By Beena Sarwar

OF the many challenges Pakistan’s elected government faces perhaps the most menacing and deep-rooted is Talibanisation — a phenomenon identified earlier on by the then exiled Afghan government’s acting foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, on Sept 21, 2000, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Pleading for urgent measures to combat this threat, Abdullah wondered “how far the evil threat of Talibanism shall expand … before the conscience of the international community would be awakened, not to just consider, but to adopt immediate and drastic preventive measures.”

His warnings fell on deaf ears. Today, Pakistan bears the brunt of the Taliban fallout, thanks to short-sighted Pakistanis fixated on creating an illusionary ‘strategic depth’ and Americans who thought routing the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan, thanks to superior technology, would ‘root out the evil’. All it did was push their support base underground for a while, even as the political vacuum created by mainstream Pakistani party leaders being in exile allowed the Taliban-sympathetic Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (also referred to by Benazir Bhutto as the Mullah Military Alliance) to win elections and strengthen these forces.

They have been gaining ground since Pakistan’s creation, with formulations like the Objectives Resolution. The process accelerated with successive governments pandering to right-wing ideologues who practically took over the country during the Afghan war. Then it suited Washington and its allies, including the Zia regime, to arm and train the Mujahideen and initiate what Dr Eqbal Ahmad called ‘jihad international’.

Writers and artists also courageously took on these elements. The dozens of works exhibited recently by the Peshawar-based cartoonist Zahoor at The Second Floor in Karachi included one dated Dec 23, 2007 in which he personifies a cloud as an armed, bearded man (‘Taliban’ inscribed on his turban) hovering ominously overhead, moving from Darra towards Peshawar. Another cartoon titled ‘Scenic Swat Valley’ shows a mean-faced, hirsute volcano overseeing a pile of burning television sets.

Perhaps most prescient was the short-story writer Ghulam Abbas who during another time of ‘enlightened moderation’ (Ayub Khan’s) predicted the logical conclusion of organised bigotry and fanaticism in Hotel Mohenjodaro, a futuristic story in which guests at the fictional Hotel Mohenjodaro celebrate Pakistan becoming the first country to send a man to the moon (Abbas wrote it in 1967 or so, before Neil Armstrong’s feat).

Mullahs around the country condemn the astronaut’s act as heretical. They whip up a frenzy that topples the government, grab power, destroy universities, schools and libraries and impose strict gender segregation. They ban music, art, English and modern inventions — but don’t mind using these inventions (loudspeakers then, Internet, television and FM radio stations now) for their own purpose. Their infighting leads to anarchy. Pakistan is invaded and destroyed. Years later, a tour guide points to the spot in a desert “where, before the enemy struck, stood the Hotel Mohenjodaro.”

The Taliban have already reduced many hotels and educational institutions to rubble in Swat and other previously idyllic areas. Recovery from the nightmare they have unleashed will take much time, once it is over. And over it must be, later if not sooner. In the long term, as Pervez Hoodbhoy predicts, “the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction.”

Those who justify the Taliban uprising in Pakistan as an anti-imperialist movement forget that since the Taliban first swept into Afghanistan in 1996 (with the blessings of the Pakistani establishment), they have been a threat to women, pluralism and democracy in the region. Their oppressive order in Afghanistan pre-dates the American invasion of Iraq, bombing of Afghanistan, and drone attacks in Pakistan.

Although many Afghans initially welcomed the Taliban for their ‘speedy justice’, oppressive measures like closing girls’ schools and pushing women out of the public sphere added to the people’s miseries. Forced to give up their jobs, thousands of women, the sole bread-earners for their families, had three choices: beggary, starvation or prostitution.

Pushed out of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban and their ideological extensions began attempting to enforce this order in Pakistan. Over the past months they have closed or demolished scores of girls’ schools in Swat and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), forcing thousands of girls to discontinue their education.

