Editorial
Ruling party sets a bad precedent
TO REGARD the case filed by the National Board of Revenue on charges of tax evasion – and the subsequent issuance of a warrant for arrest by a Dhaka court – against Awami League lawmaker Abdul Jalil as a manifestation of the government’s newfound zeal in the fight against tax evaders, regardless of their financial and political mettle, would be naïve at best and delusional at worst. The revenue board is well within its jurisdiction to take recourse to law and so too is any court of law to issue a warrant for arrest against a tax evader – and they should, indeed. However, the case in point appears to have political vendetta written all over it, comes as it does after Jalil alleged, in an interview on September 22 during his stay in London, that the Awami League had reached an understanding with the military-controlled interim government before the December 2008 elections, that there were many agents of an intelligence agency on Sheikh Hasina’s cabinet and that he had made a mistake by not opposing Hasina when she returned home in 2007. While Jalil eventually retracted his statements and apologised, the ruling party does not seem to have condoned his controversial outburst.
The ruling party, or any political party for that matter, is surely within its rights to discipline any leader or activist that it deems guilty of transgression. However, in this particular case, the ruling party appears to have used, abused to be precise, the state machineries to give Jalil a lesson. As indicated before, the AL lawmaker deserves to be taken to court and, if proven guilty, even punished, but surely Jalil is not the only one, let alone the only politician, in Bangladesh who may have evaded tax. If the government wants the people to believe that he is, it may be questioning their intelligence. Moreover, the people in general do possess reasonable political understanding to discern between anti-corruption activism of the government and political vengeance of the ruling party.
Importantly still, the Jalil episode, starting from his ignominious exit from the Awami League’s policymaking forum apparently for his perceived hobnobbing with the interim government till now, sets a bad precedent for AL politics since the AL leadership will be perceived to have made it clear that it would rather be surrounded by immature and inane cronies than experienced and thinking political leaders. This episode also has serious implications for the political process as a whole. No one in the politically conscious and democratically oriented sections of society brooks, even for a fleeting second, the illusion that the major political parties are internally democratic. On the contrary, most people seem to believe these parties are driven by their respective chiefs. After the Jalil episode, it is only likely that no member of these political parties would dare raise a dissenting voice, either in or outside a party forum. In other words, the already limited space in the mainstream political parties for democratic exercises could be further constricted. Such constriction of democratic space within the political establishments would only set back the democratisation of the political process and, by implication, of the state and society.
Time to look at existing
economic order
BANGLADESH has made substantial improvement in reducing maternal, infant mortality and even poverty besides the impressive overall economic growth. Despite its steady improvement in the traditionally mainstream economic indicators recent years have seen a slump in poverty and hunger, especially during the nearly two-year tenure of a military-controlled interim government when the country was ravaged by a major cyclone and two bouts of heavy flood followed by a serious food crisis which was also accompanied by a double-digit food inflation. That period was also marked by low employment generation due to low private investment which was a result of that regime’s drive against corruption. According to different surveys and research reports, the poverty level reverted to the situation it was back in 2000 at about 48 per cent from 40 per cent in 2005.
A recent report published by the International Food Policy Research Institute only confirms those research findings done mostly by local research organisations. The report titled ‘The Global Hunger Index’ ranks Bangladesh 67th among 84 countries. According to a report in New Age on Thursday, the international institute found that Bangladesh had one of the highest prevalence of under-weight children which is over 40 per cent. Another report, ‘The State of Food Insecurity’ by the World Food Programme, also found that numerous households had been affected by the fall in remittances from expatriate workers besides other adverse impacts due to the international financial meltdown, especially in the oil rich gulf. The report stated that, on an average, at the end of 2008, households were spending 62 per cent of their income on food, which was up from 52 per cent in 2005. Quite understandably this increase in household expenditure on food forced poor household to cut down on their expenses on other items and one of the first to be hit were children’s education.
