It was a futile exercise

THE president’s recently concluded 10-day trip to Europe has aroused unusual interest and controversy, both as regards its timing and purpose.

Though his declared aim was to participate in the Davos Economic Forum, Musharraf recognised that official pronouncements were not enough to attract foreign investment, especially when the global media was projecting Pakistan as being in a state of unprecedented crisis.

Moreover, his regime’s much-touted economic miracle has been exposed as frightful mismanagement of the nation’s resources that has resulted in a major energy crisis, serious economic imbalances, disappearances of essential food items and growing inequalities of income and wealth.

Therefore, Brussels, Paris and London were added to permit the president to use his much-vaunted ‘charm’ on his hosts to remove the ‘wrong perceptions’ and ‘misunderstandings’ that had cropped up in recent months. He therefore anchored his appearances on the one card he could play with the ease of a consummate practitioner — that of a strong, determined leader, whose courage and iron will was keeping the extremists at bay and preventing Pakistan from sliding into chaos.

He sought to burnish his image by repeated assertions that more than any leader, he had been in the forefront of the war on terror and those now clamouring for democracy and human rights were either ignorant of the ground realities or oblivious to the dangers of a democratic dispensation in Pakistan.

The retired general also gave fresh evidence of continuing confidence in his ability to ‘talk’ through the growing haze of deepening doubts in the West. This is not surprising given that he has been ‘praised and pampered’ over the years, even when demonstrating his disregard for democratic principles and insisting on the ‘unity of command’. No wonder, he believes that Houdini-like he will be able to extricate himself from an increasingly untenable situation.

But what he may have failed to appreciate is the sea change that has taken place in the West, especially in the media and think-tanks, when he imposed the state of emergency which may have dealt the final blow to his reputation. While the Bush administration may believe that Musharraf remains the panacea to Pakistan’s ills, Europe, with its longer tradition of democracy and stronger commitment to human rights, is now less tolerant of his transgressions.

At Davos, the president met with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice amidst speculation that the US was getting increasingly concerned about the continuing turmoil in Pakistan, as well as with the resurgence of extremists. There were also reports that Bush was considering punitive measures against armed militants in northern Pakistan.

On Jan 25, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates reiterated that the US “remains ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them to provide additional training to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so.” This indicated increased US pressure on Pakistan to take the Pentagon up on its offer to conduct joint military activities or additional training operations.

Moreover, last month the US House of Representatives passed a bill that places tough conditions on assistance to Pakistan that includes holding of free and fair elections, release of political prisoners and the restoration of an independent judiciary.

The president also sought to portray himself as a democrat at heart, assuring that he would honour the pledges made by him. However, habits acquired over years do not disappear; in fact they emerge in the heat of the moment. After reiterating that he was “an army man who believes very strongly in democracy and human rights”, Musharraf demanded that the West stop its ‘obsession’ with promoting democracy.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana nevertheless linked the EU’s cooperation with Pakistan to the manner in which the forthcoming elections would be held. He made it clear that “our cooperation, our level of engagement will be in view of the results of the election process. Elections have to be fair, free and secure”.

Though the government may not welcome such a remark, given the Third Generation Agreement with the EU (ratified in April 2004), we have to conform to demands for democracy and human rights. This attitude was also echoed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who after his meeting with Musharraf indicated that Britain’s enhanced assistance to Pakistan would depend on elections being free and fair, and visible progress on the democracy front.

The EU’s position is that the independence of the judiciary must be restored and restrictions on the media lifted. It is also convinced that it is time to focus on building strong institutions rather than strong personalities. In view of its experience in former communist East Europe, the EU believes it can help Pakistan in reforming and modernising the institutions of democracy. Finally, the EU’s position on terrorism is more nuanced and not focused on military means alone.

If the ostensible purpose of the trip was to remove misunderstandings and misperceptions, Musharraf did little to promote this goal, especially when he painted a bleak picture of the country, where citizens were ‘despondent and demoralised’. Worse, he said he feared the ‘Talibanisation of our society’.

He also did himself no good by lashing out at deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, calling him among other things, ‘inept and corrupt’. This was not only in bad taste, but counter-productive, for it drew attention to an issue that he would have wished to avoid, i.e. the virtual massacre of the judiciary. He also showed growing sensitivity to criticism when he ridiculed retired servicemen who had issued a statement telling him to quit, calling them insignificant personalities, who had now become ‘paper tigers’.

Just as the visit was concluding, it was learnt that the president had a ‘chance’ meeting with Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak that enabled them to have a comprehensive exchange. Unless well prepared, these ‘chance’ encounters can serve no purpose other than to create unnecessary speculation. But it demonstrated the president’s view that reaching out to Israel will earn him kudos with the US. Such benefits are at best transitory, with no real advantage to Pakistan.

As is the practice, the government is claiming that the president’s tour was a triumph. That is, however, not the view of political analysts here or in European capitals. Most of them are convinced that Musharraf can no longer resolve the crisis currently enveloping Pakistan.