The diary of a seventh-grade Swat schoolgirl writing under the pen name ‘Gul Makai’ (BBC Urdu Online) bears poignant testimony to these horrors. On Jan 3, she wrote, “I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat…. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had banned all girls from attending schools.” That day, only 11 out of 27 students attended class because of the Taliban’s edict. Three of her friends had already moved to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families. In the latest installment, her own family has moved to Islamabad.

Here in Karachi, even my seventh-grade old daughter argues that all this has nothing to do with Islam.

What it has to do with is territorial control and power. As the historian Rajesh Kadian notes, most of Asia’s major countries are “frayed at the edges with central authority barely maintaining the functions, power and dignity of the state”. Pakistan’s “frayed fringe” Fata was strategically important to the West during the Afghan war and after 9/11. The exception was “the extraordinary valley of Swat”, the cradle of Tibetan Buddhism, the home of Shah Mir whose piety converted the Kashmiris to Islam, boasting the highest literacy rates in the area especially among women. By targeting this peaceful, settled area with its diverse cultural and religious traditions, the Taliban have made life hell for its residents. They have also challenged the writ of the state by establishing their own parallel system.

This would have been impossible if the heavily armed and trained Pakistan Army meant business. Instead, they say they are unable to even neutralise the FM radio station from which daily announcements are made of the Taliban’s next targets. The army’s recently stated resolve to work in tandem with the civilian government counters public perceptions about its reluctance to do just that. Somewhere, the will seems to be lacking. It will continue to remain lacking unless those who control Pakistan realise that the target of these ‘jihadi’ forces is not just to control some areas, but to overrun the entire country, just as Ghulam Abbas predicted.

The writer is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Karachi.

beena.sarwar@gmail.com
Submitted by Hamid Bashani Khan.
Originally published in Dawn

by Sonja Kakar

Having just returned to my fire-ravaged home state Victoria after a 7-week absence, I doubt that any Australian would be giving much thought to the terror and devastation that wracked the lives of some 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza only last month. But we cannot dismiss one disaster with a new one, even if it is our own. More than ever, Australians ought to feel some degree of empathy with the Palestinians who saw over 6,000 of their fellow citizens killed or injured in the attacks – a third of them children – and leaving almost 50,000 people homeless. One disaster was caused by a merciless fire storm that has had police and firefighters describing the charred wastelands and destroyed lives as akin to “a holocaust”; the other was caused by three weeks of merciless bombardments ordered by the state of Israel that few would dare to describe as “a holocaust” for fear of being charged with somehow trivialising a word long reserved for the genocide of European Jews more than half a century ago. But how else does one describe the sheer terror that people feel when they see the bodies of their loved ones shrivel before their eyes in blistering fire regardless if caused by nature or man? Whether it is 200, 1400 or 6 million people killed, the terror and overwhelming sense of loss the rest of a threatened population feels in the wake of such onslaughts, is the same. No one thinks of numbers when one is totally helpless to stop the tyranny of powerful forces. As we rush to help our suffering own and feel that sense of shared tragedy in the crisis of the moment, we should spare a thought for all those who are suffering similarly through no fault of their own. The aftermath inevitably comes and politicians, the media and those of us unaffected will eventually turn our attention to other matters, but the people who have borne the brunt of nature’s or human-contrived catastrophes will carry with them forever the scars of loves and labours lost. And when the world is silent and people turn the other way, the pain is that much harder to bear.

We should not forget the victims of the fires or the victims of war because life for them will never be the same again. They are part of the human family and none of us are any less vulnerable than the other to malevolent forces that threaten to strip us of everything near and dear to our hearts; we can only be grateful for the helping hand, the kind word, and those who are willing to reach out beyond the call of duty long after the fury unleashed is finally spent.
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

Gone
A family rests on the rubble of their home in Jebaliya.

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Submitted by reader.

