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Posco green signal Policemen as
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Mubarak
must go
N-export
control regimes
Comedy
of errors
Egypt’s
saviour-in-waiting Potential
players in Egyptian reform
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Policemen as friends
Addressing
yet another conference of Chief Ministers on internal security, an exercise launched after the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, both the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister on Tuesday harped on fresh threats posed by new terror groups. Although 2010 was relatively peaceful, with only two major incidents reported from Pune and Varanasi, India remains vulnerable to terror strikes and internal strife. The preceding year did register fewer casualties of security forces, despite Maoists wiping out an entire company of the Central Reserve Police Force ( CRPF) in Chhattisgarh, but the number of civilians killed by militants, Maoists and terrorists rose sharply during the year. Ethnic violence, religious fundamentalism, Left-wing extremism and cross border terrorism remain serious challenges for the Indian state. The report-card has, however, been a mixed bag. To cite just one example, while the states have set up 71 coastal police stations and the Centre has delivered 183 interceptor boats to them, the boats are still not operational because of the dearth of trained manpower. By far the most important statement in the Prime Minister’s address, however, was the need to focus on the policeman as ‘a friend’. Acknowledging the role of the policemen in internal security, the Prime Minister rightly asserted that the police would be able to discharge its duties only when people start counting them as friends. But while the Centre has set aside a whopping Rs 2000 crore for modernising the police in states and has readily offered money, material and moral support, few states have taken the initiative to free police from political interference and help the force transform itself as a friend of the community. Also, India still has about 130 policemen for every 100,000 people against the figure of 220 suggested by the United Nations as the norm. The states thus require not just more policemen but also better trained and more sensitive policemen. The Union government’s budgetary allocation for internal security has gone up from Rs 25,923 crore in 2008 to Rs 40,582 crore during the current financial year. But the stereotype of the policeman as a bumbling, inefficient, arrogant and corrupt buffoon has not changed. The states, therefore, have a duty to come forward and transform the police first if the people are to feel safe and secure.
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Mubarak must go
The
protests against the dictatorial regime of President Hosne Mubarak of Egypt have become unstoppable. There are clear indications that his days are numbered. He has little chance of successfully weathering the storm when the military has refused to use force against the protesters. The police has already failed to stem the tide of protests, which led to the looting of shops and the transport system getting paralysed. Mr Mubarak is trying to control the situation through his most trusted man in the government, Vice-President Omar Suleiman, but in vain. He has ruled Egypt for three decades as a dictator, not allowing the political parties other than his own to grow roots. But times have changed. People want nothing less than his ouster from power. The coalition of the parties behind the protests is composed of anti-American elements like the Muslim Brotherhood and left organisations. They are getting massive support from the people owing to the fact that there is a strong anti-American sentiment all over the most populous Arab country. Mr Mubarak has been surviving in power owing to US support. But the people of Egypt want his government to be replaced by a democratically elected administration. Will the US lend its support to the pro-democracy protesters? Or will it try to protect the despot? The American stand will expose its real intensions. India should not shy away from sympathising with aspirations of the Egyptians who want political reforms for genuine democracy. This does not amount to interfering with the internal affairs of Egypt. There is a powerful message in the pro-democracy protests that have engulfed a major part of the Arab world, including Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen: it is not possible to hide the truth in this age of Internet and private TV channels. The Mubarak regime had failed to deliver on almost all fronts. The Egyptian economy has been passing through a very difficult period for a long time. Unemployment has been spreading fast. In such a situation, people’s anger was bound to result in the kind of revolt his regime faces today. The Egyptian economy will suffer further as tourism, the country’s major revenue earner, has almost collapsed. With petroleum prices likely to shoot up, the situation will become unbearable for Egypt. In the larger interests of his country, therefore, Mr Mubarak should say goodbye to power and allow a democratically elected government to be formed.
