The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Crime and policing
Line being crossed a little too often

It is not uncommon to hear reports of police officers being indicted or convicted in various crimes, but Tuesday’s newspapers made the khaki look particularly sullied. There were reports of an IPS officer sentenced to 13 years in jail for dealing in drugs; a Punjab SSP and five other officers sentenced to imprisonment of up to 10 years for kidnapping with the intent of murder; and several serving and former police officials being under investigation in the Rs 130-crore Fatehgarh Sahib drug bust.

While it is police officials in all these cases, their circumstances differ, and an examination of each would provide an insight into the pressures, temptations and opportunities that lead the very protectors of society to crime.

Many of those indicted in terror-related cases take the defence they were working with the bona fide intention of checking rampant terror activity under dire circumstances. That is true, but as experience and hindsight show, a lot of deliberate as well as unintentional wrong gets committed in the process, and innocent lives are ruined. That has been learnt in J&K too. The country’s police forces are today relatively more equipped to handle terror than they were two decades ago. A responsible police officer will always keep an eye on the law even while testing its limits. The other forms of police involvement in crime, however, are a result of sheer greed and opportunity. The very nature of their duty brings them in contact with criminals, whose primary target is money through whatever means. Taking a bribe to look the other way is the easiest thing for a policeman to do, as there is no complainant, and the allurements are too powerful.

One — though not the only — reason for police officials’ involvement in crime is the channel of their selection as well as promotion, a lot of which is based on political patronage, if not plain bribery. Officers appointed for political gains will draw their pound of flesh, and the political rulers will be obliged to look the other way. It is the quid pro quo that sustains the rot. When everyone only stands to gain, it is for the voter to be wise.

Rajasansi weaves hope
In the knots of economic failure

Most Indians may never have taken a ride on Aladdin’s magical carpet, but they have certainly got the love for their velvety touch under their feet. When Mughals established their empire in India in the sixteenth century, they brought along their finest carpet weavers from Persia.

The hand — woven Persian carpets lent the floors of their stone palaces a touch of softness. The finesse of these carpets lay in the number of knots that a weaver could push in per square inch; the more the knots, the softer would be the feel of the carpet. It required nimble fingers to push more knots per square inch for the threads used — which could be wool or any other organic fabric. In the age of machine-made carpets that are washable and durable and are made of plastic derived fibres glued onto a strong synthetic base, the hand-made carpet is losing its sheen.

Two major factors are causing the decline of this industry. One, carpet weaving is labour-intensive; it takes an entire family to weave for close to a month to produce a carpet of about 50 sq feet. With rising labour costs, these carpets are becoming unaffordable for a middle class buyer. This creates a vicious circle. To reduce the production cost, the agents demand carpets to be made with lesser finesse, which makes them lose quality and trust in the international market. The high-end customers are mostly foreigners and they have options available in other places, including China.

The second reason is that weaving got associated with its commercial value alone in the changing climate whereas it is a part of a tradition for hundreds of families. The Ministry of Textiles, which has a full-fledged department of handicrafts, has looked at this issue only for its commercial woes, and has done little to help weavers create their own market so that the middleman could be removed from the cycle. This apart, no study has ever been conducted to restore the relevance of weaving tradition in people’s lives.

Thought for the Day

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. —Margaret Thatcher

ARTICLE

‘How long this silence?’
Fratricidal war in Pakistan
by B.G. Verghese

DR Manmohan Singh is a man of few words and slow to anger. He has sincerely sought to pursue peace negotiations with Pakistan against heavy odds, staking his prestige on this high endeavour. But he was compelled to tell the Rajya Sabha last week that "there cannot be normalisation of relations between our two countries unless and until the terror machine that is still active in Pakistan is brought under control". Islamabad's concept of peace talks seem to embrace periodic sub rosa attacks on India as "peace" appears more a tactic than a deeply held strategic goal.

The proof of this is self-evident in Pakistan's murderous killings of its Shia population almost as a routine. Hundreds have perished in cowardly bomb attacks on innocent people. Cross-border attacks continue on India through jihadi groups that have high patronage. Pakistan's narrow and pernicious two-nation theory, its foundational principle, has fractured into a multi-nation theory, with fratricidal war being relentlessly waged within its so-called Islamic brotherhood. The overthrow of this medieval barbarism is even now being celebrated in Bangladesh where the cry is for just punishment against those who committed terrible war crimes against what were their own countrymen who were ultimately disowned and derided.