In particular, his open contempt for democracy and human rights was jarring to the Europeans, who are genuinely proud and passionately attached to these principles. He may also feel that Pakistan is not fit for democracy, but the people are convinced that if they were fit for it in 1947, they certainly deserve it much more today. What the country needs is not less but more democracy.

In any case, there are those who, notwithstanding a lifetime spent in the field of diplomacy, are convinced that domestic problems can neither be resolved nor brushed aside by public relations exercises carried out in foreign capitals, however skilful these may be. This is an illness that afflicts many world leaders, especially in the Third World, where there is a tendency to assume that attractive packaging and elegant presentation can cover up the warts and blemishes.

Critical condition

THE first step in fixing a problem is facing up to it. Tuesday’s report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) made for depressing reading, but it did an invaluable job by making plain how unwell one part of the welfare state in Britain has grown.

In the year that pensioners outnumber children for the first time ever, it hardly needs saying that personal care is in heavy demand. Yet it is being provided to more than 100,000 fewer households than it was when Labour first came to power. It is not a case of budget cuts –– the money has been increased.

Anyone who has applied for care knows the hideous complexities involved. At a time when a family already faces great emotional strains, they can find themselves caught up in a baffling paper chase between care provider, council and benefit office. Increasingly, however, this unhappy process leads nowhere. With more councils rationing their care, the overwhelming majority now restrict services to “critical” or “substantial” cases.

Rationing by diversion, as it is known, is the most damaging response of all. Turning vulnerable people into someone else’s problem may help make the sums add up, but the effect is that 281,000 with real needs are left with no assistance at all.

Encouragingly, care minister Ivan Lewis did not gloss over the report’s grim conclusions, but accepted that the coming green paper would need to do something about them. All solutions will involve asking people to pay more, whether from their own wallets or through their taxes. Neither option is an easy sell.

—The Guardian, London

These walls that divide us

The beloved sun did not rise when they threw up the wall.

How long eyes have searched for it and are still waiting!

Can the eyes themselves be lost?

Could the wall have gouged them out?

— Mahmood Darwish

THE six-metre high metal border wall erected by the Israeli government around Rafah in 2004 stands like a sentinel in the desert between Sinai and the Gaza Strip, ruptured and rusted, a festering wound in the body of a nation disenfranchised and violated for 60 years.

Subjected to the violence of colonisation and then the brutality of dehumanisation, the people of Rafah live divided lives, like many Palestinians who have left homes built by ancestors in the ancient land of biblical Judea and Samaria.

The history of Gaza is the history of the people of Ashkelon and Ashdod, and Gaza is the city which saw the birth of Goliath, defeated by David in a battle signifying the victory of the powerless against the powerful.Today, the people of Rafah fight another war, against a state which has literally imprisoned them within the confines of the coastal strip which saw massive relocations of Israeli settlers in 2006, a move made to ‘appease’ the peace process. And what of the peace process today? Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was designed to cripple a population which is seen to be complicit in attacks on Israeli territory and citizens.

On Jan 22, the Security Council met in an emergency session to consider a call for ending the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. The open meeting was requested by Arab and Islamic states amid an international outcry at what the European Union termed the “collective punishment of 1.5 million residents”. Cutting off fuel to the territory’s only power plant plunged Gaza into darkness, forcing doctors to choose between saving the lives of newborns or those undergoing heart surgeries.

Israel also blockaded the provision of food and medicines in a replay of the tragedy of Karbala. Today, it appears that the conflict pitting Imam Hussein against the forces of tyranny is reflected around the Muslim world, gaining more significance in a world echoing with chants of democracy and human rights and heaving with growing inequities of power and wealth. Perhaps the walls that divide us are not just erected to keep some in and others out. Perhaps these walls are meant to divide us permanently into those who wield power and those who are compelled to submit to it.

In his autobiography Out of Place, Edward Said talks about growing up as a Palestinian whose people were battered and then displaced by the British Empire which was in a crisis at the time. He learnt that as an Arab, he was the subject of a long history of imperial stereotyping and misrepresentation.

As a student of literature he learnt of the ineluctable and energising connections between culture and politics, with Gramsci and Foucault taking a central position in his intellectual growth. Both philosophers and theorists of social hierarchies and institutions, these giants inspired Said to write a book exploring the various ways in which knowledge about the ‘Orient’ was produced as a prelude to and a corollary of the conquest of these territories: “My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively…”

Said’s seminal work Orientalism needs to be considered seriously today in order to dismantle the walls which have divided the world into conquerors and those who are conquered, the ‘sub-human, barbaric native’ of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is only by considering the narrative of the ‘other’ as valid and legitimate that we can begin to deconstruct the prejudices and the contempt with which we perceive those who are not from ‘among us’, whether that community happens to be the conquered subject or the warring tribal fiercely protective of territory and historical imperatives which strengthen that claim.

