| 14 May 2000 | Sunday | 09 Safar 1421 |
ECO progress and prospects
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Arabs
IT IS no surprise how the Islamists have suddenly bonded together, daubed the war-paint, and sat spurs to their horses. A bit more of a surprise is how quickly the regime's reformist professions have come down in a heap at this first whiff of a zealotic challenge.
The blasphemy law offered the pietists their chance. Nothing, it must have seemed, could rally their ranks, rouse the laity, corner the authority more surely than images of insults to the Holy Prophet (PBUH). And while at it, they could twist the knife some more. They could press all their other demands.
These additional demands now are; make the Islamic provisions a part of the current provisional constitutional order, forswear joint electorate, ban NGOs, revert to Friday as the weekly holiday, pledge full freedom to deeni madaris and jehadist bodies. And do all that by next Friday, or else.
Panic in the official ranks was palpable this past week. Not a day passed when there was not someone on the media disavowing, hand on heart, any interference with the blasphemy law. Not even with the enforcement procedure, they began saying in the end. Some of the serried ranks were in that way won over and thereupon promptly and amply featured on the screen expressing their satisfaction. Their leading lights were holding out. The Friday strike is still on, they claim.
It is all a pity. If there were conviction in its move the government would not have beaten such a clumsy retreat. It made no effort to appeal to the good sense of the people. It could do this, even if that was necessary, over the head of these self-appointed holy Willies. It could demonstrate that the object was not remotely to be soft on blasphemers, only to be just to like non-blasphemers.
It could have shown how in all the years of its existence the law had been repeatedly abused: how innocent persons had been made to suffer months, even years, of incarceration, harassment and calumny on false imputation; how some were even extra-judicially killed and no questions asked; how, even judicially, lower courts were sometimes hustled and pressured by mob action into awarding conviction, which convictions had to be overturned on appeal because of their being cases of no evidence; how sometimes loyal members of these organizations themselves became victims of personal vendetta under the cover of blasphemy; and how once even a person of the stature of the late Akhtar Hameed Khan was humiliated and dragged in the courts on that charge near the close of his life and thus for months made to live in the shadow of the gallows.
It would have been one worthwhile task for the National Reconstruction Bureau to anticipate the controversy and draw up a white paper on just how the law has worked out in practice. The white paper could have included the backgrounds of all the complainants and the accused, the contents of the FIRs, the evidence and the witnesses produced, the arguments advanced, the points made in the judgments at different levels of the courts, and all that the accused went through meanwhile. It would also have been handy to give a comparison of the number and kind of blasphemy cases filed before the present law was enacted and those brought in afterwards. Just the bare facts might have spoken for themselves.
Blasphemy is unpardonable. But that a blasphemy has occurred has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt in the first place. A person cannot be half-assumed, either by the law or by crowds milling around the courts, to be guilty by virtue of his just having been accused of that heinous crime. There has clearly to be something seriously wrong with a law and a procedure that require him to begin paying for the crime from the point some one makes a complaint against him, while it is still to be proved whether he has committed that crime at all.
Similarly, in respect of the deeni madaris, the honest object never was to interfere with whatever religious education these schools and the children's parents between them had wished to be given to the children (though there was always the hope that this would not be narrowly, intolerantly sectarian). The idea was, firstly, to ensure that religious militancy was not part of that teaching or training.
The mullahs may largely be right in claiming that this was never there. But on the other hand there had been intelligence reports in the past, and also some hard evidence such as in the form of the Taliban phenomenon, that at least a few of the institutions did include training in the use of arms in their curriculum. Surely, any government worth the name has the right and the responsibility to check such a possibility? No resistance to it can be considered reasonable and in the national interest.
Secondly, if the children of these madaris have to be brought into the educational mainstream for the sake of their own future, the country's educational boards and the universities have to be given a say in their syllabi. Arrogant rejection of this does not serve the children's own interests.
Joint electorate was another issue for an official think-tank. The religious parties have argued that it negates the two-nation theory. Will the rest of the people of this country agree that Pakistan is still made up of two nations, one Muslim, the other non-Muslim? Secondly, were we really negating that theory all the time we were practising joint electorate, right until the time of Gen Ziaul Haq? Was the ideology therefore faring any worse then than it is doing now? Thirdly, what of Quaid-i-Azam's assertion at Pakistan's birth that from that point on Hindus and Muslims had ceased to be those in the political sense? Should the people accept that these parties are better exponents of the country's ideology and ethos than the Father of the Nation was? An honest answer to such questions would also have resolved the electorate debate.