Even the head of Ajmer's Dargah Sharif, the famed sufi shrine, refused to welcome the Pakistan Prime Minister, when he visited there last week to offer prayers, as he has condoned military atrocities and not protected minorities and their places of worship. Pakistan's military leadership too has warned President Zardari that the internal situation is fast spiralling out of control. This drift to chaos could jeopardise Pakistan's forthcoming elections and the constitution of an agreed caretaker administration. This spells danger.

It is at this juncture that Lt-Gen Shahid Aziz (retd) has courageously written his autobiography, "How Long This Silence?", narrating the truth about Pakistan's blatant aggression in Kargil, an ill-planned fiasco that ended in disgraced wrapped in a tissue of lies, with Musharraf claiming "victory". This was known since the Musharraf-General Aziz (CGS) intercepts were published with Nawaz Sharif's interjections at the very commencement of the perfidious assault under cover of promising peace negotiations.Others, like Group-Captain Kaiser Tufail, Director of Ops, PAF, have exposed Musharraf's lies earlier. But now comes a full confession by someone who monitored the bizarre unfolding from a key perch in the ISI.

Gen Aziz confirms the sordid details already known. Yet, as a connected account from the inside, it exposes the perfidy of the Pakistan leadership which has consistently lied to its people about every single war it has launched on India since 1947 and continues to do so unabashedly. If Musharraf dares return to Pakistan this month, as he boasts he will, he may well find himself walking into a well-deserved treason trial. Read Aziz's conclusion that the war was born in hate: "We can identify the hate that is (still) being sown and also those hands which are sowing these seeds". That is the key word: "hate". Pakistan is a nation founded on hate and compelled to live a lie ever since. Harsh words but true.

Kargil, Aziz notes, was an unprovoked act of aggression in which the mujahideen did not have any part at all as made out. Further, "in accordance with the general custom of telling lies being in fashion, false reports were being given… After all, the same thing was done in the war of 1965 too. No one believed it. Though until now we still lie to the nation that the war was started by the enemy, its offensive was in retaliation to our Operation Gibraltar. We still celebrate September 6".

The 1965 war launched by Pakistan through military-led and stiffened "mujahideen", a crude ruse, was fully documented by Gen Nimmo, the Australian Chief of UNMOGIP, only to be studiously bypassed by Britain and the US, Pakistan's steadfast allies in the Security Council. Go back to Pakistan's cynical disregard of the Standstill Agreement with J&K in 1947, its "mujahideen" tribal uprising in Poonch, a poor facade for a planned invasion of J&K under Maj-Gen (then Brigdier) Akbar Khan who, like Shahid Aziz, told it all later in his "Raiders in Kashmir".

The UN Security Council's Special Representative, Sir Owen Dixon, named Pakistan a repeated aggressor in J&K in 1948, (See UN Resolution of August 13, 1948). Pakistan lied further to advance on Leh and then used Major Brown, a serving British Army officer commanding the Gilgit Scouts, to stage a coup against the Maharaja's Governor and annex Gilgit, Hunza, Nagir and the rest of the Northern Areas which it has since held in thrall. Shia's enjoy no safety there and calculated efforts have been made to ensure demographic change by importing Sunnis.

Responsible Pakistani spokesmen have from time to time claimed responsibility for the attacks on the J&K legislature, Delhi's Red Fort and India's Parliament House. Siachen was an act of creeping aggression by Pakistan, powerfully aided by the US Defence Mapping Agency. And every time the suggestion has been to let bygones be bygones and move on. But for how long and to what end is what Dr Manmohan Singh and the rest of India is asking. And in the midst of all of this lying and bravado, Chuck Hagel, the new US Defence Secretary, had the gall some two years back to accuse India of "financing problems" for Pakistan in Afghanistan to gain strategic depth. This is sheer balderdash, without an iota of evidence.

As long as Pakistan clings to Nazariya-e-Pakistan, defending its "ideological frontiers" (Kashmir?) against a hated India, as its school textbooks preach, it will never be whole.The Jinnah Institute last April styled what was being taught as "a curriculum of hate". Yet, India must persevere in pursuing peaceand friendship with its western neighbour.

