[sacw] [ACT] sacw dispatch #2 (23 March 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2.
23 March 2000
____________________________

#1. Lahore dialogue on possibilities of Indo-Pak rapprochement
#2. Gen. Musharraf takes aim at his country's gun culture
#3. Clash of Civilisations [in Pakistan]
#4. Jamaat i Islami: Basant festival is a plot against Pak. culture
#5. Clinton visit highlights India's vulnerability
#6. Mushirul Hasan Talk - NYC - Friday 24th 6:30 PM.
____________________________

#1.

[23 March Recieved from Journalist Resource Centre Lahore]

PRESS STATEMENT

We should have a futuristic orientation towards the issue of Indo-Pak
peace, as a peaceful South Asia is imperative to resist the onslaught of
the West.
This was stated by former Finance Minister and peace stalwart Dr. Mubashir
Hasan, while addressing a dialogue on possibilities of Indo-Pak
rapprochement, organised by Pak-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy
in collaboration with Journalists Resource Centre at Lahore Press Club on
March 21, 2000.
While elaborating his point of view, he said that the western onslaught of
privatisation and globalisation promises no future to the third world and
to safeguard out interests, we need to ensure that both Pakistan and India
resolve the conflict in a peaceful manner.
Giving a brief overview of the similar efforts for reconciliation between
the two countries in the past, he said that the initiative of the people to
start second track diplomacy gained impetus in the 1990s. According to an
independent report as many as 76 different government, semi-government and
non-government organisations actively engaged in the efforts for
rapprochement between the two countries.
He said that people in Pakistan had the stance that since India had not
accepted the existence of Pakistan, there was no point in entering into a
dialogue with them. But Vajpayee's visit to Pakistan and Lahore declaration
were enough for us to realise that India considers it more beneficial to
improve ties with Pakistan, he added. He said that he had been stressing
for the last six years that strength of Pakistan was in the interest of
India. Since the Indians have experienced invasions from the Northwest,
having better ties with Pakistan India could ensure peace on its
north-western borders.
He said that United States felt threatened owing to the increasing military
strength of India and for the reason it had offered membership of Security
Council to India if the later disbands its nuclear programme. He said that
since Indian government had no intentions to stop its nuclear programme the
strife between India and America was bound to increase, he viewed. He
furthered his argument saying that we should carefully watch our own
interest before becoming a stooge in the hands of America.
About the possibilities of war he said that we should not have the fear
that India could conquer us nor should we have the fallacy that we could
conquer India. He said that the last two major combats between the two
countries had been fought following the war ethics as the areas of vital
importance and civilian population were not targeted.
He said that the politicians had finally realised that people wanted peace
and they were looking forward to reconciliation with India. He said that it
did not matter if the World Bank and other international donors did not
approve of Pak-India reconciliation, as they did not hold the key to the
people's whims and wishes. President Pak-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and
Democracy, Mr Aziz Mazhar and Executive Director Journalists Resource
Centre Mohammad Tanveer also spoke on the occasion.
________

#2.

Newsweek.com: Newsweek International Edition: Asia:
March 27, 2000

'We All Fear for Our Lives'
MUSHARRAF TAKES AIM AT HIS COUNTRY'S GUN CULTURE

By Zahid Hussain and Ismail Khan
Newsweek International, March 27, 2000

Karachi is eerily quiet. The Pakistani military seems to have performed a
minor miracle: cleaning up the violence that once ripped through this
teeming port city. There have been no daylight gun battles between brazen
sectarian armies recently. Even the warring factions of Karachi's
Urdu-speaking migrants from India, locked in vicious street rivalries, seem
to be taking a breather. But no one can be sure the lull will last. That's
because below the surface, Pakistan's largest city still simmers. In the
lower-class neighborhood of Liaquatabad, six members of one Urdu faction
squat over a deck of cards. They are nervous, restlessly fingering rifles
and pistols barely concealed by a sheet. Across town their blood enemies,
known by the acronym MQM, gather in their headquarters. A thin,
clean-shaven male watches the door. Though innocent-looking, he is uneasy.
Who wouldn't be, trying to balance an automatic rifle in his lap while
answering the phone?

