| 24 May 2000 | Wednesday | 19 Safar 1421 |
Tiger, tiger!
A new kind of thriller
Anti-corruption treaty in limbo
JUDGES are human, like the rest of us. They take on the same tints and hues, the same traits and characteristics, as the society in which they live. There is much talk of their independence. This, at best, can only mean their formal independence of the other organs of the state. We cannot expect them to be independent of societal values, of prejudices and predilections, of temptations and beliefs.
Their professional skills are supposed to make them better evaluators of evidence and better interpreters of the law. But there is scarcely a case that comes before a judge when he could not, with equal facility, give a judgment either way and adduce strong reasons for doing so. In a sense, therefore, it is not fair to ask a handful of men to be the final arbiters on complex and weighty political issues where their expertise may be no greater than anybody else's.
It is in this light that the latest Supreme Court verdict needs to be seen. A year from now, the present Chief Justice may well be judged as harshly as Justice Munir. But history has the advantage of hindsight and its assessments are not always the fairest. The only fair assessment is one given within the context of the conditions at a given time.
Pragmatism is often considered a bad word, but it is the way in which the world is run. Quite obviously, the Supreme Court must have felt that, in the obtaining circumstances, the least damage and disruption would be caused if a pragmatic course was adopted. Imagine the convulsions that would have engulfed the country if the existing order had been declared illegal. It should then logically follow that Nawaz Sharif and the assemblies should be reinstated while Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his colleagues should be charged with high treason. The very thought is mind-boggling and certainly would not have served any national purpose. The army, having the power of the gun, would be unlikely to bow before this and would have been pushed to the wall. One inevitable consequence would have been the total destruction of the judiciary. This is not to say that the army would have been right in reacting thus - only that it would have had little choice.
There may be good reason to believe that the Supreme Court has given too much leeway to the military regime. But that depends on how one interprets the judgment. Surely it would be most unwise for the military rulers to believe that they now have a blank cheque to do as they please. Nawaz Sharif misinterpreted his so-called heavy mandate in this way with disastrous results.
The need for moderation and good sense and a willingness to change has been made all the greater and more urgent by the Supreme Court verdict. For one thing, this military regime now has the opportunity to set in motion the process of institution-building without batteries of lawyers challenging every action and decision of the present government.
Lasting institutions are those which are built on the widest possible consensus. No panacea lies in the hands of the army alone. That is why it is now incumbent on all relevant sectors of society to lay aside narrow self-interests and work together in reconstructing a durable national economic and democratic edifice.
In an earlier article, this writer had argued in favour of a time-bound cooperative partnership between the military and untainted politicians so that the return to democracy could be facilitated and the image of the country abroad be improved. The Supreme Court judgment strengthens, not weakens, this case. Indeed, it opens the way for co-operation over a wider range of objectives that are there for all to see.
Participants in the field of governance include various state organs like the armed forces, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the politicians. They also include the private sector and civil society. Institution- building is the crying need of the hour in every area of national life. It can only be done if the relevant actors in each area work in a spirit of partnership.
At this critical juncture, the nation needs consensus, not confrontation between the various segments of society or different organs of the state. As the ruling institution of the moment, it is for the military to start the process of consensus-building in relation to the task of national renewal and re-building. It would then be the bounden duty of all others to facilitate the process.
Quite obviously, broadening the base of government is the first step. Both the army and the 'good' politicians have to get off their high horses for, neither has cut a particularly fine figure in the saddle. If technocrats are needed to lend the necessary expertise to the task at hand, let it be sought and given.
If it is interpreted in its proper light, the latest Supreme Court judgment might well prove to be a vital catalyst and escape the condemnation of history.
Tiger, tiger!
SO far as strength, ferocity and animal cunning go, what is the principal difference between a lion and a tiger? The lion has always been known as King of the Jungle, a title that has never been disputed by the tiger. Then why do countries like Pakistan want to become tiger and not lion in progress and development? What I like about General Pervez Musharraf is that he hasn't expressed the ambition to make Pakistan the Tiger of Asia. Maybe it's because he knows he is already riding a tiger!
Everyone who has mattered in the destiny of Pakistan during the last few years boasted of making this country an Asian Tiger. Of course former PM Nawaz Sharif saw this dream day and night without doing anything about it. Even the normally staid President Farooq Leghari once talked about converting Pakistan into a tiger, although I'm sure he had never seen one from close quarters. Neither had Mian Sahib for that matter, but I suppose that is immaterial.
