Does the agreement with TNSM augur well for Islamabad?
Nasim Zehra

THE Pakistani government’s six-point agreement with the Tehrik e Nifaz e Shariat e Mohammedi (TNSM) comes as no surprise. The mainstream political parties, including the ANP, had consistently declared during and after the election that they would try to establish peace in the NWFP and the FATA areas through a multi-pronged strategy which would include dialogue. On the April 3, when the army chief General Kiyani gave his presentation to the leadership of the ruling coalition he categorically stated that in Swat the army operation had brought relative peace. General Kiyani specifically turned to the ANP leadership, encouraging them to use the political route to take forward the process of establishing peace. The ANP, which leads the NWFP coalition government, has won the majority of seats from Swat district.
This position of the political leaders and the army chief on the need to take the dialogue route was an offshoot of multiple factors. These included, above all, a policy of military force backed by dialogue, which failed to deliver sustained security and peace in the NWFP and FATA region. The insecurity through terrorist and suicide attacks spread into various parts of Pakistan, driving a growing wedge between the people and the government including the army. The public policy of the Musharraf government, which was largely devoid of political ownership, failed to gain the one factor without which no insurgency can be won by any government — the elements of people support. Nor can a government expect its citizen to bear the cost of fighting insurgency and terrorism.
It is against this backdrop that the ANP government took the significant step of entering into an agreement with the long jailed TNSM leader Sufi Muhammad, who in his political prime, had led thousands of Pakistani fighters into Afghanistan in aid of the Taleban. He was a likely candidate for a political government to open dialogue with. In 1994, Sufi Muhammad did enter into political negotiations with the Benazir government, and with the Nawaz Sharif government in 1999. As the unchallenged leader of the TNSM, Sufi Muhammad had then commanded the support of thousands of followers from Malakand Agency. In neighbouring Afghanistan the Taleban were ascendant and in Pakistan key sections within the intelligence agencies, were sympathetic and supportive of the Taleban. In 1994, the Bhutto government, confronted with the TNSM demand to enforce Shariah and by its simultaneous ability to bring out thousands of armed followers in support of his demand, entered into an agreement with the TNSM. Under the agreement, the Shariah ordinance, under which Qazi courts would be established in Swat and Malakand, was reached. In 1999 the ordinance was amended in order to make the Qazi courts more effective. At present, Sufi Muhammad’s following is relatively reduced compared to that in the Nineties. His followers are also less prone to use violence compared to the other forces that have emerged in the region.
Sufi Muhammad’s reduced following, directly linked to the rise of his son-in-law Maulvi Fazlullah, led to the TNSM introducing more aggressive and militant ways in the movement. Fazlullah, leading in the post 9/11 context with the rise of weaponised anti-US and ideologically-inspired violence, became more violent. His forces entered into guerrilla battles with Pakistani soldiers, blatantly and repeatedly threatened the civilian administration in Malakand and Swat Divisions directly and violently destroying the structure of the state. It was this attitude of consistently attacking police stations, district administrations and local political representatives that led to the start of military operations in Swat. While different claims are made regarding the popularity of Fazlullah, it is clear that the people of the area are seeking security and peace.
The two factors that have provided an enabling environment to various armed militias to previously establish a virtual free reign, have been the failure of the MMA government to directly resist the attacks of these militant groups on people’s right to make their own choices regarding the dress code, girls’ education, sporting beards or listening to music. It is significant against this backdrop that the major thrust of the Sufi Muhammad-government agreement has been two-fold. One, that the TNSM will not threaten or attack the institutions of the state, including the army and the civilian law enforcement agencies. Two, that while the TNSM is free to propagate Shariah, under no circumstances will it resort to violence.
This agreement is both logical and constitutional, while it grants citizens or a group of citizens the right to propagate their beliefs, it forbids them to do so by undermining the rights of others to freely to make their own choices. Through the agreement the government also intends to resurrect the effectiveness, credibility and, consequently, the image of state institutions including the army. Sufi Mohammad’s followers have undertaken not to target state institutions. However, for the implementation of this agreement specific mechanisms will have to be put in place for government-TNSM coordination on the common approach and message that the government, the TNSM leadership, the elected political leadership, the civil administration and the security agencies will have to develop and disseminate among their followers, their institutions and the public. The message of tolerance, of no to violence and to violation of law and of a mutually cooperative attitude will have to be systematically reiterated by all stakeholders of this latest attempt at peace-making.
As for the effectiveness of Sufi Mohammad as the unchallenged leader of the TNSM, that will depend on the quid pro quo that the government may have agreed to. This quid pro quo, which was evolved during the caretaker government and enjoys the support of the then-federal government and the army, is an amendment to the Shariah Ordinance. Under the amendment, additional qazi courts will be established to ensure the implementation of the Shariah in Swat and Malakand Divisions. Such an amendment will likely raise Sufi Mohammad’s stature among his followers. They have been demanding more effective dispensation of justice in the post-Wali-of-Swat era in which the spread and effectiveness of courts and the accessibility to good and inexpensive legal aid is highly deficient. In a culture of conciliatory settlement of disputes the end of the jirga has created a vacuum detrimental to the interests of the local population which has suffered from the fallout of the nationwide crisis of governance. The growing demand for qazi courts has been in direct proportion to the absence of effective state institutions. Finally, the question is the success factor of the TNSM-government agreement. If Sufi Mohammad is handed down the amended Shariah Ordinance, will he then be able to attract his son-in-law’s supporters who have all argued that their ultimate objective has been the enforcement of Shariah? There is no ready answer. Fazlullah’s supporters have been using force to push their version of Islam on the local population. Will they abandon the use of force once the Shariah ordinance factors in some of their demands?
Perhaps the possibility of this agreement delivering relative peace and security without engaging Fazlullah may be minimal. The government’s credibility and capacity to bargain with the more militant groups now increases with Sufi Mohammad on board. Fazllulah is likely to be more pliant now. Maybe past this agreement the government must open, with Sufi Mohammad’s assistance, behind-the-scenes dialogue with Fazlullah as well. Any demand that Fazullah surrenders before the opening of dialogue with him is unrealistic and will not work. Similarly, it is equally unrealistic to expect that without a chastened Fazullah on board there will be peace in the region.

