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Politics of the humdrum and the rough and tumble type with which people became used since independence suddenly disappeared from the scene leaving the country in a state of political torpor. Ministers were appointed by Field Marshal Ayub Khan from army, private sector, bureaucracy and judiciary. Even an international civil servant working in the World Bank was also called back to serve in the cabinet. Mr Shoab, who became the finance minster, was a garrulous and vainglorious man, as he found out when he came on a visit to Dacca along with a  few other of his cabinet colleagues soon after martial law was declared. Their objective was to win over the hearts and minds of the most vocal and critical section of East Pakistan population, the students community. It was a sort of goodwill mission by the martial law cabinet members which, Ayub Khan thought, would present the civil face of the martial law regime. To placate the feelings of East Pakistanis a number of advisors/ministers were taken from the eastern province also. All three of them were from police service, belonging to former IPS cadre. No civilian bureaucrat was appointed most probably because there was no old ICS among Bengalis. Be that as it may, the appointment of three police officers in the martial law government created the impression that civilians were not trusted by martial law authorities. Being officers in uniform, the police were regarded as natural allies of the army. The students community in East Pakistan had faced the wrath of police and were fired upon by them during the Language Movement and therefore, the presence of three senior police officials from East Pakistan did not assuage their feelings of opposition to the overthrow of the political regime. Politics in Pakistan and by extension in East Pakistan, though turbulent and unstable, had escape valves to give vent to criticism, protest and demonstrations by the aggrieved. Martial law banned all these avenues of democratic dissent.
   The martial law authorities seemed to have lodged themselves for the long haul. They banned all political parties and prohibited some prominent politicians from participating in politics in future under an order known as EBDO. Among East Pakistani politicians who become its victims were Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former prime minister, Abul Mansur Ahmed, the former commerce minister and Hamidul Huq Choudhury, the former law minister. Tamizuddin Khan, the first speaker of the Constituent and later the National Assembly, challenged the martial law authorities’ action dissolving the National Assembly. The spineless or scared-to-death Supreme Court headed by Justice Munir, gave the verdict in favour of the martial law regime. Moulavi Tamizuddin Khan became a hero in the eyes of the public by standing up against the martial law regime. He did not accomplish much as a politician but his stand against the enemies of democracy and representative government gave him a place in the pantheon of national heroes. Unfortunately, there were not many like him among politicians and as a result no political opposition was launched against martial law. Rather, everyone cowered and cringed in fear.
   The visit by the emissaries of Ayub Khan to impress upon the East Pakistanis about the need for replacing the ‘corrupt’ politicians was not a success, rather it backfired. In the meeting at Curzon Hall with the students and intelligentsia, some blunt questions were asked that saw Ayub’s messengers squirming in discomfort. After the meeting, he happened to meet Shoab who was explaining to a clutch of students enthusiastically how the World Bank functioned and what he was doing there. He did not talk about martial law or its future programme for economic development of the country. Showing his wrist watch he smugly said that the time displayed was that of Washington DC. It was as if he did not have much confidence in the military regime and had kept his options open to beat a hasty retreat the moment events took a turn for the worse. After all, martial law was a new experience and no one knew how it would fare. But he was wrong in being sceptical if that was what his timing in the wrist watch meant. As Justice Kayani, the outspoken jurist, said years later, the Pakistani army’s greatest achievement was that it had conquered the homeland. President Abub Khan was reportedly sitting by his side with a frown in his face.
   After a year Ayub Khan sent a new governor to East Pakistan to give the message that martial law had come to stay and no ‘subversive’ activity would be tolerated. Lt General Azam Khan, the new governor, had earned the epithet of ‘Butcher of Lahore’ and was thought to be a ruthless man. He had crushed down the anti-Ahmadya movement in Lahore with an iron hand literally, sending tanks into mosques and killing hundreds of people. If need be he would do the same in East Pakistan, Ayub Khan might have
   reasoned.
   Azam Khan did not live up to his image and reputation, much to the surprise of East Pakistanis and to the disbelief of Ayub Khan. He shed his army uniform and turned into a civilian with an amiable face. One day he paid a surprise visit to the Arts Building of the University and walked on foot from the gate pumping the hands of students, peons and bearers, anyone who came across him. The students could not believe their eyes. No politician had ever come inside the campus whether out of fear or reverence. To see an army general representing martial law in the province inside the campus, almost without any security guard and protocol was something the students could never imagine. Azam Khan came straight to Madhu’s canteen seeing many students there and introduced himself. Moudud immediately took him on a tour of the abysmally scant facilities in the canteen and the common room and told him of lack of other amenities from which the students suffered. Lt General Azam Khan took great interest in student affairs and gave assurances to do his utmost to improve the conditions. He went to the kitchen and talked to the cooks and bearers, asking about their problems. Students surrounded him as he moved about briskly going from one place to another throwing protocol and security arrangements to the wind. His aide de camp and guards tried to be near him but gave up after some time. Azam Khan talked to students like an old friend and the expression in his face was disarming. It was difficult to imagine that it was the same man who had earned notoriety for his cruelty in the military action in Lahore. He gave the impression of a man who could not kill even a fly with a swat. What Ayub Khan could not achieve by sending his full council of advisers, Azam Khan accomplished that instantly: he won the hearts and minds of the students. There were a few sceptics, of course, who doubted his sincerity and thought the whole show was a pretence. It was pointed out that he was a shrewd man and took a different tack in making inroads into the citadel of students power, the Arts Building. In spite of this reservation about his real intention, students in general were full of praise for his simplicity and geniality.
   Azam Khan proved to be a sincere man, trying hard to mix with the people of East Pakistan without flaunting his authority. When he visited the Airport Road under construction and sat with the workers to have lunch with them, there was no doubt left about this. Perhaps it was all for public relations, but that gesture, even if superficial, was not made by anyone else before. As a result of his easygoing, unostentatious nature and spontaneous contact with all sections, his popularity continued to soar among the people of East Pakistan. When he was removed from the post of governor by Ayub Khan everyone was surprised and shocked. It was rumoured that Ayub Khan became jealous of his popularity and so removed him. A more likely reason could be Azam Khan’s championship of East Pakistan’s cause. He, perhaps the first among the Punjabis, realised how neglected and exploited was East Pakistan and wanted to redress some of the genuine grievances of the people. By trying to do that he might have come into clash with the ruling clique dominated by Punjabis in the army and civil service. After Bangladesh became independent he was the only West Pakistani general who was given a hero’s welcome when he visited Dacca. If there were many Punjabis in the army like him the history of Pakistan could have been different.

