Sabotaged by hawks

THE PPP-led government ought to take notice of the revelation made by Mushahid Hussain Syed in the Senate on Friday. Speaking after Senator Sanaullah Baloch resigned his Senate seat, the PML-Q secretary general said that hawks in the military establishment had sabotaged the two parliamentary committees’ reports which had made valuable suggestions to the government for a peaceful solution to the crisis in Balochistan. Mushahid Hussain knows. He is an insider, for he headed one of the two parliamentary committees which were charged with the task of investigating the causes of insurgency in what is the country’s largest province territorially, and coming up with a solution. Though some ‘nationalist’ Baloch leaders on the committee boycotted it, the Mushahid Hussain panel, nevertheless, met a cross section of Baloch leaders and came up with some valuable suggestions aimed at alleviating the Baloch people’s grievances. Calling for a revision of the existing policies, the report paid special attention to minerals, including gas, and called for royalty to be paid to the districts where the mineral was exploited, recommended strict implementation of the 5.4 per cent quota reserved for the Baloch in federal jobs, and laid down priorities for jobs in Gwadar, shifting the headquarters of the port authority from Karachi to Gwadar, and building more highways and roads. If implemented, these proposals would have had a positive impact on the political situation in the province. The recommendations were made public in 2004 and then went into the deep freezer, and the nation never heard again about the Mushahid Hussain committee and its proposals. On Friday, Mushahid Hussain informed the Upper House of the reason why the recommendations had not been implemented.

Resigning his Senate seat, Sanaullah Baloch said he had done so on the recommendations of his party, because he wanted to see Baloch control over the province’s natural resources. Quite appropriately, PPP Senator Mian Raza Rabbani tendered his ‘unqualified apologies’ to the Baloch people for the past excesses of ‘the outgoing military government’. However, Senator Rabbani should have also apologised for the military action launched in Balochistan by his government in the 1970s. Sanaullah Baloch’s resignation will be regretted. The BNP (Mengal) leader could advance his people’s cause by staying in parliament rather than quitting it. Abandoning the democratic path strengthens the hands of those in the establishment who are ever so keen to find a military solution to Balochistan’s political problems. The PPP government has taken a number of positive decisions, including the release of a number of Baloch leaders, apologising to Balochistan for past excesses and pledging itself to a political solution to its problems. Mushahid Hussain’s statement should alert the Gilani government to the possibilities of the hawks sabotaging the PPP-led government’s policies on Balochistan.

Aiding the displaced

LIFE is tough enough in these times of crippling inflation, food crises, joblessness and underemployment, senseless violence, rising crime, and water and power shortages. With the exception of the serenely wealthy and heavily fortified, everyone feels the pinch. Sources of solace are few and far between, foremost among them the security net provided by family and community. Consider for a moment then the plight of internally displaced persons in Pakistan who must cope with unspeakable privation in a strange if not completely alien environment. Many have no one to fall back on and are unaware of the customs and workings of the region in which they suddenly find themselves against their will and through no fault of their own. Since flight is often unplanned and the victims poor to begin with, most have no resources other than the clothes on their backs, a few belongings and a little cash in hand. Some find work but others turn to scavenging, begging and, in the most desperate cases, crime. Often these refugees also face harsh discrimination in their new ‘homes’ in a land that publicly prides itself on its sense of hospitality. Easy scapegoats, they are blamed for all manner of social ills that in most cases existed in the area before their arrival.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates that there are some 1.5m internally displaced persons in the country, most of them victims of the army operation unleashed in Balochistan by the Musharraf regime. With the hawks calling the shots, little or no sustained thought went into that military misadventure, so much so that innocent, unarmed villagers barely eking out a living were seen as the enemy. Just as every Vietnamese was the Vietcong for the Americans, no Baloch was above suspicion in the eyes of the Pakistan Army. As helicopter gunships pounded villages, hundreds of thousands were forced to flee to safer ground.

Conflict may be the common denominator, but the situation in parts of Fata is somewhat different. The refugees from the tribal belt left their homes not just because of military operations and missile strikes but also the barbarous activities of the Taliban. The silver lining in the context of both Balochistan and Fata, as well as Swat, is the willingness shown by the new government to try and talk peace instead of just saying it with bombs. As negotiations progress, the authorities must strain every sinew to ensure that people who fled the fighting are able to return safely to their homes. They will also need assistance in cash or kind during the rehabilitation process that may span months if not a few years. The HRCP is calling for UN support but we believe that outside help should be sought only in the case of foreign refugees. Taking care of our own should be our own responsibility.