This "close quarters" thing takes me back 53 years. Just before partition I was serving in the Junagadh State Railway. Once we had a derailment right in the heart of the Gir forest, the only home in India of the lion. So we took a relief train there. At night the lions came out, and there we were in a carriage with barred windows and a giant of a lion peeping at us from a few feet away. When it roared any of us cold have died of fright and resultant heart failure.
That is the only occasion I know of where men were in a cage and a lion was roaming free outside, probably musing contemptuously on their puny effort to invade its domain. I admit that in this case it was not a tiger (which is the subject of this piece) but so what? As the British colonel said on sanctioning leave for Natha Singh when it was Prem Singh who had applied for it, "What's the difference? Natha Singh, Prem Singh, comes to the same thing."
Trying to find an answer to my own question, I guess the tiger is preferred in Pakistan so that there is no mix-up with well-know politicians claiming to be lions in their parts of the country. Mr Ghulam Mustafa Khar revelled for long in his title "Lion of Punjab"" without having displayed his claws even once, while Sardar Abdul Qayyum proudly accepted the honorific "Lion of Azad Kashmir" at a public meeting some years ago.
I must say Sardar Sahib was realistic enough not to crib at the limitation without which he could have been confused with Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, although the latter being dead he could have picked up the title. But he chose to be modest. He continues to roar ineffectually at the Indian occupation of the valley, or whenever anyone in AK questions his claim to having fired the first shot in the Poonch revolt against the Dogra regime in 1947.
In Sindh every chief minister has been a lion but has not been able to make a mark as such in the provincial jungle because of the permanent presence of the MQM as lion-tamer. It was given only to the late (unlamented) Jam Sadiq Ali to play the role with any degree of effectiveness, and that was because he had succeeded in taming the lion-tamers. The other two provinces, Balochistan and the Frontier, have singularly failed to produce any lion so far, in fact not even a tiger. Maybe that is why they are called backward.
But I digress. I was talking of Asian countries wanting to become tigers in their part of the world. What surprises me is that no country in Africa, the home of lions and tigers, as well as elephants and rhinoceroses and hippos - not to speak of ostriches - desires to change itself into any of these wild beasts. Is it because some of them are already wild and are killing their own people as calmly as we kill flies?
What I would like to know from leaders who want Pakistan to become an Asian Tiger is this: which attribute of that ferocious animal do they think we need for this country? Is it the tiger's sleek looks or its predatory nature or its dart-like speed or its unsparing cruelty? And when they say tiger, do they mean the beast in the jungle or the one tamed to do tricks in a circus or the one stuffed by taxidermists and available as an item of decoration? But I don't think these leaders will be inclined to answer my questions.
By temperament I am unambitious to a fault. Instead of hankering after unattainable targets I am content with what I have. I don't want all Pakistanis to be like me. They must learn to strive for greater heights. For instance, there are a number of spheres of national activity in which we are already tiger, or near-tiger, but we tend to overlook them, ignore them, forget them, rather than take pride in them.
Some time ago we were branded as the second dirtiest people in the world. I wonder if that qualifies us to call ourselves tiger in that respect, or do we fall a little lower in the feline hierarchy because of being second - at the level of, say, a leopard? We must try to improve our rating.
Then, a European organization called Transparency Something awarded us the honour of being Number Two among the most corrupt people in the world. It is an achievement to reach even that rung on that sleazy ladder, but again we should make a determined effort to reach the top rung even if we have to bribe someone to get there.
Recently we have been emulating some of the African countries whose tribes endeavour to decimate other tribes. Only, instead of killing tribes we think we can do away with members of religious sects other than our own, and we are going at it with the zeal of crusaders. In fact, some of us think this is the only jehad we are good at. Here too, at whatever level of pride of performance we may be, we can aim still higher. Remember the stirring poem in our school days, "Excelsior!"
The point is that instead of putting all our energies into becoming an Asian Tiger in respect of an ideal which no leader has so far been able to define why not improve our performance in things which we are really good at and in which, with a little push (or pull, or whatever), we can start looking like a tiger? Isn't this what is called sustainable development.
A new kind of thriller
DURING the Oscar ceremonies last March only one award (Best Documentary) was given to a 1999 film that had neither been released, nor seen by anyone outside the academy (for some of whose members special screenings of the film had, I gather, been hastily improvised). To say the least, this was an unusual set of circumstances for so important an award.
At last, though, One Day in September was released on May 19. Directed by Kevin Mac Donald and produced by John Battsek and Arthur Cohn it is a 92 minute account of what is supposed to have occurred when a group of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games was held hostage by eight Palestinians who on September 5, 1972 seized the unsuspecting men at 4:40 am, and held them for 21 hours.