Word is out on the streets of Karachi: if you have a gun, keep it hidden.
Long racked by violence, Pakistan is trying once again to crack down on its
"Kalashnikov culture." Firearms have been abundant since the 1980s, when
the United States sent huge supplies of weapons through Pakistan to arm the
Afghan rebels. On Feb. 15, the military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf
announced a major "deweaponization" plan. Its initial goal is to stop
licensing new weapons and ban the public display of guns. Later the
military will begin rounding up illegal weapons. "The brandishing of
weapons gives an impression of lawlessness," says Gen. Rashid Qureshi, a
spokesman for Musharraf. Over the next six months, says Interior Minister
Moinuddin Haider, Islamabad will regulate the manufacture of weapons in
northern tribal areas=97and cancel the licenses on thousands of automatic
weapons given out by previous governments. The state also will start a gun
"buyback" program. If guns are not turned in, Haider says, "we will
[eventually] want to take them forcibly from people after giving due
warning. We don't like killing; we don't like arms."

There are plenty of Pakistanis who do. Previous governments have also
tried to crack down on crime=97but in a country awash in weapons and old
hatreds, it is hard to contain violent impulses. Sunni and Shiite Muslim
sects are always at each other's throats, as are various mafia gangs and
tribal warlords, who kill one another over property or revenge. Political
disputes often end in bloodshed. Ordinary citizens, who might have settled
a grievance in the past with a punch or insult, now pull out guns.
Thousands of people have died violently in Karachi alone since the
mid-1980s=97and Pakistan's overall crime rate continues to rise. The
country's Human Rights Commission says crime increased in 1999 in many
categories=97murder, kidnapping, robberies, sniper victims, bomb blasts. "No
one is safe," says I. A. Rehman, the commission's director.

Two weeks ago three assassins walked into the Karachi office of Iqbal
Raad=97a lawyer defending former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a
high-profile trial=97and shot him dead. On the eve of a visit by U.S.
President Bill Clinton, the Raad murder was another blot on Pakistan's
reputation for nasty violence. Political leaders are hoping to convince
Clinton that the new government is moving to restore order to society.
"We're concerned about the image of our country," says Interior Minister
Haider.

It won't be easy to wipe out Pakistan's deeply entrenched gun culture.
=46eudal landowners and tribal chiefs have their own private armies.
Sectarian groups possess sophisticated arsenals. In rural Sindh province,
bandits with light machine guns rob and kill people randomly. Even in the
genteel capital of Islamabad, many businessmen, political leaders and
bureaucrats keep a pistol or rifle for protection. Military officials
concede that the gun-loving Tribal Areas, a quasi-autonomous strip of
territory straddling the Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan provinces,
cannot be disarmed. Darra Adamkhel, a small Tribal Areas town in western
Pakistan, may be the largest gun market in the world. Occupying just a
square kilometer, Darra Adamkhel contains some 2,600 arms shops and five
gun factories. On sale are Chinese- and Soviet-made Kalashnikov automatic
rifles ($225 for the real thing; $56 for a knockoff), hand grenades and
antiaircraft guns. There are said to be roughly 7 million Kalashnikovs in
the Northwest Frontier and Tribal Areas alone=97one for every grown man. As
Haji Waris Khan Afridi, a 62-year-old gunmaker, shows a visitor his shop,
gunfire rings out in the nearby mountains. "Looks like we'll have good
business today," he says.