WASHINGTON: As the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of taking over the Senate, George W Bush announced that Donald Rumsfeld was out and Robert Gates was in as secretary of defence. When Bush is being run out of town, he knows how to get out in the front of the crowd and make it look like he’s leading the parade. The Rumsfeld-Gates swap is a classic example.
   The election was a referendum on the war. The dramatic results prove that the overwhelming majority of people in this country don’t like the disaster Bush has created in Iraq. So rather than let the airwaves fill up with beaming Democrats and talk of the horrors of Iraq, Bush changed the subject and fired Rumsfeld. Now, when the Democrats begin to investigate what went wrong, Rumsfeld will no longer be the controversial public face of the war.
   Rumsfeld had come under fire from many quarters, not the least of which was a gaggle of military officers who had been clamouring for his resignation. Bush said he decided to oust Rumsfeld before Tuesday’s [November 7] voting but lied to reporters so it wouldn’t affect the election. Putting aside the incredulity of that claim, Bush likely waited to see if there would be a changing of the legislative guard before giving Rumsfeld his walking papers. If the GOP had retained control of Congress, Bush would probably have retained Rumsfeld. But in hindsight, Bush has to wish he had ejected Rumsfeld before the election to demonstrate a new direction in the Iraq war to angry voters.
   Rumsfeld’s sin was not in failing to develop a winning strategy for Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, because we never belonged there in the first place. The war in Iraq is a war of aggression. It violates the United Nations Charter which only permits one country to invade another in self-defence or with the blessing of the Security Council.
   Donald Rumsfeld was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war. On September 15, 2001, in a meeting at Camp David, Rumsfeld suggested an attack on Iraq because he was deeply worried about the availability of ‘good targets in Afghanistan.’ Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported that Rumsfeld articulated his hope to ‘dissuade’ other nations from ‘asymmetrical challenges’ to US power. Rumsfeld’s support for a preemptive attack on Iraq ‘matched with plans for how the world’s second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world’s contractors made for an irresistible combination,’ Ron Suskind wrote after interviewing O’Neill.
   Rumsfeld defensively sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq when he appeared on CBS News on November 15, 2002. In a Macbeth moment, Rumsfeld proclaimed the United States’ beef with Iraq has ‘nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.’ The secretary doth protest too much.
   Prosecuting a war of aggression isn’t Rumsfeld’s only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. Wilful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. In his book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh described the ‘unacknowledged’ special-access programme (SAP) established by a top-secret order Bush signed in late 2001 or early 2002. It authorised the Defence Department to set up a clandestine team of Special Forces operatives to defy international law and snatch, or assassinate, anyone considered a ‘high-value’ Al Qaeda operative, anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld expanded SAP into Iraq in August 2003.
   But Rumsfeld’s crimes don’t end there. He sanctioned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. According to Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. Rumsfeld also authorised waterboarding, where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture.
   Rumsfeld was intimately involved with the interrogation of a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Qahtani, at Guantánamo in late 2002. General Geoffrey Miller, who later transferred many of his harsh interrogation techniques to Abu Ghaib, supervised the interrogation and gave Rumsfeld weekly updates on his progress. During a six-week period, al-Qahtani was stripped naked, forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, denied bathroom access, threatened with dogs, forced to perform tricks while tethered to a dog leash, and subjected to sleep deprivation. Al-Qahtani was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. For 48 days out of 54, he was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day.
   Even though Rumsfeld didn’t personally carry out the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he authorised it. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be liable for war crimes committed by his inferiors if he knew or should have known they would be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them. The US War Crimes Act provides for prosecution of a person who commits war crimes and prescribes life imprisonment, or even the death penalty if the victim dies.
   Although intending to signal a new direction in Iraq with his nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld, Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq. He is building huge permanent US military bases there. Gates at the helm of the Defence Department, Bush said, ‘can help make the necessary adjustments in our approach.’ But this war can never get smarter. Now that there is a new day in Congress, there must be a new push to end the war. That means a demand that Congress cut off its funds.
   And the war criminals must be brought to justice –– beginning with Donald Rumsfeld. On November 14, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and other organisations will ask the German federal prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation into the war crimes of Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. Although Bush has immunised his team from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, they could be tried in any country under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction.
   Donald Rumsfeld may be out of sight, but he will not be out of mind. The chickens have come home to roost.
   CounterPunch, November 10, 2006. Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. This column originally appeared in the Jurist.