These were not exactly groundbreaking findings as, in one way or the other, reports and surveys either by the popular media or research organisations indicated similar trends long ago. However, what is perhaps to be grappled with is that, according to these recent international reports, the number of hungry people worldwide has hit an all-time high at one billion people, which is more than six times Bangladesh’s population. While many have predicted the end of laissez faire capitalism, corporate globalisation has hardly been hindered. In fact, the establishment advocating neo-classical economic growth are only ensuring that the global economic system continues to conform to its previous mantra of free trade and open market although the neo-liberal paradigm has been proven to be faulty, if not essentially flawed, several times.
That the prevailing system is faulty is apparent from the trend of rising inequality in Bangladesh, as well as the globe, despite spectacular advances and improvement of the global as well as national economic indicators that are considered important by the proponents of the prevailing system. It is perhaps time the government took a serious look at not just its poverty eradication strategy but also the national economic system in general and take up initiatives to appropriately modify it, if not completely overhaul it.
Security, reconciliation in
Iraq irreconcilable
by Nicola Nasser
THE car bombing in a parking lot adjacent to a building where a meeting was held on reconciliation efforts – attended by a representative of the National Reconciliation Committee formed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki – in the capital of the Iraqi western province, al-Ramadi, on October 11 was the latest symbolic bloody example of the irreconcilable security and reconciliation in Iraq.
All efforts at reconciliation exerted by the US occupying power, Arabs collectively through the Arab League or separately by individual Arab states, or by regional powers have failed. While Obama is seeking a tactical exit strategy from Iraq for the sake of a long-term ‘strategic’ commitment thereto, ‘Iraqisation’ of what he described as the US ‘war of choice’ on Iraq seems to be his option. A prerequisite for ‘Iraqisation’ is installing an effective ‘Iraqi’ government in Baghdad; a prerequisite for such a government is an Iraqi national reconciliation, and here Obama’s moment of truth in Iraq is racing against time.
Biden, al-Maliki cannot deliver
PROMOTING the level of the supervisor of a sectarian reconciliation from a secretary of state or a defence secretary to vice presidency to mandate Joe Biden with a failed mission will not make it a success. Biden made three visits to Iraq this year, but the outcome has been more insecurity and instability. Inside Iraq, Biden is best known as a co-author of the 2006 ‘Biden-Gelb Plan’, which urged ‘as much real power as possible be devolved from Iraq’s central government in Baghdad to three mini-states that would divide the country along ethnic and religious lines.’ Helena Cobban on July 6 quoted an Iraqi demonstrator against Biden’s second visit as telling a McClatchy News reporter that, ‘Biden’s visit sent the signal to us that Iraq will be divided. Biden’s background doesn’t allow him to play any role in reconciliation.’ Norwegian analyst of Iraqi affairs Reidar Visser concluded that Biden’s ‘solution’ boils down to merely a power quota distribution among the three ethno-religious groups of ‘Kurds, Sunnis and Shias’. The persisting failure proves that Biden was the wrong man for a mission of an Iraqi ‘national’ reconciliation.
Al-Malki is not the right man for the mission, either. Bolstering him only gives him a veto power on reconciliation. His lifelong anti-Baath bias as well as his lifelong engagement with Iran and his sectarian and political loyalty thereto are trapping him into an anti-Baath obsession that unwisely made him challenge Biden during his second visit to state on record that reconciliation was and is an Iraqi ‘internal affair’ that Biden has nothing to do with. Al-Maliki’s version of reconciliation is based on abruptly cutting Iraq off its Arab geopolitical affiliation, conceding to the Iranian and Kurdish view that only the Arabs of Iraq, a founding member of the Arab League, are part of the Pan-Arab bondage, although they are the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, and consequently giving priority to ties with Iran and the United States. Hence the latest deterioration of Al-Maliki’s ties with Syria and the reluctance of Saudi Arabia to send an ambassador to Baghdad. Internally, al-Maliki’s sole hope to form a semblance of a non-sectarian electoral constituency ahead of the upcoming elections on January 16 – pending ‘sectarian’ reconciliation in the ‘parliament’ to pass an election law – was pinned on winning the support of the Sunni al-Sahwa (awakening) militia, which the US was financially successful to recruit to fight al-Qaeda among its Sunni powerbase. However, the tribal leader of al-Sahwa, Sheikh Ahmad Abu Risha, recently announced he would not join al-Maliki’s electoral coalition (Iraqi daily al-Zaman on October 13).
