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Heads I win, tails you lose
Irfan Husain
BARELY had the local body election
results been declared that charges of rigging began flying across the
political landscape. However, this is par for the course: Pakistan’s uneven
electoral history is replete with controversy and bitterness.
A fundamental problem is that we are a nation of bad losers. Whether it’s a
cricket match or a general election, we blame our opponents for cheating,
and the umpire for being partial. Currently it’s the Election Commission
that is being criticised for siding with the ruling coalition and its
candidates. No doubt the usual bag of dirty tricks was used to help PML (Q)
and MQM candidates. But even if the elections had been totally fair, I have
no doubt the losers would still have cried foul.
There is a fundamental problem here. Or rather, a set of interlocking
problems that makes it impossible for genuine democracy to put down roots.
Part of the nature of our political soil is to do with the repeated army
interventions that have blighted institutional development in Pakistan. But
looking beyond this obvious issue, we can discern a number of other serious
difficulties.
For one, the benefits of electoral victory are so lucrative that nobody
wants to lose. The other side of the coin is the high cost of defeat: in the
name of accountability, political rivals are mercilessly persecuted by the
victors. Once in the opposition, you are fair game: vulnerable to real and
trumped-up charges, politicians on the losing side can often be pressured to
switch loyalties.
Next, there is the role of the bureaucracy. Gone are the days when officials
were expected to be neutral. Now, if a field officer does not help the
official candidate, he can expect a swift transfer to the perk-less
wilderness of being a civil servant without a job. The concept of the
Officer on Special Duty is a wonderfully convenient invention whereby
somebody can be punished without having to charge-sheet him, or giving him
an opportunity to defend himself.
The really sad truth is that most civil servants do not wait for orders to
toe the line. Now, when they are told to jump, they only ask how high. This
sea-change in attitudes means that it is virtually impossible to conduct
free and fair elections in Pakistan. The enormous advantage a sitting
government enjoys by virtue of its control over the levers of power means
that short of military or divine intervention (often the same thing in
Pakistan), it is impossible to unseat it.
This lack of spine that now afflicts much of our bureaucracy has inevitably
infected the Election Commission which is no more and no less than any other
government department, at least in the public perception. The Chief Election
Commissioner, although endowed with a vast array of powers under the
Constitution, has seldom ruled against the government of the day. While he
is technically independent, he hardly ever asserts his status except in the
matter of perks. What is true of the Commission is equally true of the
higher judiciary. When political issues are referred to the Supreme or High
Courts, it would be silly to expect them to rule against the government.
Indeed, Pakistan’s political history would have been very different today
had independent judges taken a stand on the side of democracy. But while
they too enjoy many powers under the Constitution, they too are viewed as an
adjunct of the power structure.
With the bureaucracy, the Election Commission and the judiciary all squarely
on the side of the government of the day, what chance does the opposition
have? Or, indeed, what chance does democracy have?
So why do individuals bend so swiftly when they have the constitutional
means to resist pressure? One problem is that the state is the trough at
which the high and mighty feed. To join in, you have to be one of the crowd.
For medical treatment abroad, for sending your kids on foreign scholarships,
for a plot of land in an official housing scheme, and a host of other
goodies, you need to be on the right side of the ruling elite. And if the
state can be warm and nurturing to its favourites, it can be mean and
vindictive to those outside the fold.
Unless you play by the establishment’s rules, you face an uncertain future
as an OSD or worse. So the motivation to please those in power is strong.
Historically, too, the bureaucracy in the subcontinent has little tradition
of independence and honesty. The traditions the Indian Civil Service tried
to instil here were short-lived, and disappeared a generation or two after
the Brits left.
Underlying these different causes for the failure of democracy is the
general lack of tolerance that is such a basic part of our ethos. We are, by
and large, incapable of accepting that others have the right to divergent
views. And it follows that we refuse to the right of opponents to govern. In
cricketing terms, we want to bat on forever, and to ensure this, the umpire
is perpetually on our side, turning down appeal after appeal.
