September 7, 2008
Bhutto’s Widower, Viewed as Ally by U.S., Wins the Pakistani Presidency Handily
By JANE PERLEZ and SALMAN MASOOD
There is also a related article linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/world ... ref=slogin
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who has little experience in governing, was elected president of Pakistan on Saturday by a wide margin.
Mr. Zardari, 53, who spent 11 years in jail on corruption charges that remain unproved, succeeds Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last month under the threat of impeachment. He is expected to be sworn in on Monday or Tuesday, officials said.
Mr. Zardari has the tacit approval of the United States, which views him as an ally in the campaign against terrorism. He has promised a tougher fight against members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda ensconced in the nation’s tribal areas, from where they mount assaults on American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
His election coincides with a stepped-up effort by the United States to root out the Taliban and Al Qaeda from the tribal areas. American commandos attacked militants in a village near the Afghan border on Wednesday, in what American military officials said could be a continuing campaign in Pakistan’s tribal region.
Evidence is growing that the government and military face almost overwhelming difficulties in battling the militants, who now virtually control the tribal areas. In a reminder of that challenge, a suicide bomber killed at least 30 people and wounded 80 at a police checkpoint near Peshawar on Saturday.
Official results from voting in the two houses of Parliament and four provincial assemblies showed that Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, won 481 of 702 votes. His closest competitor, Saeeduz Zaman Siddiqui, of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, won 153 votes, and a third candidate, Mushahid Hussain Syed, received 44 votes.
After Ms. Bhutto was killed in December, Mr. Zardari became the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which was founded by Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and is considered to be almost a cult of the Bhutto dynasty.
Mr. Zardari led the party to victory in a parliamentary election on Feb. 18 and formed a coalition with Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N.
That coalition collapsed last month amid recriminations over the reinstatement of some 60 judges fired by President Musharraf when he imposed emergency rule in November.
In a sign of conciliation, Mr. Sharif telephoned Mr. Zardari on Saturday to congratulate him on his victory and pledge his support, according to television accounts of the call.
The White House issued a supportive statement on Saturday. “The United States congratulates Asif Ali Zardari on his election as president,” said Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman. “President Bush looks forward to working with him, Prime Minister Gilani and the government of Pakistan on issues important to both countries, including counterterrorism and making sure Pakistan has a stable and secure economy.”
Mr. Zardari’s aides have promised that as president, Mr. Zardari would agree to the elimination of a constitutional provision that allows the president to dismiss Parliament, long considered a weak institution.
The minister of information, Sherry Rehman, a member of the Pakistan Peoples Party, said the relationship between the presidency and Parliament would be better balanced under Mr. Zardari, resulting in a “new era of democratic stability.” Ms. Rehman added, “Today, every Pakistani can raise his head with pride.”
After the vote, Mr. Zardari spoke briefly outside the prime minister’s residence. Flanked by his two teenage daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa, Mr. Zardari said he would uphold the democratic philosophy of Ms. Bhutto.
“Parliament will be sovereign,” he said. “This president shall be subservient to the Parliament.”
But there was considerable skepticism among politicians and in the news media that Mr. Zardari would agree to a diminution of power. An editorial on Saturday in the daily newspaper Dawn said it hoped that “his commitment to make himself a titular head of state will not waver.”
Most Pakistanis looked on the presidential vote with considerable indifference, a sharp contrast to the excitement during the campaign leading to parliamentary elections.
In the Aabpara market in Islamabad, some storekeepers viewed Mr. Zardari’s victory as a foregone conclusion.
Several said it was good for Pakistan to have a president and a prime minister from the same party, reflecting the official line of the Pakistan Peoples Party. “He can be a good president because the whole party is behind him,” said Malik Zahoor, 50.
But some vendors said the corruption charges against Mr. Zardari made him unsuitable for the presidency.
“He’s a certified thief,” said Akhlaq Abbasi, 60, the owner of a fabric and tailoring shop.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
****
September 7, 2008
Atomic Club Votes to End Restrictions on India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and MARK MAZZETTI
The worldwide body that regulates the sale of nuclear fuel and technology approved a landmark deal on Saturday to allow India to engage in nuclear trade for the first time in three decades, after a pressure campaign by the Bush administration and despite concerns about setting off an arms race in Asia.
Only one hurdle now remains for the deal: final approval by the United States Congress. But passage is likely to be difficult, considering both political opposition and dwindling time in the Congressional calendar before November’s elections.
If the agreement ultimately goes through, it would stand as a symbol of the deepening strategic ties between the United States and India, seen as a potential balancing power to a rising China. It would also be enormously lucrative for sellers of nuclear fuel and technology all over the world; India plans to import at least eight nuclear reactors by 2012, according to projections by the State Department.
State Department officials were ecstatic about the vote Saturday by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, or N.S.G. “I don’t think a lot of people thought we’d be able to get this through the N.S.G. this weekend,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was in Algiers.
Both President Bush and the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, have cast the nuclear agreement as a legacy issue. The White House said the two leaders spoke to each other on Saturday.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/world ... ?th&emc=th
ASIA
September 10, 2008
Widower of Bhutto Takes Office in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was sworn in as president of Pakistan on Tuesday and immediately declared he would work alongside the leader of Afghanistan to fight terrorism.
In a gesture of improved relations between the countries, Mr. Zardari invited the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, to attend his inauguration. He was the only foreign leader present.
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly accused Pakistan of helping Taliban fighters cross into Afghanistan in order to attack Afghan, NATO and American forces.
But there was no sign of sour feelings when the two men appeared at a news conference where Mr. Zardari was pummeled with sharp questions from Pakistani reporters about the alliance with the United States.
A major balancing act for Mr. Zardari will be how to allow the Americans to increase the attacks against the Taliban in the tribal areas — something Washington appears intent on doing — in the face of strong anti-American popular sentiment. For the first time, American helicopter-borne Special Forces troops landed in the tribal area last week and fought militants there.
The new president offered few clues as to how he would handle the conflicting priorities.
When a reporter suggested that it was time for the “Americans to go back into their tents,” Mr. Zardari sidestepped.
“We are in the eye of the storm,” he said. “I consider that an opportunity. I intend to take that and make it our strength.”
Mr. Zardari said he would attend the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this month and go “as a victim of terrorism,” apparently a reference to the assassination of Ms. Bhutto in December. At the United Nations, he said, he will seek an inquiry into her death.
“I will ask the world to look upon us as victims of terrorism,” he said. He said he had a “comprehensive plan” for tackling terrorism, but he did not spell it out.
His first trip abroad will be to China, he said, a visit that will follow in the footsteps of Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who as prime minister in the 1970s forged a strong bond with Beijing.
“I will take whatever brief the Foreign Office gives me,” he said of the purpose of the visit.
Mr. Zardari, 53, took the oath of office from Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar, a controversial start to his rule because Mr. Dogar was appointed under an emergency decree by the former president, Pervez Musharraf, and has remained in place with Mr. Zardari’s support.
The role of Mr. Dogar at the ceremony appeared to definitively signal that the former chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was fired twice by Mr. Musharraf, would not be invited back to his old job. Mr. Zardari has refused to reappoint Mr. Chaudhry despite pressure from his former coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif, who left the government over the issue.
Accompanying Mr. Zardari at the ceremony were his daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa, and his son, Bilawal, who has been named heir of Mr. Zardari’s mantle as head of the Pakistan Peoples Party.
The chief of staff of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and other top brass sat in a prominent position at the swearing-in.
Historically, the Pakistan Peoples Party, founded by Ms. Bhutto’s father, has had difficult relations with the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, the nation’s premier spy agency.
Mr. Zardari begins his five-year term with mixed reviews. He, like Ms. Bhutto and other politicians, received an amnesty on corruption charges from Mr. Musharraf, but the cloud of the allegations still lingers.
He spent 11 years in jail, leading The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper here, to use the headline “Prison to Presidency” when Mr. Zardari won the electoral college vote for the presidency on Saturday.
In a nationwide survey by Gallup Pakistan, 44 percent of respondents said none of the top three candidates should be the next president. Mr. Zardari received a 26 percent approval rating, compared with 18 percent for Saeeduz Zaman Siddiqui, the candidate of Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N.
About 2,000 adults were interviewed in person on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 for the survey. The margin of sampling error was four percentage points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/world ... ?ref=world
Widower of Bhutto Takes Office in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was sworn in as president of Pakistan on Tuesday and immediately declared he would work alongside the leader of Afghanistan to fight terrorism.
In a gesture of improved relations between the countries, Mr. Zardari invited the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, to attend his inauguration. He was the only foreign leader present.
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly accused Pakistan of helping Taliban fighters cross into Afghanistan in order to attack Afghan, NATO and American forces.
But there was no sign of sour feelings when the two men appeared at a news conference where Mr. Zardari was pummeled with sharp questions from Pakistani reporters about the alliance with the United States.
A major balancing act for Mr. Zardari will be how to allow the Americans to increase the attacks against the Taliban in the tribal areas — something Washington appears intent on doing — in the face of strong anti-American popular sentiment. For the first time, American helicopter-borne Special Forces troops landed in the tribal area last week and fought militants there.
The new president offered few clues as to how he would handle the conflicting priorities.
When a reporter suggested that it was time for the “Americans to go back into their tents,” Mr. Zardari sidestepped.
“We are in the eye of the storm,” he said. “I consider that an opportunity. I intend to take that and make it our strength.”
Mr. Zardari said he would attend the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this month and go “as a victim of terrorism,” apparently a reference to the assassination of Ms. Bhutto in December. At the United Nations, he said, he will seek an inquiry into her death.
“I will ask the world to look upon us as victims of terrorism,” he said. He said he had a “comprehensive plan” for tackling terrorism, but he did not spell it out.
His first trip abroad will be to China, he said, a visit that will follow in the footsteps of Ms. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who as prime minister in the 1970s forged a strong bond with Beijing.
“I will take whatever brief the Foreign Office gives me,” he said of the purpose of the visit.
Mr. Zardari, 53, took the oath of office from Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar, a controversial start to his rule because Mr. Dogar was appointed under an emergency decree by the former president, Pervez Musharraf, and has remained in place with Mr. Zardari’s support.
The role of Mr. Dogar at the ceremony appeared to definitively signal that the former chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was fired twice by Mr. Musharraf, would not be invited back to his old job. Mr. Zardari has refused to reappoint Mr. Chaudhry despite pressure from his former coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif, who left the government over the issue.
Accompanying Mr. Zardari at the ceremony were his daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa, and his son, Bilawal, who has been named heir of Mr. Zardari’s mantle as head of the Pakistan Peoples Party.
The chief of staff of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and other top brass sat in a prominent position at the swearing-in.
Historically, the Pakistan Peoples Party, founded by Ms. Bhutto’s father, has had difficult relations with the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, the nation’s premier spy agency.
Mr. Zardari begins his five-year term with mixed reviews. He, like Ms. Bhutto and other politicians, received an amnesty on corruption charges from Mr. Musharraf, but the cloud of the allegations still lingers.
He spent 11 years in jail, leading The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper here, to use the headline “Prison to Presidency” when Mr. Zardari won the electoral college vote for the presidency on Saturday.
In a nationwide survey by Gallup Pakistan, 44 percent of respondents said none of the top three candidates should be the next president. Mr. Zardari received a 26 percent approval rating, compared with 18 percent for Saeeduz Zaman Siddiqui, the candidate of Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N.
About 2,000 adults were interviewed in person on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 for the survey. The margin of sampling error was four percentage points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/world ... ?ref=world
Pakistan's new leader needs all the help he can get
The Economist
Monday, September 15, 2008
CREDIT: Mian Khursheed, Reuters
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari attends a news conference following his swearing-in ceremony in Islamabad on Tuesday, in front of a portrait of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated last December.
Three clouds hovered over Asif Zardari as he was sworn in Sept. 9 as Pakistan's president. First, the economy is in crisis. Second, the war against the local Taliban is going badly. And, third, Zardari himself has not shaken off the reputation he earned when his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister, as "10 per cent" -- a man less interested in running his country wisely than in looting it greedily.
Pessimists are already predicting a short, chaotic and disastrous presidency, followed, as night follows day in Pakistani politics, by a solid-looking general stepping in to stop the rot.
But since it is solid-looking generals who have reduced Pakistan to this dire pass, Zardari deserves, if not the benefit of the doubt, then at least the help due the constitutionally elected leader of a country of 165 million people that is, or should be, a vital NATO ally in the war in Afghanistan.
In return, he needs to show that he really does have at heart the national interest rather than self-aggrandizement or self-enrichment.
The omens are not good. Two economic issues above all are fuelling public anger: price rises, especially for food, and power cuts, a consequence of a shortage of money to pay for imported fuel.
Both demand fiscal discipline. Printing money would worsen inflation, debauch the currency and bring a balance-of-payments crisis.
Yet, in at least two ways, apparently at Zardari's behest, the government has sacrificed fiscal responsibility for political advantage.
First, it raised the procurement price of grain -- benefiting mainly farmers in Punjab, Pakistan's most prosperous province (and the stronghold of the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif), but pushing up the cost of food subsidies for the cash-starved government.
Meanwhile, a proposed capital-gains tax was dropped, reportedly after Zardari was lobbied by wealthy financiers from Karachi, the biggest city in Zardari's own power base, Sindh province.
More encouragingly, Zardari's officials have reportedly come up with a sensible stabilization plan that should win the support of international donors. If so, America's Congress should smile on the 10-year, $15 billion aid proposal before it.
America has been lavish in the aid it has provided since Sept. 11, 2001. But most has gone to the army. Reducing poverty and offering economic opportunity would also do much to ease the fight against Islamist extremism.
So would better cross-border co-operation with Afghanistan.
Zardari is to be applauded for making President Hamid Karzai the guest of honour at his inauguration. His predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, and Karzai scarcely bothered to conceal their mutual antipathy.
Zardari resembles Musharraf, however, in talking a good game: about the importance of fighting the Taliban not for America's or Afghanistan's sake but for Pakistan's.
Like Musharraf, too, Zardari may find it hard to persuade Pakistan's people that the fight is worthwhile, especially since the army itself, whose soldiers' lives are on the line, is not wholly committed to it.
Exasperated at the continuing infiltration of armed militants from Pakistan's tribal areas, America has launched air strikes -- and even sent soldiers -- on its soil.
This seems intended in part to focus Zardari's wayward mind on the task in hand. But it also causes huge resentment in Pakistan, especially since at least one raid killed civilians instead of militants.
As the United States is finding in Afghanistan itself, there is no surer way of angering local people, undermining a friendly government and boosting Taliban recruitment than killing civilians.
It is no way to treat an ally, even 10 per cent.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 6&sponsor=
The Economist
Monday, September 15, 2008
CREDIT: Mian Khursheed, Reuters
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari attends a news conference following his swearing-in ceremony in Islamabad on Tuesday, in front of a portrait of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated last December.
Three clouds hovered over Asif Zardari as he was sworn in Sept. 9 as Pakistan's president. First, the economy is in crisis. Second, the war against the local Taliban is going badly. And, third, Zardari himself has not shaken off the reputation he earned when his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister, as "10 per cent" -- a man less interested in running his country wisely than in looting it greedily.
Pessimists are already predicting a short, chaotic and disastrous presidency, followed, as night follows day in Pakistani politics, by a solid-looking general stepping in to stop the rot.
But since it is solid-looking generals who have reduced Pakistan to this dire pass, Zardari deserves, if not the benefit of the doubt, then at least the help due the constitutionally elected leader of a country of 165 million people that is, or should be, a vital NATO ally in the war in Afghanistan.
In return, he needs to show that he really does have at heart the national interest rather than self-aggrandizement or self-enrichment.
The omens are not good. Two economic issues above all are fuelling public anger: price rises, especially for food, and power cuts, a consequence of a shortage of money to pay for imported fuel.
Both demand fiscal discipline. Printing money would worsen inflation, debauch the currency and bring a balance-of-payments crisis.
Yet, in at least two ways, apparently at Zardari's behest, the government has sacrificed fiscal responsibility for political advantage.
First, it raised the procurement price of grain -- benefiting mainly farmers in Punjab, Pakistan's most prosperous province (and the stronghold of the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif), but pushing up the cost of food subsidies for the cash-starved government.
Meanwhile, a proposed capital-gains tax was dropped, reportedly after Zardari was lobbied by wealthy financiers from Karachi, the biggest city in Zardari's own power base, Sindh province.
More encouragingly, Zardari's officials have reportedly come up with a sensible stabilization plan that should win the support of international donors. If so, America's Congress should smile on the 10-year, $15 billion aid proposal before it.
America has been lavish in the aid it has provided since Sept. 11, 2001. But most has gone to the army. Reducing poverty and offering economic opportunity would also do much to ease the fight against Islamist extremism.
So would better cross-border co-operation with Afghanistan.
Zardari is to be applauded for making President Hamid Karzai the guest of honour at his inauguration. His predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, and Karzai scarcely bothered to conceal their mutual antipathy.
Zardari resembles Musharraf, however, in talking a good game: about the importance of fighting the Taliban not for America's or Afghanistan's sake but for Pakistan's.
Like Musharraf, too, Zardari may find it hard to persuade Pakistan's people that the fight is worthwhile, especially since the army itself, whose soldiers' lives are on the line, is not wholly committed to it.
Exasperated at the continuing infiltration of armed militants from Pakistan's tribal areas, America has launched air strikes -- and even sent soldiers -- on its soil.
This seems intended in part to focus Zardari's wayward mind on the task in hand. But it also causes huge resentment in Pakistan, especially since at least one raid killed civilians instead of militants.
As the United States is finding in Afghanistan itself, there is no surer way of angering local people, undermining a friendly government and boosting Taliban recruitment than killing civilians.
It is no way to treat an ally, even 10 per cent.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 6&sponsor=
September 17, 2008
India Grapples With How to Convert Its Farmland Into Factories
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
SINGUR, India — Barely a month before Tata, one of India’s most powerful conglomerates, was due to roll out the world’s cheapest car from a new factory on these former potato and rice fields, a peasant uprising has forced the company to suspend work on the plant and consider pulling out altogether.
The standoff is just the most prominent example of a dark cloud looming over India’s economic transition: How to divert scarce fertile farmland to industry in a country where more than half the people still live off the land.
At the heart of the challenge, one of the most important facing the Indian government, is not only how to compensate peasants who make way for India’s industrial future, but also how to prepare them — in great numbers — for the new economy India wants to enter.
In recent years, clashes over land have dogged several major industrial projects in virtually every corner of this crowded democracy of 1.1 billion people, most of them rural and poor.
In eastern Orissa State, betel leaf farmers have held up a $12 billion project by Posco, the South Korean steel maker, occasionally kidnapping company officials. In western Goa, several proposed Chinese-style special economic zones were scrapped after sustained public protests. And outside Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, village councils insist on a referendum this month on an economic zone proposed by Mukesh D. Ambani, the nation’s richest man.
In nearly all these cases, the peasants who resist most intensely are often those who know they are qualified to do little beyond eke out a living off the land.
If that fundamental anxiety feeds their protests, farmers and farmhands, often egged on by the politicians who seek their support, also stage protests to ratchet up the price of the land or to renegotiate deals.
The target of their ire is often the government, which in most cases acquires the land and turns it over to industrial developers. The central government has yet to release a long-awaited national policy on how to compensate those who lose their land.
“If the price is right, people will sacrifice the emotional attachment, but if you no longer have the guarantee of living off the land, then what do you do?” asked Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s in India. “The people who are being displaced are not the people who see themselves as benefiting immediately from the employment opportunities.”
Medha Patkar, one of India’s best-known opponents of large industrial projects, said, “Land is livelihood, it’s not just property.”
Last month in this rich farm belt in West Bengal State, protesters laid siege to the new Tata Motors plant, on one occasion preventing workers there from leaving.
The protesters now want the government to return roughly a third of the 997 acres that the state acquired for the Tata factory. Some of the land was taken by force from farmers.
Their demands have since forced the state government, controlled of all things by an elected Communist administration, to sweeten the deal without taking apart the factory site.
On Sunday, in an effort to assuage the protesters, the government announced a new, more generous compensation package for those who had been evicted. It included a 50 percent increase in the price paid for the property and job training for one member of each displaced family. The ruling party and its opponents have been staging competing protests this week.
That new deal only revealed the deep wedge of anxiety that the factory has driven through this cluster of villages.
“We are farmers,” said Tayab Ali Mandal, 52, of Joymolla village. “We know only farm work; we don’t know any paper-pencil work.” He gave up his land last year, but bitterly. Now, he wants it back, and he rejected the government’s latest offer of a job in the plant.
He said he would rather that his 16-year-old son continue to work in a small factory embroidering clothes, a traditional craft in his community. “I won’t go inside that place even to urinate,” he said. “We are disgusted by that place.”
Gopal Santra and his clan, who refused to accept money for the land they lost, said they hoped the renewed agitation would prompt the state to raise its offer even more.
The Santras also had land across the street from the Tata plant, which they sold to a private party a month ago for more than four times the price the state is now offering.
Still others, like Sheik Muhammad Ali, who welcomed the Nano, Tata’s flat-faced, pint-size car, to his fields, threatened to put the naysayers in their place.
Mr. Ali, 50, had readily given up his land, and through his contacts with Communist Party workers, started a business supplying cement to the factory developer.
On Sunday, he was seething at the protesters who had halted work on the plant for the last two weeks and, in turn, his business.
“There’s a limit to our patience,” he barked. “If you take my plate of rice, will I just let you go off with it?”
Bidyut Kumar Santra, 30, a rare high school graduate in Joymolla, was among the lucky few to get jobs on the assembly line and, in turn, he realized how poorly equipped he was to keep up with events on the factory floor. The engineers all spoke English, to him an alien tongue.
“I feel ashamed, like what kind of education did I get?” Mr. Santra said the other day and vowed to make certain that his son, who is in first grade, learns to speak English.
The villages of Singur, where the Nano was to be produced, stand at the crossroads of the two Indias.
For Tata, it is ideally located along a new national highway that heads north to New Delhi, the capital, and intersects an important east-west artery.
For farmers, it is ideally located on the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River and fed by irrigation canals, making the earth so rich and red that it yields two rice harvests a year, in addition to potatoes, cucumbers and squash.
West Bengal lured Tata here with heavy incentives, including a generous land lease and tax breaks from the state’s industrial development agency.
Some of these details of the company’s hitherto secret contract with the government have emerged in recent days, prompting the company to go to court, where a ruling blocked further disclosures. If Tata were required to give back 300 acres of land from the factory site, as the opposition demands, it would have to evict auto-parts makers who are setting up shop next to the main Nano plant. Their proximity allows Tata to save on the cost of production. Those savings and the generous land and tax deal allow Tata to offer the Nano at an astonishing price of less than $2,500. The plant’s fate is uncertain. Tata, while welcoming the government’s proposed compensation package, has remained silent on its plans.
The company has several other plants where it could produce the Nano in time for the Hindu festival season next month, traditionally a time of big spending. It has dangled the possibility of making the Nano elsewhere if the cost of production and the price of the world’s cheapest car rise too high.
India Grapples With How to Convert Its Farmland Into Factories
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
SINGUR, India — Barely a month before Tata, one of India’s most powerful conglomerates, was due to roll out the world’s cheapest car from a new factory on these former potato and rice fields, a peasant uprising has forced the company to suspend work on the plant and consider pulling out altogether.
The standoff is just the most prominent example of a dark cloud looming over India’s economic transition: How to divert scarce fertile farmland to industry in a country where more than half the people still live off the land.
At the heart of the challenge, one of the most important facing the Indian government, is not only how to compensate peasants who make way for India’s industrial future, but also how to prepare them — in great numbers — for the new economy India wants to enter.
In recent years, clashes over land have dogged several major industrial projects in virtually every corner of this crowded democracy of 1.1 billion people, most of them rural and poor.
In eastern Orissa State, betel leaf farmers have held up a $12 billion project by Posco, the South Korean steel maker, occasionally kidnapping company officials. In western Goa, several proposed Chinese-style special economic zones were scrapped after sustained public protests. And outside Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, village councils insist on a referendum this month on an economic zone proposed by Mukesh D. Ambani, the nation’s richest man.
In nearly all these cases, the peasants who resist most intensely are often those who know they are qualified to do little beyond eke out a living off the land.
If that fundamental anxiety feeds their protests, farmers and farmhands, often egged on by the politicians who seek their support, also stage protests to ratchet up the price of the land or to renegotiate deals.
The target of their ire is often the government, which in most cases acquires the land and turns it over to industrial developers. The central government has yet to release a long-awaited national policy on how to compensate those who lose their land.
“If the price is right, people will sacrifice the emotional attachment, but if you no longer have the guarantee of living off the land, then what do you do?” asked Subir Gokarn, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s in India. “The people who are being displaced are not the people who see themselves as benefiting immediately from the employment opportunities.”
Medha Patkar, one of India’s best-known opponents of large industrial projects, said, “Land is livelihood, it’s not just property.”
Last month in this rich farm belt in West Bengal State, protesters laid siege to the new Tata Motors plant, on one occasion preventing workers there from leaving.
The protesters now want the government to return roughly a third of the 997 acres that the state acquired for the Tata factory. Some of the land was taken by force from farmers.
Their demands have since forced the state government, controlled of all things by an elected Communist administration, to sweeten the deal without taking apart the factory site.
On Sunday, in an effort to assuage the protesters, the government announced a new, more generous compensation package for those who had been evicted. It included a 50 percent increase in the price paid for the property and job training for one member of each displaced family. The ruling party and its opponents have been staging competing protests this week.
That new deal only revealed the deep wedge of anxiety that the factory has driven through this cluster of villages.
“We are farmers,” said Tayab Ali Mandal, 52, of Joymolla village. “We know only farm work; we don’t know any paper-pencil work.” He gave up his land last year, but bitterly. Now, he wants it back, and he rejected the government’s latest offer of a job in the plant.
He said he would rather that his 16-year-old son continue to work in a small factory embroidering clothes, a traditional craft in his community. “I won’t go inside that place even to urinate,” he said. “We are disgusted by that place.”
Gopal Santra and his clan, who refused to accept money for the land they lost, said they hoped the renewed agitation would prompt the state to raise its offer even more.
The Santras also had land across the street from the Tata plant, which they sold to a private party a month ago for more than four times the price the state is now offering.
Still others, like Sheik Muhammad Ali, who welcomed the Nano, Tata’s flat-faced, pint-size car, to his fields, threatened to put the naysayers in their place.
Mr. Ali, 50, had readily given up his land, and through his contacts with Communist Party workers, started a business supplying cement to the factory developer.
On Sunday, he was seething at the protesters who had halted work on the plant for the last two weeks and, in turn, his business.
“There’s a limit to our patience,” he barked. “If you take my plate of rice, will I just let you go off with it?”
Bidyut Kumar Santra, 30, a rare high school graduate in Joymolla, was among the lucky few to get jobs on the assembly line and, in turn, he realized how poorly equipped he was to keep up with events on the factory floor. The engineers all spoke English, to him an alien tongue.
“I feel ashamed, like what kind of education did I get?” Mr. Santra said the other day and vowed to make certain that his son, who is in first grade, learns to speak English.
The villages of Singur, where the Nano was to be produced, stand at the crossroads of the two Indias.
For Tata, it is ideally located along a new national highway that heads north to New Delhi, the capital, and intersects an important east-west artery.
For farmers, it is ideally located on the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River and fed by irrigation canals, making the earth so rich and red that it yields two rice harvests a year, in addition to potatoes, cucumbers and squash.
West Bengal lured Tata here with heavy incentives, including a generous land lease and tax breaks from the state’s industrial development agency.
Some of these details of the company’s hitherto secret contract with the government have emerged in recent days, prompting the company to go to court, where a ruling blocked further disclosures. If Tata were required to give back 300 acres of land from the factory site, as the opposition demands, it would have to evict auto-parts makers who are setting up shop next to the main Nano plant. Their proximity allows Tata to save on the cost of production. Those savings and the generous land and tax deal allow Tata to offer the Nano at an astonishing price of less than $2,500. The plant’s fate is uncertain. Tata, while welcoming the government’s proposed compensation package, has remained silent on its plans.
The company has several other plants where it could produce the Nano in time for the Hindu festival season next month, traditionally a time of big spending. It has dangled the possibility of making the Nano elsewhere if the cost of production and the price of the world’s cheapest car rise too high.
China's dairy industry in chaos
Liquid milk now on tainted list; 6,200 babies sick
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... c&sponsor=
Aileen McCabe
Canwest News Service
Saturday, September 20, 2008
CREDIT: Reuters
Staff members of the local quality supervision bureau empty tainted milk power packets at a garbage dump in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.
China's dairy industry is in disarray after the baby milk powder scandal widened Friday to include liquid milk.
Tainted milk has sickened more than 6,200 babies so far.
Stores all over China were removing milk from their shelves and both Starbucks and KFC announced their supplies were affected.
Consumers across the country voted with their feet.
"Usually we sell several thousand kwai ($400-$500) worth of milk every day. Today we sold just a few cartons," said Chen Xiuzhen, a cashier at an Alldays convenience store in Shanghai where the dairy case was almost empty due to the recall.
And that was tough work, she said, because every customer wanted assurances it was safe.
"It is a lot of explanation work," Chen said.
The most recent traces of melamine that were found in liquid milk samples came from three of China's top dairy firms. On the mainland, the fresh milk involved was recalled immediately.
In Hong Kong, officials went further, recalling ice cream and yogurt, too. Singapore on Friday suspended the import and sale of all milk and milk products from China after tests found samples containing melamine.
Even the Yili group, a premier Chinese sponsor at the Beijing Olympics, has been found selling melamine-tainted milk and milk products.
Melamine is a chemical usually used in making plastics, but officials say milk producers have been adding it to illegally watered-down milk to boost protein levels -- and profits. The melamine is causing infants to develop kidney stones that block their urinary tracts and can cause renal failure.
In an effort to ease fears, officials are now saying the melamine poses little danger for adults. They maintain an adult weighing 60 kilograms or more can safely drink two litres of the tainted milk a day without encountering any problems.
Still, the milk crisis is threatening to ruin China's fledgling dairy industry. A summary of proceedings published after an emergency cabinet meeting earlier this week said ministers were told the whole sector is in disarray. The melamine scandal "reflects the chaotic condition in the industry and the loopholes in the supervision and management," it said.
Milk has not traditionally been an integral part of the Chinese diet, but changing tastes and habits and the trend towards urbanization have led to rapid growth in dairy consumption over the past two decades, particularly with liquid milk, ice cream and yogurt.