Above all, skeptics wonder how the anti-gun plan will work if the
government continues to support religious militants. Heavily armed radical
Islamic groups use Pakistan as a staging ground for attacks against the
Indian-controlled area of Kashmir. Musharraf himself calls the Kashmiri
militants "freedom fighters," and their cause is extremely popular within
the Army. When Clinton talks with Musharraf, he's expected to raise the
issue of Pakistani support for Harkat ul-Mujahedin, a suspected Kashmiri
terrorist group. Analysts say that if the government places gun
restrictions on the militants, there could be serious political
consequences for Musharraf=97including a rift within the military. "The
[militants] might turn their guns on the military rulers," says Ataullah
Mengal, a tribal leader from Baluchistan province. General Qureshi told
NEWSWEEK that there will be no exceptions to the new laws.

Nobody expects the anti-gun campaign to soften Pakistan's rough-and-ready
culture any time soon. "We have a long way to go to clean up this mess,"
says Aftab Nabi, the police inspector general of Sindh province. Many
political and tribal leaders are plainly pessimistic. Some contend that the
gun campaign is too mild. Iqbal Haider, a senator from the Pakistan
People's Party, thinks the government should have taken a hard-line
approach: cancel all gun licenses and order everybody to turn in his guns
immediately. "Weapons have destroyed our culture, our body politic and our
values," he says. Getting rid of a few guns is no substitute for good
governance. But it's better than nothing.

With Tasgola Karla Bruner and Steve LeVine in Islamabad

=A9 2000 Newsweek, Inc.
________

#3.
The News International / News on Sunday
March 5, 2000

"Clash of civilizations"
A. H. Nayyar

If there is anything that points to the fulfilling of Samuel Huntington=EDs
prophecy of clash of civilizations, it is the growing Islamic Jihadi
movements across the globe. And madariss as the centers of the classical
Islamic learning have become a major fountainhead of this jihad, at least
in this part of the world.

The madariss-based movements are very strongly anti-modernity and hence
anti-west. They believe, as Shah Waliullah did in the eighteenth century,
that the woes of Muslims can be traced to their abandoning the true Islamic
way of life. They also view the relation between the Muslim societies and
the West as a continuation of the age-old Islam-Christianity tussle. The
madrasah students are engaged in arcane debates of philosophy, logic,
astronomy and arithmetic that had existed in the tenth or twelfth
centuries. Reason, and hence modern science, is regarded as heretical and
something that leads astray. The foremost concern of madariss is the
preservation of specific doctrines. The mindset that is created is
intolerant, fearful of outside influences and increasingly militant. The
most glaring example of the way they would like their societies to be run
is that of Afghanistan under the Taliban, themselves a product of madariss.

Having said that, it must also be admitted that there are various shades in
the contemporary Islamist movements and jihadis. Besides the radicals of
the madrasah variety (also commonly known as fundamentalists), there are
also relatively modern Islamists of the kind of Jamat-e-Islami who do not
shun the worldly knowledge, get educated in the mainstream educational
institutions, and, unlike the madrasah graduates, are usefully employed in
various sectors of the society. The International Islamic University,
Islamabad, models the educational system they profess.

While Jamat-i-Islami has had its ups and downs in the politics of Pakistan,
and it has been mostly downs, what raises alarm however is the
unprecedented rise in the militant forces associated with madariss.

The Bannuri Town mosque in Karachi is identified as the fountainhead of the
jihad that has produced phenomenal jihadi movements like the Taliban. The
Deobandi cleric Moulana Shamzai of this mosque is known as the mentor of
Mulla Omar and is recognized as the inspiration behind several jihadi
movements. He has recently formed Jayash-e-Muhammad to unify diverse jihadi
forces and has vowed to raise a fighting force of a half-million mujahideen.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is the jihadi component of the movement springing from
the famous Markaz Dawat wal Irshad in Muredke. Hundreds of thousands of
people flock to the annual congregations of the Markaz where, guarded by
thousands of heavily armed cadre, fiery speeches in favour of jihad are
made. Lashkar is one of the most prominent jihadi groups engaged in Kashmir
from the Pakistani soil. It puts up recruitment centers for the Kashmir
jihad openly on roadsides in big and small cities, and, alarmingly,
succeeds in large enrollments.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, which runs scores of madariss all over the country
and which after the Taliban takeover of Kabul openly declared abjuring the
electoral politics of Pakistan, is believed to have a much wider
international jihadi connections. Besides Taliban, it is believed to have
contacts with movements in Urumqi, Tajikistan, Chechnya and, of course,
Kashmir.