Meanwhile, India must resist pressure to agree to a one-sided war crimes resolution against Sri Lanka. Both sides have been at a fault and the LTTE was no innocent, shamefully assisted and goaded by India in the early years. The goal of reconciliation between Sinhalas, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka must never be forgotten. One wonders when the UNHCR will as vigorously take up the case of the ethnocide of the Chagos Islanders who have been driven out of their homes by Britain and the US in order to use Diego Garcia to wage war against all and sundry. There is a lot of double standards and doublespeak here.

Back home, Raj Thackeray continues to wage war against Biharis and UP migrants with impunity. The BJP has glorified Narendra Modi as its election mascot and future prime minister even as the net steadily closes on the man for his evil role in 2002. Rapists and molesters brazenly continue on the rampage, while Raja Bhaiyya, a known SP thug, has yet to be arraigned for the murder of a Muslim police officer even as the VHP says he has been framed because he is a Hindu. How communal can you get? And in Jaipur, new lawyers are demanding a monthly Rs 2000 stipend plus housing. Where are we headed?

MIDDLE

To Lahore with love!
by Robin Gupta

In 1985, I was deputed to represent India at a prestigious conference on the subject of “Sports for All” in Frankfurt. I was received with fanfare at the airport by a comely blonde from the German foreign office and the Indian tricolour fluttered on the car sent by the government. I was accorded the facilities due to a visiting head of a delegation. The liaison officer showed me to a luxurious suite that commanded a panoramic view of the city.

I could as well have been in New York — such was the skyline. Dreaming of fairytale castles with bridges built over moats, of turreted palaces and large opera houses overgrown with rose climbers, of medieval museums and cobbled streets lined with taverns, I had to remind myself that Frankfurt had been rebuilt at the end of the war.

The international conference on sports consciousness was held in a tall building constructed of steel and glass. It was clinically clean from within and without and the only sign of life, before the delegates arrived, comprised the sprightly housekeeping staff in uniform and the potted plants in broken arrangements. Delegates from all over the world presented their papers and shared valuable information; the entire conference was organised on a mathematical axis. I was amazed at the importance given to sports and physical education. We could have been determining the war and peace of nations.

I had worked hard on my presentation basing my speech on the National Sports Policy on India's aspirations. When I was done, there was a ringing silence, followed by thunderous clapping.

After the conference was over and business cards were exchanged, I motored down to the hotel and, with a sigh of relief, bid the liaison officer adieu.

I then sat in the bar room planning out the next two days. I intended to go pub-crawling and unwind, for which I went upstairs to change into informal clothes. On reaching my room, I found that it was locked from within; the new occupants, a honeymooning couple, had installed themselves after lunch in accordance with the booking chart. I found that my bags had been neatly packed and placed on shelves in the basement.

As I had put in a request to extend my stay in the hotel at my personal expense and deferred my departure, I had nowhere to go. As far as the Germans were concerned, the conference was over and my visit had ended. The visit to Frankfurt was a strange experience, reflective of a people who had organised themselves to the point of imprisonment.

Aghast, I stood uncertainly at the kerb with my bags and hailed a cab. The driver was from Lahore; I told him of my unexpected plight and the need to book into a reasonable hotel room. “What will be charges for the evening?” I asked him.

Rashid Khan took me to his house, where his begum greeted me with the traditional aadab. One of his sons carried my bags into a room and Rashid said to his wife: “Mehmaan aaye hain, kuchh khaane ka intezaam ki jiye.”

For the next three days, I stayed with Rashid Khan as his guest. He took me to taverns, to operas, to museums. And he drove me all the way to Bavaria to see one of Ludwig's castles. Though the family wanted me to stay and celebrate Eid with them, I had to return to Mother.

“Ji haan,” said the elderly lady of the house, when she heard this. Looking into the distance, she recited the words of the Holy Prophet: “Al jannato tahta ikdamil umme haat.” (Heaven lies at the feet of one's mother.)