The industry now boasts 15 million milk cows. But many consumers are now wary of just about any "Made in China" dairy products.
On the Internet, meanwhile, there is growing anger at Beijing's attempts to control the scandal by restricting what the domestic media can report about it.
On a web forum, Fu Rui-Lon wrote: "The 'Sanlu poisonous milk scandal' attracted more and more attention until the Central Propaganda Department gave strict orders on 9/15 to stop all Chinese media to report and investigate this scandal.
In Canada, a national Chinese supermarket chain with stores in B.C., Alberta and Ontario has voluntarily recalled two yogurt drink brands from its shelves following the tainted-milk scandal.
An official with the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency said Friday that Vancouver-based T&T Supermarket pulled the yogurt drinks as a precaution because it has the same brand names included in the recall overseas.
The major chain has 16 locations across Canada including in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. No illnesses have been reported from the yogurt drinks.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
****
September 20, 2008
Editorial
China’s Baby Formula Scandal
We had been assured by Chinese authorities that their regulators and manufacturers were cracking down on the negligent procedures and criminal acts that have produced lead-laced toys and poisoned pet food, toothpaste and other dangerous goods. But a new scandal involving contaminated baby formula is a frightening reminder that China still is not doing enough to ensure the safety of its products — and a reminder that American importers and regulators cannot let down their guard.
The tainted milk powder has killed several babies in China and injured more than 6,000 others, many with kidney stones or kidney failure. This is an unconscionable toll and a shameful betrayal of families who relied on their government and corporate leaders to protect them.
The powdered formula has not been approved for import into the United States, so it poses no major threat here. But it is conceivable that limited amounts could have found their way into specialty markets.
The formula contains a dangerous chemical additive known as melamine — the same additive that sickened thousands of American dogs and cats last year. The best guess is that milk dealers eager to cut costs diluted their milk with water, then added the melamine to inflate the protein readings on a common industrial test.
It is increasingly clear that at least one major dairy company, the Sanlu Group, knew about the problem for months, and city officials in the company’s hometown knew about the problem for weeks and did nothing to warn the public or force a widespread recall. Critics speculate that local officials may have feared that any publicity would tarnish the Olympics. Only last week did the central government begin a vigorous response.
Since then, authorities have announced a well-publicized recall, arrested a number of suspects and fired several local officials, including the mayor. Regulators have revoked exemptions that previously allowed many top companies to police themselves. China alerted the World Health Organization to the contamination, a welcome contrast to its past inclination to hush problems up.
Investigators have now found melamine in infant milk powder produced by more than 20 companies, including some of China’s biggest dairy companies, and in other dairy products, suggesting a much wider problem.
While this time the tainted product was not imported into this country, the episode carries a serious warning for all Americans. Companies that buy goods from Chinese suppliers, and government regulators who oversee import safety, must be vigilant in policing Chinese companies. Even the biggest and supposed best can fail to meet safety standards that we take for granted.
Liquid milk now on tainted list; 6,200 babies sick
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... c&sponsor=
Aileen McCabe
Canwest News Service
Saturday, September 20, 2008
CREDIT: Reuters
Staff members of the local quality supervision bureau empty tainted milk power packets at a garbage dump in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.
China's dairy industry is in disarray after the baby milk powder scandal widened Friday to include liquid milk.
Tainted milk has sickened more than 6,200 babies so far.
Stores all over China were removing milk from their shelves and both Starbucks and KFC announced their supplies were affected.
Consumers across the country voted with their feet.
"Usually we sell several thousand kwai ($400-$500) worth of milk every day. Today we sold just a few cartons," said Chen Xiuzhen, a cashier at an Alldays convenience store in Shanghai where the dairy case was almost empty due to the recall.
And that was tough work, she said, because every customer wanted assurances it was safe.
"It is a lot of explanation work," Chen said.
The most recent traces of melamine that were found in liquid milk samples came from three of China's top dairy firms. On the mainland, the fresh milk involved was recalled immediately.
In Hong Kong, officials went further, recalling ice cream and yogurt, too. Singapore on Friday suspended the import and sale of all milk and milk products from China after tests found samples containing melamine.
Even the Yili group, a premier Chinese sponsor at the Beijing Olympics, has been found selling melamine-tainted milk and milk products.
Melamine is a chemical usually used in making plastics, but officials say milk producers have been adding it to illegally watered-down milk to boost protein levels -- and profits. The melamine is causing infants to develop kidney stones that block their urinary tracts and can cause renal failure.
In an effort to ease fears, officials are now saying the melamine poses little danger for adults. They maintain an adult weighing 60 kilograms or more can safely drink two litres of the tainted milk a day without encountering any problems.
Still, the milk crisis is threatening to ruin China's fledgling dairy industry. A summary of proceedings published after an emergency cabinet meeting earlier this week said ministers were told the whole sector is in disarray. The melamine scandal "reflects the chaotic condition in the industry and the loopholes in the supervision and management," it said.
Milk has not traditionally been an integral part of the Chinese diet, but changing tastes and habits and the trend towards urbanization have led to rapid growth in dairy consumption over the past two decades, particularly with liquid milk, ice cream and yogurt.
The industry now boasts 15 million milk cows. But many consumers are now wary of just about any "Made in China" dairy products.
On the Internet, meanwhile, there is growing anger at Beijing's attempts to control the scandal by restricting what the domestic media can report about it.
On a web forum, Fu Rui-Lon wrote: "The 'Sanlu poisonous milk scandal' attracted more and more attention until the Central Propaganda Department gave strict orders on 9/15 to stop all Chinese media to report and investigate this scandal.
In Canada, a national Chinese supermarket chain with stores in B.C., Alberta and Ontario has voluntarily recalled two yogurt drink brands from its shelves following the tainted-milk scandal.
An official with the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency said Friday that Vancouver-based T&T Supermarket pulled the yogurt drinks as a precaution because it has the same brand names included in the recall overseas.
The major chain has 16 locations across Canada including in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. No illnesses have been reported from the yogurt drinks.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
****
September 20, 2008
Editorial
China’s Baby Formula Scandal
We had been assured by Chinese authorities that their regulators and manufacturers were cracking down on the negligent procedures and criminal acts that have produced lead-laced toys and poisoned pet food, toothpaste and other dangerous goods. But a new scandal involving contaminated baby formula is a frightening reminder that China still is not doing enough to ensure the safety of its products — and a reminder that American importers and regulators cannot let down their guard.
The tainted milk powder has killed several babies in China and injured more than 6,000 others, many with kidney stones or kidney failure. This is an unconscionable toll and a shameful betrayal of families who relied on their government and corporate leaders to protect them.
The powdered formula has not been approved for import into the United States, so it poses no major threat here. But it is conceivable that limited amounts could have found their way into specialty markets.
The formula contains a dangerous chemical additive known as melamine — the same additive that sickened thousands of American dogs and cats last year. The best guess is that milk dealers eager to cut costs diluted their milk with water, then added the melamine to inflate the protein readings on a common industrial test.
It is increasingly clear that at least one major dairy company, the Sanlu Group, knew about the problem for months, and city officials in the company’s hometown knew about the problem for weeks and did nothing to warn the public or force a widespread recall. Critics speculate that local officials may have feared that any publicity would tarnish the Olympics. Only last week did the central government begin a vigorous response.
Since then, authorities have announced a well-publicized recall, arrested a number of suspects and fired several local officials, including the mayor. Regulators have revoked exemptions that previously allowed many top companies to police themselves. China alerted the World Health Organization to the contamination, a welcome contrast to its past inclination to hush problems up.
Investigators have now found melamine in infant milk powder produced by more than 20 companies, including some of China’s biggest dairy companies, and in other dairy products, suggesting a much wider problem.
While this time the tainted product was not imported into this country, the episode carries a serious warning for all Americans. Companies that buy goods from Chinese suppliers, and government regulators who oversee import safety, must be vigilant in policing Chinese companies. Even the biggest and supposed best can fail to meet safety standards that we take for granted.
There is a video and a multimedia presentation linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 21, 2008
Bombing at Hotel in Pakistan Kills at Least 40
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A huge truck bomb exploded at the entrance to the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday evening, killing at least 40 people and wounding at least 250, the police said.
The blast, one of the worst acts of terrorism in Pakistan’s history, went off just a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where all the leaders of government were dining after the president’s address to Parliament.
The toll was expected to grow because of reports that people had been trapped inside the six-story hotel, which has been a favorite meeting spot of both foreigners and well-connected Pakistanis in the heart of the capital. The building was quickly engulfed in flames and continued to burn for hours Saturday night.
The bomb left a vast crater, 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep, at the security barrier to the hotel. Witnesses said security guards were buried under a mound of rubble. Cars across the street from the hotel were mangled, and trees on the street were charred and stripped of their branches. The blast shattered windows in buildings hundreds of yards away.
Witnesses said they dragged dozens of bodies from the lobby of the hotel and an adjacent parking lot, including those of a number of foreigners. Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the State Department, issued a statement saying at least one American citizen was killed and several others were injured.
The bombing was the deadliest to take place in the well-guarded capital and may have been timed for the day that President Asif Ali Zardari made his first address to Parliament since his election two weeks ago. Mr. Zardari, whose wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in December by a suicide bomber, vowed in his speech to root out extremism and to stop terrorists from using Pakistani soil to attack other countries.
Both he and the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, condemned the attack and repeated their determination to deal with terrorism with an iron hand, the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, reported.
On national television late Sunday, Mr. Zardari said most of the victims had been security guards at the entrance to the hotel. “These are not the acts of a Muslim,” he said. “We will get rid of this terrorism cancer.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But Pakistani analysts said the bombing may have been in retaliation for recent army operations that have reportedly killed scores of militants in the tribal area of Bajaur, near the border with Afghanistan, and the adjacent area of Swat.
An American intelligence official said the attack “bears all the hallmarks of a terrorist operation carried out by Al Qaeda or its associates.”
The tribal areas have become a safe haven for insurgents linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whose attacks on targets in Pakistan have become increasingly frequent and lethal. Coming after a bombing this year at another gathering spot for foreigners, the Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Marriott attack seemed intended to send a message to Washington and other allies of Pakistan.
Despite the tough talk by the president and prime minister, it was unclear what kind of response the government would mount. Pakistan has been in a state of political turmoil for months, and from the American perspective at least, the new civilian government has so far shown little interest in pursuing a campaign against the militants.
President Bush denounced the attack on Saturday. “I strongly condemn the terrorist bombing in Islamabad that targeted and killed many innocents,” he said.
The Islamabad Marriott has been attacked by militants at least twice in the past, including in a suicide attack in January 2007 that killed a policeman. A senior police official, Ashfaq Ahmed Khan, said initial reports suggested that an explosives-laden dump truck had been detonated near the entrance.
“The Marriott is an icon,” said Abdullah Riar, a former aide to Mrs. Bhutto. “It’s like the twin towers of Pakistan. It’s a symbolic place in the capital of the country, and now it has melted down.”
One wounded American who works at the embassy here said he was unlocking his car when the bomb exploded. The American, who gave only his first name, Chris, had injuries to his face, neck and shoulder, and was holding a bloody T-shirt to his face.
American Embassy personnel members at the scene said they had come to help American citizens caught in the blast.
Amjad Ali Khan, a guard on duty at a side entrance to the hotel, said that he had seen four to five bodies in the hotel parking lot and that he helped carry out 40 bodies from inside the hotel. He said they had been “in the lobby and in the restaurant and everywhere.”
“There were very few people injured,” he said. “They were all dead.”
When asked who he thought was responsible for the blast, he responded, “They are terrorists.”
The Interior Ministry had warned several days ago that it had information that four or five suicide bombers had been dispatched on missions around the country. The government enforced tight security during the president’s 3 p.m. address, posting Army Rangers and police officers in rings around the Parliament and government buildings.
The Marriott is nearby, but security may have been reduced after the speech and ahead of the evening meal, when Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan. The bomb exploded at 8 p.m., when many Pakistanis were inside the banquet hall at the back of the hotel.
Asmatullah Marvat, a paramedic for the Capital Development Authority, said rescue workers had taken 70 to 80 people to different hospitals in the city.
Hotel workers said that they had heard a loud explosion and that the east wing of the hotel was on fire. “I was inside the Marquee Hall,” said a man who identified himself as Kaleem. “It was iftar time. All of a sudden there was a massive explosion. The roofs collapsed, and we ran out the back.”
Zahid Ahmed, a businessman who rushed to the blast site from a nearby neighborhood, was standing near the wreckage of mangled cars across the road. “I saw dozens of casualties,” he said. “People were trying to help but it was such a depressing sight that I cannot describe it”, he added, with moist eyes and shaking his head.The Islamabad police asked the army to assist in the rescue work.
The F.B.I. offered to send special agents to help investigate, said a senior American official, who declined to be identified because of the nature of the matter. The F.B.I. is awaiting approval from the Pakistani government, the official said.
Reporting was contributed by Salman Masood from Islamabad, Jane Perlez from London and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/world ... ?th&emc=th
September 21, 2008
Bombing at Hotel in Pakistan Kills at Least 40
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A huge truck bomb exploded at the entrance to the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday evening, killing at least 40 people and wounding at least 250, the police said.
The blast, one of the worst acts of terrorism in Pakistan’s history, went off just a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where all the leaders of government were dining after the president’s address to Parliament.
The toll was expected to grow because of reports that people had been trapped inside the six-story hotel, which has been a favorite meeting spot of both foreigners and well-connected Pakistanis in the heart of the capital. The building was quickly engulfed in flames and continued to burn for hours Saturday night.
The bomb left a vast crater, 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep, at the security barrier to the hotel. Witnesses said security guards were buried under a mound of rubble. Cars across the street from the hotel were mangled, and trees on the street were charred and stripped of their branches. The blast shattered windows in buildings hundreds of yards away.
Witnesses said they dragged dozens of bodies from the lobby of the hotel and an adjacent parking lot, including those of a number of foreigners. Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the State Department, issued a statement saying at least one American citizen was killed and several others were injured.
The bombing was the deadliest to take place in the well-guarded capital and may have been timed for the day that President Asif Ali Zardari made his first address to Parliament since his election two weeks ago. Mr. Zardari, whose wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in December by a suicide bomber, vowed in his speech to root out extremism and to stop terrorists from using Pakistani soil to attack other countries.
Both he and the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, condemned the attack and repeated their determination to deal with terrorism with an iron hand, the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, reported.
On national television late Sunday, Mr. Zardari said most of the victims had been security guards at the entrance to the hotel. “These are not the acts of a Muslim,” he said. “We will get rid of this terrorism cancer.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But Pakistani analysts said the bombing may have been in retaliation for recent army operations that have reportedly killed scores of militants in the tribal area of Bajaur, near the border with Afghanistan, and the adjacent area of Swat.
An American intelligence official said the attack “bears all the hallmarks of a terrorist operation carried out by Al Qaeda or its associates.”
The tribal areas have become a safe haven for insurgents linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whose attacks on targets in Pakistan have become increasingly frequent and lethal. Coming after a bombing this year at another gathering spot for foreigners, the Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Marriott attack seemed intended to send a message to Washington and other allies of Pakistan.
Despite the tough talk by the president and prime minister, it was unclear what kind of response the government would mount. Pakistan has been in a state of political turmoil for months, and from the American perspective at least, the new civilian government has so far shown little interest in pursuing a campaign against the militants.
President Bush denounced the attack on Saturday. “I strongly condemn the terrorist bombing in Islamabad that targeted and killed many innocents,” he said.
The Islamabad Marriott has been attacked by militants at least twice in the past, including in a suicide attack in January 2007 that killed a policeman. A senior police official, Ashfaq Ahmed Khan, said initial reports suggested that an explosives-laden dump truck had been detonated near the entrance.
“The Marriott is an icon,” said Abdullah Riar, a former aide to Mrs. Bhutto. “It’s like the twin towers of Pakistan. It’s a symbolic place in the capital of the country, and now it has melted down.”
One wounded American who works at the embassy here said he was unlocking his car when the bomb exploded. The American, who gave only his first name, Chris, had injuries to his face, neck and shoulder, and was holding a bloody T-shirt to his face.
American Embassy personnel members at the scene said they had come to help American citizens caught in the blast.
Amjad Ali Khan, a guard on duty at a side entrance to the hotel, said that he had seen four to five bodies in the hotel parking lot and that he helped carry out 40 bodies from inside the hotel. He said they had been “in the lobby and in the restaurant and everywhere.”
“There were very few people injured,” he said. “They were all dead.”
When asked who he thought was responsible for the blast, he responded, “They are terrorists.”
The Interior Ministry had warned several days ago that it had information that four or five suicide bombers had been dispatched on missions around the country. The government enforced tight security during the president’s 3 p.m. address, posting Army Rangers and police officers in rings around the Parliament and government buildings.
The Marriott is nearby, but security may have been reduced after the speech and ahead of the evening meal, when Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan. The bomb exploded at 8 p.m., when many Pakistanis were inside the banquet hall at the back of the hotel.
Asmatullah Marvat, a paramedic for the Capital Development Authority, said rescue workers had taken 70 to 80 people to different hospitals in the city.
Hotel workers said that they had heard a loud explosion and that the east wing of the hotel was on fire. “I was inside the Marquee Hall,” said a man who identified himself as Kaleem. “It was iftar time. All of a sudden there was a massive explosion. The roofs collapsed, and we ran out the back.”
Zahid Ahmed, a businessman who rushed to the blast site from a nearby neighborhood, was standing near the wreckage of mangled cars across the road. “I saw dozens of casualties,” he said. “People were trying to help but it was such a depressing sight that I cannot describe it”, he added, with moist eyes and shaking his head.The Islamabad police asked the army to assist in the rescue work.
The F.B.I. offered to send special agents to help investigate, said a senior American official, who declined to be identified because of the nature of the matter. The F.B.I. is awaiting approval from the Pakistani government, the official said.
Reporting was contributed by Salman Masood from Islamabad, Jane Perlez from London and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
India spawning millionaires at fastest rate
SALILPANCHAL
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE MUMBAI
India is minting new millionaires at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world, buoyed by a fast-growing economy, according to a new study.
There were an estimated 123,000 millionaires in India at the end of 2007 — 22.7 per cent more than in the previous 12 months, said the Asia-Pacific Wealth Report, compiled by U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and consultants Capgemini.
"Despite dislocations in developed markets, the number of high net worth individuals in India grew at a faster rate than the global average," said Pradeep Dokania, head of Global Wealth Management for DSP Merrill Lynch.
"Domestic demand and Asia's appetite for commodities continue to drive wealth accumulation in India," he said.
China was the second in the millionaire stakes. It had a millionaire population growth of 20.3 per cent in the same period followed by South Korea with 18.9 per cent.
The figures, released late Thursday, assessed the wealth of so-called "high net-worth individuals" (HNWIs) as people with more than one million dollars in net assets — excluding primary residences.
"In 2007, the standout markets in the Asia-Pacific region were China and India, with the number of wealthy individuals, and their overall level of wealth, growing at a faster rate than the global averages," the report said.
India's economy grew by nine per cent in the financial year to March 2008 while China's economy expanded by 11.9 per cent last year, well ahead of other industrialized countries who are feeling the effects of global market turmoil. But growth is expected to slow this year in both countries, albeit to still strong rates.
In India, the country's economy, which has drawn billions of dollars in foreign investment, has been losing steam as the central bank has aggressively raised interest rates to curb inflation now at 13-year highs.
Economic growth for the first quarter ending June slowed to 7.9 per cent, the weakest in three-and-a-half years.
India's stock markets grew by 47.1 per cent in 2007, but the benchmark Sensex is down more than 33 per cent this year. China meanwhile has seen growth slow to 10.1 per cent in the second quarter of this year.
Still, India's millionaire wealth trails behind China and Japan, the study shows, despite Indian tycoons like Mukesh and Anil Ambani who regularly feature on the Forbes magazine billionaire list.
India's millionaires have a combined wealth of 454 billion dollars, compared with 2.18 trillion dollars in China and 3.9 trillion dollars in Japan.
China and Japan account for 62.4 per cent of Asia's millionaire wealth, while India's share is just 4.6 per cent But the report added: "Although the number of emerging-HNWIs in China and India is still relatively small, we expect that within 10 years" it will surpass the mature markets."
Calgary Herald
SALILPANCHAL
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE MUMBAI
India is minting new millionaires at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world, buoyed by a fast-growing economy, according to a new study.
There were an estimated 123,000 millionaires in India at the end of 2007 — 22.7 per cent more than in the previous 12 months, said the Asia-Pacific Wealth Report, compiled by U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch and consultants Capgemini.
"Despite dislocations in developed markets, the number of high net worth individuals in India grew at a faster rate than the global average," said Pradeep Dokania, head of Global Wealth Management for DSP Merrill Lynch.
"Domestic demand and Asia's appetite for commodities continue to drive wealth accumulation in India," he said.
China was the second in the millionaire stakes. It had a millionaire population growth of 20.3 per cent in the same period followed by South Korea with 18.9 per cent.
The figures, released late Thursday, assessed the wealth of so-called "high net-worth individuals" (HNWIs) as people with more than one million dollars in net assets — excluding primary residences.
"In 2007, the standout markets in the Asia-Pacific region were China and India, with the number of wealthy individuals, and their overall level of wealth, growing at a faster rate than the global averages," the report said.
India's economy grew by nine per cent in the financial year to March 2008 while China's economy expanded by 11.9 per cent last year, well ahead of other industrialized countries who are feeling the effects of global market turmoil. But growth is expected to slow this year in both countries, albeit to still strong rates.
In India, the country's economy, which has drawn billions of dollars in foreign investment, has been losing steam as the central bank has aggressively raised interest rates to curb inflation now at 13-year highs.
Economic growth for the first quarter ending June slowed to 7.9 per cent, the weakest in three-and-a-half years.
India's stock markets grew by 47.1 per cent in 2007, but the benchmark Sensex is down more than 33 per cent this year. China meanwhile has seen growth slow to 10.1 per cent in the second quarter of this year.
Still, India's millionaire wealth trails behind China and Japan, the study shows, despite Indian tycoons like Mukesh and Anil Ambani who regularly feature on the Forbes magazine billionaire list.
India's millionaires have a combined wealth of 454 billion dollars, compared with 2.18 trillion dollars in China and 3.9 trillion dollars in Japan.
China and Japan account for 62.4 per cent of Asia's millionaire wealth, while India's share is just 4.6 per cent But the report added: "Although the number of emerging-HNWIs in China and India is still relatively small, we expect that within 10 years" it will surpass the mature markets."
Calgary Herald
One small step puts China in elite space-walk club
Experimental suit key to Chinese space station plans
Aileen McCabe
Canwest News Service
Sunday, September 28, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 3&sponsor=
CREDIT: STR, AFP-Getty Images
Chinese taikonaut Zhai Zhigang waves to the camera as he starts his walk through space on Saturday.
China left its mark in space history Saturday, successfully turbocharging its space program into an orbit that could see a Chinese man walk on the moon before the U.S. has a chance to get back there in 2020.
Taikonaut Zhai Zhigang spent almost 20 minutes outside the Shenzhou Vll's orbital capsule and exuberantly waved the red flag of the People's Republic of China in space for the first time.
As he exited the craft his voice could be clearly heard, broadcast into the command centre in Beijing where a solemn Chinese President Hu Jintao was on hand to watch the historic walk.
"I am feeling good," Zhai said.
He waved at the camera and said he wanted to send greetings to everyone in China and around the world. "People of my country have faith in me and my team and we will finish this mission."
His every move outside the capsule was caught by cameras and beamed back for live broadcast across China.
Zhai wore the Chinese-designed Feitian spacesuit and gave it the ultimate test. The 120-kilogram, $4.4-million suit that took the astronaut 12 hours to assemble inside the space capsule appeared to live up to expectations as Zhai performed small experiments designed to measure its flexibility outside the capsule.
Waiting inside, just in case, was astronaut Liu Boming, dressed in a Russian Orlan suit that has proven its ability to keep a man safe in space.
His head was clearly visible above the hatch at one point, but he did not venture further from his perch. Still, some experts immediately said he may have come out far enough for this to be technically considered a two-man walk.
The Feitian suit is key to China's plans to develop a space-docking station and laboratory, which will allow it to carry out large-scale experiments in space.
Shenzhou Vll has been successfully orbiting 343 kilometres above Earth every 90 minutes since it blasted off from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest Gansu province on Thursday night. It was in its 29th orbit when Zhai made his historic walk.
China sent its first man into space in 2003. Two more went up in 2005 and the trio now orbiting are on the country's third manned mission.
When Zhai stepped out of the capsule, he confirmed China's membership in the world's most exclusive club: only Russia and the United States have the technology to allow their astronauts to walk in space.
On Friday, Zhang Bainan, the chief designer of the Shenzhou series of spacecraft, said beginning with the Shenzhou Vlll, China will start mass production of its space capsules so it can establish a shuttle program to supply the space station it expects to develop.
"The mass production would also allow intensive launch(es) in a short period of time," he told Xinhua, China's official news agency.
Zhang said he expected the new generation craft to support three astronauts for seven days in space and he predicted other countries will want to piggyback on China's achievements by sending cargo and astronauts on its flights.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Experimental suit key to Chinese space station plans
Aileen McCabe
Canwest News Service
Sunday, September 28, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 3&sponsor=
CREDIT: STR, AFP-Getty Images
Chinese taikonaut Zhai Zhigang waves to the camera as he starts his walk through space on Saturday.
China left its mark in space history Saturday, successfully turbocharging its space program into an orbit that could see a Chinese man walk on the moon before the U.S. has a chance to get back there in 2020.
Taikonaut Zhai Zhigang spent almost 20 minutes outside the Shenzhou Vll's orbital capsule and exuberantly waved the red flag of the People's Republic of China in space for the first time.
As he exited the craft his voice could be clearly heard, broadcast into the command centre in Beijing where a solemn Chinese President Hu Jintao was on hand to watch the historic walk.
"I am feeling good," Zhai said.
He waved at the camera and said he wanted to send greetings to everyone in China and around the world. "People of my country have faith in me and my team and we will finish this mission."
His every move outside the capsule was caught by cameras and beamed back for live broadcast across China.
Zhai wore the Chinese-designed Feitian spacesuit and gave it the ultimate test. The 120-kilogram, $4.4-million suit that took the astronaut 12 hours to assemble inside the space capsule appeared to live up to expectations as Zhai performed small experiments designed to measure its flexibility outside the capsule.
Waiting inside, just in case, was astronaut Liu Boming, dressed in a Russian Orlan suit that has proven its ability to keep a man safe in space.
His head was clearly visible above the hatch at one point, but he did not venture further from his perch. Still, some experts immediately said he may have come out far enough for this to be technically considered a two-man walk.
The Feitian suit is key to China's plans to develop a space-docking station and laboratory, which will allow it to carry out large-scale experiments in space.
Shenzhou Vll has been successfully orbiting 343 kilometres above Earth every 90 minutes since it blasted off from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwest Gansu province on Thursday night. It was in its 29th orbit when Zhai made his historic walk.
China sent its first man into space in 2003. Two more went up in 2005 and the trio now orbiting are on the country's third manned mission.
When Zhai stepped out of the capsule, he confirmed China's membership in the world's most exclusive club: only Russia and the United States have the technology to allow their astronauts to walk in space.
On Friday, Zhang Bainan, the chief designer of the Shenzhou series of spacecraft, said beginning with the Shenzhou Vlll, China will start mass production of its space capsules so it can establish a shuttle program to supply the space station it expects to develop.
"The mass production would also allow intensive launch(es) in a short period of time," he told Xinhua, China's official news agency.
Zhang said he expected the new generation craft to support three astronauts for seven days in space and he predicted other countries will want to piggyback on China's achievements by sending cargo and astronauts on its flights.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 3, 2008
Confronting Taliban, Pakistan Finds Itself at War
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorstep.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into Pakistan’s tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in Afghanistan.
Many others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members from the United Nations refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
No reliable casualty figures are available. But the International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
“This is now a war zone,” said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by Special Operations forces in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
But the army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the Marriott Hotel bombing on Sept. 20, which have generated fears among the political, business and diplomatic elite that the country is teetering.
Fighting on Three Fronts
In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing.
“Swat is a place of hell,” said Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial government who has taken refuge in Peshawar. Mr. Khan said he was so afraid that he had not been to his house in Swat for a month.
At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The new president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, spoke in New York during a visit to the United Nations General Assembly, about how the fight against terrorism was Pakistan’s war, not America’s.
But even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness, there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the fighting. Public opinion has soured on Pakistan’s alliance with the United States and has strongly opposed military campaigns that inflict heavy civilian casualties.
Pakistani law enforcement officials and residents of Bajaur and Swat say there have been many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an estimate of those killed.
Hanging in the balance in the fighting is the allegiance of the civilians who have seen their homes wrecked, their cattle and crops abandoned, and their loved ones killed and wounded.
Pakistani Army commanders have said that in order to put down the Taliban, the government must win the hearts and minds of the Bajaur tribesmen.
Losing Hearts and Minds
But in interviews in the camps, and in villages around Peshawar where the displaced are bunking with relatives, many of the people of Bajaur say they are fed up with both sides of the conflict.
In the Red Cross hospital ward, two young brothers, Haseen Ullah, 5, and Shakir Ullah, 8, lay immobile on their hospital beds, their limbs tightly bound in white bandages covering what Dr. Daniel Brechbuhler, a Red Cross surgeon, said were shrapnel wounds.
The father of the two wounded boys, Hajji Sher Zaman, a relatively well-to-do used-car dealer in Bajaur, said he had no patience with the Taliban.
But Mr. Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone responsible for the killing and wounding of civilians.
“In Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been killed,” he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was “full of the rotten smell of dead animals.”
“Why not target the real people, the administration knows where they are,” Mr. Zaman said.
In another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm, his right one had been amputated. An army helicopter had circled his family’s pickup truck as they were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.
An Insurgent Sanctuary
At a briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday, the military said it believed that Fakir Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in Bajaur, had taken sanctuary in the neighboring Mohmand district. Another important commander, an Afghan Taliban, Qari Ziaur Rehman, had moved back to Afghanistan, it said.
From their side of the fighting in Bajaur, the Taliban have mounted a brutal show of intimidation, aided by money and deep support from across the border in Afghanistan and Mohmand, according to interviews with the displaced and with law enforcement and military officials.
Recently, the Taliban leader, Mr. Mohammed, stormed into a gathering of tribal leaders, arriving in a convoy of 20 vehicles, said Habib-ur Rehman, a trader from Bajaur who now lives in a camp for the displaced in Timergara in the district of Dir, just outside Bajaur.