Where does one even begin to talk about what the KaraFilm Festival has been through over the last two years? In December 2006, during the 6th KaraFilm Festival, we were musing about the direction the Festival should take after finally getting the State of Pakistan to accept its legitimacy and having celebrated six consecutive years of its existence. We were discussing how to consolidate the gains the Festival had made – and there were many – and how to take the next step towards translating those achievements into a more viable film industry in the country. “How do we ensure that this first step does not remain the only bright light on Pakistan’s film scene,” we wrote in our catalogue, “but feeds into better trained and more thoughtful filmmakers, a more conducive environment for good cinema and, indeed, better films being made?”
So it was ironic that, even as some of the fruits of our endeavours began to bear fruit – cinema attendances began to see an upsurge and at least some of the films made in Pakistan set people talking about a nascent “revival” – the subsequent months threatened the very existence of the Festival itself. Two years of political and social turmoil and ever increasing security challenges forced us, despite our best efforts and to our dismay, to twice postpone the 7th KaraFilm Festival. Like the thousands of people who looked forward to the annual ‘Kara experience’, we were extremely disappointed; more so, because we had put in months and months of hard work preparing for it. For some people, who perhaps did not understand the dynamics of an international film festival and all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that go into putting together an event of this magnitude, the postponements were inexcusable. But if anyone understood how much potential damage this still tender sapling could suffer if it was deprived of the sunlight of an annual airing, it was us, those who had planted it and nurtured it against all the odds.
But as if we did not have enough issues to contend with, in the last few months we have also been hit by the double-whammy of rampant inflation in Pakistan and the global economic downturn, imperiling the Festival’s financial resources. The rising tensions with our neighbour India after the brutal terrorist attacks in Mumbai have also negatively impacted the relationships we had so carefully cultivated over the last six years. Of course, we are not the only ones to suffer in the cultural sphere. Music concerts, theatre performances, filmmaking and fashion shows, all have suffered in the same environment. But perhaps because of the scope and ambitions of the Festival, and perhaps because we had nurtured this space precisely to fight against the decades-long marginalization of cinema in Pakistan, the implications are more far-reaching. In a country where creativity and film is once again under attack from forces of extremism, and precious few institutions of art and culture exist, it is particularly galling to stand by and see all of one’s efforts to establish just such a credible institution endangered.
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(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)

MONROVIA (AFP) – Four West African nations have joined forces to do battle against a species of caterpillars laying waste to crops in the region, a statement said Saturday.
The agriculture ministers from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast have created a team to look into the threats posed by what are believed to be Achaea Catocaloides caterpillars.
Crops in central Liberia and southern Guinea have already been ravaged by the caterpillars, and other countries in the region fear the damage will spread further.
“The five-man technical committee will begin work immediately,” the ministers from the four countries forming the Mano River Union said in a statement after meeting in Monrovia on Friday.
“They will design plans of action that will be implemented by all member countries.”
An expert from Brazil already working with Liberia will assist the new committee.
Liberia’s agriculture minister said earlier this week that the caterpillars were not army worms as previously believed but the Achaea Catocaloides species, which could turn out to be even more destructive.
Experts warned that the insects could attack more crops than army worms, including coffee and cocoa.
Ivory Coast is the world’s top cocoa producer and many of its plantations are in the west of the country in a region that borders Liberia.
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Submitted by a reader

by Anand Patwardhan

Terror: The Aftermath

In Mumbai, after the numbing sorrow came the blame game and the solutions. Loud voices amplified by saturation TV: Why don’t we amend our Constitution to create new anti-terror laws? Why don’t we arm our police with AK 47s? Why don’t we do what Israel did after Munich or the USA did after 9/11 and hot pursue the enemy? Solutions that would lead us further into the abyss. For terror is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It thrives on reaction, polarisation, militarisation and the thirst for revenge.