OPED World

A history that must not be repeated
The occupation had little to do with the good of the Iraqi people, and much to do with Washington and London seeking to prevent Iran filling the political vacuum in Iraq left by the fall of Saddam Hussein
Patrick Cockburn

The Syrian civil war is spreading to Iraq, carrying with it the risk of fresh violence. Forty-eight unarmed Syrian soldiers and nine Iraqis were killed recently by al-Qa'ida fighters in an ambush in western Anbar province. The Syrian soldiers were in Iraqi territory having escaped across the border from a battle with the Syrian rebels further north, and were being repatriated to Syria when they were attacked. The killings have led to fears among Iraqis that it would not take much to revive their own Sunni-Shia civil war, which only died down five years ago.

Hadi al-Amiri, Iraqi Transport Minister and former head of the Shia militia group Badr, complains that "presenting money and weapons to al-Qa'ida in Syria by Qatar and Turkey is a declaration of armed action against Iraq. If we (Shia) form militia and they (Sunnis) form militia, then Iraq will be lost."

Sunni Muslims take part in an anti-government demonstration in Falluja, 50 km west of Baghdad on March 8, 2013. Thousands of Sunni Muslims protested after Friday prayers in huge rallies against Shia Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, demanding that he step down. Photo: Reuters

Fears of civil war

It may already be too late. Iraqi leaders from different communities are edgy, fearing that the spread of sectarian civil war from Syria to Iraq and to the rest of the region is becoming inevitable.

“The next item on the agenda is Shia-Sunni conflict,” said a senior Iraqi politician. “We thought Lebanon would be first affected by events in Syria, but, in fact, it is us. The only way to prevent Iraq being destabilised is to put out the Syrian fire at once.”

Iraqis are cynical about the motives of the US and Britain in condemning an al-Qa’ida fighter as a terrorist when he is shooting and bombing in Iraq. But should the same al-Qa’ida member travel a few miles up the Euphrates, cross the Syrian border and fight the Syrian army, he is transformed into a freedom fighter and may soon benefit from “non-lethal” American and British aid.

Parallels between Iraq and Syria

Other parallels can be drawn between the Syrian crisis today and the Iraq crisis 10 years ago. Saddam Hussein had far more blood on his hands than Bashar al-Assad, yet there are similarities in the way both men have been demonised by Western governments and media. Discussion of ways of ending or modifying their rule is denounced as collaboration with undiluted evil.

Everything wrong in Iraq in 2003 and Syria in 2013 is blamed on demonic misrule, so any change at the hands of an opponent, however bloodstained and unsavoury, is legitimised. Propaganda and slogans displace rational policy and prevent negotiations and compromise.

Imperial or dictatorial rule is often justified as necessary to restore law and order. This famously failed to happen in Iraq. Moreover, the whole post-Saddam political settlement was de-legitimised in the eyes of Iraqis by being devised and imposed by foreign powers.

A decade after the US and British invasion, any audit of American and British actions must look at how much good and harm they have done in Iraq. One point seldom made, but of great importance in determining what happened later, is that the military campaign to overthrow the Iraqi Government may have begun on March 19, 2003, but the economic war against Iraq started 13 years earlier with devastating results for its people. Indeed, the worst disaster for the Iraqi people as a whole arguably took place before the invasion and not afterwards. UN sanctions between 1990 and 2003 amounted to an economic siege, unprecedented in its severity outside military conflict that destroyed the Iraqi economy and reduced millions to poverty. People who had held good jobs were reduced to selling their furniture in the streets.

Collapse of a system

The suffering of his people did not weaken Saddam Hussein, who was happily building giant palaces and mosques to his own glory. The Iraqi health service and education systems, previously among the best in the Middle East, were degraded and brought close to collapse. Officials could not be paid so they only acted in return for a bribe. Young men without jobs or hope of employment turned to crime. Baghdad had been safe but I remember that from about 1994 taxi drivers started carrying pistols, in case customers tried to rob them.

The senior UN official in Iraq, Denis Halliday, who resigned in protest over sanctions, said a generation of Iraqis was growing up brutalised and open to fanatical beliefs. The US and Britain never admitted the cruelty and injustice of sanctions but the anarchy and violence they discovered when they tried to rule Iraq had much to do with the economic and social ruin inflicted by them on Iraqis.