Mr. Mohammed, who is described by the army as one of the most skilled Taliban tacticians, told the tribesmen, “I’m here to get you to stop the meeting. If you don’t stop, you will have a coffin over your heads,’ ” Mr. Rehman recalled.
The Taliban were well financed, some of the displaced tribesmen said.
In Koz Cinari, in Mohmand, the Taliban gathered nightly with a fleet of up to 100 double-cabin pickup trucks, according to a resident of Koz Cinari who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The vehicles were carefully caked in mud for camouflage against possible sightings from government planes, with only a patch of clear glass in front for the driver. The convoys then crossed into Bajaur with men and weapons, the resident said.
Foreign languages pierced the nighttime air as the vehicles were prepared, the resident said.
According to the military officials at the briefing on Monday, many of the Taliban fighters come from Central Asia.
In Swat, the Pakistani Army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months, and still the Taliban hold the upper hand, according to accounts from people who have fled the area.
Reports of Taliban terrorism are widespread.
In one case, scores of Taliban fighters confronted Iqbal Ahmed Khan, the brother of Waqar Khan, a member of the provincial assembly. The fighters ordered Mr. Khan, who was with two of his sons, to choose the son he wanted killed, said the president of the Awami National Party, Senator Asfandyar Wali.
After Mr. Khan was humiliated into choosing one son, the Taliban killed both boys, Mr. Khan and seven servants, Mr. Wali said.
On Thursday a suicide bomber attacked Mr. Wali’s home, killing four people and narrowly missing Mr. Wali, one of the best-known politicians in North-West Frontier Province and a national figure.
Life in a Battle Zone
Many residents of Swat say they are exasperated by the army-imposed round-the-clock curfew that keeps them indoors listening to the scream of jets and the thud of artillery.
To increase the misery, the Taliban blew up the power grid last week, and when protesters gathered in the main street of Mingora, the police fired on them, killing six people.
More than 140 girls schools have been destroyed by the Taliban in the last several months.
In a typical technique to raise funds, the militants ordered the shopkeepers in the mall in the town of Matta to stop paying rent to the landlord and pay the militants instead.
“There is no light, no gas, no water, no food,” Mr. Khan said.
Despite all the distress of the civilians, “only two Taliban commanders have been killed,” he said. “The army has its strategy, but they don’t explain.”
The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the region as lashkars.
They have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in Pakistan’s tribal society, but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.
Forming Tribal Armies
In Salarzai, in the northern corner of Bajaur, a local private army has attracted several thousand anti-Taliban fighters, said Jalal-Uddin Khan, a tribal leader.
But whether the fervor of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the Taliban is an open question.
In other places, like Dir, just outside Bajaur, these private armies have pledged to keep both the Pakistani Army and the Taliban from entering their territory.
“Where the army comes, the Taliban come,” said Sher Bahadar Khan, a tribal leader from Upper Dir. His community had organized a militia and persuaded the army not to put up checkpoints. The army was of little comfort because when the Taliban killed civilians, soldiers stood by as a “silent spectator,” he said.
Closer to Peshawar, in the village of Shabqadar, where the Taliban have held sway for months, the local police organized civilians to join them in a display of force against the militants.
The Taliban had terrorized women who did not wear the burqa, and killed men they deemed as “pimps” and threw their bodies in the river.
The police chief of North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, said he had encouraged the new police chief in Shabqadar to organize a “popular movement.”
Last week, about 500 people, led by the local police chief, marched toward a fort controlled by the Taliban in Shabqadar, Mr. Khan said.
A 15-hour battle ensued, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead and 28 wounded, the police chief said. On the government side, one man was killed, and five wounded, he said.
In revenge, the Taliban threatened to blow up Warsak Dam, the main water supply for Peshawar. But Mr. Khan said he was not deterred. He would not back down. “I told the governor: ‘Open many fronts. We are more than them.’ ”
****
India implements public smoking ban
Law infringes on individual rights, tobacco firms say
Krittivas Mukherjee
Reuters
Friday, October 03, 2008
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/new ... 3312c5d38e
CREDIT: Rupak Chowdhuri, Reuters
India banned smoking in public places on Thursday. The ban, which includes all offices and restaurants, will hit an estimated 240 million tobacco users.
India banned smoking in public places on Thursday in an attempt to fight tobacco use blamed, directly or indirectly, for a fifth of all deaths in the world's third-largest consumer.
The ban, which includes all offices and restaurants, will hit its estimated 240 million tobacco users, who are likely to find their homes and cars among the last few places to light up.
The government cites the economic costs and the need to stem the loss of human lives but tobacco firms say the ban infringes on individual rights.
Everyone agrees, though, that implementing the ban could be a problem and much will depend on compliance rather than enforcement.
The ban includes schools and colleges, pubs and discotheques, hospitals and bus stops. Offenders will be fined $4.60.
"Don't wait for enforcing authorities to catch you," said Anbumani Ramadoss, India's health minister who has long championed a ban on tobacco, urging Bollywood actors not to encourage smoking by lighting up on screen.
Past attempts to ban spitting and urinating in public in India drew little success, and the impoverished and lawless northern state of Bihar has already expressed reservations about the practicalities of implementing the ban.
While rules limiting advertising, marketing and sales existed before, implementation was not very effective.
Not everyone is happy with the ban. Many say a lack of smoking rooms means they would be deprived of a stress-busting puff in offices and other public places.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Confronting Taliban, Pakistan Finds Itself at War
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorstep.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into Pakistan’s tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in Afghanistan.
Many others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members from the United Nations refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
No reliable casualty figures are available. But the International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
“This is now a war zone,” said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by Special Operations forces in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
But the army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the Marriott Hotel bombing on Sept. 20, which have generated fears among the political, business and diplomatic elite that the country is teetering.
Fighting on Three Fronts
In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing.
“Swat is a place of hell,” said Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial government who has taken refuge in Peshawar. Mr. Khan said he was so afraid that he had not been to his house in Swat for a month.
At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The new president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, spoke in New York during a visit to the United Nations General Assembly, about how the fight against terrorism was Pakistan’s war, not America’s.
But even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness, there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the fighting. Public opinion has soured on Pakistan’s alliance with the United States and has strongly opposed military campaigns that inflict heavy civilian casualties.
Pakistani law enforcement officials and residents of Bajaur and Swat say there have been many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an estimate of those killed.
Hanging in the balance in the fighting is the allegiance of the civilians who have seen their homes wrecked, their cattle and crops abandoned, and their loved ones killed and wounded.
Pakistani Army commanders have said that in order to put down the Taliban, the government must win the hearts and minds of the Bajaur tribesmen.
Losing Hearts and Minds
But in interviews in the camps, and in villages around Peshawar where the displaced are bunking with relatives, many of the people of Bajaur say they are fed up with both sides of the conflict.
In the Red Cross hospital ward, two young brothers, Haseen Ullah, 5, and Shakir Ullah, 8, lay immobile on their hospital beds, their limbs tightly bound in white bandages covering what Dr. Daniel Brechbuhler, a Red Cross surgeon, said were shrapnel wounds.
The father of the two wounded boys, Hajji Sher Zaman, a relatively well-to-do used-car dealer in Bajaur, said he had no patience with the Taliban.
But Mr. Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone responsible for the killing and wounding of civilians.
“In Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been killed,” he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was “full of the rotten smell of dead animals.”
“Why not target the real people, the administration knows where they are,” Mr. Zaman said.
In another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm, his right one had been amputated. An army helicopter had circled his family’s pickup truck as they were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.
An Insurgent Sanctuary
At a briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday, the military said it believed that Fakir Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in Bajaur, had taken sanctuary in the neighboring Mohmand district. Another important commander, an Afghan Taliban, Qari Ziaur Rehman, had moved back to Afghanistan, it said.
From their side of the fighting in Bajaur, the Taliban have mounted a brutal show of intimidation, aided by money and deep support from across the border in Afghanistan and Mohmand, according to interviews with the displaced and with law enforcement and military officials.
Recently, the Taliban leader, Mr. Mohammed, stormed into a gathering of tribal leaders, arriving in a convoy of 20 vehicles, said Habib-ur Rehman, a trader from Bajaur who now lives in a camp for the displaced in Timergara in the district of Dir, just outside Bajaur.
Mr. Mohammed, who is described by the army as one of the most skilled Taliban tacticians, told the tribesmen, “I’m here to get you to stop the meeting. If you don’t stop, you will have a coffin over your heads,’ ” Mr. Rehman recalled.
The Taliban were well financed, some of the displaced tribesmen said.
In Koz Cinari, in Mohmand, the Taliban gathered nightly with a fleet of up to 100 double-cabin pickup trucks, according to a resident of Koz Cinari who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The vehicles were carefully caked in mud for camouflage against possible sightings from government planes, with only a patch of clear glass in front for the driver. The convoys then crossed into Bajaur with men and weapons, the resident said.
Foreign languages pierced the nighttime air as the vehicles were prepared, the resident said.
According to the military officials at the briefing on Monday, many of the Taliban fighters come from Central Asia.
In Swat, the Pakistani Army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months, and still the Taliban hold the upper hand, according to accounts from people who have fled the area.
Reports of Taliban terrorism are widespread.
In one case, scores of Taliban fighters confronted Iqbal Ahmed Khan, the brother of Waqar Khan, a member of the provincial assembly. The fighters ordered Mr. Khan, who was with two of his sons, to choose the son he wanted killed, said the president of the Awami National Party, Senator Asfandyar Wali.
After Mr. Khan was humiliated into choosing one son, the Taliban killed both boys, Mr. Khan and seven servants, Mr. Wali said.
On Thursday a suicide bomber attacked Mr. Wali’s home, killing four people and narrowly missing Mr. Wali, one of the best-known politicians in North-West Frontier Province and a national figure.
Life in a Battle Zone
Many residents of Swat say they are exasperated by the army-imposed round-the-clock curfew that keeps them indoors listening to the scream of jets and the thud of artillery.
To increase the misery, the Taliban blew up the power grid last week, and when protesters gathered in the main street of Mingora, the police fired on them, killing six people.
More than 140 girls schools have been destroyed by the Taliban in the last several months.
In a typical technique to raise funds, the militants ordered the shopkeepers in the mall in the town of Matta to stop paying rent to the landlord and pay the militants instead.
“There is no light, no gas, no water, no food,” Mr. Khan said.
Despite all the distress of the civilians, “only two Taliban commanders have been killed,” he said. “The army has its strategy, but they don’t explain.”
The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the region as lashkars.
They have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in Pakistan’s tribal society, but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.
Forming Tribal Armies
In Salarzai, in the northern corner of Bajaur, a local private army has attracted several thousand anti-Taliban fighters, said Jalal-Uddin Khan, a tribal leader.
But whether the fervor of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the Taliban is an open question.
In other places, like Dir, just outside Bajaur, these private armies have pledged to keep both the Pakistani Army and the Taliban from entering their territory.
“Where the army comes, the Taliban come,” said Sher Bahadar Khan, a tribal leader from Upper Dir. His community had organized a militia and persuaded the army not to put up checkpoints. The army was of little comfort because when the Taliban killed civilians, soldiers stood by as a “silent spectator,” he said.
Closer to Peshawar, in the village of Shabqadar, where the Taliban have held sway for months, the local police organized civilians to join them in a display of force against the militants.
The Taliban had terrorized women who did not wear the burqa, and killed men they deemed as “pimps” and threw their bodies in the river.
The police chief of North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, said he had encouraged the new police chief in Shabqadar to organize a “popular movement.”
Last week, about 500 people, led by the local police chief, marched toward a fort controlled by the Taliban in Shabqadar, Mr. Khan said.
A 15-hour battle ensued, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead and 28 wounded, the police chief said. On the government side, one man was killed, and five wounded, he said.
In revenge, the Taliban threatened to blow up Warsak Dam, the main water supply for Peshawar. But Mr. Khan said he was not deterred. He would not back down. “I told the governor: ‘Open many fronts. We are more than them.’ ”
****
India implements public smoking ban
Law infringes on individual rights, tobacco firms say
Krittivas Mukherjee
Reuters
Friday, October 03, 2008
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/new ... 3312c5d38e
CREDIT: Rupak Chowdhuri, Reuters
India banned smoking in public places on Thursday. The ban, which includes all offices and restaurants, will hit an estimated 240 million tobacco users.
India banned smoking in public places on Thursday in an attempt to fight tobacco use blamed, directly or indirectly, for a fifth of all deaths in the world's third-largest consumer.
The ban, which includes all offices and restaurants, will hit its estimated 240 million tobacco users, who are likely to find their homes and cars among the last few places to light up.
The government cites the economic costs and the need to stem the loss of human lives but tobacco firms say the ban infringes on individual rights.
Everyone agrees, though, that implementing the ban could be a problem and much will depend on compliance rather than enforcement.
The ban includes schools and colleges, pubs and discotheques, hospitals and bus stops. Offenders will be fined $4.60.
"Don't wait for enforcing authorities to catch you," said Anbumani Ramadoss, India's health minister who has long championed a ban on tobacco, urging Bollywood actors not to encourage smoking by lighting up on screen.
Past attempts to ban spitting and urinating in public in India drew little success, and the impoverished and lawless northern state of Bihar has already expressed reservations about the practicalities of implementing the ban.
While rules limiting advertising, marketing and sales existed before, implementation was not very effective.
Not everyone is happy with the ban. Many say a lack of smoking rooms means they would be deprived of a stress-busting puff in offices and other public places.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
October 17, 2008
Courts Compound Pain of China’s Tainted Milk
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — The first sign of trouble was powder in the baby’s urine. Then there was blood. By the time the parents took their son to the hospital, he had no urine at all.
Kidney stones were the problem, doctors told the parents. The baby died on May 1 in the hospital, just two weeks after the first symptoms appeared. His name was Yi Kaixuan. He was 6 months old.
The parents filed a lawsuit on Monday in the arid northwest province of Gansu, where the family lives, asking for compensation from Sanlu Group, the maker of the powdered baby formula that Kaixuan had been drinking. It seemed like a clear-cut liability case; since last month, Sanlu has been at the center of China’s biggest contaminated food crisis in years. But as in two other courts dealing with related lawsuits, judges have so far declined to hear the case.
Tainted infant formula is the latest in a long string of food and drug safety problems that have exposed corruption and inefficiency among China’s regulators. But the problem goes well beyond the inability of regulators to police a huge, dynamic economy. Companies that produce shoddy goods rarely face financial penalties from the legal system, run by the Communist Party.
Some lawyers and judges are making great efforts in China to establish the power of the courts. Still, courts often remain passive pawns in the party’s efforts to handle big disputes behind closed doors.
“I felt myself falling apart when he died, and my wife even avoids thinking about it now,” the baby’s father, Yi Yongsheng, 30, said by telephone from the city of Xian, where he works menial construction jobs to send money home. “I don’t place too much hope in the lawsuit. I just want to ask for justice.”
Chinese officials, under pressure to promote fast rates of economic growth and to enforce social stability, routinely favor producers over consumers. Product liability lawsuits remain difficult to file and harder still to win, especially if the company involved is state-owned or has close connections to the government.
Officials also view high-profile lawsuits as a potential political threat and go to great lengths to silence the plaintiffs rather than allowing the wheels of justice to turn. In the milk crisis, officials in several provinces have put pressure on many involved, including parents, lawyers and judges, to drop the issue, said legal scholars and lawyers who have volunteered to help the parents.
Western lawyers would probably have lined up to sue Sanlu. One of China’s largest milk companies, Sanlu, based in the city of Shijiazhuang, was the most prominent dairy producer found to sell milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical illegally added to watered-down milk to artificially increase the protein count and fool safety tests. At least four babies have died from complications resulting from kidney stones, and 53,000 children have been sickened. Senior government officials and company executives were fired after evidence emerged of a wide-ranging cover-up.
In China, Mr. Yi and his wife, who are seeking $152,000 from Sanlu, are among only a handful of Chinese who have filed a lawsuit against a dairy company. The plaintiffs are all individual families; lawyers say there is almost no chance that any judge would consider a class-action lawsuit because those are strongly discouraged in China.
More than 100 lawyers across the country put themselves on a list of volunteers willing to give legal advice to anxious parents, but local government officials have put pressure on some not to take on any cases, several lawyers said. At least two dozen have since removed themselves from the list.
“This will move further away from the legal system,” Zhang Xinbao, a law professor at People’s University of China, said of the milk crisis. “The legal system and mechanism we have can’t function in this case. This is what law experts are concerned about.”
“This is a product liability case that in a Western country would turn into a class-action lawsuit,” Professor Zhang said. In China, he said, “they don’t want to see so many people getting involved in one lawsuit. This might threaten social stability.”
Qian Weiqing, the head of the Dacheng Law Office in Beijing, said at a legal conference last week that the government, in continually suppressing such lawsuits, had “missed many opportunities to improve the system to deal with these problems, including perfecting the law enforcement system, the judicial system and the relief system.”
Government officials have told parents and lawyers in the milk cases that their complaints can be resolved through out-of-court compensation payments.
Local governments in Sichuan Province employed the same strategy with grieving parents whose children died in school collapses during the May 12 earthquake. Over the summer, the officials compensated the parents if they signed individual papers agreeing to drop demands for investigations into shoddy school construction. Most of the parents accepted the money, but many said they were furious that no one had been held responsible for the deaths of their children.
As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.
“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”
In the milk scandal, judges are trying to decide whether to accept three lawsuits that have been filed separately in the provinces of Gansu, Henan and Guangdong. The Gansu lawsuit is the only one to involve a dead child, Mr. Yi’s son. Courts in Henan have already rejected two other cases, said Chang Boyang, a volunteer lawyer in Henan representing parents whose 1-year-old son died in early September.
Lawyers in Henan, a poor backward province, have faced more harassment from local officials than lawyers elsewhere. At least 20 of the lawyers who have dropped off the volunteer list are from Henan. On Sept. 27, officials from the province’s judicial bureau, which administers the courts and legal licenses, met with lawyers to discourage them from taking the cases.
A working brief issued Oct. 7 by the national volunteer group said the officials had directly told the lawyers not to give any legal aid to the parents.
Mr. Chang said the pressure actually took a subtler form. Officials told the lawyers to report to the government if they decided to handle a milk case. The officials also reiterated rules mandating that the lawyers tell the government if they take any cases centered on incidents involving many people or delicate issues.
Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer, said officials from the Beijing lawyers association met with lawyers in the capital last month to discourage them from filing milk lawsuits, especially suits with plaintiffs from multiple provinces. The lawyers were told not to publish working briefs on the Internet. At the time, the volunteer lawyers had already gotten more than 1,200 phone calls from concerned parents.
Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.
The All China Lawyers Association, the country’s bar association, strongly discourages class-action lawsuits. In March 2006, the association put out a guiding opinion aimed at curbing cases involving 10 or more plaintiffs. There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus, said Jerome A. Cohen, a professor of law at New York University who specializes in the Chinese legal system.
On Oct. 10, a group of lawyers, law professors and a judge from the Supreme People’s Court held a conference at People’s University to discuss the milk scandal’s legal issues. The judge, Chen Xianjie, said China’s courts had little experience with class-action suits. “If the court accepts the Sanlu case as a collective lawsuit, consumers would end up with no legal protection,” he warned.
Judge Chen said it would be better for the parents’ complaints to be treated in the traditional manner. The government should handle them as an administrative issue and dole out compensation, he said. It has already agreed to pay medical bills, but has yet to offer more compensation.
Some Chinese have raised questions, though, about whether the government should be using taxpayers’ money to compensate for private companies’ mistakes.
Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research, and Jim Yardley contributed reporting.
Courts Compound Pain of China’s Tainted Milk
By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — The first sign of trouble was powder in the baby’s urine. Then there was blood. By the time the parents took their son to the hospital, he had no urine at all.
Kidney stones were the problem, doctors told the parents. The baby died on May 1 in the hospital, just two weeks after the first symptoms appeared. His name was Yi Kaixuan. He was 6 months old.
The parents filed a lawsuit on Monday in the arid northwest province of Gansu, where the family lives, asking for compensation from Sanlu Group, the maker of the powdered baby formula that Kaixuan had been drinking. It seemed like a clear-cut liability case; since last month, Sanlu has been at the center of China’s biggest contaminated food crisis in years. But as in two other courts dealing with related lawsuits, judges have so far declined to hear the case.
Tainted infant formula is the latest in a long string of food and drug safety problems that have exposed corruption and inefficiency among China’s regulators. But the problem goes well beyond the inability of regulators to police a huge, dynamic economy. Companies that produce shoddy goods rarely face financial penalties from the legal system, run by the Communist Party.
Some lawyers and judges are making great efforts in China to establish the power of the courts. Still, courts often remain passive pawns in the party’s efforts to handle big disputes behind closed doors.
“I felt myself falling apart when he died, and my wife even avoids thinking about it now,” the baby’s father, Yi Yongsheng, 30, said by telephone from the city of Xian, where he works menial construction jobs to send money home. “I don’t place too much hope in the lawsuit. I just want to ask for justice.”
Chinese officials, under pressure to promote fast rates of economic growth and to enforce social stability, routinely favor producers over consumers. Product liability lawsuits remain difficult to file and harder still to win, especially if the company involved is state-owned or has close connections to the government.
Officials also view high-profile lawsuits as a potential political threat and go to great lengths to silence the plaintiffs rather than allowing the wheels of justice to turn. In the milk crisis, officials in several provinces have put pressure on many involved, including parents, lawyers and judges, to drop the issue, said legal scholars and lawyers who have volunteered to help the parents.
Western lawyers would probably have lined up to sue Sanlu. One of China’s largest milk companies, Sanlu, based in the city of Shijiazhuang, was the most prominent dairy producer found to sell milk products tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical illegally added to watered-down milk to artificially increase the protein count and fool safety tests. At least four babies have died from complications resulting from kidney stones, and 53,000 children have been sickened. Senior government officials and company executives were fired after evidence emerged of a wide-ranging cover-up.
In China, Mr. Yi and his wife, who are seeking $152,000 from Sanlu, are among only a handful of Chinese who have filed a lawsuit against a dairy company. The plaintiffs are all individual families; lawyers say there is almost no chance that any judge would consider a class-action lawsuit because those are strongly discouraged in China.
More than 100 lawyers across the country put themselves on a list of volunteers willing to give legal advice to anxious parents, but local government officials have put pressure on some not to take on any cases, several lawyers said. At least two dozen have since removed themselves from the list.
“This will move further away from the legal system,” Zhang Xinbao, a law professor at People’s University of China, said of the milk crisis. “The legal system and mechanism we have can’t function in this case. This is what law experts are concerned about.”
“This is a product liability case that in a Western country would turn into a class-action lawsuit,” Professor Zhang said. In China, he said, “they don’t want to see so many people getting involved in one lawsuit. This might threaten social stability.”
Qian Weiqing, the head of the Dacheng Law Office in Beijing, said at a legal conference last week that the government, in continually suppressing such lawsuits, had “missed many opportunities to improve the system to deal with these problems, including perfecting the law enforcement system, the judicial system and the relief system.”
Government officials have told parents and lawyers in the milk cases that their complaints can be resolved through out-of-court compensation payments.
Local governments in Sichuan Province employed the same strategy with grieving parents whose children died in school collapses during the May 12 earthquake. Over the summer, the officials compensated the parents if they signed individual papers agreeing to drop demands for investigations into shoddy school construction. Most of the parents accepted the money, but many said they were furious that no one had been held responsible for the deaths of their children.
As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.
“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”
In the milk scandal, judges are trying to decide whether to accept three lawsuits that have been filed separately in the provinces of Gansu, Henan and Guangdong. The Gansu lawsuit is the only one to involve a dead child, Mr. Yi’s son. Courts in Henan have already rejected two other cases, said Chang Boyang, a volunteer lawyer in Henan representing parents whose 1-year-old son died in early September.
Lawyers in Henan, a poor backward province, have faced more harassment from local officials than lawyers elsewhere. At least 20 of the lawyers who have dropped off the volunteer list are from Henan. On Sept. 27, officials from the province’s judicial bureau, which administers the courts and legal licenses, met with lawyers to discourage them from taking the cases.
A working brief issued Oct. 7 by the national volunteer group said the officials had directly told the lawyers not to give any legal aid to the parents.
Mr. Chang said the pressure actually took a subtler form. Officials told the lawyers to report to the government if they decided to handle a milk case. The officials also reiterated rules mandating that the lawyers tell the government if they take any cases centered on incidents involving many people or delicate issues.
Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer, said officials from the Beijing lawyers association met with lawyers in the capital last month to discourage them from filing milk lawsuits, especially suits with plaintiffs from multiple provinces. The lawyers were told not to publish working briefs on the Internet. At the time, the volunteer lawyers had already gotten more than 1,200 phone calls from concerned parents.
Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.
The All China Lawyers Association, the country’s bar association, strongly discourages class-action lawsuits. In March 2006, the association put out a guiding opinion aimed at curbing cases involving 10 or more plaintiffs. There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus, said Jerome A. Cohen, a professor of law at New York University who specializes in the Chinese legal system.
On Oct. 10, a group of lawyers, law professors and a judge from the Supreme People’s Court held a conference at People’s University to discuss the milk scandal’s legal issues. The judge, Chen Xianjie, said China’s courts had little experience with class-action suits. “If the court accepts the Sanlu case as a collective lawsuit, consumers would end up with no legal protection,” he warned.
Judge Chen said it would be better for the parents’ complaints to be treated in the traditional manner. The government should handle them as an administrative issue and dole out compensation, he said. It has already agreed to pay medical bills, but has yet to offer more compensation.
Some Chinese have raised questions, though, about whether the government should be using taxpayers’ money to compensate for private companies’ mistakes.
Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research, and Jim Yardley contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/world ... ref=slogin
October 22, 2008
India Launches Unmanned Orbiter to Moon
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI — India launched its first unmanned spacecraft to orbit the moon early Wednesday, part of an effort to assert its power in space and claim some of the business opportunities there.
The Indian mission is scheduled to last two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.
The spacecraft will not land on the moon, though it is supposed to send a small “impactor” probe to the surface.
The launching of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called — roughly translated as Moon Craft-1 — comes about a year after China’s first moon mission.
Talk of a space race with China could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due to visit Beijing later in the week.
“China has gone earlier, but today we are trying to catch them, catch that gap, bridge the gap,” Bhaskar Narayan, a director at the Indian space agency, was quoted by Reuters as having said.
The first Indian lunar voyage is carrying two devices from NASA. One, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, will assess mineral composition of the moon from orbit. The other, the Mini-SAR, will look for ice deposits in the moon’s polar regions.
Chandrayaan-1 was launched from a research station in Sriharikota, a barrier island off the coast of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The moon mission, in addition to demonstrating technological capacity, can potentially yield commercial gains for India’s space program. India’s ability to put satellites into orbit has already resulted in lucrative deals; for example, Israel has sent up a satellite by means of an Indian launcher.
“It is proof of India’s technical capability in an advanced area of science,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired army general who is the director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies here. “India wants to be counted as one of the emerging players in Asia. Space is, of course, an important part of power projection.”
The mission is not without domestic critics. Bharat Karnad, a strategic affairs analyst who frequently finds fault with the Congress Party-led coalition government, called the mission a “grandiloquent” effort designed to catch up with a far more advanced Chinese space program. “It is kind of a prestige project the government has gotten into,” Mr. Karnad said. “This is misuse of resources that this country can ill afford at this point.”
John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
October 22, 2008
India Launches Unmanned Orbiter to Moon
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI — India launched its first unmanned spacecraft to orbit the moon early Wednesday, part of an effort to assert its power in space and claim some of the business opportunities there.
The Indian mission is scheduled to last two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.
The spacecraft will not land on the moon, though it is supposed to send a small “impactor” probe to the surface.
The launching of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called — roughly translated as Moon Craft-1 — comes about a year after China’s first moon mission.
Talk of a space race with China could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due to visit Beijing later in the week.
“China has gone earlier, but today we are trying to catch them, catch that gap, bridge the gap,” Bhaskar Narayan, a director at the Indian space agency, was quoted by Reuters as having said.
The first Indian lunar voyage is carrying two devices from NASA. One, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, will assess mineral composition of the moon from orbit. The other, the Mini-SAR, will look for ice deposits in the moon’s polar regions.
Chandrayaan-1 was launched from a research station in Sriharikota, a barrier island off the coast of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The moon mission, in addition to demonstrating technological capacity, can potentially yield commercial gains for India’s space program. India’s ability to put satellites into orbit has already resulted in lucrative deals; for example, Israel has sent up a satellite by means of an Indian launcher.
“It is proof of India’s technical capability in an advanced area of science,” said Dipankar Banerjee, a retired army general who is the director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies here. “India wants to be counted as one of the emerging players in Asia. Space is, of course, an important part of power projection.”
The mission is not without domestic critics. Bharat Karnad, a strategic affairs analyst who frequently finds fault with the Congress Party-led coalition government, called the mission a “grandiloquent” effort designed to catch up with a far more advanced Chinese space program. “It is kind of a prestige project the government has gotten into,” Mr. Karnad said. “This is misuse of resources that this country can ill afford at this point.”
John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
November 2, 2008
As Taliban Overwhelm Police, Pakistanis Hit Back
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
SHALBANDI, Pakistan — On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.
The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.
Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed their quarry. A video made on a cellphone showed the six militants lying in the dirt, blood oozing from their wounds.
The stand at Buner has entered the lore of Pakistan’s war against the militants as a dramatic example of ordinary citizens’ determination to draw a line against the militants.
But it says as much about the shortcomings of Pakistan’s increasingly overwhelmed police forces and the pell-mell nature of the efforts to stop the militants, who week by week seem to seep deeper into Pakistan from their tribal strongholds.
Since the events in Buner, the inspector general of the police in the North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, has encouraged citizens in other towns and villages in his realm to form posses of their own.
The hope is that determination itself will deter Taliban encroachment, building on the August victory with one phalanx after another of committed citizens.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/world ... nted=print
****
China punishes hospitals for sale of human organs
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 02, 2008
China's Health Ministry has penalized three hospitals for illegally selling human organs to foreigners, a local media report said on Saturday, citing a deputy health minister.
Huang Jiefu did not identify the hospitals or doctors involved in the illegal organ transplant cases or the penalties handed out, Caijing Magazine, an influential financial magazine, said.
Huang, who was addressing a national medical academic forum, warned that the licences of future offenders would be revoked, Caijing said.