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Confidence is the companion of success. — Anonymous
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N-export control regimes The
joint statement issued during President Obama’s visit to India last November mentioned that “…the United States intends to support India’s full membership in the four multilateral export control regimes (Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, Australia Group and Wassenaar Arrangement) in a phased manner...” The US committed itself without any reservations. In fact, it has recently lifted its ban on exports to several “entities” in the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defence Research and Development Organisation that were on its prohibited list for decades. Clearly, the US is following through on the inner logic of the Indo-US nuclear deal, which the Bush administration had hammered through the U.S. Congress, the International Atomic Energy Agency and, finally, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 2008. This agreement allows India to import nuclear technology, materials and equipment from abroad, despite its not joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or placing its entire nuclear programme under safeguards, which is a pre-requisite for all such transfers by proficient and capable countries. Consequently, India has been accorded a truly extraordinary concession. The question now is: can the US deliver on President Obama’s promise? Can it hammer through again India’s admission into these four export control regimes despite the reservations of various countries due to their domestic or foreign policy compulsions? Not unexpectedly, Pakistan has denounced the American pledge by arguing that it would upset the “strategic balance” between the two nuclear armed adversaries. It alleges that after India gains entry into these regimes, it would be enabled to import sensitive technology, materials and equipment relating to nuclear, missile, conventional, chemical and biological weapons, and enlarge its existing arsenals. Its main grievance, however, is that a similar dispensation is not available to Pakistan. It is also most unlikely that it would ever be similarly favoured, given its horrendous proliferation record. Pakistan’s fulminations are entirely in character since it really has no foreign policy, but only an India policy. However, Australia recently refused to sell uranium to India on the grounds that it has not signed the NPT. New Delhi has been arguing that it needs to enlarge its atomic energy programme to generate clean energy, and that it can be trusted with Australian uranium. While respecting India’s strong non-proliferation credentials, Australia remains adamant despite its having joined the decision taken by the NSG members in 2008 to countenance the Indo-US nuclear deal, which entailed India’s being made an exception to the prohibitions of the NPT. This logic could prompt Australia to oppose India’s entry into the NSG and other export control regimes. Then there is the parallel case of Japan. The intense negotiations on an India-Japan civilian nuclear trade pact are completely bogged down at present on the issue whether India can recycle spent reactor fuel from nuclear facilities using Japanese equipment and materials. Japan emphasises that reprocessing can produce nuclear fuel but also weapons-usable material. But India believes that nuclear fuel reprocessing is imperative to pursue its fast breeder programme. Japan is also leery of the fact that India is adamant on not joining the NPT, and has also refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. New Delhi is not agreeable to even a reference being made that it will continue to abide by its self-imposed ban on nuclear tests, which it had promised the Nuclear Suppliers Group when the Indo-US nuclear deal was being negotiated. On the other hand, India has sought to clarify that a nuclear trade deal with Japan will not inhibit its military nuclear programme, which is anathema to Japan. These differences remain unresolved. Will Japan support India’s entry into the export control regimes in these circumstances? No doubt, nations like France, Russia and the United States are eager to take advantage of the trade opportunities inherent in the Indo-US nuclear deal and would be quite willing to support India’s entry into these export control regimes. But there are several other countries that have reservations, and it could be reasonably expected that they would oppose India’s admittance into these export control regimes. This would not matter if decisions in these bodies were to be taken on the basis of majority voting, but this is not the case. All decisions in these bodies are mandated to be reached by consensus, which it would be very hard to achieve. So, what should India be doing to reverse this situation? It could request the US to bulldoze the members of these various regimes to accept India’s membership. It might be recollected that several NSG members like Norway, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and the Netherlands had opposed the Indo-US nuclear deal. China’s role was very dubious. While assuring India and the US that it would not oppose the deal, it encouraged the dissenting voices in the NSG to oppose it. Ultimately, it was American pressure, lacing threats with inducements that got the Indo-US nuclear deal through the NSG. India could request the US to turn its broadside again on the countries opposing its entry into the export control regimes. But President Obama in 2011 is not President Bush in 2008. China’s position has also changed; hence American pressure, though important, may not be decisive. How can India help its candidature of these export control regimes? Clearly, it can harmonise its domestic export control laws with that in the export control regimes; clarify that India will continue its moratorium on nuclear testing unless specified events occur; declare that it will cease fissile materials production for military purposes to facilitate the passage of the Fissile Materials Control Treaty; and enter the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to highlight its responsibility towards stopping the clandestine export of sensitive technologies. Hopefully, a concerted effort by the US and India would enable New Delhi’s entry into the four export control regimes visualised by President Obama. Currently, however, delivering on this promise has become quite
uncertain.
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Comedy of errors I
have
always considered myself a well-intentioned man. All these years, I have been living under the impression that I am held in high esteem by my friends and colleagues. That I had been living in a fool’s paradise, was revealed to me, the other day. One day, after spending a bit hectic day in the office, I was back home, enjoying my evening cup of tea, that my phone rang. I picked up the receiver. Before I could utter anything, the caller spoke up: “How are you”? “Fine, sir.” “Have you recognised me?” The person calling had a peculiar voice. I had recognised him. In fact, he was one of my former colleagues, who had retired about two years ago. We had remained posted at a station. There was no question of my mistaking his identity. “Yes, sir. How can I forget you,” I replied humbly. “How is life?” “Fine, sir.” “Actually, I wanted to put you to trouble.” “You are welcome, sir. It would be my pleasure.” “Actually, I have a personal matter pending with Narang.” “I am N…a……r…” Before I could complete my response, the caller interrupted again. “Actually, my arrears file is pending with Narang. But that crook has been sitting over it for the last two months. Though we were together at a station, yet I was not very intimate with him. What should I say about him. Bahut Bud Demag Aadmi hai.” “Yes, sir,” I replied. The person calling also showered other calumnies at Narang. Decency demands that I refrain from repeating them here, verbatim. The caller continued: “Since you are posted with him and may be close to him, I thought of calling you. It would be better if you could talk to him at your level”. “Yes sir, I will try,” I replied. “OK. I will call you after two or three days.” I put the receiver back on the cradle. It took me quite some time to be my normal self. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I had recognised the person calling, but the latter had not recognised that he was talking to Narang himself. I could make out to whom my former colleague wanted to talk. I picked up our official directory to make the call to my friend, to whom my former colleague wanted to talk. What I found was that our phone numbers had got swapped in the directory. I am still waiting for a phone call from my former
colleague.