Meanwhile, Iran’s version for reconciliation is on record sectarian, and accordingly a non-starter, neither for national accord nor for security. Tehran succeeded in grouping together almost all the pro-Iran Shiite militias in one electoral bloc, a recipe for more bloody sectarian strife and further disintegration of the country on sectarian basis. The Baghdad’s bombings of August 19 of the sovereign ministerial symbols of al-Maliki’s ‘state’ was the bloody manifestation of ‘to the death’ power struggle between the two sectarian blocs. Both blocs found in accusing Syria of harbouring the alleged culprits in the bombings, and in threatening to take Syria to the UN Security council, their best way to divert both internal and external attention away from their own responsibility, and indirectly that of Iran.
Former British army chief of staff General Richard Dannatt, who stepped down at the end of August, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, attributed ‘our failure’ in Iraq first to the ‘early switch to an economy of force operation in favour of Afghanistan’, which has become now Obama’s ‘strategic priority’, and second to missing ‘a window of consent’ early after the invasion to address Iraq’s security and basic needs by the US-led coalition forces, which allowed ‘the rise of the militias supported so cynically by the Iranians.’ Dannatt was short of saying that the security and reconciliation in Iraq have become irreversibly irreconcilable.
In February last year, US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the success of the ‘surge’ in Iraq. ‘The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure,” she said. Defence secretary Robert Gates admitted candidly in mid-March that without ‘sectarian reconciliation’ among Iraqis the ‘strategy won’t work’. Indeed, the entire point of the surge of 30,000 troops was to bring such reconciliation about by, in Gates’ words, ‘buy[ing] the Iraqis time.’ Gates was wrong, what is required is a national reconciliation, not a sectarian one.
Four de Facto Governments
Ironically, Iraq has now two self-proclaimed sectarian governments, the first is the Shiite US-installed and backed in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone and the second is the al-Qaeda’s underground Sunni Islamic State of Iraq (or Dawlat al-Iraq al-Islamiyya in Arabic); both are in a declared state of war, but neither has real authority on the ground that encompass all the regional territory of the country. A third de facto theocratic pro-Iran Shiite state has evolved in southern Iraq, where it is no more possible to discern whether it is Baghdad or Tehran the central authority to which the area reports. No surprise a strong call is voiced deafeningly here for a ‘federal’ entity similar to the Kurdish one in the north. A fourth de facto Kurdish government rules in Iraqi Kurdistan, but similarly has no ‘national’ authority. Legitimacy of the four governments is challenged both internally and externally. Obama’s strategy, like that of his predecessor Bush, reveals no concrete evidence that he is looking for other than sustaining this tragic status quo in Iraq.
There is no single dominant grouping in this internal struggle for power. The new ‘Iraqi army most often behaves as a Shia militia’, and ‘the last chance for some kind of stability may be the division of Iraq into three nationally based independent states,’ Michael Dougall Bell concluded, writing in the Globe and Mail on September 30. Disintegrating regional states into smaller ones on religious, sectarian and ethnic bases has been a pronounced goal of Israeli strategists for too long now to be dismissed as an unrealistic Israeli strategy. The writer only can tell how much he was influenced by the Israeli view, given the fact that Bell was a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and former chair of the Donor Committee of the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq. However, Bell is not a lone voice. The Independent Fund for Peace titled its ninth report on Iraq earlier this month, ‘A Way Out: The Union of Iraqi States’. Dismantling Iraq is now a realistic threat as never before.
