise ignored all the strictures of the UN Charter which, whilst allowing members that are imperilled to act in self-defence, abjures them to bring the matter before the Security Council as soon as possible and get it to take up the baton of authorizing the fighting of a war if needs be.

This time round with Iraq, despite the arguments to circumvent the UN once again from deep inside the administration, from vice president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld — all of whom we were told by insiders were the ones whom the president instinctively listens to — George Bush has decided to ignore them.

It was not an easy decision for him. It didn’t fit with his visceral desire to get on with the job that had been decided on, to defang Saddam Hussein once and for all. But he decided to do it. He went through the UN and its tortuous hair splitting procedures and reminded us, as Anthony Blinken, a former U.S. National Security Council member, argued so well in Prospect magazine last year, why there is still more that binds Europe (and Japan and Canada, not to mention a host of other democracies) to the United States than divides it.

And the biggest unifying item of all is this question of a relatively free press and free debate. We too often take it for granted. But if, as the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has argued, it is the main reason why India during the last fifty years has not suffered a major famine — because the bureaucrats can’t cover it up — then it is very much the principal reason why Bush has turned 180 degrees on a dime.

Somehow deep down, despite the shenanigans of the general election count, he is democratic enough to listen, or at least has the good sense to realize he owes his political future to the voters and the opinion makers.

So now perhaps we have to do our part and support Washington. Of course we can still see the weaknesses. We can see that the whole Iraq confrontation might be an unnecessary distraction from hunting down Al Qaeda. This requires, as it did with the pursuit of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi exterminator-in-chief of the Jews, long-term police work, not massive bombing.

The Clinton administration was offered Osama bin Laden by Sudan and turned the suggestion down. The Bush administration could have run him down in Afghanistan if it had been clever instead of bombing the place to smithereens. And now, obsessed with Iraq, they have taken the eye of the ball, convinced themselves he was probably dead, only to find he is still there and the hydra has grown heads all over the world. You can only do one job of these proportions at a time and Iraq is a distraction, all the more so since very few believe Saddam has a nuclear weapon or could build one any time soon, and anyway if he did whom would he use these terrible weapons of mass destruction against unless he was attacked?

But this is only half the point. The other half is that Security Council members solemnly and rationally considered the American argument and judged it as worthy of not their “no” or even abstention but a “yes”.

The U.S. has at last realized it may be the world’s only superpower but that it can only wield that strength if the world at large supports it. And countries such as Russia, China and France have likewise realized that the only way they can any longer bring influence to bear in Washington is to make it feasible for the U.S. to work through the UN. This is momentous progress, the most significant development since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps, after all, we will soon be saying, “We are all Americans now”.—Copyright Jonathan Power

When distant holes collide

HERE we were contemplating a dispute around the old oak tree, a thorough holiday rug-cleaning and which turkey stuffing to use next week when suddenly our lives collided with news of these two colliding black holes in space.

You might have missed it because the discovery of evidence pointing to the colossal crash of two galaxies was widely deemed less newsworthy on Earth than the Bachelor’s final pick or the possible demolition of Los Angeles police headquarters.

So let’s think of this celestial story in terms familiar to the California universe — say, as a freeway. We (our sun and its planets) are on the southbound side of the freeway. Earth is in the southbound commuter lane moving at 66,500 miles an hour, which would make for a short commute if Earth had a destination in the infinity of space.

On the freeway’s northbound side are two trucks, each the size of the Milky Way. Interestingly, one of them is going the wrong way. They collide. Whatever is in them, along with whatever is in the neighbourhood, flies into a lot of large pieces, emitting forces we’ve yet to contemplate and radiation requiring sun block with an SPF around 5,000. All this would spill into the southbound lanes for millions of years. Now, do you find this worthy of the traffic report?

It’s true, space news seems far away, even if Lance Bass gets there. If we ignore space, maybe it too will go away. Space can be bewildering. It has hypotheses, hypotenuses and nuclei, invisible rays, black holes that aren’t holes and more baffling numbers than even your car lease. For example, these colliding galaxies are 400 million light-years away, which, at 186,000 miles a second, is 2,400 million trillion miles away, give or take a lane.

Each of the two galaxies has a black hole, and the mass in each black hole generates gravity stronger than any Oreck. Light can’t even escape from black holes; hence, the name. Talk about stuffing.— Los Angeles Times

Media awareness is the challenge

PAKISTANI community in the United States is growing at a fast pace. A recent survey pointed out that the combined output of Pakistani Americans in pure financial terms now equals the GDP of Pakistan.

It is indeed gratifying to note that we have excelled as individuals in a society based on puritan ethics of hard work and service with dedication. However, we live in complex times, and today our self-image is dependent upon more than our personal success.

It is our collective image that is continuously taking a battering. Media is in the centre of this onslaught on our identity both as Muslims and as Pakistanis.

Unfortunately, to this day we have failed to interact with the American media as a community and thus it is no wonder that we have emerged as its helpless victims.

It is not that we are not aware of this predicament. Every dinner and iftar party is filled with frustrated analyses and suggestions regarding the problems we face.

But then our individualistic efforts never move beyond this stage. If we do not have any collective plan to deal with the problems affecting us, then is it surprising that day after day articles and editorials take liberty to paint and project us the way they like.