And there are many more such organizations. The rapid rise in their number,
the level of militancy, and the increasing public support is truly amazing.
Madariss have been singularly successful in this respect.

The madrasah system of education, as it historically evolved in the
subcontinent, was a small component of the total system of education of the
Muslim society. In Pakistan, it started out at a modest level and
experienced a slow rise until 1980. It was during the martial law regime of
Zia-ul-Haq and the Afghan war that the system experienced a very rapid
growth. The rise was not only in terms of new madariss emerging and larger
enrollment but also in the state patronage. Large sums were made available
to them as grants from the Zakat Fund. As an encouragement, Zia-ul-Haq=EDs
government equated the asnad of madariss with university degrees, enabling
a madrasah graduate to compete for a grade-17 job.

According to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Education in 1987-88,
there were by then a total of 2,862 madariss of all levels =F1 elementary to
the highest level =F1 a vast majority of them organizing themselves into fou=
r
boards of education catering to the Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-e-Hadith and
Shia schools of thought, respectively. Since independence, they have been
producing on the average 5,500 Huffaz-e-Quran, 4,500 Qaris and 7,500 Ulema
every year. During the five years prior to the survey, the average had
amazingly jumped to 12,000, 11,000 and 9,000 respectively. No proper survey
has been conducted since 1987. These numbers must have now increased by a
large factor.

Millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan provided a fertile ground for
expansion in madrasah education in the eighties. Supported by the USA,
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and aided logistically by the Pakistani
military agencies, religious political parties with madariss got their
cadres trained and battle-hardened.

The madariss also hosted fellow mujahideen from other Islamic countries,
getting an opportunity to foster unprecedented international links for the
=EBholy cause=ED. With money pouring in billions, the Jihad International In=
c.
was born, as Eqbal Ahmed put it. The madrasah-based mujahideen were now
ready to fight for Islam militarily, be it in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia,
Tajikistan, Algeria, Chechnya, Philippines, or in Urumqi. The posture had
never been so militant, and the century old dream of Pan-Islamism never so
realizable.

In the post 1989 Kashmir situation, the Pakistani state found it tactically
convenient to use jihadi groups in its blind quest for =EBsecurity against
India=ED. That in turn provided another opportunity to the jihadi movements
to grow both militarily as well as organizationally. The state agencies
engaged in this game learnt later that as a group gains strength, it
becomes autonomous and refuses to follow all the orders of the master. It
is therefore not at all far fetched to fear that this trend constitutes a
potential threat to the Pakistani state itself.

The threat is not just in terms of such armed groups becoming a
destabilizing factor from within. The jihadis have pitted Pakistan against
a host of countries other than India: Against China for what the jihadis
are doing in Urumqi, against Russia for support to Chechens, against the
Central Asian republics for the movement in Tajikistan and consequently
posing a threat to all of them, against the USA for harbouring what the
Americans term as terrorists, against Iran for the intense sectarian hatred
these madariss inculcate in their students, and even against Saudi Arabia
for their love for Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani state will have to take
the hard decision of putting a rein to madariss and jihadis before it gets
too late.
________

#4.