Education and poverty

IT seems that learning may soon be relegated to a void. Where quality education is regarded the world over as the most effective tool to break the poverty wheel as it provides skills and knowledge for employment, Pakistan’s education is getting poorer by the day. There are schools that don’t operate and there are hundreds of posts of junior, primary and secondary school staff that lie vacant. This is further aided by a rather unique ‘visa system’ whereby teachers and other employees contribute part of their salaries to relevant departments in collusion with their bigwigs as a trade-off for being absent from duty. As a result, a number of teachers working abroad continue to rake it in here as well. School buildings are constructed in ‘selected’ grounds for political reasons.

It hardly needs to be emphasised that the government is perhaps the only body that can rescue education from its current state of abysmal decline. There is no reason for corruption in education to be treated differently from that in other social sectors. Accountability mechanisms in both private and public-sector school education have become a crying need of our times and must include stringent, structured recruitment rules with adequate compensation. These have to be supported by dire consequences for corrupt practices, and administrations must be made entirely independent and accountable with an effective system of complaints for students, parents and teachers. This is possible only if the school management committees are made effective to monitor the working of their institutions. This mechanism should help check corruption which has emerged as the bane of the education sector. Nepotism and bribery are taken to be the only avenues to success. Hence, we can expect rampant disregard for the law and for fellow humans in the future. Such a despicable state of our educational infrastructure is particularly detrimental to the poor as it makes poverty almost entirely inescapable.

OTHER VOICES - North American Press

Raising the bar

The New York Times

IT’S not often in American politics or government that officials are held accountable these days, so Defence Secretary Robert Gates’s decision to fire the top two air force leaders on Thursday was as surprising as it was commendable.

Mr Gates made accountability a priority after taking office 18 months ago, and he removed senior army officers following disclosures of deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre. But never before had both a service secretary … and a service chief … been forced to resign simultaneously. It was an absolutely necessary move.

The problems first surfaced when it was disclosed last year that the air force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Then in March, it was discovered that four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent — a year and a half earlier — to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries.

… Since 9/11, President Bush has repeatedly said keeping nuclear weapons safe and out of the hands of terrorists and other adversaries is a priority. That is why the United States has spent millions of dollars trying to secure nuclear stockpiles at vulnerable facilities in Russia and other countries. Now, as we have seen not once but twice, America’s own vaunted military failed to perform one of the most essential missions required to protect the country.

How did the air force miss that message? Or was everybody at the Pentagon — starting with the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld — just too focused on waging an unnecessary war in Iraq? … — (June 7)

Towards quicker justice

The Toronto Star

THE interests of both accused criminals and the public are best served when charges are dealt with quickly and efficiently.

So faced with mounting evidence that criminal cases in Ontario are getting bogged down in delays, it is welcome news that Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley has committed to moving them through the justice system faster.

Bentley said this week he aims to cut the average number of days and court appearances needed to complete a criminal case by 30 per cent over the next four years. By both measures, Ontario is doing badly. Between 1992 and last year, the average number of days a criminal case spent in the system roughly doubled….

As a first step, Bentley is expanding ‘dedicated prosecution’ which will see small teams of prosecutors hang on to cases until they are resolved, or go to trial. This should cut down on delays caused when new Crown attorneys have to get up to speed on cases.

Superior Court Justice Bruce Durno and Crown attorney Kenneth Anthony have been tapped to spearhead efforts to speed up cases.

They will have their work cut out for them. This is a complex problem that eludes easy fixes. And so far, at least, there is no new funding attached to the target. The announcement “isn’t about more, it’s about more effective,” a spokesperson for Bentley told the Star.

It is hard to argue with making better use of existing resources. But given the scope of the problem, notably the number of accused appearing in court without a lawyer, these measures should be seen for what they are — a promising start. — (June 7)

And, who invented daylight saving?

JOHNNY Hart’s absolutely hilarious comic strip ‘BC’ has the kid ant asking the dad ant who invented daylight saving. Dad ant tells the kid that it was Edison, but not Thomas as is commonly believed. It was his brother Mason, the inventor of the Mason Jar, who did it.