Live organ transplants are allowed in China only among family members, but illegal organ vending is widely practised due to a shortage of organs, it said.
The penalties against the three hospitals were the first under China's guidelines for organ transplants, the magazine quoted Huang as saying. Official statistics show about 1.5 million people need organ transplants annually, but only 10,000 organs are available, it said.
Huang did not disclose the number of hospitals permitted to provide organ transplant services, but said the ministry would not issue additional licences this year due to a lack of organs.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
As Taliban Overwhelm Police, Pakistanis Hit Back
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
SHALBANDI, Pakistan — On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.
The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.
Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed their quarry. A video made on a cellphone showed the six militants lying in the dirt, blood oozing from their wounds.
The stand at Buner has entered the lore of Pakistan’s war against the militants as a dramatic example of ordinary citizens’ determination to draw a line against the militants.
But it says as much about the shortcomings of Pakistan’s increasingly overwhelmed police forces and the pell-mell nature of the efforts to stop the militants, who week by week seem to seep deeper into Pakistan from their tribal strongholds.
Since the events in Buner, the inspector general of the police in the North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, has encouraged citizens in other towns and villages in his realm to form posses of their own.
The hope is that determination itself will deter Taliban encroachment, building on the August victory with one phalanx after another of committed citizens.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/world ... nted=print
****
China punishes hospitals for sale of human organs
Calgary Herald
Sunday, November 02, 2008
China's Health Ministry has penalized three hospitals for illegally selling human organs to foreigners, a local media report said on Saturday, citing a deputy health minister.
Huang Jiefu did not identify the hospitals or doctors involved in the illegal organ transplant cases or the penalties handed out, Caijing Magazine, an influential financial magazine, said.
Huang, who was addressing a national medical academic forum, warned that the licences of future offenders would be revoked, Caijing said.
Live organ transplants are allowed in China only among family members, but illegal organ vending is widely practised due to a shortage of organs, it said.
The penalties against the three hospitals were the first under China's guidelines for organ transplants, the magazine quoted Huang as saying. Official statistics show about 1.5 million people need organ transplants annually, but only 10,000 organs are available, it said.
Huang did not disclose the number of hospitals permitted to provide organ transplant services, but said the ministry would not issue additional licences this year due to a lack of organs.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
November 10, 2008
China Unveils Sweeping Plan for Economy
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — China announced a huge economic stimulus plan on Sunday aimed at bolstering its weakening economy, a sweeping move that could also help fight the effects of the global slowdown.
At a time when major infrastructure projects are being put off around the world, China said it would spend an estimated $586 billion over the next two years — roughly 7 percent of its gross domestic product each year — to construct new railways, subways and airports and to rebuild communities devastated by an earthquake in the southwest in May.
The package, announced Sunday evening by the State Council, or cabinet, is the largest economic stimulus effort ever undertaken by the Chinese government.
“Over the past two months, the global financial crisis has been intensifying daily,” the State Council said in a statement. “In expanding investment, we must be fast and heavy-handed.”
The plan was unveiled as finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations met in São Paulo, Brazil, over the weekend.
It came less than a week before President Hu Jintao was scheduled to travel to Washington for a global economic summit meeting hosted by President Bush.
On Saturday, Mr. Hu spoke by telephone with President-elect Barack Obama about a variety of issues, including the global financial crisis and how their countries might cooperate to help resolve economic problems.
Asian markets welcomed news of the stimulus plan. The Japanese Nikkei index rose 5.6 percent in trading early Monday. Stocks in Hong Kong and Shanghai rallied strongly, jumping over 5 percent and lifting share prices that have been depressed for much of the year.
Although Beijing has indicated that it will focus on keeping its own economy on track, it is difficult to insulate any economy from a global downturn. After five years of growth in excess of 10 percent, China’s economy is beginning to weaken. Growth in exports and investment is slowing, consumer confidence is waning and stock and property markets are severely depressed.
The stimulus plan, though driven by domestic concerns, represents a fresh commitment by China to keep from adding to the economic and financial woes of the United States and Europe. It is also likely to cheer foreign investors in China’s economy by ensuring that the country remains a source of growth.
China’s package is not comparable to fiscal stimulus measures that are being discussed in Washington. In China, much of the capital for infrastructure improvements comes not from central and local governments but from state banks and state-owned companies that are encouraged to expand more rapidly.
The plan also differs from the $700 billion financial rescue package approved by Congress, which has helped strengthen bank balance sheets but did not directly mandate new lending or support specific investment projects in the United States.
China’s overall government spending remains relatively low as a percentage of economic output compared with the United States and Europe. Yet Beijing maintains far more control over investment trends than Washington does, so it has greater flexibility to increase investment to counter a sharp downturn.
It was unclear how Chinese officials arrived at the $586 billion figure or how much of the stimulus would be spending above what Beijing normally earmarks for infrastructure projects. Beijing said it was loosening credit and encouraging state-owned banks to lend as part of a more “proactive fiscal policy.”
The government said the stimulus would cover 10 areas, including low-income housing, electricity, water, rural infrastructure and projects aimed at environmental protection and technological innovation — all of which could incite consumer spending and bolster the economy. The State Council said the new spending would begin immediately, with $18 billion scheduled for the last quarter of this year.
State-driven investment projects of this kind have been a major impetus to Chinese growth throughout the 30 years of market-oriented reforms, a strong legacy of central planning.
The biggest players in many major Chinese industries — like steel, automobiles and energy — are state-owned companies, and government officials locally and nationally have a hand in deciding how much bank lending is steered to those sectors.
The investment numbers announced by China’s central government often include projects financed by a variety of sources, including state-backed entities and even foreign investors.
Beijing is struggling to cope with rapidly slowing economic growth. A downturn in investment and exports has led to factory closings in southern China, resulting in mass layoffs and even setting off sporadic protests by workers who have complained that owners disappeared without paying them their wages.
With many economists in China now projecting that growth in the fourth quarter of this year could be as low as 5.8 percent, and amid worries that the country’s economy could be walloped by the global financial crisis, Beijing is moving aggressively.
Analysts were expecting China to announce a big stimulus package, but they said they were surprised at its size. “That is much more aggressive than I expected,” said Frank Gong, an economist at J. P. Morgan who is based in Hong Kong. “That’s a lot of money to spend.”
Mr. Gong said that after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Beijing undertook a similar, but much smaller, stimulus package, earmarking huge sums to build the country’s highway and toll-road system, projects that helped keep the economy growing.
Arthur Kroeber, managing director at Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic research firm, said the government was concerned because people in China had suddenly pulled back on spending as a precautionary move because of worries about China’s suffering with the global economy.
“The government is sending a signal saying: ‘We’re going to spend in a big way,’ ” Mr. Kroeber said Sunday in a telephone interview. “This is designed to say to the market that people should not panic.”
Quake Hits Remote Area in China
BEIJING (AP) — A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck the remote northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai on Monday, the United States Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The quake struck at a depth of 6.2 miles, the agency said.
China’s far west is fairly earthquake-prone. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake on May 12 devastated parts of Sichuan Province, killing about 70,000 people and leaving millions homeless.
China Unveils Sweeping Plan for Economy
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — China announced a huge economic stimulus plan on Sunday aimed at bolstering its weakening economy, a sweeping move that could also help fight the effects of the global slowdown.
At a time when major infrastructure projects are being put off around the world, China said it would spend an estimated $586 billion over the next two years — roughly 7 percent of its gross domestic product each year — to construct new railways, subways and airports and to rebuild communities devastated by an earthquake in the southwest in May.
The package, announced Sunday evening by the State Council, or cabinet, is the largest economic stimulus effort ever undertaken by the Chinese government.
“Over the past two months, the global financial crisis has been intensifying daily,” the State Council said in a statement. “In expanding investment, we must be fast and heavy-handed.”
The plan was unveiled as finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations met in São Paulo, Brazil, over the weekend.
It came less than a week before President Hu Jintao was scheduled to travel to Washington for a global economic summit meeting hosted by President Bush.
On Saturday, Mr. Hu spoke by telephone with President-elect Barack Obama about a variety of issues, including the global financial crisis and how their countries might cooperate to help resolve economic problems.
Asian markets welcomed news of the stimulus plan. The Japanese Nikkei index rose 5.6 percent in trading early Monday. Stocks in Hong Kong and Shanghai rallied strongly, jumping over 5 percent and lifting share prices that have been depressed for much of the year.
Although Beijing has indicated that it will focus on keeping its own economy on track, it is difficult to insulate any economy from a global downturn. After five years of growth in excess of 10 percent, China’s economy is beginning to weaken. Growth in exports and investment is slowing, consumer confidence is waning and stock and property markets are severely depressed.
The stimulus plan, though driven by domestic concerns, represents a fresh commitment by China to keep from adding to the economic and financial woes of the United States and Europe. It is also likely to cheer foreign investors in China’s economy by ensuring that the country remains a source of growth.
China’s package is not comparable to fiscal stimulus measures that are being discussed in Washington. In China, much of the capital for infrastructure improvements comes not from central and local governments but from state banks and state-owned companies that are encouraged to expand more rapidly.
The plan also differs from the $700 billion financial rescue package approved by Congress, which has helped strengthen bank balance sheets but did not directly mandate new lending or support specific investment projects in the United States.
China’s overall government spending remains relatively low as a percentage of economic output compared with the United States and Europe. Yet Beijing maintains far more control over investment trends than Washington does, so it has greater flexibility to increase investment to counter a sharp downturn.
It was unclear how Chinese officials arrived at the $586 billion figure or how much of the stimulus would be spending above what Beijing normally earmarks for infrastructure projects. Beijing said it was loosening credit and encouraging state-owned banks to lend as part of a more “proactive fiscal policy.”
The government said the stimulus would cover 10 areas, including low-income housing, electricity, water, rural infrastructure and projects aimed at environmental protection and technological innovation — all of which could incite consumer spending and bolster the economy. The State Council said the new spending would begin immediately, with $18 billion scheduled for the last quarter of this year.
State-driven investment projects of this kind have been a major impetus to Chinese growth throughout the 30 years of market-oriented reforms, a strong legacy of central planning.
The biggest players in many major Chinese industries — like steel, automobiles and energy — are state-owned companies, and government officials locally and nationally have a hand in deciding how much bank lending is steered to those sectors.
The investment numbers announced by China’s central government often include projects financed by a variety of sources, including state-backed entities and even foreign investors.
Beijing is struggling to cope with rapidly slowing economic growth. A downturn in investment and exports has led to factory closings in southern China, resulting in mass layoffs and even setting off sporadic protests by workers who have complained that owners disappeared without paying them their wages.
With many economists in China now projecting that growth in the fourth quarter of this year could be as low as 5.8 percent, and amid worries that the country’s economy could be walloped by the global financial crisis, Beijing is moving aggressively.
Analysts were expecting China to announce a big stimulus package, but they said they were surprised at its size. “That is much more aggressive than I expected,” said Frank Gong, an economist at J. P. Morgan who is based in Hong Kong. “That’s a lot of money to spend.”
Mr. Gong said that after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Beijing undertook a similar, but much smaller, stimulus package, earmarking huge sums to build the country’s highway and toll-road system, projects that helped keep the economy growing.
Arthur Kroeber, managing director at Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic research firm, said the government was concerned because people in China had suddenly pulled back on spending as a precautionary move because of worries about China’s suffering with the global economy.
“The government is sending a signal saying: ‘We’re going to spend in a big way,’ ” Mr. Kroeber said Sunday in a telephone interview. “This is designed to say to the market that people should not panic.”
Quake Hits Remote Area in China
BEIJING (AP) — A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck the remote northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai on Monday, the United States Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The quake struck at a depth of 6.2 miles, the agency said.
China’s far west is fairly earthquake-prone. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake on May 12 devastated parts of Sichuan Province, killing about 70,000 people and leaving millions homeless.
November 14, 2008
Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering
By EDWARD WONG
CHANG’AN, China — Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children’s school tuition.
But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs.
“He just ran without telling anyone,” Mr. Wang said.
For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China’s astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside.
Furthermore, the slowdown inhibits China’s ability to work with other nations in alleviating the worldwide crisis.
The Pearl River Delta, known as the world’s factory, powered an export industry that pushed China’s annual growth rate into the double digits and provided work for migrants from interior provinces with poor farmland. But circumstances have changed quickly. The slowdown in exports contributed to the closing of at least 67,000 factories across China in the first half of the year, according to government statistics. Labor disputes and protests over lost back wages have surged, igniting fear in local officials.
After the shutdown of their shoe factory, called Weixu in Chinese and China Top Industries in English, Mr. Wang and some co-workers took to the streets in protest, demanding two months of back pay, or $440 on average. The government called in the riot police. Seven workers were thrown in jail and six were beaten, including Mr. Wang, he said.
“I plan to return home once I get my money,” Mr. Wang said as he stood outside the factory on Tuesday, showing the bloody shin wound that he said resulted from a blow from a metal baton. (The police declined to comment.) “I’m over 50 years old, and I won’t be able to find work. I’ll just retire.”
Under pressure from Beijing to maintain social stability, local officials are also trying to tamp down unrest by doling out back wages. Here in Chang’an, after the worker protest, the government shelled out more than $1 million to pay back wages to most of the workers at the shoe factory. (Mr. Wang and some other laborers say they are still without back pay.)
The slowdown in exports has accelerated a major shift in the nature of Chinese manufacturing: small factories that were already being pinched by rising costs of labor, transportation and raw materials, as well as by the appreciating yuan, are closing en masse. That is especially the case in these towns scattered around the city of Dongguan, known for churning out low-end products. Soon the labor-intensive factories that rely solely on migrant work could disappear from southern China, and foreign companies could contract with similar factories in Vietnam and other countries where costs are lower.
“There’s very serious damage being done down there, I don’t deny it, and I think it’ll get worse because we haven’t seen the full impact of the economic downturn in Europe,” said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, an economic research and advisory firm based in Beijing. “I think next year we might see export growth in the country as a whole go down to 0 percent.”
The export sector is still growing but has slowed considerably; year-on-year growth was at 9 percent in October compared with 26 percent in September 2007, Mr. Kroeber said.
The social problems arising from the slowdown have stirred anxiety in the top leadership of the Communist Party, whose legitimacy is based on maintaining economic growth. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is pushing for policies that will increase domestic consumer consumption to wean China off its reliance on exports. Last Sunday, the government unveiled a stimulus package worth $586 billion over the next two years — the largest ever announced in China — to help create jobs, mostly by building new transportation infrastructure.
Foreign governments expecting China to take the lead in addressing the global crisis will be disappointed, say analysts and scholars. Chinese officials say they are focused on trying to ease domestic problems and keeping the country’s annual growth rate above 8 percent, which they see as vital to generating enough new jobs. Some analysts say economic expansion could drop to as little as 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter this year, down from about 11 percent in 2007.
“I think China foresees that it’ll need to spend a lot of money to get itself out of the current domestic situation,” said Victor Shih, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University who studies the political economy of China. “On the global financial crisis, China will not take a leading role.”
The mass layoffs have led to a profound change in the movements this year of migrant workers like Mr. Wang who spend virtually the entire year away from home. Many are heading home early for the Chinese New Year, in late January, and say they might not return to work in the coastal regions. A worker in the railway station in Guangzhou said that from Oct. 11 to Oct. 27, there were 1.17 million passengers on trains leaving the station, an increase of 129,000 over the same period last year. There have been reports of a similar jump in other regions.
Once in the interior, the workers will have less incentive than in the past to return to the coastal provinces. Rising grain prices have made farming more profitable. The Chinese government announced a rural land reform policy last month that could spur some farmers to stay on their land and make better use of it.
A growing number of factories have opened in the interior provinces as well. Wages are still lower than on the coast, but have risen quickly in recent years.
In Zhangmutou, a town here in the Dongguan area, many of the 7,000 workers who lost their jobs when a Hong Kong-owned toy factory called Smart Union shut down last month have returned home. Li Dongmei, a former human resources employee, said her two older brothers who worked in the factory had taken the 20-hour bus ride home to Hunan Province. Ms. Li, though, still lives across from the abandoned factory building because she is eight months pregnant.
“This place isn’t too stable economically,” Ms. Li, 25, said as she sat on a terrace outside her cramped apartment. “Guangdong isn’t so good anymore.”
As was the case with the Weixu shoe factory, Smart Union closed without any notice, and hundreds of angry workers poured into the streets to demand that the local government pay them back wages. Many such factories were run by Taiwanese or Hong Kong managers who fled the mainland. Chinese police and courts have limited reach in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system, and they have almost no ability to prosecute people in Taiwan, which is treated as a renegade province and does not have formal political or diplomatic relations with the mainland.
The wave of factory shutdowns is taking place at a time when migrant workers are more aware than ever of their legal rights and know how to put pressure on local governments. Two national labor laws were enacted in January that, among other things, require companies to pay severance and give out more long-term labor contracts. The laws could lead to more labor disputes and protests, said Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
“Increasingly, the migrant workers know their rights,” she said.
Here in Chang’an, nearly 200 workers showed up outside the south gate of the four-story Weixu factory on Tuesday to demand from the government severance payments that generally ranged from $1,500 to $3,700 each. They signed their names on a list and put a red fingerprint stamp next to each signature.
“No one’s gotten this subsidy yet,” said a woman from Qinghai Province who spoke on condition of anonymity because local officials had scolded her for talking to a local newspaper. “The government has been helpful in giving us our back pay, but it hasn’t been helpful in paying the subsidy.”
The Taiwanese chairman of the shoe factory, Zhuang Jiaying, did not return calls seeking comment. The collapse of the factory started a domino effect: Related businesses, like a smaller factory that put labels on Weixu’s shoe boxes, have also failed. Hundreds of additional laborers have lost their jobs, and more than 200 creditors have yet to collect millions of dollars, said Yang Qiusheng, the manager of the factory that handled the labels.
“I had to fire people who had worked for me for a long time,” he said. “When I see this shoe factory, this enterprise, I feel very sad and sorry. I never thought it would end like this.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Jimmy Wang from Chang’an. Huang Yuanxi contributed research
Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering
By EDWARD WONG
CHANG’AN, China — Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children’s school tuition.
But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs.
“He just ran without telling anyone,” Mr. Wang said.
For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China’s astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside.
Furthermore, the slowdown inhibits China’s ability to work with other nations in alleviating the worldwide crisis.
The Pearl River Delta, known as the world’s factory, powered an export industry that pushed China’s annual growth rate into the double digits and provided work for migrants from interior provinces with poor farmland. But circumstances have changed quickly. The slowdown in exports contributed to the closing of at least 67,000 factories across China in the first half of the year, according to government statistics. Labor disputes and protests over lost back wages have surged, igniting fear in local officials.
After the shutdown of their shoe factory, called Weixu in Chinese and China Top Industries in English, Mr. Wang and some co-workers took to the streets in protest, demanding two months of back pay, or $440 on average. The government called in the riot police. Seven workers were thrown in jail and six were beaten, including Mr. Wang, he said.
“I plan to return home once I get my money,” Mr. Wang said as he stood outside the factory on Tuesday, showing the bloody shin wound that he said resulted from a blow from a metal baton. (The police declined to comment.) “I’m over 50 years old, and I won’t be able to find work. I’ll just retire.”
Under pressure from Beijing to maintain social stability, local officials are also trying to tamp down unrest by doling out back wages. Here in Chang’an, after the worker protest, the government shelled out more than $1 million to pay back wages to most of the workers at the shoe factory. (Mr. Wang and some other laborers say they are still without back pay.)
The slowdown in exports has accelerated a major shift in the nature of Chinese manufacturing: small factories that were already being pinched by rising costs of labor, transportation and raw materials, as well as by the appreciating yuan, are closing en masse. That is especially the case in these towns scattered around the city of Dongguan, known for churning out low-end products. Soon the labor-intensive factories that rely solely on migrant work could disappear from southern China, and foreign companies could contract with similar factories in Vietnam and other countries where costs are lower.
“There’s very serious damage being done down there, I don’t deny it, and I think it’ll get worse because we haven’t seen the full impact of the economic downturn in Europe,” said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, an economic research and advisory firm based in Beijing. “I think next year we might see export growth in the country as a whole go down to 0 percent.”
The export sector is still growing but has slowed considerably; year-on-year growth was at 9 percent in October compared with 26 percent in September 2007, Mr. Kroeber said.
The social problems arising from the slowdown have stirred anxiety in the top leadership of the Communist Party, whose legitimacy is based on maintaining economic growth. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is pushing for policies that will increase domestic consumer consumption to wean China off its reliance on exports. Last Sunday, the government unveiled a stimulus package worth $586 billion over the next two years — the largest ever announced in China — to help create jobs, mostly by building new transportation infrastructure.
Foreign governments expecting China to take the lead in addressing the global crisis will be disappointed, say analysts and scholars. Chinese officials say they are focused on trying to ease domestic problems and keeping the country’s annual growth rate above 8 percent, which they see as vital to generating enough new jobs. Some analysts say economic expansion could drop to as little as 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter this year, down from about 11 percent in 2007.
“I think China foresees that it’ll need to spend a lot of money to get itself out of the current domestic situation,” said Victor Shih, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University who studies the political economy of China. “On the global financial crisis, China will not take a leading role.”
The mass layoffs have led to a profound change in the movements this year of migrant workers like Mr. Wang who spend virtually the entire year away from home. Many are heading home early for the Chinese New Year, in late January, and say they might not return to work in the coastal regions. A worker in the railway station in Guangzhou said that from Oct. 11 to Oct. 27, there were 1.17 million passengers on trains leaving the station, an increase of 129,000 over the same period last year. There have been reports of a similar jump in other regions.
Once in the interior, the workers will have less incentive than in the past to return to the coastal provinces. Rising grain prices have made farming more profitable. The Chinese government announced a rural land reform policy last month that could spur some farmers to stay on their land and make better use of it.
A growing number of factories have opened in the interior provinces as well. Wages are still lower than on the coast, but have risen quickly in recent years.
In Zhangmutou, a town here in the Dongguan area, many of the 7,000 workers who lost their jobs when a Hong Kong-owned toy factory called Smart Union shut down last month have returned home. Li Dongmei, a former human resources employee, said her two older brothers who worked in the factory had taken the 20-hour bus ride home to Hunan Province. Ms. Li, though, still lives across from the abandoned factory building because she is eight months pregnant.
“This place isn’t too stable economically,” Ms. Li, 25, said as she sat on a terrace outside her cramped apartment. “Guangdong isn’t so good anymore.”
As was the case with the Weixu shoe factory, Smart Union closed without any notice, and hundreds of angry workers poured into the streets to demand that the local government pay them back wages. Many such factories were run by Taiwanese or Hong Kong managers who fled the mainland. Chinese police and courts have limited reach in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system, and they have almost no ability to prosecute people in Taiwan, which is treated as a renegade province and does not have formal political or diplomatic relations with the mainland.
The wave of factory shutdowns is taking place at a time when migrant workers are more aware than ever of their legal rights and know how to put pressure on local governments. Two national labor laws were enacted in January that, among other things, require companies to pay severance and give out more long-term labor contracts. The laws could lead to more labor disputes and protests, said Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
“Increasingly, the migrant workers know their rights,” she said.
Here in Chang’an, nearly 200 workers showed up outside the south gate of the four-story Weixu factory on Tuesday to demand from the government severance payments that generally ranged from $1,500 to $3,700 each. They signed their names on a list and put a red fingerprint stamp next to each signature.
“No one’s gotten this subsidy yet,” said a woman from Qinghai Province who spoke on condition of anonymity because local officials had scolded her for talking to a local newspaper. “The government has been helpful in giving us our back pay, but it hasn’t been helpful in paying the subsidy.”
The Taiwanese chairman of the shoe factory, Zhuang Jiaying, did not return calls seeking comment. The collapse of the factory started a domino effect: Related businesses, like a smaller factory that put labels on Weixu’s shoe boxes, have also failed. Hundreds of additional laborers have lost their jobs, and more than 200 creditors have yet to collect millions of dollars, said Yang Qiusheng, the manager of the factory that handled the labels.
“I had to fire people who had worked for me for a long time,” he said. “When I see this shoe factory, this enterprise, I feel very sad and sorry. I never thought it would end like this.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Jimmy Wang from Chang’an. Huang Yuanxi contributed research
November 19, 2008
The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To
By EDWARD WONG
URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.
The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire?
Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the region.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/world ... nted=print
The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To
By EDWARD WONG
URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.
The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire?
Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the region.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/world ... nted=print
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opini ... &th&emc=th
November 23, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Pakistan Test
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Islamabad, Pakistan
Barack Obama’s most difficult international test in the next year will very likely be here in Pakistan. A country with 170 million people and up to 60 nuclear weapons may be collapsing.
Reporting in Pakistan is scarier than it has ever been. The major city of Peshawar is now controlled in part by the Taliban, and this month alone in the area an American aid worker was shot dead, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped, a Japanese journalist shot and American humvees stolen from a NATO convoy to Afghanistan.
I’ve been coming to Pakistan for 26 years, ever since I hid on the tops of buses to sneak into tribal areas as a backpacking university student, and I’ve never found Pakistanis so gloomy. Some worry that militants, nurtured by illiteracy and a failed education system, will overrun the country or that the nation will break apart. I’m not quite that pessimistic, but it’s very likely that the next major terror attack in the West is being planned by extremists here in Pakistan.
“There is real fear about the future,” notes Ahmed Rashid, whose excellent new book on Pakistan and Afghanistan is appropriately titled “Descent Into Chaos.”
The United States has squandered more than $10 billion on Pakistan since 9/11, and Pakistani intelligence agencies seem to have rerouted some of that to Taliban extremists. American forces periodically strike militants in the tribal areas, but people from those areas overwhelmingly tell me that these strikes just antagonize tribal leaders and make them more supportive of the Taliban.
One man described seeing Pashtuns in tribal areas throwing rocks in helpless frustration at the American aircraft flying overhead.
President Asif Ali Zardari seems overwhelmed by the challenges and locked in the past. Incredibly, he has just chosen for his new cabinet two men who would fit fine in a Taliban government.
One new cabinet member, Israr Ullah Zehri, defended the torture-murder of five women and girls who were buried alive (three girls wanted to choose their own husbands, and two women tried to protect them). “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them,” Mr. Zehri said of the practice of burying independent-minded girls alive.
Then there is Pakistan’s new education minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered him arrested for allegedly heading a local council that decided to solve a feud by taking five little girls and marrying them to men in an enemy clan. The girls were between the ages of 2 and 5, according to Samar Minallah, a Pakistani anthropologist who investigated the case (Mr. Bijarani has denied involvement).
While there are no easy solutions for the interlinked catastrophes unfolding in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are several useful steps that we in the West can take to reduce the risk of the region turning into the next Somalia.
First, we should slow the financial flow to Pakistan’s government and military. If the government wants to stop the Talibanization of Pakistan, its greatest need isn’t money but the political will to stop sheltering Taliban leaders in the city of Quetta.
Second, we should cut tariffs on Pakistani agricultural and manufactured products to boost the economy and provide jobs. We should also support China on its planned export-processing zone to create manufacturing jobs in Pakistan.
Third, we should push much harder for a peace deal in Kashmir — including far more pressure on India — because Kashmir grievances empower Pakistani militants.
Fourth, let’s focus on education. One reason the country is such a mess today is that half of all Pakistanis are illiterate.
In the southern Punjab a couple of days ago, I dropped in on a rural elementary school where only one teacher had bothered to show up that day. He was teaching the entire student body under a tree, in part because the school doesn’t have desks for the first three grades.
One happy note: I visited a school run by a California-based aid group, Developments in Literacy, which represents a successful American effort to fight extremism. DIL is financed largely by Pakistani-Americans trying to “give back,” and it runs 150 schools in rural Pakistan, teaching girls in particular.
Tauseef Hyat, the Islamabad-based executive director of DIL, notes that originally the plan was to operate just primary schools, but then a group of 11-year-old girls threatened to go on hunger strike unless DIL helped them continue their education in high school. Ms. Hyat caved, and some of those girls are now studying to become doctors.
Mr. Obama should make his first presidential trip to Pakistan — and stop at a DIL school to remind Pakistan’s army and elites that their greatest enemy isn’t India but illiteracy.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Frank Rich is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opini ... &th&emc=th
November 23, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Pakistan Test
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Islamabad, Pakistan
Barack Obama’s most difficult international test in the next year will very likely be here in Pakistan. A country with 170 million people and up to 60 nuclear weapons may be collapsing.
Reporting in Pakistan is scarier than it has ever been. The major city of Peshawar is now controlled in part by the Taliban, and this month alone in the area an American aid worker was shot dead, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped, a Japanese journalist shot and American humvees stolen from a NATO convoy to Afghanistan.
I’ve been coming to Pakistan for 26 years, ever since I hid on the tops of buses to sneak into tribal areas as a backpacking university student, and I’ve never found Pakistanis so gloomy. Some worry that militants, nurtured by illiteracy and a failed education system, will overrun the country or that the nation will break apart. I’m not quite that pessimistic, but it’s very likely that the next major terror attack in the West is being planned by extremists here in Pakistan.
“There is real fear about the future,” notes Ahmed Rashid, whose excellent new book on Pakistan and Afghanistan is appropriately titled “Descent Into Chaos.”
The United States has squandered more than $10 billion on Pakistan since 9/11, and Pakistani intelligence agencies seem to have rerouted some of that to Taliban extremists. American forces periodically strike militants in the tribal areas, but people from those areas overwhelmingly tell me that these strikes just antagonize tribal leaders and make them more supportive of the Taliban.
One man described seeing Pashtuns in tribal areas throwing rocks in helpless frustration at the American aircraft flying overhead.
President Asif Ali Zardari seems overwhelmed by the challenges and locked in the past. Incredibly, he has just chosen for his new cabinet two men who would fit fine in a Taliban government.
One new cabinet member, Israr Ullah Zehri, defended the torture-murder of five women and girls who were buried alive (three girls wanted to choose their own husbands, and two women tried to protect them). “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them,” Mr. Zehri said of the practice of burying independent-minded girls alive.
Then there is Pakistan’s new education minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered him arrested for allegedly heading a local council that decided to solve a feud by taking five little girls and marrying them to men in an enemy clan. The girls were between the ages of 2 and 5, according to Samar Minallah, a Pakistani anthropologist who investigated the case (Mr. Bijarani has denied involvement).
While there are no easy solutions for the interlinked catastrophes unfolding in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are several useful steps that we in the West can take to reduce the risk of the region turning into the next Somalia.