Basant festivity a plot against Pak culture, says Qazi

Lahore, Feb 25: Jamaat-e-Islami ameer Qazi Hussain Ahmad has said Basant is
a Hindu festival and its official celebration in the name of
Jashn-e-Baharan and kite flying is a conspiracy against Pakistani culture
and identity. Delivering Friday sermon at Jamia Mansoorah, Qazi said the
main reason for creation of Pakistan was that the Muslim culture and
traditions were diagonally different from those of Hindus. But now the same
Hindu culture was being spread in the country and the electronic media was
playing a fatal role in it, he added. Expressing concern, he said the PTV
was competing Indian media in obscenity and stimulating indecent
sentiments. He said Chief Executive General Pervaiz Musharaf was himself
attending a musical show in Hyderabad, while another show of un-Islamic
culture would be held in Defence Club, Lahore on February 27. Qazi warned
against involving the army into music and merry-making, saying that those
doing that had forgotten the fate of Yahya Khan. He said the real happiness
never came with material satisfaction, merry-making and drinking. Had it
been so, everybody in America and Europe would have been happy and the
people would not commit suicide. "Our problem is that we follow evil
traditions of other nations but avoid their virtues of truthfulness, hard
work and patriotism," he said. Qazi said the nation was unanimous against
the CTBT but an officially campaign was being dine to sign it.

Released by:
Central Information Department
JAMAAT-E-ISLAMI PAKISTAN Mansoorah, Multan Road, Lahore (Pakistan)

Ph. :+92-42-7844605-9, Fax : +92-42-541950
________

#5.

Rashtriya Sahara
=46ebruary 2000

CLINTON VISIT HIGHLIGHTS INDIA'S VULNERABILITY

By Praful Bidwai

Nothing speaks more eloquently of the imbalance and asymmetry in Indo-US
relations than the following two contrasting scenes. In India, state
governments are falling over one another to get President Clinton to visit
their capitals and declare them "real" high-tech cities. Universities and
IITs are vying with one another to confer honorary doctorates upon Clinton.
Even our security agencies are being bullied by American experts in
scouring the hotel rooms where the Clintons are meant to stay-four weeks in
advance of the visit. There is nervous excitement all around. After all,
the FBI is now about to open an office in Delhi-something India resisted
for 50 years!

In Washington, the Clinton visit to South Asia (India always figures
non-exclusively) is just one of many blips on the radar. It occasions some
lobbying, like 20 other issues do. It merits the odd "colour" story, in
addition to South Asia's normal minuscule media quota. But everyone knows
Clinton is a lame-duck president. He may be keen to fill the Indian "void
in his life". But politically, he is yesterday's man. The big domestic news
in the US is the primaries; not Clinton. The big foreign story is Chechnya,
Austria, Iran; not India.

So why is Clinton intent on visiting India? The short answer is the
L-factor, or the desire to leave behind a positive legacy for which he will
be remembered. Clinton wants to be seen as someone who highlighted the
importance of South Asia as "the most dangerous place in the world" and at
least did something to begin to defuse the tension between its two
now-nuclearised rivals. That is why he is coming without a clear assurance
that India will sign the CTBT, or that he can even bring New Delhi and
Islamabad to start a dialogue on Kashmir.

This itself should tell us that Clinton's rationale for his visit puts
India in a rather unflattering light. But the fact that the visit creates
such a flutter in our policy-makers' dovecotes shows how low our
self-esteem has fallen. An even stronger indicator of this lowliness is the
unseemly obsession with dissuading Clinton from visiting Pakistan. New
Delhi's diplomats-including foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh-, paid
lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and numerous foreign policy commentators are
burning the midnight oil to this trivial end as they demean themselves by
writing about Islamabad's "blackmailing" tactics, and pitifully plead with
Washington that it should honour its unflinching commitment to democracy
and refuse to bestow legitimacy upon Pakistan's military rulers. Never
before has New Delhi practised such complete self-equation with Pakistan.
Nor has its main foreign policy agenda been so reduced to just one point:
counter Pakistan.