Thirdly, there is the hostility to NGOs. Bashing them has been a favourite pastime all round. But to no one have they been more of a red rag than the clerical ranks. The latter feel threatened by any challenge from any side to the social orthodoxies. Understandably so, since they thrive on these.
The anti-NGO sentiment, more specifically, is often triggered by the NGO's efforts to press for the observance of human rights and women rights standards, and to urge the country's adherence to its international commitments. When this leads to criticism of government's policies, such as in Nawaz Sharif's time against his 15th Constitutional Amendment, it raises the gorge of the likes of Pir Binyamin Rizvi and those behind him. When it works towards greater awareness among women and towards an end to customs that victimize them, or when it opposes tendencies that promote intolerance and bigotry, or when it criticizes militancy and jingoism, it is the orthodoxy that feels its ramparts under assault.
The campaigning for women's rights has particularly been a bugbear of religious bodies. The Milli Yekjehti Council was sharply critical the other day of the proposed enhancement of women's representation in the local bodies. This would create a 'women-dominated culture', it declared in all seriousness. In other words, it was altogether apt that there was almost total masculine culture created by up to 100 per cent representation for men alone; on the other hand, a mere 50 per cent representation for women now would create a 'domination' by the latter - an anathema to be rejected completely and with contempt.
A highly regarded NGO, Shirkat Gah, was picked out the other day for special castigation by the Jamaat-i-Islami chief. It was charged with being anti-Islam because it had put out a document that carried critical references to the Hudood Ordinances and the Federal Shariat Council. It so happened that that was a consensus document flowing from Pakistan's national commitments made at the Beijing world conference on women, and it was part of the official blueprint for a national plan of action.
NGOs have even been berated for their opposition to child labour. According to the Islamists, the opposition is a recipe for promoting poverty, unemployment, immorality and idleness among children, and preventing their acquiring working skills. Immaterial to them are the experience of other countries like Japan, China and South Korea (not to speak of the 18th and 19th century Europe) whose exertions to heave themselves out of backwardness included their withdrawing their children from workplaces and putting them into schools and vocational centres.
The recent women's delegation to India became a merry punching bag for people of all this category. It happened to combine many of their pet aversions. It was women's delegation. It made expressions and overtures of peace and goodwill to Indians. It was unapproving of jihadi activity as well as being critical of India's human rights violations in occupied Kashmir. And it was led by Asma Jahangir. They were rarely served a headier mix. They proceeded, therefore, to amply throw up on the pages of the Urdu press, day after day.
How far this bout of the onslaught goes remains to be seen. That will in part depend on the pressure the joint front feels it will be able to exert, which in turn will be determined by the weakness the government displays. For now the mullah power, such as it is, must feel elated by the success it perceives it has already had.
Unfortunately, elected governments have been no less gutless in facing up to the mullahs' challenge. They could never bring themselves round to trumping the religious card. There are no signs they will be bolder when they come back next. The common people, who have so far never voted for these so-called religious parties, may therefore continue to be finessed as these parties and the governments cut their deals. If there is hope in the future, it is only to the extent that the people find ways, and develop forums, to assert their will even outside of elections.
ECO progress and prospects
THE transport and communications ministers of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan, accompanied by a battery of experts, met in Islamabad at a five-day (April 24-28) ministerial conference, the third in a series.
They got some useful work done as they signed the transit transport framework agreement to lay a network of rail and road system linking their capitals. A detailed map of the proposed rail-and-road system has, therefore, been published and will be made available to the tourists.
In this respect, the Almaty Outline Plan has made an important contribution since it has marked out specific rail-cum- road network linking the member states. It follows the guidelines set forth by the 1997 Ashgabad Declaration that there should be a comprehensive infrastructure of transport and communications in the region to facilitate trade and commerce and cross-border traffic. For that the participants rightly decided to simplify the issuance of visas to the businessmen and the documentation procedure. The cost of transportation would be low and the goods would be delivered within a guaranteed timeframe.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf informed the participants in the conference about his plan to build a system of high-speed expressways across the length of the country and dualization of inter-provincial and inter-city links. His offer of the facilities of the ports of Karachi and Gawadar to the landlocked Central Asian states would be of particular interest to them since these are the nearest ports for them as well as for Russia. It all sounds so good but as long as there is turmoil in Afghanistan, the member countries would be forced to take a detour via Iran and China.