First, we should slow the financial flow to Pakistan’s government and military. If the government wants to stop the Talibanization of Pakistan, its greatest need isn’t money but the political will to stop sheltering Taliban leaders in the city of Quetta.
Second, we should cut tariffs on Pakistani agricultural and manufactured products to boost the economy and provide jobs. We should also support China on its planned export-processing zone to create manufacturing jobs in Pakistan.
Third, we should push much harder for a peace deal in Kashmir — including far more pressure on India — because Kashmir grievances empower Pakistani militants.
Fourth, let’s focus on education. One reason the country is such a mess today is that half of all Pakistanis are illiterate.
In the southern Punjab a couple of days ago, I dropped in on a rural elementary school where only one teacher had bothered to show up that day. He was teaching the entire student body under a tree, in part because the school doesn’t have desks for the first three grades.
One happy note: I visited a school run by a California-based aid group, Developments in Literacy, which represents a successful American effort to fight extremism. DIL is financed largely by Pakistani-Americans trying to “give back,” and it runs 150 schools in rural Pakistan, teaching girls in particular.
Tauseef Hyat, the Islamabad-based executive director of DIL, notes that originally the plan was to operate just primary schools, but then a group of 11-year-old girls threatened to go on hunger strike unless DIL helped them continue their education in high school. Ms. Hyat caved, and some of those girls are now studying to become doctors.
Mr. Obama should make his first presidential trip to Pakistan — and stop at a DIL school to remind Pakistan’s army and elites that their greatest enemy isn’t India but illiteracy.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Frank Rich is off today.
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/world ... &th&emc=th
November 27, 2008
At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MUMBAI, India — Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.
Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.
The Mumbai police said Thursday that the attacks killed at least 101 people and wounded at least 250. Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.
A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups.
Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning.
Hours after the assaults began, the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, next to the famed waterfront monument the Gateway of India, was in flames.
Guests banged on the windows of the upper floors as firefighters worked to rescue them.
Fire also raged inside the luxurious Oberoi Hotel, according to the police. A militant hidden in the Oberoi told India TV on Thursday morning that seven attackers were holding hostages there.
“We want all mujahedeen held in India released, and only after that we will release the people,” he said.Some guests, including two members of the European Parliament who were visiting as part of a trade delegation, remained in hiding in the hotels, making desperate cellphone calls, some of them to television stations, describing their ordeal.
Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands.
“They were talking about British and Americans specifically,” he said. “There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, ‘Where are you from?’ and he said he’s from Italy, and they said, ‘Fine,’ and they left him alone.”
Sajjad Karim, 38, a British member of the European Parliament, told Sky News: “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me.”
Before his phone went dead, Mr. Karim added: “I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement. We are now in the dark in this room, and we have barricaded all the doors. It’s really bad.”
Attackers had also entered Cama and Albless Hospital, according to Indian television reports, and struck Nariman House, which is home to the city’s Chabad-Lubavitch center.
A spokesman for the Lubavitch movement in New York, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, told the Associated Press that attackers “stormed the Chabad house” in Mumbai.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was trying to locate an unspecified number of Israelis missing in Mumbai, according to Haaretz.com, the Web site of an Israeli newspaper.
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed.
The military was quickly called in to assist the police.
Hospitals in Mumbai, a city of more than 12 million that was formerly called Bombay, have appealed for blood donations. As a sense of crisis gripped much of the city, schools, colleges and the stock exchange were closed Thursday.
Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister for Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is, told the CNN-IBN station that the attacks hit five to seven targets, concentrated in the southern tip of the city, known as Colaba and Nariman Point. But even hours after the attacks began, the full scope of the assaults was unclear.
Unlike previous attacks in India this year, which consisted of anonymously planted bombs, the assailants on Wednesday night were spectacularly well-armed and very confrontational. In some cases, said the state’s highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, the attackers opened fire and disappeared.
Indian officials said the police had killed six of the suspected attackers and captured nine.
A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen said it had carried out the attacks. It was not known who the group is or whether the claim was real.
Around midnight, more than two hours after the series of attacks began, television images from near the historic Metro Cinema showed journalists and bystanders ducking for cover as gunshots rang out. The charred shell of a car lay in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, the mammoth railway station. A nearby gas station was blown up.
The landmark Leopold Café, a favorite tourist spot, was also hit.
Reached by phone, some guests who had been trapped in the Taj said about 1 a.m. that they had heard an explosion and gunfire in the old wing of the hotel.
A 31-year-old man who was in the Taj attending a friend’s wedding reception said he was getting a drink around 9:45 p.m. when he heard something like firecrackers — “loud bursts” interspersed with what sounded like machine-gun fire.
A window of the banquet hall shattered, and guests scattered under tables and were quickly escorted to another room, he said. No one was allowed to leave.
Just before 1 a.m., another loud explosion rang out, and then another about a half-hour later, the man said.
At 6 a.m., he said that when the guests tried to leave the room early Thursday, gunmen opened fire. One person was shot.
The man’s friend, the groom, was two floors above, in the old wing of the hotel, trapped in a room with his bride. One explosion, he said, took the door off its hinges. He blocked it with a table.
Then came another blast, and gunfire rang out throughout the night. He did not want to be identified, for fear of being tracked down.
Rakesh Patel, a British businessman who escaped the Taj, told a television station that two young men armed with a rifle and a machine gun took 15 hostages, forcing them to the roof.
The gunmen, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, “were saying they wanted anyone with British or American passports,” Mr. Patel said.
He and four others managed to slip away in the confusion and smoke of the upper floors, he said. He said he did not know the fate of the remaining hostages.
Clarence Rich Diffenderffer, of Wilmington, Del., said after dinner at the hotel he headed to the business center on the fifth floor.
“A man in a hood with an AK-47 came running down the hall,” shooting and throwing four grenades, Mr. Diffenderffer said. “I, needless to say, beat it back to my room and locked it, and double-locked it, and put the bureau up against the door.”
Mr. Diffenderffer said he was rescued hours later, at 6:30 a.m., by a cherrypicker.
Among those apparently trapped at the Oberoi were executives and board members of Hindustan Unilever, part of the multinational corporate giant, The Times of India reported.
Indian military forces arrived outside the Oberoi at 2 a.m., and some 100 officers from the central government’s Rapid Action Force, an elite police unit, entered later.
CNN-IBN reported the sounds of gunfire from the hotel just after the police contingent went in.
The Bush administration condemned the attacks, as did President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The White House said it was still “assessing the hostage situation.”
Reporting was contributed by Michael Rubenstein and Prashanth Vishwanathan from Mumbai; Jeremy Kahn and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt, Germany; Sharon Otterman and Michael Moss from New York; and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/world ... &th&emc=th
November 27, 2008
At Least 100 Dead in India Terror Attacks
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MUMBAI, India — Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.
Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.
The Mumbai police said Thursday that the attacks killed at least 101 people and wounded at least 250. Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.
A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups.
Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning.
Hours after the assaults began, the landmark Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, next to the famed waterfront monument the Gateway of India, was in flames.
Guests banged on the windows of the upper floors as firefighters worked to rescue them.
Fire also raged inside the luxurious Oberoi Hotel, according to the police. A militant hidden in the Oberoi told India TV on Thursday morning that seven attackers were holding hostages there.
“We want all mujahedeen held in India released, and only after that we will release the people,” he said.Some guests, including two members of the European Parliament who were visiting as part of a trade delegation, remained in hiding in the hotels, making desperate cellphone calls, some of them to television stations, describing their ordeal.
Alex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands.
“They were talking about British and Americans specifically,” he said. “There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, ‘Where are you from?’ and he said he’s from Italy, and they said, ‘Fine,’ and they left him alone.”
Sajjad Karim, 38, a British member of the European Parliament, told Sky News: “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me.”
Before his phone went dead, Mr. Karim added: “I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement. We are now in the dark in this room, and we have barricaded all the doors. It’s really bad.”
Attackers had also entered Cama and Albless Hospital, according to Indian television reports, and struck Nariman House, which is home to the city’s Chabad-Lubavitch center.
A spokesman for the Lubavitch movement in New York, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, told the Associated Press that attackers “stormed the Chabad house” in Mumbai.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was trying to locate an unspecified number of Israelis missing in Mumbai, according to Haaretz.com, the Web site of an Israeli newspaper.
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were reported killed.
The military was quickly called in to assist the police.
Hospitals in Mumbai, a city of more than 12 million that was formerly called Bombay, have appealed for blood donations. As a sense of crisis gripped much of the city, schools, colleges and the stock exchange were closed Thursday.
Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister for Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is, told the CNN-IBN station that the attacks hit five to seven targets, concentrated in the southern tip of the city, known as Colaba and Nariman Point. But even hours after the attacks began, the full scope of the assaults was unclear.
Unlike previous attacks in India this year, which consisted of anonymously planted bombs, the assailants on Wednesday night were spectacularly well-armed and very confrontational. In some cases, said the state’s highest-ranking police official, A. N. Roy, the attackers opened fire and disappeared.
Indian officials said the police had killed six of the suspected attackers and captured nine.
A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen said it had carried out the attacks. It was not known who the group is or whether the claim was real.
Around midnight, more than two hours after the series of attacks began, television images from near the historic Metro Cinema showed journalists and bystanders ducking for cover as gunshots rang out. The charred shell of a car lay in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus, the mammoth railway station. A nearby gas station was blown up.
The landmark Leopold Café, a favorite tourist spot, was also hit.
Reached by phone, some guests who had been trapped in the Taj said about 1 a.m. that they had heard an explosion and gunfire in the old wing of the hotel.
A 31-year-old man who was in the Taj attending a friend’s wedding reception said he was getting a drink around 9:45 p.m. when he heard something like firecrackers — “loud bursts” interspersed with what sounded like machine-gun fire.
A window of the banquet hall shattered, and guests scattered under tables and were quickly escorted to another room, he said. No one was allowed to leave.
Just before 1 a.m., another loud explosion rang out, and then another about a half-hour later, the man said.
At 6 a.m., he said that when the guests tried to leave the room early Thursday, gunmen opened fire. One person was shot.
The man’s friend, the groom, was two floors above, in the old wing of the hotel, trapped in a room with his bride. One explosion, he said, took the door off its hinges. He blocked it with a table.
Then came another blast, and gunfire rang out throughout the night. He did not want to be identified, for fear of being tracked down.
Rakesh Patel, a British businessman who escaped the Taj, told a television station that two young men armed with a rifle and a machine gun took 15 hostages, forcing them to the roof.
The gunmen, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, “were saying they wanted anyone with British or American passports,” Mr. Patel said.
He and four others managed to slip away in the confusion and smoke of the upper floors, he said. He said he did not know the fate of the remaining hostages.
Clarence Rich Diffenderffer, of Wilmington, Del., said after dinner at the hotel he headed to the business center on the fifth floor.
“A man in a hood with an AK-47 came running down the hall,” shooting and throwing four grenades, Mr. Diffenderffer said. “I, needless to say, beat it back to my room and locked it, and double-locked it, and put the bureau up against the door.”
Mr. Diffenderffer said he was rescued hours later, at 6:30 a.m., by a cherrypicker.
Among those apparently trapped at the Oberoi were executives and board members of Hindustan Unilever, part of the multinational corporate giant, The Times of India reported.
Indian military forces arrived outside the Oberoi at 2 a.m., and some 100 officers from the central government’s Rapid Action Force, an elite police unit, entered later.
CNN-IBN reported the sounds of gunfire from the hotel just after the police contingent went in.
The Bush administration condemned the attacks, as did President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The White House said it was still “assessing the hostage situation.”
Reporting was contributed by Michael Rubenstein and Prashanth Vishwanathan from Mumbai; Jeremy Kahn and Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt, Germany; Sharon Otterman and Michael Moss from New York; and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.
December 3, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
India’s 9/11? Not Exactly
By AMITAV GHOSH
SINCE the terrorist assaults began in Mumbai last week, the metaphor of the World Trade Center attacks has been repeatedly invoked. From New Delhi to New York, pundits and TV commentators have insisted that “this is India’s 9/11” and should be treated as such. Nearly every newspaper in India has put “9/11” into its post-massacre headlines. The secretary general of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the leading Hindu nationalist political faction, has not only likened the Mumbai attack to those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but has insisted that “our response must be close to what the American response was.”
There can be no doubt that there are certain clear analogies between the two attacks: in both cases the terrorists were clearly at great pains to single out urban landmarks, especially those that serve as symbolic points of reference in this increasingly interconnected world. There are similarities, too, in the unexpectedness of the attacks, the meticulousness of their planning, their shock value and the utter unpreparedness of the security services. But this is where the similarities end. Not only were the casualties far greater on Sept. 11, 2001, but the shock of the attack was also greatly magnified by having no real precedent in America’s history.
India’s experience of terrorist attacks, on the other hand, far predates 2001. Although this year has been one of the worst in recent history, 1984 was arguably worse still. That year an insurgency in the Punjab culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This in turn led to riots that took the lives of some 2,000 Sikhs.
I was living in Delhi then and I recall vividly the sense of besetting crisis, of extreme fragility, of being pushed to the edge of an abyss: it was the only time I can recall when the very project of the Indian republic seemed to be seriously endangered. Yet for all its horror, the portents of 1984 were by no means fulfilled: in the following years, there was a slow turnaround; the Punjab insurgency gradually quieted down; and although the victims of the massacres may never receive justice in full measure, there has been some judicial retribution.
This has been another terrible year: even before the invasion of Mumbai, several hundred people had been killed and injured in terrorist assaults. Yet the attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Guwahati and elsewhere did not set off chains of retaliatory violence of the sort that would almost certainly have resulted 10 or 15 years ago. Nor did the violence create a sense of existential crisis for the nation, as in 1984. Thus, despite all loss of life, this year could well be counted as a victory not for terrorism but for India’s citizenry.
The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai change this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is certain that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome will be profoundly counterproductive. As a metaphor “9/11” is invested not just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround the events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath, in particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial response, one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.
When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India takes a hard line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration, the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other, more productive analogies for the invasion of Mumbai: one is the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable number of casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief.
If 9/11 is a metaphor for one kind of reaction to terrorism, then 11-M (as it is known in Spanish) should serve as shorthand for a different kind of response: one that emphasizes vigilance, patience and careful police work in coordination with neighboring countries. This is exactly the kind of response India needs now, and fortunately this seems to be the course that the government, led by the Congress Party, has decided to follow. Government spokesmen have been at some pains to specify that India does not intend to respond with a troop buildup along the border with Pakistan, as the Bharatiya Janata-led government did after the attack by Muslim extremists on India’s Parliament in 2001.
A buildup would indeed serve no point at all, since this is not the kind of war that can be fought along a border, by conventional armies. The Indian government would do better to focus on an international effort to eliminate the terrorists’ hide-outs and safe houses, some of them deep inside Pakistan. India will also need to cooperate with those in the Pakistani government who have come around to a belated recognition of the dangers of terrorism.
The choice of targets in Mumbai clearly owes something to the September bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, another high-profile site sure to include foreign casualties. Here already there is common ground between the two countries — for if this has been a bad year for India in regard to terrorism, then for Pakistan it has been still worse.
It is clear now that Pakistan’s establishment is so deeply divided that it no longer makes sense to treat it as a single entity. Sometimes a crisis is also an opportunity: this is a moment when India can forge strategic alliances with those sections of the Pakistani government, military and society who understand that they, too, are under fire.
Much will depend, in the coming days, on Mumbai’s reaction to the invasion. That the city was not stricken by turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the attack is undoubtedly a positive sign. That the terrorists concentrated their assault on the most upscale parts of the city had the odd consequence of limiting the disruption in the everyday lives of most Mumbai residents. Chhatrapati Shivaji station, for instance, was open just a few hours after the terrorists there were cleared out. In the northern suburbs, the home of Bollywood’s studios, actors were summoned to rehearsal even while the battles were being fought.
But with each succeeding day, tensions are rising and the natural anxieties of the inhabitants are being played upon. Still, this is not a moment for precipitate action: if India can react with dispassionate but determined resolve, then 2008 may yet be remembered as a moment when the tide turned in a long, long battle. For if there is any one lesson to be learned from the wave of terrorist attacks that has convulsed the globe over the last decade it is this: Defeat or victory is not determined by the success of the strike itself; it is determined by the response.
Amitav Ghosh is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sea of Poppies.”
Op-Ed Contributor
India’s 9/11? Not Exactly
By AMITAV GHOSH
SINCE the terrorist assaults began in Mumbai last week, the metaphor of the World Trade Center attacks has been repeatedly invoked. From New Delhi to New York, pundits and TV commentators have insisted that “this is India’s 9/11” and should be treated as such. Nearly every newspaper in India has put “9/11” into its post-massacre headlines. The secretary general of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the leading Hindu nationalist political faction, has not only likened the Mumbai attack to those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but has insisted that “our response must be close to what the American response was.”
There can be no doubt that there are certain clear analogies between the two attacks: in both cases the terrorists were clearly at great pains to single out urban landmarks, especially those that serve as symbolic points of reference in this increasingly interconnected world. There are similarities, too, in the unexpectedness of the attacks, the meticulousness of their planning, their shock value and the utter unpreparedness of the security services. But this is where the similarities end. Not only were the casualties far greater on Sept. 11, 2001, but the shock of the attack was also greatly magnified by having no real precedent in America’s history.
India’s experience of terrorist attacks, on the other hand, far predates 2001. Although this year has been one of the worst in recent history, 1984 was arguably worse still. That year an insurgency in the Punjab culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This in turn led to riots that took the lives of some 2,000 Sikhs.
I was living in Delhi then and I recall vividly the sense of besetting crisis, of extreme fragility, of being pushed to the edge of an abyss: it was the only time I can recall when the very project of the Indian republic seemed to be seriously endangered. Yet for all its horror, the portents of 1984 were by no means fulfilled: in the following years, there was a slow turnaround; the Punjab insurgency gradually quieted down; and although the victims of the massacres may never receive justice in full measure, there has been some judicial retribution.
This has been another terrible year: even before the invasion of Mumbai, several hundred people had been killed and injured in terrorist assaults. Yet the attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Guwahati and elsewhere did not set off chains of retaliatory violence of the sort that would almost certainly have resulted 10 or 15 years ago. Nor did the violence create a sense of existential crisis for the nation, as in 1984. Thus, despite all loss of life, this year could well be counted as a victory not for terrorism but for India’s citizenry.
The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai change this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is certain that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome will be profoundly counterproductive. As a metaphor “9/11” is invested not just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround the events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath, in particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial response, one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.
When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India takes a hard line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration, the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other, more productive analogies for the invasion of Mumbai: one is the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable number of casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief.
If 9/11 is a metaphor for one kind of reaction to terrorism, then 11-M (as it is known in Spanish) should serve as shorthand for a different kind of response: one that emphasizes vigilance, patience and careful police work in coordination with neighboring countries. This is exactly the kind of response India needs now, and fortunately this seems to be the course that the government, led by the Congress Party, has decided to follow. Government spokesmen have been at some pains to specify that India does not intend to respond with a troop buildup along the border with Pakistan, as the Bharatiya Janata-led government did after the attack by Muslim extremists on India’s Parliament in 2001.
A buildup would indeed serve no point at all, since this is not the kind of war that can be fought along a border, by conventional armies. The Indian government would do better to focus on an international effort to eliminate the terrorists’ hide-outs and safe houses, some of them deep inside Pakistan. India will also need to cooperate with those in the Pakistani government who have come around to a belated recognition of the dangers of terrorism.
The choice of targets in Mumbai clearly owes something to the September bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, another high-profile site sure to include foreign casualties. Here already there is common ground between the two countries — for if this has been a bad year for India in regard to terrorism, then for Pakistan it has been still worse.
It is clear now that Pakistan’s establishment is so deeply divided that it no longer makes sense to treat it as a single entity. Sometimes a crisis is also an opportunity: this is a moment when India can forge strategic alliances with those sections of the Pakistani government, military and society who understand that they, too, are under fire.
Much will depend, in the coming days, on Mumbai’s reaction to the invasion. That the city was not stricken by turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the attack is undoubtedly a positive sign. That the terrorists concentrated their assault on the most upscale parts of the city had the odd consequence of limiting the disruption in the everyday lives of most Mumbai residents. Chhatrapati Shivaji station, for instance, was open just a few hours after the terrorists there were cleared out. In the northern suburbs, the home of Bollywood’s studios, actors were summoned to rehearsal even while the battles were being fought.
But with each succeeding day, tensions are rising and the natural anxieties of the inhabitants are being played upon. Still, this is not a moment for precipitate action: if India can react with dispassionate but determined resolve, then 2008 may yet be remembered as a moment when the tide turned in a long, long battle. For if there is any one lesson to be learned from the wave of terrorist attacks that has convulsed the globe over the last decade it is this: Defeat or victory is not determined by the success of the strike itself; it is determined by the response.
Amitav Ghosh is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sea of Poppies.”
December 7, 2008
Mumbai Attacks Politicize Long-Isolated Elite
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MUMBAI, India — Last Wednesday, an extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in this city’s highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.
The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India’s largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country’s financial capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city’s largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.
The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended a week ago, was a watershed for India’s prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country’s dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.
Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.
On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or people’s power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)
Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens’ action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.
Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. An e-mail campaign began Saturday called “I Am Clean,” urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights.
And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world’s largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, “I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government.”
Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented a rare example of corporate India’s confronting the government outright rather than making back-room deals.
“It says in a nutshell, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. “More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable.”
In India’s city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railway tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.
Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoons in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city’s ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction that water had nowhere to go.
Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. “We overlook for now your neglect of the city,” he wrote. “Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard antiterrorism plan.”
None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. “It has touched a raw nerve,” said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. “People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places.” In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past.
“There’s a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before,” said Gerson D’Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, A.G.N.I., presses for better governing. “The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they’ve been galvanized.”
For how long? That is a question on everyone’s lips. At a memorial service on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier’s College here, a placard asked: “One month from now, will you care?”
“It’s helplessness, what do we do?” said Probir Roy, the owner of a technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier’s. “All the various stakeholders — the police, politicians — you can’t count on them anyway. Now what do you do?”
Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools, malls and “high net individuals” on how to protect themselves better. Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks. Tops’s global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000 security guards today, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.
Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside. Government schools are notoriously mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic. In some of India’s booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate electricity for their own buildings.
Political interference often gets in the way of the woefully understaffed and poorly paid police force. Courts and commissions have called for law enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.
The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city’s wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman Point. They were the elite’s watering holes and business dinner destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast publications in India, is like losing a limb.
“It’s like what I imagine an amputee would feel,” he said. “It’s so much part of our lives.”
Last Wednesday, on the night of the candlelight vigil, Mr. Kuruvilla’s driver made a wrong turn. A traffic policeman virtually pounced on the driver and then let him go with a bribe of 20 rupees, less than 50 cents. Mr. Kuruvilla is not optimistic about swift change. “Our cynicism is justified,” he said.
Ashok Pawar, a police constable from the police station nearest the Taj, entered the hotel the night the siege began. It was full of gunfire and smoke. He could not breathe, and he did not know his way around. “It was my first time inside the Taj,” he said. “How can a poor man go there?”
In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to “South Bombay,” shorthand for the city’s most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. “You refer to your part of the city simply as ‘town,’ ” he wrote, and then he begged: “Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones.”
“In your hour of need today,” he added, “it is India that needs your help.”
Mumbai Attacks Politicize Long-Isolated Elite
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
MUMBAI, India — Last Wednesday, an extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in this city’s highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.
The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India’s largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country’s financial capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city’s largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.
The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended a week ago, was a watershed for India’s prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country’s dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.
Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.
On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or people’s power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)
Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens’ action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.
Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. An e-mail campaign began Saturday called “I Am Clean,” urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights.
And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world’s largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, “I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government.”
Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented a rare example of corporate India’s confronting the government outright rather than making back-room deals.
“It says in a nutshell, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. “More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable.”
In India’s city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railway tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.
Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoons in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city’s ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction that water had nowhere to go.
Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. “We overlook for now your neglect of the city,” he wrote. “Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard antiterrorism plan.”
None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. “It has touched a raw nerve,” said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. “People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places.” In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past.
“There’s a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before,” said Gerson D’Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, A.G.N.I., presses for better governing. “The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they’ve been galvanized.”
For how long? That is a question on everyone’s lips. At a memorial service on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier’s College here, a placard asked: “One month from now, will you care?”
“It’s helplessness, what do we do?” said Probir Roy, the owner of a technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier’s. “All the various stakeholders — the police, politicians — you can’t count on them anyway. Now what do you do?”
Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools, malls and “high net individuals” on how to protect themselves better. Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks. Tops’s global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000 security guards today, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.
Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside. Government schools are notoriously mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic. In some of India’s booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate electricity for their own buildings.
Political interference often gets in the way of the woefully understaffed and poorly paid police force. Courts and commissions have called for law enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.
The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city’s wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman Point. They were the elite’s watering holes and business dinner destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast publications in India, is like losing a limb.
“It’s like what I imagine an amputee would feel,” he said. “It’s so much part of our lives.”
Last Wednesday, on the night of the candlelight vigil, Mr. Kuruvilla’s driver made a wrong turn. A traffic policeman virtually pounced on the driver and then let him go with a bribe of 20 rupees, less than 50 cents. Mr. Kuruvilla is not optimistic about swift change. “Our cynicism is justified,” he said.
Ashok Pawar, a police constable from the police station nearest the Taj, entered the hotel the night the siege began. It was full of gunfire and smoke. He could not breathe, and he did not know his way around. “It was my first time inside the Taj,” he said. “How can a poor man go there?”
In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to “South Bombay,” shorthand for the city’s most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. “You refer to your part of the city simply as ‘town,’ ” he wrote, and then he begged: “Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones.”
“In your hour of need today,” he added, “it is India that needs your help.”
December 19, 2008
After 30 Years, Economic Perils on China’s Path
By JIM YARDLEY
SHENZHEN, China — The ruling Communist Party threw itself a big party on Thursday. The country’s leadership marked the 30th anniversary of the reform era that transformed China into a global economic power and, in doing so, changed the world.
At a triumphant ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, President Hu Jintao invoked Deng Xiaoping, who consolidated power in 1978 and began “reform and opening.” Mr. Hu emphasized the party’s unwavering focus on economic development. “Only development makes sense,” said Mr. Hu, quoting Deng.
But beyond the oratory, Mr. Hu and other Chinese leaders are now facing a new era in which Deng’s export-led economic model, as well as his iron-fisted political control, face unprecedented challenges. Global demand for Chinese goods has slumped, unrest is on the rise in the industrial heartland, and China is scrambling for a new formula to preserve stability and ensure growth.
The downturn is so swift — exports fell last month for the first time in seven years — that Beijing is being forced to abruptly shift priorities. Until recently, Mr. Hu had been trying to curb excesses like rampant pollution and income inequality that posed environmental and social challenges to long-term development. Now, those priorities seem eclipsed.
Instead, leaders are restoring tax breaks for exporters and pushing down the value of China’s currency to encourage exports. At the same time, they are casting about for ways to spur domestic demand and wean China’s economy off its dependence on foreign markets swept up in the global financial crisis.
More and a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/world ... &th&emc=th
After 30 Years, Economic Perils on China’s Path
By JIM YARDLEY
SHENZHEN, China — The ruling Communist Party threw itself a big party on Thursday. The country’s leadership marked the 30th anniversary of the reform era that transformed China into a global economic power and, in doing so, changed the world.
At a triumphant ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, President Hu Jintao invoked Deng Xiaoping, who consolidated power in 1978 and began “reform and opening.” Mr. Hu emphasized the party’s unwavering focus on economic development. “Only development makes sense,” said Mr. Hu, quoting Deng.
But beyond the oratory, Mr. Hu and other Chinese leaders are now facing a new era in which Deng’s export-led economic model, as well as his iron-fisted political control, face unprecedented challenges. Global demand for Chinese goods has slumped, unrest is on the rise in the industrial heartland, and China is scrambling for a new formula to preserve stability and ensure growth.
The downturn is so swift — exports fell last month for the first time in seven years — that Beijing is being forced to abruptly shift priorities. Until recently, Mr. Hu had been trying to curb excesses like rampant pollution and income inequality that posed environmental and social challenges to long-term development. Now, those priorities seem eclipsed.
Instead, leaders are restoring tax breaks for exporters and pushing down the value of China’s currency to encourage exports. At the same time, they are casting about for ways to spur domestic demand and wean China’s economy off its dependence on foreign markets swept up in the global financial crisis.
More and a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/world ... &th&emc=th
December 25, 2008
Cash Flow From Tajik Migrants Stalls
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
TOSH-TEPPA, Tajikistan — In poverty-stricken Tajikistan, the global financial crisis is measured in bags of flour.
At least that is how Bibisoro Sayidova sees it, as she looks for ways to feed her five children, since her husband, a migrant worker in Russia, stopped receiving his wages this fall. Now he is loading large sacks of dried fruit in Moscow on faith.
“Sometimes I cry when the kids don’t have socks or coats,” she said, mixing a stew of water, bread, onion and oil. “We’re still hoping he’ll get paid.”
The financial crisis that is in full swing in the world’s developed countries is only beginning to reach the poorest, and labor migrants, with feet in both worlds, are among the first to feel it.
Flows of migrant money to developing countries, known as remittances, began to slow this fall, the first moderation after years of double-digit growth, according to the World Bank. The slowdown is expected to turn into a decline of 1 to 5 percent in 2009, when the full effect of the crisis hits.
Some are already feeling it. Mexico, for example, is likely to have a 4 percent decline in the flows of migrant money in 2008, according to World Bank estimates. The biggest declines next year are expected in the Middle East and North Africa, because of economic slowdowns in the Persian Gulf and Europe.
“There’s definitely a serious moderation in the growth of remittances,” said Dilip Ratha, a senior economist at the World Bank who tracks migrant money flows.
The decline will be less severe than for other flows, like foreign investment, Mr. Ratha said, but its effects will be amplified in countries like Tajikistan that have come to depend on rapidly growing remittances. The country will rank first in the world in 2008 for remittances as a portion of its economy — 54 percent — according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
“The Tajik economy is not sustainable without migration,” Mr. Ratha said. “It is not diversified. People are the most important resource they have.”
The reason dates to the Soviet collapse, when factories closed, subsidies from Moscow dried up and villages like Tosh-Teppa, 25 miles north of Afghanistan, were left to rot. More than 80 percent of the population lived under the poverty line of about $2 a day, and Tajiks began to export the only thing they had: themselves.
