By James Crabtree

Ten years ago Pakistan had one television channel. Today it has over 100. Together they have begun to open up a country long shrouded by political, moral and religious censorship—taking on the government, breaking social taboos and, most recently, pushing a new national consensus against the Taliban. One channel in particular, Geo TV, has won a reputation for controversy more akin to America’s Fox News than CNN or Sky News. Some Pakistanis see it and its competitors as a force for progress; others as a creator of anarchy and disorder. Certainly, the channels now wield huge political influence in a country where half the population is illiterate. But their effect is now felt beyond Pakistan’s borders too—revealing an underappreciated face of globalisation, in which access to television news means that immigrant communities, and in particular Britain’s 0.7m Pakistanis, often follow events in their country of origin more closely than those of the country where they actually live.

I went to Islamabad this April to learn about what many Pakistanis call their “media revolution.” The previous month, during a spate of anti-government protests, Geo TV had again demonstrated its influence by using its popular news programmes to support a “long-march” by opposition groups on the capital Islamabad, and even hosting a celebratory rock concert on the city’s streets when the government caved in to demands to reinstate the country’s most prominent judge.

I had chosen a tense time to visit. On my first day a man loyal to the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud walked into an army camp two blocks from where I was staying and blew himself up, killing eight soldiers. That same day news channels first aired a grainy video of a Taliban punishment beating in the Swat valley on the northwest frontier. A girl had been accused of infidelity and in the clip she was pinned face down by two men in a dusty village square while a third beat her with a stick. It topped the news for days, causing controversy for its brutality and for exposing the reality behind a “peace deal” to hand Swat over to the Taliban.

The video marked the start of an important new phase in Pakistan’s internal battles, with the army launching a bloody offensive to retake Swat in May, and a further push against the Taliban’s mountainous strongholds during July. Pakistanis have often felt sympathy for the Taliban, seeing their struggle as an understandable reaction to America’s military presence. This view began to change as militants launched more frequent bombings in major cities. But media coverage of Taliban brutality—beheadings, murders and most gruesomely the exhumation of a corpse to be hung in a public square—swayed opinion further. At the beginning of June one story in particular captured the country’s attention: a young army captain, killed on his birthday in a battle with Taliban fighters in Swat. The night before he had written to his father, worrying that he might die, but asking his family to be proud of him and his country. Pictures of his distraught mother ran for days, further pushing anti-Taliban opinion with far-reaching implications in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. And behind this shift lies a new power in Pakistan’s normally rigid hierarchy, which now rivals the ability of politicians, generals, spies and mullahs to shape events: the media itself.

Pakistani television’s great unshackling was sparked by an earlier military campaign. In May 1999 Pervez Musharraf, then head of the army, launched an incursion into Kargil, a mountainous region of Indian Kashmir. Here the Pakistani and Indian armies faced each other at 18,000 feet, in conditions so inhospitable that both abandon the area in winter. In the spring of 1999 Musharraf snuck his troops in early, taking the empty Indian positions without a fight. The subsequent war saw Pakistan beaten back, withdrawing under US pressure. In the aftermath Musharraf launched a coup to become president. But he also took a more unusual lesson from his defeat.

At the time Pakistan Television (PTV) was the only source for television news. The state broadcaster was closely controlled, earning the moniker “seeing is not believing.” In desperation many bought illegal satellite dishes, tuning in to Indian television during the war, which while jingoistic was broadly truthful. Musharraf would later paint his decision to loosen media restrictions as evidence of his liberalism. But it was a calculation born of losing both an actual war and a PR one: if India had a private television sector, so must Pakistan.

Pakistan has long had a vibrant print media, both in Urdu and English. Television was different: the elite could get CNN and the BBC World Service but access for most Pakistanis was strictly limited. Just as limited, says Rana Jawad, Geo TV’s Islamabad bureau chief, was the news that did make it onto air. Bulletins had a familiar pattern: “First you had what the president had said that day, then prime minister, then minister of foreign affairs, and so on… it had no credibility.” Musharraf liberalised the system in 2002. It was a decision that, six years later, would play a major role in his downfall.