The end of the ordeal came at Munich airport when five German snipers opened fire on hostages and captors, thereby instigating an appalling bloodbath that drew in a considerable number of basically untrained and undisciplined German police. Eleven Israelis were killed, as were five Palestinians (three were seriously wounded but survived and later escaped) and one German.
I don't imagine that there is a Palestinian who does not think that the Munich adventure was a total disaster for the cause and the people, who remain stateless and either under Israeli occupation or as refugees, 28 years after the Munich Olympics, 52 years after most of them were driven out - indeed, ethnically cleansed - by Zionist forces.
Over 400 villages were destroyed in 1947-48, uncounted numbers of innocents either massacred or forcibly evicted, and an entire society effectively destroyed in order that Israel could come into existence. That is the tragic nub of the Middle East conflict, enacted as I write these lines on a daily basis in West Bank and Gaza towns and villages, as youngsters battle Israeli settlers and soldiers who represent a state still in the process of demolishing homes, holding a large number of prisoners, taking more land, all the while remaining adamant in its official unwillingness to acknowledge any responsibility for what was and is being done to the Palestinian people.
One of the shortcomings of the Oslo accords is that, thanks to the servile acquiescence of Yasir Arafat, the damages of thirty-plus years of Israeli occupation of the rest of historical Palestine that began in 1967, are casually written off without so much as a word about reparations which by comparison with Iraq's relatively short, but no less illegal occupation of Kuwait, are still being extracted from Saddam Hussein's dreadful regime and his long-suffering people.
There was an unacceptable loss of life, the goal of getting 200 political prisoners released from Israel (which was their declared aim from beginning to end) was not achieved, and ever since, thanks as much to this one incident as to all the others combined, it permanently affixed the label "terrorist" so implacably to "Palestinian" as to displace and even to efface the tragedy of Palestine almost completely.
But this latter result is largely due to the unrelenting mills of political propaganda, and this is where One Day in September, in its crudely deliberate manner ("style" being too strong a word here), comes in. To make of the awful Munich episode "a new kind of thriller" is in the first instance to eliminate the Palestinian narrative that antecedes and in some way illuminates if not the idiocy of the outrage but the desperation and horror that gave it inception and nourishment.
Nowhere in the film is there focused attention paid to Israel's antecedent role, its daily, hourly, minute by minute persecution, in the maiming, bombing, dispossessing, humiliating of Palestinians from top to bottom, right across the board, from eviction, to wiping out of every possible trace of Palestinian life , to brazen denial of same, from the beginning to the end of the last fifty two years.
Let's hear a little more from Macdonald's production notes, which seem tirelessly to extoll the film's total, complete, unqualified originality: "What I wanted to do with One Day in September," he rattles on yet again , " was to make a documentary different than anything I had seen before: a documentary thriller, one that would work as a film at the cinema. I wanted it to have a strong narrative grip and to pull the emotions of the audience, while at the same time investigating and revealing the extraordinary facts behind this event in a detailed way."
Well, it doesn't work as a film in any locale, unless one's standards are so low as to allow that a transparent, and even caricatural quasi-staccato sequence that basically tells a well-known, thoroughly familiar story pieced together out of old film clips, predictable interviews, and gross misrepresentations that show Palestinians to be irreducibly terrorist (though clever, and a bit manipulative), Israelis brave, serious, courageous, and long-suffering, Germans (shades of Colonel Klink in TV's Hogan's Heroes) incompetent, lying, bungling, bloody-minded fools is "original" filmmaking.
Granted that we mustn't forget all that, but what "original" point is being made by mining this already ideologically over-loaded film with subliminal cues planted to elicit western guilt for Jewish suffering, at the same time condoning and even justifying Israel's horrendous practices? This at a time when an on-going conflict, tragically unresolved between two peoples (despite what Macdonald, in an unusually grotesque image calls "the monumental peace process") is weighted preponderantly in favour of one of them, while the other enjoys no access to the mass media, no ready narrative of persecution and dispossession, no admissible and endlessly re-useable symbol for political exploitation. Once the film is finally available to viewers the distinctly unpleasant experience of viewing it will pretty much dissipate any claim about the absence of a political agenda.