Every day, so dad ant tells the kid, Mason would go to his workshop, blow a jar as they used to blow glass jars in the old days and set it out in the sun to dry before capping it.

Little did old Mason realise that his jars were filling up with daylight and when he capped them, he got a jar full of daylight. Since blowing glass jars was his business, he soon had a whole great bunch of them all duly filled with daylight. Then one day the expected happened: just about sunset, one of the jars, perhaps too overfilled with daylight, blew the top. And, presto! the world had an extra hour of daylight.

Satisfied, kid ant turns around while dad ant nonchalantly spits out his wad of tobacco and says to himself, ‘This home schooling could turn out to be a lot more fun than I thought.’ This, I suspect, is the sentence with a little variation that some bureaucrat in Islamabad, having high-fived his lesser crony, said.

With the variation the bureaucrat’s sentence would be something like, ‘Could you believe these moronic politicians would fall for this one so soon again? Making them look like fools is going to be a lot more fun than we thought.’

As the late great Peter Ustinov once said that he suspected there was a room in the foreign office where they taught future diplomats to stammer, so too do I suspect there are several rooms in every department in the Islamabad secretariat where sinister characters concoct such imbecile ideas to be inflicted upon us poor masses via our unthinking herds of politicians. It might work for the West with its high literacy to put their clocks forward by an hour every spring and back every autumn, but in a country of just about 10 per cent actually literate people, it does not.

Go back 19 years and you first find this absurd idea almost being inflicted upon us by the first PPP government. It was the winter of 1989-90 when out of the blue came the announcement that Pakistani clocks were being set ahead — yes, ahead — in a few days’ time.

The nation immediately went into turmoil. Thank heavens we only had PTV to tell us how our lives were going to be revolutionised by this one hour of jiggery-pokery. Had private channels been then inflicted on us as now, they would have gone into overdrive screaming about how the Zionist-Hindu lobby had launched the final solution for the unmaking of Pakistan.

Good sense prevailed and the idiotic idea was killed before it could actually be put into practice. Years stumbled by and then we had The Man Who Would Refuse To Ever Know His End Is Come. One summer (was it 2002 or the year after?) it was announced that like most of the western world, we too were to put our clocks ahead by one hour.

Those very same bureaucrats, having sold their crazy idea to generalissimo-politico, were once again sniggering up their sleeves. They could hardly believe that the person who thought he was the smartest thing ever to happen to this sorry land was so easy to fool.

Shortly after we began revelling in the extra hour of General daylight, the people of Sibi being particularly enamoured of it especially when temperatures there hit 52 Celsius, I went cycling around rural Punjab. As I waited for my cup of tea at a village teashop, an elderly woman came along to ask the man what time it was. He told her and she looked a little uncertain as she turned to go. Then she stopped and asked if this was the ‘real’ 10 o’clock or Musharraf’s 10 o’clock.

This woman of rural Punjab, like all those of her kind sprinkled across the villages of the entire country, was a real Pakistani: simple, with little or no education, whose daily timetable was guided less by clocks, more by the rising and setting of the sun.

When she needed to milk her buffalo, she did not give a fig about what the clock said. She milked it when the stars above still blazed and the horizon had just a touch of colour. Summer or winter, it was the sun that set the pace for her chores of the day, the same way it did for those millions of other real Pakistanis.

The foolishness was permitted to persist for a full six months because generalissimo did not want to admit he had made a very foolish mistake. Reversion to Pakistan Standard Time was greeted with a great sigh of relief. Speaking of PST, here’s another gem which shows why we should not indulge in this gimmickry that suits only 100 per cent literate nations. Radio Pakistan and PTV announcers would tell you what o’clock it was Pakistan Standard Time. No one told those morons that the time we were going by was not PST but summer time.

If you have kept your eyes open and watched the pattern of life in Pakistan, you will know that it was the introduction of satellite TV that turned our lives around. Until then, ordinary folks would watch the nine o’clock news on PTV and hit the sack. Then came ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’, and people who could not understand a word of English stayed awake all night watching the same inanity again and again and again. And so it was since the onset of the Nutty Nineties that our lives were no longer guided by the sun.

Now when the government told the traders to do business on Sunday instead of Friday in order to stagger businesses and offices, the traders duly thumbed their noses at the government. They also told it to go to hell about closing at 9 pm. Why, it was their business and they had every right to carry on until whenever they wished, they are now on record as having said. They have every right to go home about midnight and watch Indian soap operas until the muezzin calls them to their first duty of the day. Saving electricity be damned.