Media is not a simple reflection of external reality. Far from it: it continuously assembles and repackages facts and then presents them as gems of truth. To a great extent, it is also driven by special interest groups that pursue their agendas by means of control and dissemination of information.

And all of us know there are such groups within the United States that have a strong vested interest in representing us in a distorted light as a people and in shaping perceptions in a way that brings us out as bad or evil.

This is a dangerous situation. If we still fail to come out to defend ourselves more forcefully, then noose will continue to tighten around our necks. We need to engage the editors of newspapers and producers of television programmes, in a proper but assertive manner, so that they know that we are here, are aware of their propaganda and are mindful of the way they are presenting us.

We must remember that much of the comment about us is also based on plain ignorance. It is our responsibility to inform them more methodically about us.

It is time to raise our distinct American voices to let them know that we have matured from the stage of individuals to that of a community that is an important part of the American mosaic and is proud of its role in the world.

Noam Chomsky said, “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.”

The only way this can be achieved is through media awareness. It is important to understand that every community and interest group has its own view of the process of history. When a group is weak to and fails to present its own interpretation of its history, then others take the lead in presenting it according to their own biases and perceptions.

That is precisely what is happening here and we are being pushed to a corner of insignificance by the manufacturers of a specific point of view by the US media.

It is precisely for this reason that the Pakistani community needs to be proactive in finding ways to engage the media. First, we need to distinguish between facts and opinions, ask ourselves if what we are seeing and hearing is the reality about us and then react by writing to the respective media outlets by voicing our opinion as a community.

We need to tell them that an alternate view also exists; reality is always multidimensional.

A group of Pakistani professionals formed the Association of Pakistani Professionals with the sole purpose of representing Pakistan and its people to the western media. AOPP, a New York-based think-tank, focuses on the image of Pakistan in the western world.

It strives to inform decision makers on Capitol Hill and editors of important publications of the important and difficult role Pakistan plays in the region.

The main objective of the group is to closely monitor reporting and news analysis by media outlets in reference to Pakistan and its interests in the United States.

AOPP responds to any media item, news analysis, remarks by Senators or congressional representatives in which inaccurate and distorted views are expressed about Pakistan and its people.

The group writes replies, rebuttals and clarifications with the help of volunteer writers who counter the biased propaganda and present an accurate version of the issue at hand.

It is imperative that we roll up our sleeves and participate actively in projecting and presenting the true picture of Pakistan; a country that has always fulfilled its obligations to the international community in spite of being in a very difficult and unstable region.

E-mail: asifalam@aopp.org

Russian-American friendship

A wild thing happened last week. I attended a Russian-American friendship dinner at the Russian Embassy.Because it was a black-tie affair, I couldn’t tell the Russians from the Americans.

The honoree was Tatiana Kudriavtseva, who has translated such leading American writers as Norman Mailer, William Styron, John Updike and Gore Vidal into Russian. She also did the same for “Gone With the Wind.”

I had very mixed feelings about going into the embassy. It seemed like only yesterday that Sen. Joe McCarthy, as well as the House Un-American Activities Committee, wanted names of anyone who gave a hint of being friendly with the Russians.

The fellow travellers were called traitors and Communist rats. The only way the committee could get blacklists was to force the witnesses at the hearings to give up the names of their friends.

As I entered the well-guarded gates of the embassy, I thought, “How long will it be before I am called before a House committee and have to testify that I attended a friendship dinner for the Russians?”

They would ask me for names and I would turn over the programme for the evening, which lists, among the sponsors, Sen. Ted Stevens, Trent Lott, Ted Daschle and Joseph Biden.

The second thing that went through my mind was that I live only four blocks from the embassy. For years it was the most forbidding place in Washington. No one went in unless they were Russian or from an Iron Curtain country.

The Americans had rented apartments overlooking the embassy, and there were always two or three police cars or unmarked FBI vans videotaping the Russians, who were taping them.

Now I was being treated with open arms by the ex-Evil Empire. A friend of mine had a theory. He said in the good old days, the two major powers divided up the world. One side was responsible for everything in their sphere and the U.S. was responsible for the rest.

Looking back on it as nuclear powers, we were happy with the arrangement. Then Russia lost its control over its half and we have now lost control over ours.

I’m in the embassy rubbing shoulders with the Washington and Russian elite. My friend Bill Styron is making a speech in honor of Madam Kudriavtseva, who translated “Sophie’s Choice.”

He told us about the first time they got together in Moscow when there was the threat of censorship.

Madam Kudriavtseva told Bill, “This scene, which is too bawdy, has to go.”

“Suppose I insist that it remain in?” Bill asked.

The translator said, “Then I would be arrested.”

And then she added, “And this love scene has to be taken out.”

“What happens if I refuse?”

“Then I will be taken to a gulag,” Madam Kudriavtseva said. “And this paragraph with the couple in bed also has to go.”

“What will happen if you leave the scene in?”

“I will be executed.”

The food was excellent, and for the first time, I had warm feelings for the Russian people.

The only hitch was when we left it took a long time to get our cars from the valet-parking people.

One discouraged person said, “The reason it takes so long is that the Russians are now parking all the automobiles in the tunnel the FBI dug before we became friendly with them.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services