Iraq after Saddam

Many Iraqis welcomed or tolerated the US-led invasion because it ended sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s disastrous rule. But supporters and opponents of the invasion blur a crucial distinction between invasion and occupation, as if American and British rule must inevitably have followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The occupation had little to do with the good of the Iraqi people, and much to do with Washington and London seeking to prevent Iran filling the political vacuum in Iraq left by the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I was in Kurdistan just before the war in 2003 when US officials told the Kurds that they were shelving plans for the immediate introduction of democracy and post-Saddam, Iraq would be run by US military officers. I spoke to the veteran Kurdish leader Sami Abdul Rahman, killed the following year by a suicide bomber along with 104 others, who said scathingly “conquerors always call themselves liberators”. Another Iraqi leader is fond of saying to this day that “the occupation was the mother of all mistakes”.

Imperial or dictatorial rule is often justified as necessary to restore law and order. This famously failed to happen in Iraq. Moreover, the whole post-Saddam political settlement was de-legitimised in the eyes of Iraqis by being devised and imposed by foreign powers.

The US wanted to encourage Iraqi nationalism, but nationalism of a peculiar type that was hair-trigger sensitive and hostile to Iranian influence but blithely tolerant of American control. The Kurds had their own experienced and skillful leaders, but Sunni and Shia leaders, whose careers prospered, were those who could at least pretend to be fully cooperative with the US and Britain. To this day, this taints many of them in the eyes of Iraqis. Last month I asked a Sunni sheikh from Fallujah organising protests against the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, how he regarded the Sunni political leaders. “I don’t,” he said. “They all owe their jobs to the Americans.” To a lesser degree the same is true of the Shia leaders, including Mr Maliki, previously a senior but little-known official in the Dawa party who was picked for the premiership to his own astonishment in 2006 by the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. The British ambassador, who opposed the choice, was asked to leave the room while Mr Khalilzad talked to Mr Maliki and persuaded him to take the job.

British presence

Britain contributed 45,000 soldiers to the invasion but they have left few memorials to their presence. One symbol of British failure survives in the shape of the police station in Majar al-Kabir, a Shia town on the edge of the marshes north of Basra. It was here, 18 miles south of the provincial capital Amara, that six British Royal Military Police were shot dead by angry townspeople on June 24, 2003. I drove from Baghdad the next day to the ramshackle little town, notorious for its heavily armed inhabitants and opposition to Saddam Hussein. The police station's outer walls were blackened by fire and pockmarked with bullet holes. The interior was gutted and its floors covered in broken glass. Last month, I re-visited the building where the killings took place. It is still a police station, its exterior repainted white with a blue stripe at the top, presumably indicating police presence. The police guards outside looked relaxed, as if they were not expecting any trouble.

Majar al-Kabir was and is a very tough place, but it would be a mistake to think that its people in 2003 did not have a firm grasp of what was happening. A local leader called Kadum al-Hashimi said, "It is the belief of the people here, and it is believed by all other Iraqis, that the British want to disarm us because they want to stay for a long time."

Broken pact

The story told by locals was that they had reached an agreement with the British not to patrol in their town, this agreement had been broken, one local man had been shot dead and it was then they had grabbed their weapons and hunted down the RMPs, who were unluckily visiting the police station.

It was the occupation itself, not lack of electricity or engagement with local people that was the source of their fury. Shia towns in southern Iraq like Majar al-Kabir have not done badly in the past 10 years. Like the Kurds of the KRG, they benefit from living in an area where one community is in an overwhelming majority. It is in Baghdad, central Iraq and Sunni areas where violence is worst and any new crisis might first explode.

Fresh political explosion

How likely is a fresh political explosion in Iraq? A bloody but essentially stable balance of power between communities and their foreign backers existed from 2008 to the end of 2011. Since then, the Syrian civil war, the US departure from Iraq, the regional Sunni-Shia conflict and the US-led offensive against Iran are all powerfully destabilising forces for a country as divided as Iraq. Its leaders gloomily predict things will get worse and they may be right.

But Iraqi parties have a lot to lose as well as gain from a new paroxysm of violence, which may well destroy the country. The Kurds are doing better than other Iraqis but their boom would not long survive a war along the “trigger line”. Instead of improving their condition, the Sunni might be finally pushed out of Baghdad. The Shia will be weakened by their failure to hold Iraq together and will become even more dependent on Iran.

All parties have strength enough to fight but not to be sure of success. Nevertheless, the political temperature in Iraq is rising to dangerous levels in a region convulsed by political change and an explosion may not be far off.

— The Independent

(Concluded)