Whenever people find that peaceful, legal channels for change are blocked,
they resort to violent means. The Intifada broke out in Palestine when
peaceful means got the Palestinians nowhere. The insurgency in Kashmir
erupted in 1989 when the Indian government refused to address the problems
of the Valley. Similarly, the lawlessness in Pakistan today is usually
caused by desperate people resorting to desperate means. They find that the
odds are stacked too heavily for them to overcome by constitutional means,
and form armed groups to attain basically political ends.
A reader recently asked me on email what can be done to ensure the success
of democracy. I have no easy answers. If a society is unwilling or unable to
tolerate dissent and divergent views, no law can bring about the
transformation needed to make democracy work. Ultimately, political will and
personal will have to converge to bring us to a point where we are willing
to play by an accepted set of rules. This is known as a constitution, but
judging by the tatters we have reduced ours to, we have a long way to go.
Iran’s nuke programme: Bush is the real threat
Tony Benn
Now, that the US president has announced that he has not ruled out an attack
on Iran, if it does not abandon its nuclear program, the Middle East faces a
crisis that could dwarf even the dangers arising from the war in Iraq. Even
a conventional weapon fired at a nuclear research center — whether or not a
bomb was being made there — would almost certainly release radioactivity
into the atmosphere, with consequences seen worldwide as a mini-Hiroshima.
We would be told that it had been done to uphold the principles of the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) — an argument that does not stand up
to a moment’s examination. The moral and legal basis of the NPT convention,
which the International Atomic Energy Agency is there to uphold, was based
on the agreement of non-nuclear nations not to acquire nuclear weapons if
nuclear powers undertook not to extend nuclear arsenals and negotiate to
secure their abolition.
Since then, the Americans have launched a program that would allow them to
use nuclear weapons in space, nuclear bunker-busting bombs are being
developed, and depleted uranium has been used in Iraq — all of which are
clear breaches of the NPT. Israel, which has a massive nuclear weapons
program, is accepted as a close ally of the US, which still arms and funds
it. Even those who are opposed, as I am, to nuclear weapons in every country
including Iran, North Korea, Britain and the US, accept that nuclear power
for electricity generation need not necessarily lead to the acquisition of
the bomb. Indeed, many years ago, when the shah — who had been put on the
throne by the US — was in power in Iran, enormous pressure was put on me, as
the then UK’s secretary of state for energy, to agree to sell nuclear power
stations to him.
That pressure came frm the Atomic Energy Authority, in conjunction with
Westinghouse, who were anxious to promote their own design of reactor. It is
easy to understand why President Bush might see the bombing of Iran as a way
to regain some of the political credibility he has lost as a result of the
growing hostility in America to the Iraq war due to the heavy casualties
suffered by US forces there. It is inconceivable that the White House can be
contemplating an invasion of Iran, and what must be intended is a US air
strike, or air strikes, on Iranian nuclear installations, comparable to
Israel’s bombing of Iraq in 1981. Israel has publicly hinted that it might
do the same again to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons.
Such an attack, whether by the US or Israel, would be in breach of the UN
Charter, as was the invasion of Iraq. But neither Bush, Sharon nor Blair
would take any notice of that. Some influential Americans appear to be
convinced that the US will attack Iran. Whether they are right or not, the
buildup to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002.
First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be
developing nuclear weapons. We are assured that the president is hoping that
diplomacy might succeed through the European negotiations which have been in
progress for some months. This is just what we were told when Hans Blix was
in Baghdad talking to Saddam on behalf of the UN, but we now know, from a
Downing Street memorandum leaked some months ago, that the decision to
invade had been taken long before that.
That may be the position now, and I fear that if a US attack does take
place, Tony Blair will give it his full support. And one of his reasons for
doing so will be the same as in Iraq: Namely the fear that, if he alienates
Bush, Britain’s so-called independent deterrent might be taken away. For, as
I also learned when I was energy secretary, Britain is entirely dependent on
the US for the supply of our Trident warheads and associated technology.
