Fatima Bhutto

[mtgondal]

Of love and other demons

A hundred beats
By Fatima Bhutto

In a country where factionalism pre-originates the birth of life and divisions lay so deep-rooted that politics and society are shaped by rifts, not unions, I think there is something to say for love. And if that love happens to be between two people of the same gender, then what of it?

I understand the knee-jerk reaction, the witch-hunt mentality and the feeling that someone else's personal life somehow deeply offends our own sense of calm and civility. I understand that those feelings are the primary ones, feelings that are difficult to overshadow by reason or -- imagine this -- a sense of living and letting live. I understand that there are things we cannot, or will not, tolerate. Old traditions, force of habit, schooled morality. I don't for a moment seek to undermine those prejudices or allay those feelings of confusion and dread. In our own lives, we abide by what we determine as being correct. In our own lives, we are undoubtedly free to draw the line at certain behaviour or lifestyles. But in others? Do we have a right to value the private choices made in the lives of others? In so much as they do not cause harm, I would say no, we don't.

My favourite professor at college, Dennis Dalton, demonstrated the conundrum of John Stuart Mill's no harm principle - that society ought not to restrict any action, so long as it does not cause harm -- with a personal example. Professor Dalton was sitting on a bus from New York to New Jersey to visit his grand-daughters for the weekend. Across the aisle from him was a young man making the same journey, except that as he was crossing state lines. The young man was furiously engaged in picking his nose. It was a laborious task and the young traveller seemed intent on getting the job done. Professor Dalton, wholly unamused, considered asking the hardworking man to stop, to cease and desist, but didn't. Picking his nose on the bus, as impolite and unbecoming as it was, did not cause anyone on the bus any harm. Aside from public decorum, which the young man was seriously lacking in, there were no grounds to ask him to take his finger out of his nose.

We don't automatically have the right to point fingers (no pun intended) and mark shame. What then of the latest controversy surrounding two women who chose to spend their lives together? There must be a reason that this is making national news, I just don't see it. Iran and the United States are engaging in diplomatic talks for the first time in twenty years, the Iraqi parliament is about to sign over their oil fields, their sovereign right, and all its revenues to large multinational companies, there are militants teaching boys as young as 12 to behead 'infidels' in Bannu and this is what we're devoting time to covering?

Let me backtrack a moment, Shumail and Shahzina, female couple -- or 'she-couple' in the derisive language of the press -- are not news. They are private citizens who made a private decision. Their private choice caused no amount of harm, except perhaps to Shumail who may or may not have undergone a mastectomy. The private citizens, civilians, are of legal age and free to engage in relationships of their choosing. Except that they did not do the 'done' thing. They did not place themselves in a humiliating cattle like auction in front of eligible male suitors or try to butter up a thin lipped, disapproving mother-in-law. In short, they did not tick the right box in the bio-data section. They chose not men, but each other. "They did not mean to offend," their lawyer stated at their trial, "they only acted out of love for each other".

They were not jailed for their same-sex marriage; there are no codes to punish such a nuptial deviation under Pakistani law. It wouldn't have been quite kosher to throw them into jail, separate ones I should add, for the sin of not conforming to heterosexual norms so Shumail and Shezina will be jailed for perjury. For that may or may not mastectomy. Yes. Let this be a lesson to you: liars in Pakistan will be imprisoned. Severely imprisoned. How has there not already been a boon in perjury incarcerations? Do you think judges are simply unaware of the mass stockpile we possess of thieving black marketers, extortionist businessmen, and sinisterly corrupt politicians? The prisons would be full if we were to make a precedent of jailing people for lying!

I'm afraid the crime here was not lying, not in their case. Their crime was love. It's not any more complicated than that. Two people decide they love each other and that's what we're going to try in a court of law? What a total waste of time and legal energy. Since we're on the topic, what the members of the law should devote their time to is imposing stricter sentences on men for bartering underage brides in watta satta, or ritually murdering couples under the auspices of karo kari. Judges and lawyers and us newspaper reading public should be concerned with the prostitution rings that deal in young boys, because their bodies are sold cheaper than young girls, or the spread of HIV and AIDS among the many shadow sex workers forced into the underground trade.

God help me, if the emails I received over my writings on the Hudood Ordinance were nasty, then I'm not looking forward to the ones that will line up in my inbox come Monday. But this should be said -- it doesn't matter to me what Shumail and Shahzina do because they are individuals acting on private concerns. It concerns me even less that they are both women and that they technically shouldn't be with each other. I'm not advocating mass national conversion. I'm not pro anything; I'm simply not anti anything either. Freedom is about choice and that's what we need to support.

