[sacw] The ordinary Pakistani wants peace with India

[aiindex@mnet.fr]

June 21, 1999
Posted below is an article by the prominent Pakistani journalist & peace
activist.
(South Asians Against Nukes)
______________________________

Times of India
Sunday 20 June 1999

A hostage to politics

The ordinary Pakistani wants peace with India, but the curbs on Pak media
and society mean that the picture one gets to see is often not real, says
Beena Sarwar

"We dont want war," said a woman from Peshawar University. "We dont want
to send our children to be killed."

"Why dont they ask the women what we want?" said another angrily.

The point was unanimously accepted and included in the resolution passed at
a recent women's seminar on activism in journalism, organised in Lahore by
the prominent lawyer-activist Asma Jahangir. The resolution called for "a
peaceful atmosphere both domestically and externally so that a democratic
culture can take root."

"The apprehension of war with India is disturbing," it continued. "Both
countries are using the electronic media to confuse people and to fan war
hysteria. There is no transparency in the events that led to the current
hostilities. Both governments have not taken the people into confidence and
are pursuing their agendas by encouraging hawkish elements on both sides of
the border."

The terminology reaffirms one perception: that India and Pakistan are mirror
images and that their worst traits feed on each other, however much the
concept of "us" and "them" is propagated.
Other issues discussed during the two-day workshop also provide an insight
into the issues of media, culture and society in Pakistan -- religious
extremism, how the mainstream media portrays victims of rape and other forms
of violence, child abuse, the rights of the child, to mention a few.

An outsider listening in would have had a good idea of how ordinary
Pakistanis are dealing with these problems, and how loathe they are to allow
the country to succumb to the two main threats it faces today:
Talibanisation and tribalism.

These threats loom apart, of course, from the more immediate war-clouds
darkenening the Line of Control at Kargil. Far away from the fighting,
villagers are fleeing their homes along the Wagah border which Vajpayee
crossed just a few months ago with such bonhommie. The assurances of
Pakistani officials and army jawans urging them not to evacuate prove
futile; the villagers can see threatening sight of troops build-up across
the border, where the Indian government has reportedly evacuated 85
villages. Yet, in Islamabad, the grounds outside the Indian High Commission
bustle with visa-applicants camping there for days in the hope of visiting
loved ones in India.

The people obviously dont want war, but the two governments refuse to budge
from their respective positions. Kargil again highlights that Kashmir is a
major issue. But it deserves to be treated as such not because it is
territory to be retained or acquired: it must be seen as a matter of the
lives and aspirations of its people.

Apart from Punjab in Pakistan, and the central Gangetic plain dwellers in
India, the people are largely indifferent to it; their more immediate
concerns are where the next meal is coming from.

This reality is not reflected in the official media, on either side of the
border. But then, the government controlled and influenced media is not
known for its rational or questioning stance. If India has over-reacted to
what it calls the "infiltrators" at Kargil, Pakistan could at least attempt
to get them to "melt away", even if they are indigenous Kashmiris backed
religious groups in Pakistan or elsewhere. In India, the Pakistan army has
been blamed for mutilating the bodies of six unfortunate soldiers; few
question why the Pakistan army should mutilate bodies it handed over, or
point to the known strategy of some extremist outfits who mutilate corpses
as a way to demoralise "the enemy". There are few who question the media
attention on the deaths in Kargil, when "several thousand Indian solidiers
have died in the low-intensity warfare inside Kashmir, far from the border,
over these last years" as a friend in Bombay pointed out in a recent email.

Email and the web, in fact, do serve to counter official censorship and
propaganda, even though the internet cannot match the outreach of radio or
television.

In Pakistan too, independent analyses and reporting are being actively
discouraged in "the national interest", even though the government hasn=92t
banned Indian television channels. Ironically, it has attempted to use the
Vajpayee government's banning of PTV to score media points, gleefully and
selectively flashing the Indian media's criticism of this move on PTV -
despite the long running ban on Indian publications here. Playing up the
Indian media's critical voices serves only to highlight its freedom, even
though much of it is unquestioningly toeing the official line.

There's little space for those working for peace. On May 28, there were
rallies all over Balochistan protesting the nuclearisation of South Asia and
the world, including some 5,000 men, women and children in Quetta. No
national or international newspaper (forget television) bothered to mention
this in the face of the official celebrations announced by the Nawaz Sharif
government.

It was only in the weekend issue of one Pakistani newspaper that the event
was highlighted through a couple of feature articles, with some prominance.

The 300-strong peace rally in Lahore on May 27, organised by the Pakistan
Labour Party, and the May 28 peace demonstration in Islamabad, attended by
some 80 brave souls despite threats and misgivings, merited only single
column news items in the inside pages. Yet threats against these
demonstrations and calls for the heads of the organisers had no trouble
getting space in the papers.

It is these trends that civil society in Pakistan has to combat, further
curtailed now by limitations imposed by "the national interest".

---
Beena Sarwar is Editor of weekly "The News on Sunday" (Lahore, Karachi,
Islamabad) and a human rights activist based in Lahore.

(ends)

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