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Egypt’s saviour-in-waiting
Man
of the moment? Of course Mohamed ElBaradei is. But man of the people, I have my doubts. He doesn’t claim to be, of course, and sitting in his garden easy chair near an impossibly blue but rather small swimming pool, he sometimes appears – even wearing his baseball hat – like a very friendly, shrewd and bespectacled mouse. He will not like that description, but this is a mouse, I suspect, with very sharp teeth. It’s almost a delight to dissect the bigger mice who work in the White House and the State Department. “Do you remember how on the second day, all we heard was that they were ‘monitoring the situation’. On the second day, Secretary Clinton said: ‘We assess the situation as stable’; it was funny yesterday, too, to hear Clinton say that ‘we have been urging the Egyptian Mubarak for 30 years to move on this – and he moved backward – how on earth can you still ask him to introduce democratic reform? Then Clinton talks about ‘the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people’ and now they are talking about ‘the smooth transition of power’... I think they know that Mubarak’s days are numbered.” Without any prompting, ElBaradei – Nobel peace laureate, ex-UN nuclear chief inspector, etc, etc – bites our own dear leader. “Yesterday, I heard Mr Cameron saying that ‘democracy is not an election, that it’s ‘block-building’. Well, everybody knows that. But how do you talk about building a judiciary, civil society – how do you talk about these ‘building blocks’ – under a dictatorship? You either have a civil society or you don’t.” Sometimes, ElBaradei sounds too hopeful. He agrees that the best potential Egyptian leadership have all been exiled, deliberately of course. On a recent speaking engagement at Harvard, he found 15 Egyptians on the Harvard Board. “I told them: If you come back, you can run Egypt.” But it’s not that simple. As ElBaradei admits: “It’s an old story that ends: ‘Mubarak is a friend of Israel and we think a change will bring a government hostile to Israel and it will bring on an Iranian-type velayeh-fakhi [guidance by a supreme religious leader]. I say this is like ‘True Fiction’. You need to get rid of this ‘True Fiction’ about the Muslim Brotherhood and the automatic hostility towards Israel. It is a fact that a durable peace can only be between democracies and not between dictators and, if you want a durable peace, whether Egypt is a democracy or a dictatorship, the feeling of the people in the region is not going to change.” He says he is convinced that Mubarak will go. And so say all of us. He also says he believes the Egyptian army will not fight the Egyptian people, which is by no means certain. I suspect that, like me, ElBaradei isn’t very keen on armies. “I think, ultimately, that the Egyptian army will be with the people. This is common sense when you see a couple of million people in the street who are representative of 85 million Egyptian people who hate Mubarak, who want to see his back. The army is part of the people. And at the end of the day, after anyone takes off his uniform, he is part of the people with the same problems, the same repression, the same inability to have a decent life. So eventually, I don’t think they are going to shoot their people. And why should they shoot their people? To protect what?” When Egypt lost the 1967 war, ElBaradei wrote that “a soldier fights because he defends something he wants to keep. But in the 1967 war, what was the Egyptian soldier fighting for? There was nothing to go back to. So they ran away”. Nasser, so the great man believes, was the worst of Egyptian dictators – “he even nationalised the grocery shops” – but the path of dictatorship ran right through to today. Even a few months ago he could not imagine what would happen. “I had gone to a wake, I told my brother, and I looked at the eyes of the mourners and they were dead – they were dead souls. And now I look at the people today and they have recovered their self-confidence. They are free. It was like a pressure cooker.” He talks about hypocrisy, dictatorship, criminal malfeasance, the darkest deeds of the Egyptian security services, the loyalty of the Egyptian army to the people in a high, astringent but deadly voice. No he doesn’t want to be the president, but when I ask him if he might consider a transitional presidency for himself – until fair elections, naturally – I receive a traditional reply. “If there’s a consensus by all people to do whatever they think I can do for them... I will do that.” Hmmm, I think to myself. “All this will continue to be the same until you address the plight of the Palestinians, until you review your policy in the region. We have this strange relationship where you are calling this peace but you cannot even publish an Israeli book here, or vice-versa, for example. If you really want peace, yes, the peace can be made durable with democracy, but also you have your responsibility – which is to review a balanced relationship, particularly on the Palestinian issue, Iraq, Afghanistan, what have you, and then you will have an Arab world which will be friendly to the West.” ElBaradei is surprisingly mild when he speaks of Mubarak the man. He last saw him two years ago. “I would go to see him when I returned from a UN mission or a holiday. I always received a friendly reception. It was a very cordial relationship. It was one-to-one, just us, and