Prospect Magazine for more
(Submitted by reader)

Dear friends,
Akbar Ilahbadi or Allahabadi(1846-1921) was a great Urdu poet. He was master of pun and sarcasm. He lived during time of Sir Syed Ahmed a great educationist and reformist. Akbar was not warm to Sir Syed’s ideas; Akbar was a conservative and was critical of foreign culture.
Here is his famous Ghazal that was sung by an equally famous singer Ghulam Ali. Till today it remains very popular. I have rendered it in three scripts and have provided meaning and translation of the verses for your enjoyment. The current Ghazal is very beautiful with deep meaning and, intricacy of symbolism and play on words. It may take hours discussing its details.

Hagama hai kyoN barpa, thoRi si jo pee lee hai
Hangama=commotion, uproar
Daka to nahiN Dala, chori to nahiN ki hai
Why there is uproar, for I just sipped a little wine
I didn’t commit stealing, neither did I waylay

Na tajruba-kari se, Wa’iz ki ye bateN haiN
na tajruba-kari= inexperience
Is rang ko kya jane, puchho to kabhi pee hai?
Cleric is inexperienced, so is his advice
How can he appreciate color of wine? Ask him if ever had it?

Oos mai se nahiN matlab, dil jis se hai begana
Begana=stranger, removed
Maqsood hai is mai se, dil hi meiN jo khinchti hai
Maqsood=intent
I do not yearn for that wine which has made my heart a stranger
My intent is that love-wine which oozes in heart

Ae shouq vahi mai pee, ae hosh zara so ja
Mehman nazar is dam, ek barq-e-tajjali hai
barq=lightening Tajalli= expose, shining appearance of Allah
Oh my passion! Have the same wine, oh my awareness, slumber
Right now my eyes’ guest is her unveiled shining face

VaaN, dil meiN ke sadmeN do, yaaN, jee meiN ke sab seh lo Sadma=shock, pain
Un ka bhi ajab dil hai, mera bhi ajab jee hai
Her heart plots shocks; I plan to bear everything
She has unique mind set, mine is a sublime way

Har zarra chamkta hai anvar-e-ilahi se
anvar-e-ilahi=Halo of Allah
Har saNs yeh kehti hai, hum haiN to Khuda bhi hai
Every particle shines from light borrowed from Allah
Yet, every life boasts, “God exists because of me”

Suraj meiN lage dhabba, fitrat ke karishme haiN
Fitrat=nature
B’ut hum ko kaheN kafir, Allah ki marzi hai
B’ut=idol, false God
The mighty sun gets a dark patch, it is nature’s magic
The false God is accusing me of being a Kefir; it is Allah’s will!

In Islam, idols are considered false Gods. Beloved is also called a diva or idol. Here poet has added pun False God is calling him a Kafir. Since every thing happens from will of God, so False God is calling poet a Kafir, must be Allah’s will. A beautiful verse.
Asghar Vasanwala can be reached at asgharf@att.net

Ghulam Ali singing: Hangama hai kyoN barpa by Akbar Ilah Abadi

Kyodo News

The Democratic Party of Japan will pledge a 25 percent cut in Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels in its manifesto for the upcoming national campaign, party officials said Sunday.
Bidding to wrest power from the Liberal Democratic Party-led ruling coalition, the DPJ has decided to set a more ambitious emissions goal than the 8 percent target set last month by Prime Minister Taro Aso. The DPJ’s target, however, is the same as that pledged by the LDP’s coalition partner, New Komeito.

The DPJ’s strategy would entail the adoption of a cap-and-trade system under which each company’s emissions would be capped at a certain level and quotas could be traded between companies, the officials said.

Emissions trading was taken up as an effective way to control heat-trapping gases at the Group of Eight summit earlier this month in Italy, but the government is reluctant to implement such a system in light of opposition from the business sector.

The DPJ is also pledging introduction of a feed-in tariff, or minimum price standard system, that would oblige electric utilities to buy all renewable energy output at a fixed, incentive price to overcome cost disadvantages compared with fossil fuels, according to the officials.

Japan Times for more

Written by Jason Tockman Friday, 24 July 2009
Source: NACLA

For the first time since Chile’s return to democracy, the country’s ruling political coalition may lose the presidency. The centrist “Concertación” coalition is being challenged from both the left and the right, facing perhaps its toughest electoral battle yet. Previous elections have been mostly battled out between a consensus Concertación candidate and a right-wing opponent. But this year a relative newcomer to Chile’s political scene has shaken things up, gaining momentum in the race for the presidency. The political ascendance of 36-year-old Congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami sets up a competitive three-way contest in the December 2009 election.