Consider, for instance, that no Arab voice at all, except the unfortunate Mr. Al Gamshey's and later that of an unidentified Libyan, is ever heard. Not a single Arab name is cited in the film's credits. No music, no children, no elderly women, no mutilated bodies. Above all, no Palestinian witnesses, say, to the Deir Yassin massacre, or Qalqilya, or Kufr Kassem, or Sabra and Shatila, or the 1948 terror evictions of Palestinians from towns like Lydda and Ramleh (the latter two actions commanded by the late Yitzhak Rabin). Macdonald's keen historical sense seems to have whisked away any memory of the fact that Zionist militants introduced terrorism into the Middle East in the 1920s (see in this regard David Hirst's classic book, The Gun and the Olive Branch).
Israel has always held Palestinians prisoner without trial, with torture, without real recourse. For a period the Emergency Defence Regulations first used by the British Mandatory authorities (until 1948) were adopted without change. Then after 1967 a more complicated set of occupier's laws, as the Palestinian jurist Raja Shehadeh calls them, were implemented. Until today hundreds of Palestinians are held prisoner by Israel on charges equating resistance to Israeli occupation with terrorism. Dozens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Palestinians have passed through Israeli jails; many of these men and women have been held so as to pry information out of them, to force them to work as collaborators and informers, to get their families to promise things that make military occupation easier for Israel.
In addition, since 1982 Israel has maintained a prison, Khiam, in the zone it occupies illegally in south Lebanon for the express purpose of detaining Lebanese citizens who legitimately fight against the occupation of their land. Finally, the Israeli government has openly admitted that it has abducted many Lebanese citizens (including Shaikh Obaid of Hizballah) and keeps them as civilian hostages pending the return of one or two Israeli prisoners held in Lebanon. All this is herded under the rubric of fighting and refusing to negotiate with "terrorism."
Now without in any way denying the fact that various bombing incidents against Israelis have taken place and roundly condemned by everyone, it is also true that there is no comparable set of systematic (as opposed to sporadic) Palestinian practices against Israelis, and I haven't in this context even mentioned the bombing by Israel of refugee camps, hospitals, schools and the like, the wanton killing of prisoners of war, the destruction of homes, olive trees, fertile farm land, and beduin tents.
Nor have I alluded to the veritable orgy of assassinations, state terrorism by any other name, that Israel has indulged in before, since, and after Munich, e.g., the Beirut killing of three PLO leaders in their beds in 1973, the murder of at least a dozen other Palestinian personalities, plus numerous booby-entrapments, point-blank shootings, car-bombings, one of the most horrendous being the Beirut assassination of Ghassan Kanafani, an engaged Popular Front partisan who was also one of the most gifted writers in the Arab world. This last outrage occurred before, not as a result of, Munich.
No, One Day in September is a tired, cliche-ridden tissue of bad cinema, bad politics, bad thinking. As history it has no status at all. It's as if nothing happened before or after 1972, just those events as constructed by Kevin Macdonald and company. Even the film's musical soundtrack made up of "period" music from Led Zeppelin to Philip Glass trivializes what we see on the screen: it struck me as somehow moronic and insouciant at the same time, unrelievedly inappropriate and jarring from start to finish. In short, this is a film that in constructing a simplified, ideological narrative in the best (or worst) CNN style of "you-are-there" reporting condemns the viewer to reliving the experience without learning anything new or understanding anything better. -Copyright Edward W. Said
Anti-corruption treaty in limbo
NEARLY one year after it came into force, the Convention on Combating Bribery has yet to be fully implemented by the member governments of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), widely known as the rich nations' club.
The treaty, signed in Feb 1999, criminalizes the offer, promise or delivery of a bribe to foreign public officials in order to obtain or retain international business deals.
But, according to the OECD secretary-general Donald J. Johnston, every year about 100 billion US dollars - nearly twice the amount the rich nations give to developing lands as official development assistance - are being paid out in bribes world-wide. "It is the large exporting companies, many of which have headquarters in OECD countries, that supply most of the world's bribes affecting trade," writes Johnston in the latest issue of the organisation's quarterly journal, 'OECD Observer'. "And that may be just the tip of the iceberg."
Against this backdrop, the OECD secretary-general considers the implementation of the Convention as vital.
"But ... governments cannot stop there. They must see to it that their legislation is effective too. And they must make sure that bribes can no longer be treated as deductible business expenses," writes Johnston.
The OECD brings together 29 countries sharing the principles of the market economy, pluralist democracy and respect for human rights. The original 20 members of the OECD are located in Western countries of Europe and North America.
Next came Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Finland. More recently, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea have joined.