WASHINGTON: If you listen to right-wing pundits and Republican officials, the return to power of former revolutionary Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is not evidence of democracy in action but rather an invitation to Communist tyranny, terrorism and even nuclear holocaust. It appears that on November 5 Nicaraguans went to the polls and committed the sin of selecting a leader not in favour with the White House. Ortega’s Sandinista-led coalition got the control of the executive for the first time since 1990.
   Of course, the fantasy that a small, poor and geopolitically marginal Central American nation could be a major threat to US national security is a throwback to cold war-era propaganda films like Red Dawn. It reflects the current foreign policy mindset of Washington conservatives but does not resemble anything like reality.
   The return of Daniel Ortega to Nicaragua’s presidency hardly portends a menacing new danger for the US heartland. It does, however, mark two important developments in the rise of an increasingly independent Latin America. First, given concerted efforts on the part of the Bush Administration to influence the outcome of the election, it signals that US threats of retaliation may no longer be sufficient to keep Central American citizens from voting for leaders willing to buck Washington’s economic programme. Second, in spite of Ortega’s standing as a deeply compromised political figure, his election provides a modest opening for hope that a new Nicaraguan administration might do a better job of addressing the country’s endemic poverty than have the past sixteen years of neoliberal rule.
   In recent years, the White House has chosen to remain silent during many electoral contests in Latin America. This does not reflect a newfound respect for democratic self-determination; it is pragmatic. Washington learned the hard way that its admonitions can backfire when delivered to Latin America voters fed up with having economic policy dictated from the North –– as was the case in Bolivia in 2002, when US attacks on Evo Morales helped him gain the stature that would ultimately propel him to the presidency this year. However, the United States has maintained an overt involvement in some elections, especially in cold-war hot spots Nicaragua and El Salvador.
   Bush Administration efforts over the past year to prevent the Nicaraguan electorate from choosing Ortega were particularly heavy-handed. Violating diplomatic protocol, US Ambassador Paul Trivelli expressed an open preference for Ortega’s opponents, and he made repeated efforts to unite the Nicaraguan right around a single candidate. (He failed, and the divide among Nicaraguan conservatives helped pave the way for the Sandinistas’ victory.) Adding to Trivelli’s meddling, US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez suggested that more than $220 million in aid and hundreds of millions more in investments could be jeopardised if voters picked the wrong candidate.
   In the last week of the campaign, several Republican members of Congress stepped up the threats. Most radically, they proposed to block the stream of money sent from Nicaraguan immigrants in the United States to impoverished family members back home in Central America. In an October 30 letter to Nicaraguan Ambassador Salvador Stadthagen, Representative Tom Tancredo wrote, ‘if the FSLN takes control of the government in Nicaragua, it may be necessary for the United States authorities to examine closely and possibly apply special controls to the flow of $850 million in remittances from the United States to Nicaragua ––unfortunately to the detriment of many people living in Nicaragua.’ In a public letter addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Representatives Ed Royce and Peter Hoekstra added, ‘We share US Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli’s assessment that an Ortega victory would force the United States to fully ‘re-evaluate’ relations with Nicaragua.’
   With the memory of the United States’ debilitating economic embargo of the 1980s still fresh, Nicaraguan voters do not take suggestions of retaliation from Washington lightly. In 1990 the United States made clear that its embargo, as well as funding for terrorist contra forces, would continue if Ortega were re-elected. This blackmail played a decisive role in pushing the Sandinistas from office.
   Ironically, even as the White House portrays Ortega as a committed and unrepentant leftist, the real concern is whether he has fully compromised the progressive ideals he once espoused as a leader in the movement that overthrew Nicaragua’s longstanding Somoza dictatorship. Ortega has been criticised by former partisans for keeping a tight hold on the leadership of the Sandinistas, quashing efforts to democratise the party and expelling members like former Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, who announced intentions to challenge Ortega’s power. In the 1990s, many of the most prominent cultural and intellectual figures in the Sandinista movement, including liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal, poet and novelist Gioconda Belli and Ortega’s former Vice President Sergio Ramirez, broke ranks to form a dissident party, the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In the first half of this year, Lewites made a strong showing as that party’s presidential candidate, but he suffered a massive heart attack and died in July, crippling the Renovation Movement’s efforts for the election cycle.
   Beyond internal strife within the Sandinistas, Ortega’s record has been marred by public scandals. In 1998 a grown stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez, accused Ortega of sexually abusing her for years, starting when she was an adolescent. The following year, Ortega brokered a pact with then-president Arnoldo Aleman, who was facing charges of corruption. El pacto, as the shady deal is ominously known in Nicaragua, allowed both men to avoid prosecution by granting them parliamentary immunity. It also made Ortega into one of the country’s most weighty power brokers by giving him control over many governmental appointments. While el pacto remains in place, Aleman was later stripped of his immunity and is now under house arrest, having been convicted of embezzling approximately $100 million from the government.
   Despite Ortega’s many flaws, the return of the Sandinistas to power creates the possibility of change that can genuinely benefit Nicaragua’s poor. Ortega campaigned on a platform criticising the ‘savage capitalism’ implemented by the successive conservative governments that have ruled the country over the past sixteen years. In the decade and a half since the end of the contra war, neoliberal economic policies like privatizing public industries and creating ‘free trade’ zones have failed to launch an economic recovery. Today Nicaragua ranks with Haiti and Bolivia among the poorest nations in the hemisphere. It remains to be seen what Ortega’s political programme will look like during his new term as president: whether he can be held accountable to the impoverished populations he claims to represent and whether his party can reverse trends of deepening hardship and desperation. But this is no reason not to applaud Nicaraguan voters who stood up to Republican threats, rejected a continuation of neoliberalism and demanded better of their government.
   The Nation/US, November 10, 2006.