Candidates of the Concertación – formally known as the Agreement of Parties for Democracy – have won every presidential election since 1989. Among them is former President Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), a Christian Democrat, who is seeking a second term as the Concertación’s chosen candidate. Sitting President Michelle Bachelet, of the Concertación-affiliated Socialist Party, has won record high approval ratings (74 percent) for her handling of Chile’s economic crisis. However, this has not dented deep public disillusionment with the Concertación, which has become increasingly disconnected from any popular base, stagnating into an ossified political institution incapable of responding to social forces.

“Not only is the system detached from civil society, but it possesses little capacity for renovation and high degrees of endogamy,” explain scholars David Altman and Juan Pablo Luna in a recent report on Chilean politics. “One observes a political system co-opted by the elites and with low levels of citizen participation and activation.”

Upside Down World for more

The eye-opening documentary shows how the fizzy ‘American Idol’ concept becomes something profound and unique when set in war-ridden Afghanistan.

By KENNETH TURAN, Film Critic
July 24, 2009

If you believe that bringing the questionable virtues of “American Idol” to Afghanistan would do that beleaguered nation no favors, the remarkable documentary “Afghan Star” will change your mind in an instant.

For this eye-opening film reveals that even systems as dubious as the “Idol” format mean dramatically different things when transferred to radically dissimilar cultures. In the context of Afghanistan, the show’s core idea becomes moving, dramatic and significant in ways it simply isn’t in the West.

In the process of letting us in on all that, “Afghan Star” also tells us considerably more about the current state of that country — where the only known pig is in a zoo and women in burkas rush to take cellphone photographs — than a more sober-minded film could manage.

LA Times for more

Saturday, 27 June 2009

Each revolution softens in the length of time, and gravitates towards a more pragmatic point. Revolutions devour their own children and, after internal settlements, customs of the pre-revolutionary era are implemented as if they were brand new.In any kind of revolution, cadres don’t remain as they were before; more realists and more pragmatists of these cadres stand out in time. In a sense revolutions also normalize and lose their rigidity. The French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and other different kinds of ideological and national revolutions can be counted as examples.

Despite all of the fixings, the Iranian Revolution is one of the never-normalized-revolutions. Shortly after the revolution, Iran found itself at war with Iraq. The U.S. and the Soviet Union adopted a position against Iran, and powerful foreign enemies forced Iran to feel besieged. Post-revolutionary policies of Iran have always been survival policies, and Iran has continuously renewed itself under the conditions of revolution, war and defense. Revolutionary ideology transformed into the ideology of war without encountering any challenges of ordinary life; and later the ideology manifested a defense ideology against the hard reactions of the U.S. and more generally the West. During the time the attacks of Israel against Lebanon and Palestine have also been one of the factors to keep the revolution fresh. The Cold War ended, however, the U.S. settled in the Persian Gulf with Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait, and threats of the U.S. against Iran increased. When the U.S. was settling in the Middle East it utilized the threat of Saddam Hussein and on the other hand, by frightening Arabs with the Iran threat, it obtained new bases and rights in the region. During the 1990s Iran was represented as a ‘new threat’ to the world and the dynamics for change did not awaken in Iran because of the hardness of foreign threat. Since it was too busy to respond to foreign threats, even in the period of Hatami, Iran didn’t make an insightful critic.

Turkish Weekly for more

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

Could tiny tags replace barcodes?

A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

The 3mm-diameter (0.1 inches), powered tags could be used to encode nutrition information on food packaging or create new devices for playing video games.

The work will be shown off at Siggraph, a conference in New Orleans next week.

“We think that our technology will create a new way of tagging,” Dr Ankit Mohan, one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers behind the work, told BBC News.

Distant reader

The Bokodes currently consist of an LED, covered with a tiny mask and a lens.

Information is encoded in the light shining through the mask, which varies in brightness depending on which angle it is seen from.
“It is either bright or dark depending on how we want to encode the information,” said Dr Mohan, who works for the MIT Media Lab Camera Culture group.

The researchers believe the system has many advantages over conventional barcodes.

For example, they say, the tags are smaller, can be read from different angles and can be interrogated from far away by a standard mobile phone camera.

“For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most,” said Dr Mohan.