Also writing in the latest issue of the 'OECD Observer', Frederic Wehrle from the organisation's Financial, Fiscal and Enterprise Affairs Directorate (DAF) notes: "Of the 34 signatories, which are the world's biggest exporters, 20 or so - including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland and the United States - have already amended their laws to accommodate the obligations laid down by the Convention."
Elsewhere the parliamentary machine has been set in motion.
"The process may be lengthy, either because parliamentary agendas are full, as has been the case in countries such as France, or because domestic elections have made it necessary to postpone or restart debate on the bill at a later time, as has been the case in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Chile and Turkey," writes Wehrle.
The delay in some countries has also been caused because different bodies have to be consulted before the text can be put before parliament, he adds.
Even so, it is expected that by the end of 2000, or earlier, all the countries that signed the Convention in December 1997 will have amended their legislation.
Those which fail to do so, or whose legislation does not meet the Convention's criteria, will come under pressure from their peers to put their house in order, notes Wehrle.
"In fact, the consequences of doing nothing could be quite damaging for credibility and business. Countries that appear reluctant to punish bribery of public officials might quite simply start losing markets, not least because companies increasingly seek to do business where bribes are not part of the deal," warns the OECD official.
A key element in an effective anti-corruption campaign is the sharing of information and experience on initiatives taken by countries, international organisations and civil society, he adds.
With this in mind, the OECD's Anti-Corruption Unit has launched an extensive information centre on the web that includes regional networks.
Participating countries and international organisations continuously supply the regional webs with relevant information on country-specific anti-corruption initiatives, survey results, research reports and other relevant anti-corruption information, including technical assistance programmes.
Three regional webs have so far been launched.
The first one, set up in October 1998, is called the Anti- Corruption Network for Transition Economies, and is targeted at countries from central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
All parties interested in reducing public sector corruption in the region - government, businesses, civil society, private individuals - can share action-oriented data through this network.
The second one is for the Asia-Pacific region. It includes a regular forum on anti-corruption activities under the joint auspices of the Asian Development Bank and the OECD.
The third one is for south-eastern Europe and is part of the Stability Pact Anti-Corruption Initiative for south-eastern Europe, which it helps to monitor.
These three regional webs are part of one of the largest information centres on corruption and bribery on the web.
Called the Anti-Corruption Ring Online or AnCorR Web, it is a repository of more than 3,000 references to books, journals, papers and other articles, as well as downloadable or on-line anti-corruption documentation, such as laws, international conventions, anti-corruption strategies and other anti-corruption information.
Anti-corruption practitioners and individuals need to have concrete information in order to design and implement anti- corruption activities, and AnCorR provides the qualitative and quantitative knowledge that is required to assess all aspects of corruption.
It also helps donors to identify the current situation in most regions of the world and to provide them with a real-time working tool to co-ordinate their assistance programmes.
By providing a forum for policy dialogue as well as offering direct access to the regional initiatives, the AnCorR web enables experts and the public to keep track of the fight against corruption around the world.
AnCorR is supported by a large number of partnerships, including with the American University of Paris, Basle University's Law School, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD (BIAC), the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Sorbonne, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC), the World Bank and the Stability Pact.
Meanwhile, the British government is to announce new laws aimed at cracking down on companies paying sweeteners to win lucrative foreign contracts after strong international pressure forced a change of heart in London.
Bribing corrupt foreign officials is to be made a criminal offence in a move designed to bring Britain into line with other leading industrialised nations. The UK is the only country out of 20 which have ratified the OECD's anti-bribery convention not to have adapted its domestic legislation, repeatedly arguing that existing legislation is tough enough to comply. But after lobbying from fellow cabinet ministers and foreign governments the British home secretary, Jack Straw, has accepted that a new statute is required.
The proposed change in the law - which goes against the advice of civil servants - will make it an offence for a British citizen to offer, promise or give a bribe to a foreign public official to obtain or retain international business deals, irrespective of where the offence is committed.
Other OECD members have accused Britain of shielding corrupt firms from prosecution by repeatedly failing to acknowledged that existing legislation is inadequate. The US administration, in particular, has been dismayed by the UK government's recalcitrance.Until now, the government has been arguing that existing laws, based on the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906, are sufficient, but there has never been a successful prosecution under that piece of legislation.
Threatened with publication of a highly critical report by an OECD peer review group at June's ministerial meeting, Clare Short, the British international development secretary, and Stephen Byers, the UK's trade and industry secretary, have been pressing Mr Straw to ignore his officials and take urgent action to ensure Britain abides by the convention.
Mr Straw's decision will also tidy up other aspects of the laws on corruption, including payments to MPs.-Dawn/Inter Press-Guardian Service