—Khaleej Times

Statutory warnings
Kartik Krishna

THERE are hospitals, and then there are Beijing hospitals. My first brush with the medical profession in China was actuated by an emergency of sorts, when my girlfriend collapsed and blacked out briefly as she exited from the toilet of an Indian restaurant (the food was not the culprit, not this time). Flustered Chinese waiters revived her with water, but she awoke to sharp, crippling pain in the lower abdomen. I called our landlady, and bless her sweet overflowing Chinese heart, she arrived within minutes and escorted us to the nearest hospital. My girlfriend could barely walk, still swooning from time to time. The pain continued, so intense that she was seeing flashing spots behind her eyes. The first half an hour at the hospital was torture, and not just for her, as my landlady rushed with me from counter to counter, fashioning our customary stockpile of forms out of thin air, as it were. But the big guy upstairs was evidently on our side that day, as my lady was ushered past a long line of people into a bright, sparsely-attired emergency room.
Afterwards, on our way home, I grudgingly acceded that Chinese doctors were superior in many ways to their Indian counterparts. The medicines were cheaper here, the hygiene levels higher, the nurses more cheerful and although the reams of red tape to be negotiated were about the same, at least we were secure in the knowledge that we’d be well looked after, if not downright mollycoddled, at the end. The doctor in charge had worked like greased lightning to assess her condition (an untreated urinary tract infection that had squirmed its way to her kidneys, creating a life-threatening situation), and dealt with it calmly, professionally, magically. A year passed, and I got my own back. After enduring a spate of digestive problems, I decided to investigate and get some tests done. A Chinese-speaking female friend accompanied me to a different hospital. We raced through the paperwork in record time, and arrived outside the testing ward. I had carried a sample of my stools with me, assuming that was all they would require. But the matron had other plans for me. Without batting an eyelid, she requested that I transfer a smidgen of the contents of the bottle in my hand, into a small round box, seemingly unsterilized, using little else but a plastic spoon. And I was to accomplish this in plain sight of everyone, there and then in the corridor. My impression of the hospital began to plummet rapidly.
Once this onerous, hugely embarrassing task was achieved, I was asked to kindly be seated inside the ward and wait for a nurse to collect a blood sample. Maybe I was just doomed to have a bad day, but they sent a rookie, a completely green, barely-out-of-her-teens intern who insisted on working backwards. She pushed a needle into my skin and I yelped with pain. Then she started prodding in an effort to unearth a vein. This took all of four agonizing minutes, until she’d extracted the blood as well as her pound of flesh. The throb in my forearm finally subsided about three hours later. Predictably, I did not return to that hospital, except to pick up the test results, which held no credibility for me anyway. That evening I called up my American lady friend (now ex-girlfriend) and gloated. She was as appalled by the events of the day as I’d expected her to be. Round two to me. A few months later, a third hospital was graced with my wheezing, hacking presence. A nasty cold and cough, unheard of in Beijing, had pretty much debilitated my everyday existence. An x-ray revealed a bronchial infection, and drugs were prescribed. So far so good. I began the course as advised: an antibiotic and a mycotic agent. For some reason-call it feminine intuition or just a terminal case of hypochondria-I scanned the Internet for the medicines I’d been given. The shocker came up quickly: I was told that the mycotic agent or expectorant of that name was supposed to be in solution form, whereas the doctor had prescribed pills, which were used to treat something else altogether. I had already taken one dose the previous evening, and had spent a great part of the night sweating and restive. Needless to add, I threw the rest of these pills in the trash, but continued with the antibiotics. I got better. I was about to call my ex with details of my latest cataclysm, but decided to suspend it until my fourth trip to a hospital. I was actually looking forward to falling sick just so I could clinch an emphatic 3-1 victory. As luck would have it, I walked into one of the best hospitals in Beijing, and everything went right. The tie-breaker has yet to be played. Don’t hold your breath.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)