there was no formality. I would tell him what I thought of this or that problem, what might be done. He doesn’t really have advisers who have the guts to tell him the truth.” Much good did ElBaradei’s advice do. He is outraged by the arson and looting. When I ask if state security policemen were behind the arson – which is used by Mubarak, Obama and Clinton to “tag” those who demand Mubarak’s departure with violence – the mouse shows its teeth. “They [the police] were, we are now hearing about documents which show that some of these uniformed officers have taken off their uniforms and gone about looting. And everybody says that they have been ordered to do this by the regime or the ministry of interior or whatever. And if this is true, then this is the most sinister of criminal acts. We have to verify this. But for sure, many of these bands of thugs and looters are from part of the secret police.” And then suddenly, in that high voice, eyes glittering behind pebbling spectacles, the mouse becomes a tiger. “When a regime withdraws the police entirely from the streets of Cairo, when thugs are part of the secret police, trying to give the impression that without Mubarak the country will go into chaos, this is a criminal act. Somebody has to be accountable. And now, as you can hear in the streets, people are not saying Mubarak should go, they are now saying he should be put on trial. If he wants to save his skin, he better leave.” My God, those teeth are sharp.
— The Independent
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Potential players in Egyptian reform As
a popular uprising against the rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shows no sign of letting up, the question of what people or groups could take a stake in power is fast rising to the fore. Throughout his three decades in power, Mubarak’s government has systematically weakened and manoeuvred against all the opposition parties. Other than Mohamed ElBaradei, here are some of the people and groups whose names could figure in the coming days:
Mohammed Badie Badie, 66, became leader of Egypt’s biggest opposition group last year. The Brotherhood is run on a collegiate basis, with a number of figures who often speak in its name such as Essam al-Erian or London-based Kamel El-Helbawy. But if it were to enter into talks with the government it would be on the authorisation of its “murshid ‘aam”, or general guide, Badie. Badie is seen as a conservative, in the typical mould of Brotherhood leaders, who was reluctant to challenge the authorities for fear of provoking more repression. The government says the Brotherhood is a banned organisation but allows it to operate within limits.
Ayman Nour A liberal politician and trained lawyer, Nour was Mubarak’s rival in the 2005 presidential election but suffered for his impertinence. He was jailed after conviction for submitting forged documents when setting up his Ghad (Tomorrow) party. He was released after serving more than three years of a five-year term. The law as it stands bans him any political office for at least five years after the end of his original jail term, which would rule out running in elections in September. Nour served previously as a parliamentarian for the Wafd party, which he left.
Amr Moussa The secretary general of the Arab League was a popular foreign minister under Mubarak, celebrated by singers for his populist pro-Palestinian rhetoric during years of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. His move to the Arab League, a conservative organisation that backs existing Arab rulers, has tarnished his image somewhat but he has been cited in the past by many Egyptians as someone they would support as president. He has been vocal since the protests began, saying on Sunday he wanted to see multi-party democracy in Egypt.
Ahmed Zewail Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1999, Zewail said last year he had no political ambitions. However, newspapers said on Monday he would return on Tuesday to continue work in a committee for constitutional reform including Ayman Nour and prominent lawyers. Al-Shorouk newspaper published a “letter to the Egyptian people” in which he proposed a “council of wise men” to write a new constitution.
Hamdeen Sabahi A popular Arab nationalist politician who leads the Karama party that has never achieved formal licencing from the government. Elected to parliament in 2005, Sabahi considered running in the presidential elections that year after Mubarak introduced amendments under pressure from Washington but later changed his mind. He was expected to attempt a bid for the presidency this year.
Kefaya Respected trade union leader George Ishak founded the Kefaya movement in 2004 that galvanised protests against Mubarak’s rule in 2005 around the idea of rejecting his son Gamal as a future president. The movement, which appealed to middle class professionals, subsequently lost its momentum.but when protests began last week Kefaya appeared to play a role in mobilising them.
Other groups The Wafd party, with its roots before the 1952 military coup, has traditionally been the bastion of liberal democrats in Egypt. But it is seen as having been coopted by Mubarak’s government in recent years. The leftist Tagammu has played a similar role. Magdy Hussein, leader of the Islamist Labour party, is a popular opposition figure who has frequently been in and out jail.
— Reuters
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