“The population has been completely abandoned by the state,” said Paul Quinn Judge, who runs the International Crisis Group’s Central Asian program. “When it comes to providing for basic needs — healthy drinking water, heat in winter — they are utterly failing.”
The money the migrants sent back was a lifeline. When Borun, a 42-year-old with a degree in agriculture, first went to work in Russia, a vicious civil war had just ended, and his family was eating corncobs to survive. When his two children came down with malaria, there was no money to take them to a hospital and they died after a local medical office gave them all that it had: aspirin and mosquito netting.
“We would have died without that money,” said his mother, Umiyavi, 59. Like many people interviewed for this article, Borun would not give his last name for fear the Russian authorities would refuse to let him back in to work.
When oil profits were high, workers from Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe poured into Russian cities, as many as 10 million by some estimates, making Russia the country with the second largest immigrant population, after the United States.
Like most Tajiks working in Russia — 700,000 to a million people — Borun worked in construction. It was one of the sectors hardest hit by the credit crunch and falling oil prices this fall. Borun’s wages for a job renovating the Lenin Museum in Moscow were delayed. In November his employer paid up, but then immediately fired him.
“They said those who came from abroad have to go,” he said, shivering in a thin jacket in his small house in Khodja-Durbod, a village near Tosh-Teppa. About 300 workers were fired, he said, mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks.
Economists do not expect effects to be felt broadly in labor markets until well into next year, but the trend of booming remittances has clearly ended. In Tajikistan, remittances rose just 1 percent in November, compared with the same month last year, according to the I.M.F., down sharply from a record growth of about 90 percent early this year.
That has brought a quiet desperation into households like Ms. Sayidova’s. The area is missing so many men that it feels like wartime, and its daily allowance of four to six hours of electricity is the same as in Baghdad. Malnutrition is widespread. Unicef estimates that more than one-third of children are stunted. Ms. Sayidova’s 13-year-old son has the body of a 6-year-old.
Ms. Sayidova is part of a new generation of women who are less protected from poverty than their mothers. The Soviet Union required girls to finish high school, but since its collapse the number of girls who graduate has fallen by 12 percent. Ms. Sayidova dropped out and married at 14. She was ashamed to have to borrow money from her mother to buy winter clothes for her children and Vaseline for her hands.
Migrant money had offered a safety net. Roofs were built, houses expanded and the basic needs of a large portion of society provided for. In the years of the migrant boom, the portion of the population living in poverty fell by a third, to 50 percent. In Khodja-Durbod, a school was built on migrant money, with each family contributing $100 and 320 bricks. It is missing both a math teacher and a toilet, and its headmaster is concerned that with the crisis, it will not get either.
Still, migrants do not seem to be giving up and returning home, the biggest worry for Western governments that see large numbers of poor unemployed men just north of Afghanistan as a potential security risk. Instead, people interviewed over three days last week said they would dig in further to hold on to any chance for a job, particularly if the Russian authorities made good on threats to reduce their numbers.
Borun’s oldest son is an exception. He worked for a few months gathering scrap metal in Moscow when he was 16. The experience was so painful that he returned to Tajikistan and began riding his bicycle 13 miles every morning to a better school.
“He saw the way we lived, without respect,” Borun said bitterly. “He doesn’t want to be like his father.”
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/world ... &th&emc=th
Cash Flow From Tajik Migrants Stalls
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
TOSH-TEPPA, Tajikistan — In poverty-stricken Tajikistan, the global financial crisis is measured in bags of flour.
At least that is how Bibisoro Sayidova sees it, as she looks for ways to feed her five children, since her husband, a migrant worker in Russia, stopped receiving his wages this fall. Now he is loading large sacks of dried fruit in Moscow on faith.
“Sometimes I cry when the kids don’t have socks or coats,” she said, mixing a stew of water, bread, onion and oil. “We’re still hoping he’ll get paid.”
The financial crisis that is in full swing in the world’s developed countries is only beginning to reach the poorest, and labor migrants, with feet in both worlds, are among the first to feel it.
Flows of migrant money to developing countries, known as remittances, began to slow this fall, the first moderation after years of double-digit growth, according to the World Bank. The slowdown is expected to turn into a decline of 1 to 5 percent in 2009, when the full effect of the crisis hits.
Some are already feeling it. Mexico, for example, is likely to have a 4 percent decline in the flows of migrant money in 2008, according to World Bank estimates. The biggest declines next year are expected in the Middle East and North Africa, because of economic slowdowns in the Persian Gulf and Europe.
“There’s definitely a serious moderation in the growth of remittances,” said Dilip Ratha, a senior economist at the World Bank who tracks migrant money flows.
The decline will be less severe than for other flows, like foreign investment, Mr. Ratha said, but its effects will be amplified in countries like Tajikistan that have come to depend on rapidly growing remittances. The country will rank first in the world in 2008 for remittances as a portion of its economy — 54 percent — according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
“The Tajik economy is not sustainable without migration,” Mr. Ratha said. “It is not diversified. People are the most important resource they have.”
The reason dates to the Soviet collapse, when factories closed, subsidies from Moscow dried up and villages like Tosh-Teppa, 25 miles north of Afghanistan, were left to rot. More than 80 percent of the population lived under the poverty line of about $2 a day, and Tajiks began to export the only thing they had: themselves.
“The population has been completely abandoned by the state,” said Paul Quinn Judge, who runs the International Crisis Group’s Central Asian program. “When it comes to providing for basic needs — healthy drinking water, heat in winter — they are utterly failing.”
The money the migrants sent back was a lifeline. When Borun, a 42-year-old with a degree in agriculture, first went to work in Russia, a vicious civil war had just ended, and his family was eating corncobs to survive. When his two children came down with malaria, there was no money to take them to a hospital and they died after a local medical office gave them all that it had: aspirin and mosquito netting.
“We would have died without that money,” said his mother, Umiyavi, 59. Like many people interviewed for this article, Borun would not give his last name for fear the Russian authorities would refuse to let him back in to work.
When oil profits were high, workers from Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe poured into Russian cities, as many as 10 million by some estimates, making Russia the country with the second largest immigrant population, after the United States.
Like most Tajiks working in Russia — 700,000 to a million people — Borun worked in construction. It was one of the sectors hardest hit by the credit crunch and falling oil prices this fall. Borun’s wages for a job renovating the Lenin Museum in Moscow were delayed. In November his employer paid up, but then immediately fired him.
“They said those who came from abroad have to go,” he said, shivering in a thin jacket in his small house in Khodja-Durbod, a village near Tosh-Teppa. About 300 workers were fired, he said, mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks.
Economists do not expect effects to be felt broadly in labor markets until well into next year, but the trend of booming remittances has clearly ended. In Tajikistan, remittances rose just 1 percent in November, compared with the same month last year, according to the I.M.F., down sharply from a record growth of about 90 percent early this year.
That has brought a quiet desperation into households like Ms. Sayidova’s. The area is missing so many men that it feels like wartime, and its daily allowance of four to six hours of electricity is the same as in Baghdad. Malnutrition is widespread. Unicef estimates that more than one-third of children are stunted. Ms. Sayidova’s 13-year-old son has the body of a 6-year-old.
Ms. Sayidova is part of a new generation of women who are less protected from poverty than their mothers. The Soviet Union required girls to finish high school, but since its collapse the number of girls who graduate has fallen by 12 percent. Ms. Sayidova dropped out and married at 14. She was ashamed to have to borrow money from her mother to buy winter clothes for her children and Vaseline for her hands.
Migrant money had offered a safety net. Roofs were built, houses expanded and the basic needs of a large portion of society provided for. In the years of the migrant boom, the portion of the population living in poverty fell by a third, to 50 percent. In Khodja-Durbod, a school was built on migrant money, with each family contributing $100 and 320 bricks. It is missing both a math teacher and a toilet, and its headmaster is concerned that with the crisis, it will not get either.
Still, migrants do not seem to be giving up and returning home, the biggest worry for Western governments that see large numbers of poor unemployed men just north of Afghanistan as a potential security risk. Instead, people interviewed over three days last week said they would dig in further to hold on to any chance for a job, particularly if the Russian authorities made good on threats to reduce their numbers.
Borun’s oldest son is an exception. He worked for a few months gathering scrap metal in Moscow when he was 16. The experience was so painful that he returned to Tajikistan and began riding his bicycle 13 miles every morning to a better school.
“He saw the way we lived, without respect,” Borun said bitterly. “He doesn’t want to be like his father.”
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/world ... &th&emc=th
January 2, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Next World Order
By GURCHARAN DAS
New Delhi
CHINA and India are in a struggle for a top rung on the ladder of world power, but their approaches to the state and to power could not be more different.
Two days after last month’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, I met with a Chinese friend who was visiting India on business. He was shocked as much by the transparent and competitive minute-by-minute reporting of the attack by India’s dozens of news channels as by the ineffectual response of the government. He had seen a middle-class housewife on national television tell a reporter that the Indian commandos delayed in engaging the terrorists because they were too busy guarding political big shots. He asked how the woman could get away with such a statement.
I explained sarcasm resonates in a nation that is angry and disappointed with its politicians. My friend switched the subject to the poor condition of India’s roads, its dilapidated cities and the constant blackouts. Suddenly, he stopped and asked: “With all this, how did you become the second-fastest growing economy in the world? China’s leaders fear the day when India’s government will get its act together.”
The answer to his question may lie in a common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.” As if to illustrate this, the Mumbai stock market rose in the period after the terrorist attacks. Two weeks later, in several state elections, incumbents were ousted over economic issues, not security.
All this baffled my Chinese friend, and undoubtedly many of his countrymen, whose own success story has been scripted by an efficient state. They are uneasy because their chief ally, Pakistan, is consistently linked to terrorism while across the border India’s economy keeps rising disdainfully. It puzzles them that the anger in India over the Mumbai attacks is directed against Indian politicians rather than Muslims or Pakistan.
The global financial crisis has definitely affected India’s growth, and it will be down to perhaps 7 percent this year from 8.7 percent in 2007. According to my friend, China is hurting even more. What really perplexes the Chinese, he said, is that scores of nations have engaged in the same sorts of economic reforms as India, so why is it that it’s the Indian economy that has become the developing world’s second best? The speed with which India is creating world-class companies is also a shock to the Chinese, whose corporate structure is based on state-owned and foreign companies.
I have no satisfactory explanation for all this, but I think it may have something to do with India’s much-reviled caste system. Vaishyas, members of the merchant caste, who have learned over generations how to accumulate capital, give the nation a competitive advantage. Classical liberals may be right in thinking that commerce is a natural trait, but it helps if there is a devoted group of risk-taking entrepreneurs around to take advantage of the opportunity. Not surprisingly, Vaishyas still dominate the Forbes list of Indian billionaires.
In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism.
The idea of becoming a military power in the 21st century embarrasses many Indians. This ambivalence goes beyond Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for India’s freedom, or even the Buddha’s message of peace. The skeptical Indian temper goes back to the 3,500-year-old “Nasadiya” verse of the Rig Veda, which meditates on the creation of the universe: “Who knows and who can say, whence it was born and whence came this creation? The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?” When you have millions of gods, you cannot afford to be theologically narcissistic. It also makes you suspect power.
Both the Chinese and the Indians are convinced that their prosperity will only increase in the 21st century. In China it will be induced by the state; in India’s case, it may well happen despite the state. Indians expect to continue their relentless march toward a modern, democratic, market-based future. In this, terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow.
However, Indians are painfully aware that they must reform their government bureaucracy, police and judiciary — institutions, paradoxically, they were so proud of a generation ago. When that happens, India may become formidable, a thought that undoubtedly worries China’s leaders.
Gurcharan Das is the author of “India Unbound.”
****
Bangladesh victors poised to take power
January 2, 2009
The head of Bangladesh's winning parliamentary alliance consulted party leaders on Thursday over her cabinet, and officials said the outgoing interim government would likely transfer power next week.
Sheikh Hasina, a former prime minister, looks set for another chance at leading the impoverished country after her Awami League and its allies won an overwhelming victory in a parliamentary election on Monday.
Her rival Begum Khaleda Zia, another ex-PM, has rejected the result, saying the vote was widely rigged and raising fears of violent protests.
By Thursday, however, Khaleda's camp said it wanted to give hasina a chance to govern.
"We know beyond any doubt the election was rigged and results were tailored," BNP secretary general Khandaker Delwar Hossain said. "Yet, we would like to give the Awami League a chance to rule and prove its efficiency."
International monitors say the vote was fair and credible.
The poll returned the south Asia nation of 140 million people to democracy after two years of emergency rule under an interim authority that took over at a time of political chaos.
The Awami League and its allies won more than two-thirds of parliament's 300 seats in Bangladesh's first election in seven years. A coalition led by Khaleda won just 31 seats.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Op-Ed Contributor
The Next World Order
By GURCHARAN DAS
New Delhi
CHINA and India are in a struggle for a top rung on the ladder of world power, but their approaches to the state and to power could not be more different.
Two days after last month’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, I met with a Chinese friend who was visiting India on business. He was shocked as much by the transparent and competitive minute-by-minute reporting of the attack by India’s dozens of news channels as by the ineffectual response of the government. He had seen a middle-class housewife on national television tell a reporter that the Indian commandos delayed in engaging the terrorists because they were too busy guarding political big shots. He asked how the woman could get away with such a statement.
I explained sarcasm resonates in a nation that is angry and disappointed with its politicians. My friend switched the subject to the poor condition of India’s roads, its dilapidated cities and the constant blackouts. Suddenly, he stopped and asked: “With all this, how did you become the second-fastest growing economy in the world? China’s leaders fear the day when India’s government will get its act together.”
The answer to his question may lie in a common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.” As if to illustrate this, the Mumbai stock market rose in the period after the terrorist attacks. Two weeks later, in several state elections, incumbents were ousted over economic issues, not security.
All this baffled my Chinese friend, and undoubtedly many of his countrymen, whose own success story has been scripted by an efficient state. They are uneasy because their chief ally, Pakistan, is consistently linked to terrorism while across the border India’s economy keeps rising disdainfully. It puzzles them that the anger in India over the Mumbai attacks is directed against Indian politicians rather than Muslims or Pakistan.
The global financial crisis has definitely affected India’s growth, and it will be down to perhaps 7 percent this year from 8.7 percent in 2007. According to my friend, China is hurting even more. What really perplexes the Chinese, he said, is that scores of nations have engaged in the same sorts of economic reforms as India, so why is it that it’s the Indian economy that has become the developing world’s second best? The speed with which India is creating world-class companies is also a shock to the Chinese, whose corporate structure is based on state-owned and foreign companies.
I have no satisfactory explanation for all this, but I think it may have something to do with India’s much-reviled caste system. Vaishyas, members of the merchant caste, who have learned over generations how to accumulate capital, give the nation a competitive advantage. Classical liberals may be right in thinking that commerce is a natural trait, but it helps if there is a devoted group of risk-taking entrepreneurs around to take advantage of the opportunity. Not surprisingly, Vaishyas still dominate the Forbes list of Indian billionaires.
In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism.
The idea of becoming a military power in the 21st century embarrasses many Indians. This ambivalence goes beyond Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for India’s freedom, or even the Buddha’s message of peace. The skeptical Indian temper goes back to the 3,500-year-old “Nasadiya” verse of the Rig Veda, which meditates on the creation of the universe: “Who knows and who can say, whence it was born and whence came this creation? The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?” When you have millions of gods, you cannot afford to be theologically narcissistic. It also makes you suspect power.
Both the Chinese and the Indians are convinced that their prosperity will only increase in the 21st century. In China it will be induced by the state; in India’s case, it may well happen despite the state. Indians expect to continue their relentless march toward a modern, democratic, market-based future. In this, terrorist attacks are a noisy, tragic, but ultimately futile sideshow.
However, Indians are painfully aware that they must reform their government bureaucracy, police and judiciary — institutions, paradoxically, they were so proud of a generation ago. When that happens, India may become formidable, a thought that undoubtedly worries China’s leaders.
Gurcharan Das is the author of “India Unbound.”
****
Bangladesh victors poised to take power
January 2, 2009
The head of Bangladesh's winning parliamentary alliance consulted party leaders on Thursday over her cabinet, and officials said the outgoing interim government would likely transfer power next week.
Sheikh Hasina, a former prime minister, looks set for another chance at leading the impoverished country after her Awami League and its allies won an overwhelming victory in a parliamentary election on Monday.
Her rival Begum Khaleda Zia, another ex-PM, has rejected the result, saying the vote was widely rigged and raising fears of violent protests.
By Thursday, however, Khaleda's camp said it wanted to give hasina a chance to govern.
"We know beyond any doubt the election was rigged and results were tailored," BNP secretary general Khandaker Delwar Hossain said. "Yet, we would like to give the Awami League a chance to rule and prove its efficiency."
International monitors say the vote was fair and credible.
The poll returned the south Asia nation of 140 million people to democracy after two years of emergency rule under an interim authority that took over at a time of political chaos.
The Awami League and its allies won more than two-thirds of parliament's 300 seats in Bangladesh's first election in seven years. A coalition led by Khaleda won just 31 seats.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
January 25, 2009
Radio Spreads Taliban’s Terror in Pakistani Region
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing — or a beheading.
Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed “un-Islamic” activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television, singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the Taliban have recently killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan to kill.
“They control everything through the radio,” said one Swat resident, who declined to give his name for fear the Taliban might kill him. “Everyone waits for the broadcast.”
International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the Swat Valley could prove just as devastating.
Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.
After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.
With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known for its dancing girls.
Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector general for the North-West Frontier Province.
The police have become so afraid that many officers have put advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will not kill them.
One who stayed on the job was Farooq Khan, a midlevel officer in Mingora, the valley’s largest city, where decapitated bodies of policemen and other victims routinely surface. Last month, he was shopping there when two men on a motorcycle sprayed him with gunfire, killing him in broad daylight.
“He always said, ‘I have to stay here and defend our home,’ ” recalled his brother, Wajid Ali Khan, a Swat native and the province’s minister for environment, as he passed around a cellphone with Farooq’s picture.
In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of the country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the view of furious residents, have willingly allowed the militants to spread terror deep into Pakistan.
The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question.
Seeking to deflect blame, Mr. Zardari’s government recently criticized “earlier halfhearted attempts at rooting out extremists from the area” and vowed to fight militants “who are ruthlessly murdering and maiming our citizens.”
But as pressure grows, he has also said in recent days that the government would be willing to talk with militants who accept its authority. Such negotiations would carry serious risks: security officials say a brief peace deal in Swat last spring was a spectacular failure that allowed militants to tighten their hold and take revenge on people who had supported the military.
Without more forceful and concerted action by the government, some warn, the Taliban threat in Pakistan is bound to spread.
“The crux of the problem is the government appears divided about what to do,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier who until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal areas. “This disconnect among the political leadership has emboldened the militants.”
From 2,000 to 4,000 Taliban fighters now roam the Swat Valley, according to interviews with a half-dozen senior Pakistani government, military and political officials involved in the fight. By contrast, the Pakistani military has four brigades with 12,000 to 15,000 men in Swat, officials say.
But the soldiers largely stay inside their camps, unwilling to patrol or exert any large presence that might provoke — or discourage — the militants, Swat residents and political leaders say. The military also has not raided a small village that locals say is widely known as the Taliban’s headquarters in Swat.
Nor have troops destroyed mobile radio transmitters mounted on motorcycles or pickup trucks that Shah Doran and the leader of the Taliban in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, have expertly used to terrify residents.
Being named in one of the nightly broadcasts often leaves just two options: fleeing Swat, or turning up headless and dumped in a village square.
When the army does act, its near-total lack of preparedness to fight a counterinsurgency reveals itself. Its usual tactic is to lob artillery shells into a general area, and the results have seemed to hurt civilians more than the militants, residents say.
In some parts of Pakistan, civilian militias have risen to fight the Taliban. But in Swat, the Taliban’s gains amid a large army presence has convinced many that the military must be conspiring with the Taliban.
“It’s very mysterious how they get so much weapons and support,” while nearby districts are comparatively calm, said Muzaffar ul-Mulk Khan, a member of Parliament from Swat, who said his home near Mingora was recently destroyed by the Taliban.
“We are bewildered by the military. They patrol only in Mingora. In the rest of Swat they sit in their bases. And the militants can kill at will anywhere in Mingora,” he said.
“Nothing is being done by the government," Mr. Khan added.
Accusations that the military lacks the will to fight in Swat are “very unfair and unjustified,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the chief military spokesman, who said 180 army soldiers and officers had been killed in Swat in the past 14 months.
“They do reach out, and they do patrol,” he said.
Military officials also say they are trying to step up activity in Swat. This weekend, soldiers were deployed to protect a handful of educational buildings in Mingora, amid a wave of school bombings.
General Abbas said the military did not have the means to block Taliban radio transmissions across such a wide area, but he disputed the view that Mingora had fallen to the militants.
“Just because they come out at night and throw down four or five bodies in the square does not mean that militants control anything,” he said.
Few officials would dispute that one of the Pakistani military’s biggest mistakes in Swat was its failure to protect Pir Samiullah, a local leader whose 500 followers fought the Taliban in the village of Mandal Dag. After the Taliban killed him in a firefight last month, the militants demanded that his followers reveal his gravesite — and then started beheading people until they got the information, one Mandal Dag villager said.
“They dug him up and hung his body in the square,” the villager said, and then they took the body to a secret location. The desecration was intended to show what would happen to anyone who defied the Taliban’s rule, but it also made painfully clear to Swat residents that the Pakistani government could not be trusted to defend those who rose up against the militants.
“He should have been given more protection,” said one Pakistani security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. “He should have been made a symbol of resistance.”
Gruesome displays like the defilement of Pir Samiullah’s remains are an effective tactic for the Taliban, who have shown cruel efficiency in following through on their threats.
Recently, Shah Doran broadcast word that the Taliban intended to kill a police officer who he said had killed three people.
“We have sent people, and tomorrow you will have good news,” he said on his nightly broadcast, according to a resident of Matta, a Taliban stronghold. The next day the decapitated body of the policeman was found in a nearby village.
Even in Mingora, a town grown hardened to violence, residents were shocked early this month to find the bullet-ridden body of one of the city’s most famous dancing girls splayed on the main square.
Known as Shabana, the woman was visited at night by a group of men who claimed to want to hire her for a party. They shot her to death and dragged her body more than a quarter-mile to the central square, leaving it as a warning for anyone who would flout Taliban decrees.
The leader of the militants in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, gained prominence from making radio broadcasts and running an Islamic school, becoming popular among otherwise isolated homemakers and inspiring them to sell their jewelry to finance his operation. He also drew support from his marriage to the daughter of Sufi Mohammed, a powerful religious leader in Swat until 2001 who later disowned his son-in-law.
Even though Swat does not border Afghanistan or any of Pakistan’s seven lawless federal tribal areas, Maulana Fazlullah eventually allied with Taliban militants who dominate regions along the Afghan frontier.
His fighters now roam the valley with sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortar tubes and, according to some officials, night-vision goggles and flak vests.
His latest tactic is a ban on girls’ attending school in Swat, which will be tested in February when private schools are scheduled to reopen after winter recess. The Taliban have already destroyed 169 girls’ schools in Swat, government officials say, and they expect most private schools to stay closed rather than risk retaliation.
“The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance they would lynch each and every Talib,” said Mr. Naveed Khan, the police official. “But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other areas of Pakistan.”
Ismail Khan contributed reporting.
Radio Spreads Taliban’s Terror in Pakistani Region
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing — or a beheading.
Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed “un-Islamic” activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television, singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the Taliban have recently killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan to kill.
“They control everything through the radio,” said one Swat resident, who declined to give his name for fear the Taliban might kill him. “Everyone waits for the broadcast.”
International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the Swat Valley could prove just as devastating.
Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.
After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.
With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known for its dancing girls.
Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector general for the North-West Frontier Province.
The police have become so afraid that many officers have put advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will not kill them.
One who stayed on the job was Farooq Khan, a midlevel officer in Mingora, the valley’s largest city, where decapitated bodies of policemen and other victims routinely surface. Last month, he was shopping there when two men on a motorcycle sprayed him with gunfire, killing him in broad daylight.
“He always said, ‘I have to stay here and defend our home,’ ” recalled his brother, Wajid Ali Khan, a Swat native and the province’s minister for environment, as he passed around a cellphone with Farooq’s picture.
In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of the country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the view of furious residents, have willingly allowed the militants to spread terror deep into Pakistan.
The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question.
Seeking to deflect blame, Mr. Zardari’s government recently criticized “earlier halfhearted attempts at rooting out extremists from the area” and vowed to fight militants “who are ruthlessly murdering and maiming our citizens.”
But as pressure grows, he has also said in recent days that the government would be willing to talk with militants who accept its authority. Such negotiations would carry serious risks: security officials say a brief peace deal in Swat last spring was a spectacular failure that allowed militants to tighten their hold and take revenge on people who had supported the military.
Without more forceful and concerted action by the government, some warn, the Taliban threat in Pakistan is bound to spread.
“The crux of the problem is the government appears divided about what to do,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier who until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal areas. “This disconnect among the political leadership has emboldened the militants.”
From 2,000 to 4,000 Taliban fighters now roam the Swat Valley, according to interviews with a half-dozen senior Pakistani government, military and political officials involved in the fight. By contrast, the Pakistani military has four brigades with 12,000 to 15,000 men in Swat, officials say.
But the soldiers largely stay inside their camps, unwilling to patrol or exert any large presence that might provoke — or discourage — the militants, Swat residents and political leaders say. The military also has not raided a small village that locals say is widely known as the Taliban’s headquarters in Swat.
Nor have troops destroyed mobile radio transmitters mounted on motorcycles or pickup trucks that Shah Doran and the leader of the Taliban in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, have expertly used to terrify residents.
Being named in one of the nightly broadcasts often leaves just two options: fleeing Swat, or turning up headless and dumped in a village square.
When the army does act, its near-total lack of preparedness to fight a counterinsurgency reveals itself. Its usual tactic is to lob artillery shells into a general area, and the results have seemed to hurt civilians more than the militants, residents say.
In some parts of Pakistan, civilian militias have risen to fight the Taliban. But in Swat, the Taliban’s gains amid a large army presence has convinced many that the military must be conspiring with the Taliban.
“It’s very mysterious how they get so much weapons and support,” while nearby districts are comparatively calm, said Muzaffar ul-Mulk Khan, a member of Parliament from Swat, who said his home near Mingora was recently destroyed by the Taliban.
“We are bewildered by the military. They patrol only in Mingora. In the rest of Swat they sit in their bases. And the militants can kill at will anywhere in Mingora,” he said.
“Nothing is being done by the government," Mr. Khan added.
Accusations that the military lacks the will to fight in Swat are “very unfair and unjustified,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the chief military spokesman, who said 180 army soldiers and officers had been killed in Swat in the past 14 months.
“They do reach out, and they do patrol,” he said.
Military officials also say they are trying to step up activity in Swat. This weekend, soldiers were deployed to protect a handful of educational buildings in Mingora, amid a wave of school bombings.
General Abbas said the military did not have the means to block Taliban radio transmissions across such a wide area, but he disputed the view that Mingora had fallen to the militants.
“Just because they come out at night and throw down four or five bodies in the square does not mean that militants control anything,” he said.
Few officials would dispute that one of the Pakistani military’s biggest mistakes in Swat was its failure to protect Pir Samiullah, a local leader whose 500 followers fought the Taliban in the village of Mandal Dag. After the Taliban killed him in a firefight last month, the militants demanded that his followers reveal his gravesite — and then started beheading people until they got the information, one Mandal Dag villager said.
“They dug him up and hung his body in the square,” the villager said, and then they took the body to a secret location. The desecration was intended to show what would happen to anyone who defied the Taliban’s rule, but it also made painfully clear to Swat residents that the Pakistani government could not be trusted to defend those who rose up against the militants.
“He should have been given more protection,” said one Pakistani security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. “He should have been made a symbol of resistance.”
Gruesome displays like the defilement of Pir Samiullah’s remains are an effective tactic for the Taliban, who have shown cruel efficiency in following through on their threats.
Recently, Shah Doran broadcast word that the Taliban intended to kill a police officer who he said had killed three people.
“We have sent people, and tomorrow you will have good news,” he said on his nightly broadcast, according to a resident of Matta, a Taliban stronghold. The next day the decapitated body of the policeman was found in a nearby village.
Even in Mingora, a town grown hardened to violence, residents were shocked early this month to find the bullet-ridden body of one of the city’s most famous dancing girls splayed on the main square.
Known as Shabana, the woman was visited at night by a group of men who claimed to want to hire her for a party. They shot her to death and dragged her body more than a quarter-mile to the central square, leaving it as a warning for anyone who would flout Taliban decrees.
The leader of the militants in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, gained prominence from making radio broadcasts and running an Islamic school, becoming popular among otherwise isolated homemakers and inspiring them to sell their jewelry to finance his operation. He also drew support from his marriage to the daughter of Sufi Mohammed, a powerful religious leader in Swat until 2001 who later disowned his son-in-law.
Even though Swat does not border Afghanistan or any of Pakistan’s seven lawless federal tribal areas, Maulana Fazlullah eventually allied with Taliban militants who dominate regions along the Afghan frontier.
His fighters now roam the valley with sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortar tubes and, according to some officials, night-vision goggles and flak vests.
His latest tactic is a ban on girls’ attending school in Swat, which will be tested in February when private schools are scheduled to reopen after winter recess. The Taliban have already destroyed 169 girls’ schools in Swat, government officials say, and they expect most private schools to stay closed rather than risk retaliation.
“The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance they would lynch each and every Talib,” said Mr. Naveed Khan, the police official. “But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other areas of Pakistan.”
Ismail Khan contributed reporting.
The Saudi-isation of Pakistan
A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan's towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan's demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other "wild" areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan's urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan's collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan's lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate "corruption" by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
"Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead," laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan's self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia's system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along "Islamic lines." Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child's book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan's timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of "enlightened moderation," General Musharraf's educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan's so-called "secular" public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan's education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as `maulvi sahibs' teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be "disciplined" and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan's elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia's ubiquitous religious `mutaween' (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still "dare" to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
A stern, unyielding version of Islam is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis in Pakistan.
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan's towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan's demise as a nation state.
For 20 years or more, a few of us have been desperately sending out SOS messages, warning of terrible times to come. In fact, I am surprised at how rapidly these dire predictions have come true.