BBC for more

The Economist

A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out

Alamy

WHAT ails the Arabs? The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) this week published the fifth in a series of hard-hitting reports on the state of the Arab world. It makes depressing reading. The Arabs are a dynamic and inventive people whose long and proud history includes fabulous contributions to art, culture, science and, of course, religion. The score of modern Arab states, on the other hand, have been impressive mainly for their consistent record of failure.
They have, for a start, failed to make their people free: six Arab countries have an outright ban on political parties and the rest restrict them slyly. They have failed to make their people rich: despite their oil, the UN reports that about two out of five people in the Arab world live on $2 or less a day. They have failed to keep their people safe: the report argues that overpowerful internal security forces often turn the Arab state into a menace to its own people. And they are about to fail their young people. The UNDP reckons the Arab world must create 50m new jobs by 2020 to accommodate a growing, youthful workforce—virtually impossible on present trends.

Arab governments are used to shrugging off criticism. They had to endure a lot of it when George Bush was president and America’s neoconservatives blamed the rise of al-Qaeda on the lack of Arab democracy. Long practice has made Arab rulers expert at explaining their failings away. They point to their culture and say it is unsuited to Western forms of democracy. Or they point to their history, and say that in modern times they would have done much better had they not had to deal with the intrusions of imperialists, Zionists and cold warriors.

Some of this is undeniable. A case can indeed be made that Islam complicates democracy. And, yes, oil, Israel and the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union meant that the Arab world was not left to find its own way after the colonial period ended. More recently the Arabs have been buffeted by the invasion of Iraq. Now they find themselves caught in the middle as America and Iran jostle for regional dominance.

Strangely, your highness, they like voting

Still, as the decades roll by the excuses wear thin. Islam has not prevented democracy from taking root in the Muslim countries of Asia. Even after its recent flawed election, Iran, a supposed theocracy, shows greater democratic vitality than most Arab countries. As for outside intrusion, some of the more robust Arab elections of recent years have been held by Palestinians, under Israeli occupation, and by Iraqis after America’s invasion. When they are given a chance to take part in genuine elections—as, lately, the Lebanese were—Arabs have no difficulty understanding what is at stake and they turn out to vote in large numbers. By and large it is their own leaders who have chosen to prevent, rig or disregard elections, for fear that if Arabs had a say most would vote to throw the rascals out.

For this reason, you can bet that if the regimes have their way, Arabs will not get the chance. Arab rulers hold on to power through a cynical combination of coercion, intimidation and co-option. From time to time they let hollow parties fight bogus elections, which then return them to power. Where genuine opposition exists it tends to be fatally split between Islamist movements on one hand and, on the other, secular parties that fear the Islamists more than they dislike the regimes themselves. Most of the small cosmetic reforms Arab leaders enacted when Mr Bush was pushing his “freedom agenda” on unwilling allies have since been rolled back. If anything, sad to say, the cause of democracy became tainted by association with a president most Arabs despised for invading Iraq.

The illusion of permanence

Economist for more
(Submitted by reader)

By Sonali Kolhatkar and Mariam Rawi

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere — even if you call soldiers “peacekeeping forces.”

Years ago, following the initial military success of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the temporary fall of the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan were promised that the occupying armies would rebuild the country and improve life for the Afghan people.

Today, eight years after the U.S. entered Kabul, there are still piles of garbage in the streets. There is no running water. There is only intermittent electricity in the cities, and none in the countryside. Afghans live under the constant threat of military violence.
The U.S. invasion has been a failure, and increasing the U.S. troop presence will not undo the destruction the war has brought to the daily lives of Afghans.

As humanitarians and as feminists, it is the welfare of the civilian population in Afghanistan that concerns us most deeply. That is why it was so discouraging to learn that the Feminist Majority Foundation has lent its good name — and the good name of feminism in general — to advocate for further troop escalation and war.

On its foundation Web site, the first stated objective of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls” is to “expand peacekeeping forces.”

First of all, coalition troops are combat forces and are there to fight a war, not to preserve peace. Not even the Pentagon uses that language to describe U.S. forces there. More importantly, the tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive.

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.

Here are the facts: After the invasion, Americans received reports that newly liberated women had cast off their burquas and gone back to work. Those reports were mythmaking and propaganda. Aside from a small number of women in Kabul, life for Afghan women since the fall of the Taliban has remained the same or become much worse.
Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children.

Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war. The conflict outside their doorsteps endangers their lives and those of their families. It does not bring them rights in the household or in public, and it confines them even further to the prison of their own homes. Military escalation is just going to bring more tragedy to the women of Afghanistan.