While it is the feuding Afghans who are to blame for the impasse, the ECO must also accept the responsibility for it. It has excluded the Taliban who control 80 to 90 per cent of the Afghan territory, and instead, has retained the presence of the ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani in the organization. Clearly, the ECO decision to keep the Taliban out because of its fundamentalist label is actuated by the cold war mindset. That way the ECO, a non-political organization, whose object is to promote trade and economic cooperation within the region, has arrogated to itself a political role.
If the Taliban government were seated in the ECO council, it would have to learn to give and take while other member countries would have an opportunity to engage with Kabul in a constructive way. Afghanistan should know that it is in dire need of food, medicine and relief and rehabilitation assistance, some of which can be had from its immediate neighbours. The mullahs in Kabul had demonstrated to the world their ability to fulfil their international obligations by tactfully securing the release of the hijacked Indian airliner stranded at Kandahar. The Central Asian republics, which have concerted measures with Russia to combat terrorism in Afghanistan, have exaggerated the threat. They are largely responsible themselves for the situation since they helped the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan for ten years.
If only the ECO members could put politics behind them and pursue their common economic agenda, they would again enormously from multilateral cooperation. Afghanistan has a lot to offer. It can provide the quickest transit route for export goods to and from Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Karachi is the natural entrepot of Central Asia, Azerbaijan and Russia. The distance between Dushanbe and Karachi is 2,720 kilometres, between Dushanbe and Bandar Abbas 3,440 kilometres and between Dushanbe and Odessa (Black Sea) 3,400 kilometres, while the distance between Dushanbe and Vladivostok on the Pacific coast is 9,500 kilometres.
There are two roads, one linking Pakistan to Uzbekistan - that is Peshawar-Jalalabad-Kunduz-Hairatan-Termez which is 500 miles long - and the other Chaman-Kandahar-Herat-Turghundi- Kushka road, 513 miles long, that goes to Turkmenistan. In addition, there are two roads between Quetta and Azerbaijan and between Quetta and Turkmenistan. They both run through Iran. In 1991, Pakistan and Iran agreed to build rail and road links between them. They should establish rail link between Zahedan and Kerman. Iran built a railway line between Mashhad and Sarakhs in 1996. In the same way, Pakistan and Afghanistan should connect Chaman, Kandahar and Kabul by rail link which could be extended to Ashgabad in Turkmenistan.
If implemented, Pakistan's proposal at the conference to include the transportation of oil and gas from the energy-rich states to energy-starved countries will give an impetus to intra- regional trade which is a mere six per cent of the ECO's world trade. It amounts to $4.5 billion as against $68 billion annually. The present volume can be raised to 10 per cent within three years.
Turkmenistan has 82 billion cubic metres of gas reserves. It concluded an agreement with the Taliban and Pakistan in 1999 to lay an 800-mile 48-diameter gas pipeline connecting the Daulatabad gas field in southern Turkmenistan and Multan in Pakistan. A consortium consisting of Hyundai, Delta and a few others, known as Centgas had agreed to invest $ 2 billion in the project but the US company UNOCOL which owned 46 per cent shares left the consortium on the ground that conditions were unstable, so it would not invest. Thereupon an Argentine company, Bridas, offered to provide the funds. The UNOCOL then revised its decision and agreed to invest but the project has not been taken up for implementation yet. In this case, the US role has been negative and obstructionist. The Taliban exercise effective control over the part of the Afghan territory through which the gas pipeline would run.
On the other hand, Iran and Pakistan signed an agreement in 1994 for the installation of a 1100-mile-long gas pipeline between southern Iran and Gadani near Karachi. It will be a joint enterprise to be launched by the National Iranian oil and Gas Company and the Sui Southern Gas Company and provide liquefied gas to Pakistan. The project was to be completed in three years. It has been six years now but it still remains on paper. If such useful projects are put into cold storage, how can the targets set by the ECO be achieved?
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Arabs
ONCE the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, until quite recently had almost faded from view. Shortly after his death in 1980, he was already being attacked for his "blindness" about the Soviet gulags, and even his humanistic existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism, and sheer energetic reach.
Sartre's whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux philosophers whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and post-modernists who with few exceptions had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism of the sort that excoriated Sartre's populism and his heroic public politics.
The immense sprawl of Sartre's work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it brought him readers, so that from being the most quoted of the French mantres penseurs, he became the least read and the least analyzed, all in the space of about twenty years. Forgotten were his courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam, his work on behalf of immigrants, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction. He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.
Then, as with many things French, the fashion began to change back, or so it seemed at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and once again he has (perhaps only momentarily) become the subject of talk, if not exactly of study or reflection. I must say that for my generation he has always seemed one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts seemed at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet never did one feel that he was infallible or prophetic.