A full-scale war is being fought in FATA, Swat and other "wild" areas of Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths. It is only a matter of time before this fighting shifts to Peshawar and Islamabad (which has already been a witness to the Lal Masjid episode) and engulfs Lahore and Karachi as well. The suicide bomber and the masked abductor have crippled Pakistan's urban life and shattered its national economy.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
What explains Pakistan's collective masochism? To understand this, one needs to study the drastic social and cultural transformations that have rendered this country so completely different from what it was in earlier times.
For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.
This change is by design. Twenty-five years ago, the Pakistani state used Islam as an instrument of state policy. Prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, floggings were carried out publicly, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast in Ramadan, selection for academic posts in universities required that the candidate demonstrate a knowledge of Islamic teachings and jihad was declared essential for every Muslim. Today, government intervention is no longer needed because of a spontaneous groundswell of Islamic zeal. The notion of an Islamic state – still in an amorphous and diffused form – is more popular now than ever before as people look desperately for miracles to rescue a failing state.
Villages have changed drastically; this transformation has been driven, in part, by Pakistani workers returning from Arab countries. Many village mosques are now giant madrassas that propagate hard-line Salafi and Deobandi beliefs through oversized loudspeakers. They are bitterly opposed to Barelvis, Shias and other sects, who they do not regard as Muslims. The Punjabis, who were far more liberal towards women than the Pukhtuns, are now beginning to take a line resembling that of the Taliban. Hanafi law has begun to prevail over tradition and civil law, as is evident from the recent decisions of the Lahore High Court.
In Pakistan's lower-middle and middle classes lurks a grim and humourless Saudi-inspired revivalist movement that frowns on any and every expression of joy and pleasure. Lacking any positive connection to culture and knowledge, it seeks to eliminate "corruption" by regulating cultural life and seizing control of the education system.
"Classical music is on its last legs in Pakistan; the sarangi and vichitraveena are completely dead," laments Mohammad Shehzad, a music aficionado. Indeed, teaching music in public universities is violently opposed by students of the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba at Punjab University. So the university has been forced to hold its music classes elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists consider music haram or un-Islamic. Kathak dancing, once popular with the Muslim elite of India, has few teachers left. Pakistan produces no feature films of any consequence. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite, disconnected from the rest of the population, live their lives in comfort through their vicarious proximity to the West. Alcoholism is a chronic problem of the super rich of Lahore – a curious irony for this deeply religious country.
Islamisation of the state and the polity was supposed to have been in the interest of the ruling class – a classic strategy for preserving it from the wrath of the working class. But the amazing success of the state is turning out to be its own undoing. Today, it is under attack from religious militants, and rival Islamic groups battle each other with heavy weapons. Ironically, the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers.
Pakistan's self-inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia's system, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.
On the previous page, the reader can view the government-approved curriculum. This is the basic road map for transmitting values and knowledge to the young. By an act of parliament passed in 1976, all government and private schools (except for O-level schools) are required to follow this curriculum. It was prepared by the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education, government of Pakistan. It sounds like a blueprint for a religious fascist state.
Alongside are scanned pictures from an illustrated primer for the Urdu alphabet. The masthead states that it has been prepared by Iqra Publishers, Rawalpindi, along "Islamic lines." Although not an officially approved textbook, it is being used currently by some regular schools, as well as madrassas associated with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), an Islamic political party that had allied itself with General Musharraf. These picture scans have been taken from a child's book, hence the scribbles.
The world of the Pakistani schoolchild remained largely unchanged, even after September 11, 2001, the event that led to Pakistan's timely desertion of the Taliban and the slackening of the Kashmir jihad. Indeed, for all his hypocritical talk of "enlightened moderation," General Musharraf's educational curriculum was far from enlightening. It was a slightly toned down version of the curriculum that existed under Nawaz Sharif which, in turn, was identical to that under Benazir Bhutto who had inherited it from General Zia-ul-Haq. Fearful of taking on the powerful religious forces, every incumbent government has refused to take a position on the curriculum and thus quietly allowed young minds to be moulded by fanatics. What may happen a generation later has always been a secondary issue for a government challenged on so many fronts.
The promotion of militarism in Pakistan's so-called "secular" public schools, colleges and universities had a profound effect upon young minds. Militant jihad became part of the culture on college and university campuses. Armed groups flourished, they invited students for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, set up offices throughout the country, collected funds at Friday prayers and declared a war which knew no borders. Pre-9/11, my university was ablaze with posters inviting students to participate in the Kashmir jihad. Post-2001, this ceased to be done openly.
Still, the primary vehicle for Saudi-ising Pakistan's education has been the madrassa. In earlier times, these had turned out the occasional Islamic scholar, using a curriculum that essentially dates back to the 11th century, with only minor subsequent revisions. But their principal function had been to produce imams and muezzins for mosques, and those who eked out an existence as `maulvi sahibs' teaching children to read the Quran.
The Afghan jihad changed everything. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. A detailed picture of the current situation is not available. But according to the national education census, which the ministry of education released in 2006, Punjab has 5,459 madrassas followed by the NWFP with 2,843; Sindh has 1,935; the Federally Administrated Northern Areas (FANA), 1,193; Balochistan, 769; Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 586; the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), 135; and the Islamabad capital territory, 77. The ministry estimates that 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas.
These figures appear to be way off the mark. Commonly quoted figures range between 18,000 and 22,000 madrassas. The number of students could be correspondingly larger. The free boarding and lodging plus provision of books to the students, is a key part of their appeal. Additionally, parents across the country desire that their children be "disciplined" and given a thorough Islamic education. The madrassas serve this purpose, too, exceedingly well.
Madrassas have deeply impacted the urban environment. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from the rest of Pakistan. Also, it had largely been the abode of Pakistan's elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students, sporting little prayer caps, dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they swarm the city, making women minus the hijab increasingly nervous.
Total segregation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and eight children were crushed to death and scores injured in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi, where a large number of women were attending a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving the injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this incident as being just one of a kind. In fact, soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. This action was similar to that of Saudi Arabia's ubiquitous religious `mutaween' (police) who, in March 2002, had stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas – a long robe worn in Saudi Arabia. In a rare departure from the norm, Saudi newspapers had blamed and criticised the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudi-isation of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytisers carrying this message, such as Mrs Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to the heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades back, the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. The abaya was an unknown word in Urdu. Today, some shops across the country specialise in abayas. At colleges and universities across Pakistan, the female student is seeking the anonymity of the burqa. And in some parts of the country she seems to outnumber her sisters who still "dare" to show their faces.
I have observed the veil profoundly affect habits and attitudes. Many of my veiled female students have largely become silent note-takers, are increasingly timid and seem less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. They lack the confidence of a young university student.
While social conservatism does not necessarily lead to violent extremism, it does shorten the distance. The socially conservative are more easily convinced that Muslims are being demonised by the rest of the world. The real problem, they say, is the plight of the Palestinians, the decadent and discriminatory West, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Kashmir issue, the Bush doctrine – the list runs on. They vehemently deny that those committing terrorist acts are Muslims, and if presented with incontrovertible evidence, say it is a mere reaction to oppression.
The immediate future does not appear hopeful: increasing numbers of mullahs are creating cults around themselves and seizing control of the minds of worshippers. In the tribal areas, a string of new Islamist leaders have suddenly emerged: Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh. Poverty, deprivation, lack of justice and extreme differences of wealth provide the perfect environment for these demagogues to recruit people to their cause. Their gruesome acts of terror are still being perceived by large numbers of Pakistanis merely as a war against imperialist America. This could not be further from the truth.
In the long term, we will have to see how the larger political battle works out between those Pakistanis who want an Islamic theocratic state and those who want a modern Islamic republic. It may yet be possible to roll back those Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded Pakistani society for over 30 years and to defeat its hate-driven holy warriors. There is no chance of instant success; perhaps things may have to get worse before they get better. But, in the long term, I am convinced that the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction. History leads us to believe that reason will triumph over unreason, and the evolution of the humans into a higher and better species will continue. Using ways that we cannot currently anticipate, they will somehow overcome their primal impulses of territoriality, tribalism, religiosity and nationalism. But, for now, this must be just a matter of faith.
The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
February 9, 2009
Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI — A mob attack on women drinking in a college-town bar has set off the latest battle in the great Indian culture wars, uncorking a national debate over moral policing and its political repercussions, and laying bare the limits of freedom for young Indian women.
The latest Old versus New India hubbub began one Saturday last month when an obscure Hindu organization, which calls itself Sri Ram Sena, or the Army of Ram, a Hindu god, attacked several women at a bar in the southern Indian college town of Mangalore and accused them of being un-Indian for being out drinking and dancing with men.
The Sena had television news crews in tow, so its attack on the women at the bar, called Amnesia — the Lounge, was swiftly broadcast nationwide.
The video, broadcast repeatedly since then, showed some women being pushed to the ground and others cowering and shielding their faces. It was unclear whether they were trying to protect themselves from their assailants’ fists or the television cameras or both. None of them have come out publicly since then, and it is unclear whether anyone was seriously hurt.
Eventually, more than 10 members of the Sena were arrested, only to be released on bail in a week. Since then, they have promised to campaign against Valentine’s Day, which they criticized as a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture, and they said they did not disapprove of men drinking at bars.
The conflict surrounding so-called pub culture in India set off nearly two weeks of shouting matches on television talk shows and editorial pages. Politicians have also jumped into the fray.
At first, some lawmakers with the governing Congress Party seized on the Mangalore attack to denounce their political rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., for its loose affiliations with a variety of Hindu radical groups. But the B.J.P., which governs the state of Karnataka, where Mangalore is located, instantly condemned the violence. And soon enough, others allied with the governing coalition, while condemning violence, joined the finger-wagging.
One official denounced shopping malls, too, calling them havens of hand-holding. The health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, promised a national alcohol law to curb drinking, without which, he told reporters, “India will not progress.”
B. P. Singhal, a former member of Parliament who was with the B.J.P. and who has been making the rounds of television talk shows, rued that men acted irresponsibly in the company of women at bars. A Sena leader appeared on television to say his group was stepping in to enforce morality because the government had failed.
The women and child development minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has been one of the few politicians to openly criticize the Sena, calling its methods “Talibanization.”
The debate comes as a new generation of Indian women steps out of the home for work or play in a rapidly expanding economy and finds itself having to negotiate old social boundaries, harassment and, sometimes, outright violence. New Delhi is among the most notorious for this; among big cities in India, it has logged the highest number of reported cases of rape and molestation for the last decade.
On a recent night at Cafe Morrison, a deafening rock ’n’ roll bar, the national stir over pub culture inspired irritation, dismay and soul-searching.
“It’s pathetic,” said Kirat Rawel, 23, a college student who was spending the evening at the bar here in the capital with her younger sister, Nimrit, 21. “It is basically for the vote bank. It has nothing to do with culture.”
The sisters said their parents, who live in a small town more than five hours from here by car, had no problem with their going to a bar and having a drink.
The sisters also know that even in New Delhi, one of India’s most seemingly modern cities, they are not immune to attacks like the one in Mangalore and that they are surrounded by other Indians who, in their hearts, do not approve of young women who go out at night and drink in the company of strangers. They suspected that there was quiet approval among many Indians of the Sena mob that assaulted the women in Mangalore.
“Urban India may criticize it,” Kirat Rawel said, “but there is a certain section of India that believes in it.”
By 10 p.m., most of the women, who were a minority at Cafe Morrison anyway, had begun to clear out. The Rawel sisters, like many single women in this city, said they worried most about how to get home safely.
Sanah Galgotia, 21, nursed a beer and recalled this story: She had been walking home around midafternoon recently when a car full of men slowly followed behind. Furious, she turned around, shouted and banged on the car window, only to have the driver try to run her over. She escaped and ran home. When she got there and recounted her ordeal, her mother asked why she had pursued the aggressors.
To Ms. Galgotia, the episode demonstrated the “schizophrenic” attitude of Indian women — alternating between being assertive and subservient and then judging others for tilting one way or the other. She is guilty of it, too, she said. When she sees a woman who smokes in public, she sizes her up instantly.
“In India, no matter how modern you are, you’re still in this schizophrenic nonmodern thing,” she said, straining to be heard as the D.J. blasted Pearl Jam.
She looked around and wondered aloud whether she and her friends were simply “trying to ape the West.” That set off an argument.
Her friend Murphy John, 21, shook his head. “I’m wearing a jacket, not a dhoti-kurta,” he said, referring to the traditional Indian draped pantaloon and tunic, “because I like wearing a jacket. It’s globalization.”
“We are globalized in our lifestyle,” Ms. Galgotia responded, “but very Indian at heart. I know I am.”
Another friend at the table, Sandesh Moses, 22, said he thought the Sena had probably accomplished its goal.
“They don’t want women to go out,” he said. “I can guarantee a lot of people will be supporting them.”
Attack on Women at an Indian Bar Intensifies a Clash of Cultures
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI — A mob attack on women drinking in a college-town bar has set off the latest battle in the great Indian culture wars, uncorking a national debate over moral policing and its political repercussions, and laying bare the limits of freedom for young Indian women.
The latest Old versus New India hubbub began one Saturday last month when an obscure Hindu organization, which calls itself Sri Ram Sena, or the Army of Ram, a Hindu god, attacked several women at a bar in the southern Indian college town of Mangalore and accused them of being un-Indian for being out drinking and dancing with men.
The Sena had television news crews in tow, so its attack on the women at the bar, called Amnesia — the Lounge, was swiftly broadcast nationwide.
The video, broadcast repeatedly since then, showed some women being pushed to the ground and others cowering and shielding their faces. It was unclear whether they were trying to protect themselves from their assailants’ fists or the television cameras or both. None of them have come out publicly since then, and it is unclear whether anyone was seriously hurt.
Eventually, more than 10 members of the Sena were arrested, only to be released on bail in a week. Since then, they have promised to campaign against Valentine’s Day, which they criticized as a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture, and they said they did not disapprove of men drinking at bars.
The conflict surrounding so-called pub culture in India set off nearly two weeks of shouting matches on television talk shows and editorial pages. Politicians have also jumped into the fray.
At first, some lawmakers with the governing Congress Party seized on the Mangalore attack to denounce their political rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., for its loose affiliations with a variety of Hindu radical groups. But the B.J.P., which governs the state of Karnataka, where Mangalore is located, instantly condemned the violence. And soon enough, others allied with the governing coalition, while condemning violence, joined the finger-wagging.
One official denounced shopping malls, too, calling them havens of hand-holding. The health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, promised a national alcohol law to curb drinking, without which, he told reporters, “India will not progress.”
B. P. Singhal, a former member of Parliament who was with the B.J.P. and who has been making the rounds of television talk shows, rued that men acted irresponsibly in the company of women at bars. A Sena leader appeared on television to say his group was stepping in to enforce morality because the government had failed.
The women and child development minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has been one of the few politicians to openly criticize the Sena, calling its methods “Talibanization.”
The debate comes as a new generation of Indian women steps out of the home for work or play in a rapidly expanding economy and finds itself having to negotiate old social boundaries, harassment and, sometimes, outright violence. New Delhi is among the most notorious for this; among big cities in India, it has logged the highest number of reported cases of rape and molestation for the last decade.
On a recent night at Cafe Morrison, a deafening rock ’n’ roll bar, the national stir over pub culture inspired irritation, dismay and soul-searching.
“It’s pathetic,” said Kirat Rawel, 23, a college student who was spending the evening at the bar here in the capital with her younger sister, Nimrit, 21. “It is basically for the vote bank. It has nothing to do with culture.”
The sisters said their parents, who live in a small town more than five hours from here by car, had no problem with their going to a bar and having a drink.
The sisters also know that even in New Delhi, one of India’s most seemingly modern cities, they are not immune to attacks like the one in Mangalore and that they are surrounded by other Indians who, in their hearts, do not approve of young women who go out at night and drink in the company of strangers. They suspected that there was quiet approval among many Indians of the Sena mob that assaulted the women in Mangalore.
“Urban India may criticize it,” Kirat Rawel said, “but there is a certain section of India that believes in it.”
By 10 p.m., most of the women, who were a minority at Cafe Morrison anyway, had begun to clear out. The Rawel sisters, like many single women in this city, said they worried most about how to get home safely.
Sanah Galgotia, 21, nursed a beer and recalled this story: She had been walking home around midafternoon recently when a car full of men slowly followed behind. Furious, she turned around, shouted and banged on the car window, only to have the driver try to run her over. She escaped and ran home. When she got there and recounted her ordeal, her mother asked why she had pursued the aggressors.
To Ms. Galgotia, the episode demonstrated the “schizophrenic” attitude of Indian women — alternating between being assertive and subservient and then judging others for tilting one way or the other. She is guilty of it, too, she said. When she sees a woman who smokes in public, she sizes her up instantly.
“In India, no matter how modern you are, you’re still in this schizophrenic nonmodern thing,” she said, straining to be heard as the D.J. blasted Pearl Jam.
She looked around and wondered aloud whether she and her friends were simply “trying to ape the West.” That set off an argument.
Her friend Murphy John, 21, shook his head. “I’m wearing a jacket, not a dhoti-kurta,” he said, referring to the traditional Indian draped pantaloon and tunic, “because I like wearing a jacket. It’s globalization.”
“We are globalized in our lifestyle,” Ms. Galgotia responded, “but very Indian at heart. I know I am.”
Another friend at the table, Sandesh Moses, 22, said he thought the Sena had probably accomplished its goal.
“They don’t want women to go out,” he said. “I can guarantee a lot of people will be supporting them.”
February 13, 2009
Pakistan Backtracks on Link to Mumbai Attacks
By SALMAN MASOOD
There is a video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/world ... ?th&emc=th
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that parts of the Mumbai terrorist attacks were planned on its soil and said that six suspects were being held and awaiting prosecution.
The admission amounted to a significant about-face for the Pakistani government, which has long denied that any terrorist attacks against India, its longtime enemy, have originated in Pakistan.
Officials said as recently as Monday that they did not have enough evidence to link the Mumbai assault to Pakistan, and there have been signs of internal tensions in Pakistan over cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group that India and the United States have deemed responsible for the Nov. 26 attack on India’s financial capital.
Pakistani officials did not explicitly name Lashkar as the organizer of the attacks on Thursday, but they did single out as suspects two people who are known to be connected to the group.
The formal acknowledgment of a Pakistani role came on the final day of a visit to the country by Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to the region, who raised the issue with top Pakistani government officials, according to an official familiar with the conversations.
Though Pakistani officials denied the announcement was linked to Mr. Holbrooke’s visit, the Obama administration has made clear that lowering hostilities between India and Pakistan is a crucial part of a regional solution to the war in Afghanistan.
India called Pakistan’s admission a “positive development,” but said that Pakistan must still take steps to dismantle the “infrastructure of terrorism.” In Washington, the State Department spokesman, Robert A. Wood, said, “I think it shows that Pakistan is serious about doing what it can to deal with the people that may have perpetrated these attacks.”
Both India and the United States have put strong pressure on Pakistan for some concession regarding the Mumbai attacks, which American officials feared were distracting Pakistan from the task of battling militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda who have bases inside Pakistani territory.
Despite seemingly overwhelming evidence presented by India, with the help of American and British investigators, top Pakistani officials had repeatedly raised doubts about the identity of the attackers and the links to Pakistan-based militant leaders.
Finally, on Thursday, as Mr. Holbrooke left Pakistan for Afghanistan, Rehman Malik, the senior security official in the Interior Ministry, gave the fullest public account so far of Pakistan’s investigation.
“Some part of the conspiracy has taken place in Pakistan,” he said in a televised news briefing. He emphasized Pakistan’s commitment to prosecuting the attackers and, unusually for a government official here, expressed solidarity with India.
But he was also careful to diffuse blame for the attacks, noting that the tools used by the attackers to organize their plot — cellphone SIM cards, Internet servers — provided links to other countries, however ancillary.
“We have gone the extra mile in conducting an investigation on the basis of information provided by India, and we have proved that we are with the Indian people,” Mr. Malik said.
“According to the initial inquiry report a part of the conspiracy of Mumbai attacks was hatched in Pakistan; however links have been found in other states, including the U.S.A., Austria, Spain, Italy and Russia,” he added.
A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, called the Pakistani announcement a “political decision” to ease tensions with India.
While saying they did not have enough proof that the perpetrators were Pakistanis, President Asif Ali Zardari and other civilian leaders have expressed a determination to get to the bottom of the Mumbai attacks.
Mr. Zardari even offered to send the nation’s top intelligence official to India after the attacks occurred. But his outreach to India met strong resistance from Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency and the military.
A Defense Department official, who did not want to be named for similar reasons, said the Pakistani decision may have been an effort by the civilian government to “poke a stick” at the Pakistani military and intelligence service, which helped set up Lashkar in the 1980s as a proxy force to challenge India’s control of Kashmir, the disputed border region.
Indian officials have previously blamed Lashkar for an attack in 2000 on the Red Fort in New Delhi, as well as involvement in an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. Pakistan never acknowledged any Lashkar role in those attacks. The group is officially banned, though it has continued to operate openly.
Mr. Malik’s statements appeared to vindicate many of India’s accusations of Pakistani involvement. But he gave no confirmation of Indian claims that elements of the Pakistani security apparatus may also have been involved along with Lashkar.
He said that Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the operational commander of Lashkar, was “under investigation” as the possible mastermind of the Mumbai assault. And he acknowledged allegations that e-mail messages that claimed responsibility for the attacks were created by Zarar Shah, the Lashkar communications coordinator.
While confirming much of the account of the attack already pieced together by American, British and Indian investigators, he also described an apparently broader circle of terrorist operators than previously disclosed.
He named some of those arrested as a result of the inquiry, including men he identified as Muhammad Ishfaq and Javed Iqbal, who he said was captured after being lured to Pakistan from Spain. Cellphone SIM cards used in the attacks were bought in Austria, while calls over the Internet, using a server in Texas, were paid for in Barcelona, Spain, he said.
Mr. Malik identified another co-conspirator as Hammad Amin Sadiq, who, he said, had been traced through telephone records and bank transfers. “He was basically the main operator,” Mr. Malik said. He also said that one of the people involved was in Houston, and that he planned to send a team to United States.
Only one of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, survived the Mumbai assault. The Pakistani authorities have already acknowledged that he was of Pakistani origin. But they have yet to ascertain the identities of the other nine attackers because information provided by India was too vague, Mr. Malik said.
Pakistan had given Indian officials a list of 30 questions to which investigators were seeking answers, including some relating to the records of conversations between the attackers and their handlers. “We have asked the Indian authorities to share more information so that the culprits could be given strong prosecution,” Mr. Malik said.
He said he had originally planned to hold the briefing four to five days earlier, but because of some legal matters, he had to postpone it until Thursday. “The timing has nothing to do with Mr. Holbrooke’s visit,” he said.
But Sajjan M. Gohel, director for international security of the Asia Pacific Foundation in London, who has closely followed the Mumbai investigations, said there was no denying that Pakistan had been under pressure from the United States.
“This is unprecedented,” he said. “It is the first time Pakistan has acknowledged an attack on India has originated on its soil.”
Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New Delhi.
Pakistan Backtracks on Link to Mumbai Attacks
By SALMAN MASOOD
There is a video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/world ... ?th&emc=th
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that parts of the Mumbai terrorist attacks were planned on its soil and said that six suspects were being held and awaiting prosecution.
The admission amounted to a significant about-face for the Pakistani government, which has long denied that any terrorist attacks against India, its longtime enemy, have originated in Pakistan.
Officials said as recently as Monday that they did not have enough evidence to link the Mumbai assault to Pakistan, and there have been signs of internal tensions in Pakistan over cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group that India and the United States have deemed responsible for the Nov. 26 attack on India’s financial capital.
Pakistani officials did not explicitly name Lashkar as the organizer of the attacks on Thursday, but they did single out as suspects two people who are known to be connected to the group.
The formal acknowledgment of a Pakistani role came on the final day of a visit to the country by Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to the region, who raised the issue with top Pakistani government officials, according to an official familiar with the conversations.
Though Pakistani officials denied the announcement was linked to Mr. Holbrooke’s visit, the Obama administration has made clear that lowering hostilities between India and Pakistan is a crucial part of a regional solution to the war in Afghanistan.
India called Pakistan’s admission a “positive development,” but said that Pakistan must still take steps to dismantle the “infrastructure of terrorism.” In Washington, the State Department spokesman, Robert A. Wood, said, “I think it shows that Pakistan is serious about doing what it can to deal with the people that may have perpetrated these attacks.”
Both India and the United States have put strong pressure on Pakistan for some concession regarding the Mumbai attacks, which American officials feared were distracting Pakistan from the task of battling militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda who have bases inside Pakistani territory.
Despite seemingly overwhelming evidence presented by India, with the help of American and British investigators, top Pakistani officials had repeatedly raised doubts about the identity of the attackers and the links to Pakistan-based militant leaders.
Finally, on Thursday, as Mr. Holbrooke left Pakistan for Afghanistan, Rehman Malik, the senior security official in the Interior Ministry, gave the fullest public account so far of Pakistan’s investigation.
“Some part of the conspiracy has taken place in Pakistan,” he said in a televised news briefing. He emphasized Pakistan’s commitment to prosecuting the attackers and, unusually for a government official here, expressed solidarity with India.
But he was also careful to diffuse blame for the attacks, noting that the tools used by the attackers to organize their plot — cellphone SIM cards, Internet servers — provided links to other countries, however ancillary.
“We have gone the extra mile in conducting an investigation on the basis of information provided by India, and we have proved that we are with the Indian people,” Mr. Malik said.
“According to the initial inquiry report a part of the conspiracy of Mumbai attacks was hatched in Pakistan; however links have been found in other states, including the U.S.A., Austria, Spain, Italy and Russia,” he added.
A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, called the Pakistani announcement a “political decision” to ease tensions with India.
While saying they did not have enough proof that the perpetrators were Pakistanis, President Asif Ali Zardari and other civilian leaders have expressed a determination to get to the bottom of the Mumbai attacks.
Mr. Zardari even offered to send the nation’s top intelligence official to India after the attacks occurred. But his outreach to India met strong resistance from Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency and the military.
A Defense Department official, who did not want to be named for similar reasons, said the Pakistani decision may have been an effort by the civilian government to “poke a stick” at the Pakistani military and intelligence service, which helped set up Lashkar in the 1980s as a proxy force to challenge India’s control of Kashmir, the disputed border region.
Indian officials have previously blamed Lashkar for an attack in 2000 on the Red Fort in New Delhi, as well as involvement in an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. Pakistan never acknowledged any Lashkar role in those attacks. The group is officially banned, though it has continued to operate openly.
Mr. Malik’s statements appeared to vindicate many of India’s accusations of Pakistani involvement. But he gave no confirmation of Indian claims that elements of the Pakistani security apparatus may also have been involved along with Lashkar.
He said that Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the operational commander of Lashkar, was “under investigation” as the possible mastermind of the Mumbai assault. And he acknowledged allegations that e-mail messages that claimed responsibility for the attacks were created by Zarar Shah, the Lashkar communications coordinator.
While confirming much of the account of the attack already pieced together by American, British and Indian investigators, he also described an apparently broader circle of terrorist operators than previously disclosed.
He named some of those arrested as a result of the inquiry, including men he identified as Muhammad Ishfaq and Javed Iqbal, who he said was captured after being lured to Pakistan from Spain. Cellphone SIM cards used in the attacks were bought in Austria, while calls over the Internet, using a server in Texas, were paid for in Barcelona, Spain, he said.
Mr. Malik identified another co-conspirator as Hammad Amin Sadiq, who, he said, had been traced through telephone records and bank transfers. “He was basically the main operator,” Mr. Malik said. He also said that one of the people involved was in Houston, and that he planned to send a team to United States.
Only one of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, survived the Mumbai assault. The Pakistani authorities have already acknowledged that he was of Pakistani origin. But they have yet to ascertain the identities of the other nine attackers because information provided by India was too vague, Mr. Malik said.
Pakistan had given Indian officials a list of 30 questions to which investigators were seeking answers, including some relating to the records of conversations between the attackers and their handlers. “We have asked the Indian authorities to share more information so that the culprits could be given strong prosecution,” Mr. Malik said.
He said he had originally planned to hold the briefing four to five days earlier, but because of some legal matters, he had to postpone it until Thursday. “The timing has nothing to do with Mr. Holbrooke’s visit,” he said.
But Sajjan M. Gohel, director for international security of the Asia Pacific Foundation in London, who has closely followed the Mumbai investigations, said there was no denying that Pakistan had been under pressure from the United States.
“This is unprecedented,” he said. “It is the first time Pakistan has acknowledged an attack on India has originated on its soil.”
Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New Delhi.
February 16, 2009
Pakistan and Taliban Appear Near Deal
By ISMAIL KHAN
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Government officials and Taliban militants appeared to be near a deal Sunday on the violent Swat region of northern Pakistan, where the militants declared a unilateral 10-day cease-fire and the government indicated it was willing to accept the imposition of Islamic law.
Any formal truce would be a major concession by the government, which, despite a military operation in Swat involving 12,000 Pakistani Army troops, has been losing ground to a Taliban force of about 3,000 fighters. The militants have kept a stranglehold on the area for months, killing local police officers and officials and punishing residents who do not adhere to strict Islamic tenets.
High-level talks on Taliban demands for Shariah law in Swat and the surrounding region were to continue on Monday in Islamabad, Pakistan, involving President Asif Ali Zardari; the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani; and senior local officials. But on Sunday, a prominent regional official, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said that there was already an agreement in principle.
The Taliban made several gestures on Sunday that appeared to be aimed at moving the deal along, including declaring a 10-day cease-fire with government troops in Swat. A militant spokesman there, Muslim Khan, said the move was made out of good will and told reporters that “our fighters will neither target security forces nor government installations.” But he insisted that the militants would fight back if attacked.
Earlier, Mr. Khan said that the Taliban had released a Chinese engineer, Long Xiaowei, who had been held hostage since August, The Associated Press reported.
Previous attempts at truces in the region have fallen apart, most notably last May. And the United States has strongly opposed making political concessions to the Taliban, urging Mr. Zardari’s government to fight more vigorously.
That appeared to happen last summer, when the army began an offensive in Swat. But the move quickly stalled, with troops reduced mostly to remotely shelling suspected Taliban sites and the militants effectively imposing their authority throughout the region.
Since then, Taliban leaders have proscribed what they call un-Islamic activities by residents, including watching television, dancing and shaving beards, and they have sometimes beheaded offenders. The penalties are regularly, and terrifyingly, announced over radio stations under the militants’ control. Tens of thousands of residents of the area, which was once a popular tourist spot and considered a mainstream part of the country, have fled the intimidation and violence.
