THE NWFP government has called for convening a meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI), ahead of the NFC session, so that all issues outstanding between the federation and NWFP could be sorted out prior to the finalisation of the NFC Award. The NWFP information minister, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, has said at a media briefing in Peshawar that if the CCI meeting is not held, the provincial government might feel constrained to review its decision to attend the NFC meeting. The remarks are clearly reflective of the acute financial crunch the insurgency-hit province is today faced with. The major problematic areas listed by Mian Iftikhar include payment of net profits on hydropower generation, Abiyana, the funds required for reconstruction of the infrastructure destroyed or damaged in the war on terror, and preparing a long-term strategy for the rehabilitation of IDPs with the funds received from the Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP). Almost all sectors of the provincial economy, including education, health, tourism, industry and trade, have been badly affected. According to him, other provinces have collected billions of rupees as water tax since the signing of the 1991 Water Accord, which has helped them augment their revenues, while the NWFP government has Rs 82 billion outstanding against other provinces. His hint at a possible boycott of the forthcoming NFC session needs to be taken seriously, as a boycott can cause further delay in the announcement of the Award, which is a mandatory constitutional requirement. The issues identified by Mian Iftikhar, indeed, need to be sorted out at a CCI meeting before the finalisation of the Award. This will help develop a consensus on the province’s financial needs, as it has had to bear the brunt of the war on terror.
The destruction of the infrastructure caused by the airstrikes and artillery fire against the terrorists has indeed been appalling. Secondly, the rehabilitation of millions of IDPs, and reconstruction of destroyed or damaged infrastructure will require massive amounts of funds, which should be provided to the province as a special allocation out the FoDP funds. Thirdly, different royalties, the federating units owe to NWFP, should be paid to enable the province to meet its financial needs. Fourthly, payment of the backlog of Rs 82 billion, which the provinces owe to NWFP, should be promptly made to enable the cash-strapped government to provide healthcare and educational facilities, particularly at a time when the federal government, as Mian Iftikhar has put it, is not extending any support to the provincial government. A word on NFC will help put things in proper perspective. In principle, the 1997 Award had prescribed that 63 percent of the pooled taxes would go to the federal government, with 37 percent distributed among the provinces. This had marked a major shift from the 20 percent Federal and 80 percent provincial share under the 1991 Award. However, the inclusion of custom duties that had previously been 100 percent Federal, required an increase in the Federal share. The taxes included in the pool are: income tax, general sales tax, wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, and custom duties. In the 1991 Award, customs duties had gone exclusively to the Federal government. Viewed in the wider national perspective, successive governments have unfortunately failed to respond to the smaller provinces’ demand for equitable distribution of resources, which has tended to breed resentment. Punjab being the largest population province, and hence the main beneficiary of the existing NFC formula, is said to be resisting other provinces’ call for application of the multiple criteria.
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AFTER 41 years of silence, the American officer responsible for the massacre of 500 men, women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai has finally offered an apology. Lt. William Calley, who led his unit in one of the most infamous of war crimes, told a meeting in Columbus, Georgia, that he was deeply sorry for what had happened but insisted he was only following orders. This excuse, trotted out by Nazi war criminals before him, in no way exonerates Calley and members of the C-Charlie company he commanded from this dreadful deed. But it does reopen the question of whether the orders given Calley by his commanders for this “search and destroy” mission did include an instruction to massacre the luckless inhabitants of My Lai and torch their village. Calley first made these claims in his four-month military trial in 1971, at the end of which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence was later reduced by President Nixon to just three years house arrest. Amid the outrage at this change there was widespread suspicion that Calley had indeed been the scapegoat for senior commanders who had fully intended this young officer to make an example of a village that US intelligence knew to be supporting the Viet Cong fighters.
The same excuse, that they were acting under orders, was trotted out by the US military personnel accused of perpetrating the disgusting torture and humiliation of Abu Ghraib detainees. Eleven soldiers were convicted and the prison commander was demoted but the allegations that this behavior had been ordered by senior officers were never properly tested. What is clear, however, that the Bush White House played word games with the legal concept of torture to allow the CIA to use methods such as waterboarding and mock executions to try and extract confessions from terrorist suspects. A CIA report due to be published in the coming days, after a freedom of information challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is expected to give extensive detail of abuses which it is clear were sanctioned at an extremely high level in the Bush administration. My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and CIA’s extreme renditions and torture all run completely counter to the values of justice and humanity for which the US so often claims to stand. Thoughtful Americans argue that the fact that these atrocities have come to light and that some at least of the guilty have been punished, demonstrates that at base the US remains a just and civilized society. Unfortunately, this overlooks one important fact. Every war in which Americans have been involved in recent history has been fought in someone else’s country. Ordinary American soldiers typify the insularity of the wider US and the facile conviction that they are always the good guys.
—Arab News
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