On the contrary, one admired Sartre for the efforts he made to understand situations and when necessary to supply solidarity to political causes, and never to be condescending or evasive. He could be wrong perhaps, was frequently vulnerable to error and overstatement, but he was always larger-than-life, and for a reader such as myself, I found nearly everything he wrote interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose), and its generosity of spirit. Except in one obviously special instance, which I'd like to describe here. What encourages me to do so are two fascinating if dispiriting articles about his visit to Egypt in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly (one was a review of Bernard Henry Levy's recent book on Sartre; the other a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi's account of Sartre's visit). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life, but it may be worth recalling both for its ironies and its poignancy.
It was the first part of January 1979, and I was at home in New York preparing for one of my classes. The doorbell announced the delivery of a telegram and as I tore it open I noticed appreciatively that it was from Paris. "You are invited by Les Temps Modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on March 13 and 14 this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre."
At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort: no one like me would be likely to receive so remarkable a missive from such legendary figures.It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends that the telegram was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to signify my unconditional acceptance (this after also learning that "les modalitis," the French euphemism for travel expenses, were to be borne by Les Temps Modernes, the celebrated journal established by Sartre after the war). A few weeks later I was off to Paris.
When I arrived I found a short mysterious letter from Sartre and de Beauvoir awaiting me at the modest hotel that I had booked in the Latin Quarter. "For security reasons," ran the message, "the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault." I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault's spacious apartment to find a number of people - minus Sartre himself - already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious "security reasons" that had forced a change in venue, though as a result a conspiratorial air hung quite unnecessarily over our proceedings. De Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her upcoming trip to Tehran with Kate Millett where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronizingly silly, and although I was eager to hear what de Beauvoir had to say, I also realized that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later and was never seen again.
Foucault was there, but he very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to say about the seminar's subject, and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliotheque Nationale. I was pleased that my book Beginnings was readily visible in one of his bookshelves, all of which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of books, papers, journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn't until much later that I got some idea why Foucault had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics.
In their biographies of him, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had hastily gotten out in unusual circumstances shortly after the June War. Foucault had said then that the reason he left voluntarily had been his horror at the "anti-Semitic" anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early '80s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar Foucault told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corierre della sera. "Very exciting, very strange, crazy," I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. Finally, in the late '80s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had clashed fatally because of their differences over Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians. No wonder then he hadn't wanted to discuss the Middle East with me or anyone else there!
A few Palestinians and Israeli Jews were there, among whom I recognized only Ibrahim Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a teacher at Bir Zeit, and Yehoshofat Harkabi, the leading Israeli expert on "the Arab mind", a former chief of Israeli military intelligence fired by Golda Meir for mistakenly putting the army on alert. Three years earlier, I had spent a year with him at the Stanford Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where we were both Fellows, but we did not have much of a relationship there at all. It was always polite but uncordial. In Paris, he seemed in the process of changing his position to become Israel's leading establishment dove, a man who was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinian state, which he considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel's point of view.
The other participants were mostly Israeli or French Jews. They ran the gamut from very religious to very secular, although all were pro-Zionist in one way or another. One of them, Eli Ben Gal, seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were later to be told that he had been Sartre's guide on a recent trip to Israel. But when the great man finally appeared well past the appointed time, I was shocked at how old and frail he seemed.
I recall rather needlessly and idiotically introducing Foucault to him (as if they didn't already know each other extremely well), and I also recall how clear it seemed to me from the beginning that Sartre was constantly surrounded, supported, prompted by a small retinue of people on whom he totally depended and for whom he was the main business of their lives. One was his adopted daughter whom, I later learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gaiche Proleterienne, who had now become a deeply religious and, I supposed, orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal's assistants who hovered around, that he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Levy, and was the brother of Adel Bahgat, one of the so-called Mahmoud Hussein pair.
There seemed to be nothing Egyptian about Victor; he came across as a Left Bank Parisian intellectual, part-thinker, part-hustler. Third was Helene von Bulow, a trilingual woman who worked at the journal and translated everything for Sartre. I was a little surprised and disappointed to realize that despite the fact that he had spent time in Germany, had written not only on Heidegger, but also on Faulkner and Dos Passos, Sartre knew neither German nor English.
Except for one Palestinian from Vienna who could only speak in either Arabic or German, our discussion was in English. How much of what transpired Sartre actually comprehended I shall never know, but it was profoundly disconcerting that he remained totally silent for the entire first day's proceedings. Michel Contat, Sartre's bibliographer was also there, but did not participate.