It was unclear what any formal truce would include, and the government had recently said that it was not planning to withdraw troops from Swat.
Mr. Hussain played down the significance of a formal acceptance of Shariah law in the area, saying that it would be mostly a technical agreement.
“We are not enacting any new law,” he said. “The regulation already exists and is enforced in Swat, but the mechanism to enforce it is missing. We are only providing for an increase in the number of judges and setting a time frame for the disposal of cases.”
****
The War in Pakistan (Video)
Reporting from Pakistan, Steve Kroft examines the state of Pakistan, where Islamic insurgents are attempting to take over the country. Kroft also speaks with Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4803938n
Pakistan and Taliban Appear Near Deal
By ISMAIL KHAN
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Government officials and Taliban militants appeared to be near a deal Sunday on the violent Swat region of northern Pakistan, where the militants declared a unilateral 10-day cease-fire and the government indicated it was willing to accept the imposition of Islamic law.
Any formal truce would be a major concession by the government, which, despite a military operation in Swat involving 12,000 Pakistani Army troops, has been losing ground to a Taliban force of about 3,000 fighters. The militants have kept a stranglehold on the area for months, killing local police officers and officials and punishing residents who do not adhere to strict Islamic tenets.
High-level talks on Taliban demands for Shariah law in Swat and the surrounding region were to continue on Monday in Islamabad, Pakistan, involving President Asif Ali Zardari; the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani; and senior local officials. But on Sunday, a prominent regional official, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said that there was already an agreement in principle.
The Taliban made several gestures on Sunday that appeared to be aimed at moving the deal along, including declaring a 10-day cease-fire with government troops in Swat. A militant spokesman there, Muslim Khan, said the move was made out of good will and told reporters that “our fighters will neither target security forces nor government installations.” But he insisted that the militants would fight back if attacked.
Earlier, Mr. Khan said that the Taliban had released a Chinese engineer, Long Xiaowei, who had been held hostage since August, The Associated Press reported.
Previous attempts at truces in the region have fallen apart, most notably last May. And the United States has strongly opposed making political concessions to the Taliban, urging Mr. Zardari’s government to fight more vigorously.
That appeared to happen last summer, when the army began an offensive in Swat. But the move quickly stalled, with troops reduced mostly to remotely shelling suspected Taliban sites and the militants effectively imposing their authority throughout the region.
Since then, Taliban leaders have proscribed what they call un-Islamic activities by residents, including watching television, dancing and shaving beards, and they have sometimes beheaded offenders. The penalties are regularly, and terrifyingly, announced over radio stations under the militants’ control. Tens of thousands of residents of the area, which was once a popular tourist spot and considered a mainstream part of the country, have fled the intimidation and violence.
It was unclear what any formal truce would include, and the government had recently said that it was not planning to withdraw troops from Swat.
Mr. Hussain played down the significance of a formal acceptance of Shariah law in the area, saying that it would be mostly a technical agreement.
“We are not enacting any new law,” he said. “The regulation already exists and is enforced in Swat, but the mechanism to enforce it is missing. We are only providing for an increase in the number of judges and setting a time frame for the disposal of cases.”
****
The War in Pakistan (Video)
Reporting from Pakistan, Steve Kroft examines the state of Pakistan, where Islamic insurgents are attempting to take over the country. Kroft also speaks with Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4803938n
February 17, 2009
Pakistan Makes a Taliban Truce, Creating a Haven
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The government announced Monday that it would accept a system of Islamic law in the Swat valley and agreed to a truce, effectively conceding the area as a Taliban sanctuary and suspending a faltering effort by the army to crush the insurgents.
The concessions to the militants, who now control about 70 percent of the region just 100 miles from the capital, were criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.
The accord came less than a week before the first official visit to Washington of the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to meet Obama administration officials and discuss how Pakistan could improve its tactics against what the American military is now calling an industrial-strength insurgency there of Al Qaeda and the Taliban militants.
The militants have also made deep gains in neighboring Afghanistan, where the United States is sending more troops.
Pakistani government officials insisted the truce with the Taliban and the switch to the Shariah, the Islamic legal code, were consistent with the Constitution and presented no threat to the integrity of the nation.
But the truce offered by the Taliban, and accepted by the authorities, rebuffed American demands for the Pakistani civilian and military authorities to stick with the fight against the militants, not make deals with them.
Under the terms of the accord, the chief minister of the province, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, said that Pakistani troops would now go on “reactive mode” and fight only in retaliation for an attack.
Announced by the government of the North-West Frontier Province after consultation with President Asif Ali Zardari, the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants across Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas in North and South Waziristan.
Those regions have since become a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants, who are now the focus of missile strikes by remotely piloted American aircraft. On Monday, what was thought to be a drone strike in Kurram, a separate area close to the Afghan border, killed 31 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
Analysts are now suggesting that the drone strikes may be pushing the Taliban, and even some Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley more important to the Taliban.
Speaking in India on the last leg of his trip to Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, did not address the truce directly but said the turmoil in Swat served as a reminder that the United States, Pakistan and India faced an “enemy which poses direct threats to our leadership, our capitals, and our people.”
Pakistani legal experts and other analysts warned that the decision by the authorities would embolden militants in other parts of the country.
“This means you have surrendered to a handful of extremists,” said Athar Minallah, a leader of a lawyers’ movement that has campaigned for an independent judiciary. “The state is under attack; instead of dealing with them as aggressors, the government has abdicated.”
Shuja Nawaz, the author of “Crossed Swords,” a book on the Pakistani military, said that with the accord, “the government is ceding a great deal of space” to the militants.
But some Pakistani officials have recently argued that a truce was necessary in Swat because the army was unable to fight a guerrilla insurgency and civilians were suffering in the conflict.
A former interior minister, Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, told the parliamentary committee on national security this month that Shariah ordinances should be introduced to “calm the situation.”
Sherry Rehman, the government information minister, said the deal should not be seen as a concession. “It is in no way a sign of the state’s weakness,” she said. “The public will of the population of the Swat region is at the center of all efforts, and it should be taken into account while debating the merits of this agreement.”
In legislative elections a year ago, the people of Swat, a region that is about the size of Delaware and has 1.3 million residents, voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Since then, the Taliban have singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley. Several hundred thousand residents have also fled the fighting.
Many of the poor who have stayed in Swat, which until the late 1960s was ruled by a prince, were calling for the Shariah courts as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. The authorities in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, argued that the Shariah courts were not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of females or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The new accord, they said, would simply activate laws already agreed to by Benazir Bhutto in the early 1990s when she was prime minister. Similarly, the principle of Shariah courts in Swat was also agreed to by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. In both cases, the courts, though approved, were never put in place.
A Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official did not have permission to speak publicly, said that the government’s acceptance of the courts was an attempt to blunt efforts of the Taliban to woo Swat residents frustrated by the ineffective judiciary.
“The Taliban was trying to take advantage of the local movement and desire for a judicial system,” the official said. The official insisted that the Obama administration, informed of the accord, “showed understanding of our strategy.”
On Monday, a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said only, “We have seen the press reports and are in touch with the government of Pakistan about the ongoing situation in Swat.”
Provincial officials said the accord in Swat was struck with Maulana Sufi Muhammad. He is the father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, a deputy to Baitullah Mehsud, who is the head of the umbrella group for the Taliban in Pakistan.
Mr. Muhammad is often described as more benign than his son-in-law, but the ranks of their followers and their lines of authority are fluid and overlapping.
In 2001, he took thousands of young men across the border into Afghanistan to fight jihad against the Americans. After his return he was imprisoned by Pakistani authorities.
He was released last April after agreeing to denounce violence and work to bring peace to the area.
Despite the insistence that the new legal system in Swat was consistent with existing civil law, some feared that the accord was an ominous sign of the power of the militants to spread into the heartland of Pakistan, including the most populous and wealthiest province, the Punjab.
“The hardest task for the government will be to protect the Punjab against inroads by militants,” wrote I. A. Rehman, a member of the Human Rights Commission, in the daily newspaper, Dawn.
“Already, religious extremists have strong bases across the province and sympathizers in all arenas: political parties, services, the judiciary, the middle class, and even the media,” he wrote. “For its part, the government is handicapped because of its failure to offer good governance, guarantee livelihoods, and restore people’s faith in the frayed judicial system.”
Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Pir Zubair Shah and Salman Masood from Islamabad; and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Pakistan Makes a Taliban Truce, Creating a Haven
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The government announced Monday that it would accept a system of Islamic law in the Swat valley and agreed to a truce, effectively conceding the area as a Taliban sanctuary and suspending a faltering effort by the army to crush the insurgents.
The concessions to the militants, who now control about 70 percent of the region just 100 miles from the capital, were criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.
The accord came less than a week before the first official visit to Washington of the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to meet Obama administration officials and discuss how Pakistan could improve its tactics against what the American military is now calling an industrial-strength insurgency there of Al Qaeda and the Taliban militants.
The militants have also made deep gains in neighboring Afghanistan, where the United States is sending more troops.
Pakistani government officials insisted the truce with the Taliban and the switch to the Shariah, the Islamic legal code, were consistent with the Constitution and presented no threat to the integrity of the nation.
But the truce offered by the Taliban, and accepted by the authorities, rebuffed American demands for the Pakistani civilian and military authorities to stick with the fight against the militants, not make deals with them.
Under the terms of the accord, the chief minister of the province, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, said that Pakistani troops would now go on “reactive mode” and fight only in retaliation for an attack.
Announced by the government of the North-West Frontier Province after consultation with President Asif Ali Zardari, the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants across Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas in North and South Waziristan.
Those regions have since become a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants, who are now the focus of missile strikes by remotely piloted American aircraft. On Monday, what was thought to be a drone strike in Kurram, a separate area close to the Afghan border, killed 31 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
Analysts are now suggesting that the drone strikes may be pushing the Taliban, and even some Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley more important to the Taliban.
Speaking in India on the last leg of his trip to Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, did not address the truce directly but said the turmoil in Swat served as a reminder that the United States, Pakistan and India faced an “enemy which poses direct threats to our leadership, our capitals, and our people.”
Pakistani legal experts and other analysts warned that the decision by the authorities would embolden militants in other parts of the country.
“This means you have surrendered to a handful of extremists,” said Athar Minallah, a leader of a lawyers’ movement that has campaigned for an independent judiciary. “The state is under attack; instead of dealing with them as aggressors, the government has abdicated.”
Shuja Nawaz, the author of “Crossed Swords,” a book on the Pakistani military, said that with the accord, “the government is ceding a great deal of space” to the militants.
But some Pakistani officials have recently argued that a truce was necessary in Swat because the army was unable to fight a guerrilla insurgency and civilians were suffering in the conflict.
A former interior minister, Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, told the parliamentary committee on national security this month that Shariah ordinances should be introduced to “calm the situation.”
Sherry Rehman, the government information minister, said the deal should not be seen as a concession. “It is in no way a sign of the state’s weakness,” she said. “The public will of the population of the Swat region is at the center of all efforts, and it should be taken into account while debating the merits of this agreement.”
In legislative elections a year ago, the people of Swat, a region that is about the size of Delaware and has 1.3 million residents, voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Since then, the Taliban have singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley. Several hundred thousand residents have also fled the fighting.
Many of the poor who have stayed in Swat, which until the late 1960s was ruled by a prince, were calling for the Shariah courts as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. The authorities in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, argued that the Shariah courts were not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of females or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The new accord, they said, would simply activate laws already agreed to by Benazir Bhutto in the early 1990s when she was prime minister. Similarly, the principle of Shariah courts in Swat was also agreed to by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. In both cases, the courts, though approved, were never put in place.
A Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official did not have permission to speak publicly, said that the government’s acceptance of the courts was an attempt to blunt efforts of the Taliban to woo Swat residents frustrated by the ineffective judiciary.
“The Taliban was trying to take advantage of the local movement and desire for a judicial system,” the official said. The official insisted that the Obama administration, informed of the accord, “showed understanding of our strategy.”
On Monday, a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said only, “We have seen the press reports and are in touch with the government of Pakistan about the ongoing situation in Swat.”
Provincial officials said the accord in Swat was struck with Maulana Sufi Muhammad. He is the father-in-law of Maulana Fazlullah, a deputy to Baitullah Mehsud, who is the head of the umbrella group for the Taliban in Pakistan.
Mr. Muhammad is often described as more benign than his son-in-law, but the ranks of their followers and their lines of authority are fluid and overlapping.
In 2001, he took thousands of young men across the border into Afghanistan to fight jihad against the Americans. After his return he was imprisoned by Pakistani authorities.
He was released last April after agreeing to denounce violence and work to bring peace to the area.
Despite the insistence that the new legal system in Swat was consistent with existing civil law, some feared that the accord was an ominous sign of the power of the militants to spread into the heartland of Pakistan, including the most populous and wealthiest province, the Punjab.
“The hardest task for the government will be to protect the Punjab against inroads by militants,” wrote I. A. Rehman, a member of the Human Rights Commission, in the daily newspaper, Dawn.
“Already, religious extremists have strong bases across the province and sympathizers in all arenas: political parties, services, the judiciary, the middle class, and even the media,” he wrote. “For its part, the government is handicapped because of its failure to offer good governance, guarantee livelihoods, and restore people’s faith in the frayed judicial system.”
Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Pir Zubair Shah and Salman Masood from Islamabad; and Helene Cooper from Washington.
Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Lahore
It's one o'clock in the morning and the night is pounding with hypnotic rhythms, the air thick with the smoke of incense, laced with dope.
I'm squeezed into a corner of the upper courtyard at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, famous for its Thursday night drumming sessions.
It's packed with young men, smoking, swaying to the music, and working themselves into a state of ecstasy.
This isn't how most Westerners imagine Pakistan, which has a reputation as a hotspot for Islamist extremism.
Devotional singing
But this popular form of Sufi Islam is far more widespread than the Taleban's version. It's a potent brew of mysticism, folklore and a dose of hedonism.
Now some in the West have begun asking whether Pakistan's Sufism could be mobilised to counter militant Islamist ideology and influence.
Lahore would be the place to start: it's a city rich in Sufi tradition.
At the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh Hajveri, musicians and singers from across the country also gather weekly, to perform qawwali, or Islamic devotional singing.
Qawwali is seen as a key part of the journey to the divine, what Sufis call the continual remembrance of God.
"When you listen to other music, you will listen for a short time, but the qawwali goes straight inside," says Ali Raza, a fourth generation Sufi singer.
"Even if you can't understand the wording, you can feel the magic of the qawwali, this is spiritual music which directly touches your soul and mind as well."
But Sufism is more than music. At a house in an affluent suburb of Lahore a group of women gathers weekly to practise the Sufi disciplines of chanting and meditation, meant to clear the mind and open the heart to God.
One by one the devotees recount how the sessions have helped them deal with problems and achieve greater peace and happiness. This more orthodox Sufism isn't as widespread as the popular variety, but both are seen as native to South Asia.
'Love and harmony'
"Islam came to this part of the world through Sufism," says Ayeda Naqvi, a teacher of Islamic mysticism who's taking part in the chanting.
"It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty, there were no swords, it was very different from the sharp edged Islam of the Middle East.
"And you can't separate it from our culture, it's in our music, it's in our folklore, it's in our architecture. We are a Sufi country, and yet there's a struggle in Pakistan right now for the soul of Islam."
That struggle is between Sufism and hard-line Wahhabism, the strict form of Sunni Islam followed by members of the Taleban and al-Qaeda.
It has gained ground in the tribal north-west, encouraged initially in the 1980s by the US and Saudi Arabia to help recruit Islamist warriors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But it's alien to Pakistan's Sufi heartland in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, says Sardar Aseff Ali, a cabinet minister and a Sufi.
"Wahhabism is a tribal form of Islam coming from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia," he says. "This may be very attractive to the tribes in the frontier, but it will never find resonance in the established societies of Pakistan."
So could Pakistan's mystic, non-violent Islam be used as a defence against extremism?
An American think tank, the Rand Corporation, has advocated this, suggesting support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam".
There is ample proof that Sufism remains a living tradition.
In the warren of Lahore's back streets, a shrine is being built to a modern saint, Hafiz Iqbal, and his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din. They attract followers from all classes and walks of life.
'Atrocities'
The architect is Kamil Khan Mumtaz. He describes in loving detail his traditional construction techniques and the spiritual principles they symbolise.
He shakes his head at stories of lovely old mosques and shrines pulled down and replaced by structures of concrete and glass at the orders of austere mullahs, and he's horrified at atrocities committed in the name of religion by militant Islamists.
But he doubts that Sufism can be marshalled to resist Wahhabi radicalism, a phenomenon that he insists has political, not religious, roots.
"The American think tanks should think again," he says. "What you see [in Islamic extremism] is a response to what has happened in the modern world.
"There is a frustration, an anger, a rage against invaders, occupiers. Muslims ask themselves, what happened?
"We once ruled the world and now we're enslaved. This is a power struggle, it is the oppressed who want to become the oppressors, this has nothing to do with Islam, and least of all to do with Sufism."
Ayeda Naqvi, on the other hand, believes Sufism could play a political role to strengthen a tolerant Islamic identity in Pakistan. But she warns of the dangers of Western support.
"I think if it's done it has to be done very quietly because a lot of people here are allergic to the West interfering," she says.
"So even if it's something good they're doing, they need to be discreet because you don't want Sufism to be labelled as a movement which is being pushed by the West to drown out the real puritanical Islam."
Back at the Shah Jamal shrine I couldn't feel further from puritanical Islam. The frenzied passion around me suggests that Pakistan's Sufi shrines won't be taken over by the Taleban any time soon.
But whether Sufism can be used to actively resist the spread of extremist Islam, or even whether it should be, is another question.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/s ... 896943.stm
Published: 2009/02/24 05:55:03 GMT
© BBC MMIX
*****
February 25, 2009
Taliban Accepts Pakistan Cease-Fire
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The leader of the Taliban of the Swat region announced a long-term cease-fire on Tuesday, handing the Pakistani military a respite from fighting, and raising tenuous hopes for peace.
The army, which has been battling militants in Swat off and on for more than a year, said Monday that it had returned to barracks.
The cease-fire was announced by the spokesman for Maulana Fazlullah, a hard-line cleric in Swat, who has led a terrorism campaign against civilians, including the burning of girls’ schools and public executions.
The spokesman, Muslim Khan, told reporters that the cease-fire would be for an “indefinite period.” The well-armed Taliban have gained control of about 70 percent of the Swat Valley, 100 miles north of the capital, Islamabad, by using brutal guerrilla tactics against an army unaccustomed to insurgency warfare.
There was considerable skepticism about the durability of the cease-fire. There was no word from the government or the militants on whether there was a specific agreement that dealt with the top demands of the militants, including the introduction of Islamic courts and amnesty for their fighters.
The national government has said it agrees to the introduction of Islamic courts, but will not sign off on putting them into effect until there is peace in Swat.
On Monday, Mualana Sufi Mohammed, who is the father-in-law of Mr. Fazlullah, and with whom the government initially arranged a cease-fire a week ago, said that Islamic law was now in practice in Swat.
Some politicians said Tuesday that the cessation of hostilities would give the militants a pause to gather strength and bring more recruits from the tribal belt, where the Taliban keep fighters in reserve.
The government of the North-West Frontier Province announced that schools were open on Monday, but only a few children attended. Property owners who fled Swat months ago, for fear of being singled out by the Taliban, said it was too early to return.
The seriousness of the militants was in question after they captured a newly appointed senior government official, the district coordination officer, Khushhal Khan, and his aides on Sunday. They were released after six hours.
The cease-fire announcement by Mr. Fazlullah followed a statement by militants on Monday night in nearby Bajaur, in the tribal belt, that they would observe a cease-fire with government troops there.
The Frontier Corps, a Pakistani paramilitary force that has been fighting in Bajaur, said over the weekend that soldiers had captured two crucial militant strongholds.
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Lahore
It's one o'clock in the morning and the night is pounding with hypnotic rhythms, the air thick with the smoke of incense, laced with dope.
I'm squeezed into a corner of the upper courtyard at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, famous for its Thursday night drumming sessions.
It's packed with young men, smoking, swaying to the music, and working themselves into a state of ecstasy.
This isn't how most Westerners imagine Pakistan, which has a reputation as a hotspot for Islamist extremism.
Devotional singing
But this popular form of Sufi Islam is far more widespread than the Taleban's version. It's a potent brew of mysticism, folklore and a dose of hedonism.
Now some in the West have begun asking whether Pakistan's Sufism could be mobilised to counter militant Islamist ideology and influence.
Lahore would be the place to start: it's a city rich in Sufi tradition.
At the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh Hajveri, musicians and singers from across the country also gather weekly, to perform qawwali, or Islamic devotional singing.
Qawwali is seen as a key part of the journey to the divine, what Sufis call the continual remembrance of God.
"When you listen to other music, you will listen for a short time, but the qawwali goes straight inside," says Ali Raza, a fourth generation Sufi singer.
"Even if you can't understand the wording, you can feel the magic of the qawwali, this is spiritual music which directly touches your soul and mind as well."
But Sufism is more than music. At a house in an affluent suburb of Lahore a group of women gathers weekly to practise the Sufi disciplines of chanting and meditation, meant to clear the mind and open the heart to God.
One by one the devotees recount how the sessions have helped them deal with problems and achieve greater peace and happiness. This more orthodox Sufism isn't as widespread as the popular variety, but both are seen as native to South Asia.
'Love and harmony'
"Islam came to this part of the world through Sufism," says Ayeda Naqvi, a teacher of Islamic mysticism who's taking part in the chanting.
"It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty, there were no swords, it was very different from the sharp edged Islam of the Middle East.
"And you can't separate it from our culture, it's in our music, it's in our folklore, it's in our architecture. We are a Sufi country, and yet there's a struggle in Pakistan right now for the soul of Islam."
That struggle is between Sufism and hard-line Wahhabism, the strict form of Sunni Islam followed by members of the Taleban and al-Qaeda.
It has gained ground in the tribal north-west, encouraged initially in the 1980s by the US and Saudi Arabia to help recruit Islamist warriors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But it's alien to Pakistan's Sufi heartland in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, says Sardar Aseff Ali, a cabinet minister and a Sufi.
"Wahhabism is a tribal form of Islam coming from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia," he says. "This may be very attractive to the tribes in the frontier, but it will never find resonance in the established societies of Pakistan."
So could Pakistan's mystic, non-violent Islam be used as a defence against extremism?
An American think tank, the Rand Corporation, has advocated this, suggesting support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam".
There is ample proof that Sufism remains a living tradition.
In the warren of Lahore's back streets, a shrine is being built to a modern saint, Hafiz Iqbal, and his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din. They attract followers from all classes and walks of life.
'Atrocities'
The architect is Kamil Khan Mumtaz. He describes in loving detail his traditional construction techniques and the spiritual principles they symbolise.
He shakes his head at stories of lovely old mosques and shrines pulled down and replaced by structures of concrete and glass at the orders of austere mullahs, and he's horrified at atrocities committed in the name of religion by militant Islamists.
But he doubts that Sufism can be marshalled to resist Wahhabi radicalism, a phenomenon that he insists has political, not religious, roots.
"The American think tanks should think again," he says. "What you see [in Islamic extremism] is a response to what has happened in the modern world.
"There is a frustration, an anger, a rage against invaders, occupiers. Muslims ask themselves, what happened?
"We once ruled the world and now we're enslaved. This is a power struggle, it is the oppressed who want to become the oppressors, this has nothing to do with Islam, and least of all to do with Sufism."
Ayeda Naqvi, on the other hand, believes Sufism could play a political role to strengthen a tolerant Islamic identity in Pakistan. But she warns of the dangers of Western support.
"I think if it's done it has to be done very quietly because a lot of people here are allergic to the West interfering," she says.
"So even if it's something good they're doing, they need to be discreet because you don't want Sufism to be labelled as a movement which is being pushed by the West to drown out the real puritanical Islam."
Back at the Shah Jamal shrine I couldn't feel further from puritanical Islam. The frenzied passion around me suggests that Pakistan's Sufi shrines won't be taken over by the Taleban any time soon.
But whether Sufism can be used to actively resist the spread of extremist Islam, or even whether it should be, is another question.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/s ... 896943.stm
Published: 2009/02/24 05:55:03 GMT
© BBC MMIX
*****
February 25, 2009
Taliban Accepts Pakistan Cease-Fire
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The leader of the Taliban of the Swat region announced a long-term cease-fire on Tuesday, handing the Pakistani military a respite from fighting, and raising tenuous hopes for peace.
The army, which has been battling militants in Swat off and on for more than a year, said Monday that it had returned to barracks.
The cease-fire was announced by the spokesman for Maulana Fazlullah, a hard-line cleric in Swat, who has led a terrorism campaign against civilians, including the burning of girls’ schools and public executions.
The spokesman, Muslim Khan, told reporters that the cease-fire would be for an “indefinite period.” The well-armed Taliban have gained control of about 70 percent of the Swat Valley, 100 miles north of the capital, Islamabad, by using brutal guerrilla tactics against an army unaccustomed to insurgency warfare.
There was considerable skepticism about the durability of the cease-fire. There was no word from the government or the militants on whether there was a specific agreement that dealt with the top demands of the militants, including the introduction of Islamic courts and amnesty for their fighters.
The national government has said it agrees to the introduction of Islamic courts, but will not sign off on putting them into effect until there is peace in Swat.
On Monday, Mualana Sufi Mohammed, who is the father-in-law of Mr. Fazlullah, and with whom the government initially arranged a cease-fire a week ago, said that Islamic law was now in practice in Swat.
Some politicians said Tuesday that the cessation of hostilities would give the militants a pause to gather strength and bring more recruits from the tribal belt, where the Taliban keep fighters in reserve.
The government of the North-West Frontier Province announced that schools were open on Monday, but only a few children attended. Property owners who fled Swat months ago, for fear of being singled out by the Taliban, said it was too early to return.
The seriousness of the militants was in question after they captured a newly appointed senior government official, the district coordination officer, Khushhal Khan, and his aides on Sunday. They were released after six hours.
The cease-fire announcement by Mr. Fazlullah followed a statement by militants on Monday night in nearby Bajaur, in the tribal belt, that they would observe a cease-fire with government troops there.
The Frontier Corps, a Pakistani paramilitary force that has been fighting in Bajaur, said over the weekend that soldiers had captured two crucial militant strongholds.
February 28, 2009
Editorial
Playing With Fire in Pakistan
Almost no one wants to say it out loud. But between the threats from extremists, an unraveling economy, battling civilian leaders and tensions with its nuclear rival India, Pakistan is edging ever closer to the abyss.
In a report this week, The Atlantic Council warned that Pakistan’s stability is imperiled and that the time to change course is fast running out. That would be quite enough for any government to deal with. Then on Wednesday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court added new fuel upholding a ruling barring opposition leader Nawaz Sharif — a former prime minister — and his brother from holding elected office. That touched off protests across Punjab Province, the Sharifs’ power base and Pakistan’s richest and politically most important province.
The Sharifs charge that the Supreme Court is a tool of President Asif Ali Zardari. They are backing anti-government lawyers who have long campaigned for the reinstatement of the country’s former top judge who was dismissed by former Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007.
We don’t know if Mr. Zardari orchestrated this ruling, as Nawaz Sharif and many others have charged. (The government actually argued Mr. Sharif’s side in the case, which stems from an earlier politically motivated criminal conviction.) We do know the danger of letting this situation get out of control.
When Mr. Zardari became president, he pledged to unite the country. He has not. Like Mr. Zardari, Mr. Sharif is a flawed leader and no doubt is manipulating the combustible court ruling for personal political gain.
For Pakistan’s democracy to survive, a robust opposition must be allowed to flourish and participate peacefully in the country’s political life. That includes finding a way for Mr. Sharif to run for office.
It also means Pakistan must get serious about tackling its problems, including the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Mr. Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by extremists, seems to understand.
Unfortunately, the powerful chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, still seems far more focused on the potential threat of India than the clear and present danger of the extremists. He is said to have supported the recent deal in which the government effectively ceded the Swat Valley — in the border region but just 100 miles from Islamabad — to militants in a misguided bid for a false peace.
Pakistanis need to understand that this is their fight, not just America’s. We hope top American officials delivered that message loudly and clearly when General Kayani visited Washington this week.
There was a time when Messrs. Zardari and Sharif pledged to work together for the good of Pakistan. Their country is in mortal danger. And they need to find a way to work together to save it.
Editorial
Playing With Fire in Pakistan
Almost no one wants to say it out loud. But between the threats from extremists, an unraveling economy, battling civilian leaders and tensions with its nuclear rival India, Pakistan is edging ever closer to the abyss.
In a report this week, The Atlantic Council warned that Pakistan’s stability is imperiled and that the time to change course is fast running out. That would be quite enough for any government to deal with. Then on Wednesday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court added new fuel upholding a ruling barring opposition leader Nawaz Sharif — a former prime minister — and his brother from holding elected office. That touched off protests across Punjab Province, the Sharifs’ power base and Pakistan’s richest and politically most important province.
The Sharifs charge that the Supreme Court is a tool of President Asif Ali Zardari. They are backing anti-government lawyers who have long campaigned for the reinstatement of the country’s former top judge who was dismissed by former Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007.
We don’t know if Mr. Zardari orchestrated this ruling, as Nawaz Sharif and many others have charged. (The government actually argued Mr. Sharif’s side in the case, which stems from an earlier politically motivated criminal conviction.) We do know the danger of letting this situation get out of control.
When Mr. Zardari became president, he pledged to unite the country. He has not. Like Mr. Zardari, Mr. Sharif is a flawed leader and no doubt is manipulating the combustible court ruling for personal political gain.
For Pakistan’s democracy to survive, a robust opposition must be allowed to flourish and participate peacefully in the country’s political life. That includes finding a way for Mr. Sharif to run for office.
It also means Pakistan must get serious about tackling its problems, including the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Mr. Zardari, whose wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by extremists, seems to understand.
Unfortunately, the powerful chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, still seems far more focused on the potential threat of India than the clear and present danger of the extremists. He is said to have supported the recent deal in which the government effectively ceded the Swat Valley — in the border region but just 100 miles from Islamabad — to militants in a misguided bid for a false peace.
Pakistanis need to understand that this is their fight, not just America’s. We hope top American officials delivered that message loudly and clearly when General Kayani visited Washington this week.
There was a time when Messrs. Zardari and Sharif pledged to work together for the good of Pakistan. Their country is in mortal danger. And they need to find a way to work together to save it.