They cannot even be targeted unless the US switches on its global satellite
system. Therefore Britain could be assisting America to commit an act of
aggression under the UN Charter, which could risk a major nuclear disaster,
and doing so supposedly to prevent nuclear proliferation, with the real
motive of making it possible for us to continue to break the NPT in alliance
with America. The irony is that we might be told that Britain must support
Bush, yet again, because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction, thus
allowing him to kill even more innocent civilians.
Arroyo survives, thanks to confusion
in opposition ranks
Malou Mangahas
A WALKOUT by opposition lawmakers on Tuesday marked yet another high point
in the 12-week-old political crisis, the worst ever yet, of the
administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. In a huff, the
opposition lawmakers marched out of the 6th day of hearings of a Congress
committee that is evaluating three impeachment complaints that had been
separately filed against Arroyo. The walkout came after the justice
committee chairperson ignored a motion by the last opposition speaker to
allow a former cabinet secretary to address the committee on her revelations
that Arroyo and her deputies had manipulated the first but largely infirm
impeachment complaint.
Those who deserted the committee hearing included 49 lawmakers who had
signed a second complaint against Arroyo that raised serious but documented
allegations of betrayal of the public trust, violations of human rights and
involvement of her husband and son in illegal gambling. But the tragedy of
the opposition is it has failed over the last month to secure the minimum 79
signatures required to send the complaint to trial by the Senate. A small
minority in the 212-member House of Representatives, the opposition’s
efforts to overcome the numbers’ game has proved futile. By all indications,
it is through pork barrel funds and other enticements that Arroyo has
managed to consolidate her command of numbers in the lower house.
Twelve weeks and the political crisis is nowhere closer to resolution, no
thanks to fits and starts that define the opposition’s efforts to shake the
foundations of the Arroyo presidency. Put another way, the opposition has
failed to make use of the crisis thanks to the steadfast, take-no-prisoners
attitude of Arroyo and her deputies to stand their ground, count allies,
pummel the media with public relations spins, and mount big and small
initiatives at covering up her chink in the armour. That she has sinned or
committed wrong, by the standards of law, ethics and morality, is not the
question in many people’s minds. Wiretapped phone conversations she had with
an election official in last year’s presidential elections, lend serious
evidence.
Arroyo had apologised on national television for her “lapse in judgment”
when she, a candidate at the time, called the election official. To tell the
truth, she called 14 times, making her “lapse of judgment” a veritable
addiction. Weeks earlier, a parade of whistleblowers summoned to hearings at
the Senate, had linked her husband, First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, and first
son, Congressman Mikey Arroyo, to an illegal two-number gambling operations
called “jueteng.” The allegations may be serious. But Arroyo is equally firm
to ignore public clamour for her to resign from the presidency. As the weeks
passed, she demonstrated more than average ability to bounce back to
political life mostly through PR spins.
One weekend, she walked by the coast of Manila bay, daughter, younger son,
and toddler-grandchildren in tow. For days now, her government has struck
fear in the hearts of ordinary folk by overstating a so-called “oil crisis”
that necessitates possible rationing even when soaring world crude prices
and not availability of domestic supply is the core issue. On another
Sunday, Arroyo came, uninvited, to a commemorative mass for the death
anniversary of murdered Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. — whose widow, former
President Corazon Aquino — had called for Arroyo’s resignation. Last week,
her deputies leaked information to media about opposition lawmakers who
supposedly cornered public works contracts and hefty pork barrel funds, from
tax collected from road users. Fits and starts. This is the narrative string
that runs through the 12-week-old political crisis buffeting the
Philippines.
It has to do less with Arroyo’s savoir-faire in realpolitik and more with
the weaknesses of the political opposition as a fractious, minuscule
minority in Congress. It has less to do with Arroyo’s sharp instincts as a
political animal, and more with the very considerate discernment most
Filipinos have opted as they ponder the less than attractive alternatives to
Arroyo. By the letter and intent of the Constitution, if Arroyo were to
resign or be impeached, the successor should be her running mate, Vice
President Noli de Castro, a political novice who had lived most of his life
reading the news on radio and television. Outside the constitution’s
framework, the successor could be any one of the untenable, undeveloped and
largely unarticulated and unpopular proposals of the multi-faction political
opposition. |