The External Terror

Those who invoke America need only to analyse if its actions after 9/11 increased or decreased global terror. It invaded oil-rich Iraq fully knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, killing over 200,000 Iraqis citizens but allowing a cornered Bin Laden to escape from Afghanistan. It recruited global support for Islamic militancy, which began to be seen as a just resistance against American mass murder. Which begs the question of who created Bin Laden in the first place, armed the madarsas of Pakistan and rejuvenated the concept of Islamic jehad? Israel played its own role in stoking the fires of jehad. The very creation of Israel in 1948 robbed Palestinians of their land, an act that Mahatma Gandhi to his credit deplored at the time as an unjust way to redress the wrongs done to Jews during the Holocaust. What followed has been a slow and continuing attack on the Palestinian nation. At first Palestinian resistance was led by secular forces represented by Yasser Arafat but as these were successfully undermined, Islamic forces took over the mantle. The first, largely non-violent Intifada was crushed, a second more violent one replaced it and when all else failed, human bombs appeared.
Thirty years ago when I first went abroad there were two countries my Indian passport forbade me to visit. One was racist South Africa. The other was Israel. We were non-aligned and stood for disarmament and world peace. Today Israel and America are our biggest military allies. Is it surprising that we are on the jehadi hit list? Israel, America and other prosperous countries can to an extent protect themselves against the determined jehadi, but can India put an impenetrable shield over itself? Remember that when attackers are on a suicide mission, the strongest shields have crumbled. New York was laid low not with nuclear weapons but with a pair of box cutters. India is for many reasons a quintessentially soft target. Our huge population, vast landmass and coastline are impossible to protect. The rich may build new barricades. The Taj and the Oberoi can be made safer. So can our airports and planes. Can our railway stations and trains, bus stops, busses, markets and lanes do the same?

The Terror Within

The threat of terror in India does not come exclusively from the outside. Apart from being hugely populated by the poor India is also a country divided, not just between rich and poor, but by religion, caste and language. This internal divide is as potent a breeding ground for terror as jehadi camps abroad. Nor is jehad the copyright of one religion alone. It can be argued that international causes apart, India has jehadis that are fully home grown. Perhaps the earliest famous one was Nathuram Godse who acting at the behest of his mentor Vinayak Savarkar (still referred to as “Veer” or “brave” although he refused to own up to his role in the conspiracy), murdered Mahatma Gandhi for the crime of championing Muslims.
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By Margarita Windisch

Spain colonised Western Sahara and its mostly nomadic people in 1884 claiming it as a protectorate of the Spanish Crown. Spanish rule over Western Sahara was codified in Berlin in 1885, where Africa was carved up among the European powers. The period of Spanish rule was marked by ongoing resistance, revolts and armed clashes with the indigenous population, with its liberation movements being brutally repressed by the Spanish authorities.
A 1966 UN resolution called for Saharawi people’s right to self-determination to be exercised via a referendum which never eventuated. The lack of political developments led to the formation of Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro (the Polisario Front) in 1973. Polisario was conceived as a nationalist front with the aim of achieving independence, and encompassed all Saharawi political trends.
Polisario launched a guerrilla war against Spanish rule, fought Mauritania’s occupation of part of Western Sahara (from 1975 to 1979) and Morocco’s occupation from its invasion in 1975 until 1991.
In 1975 Spain relinquished its control of Western Sahara and, contrary to 1966 UN resolution for self-determination, handed Western Sahara over to Mauritania and Morocco (the Madrid Accords). The same year, the Morocco regime organised the “Green March’’, in which 350,000 Moroccans, brandishing flags and pictures of King Hassan II, invaded Western Sahara in order to settle and “reclaim the territory’’. This strategic march was supported by 20,000 Moroccan troops, who were met with some armed resistance from Polisario. November 6, the day of the “Green March”, has become a national holiday in Morocco.
Morocco and Mauritania’s war against Polisario was financially supported by the US, France and Spain to the tune of billions of dollars.
Apart from engaging in aerial bombardment, which included napalm and cluster bombs, Morocco started to build a 2500-kilometre-long, heavily mined wall through Western Sahara, dividing almost every Saharawi family.
For a detailed map of Western Sahara and the Moroccan wall, click here
Read their Struggle here

The film is based on the Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel. Fernando Luján plays the colonel.