The NRC was grudgingly formed under the pressure of a US and Arab demand to reconcile the sectarian (Shiite) government of al-Maliki and the pro-Iran sectarian regime that brought him to power with the national and Pan-Arab majority, whose power base is perceived by his US mentors to be among the Sunnis, who have been marginalised and bloodily squeezed out of public life and institutions since the US-led invasion in 2003 – allegedly for being the power base for the pre-invasion regime, but for sectarian purposes as evidenced over the last seven years – and who populate the heart of Iraq in the capital Baghdad as well as the northern and western provinces, in particular in al-Ramadi, which is the largest in area and the most decisive strategically because it borders three Arab countries, namely Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. No surprise this majority was the incubator and their provinces were the bed rock of the Iraqi national resistance, which so far has deprived the White House from declaring ‘victory’ in Iraq. ‘I’m not sure we will ever see anyone declare victory in Iraq, because first off, I’m not sure we’ll know for 10 years or five years,’ General Ray Odierno, the top American commander in Iraq, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on October 1.
Regional input a side show
LATER this year Washington is reportedly bracing to host an Iraqi national reconciliation conference, to be chaired by Obama himself and attended by several Arab countries, which are expected to use their good offices or their ‘influence’ or both to secure that the Iraqi resistance to US military occupation, mainly that is led by Baathists, lay their arms and join the ‘political process’ in exchange for a greater role in decision-making ‘if they are allowed to function as a legitimate political party.’ Egyptian the Al-Ahram Weekly reported recently that Joe Biden urged al-Maliki to allow the Baathists to regroup into a new party and run in the elections scheduled for early next year.
The ‘sixth’ conference of Iraq’s neighbouring countries, which convened in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on October 14 – on the backdrop of ‘no Iraqi-Saudi relations’ as well as on an escalating Syrian-Iraqi crisis – grouping the interior ministers of Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, Bahrain and the Arab League as observers, will remain a sideshow as it was in its previous sessions. It serves to contain the fallout of the US military occupation of Iraq more than it contributes to the security or to the reconciliation of the country, as hopefully perceived by Washington’s seven-year old efforts to enlist the participants’ contribution thereto, given for instance Turkey’s concerns with the repercussions on its own ‘Kurdish problem’ of the de facto independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, or Iran’s concerns with losing its own exploits of the US war on Iraq, mainly the strategic role it has gained in Iraq as a security subcontractor to the US, let alone the conflicts of interest among the participating countries, or the sectarian repercussions emanating from the sectarian regime in Iraq on other neighbours. This ‘regional factor’ is still cited by the US occupying power and the political regime it is still struggling to install in Baghdad’s ‘Green Zone’ as part of the problem of insecurity more than it is part of the solution.
However, the US strategy remains the real problem, and not just part of it. This strategy has pursued five self-defeating goals, namely to empower a pro-US regime that has proved powerless in fending off the overwhelming rejection of the US occupation and whatever regime emanating therefrom, to dismantle sectarian militias by creating the additional al-Sahwa sectarian militia, to establish a ‘democratic’ political process that ‘constitutionally’ negates the democratic rights of the country’s Arab majority, to hopelessly try to uphold a ‘central’ government on the ruins of the devastated central infrastructure of the Iraqi state, and to save a semblance of the territorial unity of the country while empowering ‘mini-states’ that would sooner or later doom any such unity.
The realistic way out
The outcome after more than six bloody years is ‘that Iraq continues to lack security, stability, vital services and the non-sectarian institutions of a sovereign state’ and ‘lack of political reconciliation, persistent sectarianism,’ Prime Minister of Iraq from May 2004 to April 2005, Eyad Allawi, told the Gulf News on July 4. The US administration has realistically moved recently to indirectly recognise the de facto role of al-Baath as a unifying force that is essential for both security and reconciliation, but unfortunately in a divide-and-rule approach, that aims at neutralising or containing the rank and file of the party and the military which the party used to command. The administration/s seemed to unofficially admit the twin grave mistakes committed by Paul Bremer of disbanding the national Iraqi army, which embodied and protected the national unity for some one hundred years and of the de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi civil service, which deprived the country of its secular unifying state manpower. However this divide-and-rule approach has proved counterproductive. In the end, negotiating the US exit strategy with al-Baath and the Iraqi resistance, the real enemy, could prove the only viable way out of Iraq for the United States.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
MAIN PAGE | TOP
|
|