What next?

The people of Bangladesh, since the liberation of the country 35 years ago, have experienced presidential form of government, parliamentary form of government, military government under martial law, and finally the caretaker government. It seems all these forms of government have failed to deliver the goods, that is, good governance to the people. Will any of our social scientists or political pundits, now tell us what form of government we should have next?
   Ashraf
   Dhaka

It is an admirable thought to ask someone prominent and reliably impartial to become a monitor in our upcoming general election, for instance, Zidane or Yunus or anyone else.
   However, the monitor must be provided with effective machinery for this purpose with authority and manpower to observe partisan or intimidating activities in any polling station and to have constant and effective liaison with the election commission officers or other supervising authorities and if necessary to request them to close down polling in any station altogether. The monitor and his representatives must also have easy access to the press and other media to express their assessments. Also if there is a court action to challenge the result of polling at any station, on equitable principles the courts may seek the opinion of monitors or their representatives and give it due weight although such monitoring may not have any legal standing in the law of the land.
   Without any such back-up of authority the request by the president for someone like Zidane to become an election monitor is of no more importance than Arnie offering Blair the role of the next Terminator!
   Shafi Ahmed
   London, UK

The basic US foreign policy of unleashing the tiny Zionists population of Israel and elsewhere in the world against majority Muslim population across the globe will remain unchanged no matter who controls the government or steps down in the US. The simple verdict of nays against Bush’s policies is not enough. When the outgoing President Bill Clinton told the incoming George Bush that resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the priority of American foreign policy, George Bush rejected the idea outright saying that the priority of his administration would be to kick out Saddam out of Iraq. That was before 9/11.
   George Bush and his gang should be thoroughly investigated, arrested and brought before International Tribunal for their predetermined and premeditated crimes. Anything less than a trial of Bush and his gang is unacceptable. They may have killed more people than all the brutal dictators combined since the end of WWII.
   Syed
   Old DOHS, Dhaka
   

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