Just over a year ago, on an off-Broadway stage in New York I watched a young woman play out the life of Rachel Corrie, the American activist who died trying to protect the lives and properties of Palestinians in Gaza. Watching this courageous production put together by Alan Rickman, I thought back to the days in London when I would come across Vanessa Redgrave at meetings held in solidarity with the Palestinian people. She had befriended me and would take me home to her flat, cooking for me in a kitchen which held the warmth and love of a woman committed to causes of humanity and peace.

When the London production of this play was cancelled, Vanessa condemned the pressure to suppress the truth. I share her words: “If this cancellation is not transformed we would be complicit, all of us, in a catastrophe that must not be allowed to take place. This play is not about taking sides. It is about protecting human beings, in this case, Palestinian human beings who have no protection, for their families, their homes or their streets. Rachel Corrie gave her life to protect a family. She didn’t have or use a gun or bomb. She had her huge humanity, and she gave that to save lives.”

In Rafah today, men and women swarm across a breach in the wall at the border, “hungry for freedom, for fuel and other things”. In New York, the neo-imperial alliance between Israel and the United States ignores the warnings of the United Nations Relief Works Agency which has run out of plastic bags used to distribute food aid to 860,000 Palestinians living in Gaza. And while bulldozers breach walls in the desert, more walls are erected to ensure that the divide between those who rule and the ruled remains firmly incised into the fabric of our fissured history.

A political meltdown?

PAKISTAN appears to be a candidate for a political meltdown. All the actors, as if in a Greek drama, are ready with their knives and swords sharpened for the act of annihilation. Some believe they have the street power of protesting crowds behind them while others are armed with weapons of war.

None is equipped with a machinery of governance different from that of the existing civil and military services running the imperial system of governance bequeathed by the British. They want more of the same.

The Taliban and others of their ilk are getting bolder by the day with their successful forays in the settled districts of the NWFP. The government is determined to strike a hard blow against them before starting negotiations, not realising that this strategy does not work in modern times. It failed in Lebanon against the Hezbollah, in Afghanistan against the Mujahideen, in Palestine against the Intifada, and in Suharto’s Indonesia with respect to East Timor, besides other places. It is failing in Iraq and had spectacularly failed in Vietnam.

The so-called main political parties, each having its own do or die agenda of coming into power, are geared to save the vested interests of their class. Little do they realise that their antagonists have identical vested interests. One fails to discern any remarkable difference between the political, social and economic programmes of the big parties and the political party of President Pervez Musharraf. The parties of the APDM are boycotting the forthcoming elections depriving themselves of the privileges and benefits that could have accrued through entering parliament. They have correctly judged that in the present environ of shortages of essential commodities and energy and the wide gulf between the state and the people they are capable of mounting agitation in the street to create the most serious obstacles in the day to day working of any future government.

The huge legal community of Pakistan is putting up a heroic resistance against the establishment. Notwithstanding large-scale arrests and merciless violence against their cadre by the general’s police, the lawyers remain as determined as ever to achieve their objective of the restoration of the higher judiciary to the position of Nov 2, 2007. The lawyers having organisations in every district and tehsil of Pakistan are now a force to be reckoned with by any government.

What happens after elections is a source of worry for all serious-minded, patriotic Pakistanis. Those who have boycotted the elections, due to be held on Feb 18, and those who lose will certainly mount agitation on the plea that elections were not free and fair and the government is illegal on several counts.

One never knows when the cup of patience of the vast majority of poor Pakistanis will spill over the brim. They suffer at the hands of an oppressive administration and are prime victims of rising prices, shortage of essential commodities and unemployment. They perennially await an opportunity to pour out their anger and frustration by responding to the call of populist rhetoric by any leader at hand.

The behaviour of criminal elements at the time of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last month in some parts of the country has to be pondered over. All kinds of shops, especially those of jewellery, and banks were freely looted. Police stations were attacked and prisoners freed from lockups. Damage to the railways alone amounted to $20bn as trains, engines, railway stations were set on fire and the signalling system severely damaged. On the Karachi-Multan and Shikarpur-Sukkur highways, scores of trucks were looted and burnt down. The criminals had brought their own trucks to carry away the plunder.

The perpetrators comprising small bands which sprouted out of nowhere in Sindh and in some cities of the Punjab did not operate under any central command. No wonder, wealthy Pakistanis are transferring money on a large scale to safer stations outside the country. These inauspicious circumstances pose a grave threat to the security and stability of the country.

Given the present social, economic and political situation, no government of Pakistan, sworn in after the elections with the aim of restoring the status quo ante, has the prospect of offering stability to the state and security to the citizens. Only a government having the support of all political parties on an agreed agenda among themselves and with the civil and military establishment has a reasonable prospect of success against the dark odds on the horizon.

Pakistan will also need the support of neighbouring countries — Iran, China and India. Their highest interests are also at stake. They cannot afford a meltdown in Pakistan. Every Tom, Dick and Harry from Europe and America comes running to Pakistan warning and advising, but our neighbours seem strangely silent. If Pakistan agrees, they have to help not only in meeting its short-term requirements but also to enable it to rid itself of those tentacles of the United States which prevent it making its 160 million people prosperous and strong.