Frankly, if you ask me, I say why settle for just one hour of daylight saving. We can have as many Mason Jars of daylight as we want if we set our clocks forward by, say, five or even 10 hours. Maybe even a few years. Why not claim to be living in the year 2199? Imagine the daylight and the electricity we will save by eliminating the intervening years. No half measures, I say, go the whole hog.

The writer is the author of several travel books.

odysseus@beaconet.net

No tearful farewell likely for Bush

It is a safe bet that there will be no mass shedding of tears when US President George W. Bush visits Slovenia to attend the final summit of his presidency between the European Union and the United States June 10.

During his two terms in the White House, trans-Atlantic relations proved so divisive for Europe that Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, famously characterised the continent as being split between ‘old’ and ‘new’. The former, according to Rumsfeld, opposed the war against Iraq; the latter approved of it.

Still, there appears to be a determination on both sides that Bush’s swansong in Slovenia should not be marred by disharmony. Some contentious issues will be discussed: an 11-year-old EU ban on US poultry imports, and the fact that the US allows citizens of some EU states but not others to enter its territory without a visa. More sensitive topics, especially those relating to civil and political rights, look set to be avoided, however.

Dimitrios Papadimoulis, a Greek left-wing member of the European Parliament, has urged the EU side to press Washington for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the controversial prison camp in Cuba, and to demand an end to the secretive torture, detention and kidnapping programme run by the Central Intelligence Agency (allegedly with the cooperation of many European governments).

“The European Parliament wants Guantanamo closed down,” he said in a debate with representatives of EU governments and the European Commission. “We also want secret prisons closed down. Are you going to say something about that to the Americans?”

Neither the Commission nor the government of Slovenia, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, answered his question.

Emilou MacLean, a staff attorney with the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, suggested that the imminent departure from office of Bush offers no pretext for European reticence on Guantanamo. In a new report, the CCR states that interrogators from a number of countries have been granted access to the prison camp by the US, where they have threatened detainees. The interrogators hailed from China, Uzbekistan, Libya, Jordan, Tunisia and Tajikistan — all of which have been criticised for human rights abuses by the US State Department.

Some 50 detainees are believed to face grave risks to their personal safety if they are returned home. Human rights activists have asked European governments to provide shelter to many of these detainees. Some of them have already been cleared for release but remain in custody.

“It is critical that the international community speaks loudly and clearly,” MacLean added. “Actions, in addition to words, are needed to close Guantanamo. We’re at a critical juncture right now at the end of a political cycle, and hopefully there is an opportunity to right the wrongs that have been created. But that is only going to happen through pro-active deeds.”

Climate change — a major irritant in EU-US ties — will feature on the agenda in Ljubljana.

Although the US is the only major industrialised country to have rejected the Kyoto protocol on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, the European side is hoping to convince it to be more constructive in efforts to find a successor to Kyoto. Such efforts are scheduled to culminate in an agreement at a major conference in Copenhagen next year.

By that time, either John McCain or Barack Obama will have had ample time to settle into the White House. Both have indicated that they regard climate change as an urgent problem, unlike Bush who made his living in the oil industry before entering politics full-time.

Stephan Singer, a climate change campaigner with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), is not expecting any concrete results to emerge from the discussions on the environment during next week’s summit.

“The EU would be well advised not to put too much resources into negotiating with a dying administration,” he said. “The real debates will take place once there is a new president in the White House.”

Singer believes that the EU has been “lucky” in a sense that Bush has not been receptive to calls for swingeing cuts in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other substances blamed by scientists for heating the earth’s atmosphere. The lack of commitment to the environment in Washington has allowed the EU become a “self-proclaimed leader” in global efforts against climate change, he added.

“I would be happy if the US shows real leadership and embarrasses the EU into taking a stronger position,” he said. “That would be great.”

Without doubt, much of the conversations taking place on the margins of the summit will focus on the US presidential election, slated for November.

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Britain’s Oxford University, said this week that the “working assumption” in this continent is that both McCain and Obama would be “more multilateral” than the frequently isolationist Bush administration.

Judging by his statements to date, Obama could be “a hell of a lot more multilateral,” the professor added, and his election “would be greeted with an extraordinary welcome” in Europe.

—IPS Nrews