Enough grain for our need, if not our greed
Paul Vallely

HAVE you noticed that the price of bread has gone up in your weekly supermarket? No, to be honest, neither have I. It’s always a good interviewer’s trick to ask a politician the price of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread, but the truth is most of us often don’t register. We are too rich — and, before you protest your poverty, think of yourself in the context of the half of the world’s population who live off a measly dollar a day. And a billion people live on half that. The poorer you are, the greater percentage of your income you spend on food. The world’s poorest people use more than 80 percent of their daily wage just putting food in their children’s mouths. That is why the current spike in global food prices is not being felt most acutely here but in countries all along the equator, where as many as 100 million people are being pushed deeper into poverty. Many are today eating only half what they were a year ago.
Global food prices have been rising for three years, but over the past three months they have soared. In the past month alone, the price of rice in Asia has doubled. It’s the same with wheat and maize. Even Afghan poppy growers are switching from opium to wheat because it offers a bigger profit. The trigger came when markets realized that last year’s drought in Australia, the worst for a century, had halved its wheat harvest. The markets then magnified that blip into a crisis. Speculative activity — betting, to you and me — begins in the futures market. Then food traders begin to stockpile, which drives up the price for when they later decide to sell. Governments panic; big producers such as Thailand, India, Vietnam and nearly 40 others slap on export restrictions, to conserve their stocks. This drives up the price even further. Hedge funds come in looking for new markets.
A handful of people make huge profits in the frenzy. The giant animal feed company Cargill last week announced an 86 percent surge in profit this quarter. But all these are the symptoms not the cause. What underlies the crisis are two problems, one short-term and one more deep-seated. The former is George Bush’s lunatic love affair with American biofuels. Desperate to reduce the US “addiction to oil”, which makes it beholden to all kinds of nasty folk in the Middle East, he has been subsidizing US farmers to produce biofuel from maize. Around a third of the recent price hikes can be traced directly to Washington’s subsidies for biofuels. The US is now using nearly a third of its entire crop to fuel its cars. As a result, the price of corn has trebled in the past two years.
The trouble is that the amount of fertilizer required to do this means that it takes more than a gallon of oil to produce one gallon of ethanol. This is bad biofuel. Good biofuel comes from sugar grown in Brazil — in the southern pastures, not in cleared Amazon rainforest. Its energy is drawn from tropical sunshine, not chemical nitrogen fertilizers, and it uses the whole plant — not just the corncob — to produce fuel. What the US and Europe need to do is abandon their crazy home-grown schemes and buy Brazil’s Sustainable Sunshine Ethanol. Instead, at present, they slap a 20-30 percent tax on it to make it expensive alongside the home-grown maize biofuel that is hugely subsidized, economically unsustainable, and useless in terms of stopping global warming.
Gordon Brown needs to press Europe into an early review of policy on this. But the really deep cause is the policies that, over three decades, have devastated smallholder agriculture in places such as Africa. In the 1970s, Africa’s leaders were gung-ho for industrializing agriculture. In the 1980s and 1990s, the huge grain, butter and meat mountains produced under the vast subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy were being dumped on poor nations; local farmers, unable to compete with imported food (being sold at half what it cost to produce it) went bust. Africa got hooked on the subsidized imports. All this systematically destroyed the market for small-scale agriculture in Africa and parts of Asia.

—Arab News