In reality, this rhetoric against military rule has little to do with
either Washington's or New Delhi's love for democracy. The US has supported
a breathtaking range of brutal dictators from "Papa Doc" Duvalier to
Pinochet. The only condition has been the dictator's willingness to
"coordinate" his security policy with Washington's and to protect "free
enterprise" (read, multinational interests). For decades, the US
consciously preferred right-wing dictators over independent democratic
regimes---in Greece and Iran, or Pakistan and Zaire.

As for New Delhi, its advocacy of democratic "principle" sits ill with its
record of doing business with the Zias and Suhartos of the world, not to
speak of the King of Bhutan, the Shah of Iran or Saddam Hussain. Its
allergy to "undemocratic" Musharraf clearly has more to do with trying to
isolate Pakistan by offering a special "strategic partnership" to the US,
and with its high comfort-level with Nawaz Sharif (itself explained by
personal equations, as well as his sugar deal). South Block reckons that an
exclusive "strategic partnership" may be the best way of countering global
pressure on Kashmir, although it would also mean abridging India's own
sovereignty.

This regrettable calculation bears testimony to how far New Delhi has
moved away even from token non-alignment, and how its room for independent
manoeuvre has shrunk, especially in the last few years. This is not the
India that said no to putting all its eggs in the Western basket and
affirmed the right to a relatively autonomous economic policy. Rather, this
is an India which is disoriented by the end of the Cold War and has managed
its transition to a different world order extremely shabbily. This is not
the India that speaks for the developing Global South, but one that seeks
subordinate collaboration with global capital by exploiting domestic its
own poverty and cheap labour.

If subordination to global capitalism and the unequal trade order over the
past decade has been one major factor behind the erosion of Indian
sovereignty, another big influence has been India's security posture,
especially after the 1998 nuclear tests. Under Nehru, India exercised
influence on world affairs disproportionate to its military strength
because of its moral stature. Now, it increasingly seeks shortcuts to high
stature through raw military power. That has distorted India's image and
lost the country the respect of its neighbours.

The India-Pakistan nuclear tests were a negative landmark. They lent a
qualitatively new, extremely dangerous, edge to hostility, and
internationalised the Kashmir dispute, turning South Asia into one of the
world's worst flashpoints. South Asia, it bears recalling, is the world's
only region which has witnessed a continuous, unabating, hot-cold war for
half a century. For the world, South Asia's nuclearisation has been
alarming. Rather than induce sobriety and maturity, it has inflamed
India-Pakistan relations. Kargil happened within a year of the tests. Since
then, hostile rhetoric between India and Pakistan has scaled ever-higher
peaks.

One of the worst instances of this is Prime Minister Vajpayee's February 6
Jalandhar statement where he chided and threatened Pakistan, and diluted
India's No First Use commitment in regard to nuclear weapons: " They think
that they will drop one bomb and they'll win and we'll lose... If they
think that we will wait for them to drop a bomb and face destruction, they
are mistaken." Pakistan's statements have been, predictably, even more
intemperate. But they only underscore the danger of nuclear escalation:
there is no strategic distance between these two disaster-prone states and
missile flight-time is three to eight minutes. It is this "grave danger"
that forms the backdrop to Clinton's visit. It only underscores the eroded
bargaining power of India and Pakistan within their skewed, triangular,
relationships with America.-end-

________

#4.

________

#5.

PROF. MUSHIRUL HASAN
(Eminent Historian And Writer )
WILL SPEAK ON CONTEMPORY POLITICS AND THE FUTURE OF SECULAR DEMOCRATIC
INDIA
=46ri March 24th 2000
Dag Hammarskold Plaza 43 rd floor
240 E 47 St, ny ny 10017,
Corner of 2nd Ave and 47 St
At 6:30 PM Sharp
=46or More Info
RSVP najmany@a... call (212) 319 3233

Event Sponsors: Progressive Forum for India & The Organization for
Universal Communal Harmony

_________________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH (SACW) is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996. Dispatch archive from 1998
can be accessed by joining the ACT list run by SACW.
To subscribe send a message to <act-subscribe@egroups.com>
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D