Alternet for more

November 14-15, 2009
Honoring Hari Sharma at 75

Organizing Committee, Hari Sharma at 75:
Abi Ghimire, Amarjit Chahal, Bhanu Poudyal, Chinmoy Banerjee, Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, Sarabjit Hundal, Shinder Brar

Dear Friends,

We are friends of Hari Sharma who have come together to celebrate Hari’s 75th birthday in a manner that is appropriate for a person whose life and work have impacted on and been connected with so many of us in the Vancouver area, nationally and internationally. We invite you to participate in the activities we are planning to celebrate not only Hari’s life but the lives that we have all lived in struggle in his company. Some of us have been with Hari since the early 1970’s when he was organizing international support for political prisoners in India, some joined him when he took lead in organizing resistance to the imposition of fascist dictatorship in India by Indira Gandhi in 1975 through the formation of Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) (for which his Indian passport was impounded in 1976), and some came into his orbit with his organization of resistance to the ongoing attempt to impose a Hindu-chauvinist, fascistic polity in India through the formation of Non-Resident Indians for Secular Democracy (NRISAD) in 1993 that later developed a wider focus and became South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD).

Hari Sharma taught in the Department of Sociology in Simon Fraser University till his retirement in 1999 as professor emeritus. As a teacher he taught on Marxism and revolutionary struggles inspiring many students, and as a professional he vigorously defended academic freedom and the right of faculty to teach according to their political beliefs without persecution (including the valiant fight he put up to get his own tenure). However, he spent the major part of his enormous energy in the last forty years as an activist in the South Asian and the left community in Vancouver.

The primary focus of Hari’s activities has been the opposition to imperialism at the global level with a particular concern for the impact of imperialism and the struggle against it in India. These have engaged him in anti-war work locally and in the international campaign against nuclear weapons. But at the same time, Hari’s defense of people’s right of self-determination, national liberation, and livelihood has led him to a wide range of activities in support of wars of national liberation and people’s struggles for land, livelihood, social justice, and dignity. Hari has been vigorous in opposition to state repression in the service of Capital and an energetic champion of the rights of political prisoners in India and elsewhere. For the last twenty-five years he has been a passionate defender of the rights of minorities in India, particularly the Sikhs who came under attack from the state and state-sponsored mobs in 1984 and Muslims who came under similar attack beginning with the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. For these activities he was twice denied visa to enter India on his Canadian passport. Recently he has been denied Overseas Indian Citizensihip.

Locally, Hari has been a leader in the struggle against racism in Vancouver through the formation of the British Columbia Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) and an inspiration behind the organization of farm workers in British Columbia into the Canadian Farmworkers’ Union (CFU), the first president of which is a part of this organizing committee. Hari has also been a leader in organizing the South Asian community to seek acknowledgement from the Canadian government of the injustice done to our community by the racist policies of the government that turned away the immigrant ship Komagata Maru from the shores of Vancouver in 1914.

As a mobilizing force in support of people’s struggles, a champion of human rights and social justice, and a voice of conscience against the oppression of people everywhere but particularly minorities in India, Hari has brought many people to engage in struggle with him in Canada and the USA and connected with many people internationally. He has been a teacher and guide-and gadfly–of two generations of progressive South Asians in the Vancouver area of BC.

We invite you to celebrate the struggles we have engaged in as a community of faith in human rights, human dignity and social justice in fellowship with Hari Sharma. We plan to hold a conference on topics included under the broad rubric, “Imperialism, Socialism, and People’s Struggles Today” on November 14, to be followed by a celebratory party on November 15. We also plan to produce a publication for the occasion as a gift to Hari. The publication will have three parts: the first will be a set of articles on topics related to Imperialism, socialism and people’s struggles today conceived as a guide to action, the second will be a set of contributions of memories of struggle, which we hope will inform and inspire others, and the third will include a selection of Hari’s photographs of the people of India engaged in the struggle of everyday living.

We invite you to contribute your memories of struggle to this collection. The essay should be no more than three pages. It should be sent to us no later than September 30. Please let us know as soon as possible if we can expect a contribution from you.

We will send you further information regarding the conference on November 14 and the party on November 15 on hearing from you. We earnestly hope that you can join us for these events. We will arrange billeting for all out of town guests.

In solidarity,

Chinmoy Banerjee, for Organizing Committee, Hari Sharma at 75.
July 16, 2009

9155 Wiltshire Place, Burnaby, BC, V3N 4L6. 604-421-6752. cbanerjee@shaw.ca