Let's get back to matters that need our attention and depend on our vigilance. Visit http://www.avaaz.org/en /iraq_oil_law to learn more about the proposed Iraqi oil law and while you're there please sign the petition to defend Iraq's right to economic justice. That's a far more worthy cause than nosing around in Shumail and Shezina's business; they have suffered enough at our hands.



Email: fatima.bhutto@gmail.com

[mtgondal]

Katcha Garhi


A hundred beats

By Fatima Bhutto

Sunday,JUNE 10, 2007

On the outskirts of Peshawar lies Katcha Garhi, one of the first Afghan refugee camps established in Pakistan. Katcha Garhi, set up months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, is home to almost 100,000 refugees and is one of the largest camps inside Pakistan. Escaping more than two decades of war, both civil and international, has been no easy feat for the Afghan people. More than one million Afghans were killed, millions more maimed and crippled by carpet bombing operations and landmines (an estimated 15 million of which were planted under Afghan earth), and approximately six million people – one fifth of the pre-war population – were turned into refugees. In the 1980s it was said that one out of every two displaced people in the world was an Afghan.

Roughly four million Afghans came to Pakistan in search of refuge, half of them living in the many camps that were set up along the fringes of our cities. This year, the Pakistan government plans to close four of the largest camps, including Jalozia, Girdi Jungle, and Jungle Pir Alizai, and by doing so encourage the repatriation of 1.5 million Afghan refugees. The residents of Katcha Garhi do not get a full year, they have until next Friday – June 15 – to pack their bags and evacuate their homes. They have five days to return to a land they had left for dead.

Repatriation programmes, initiated by the government and aided by UNHCR, have been underway since 2002. Around 2.8 million refugees have been relocated in the past five years but it hasn't been an easy sell. The government is currently offering $60 a head (this includes a travel allowance) to repatriate and in many cases, families will take the money and leave Pakistan through one checkpoint only to re-enter through another border point a few months later, resettling in the homes they had pretended to desert. The authorities of Katcha Garhi have since caught on and the camp is now being bulldozed meter by meter to ensure that by next week there will be nothing left to call home, a pre-emptive measure to guarantee permanent repatriation. On May 15 twelve families took their belongings and left Katcha Garhi – their homes were bulldozed hours after they had locked their doors for the last time. This time, there will be no return.

The residents of Katcha Garhi are not new to Pakistan, they are second or third generation refugees. They may not have intended to settle in Pakistan, but every passing year brought only more conflict and warfare to their country, so they stayed. Each house in Katcha Garhi holds approximately 18-20 people. I saw eleven people file out of one cramped house myself. They could not walk side by side in the alleyways outside their home, there was no space. The alleys are three feet wide and lined with rotting garbage and snaking gutters; by any stretch of the imagination, Katcha Garhi cannot look very different from war-torn Afghanistan.

It is a town within a town – there is a school run by refugees that educates girls in the morning and boys in the afternoon, a vegetable market, a UN medical centre, and a local jirga that handles the resident's disputes. The police don't come around xhere very often. It seems that no one does. As I'm talking to a group of young boys, a man comes up to me and sticks his registration card in my face and starts rattling off in Pushto. He thought I was a UNHCR official and began complaining about his wife's medical problems in rapid fire Pushto, eager not to leave anything out. Even after I explained, through one of the young boys who translated, that I was not a UN employee the man followed me around pointing at his ID card and making pained hand gestures.

Fazle Rehman, one of the boys who vouched for my non-UN status, is a student in the third grade. He is fourteen years old. He was wearing a pair of dark black sunglasses and carrying around his schoolbooks. His father is a daily wager and his mother a housewife. Along with his five sisters and two brothers, Fazle Rehman was born in Katcha Garhi. He's never been to his home in Kabul and says that one day, when things are better, he'd like to return to Afghanistan. I don't have the heart to tell him that he's going to be back sooner than he thinks, much before things are better. As we walk and talk, the man with the ID card interjects, 'there are no facilities here, no security'. It's probably my pen and paper that have blown my cover and I nod and write down whatever he says to me through the translator. I may not be with the UN, but I'm not deaf and what he has to say is troubling, so I listen.

They don't want to leave, not like this he says. Many of them have lost their families in Afghanistan; they don't have anything to return to. He says he has made his home here, in this dusty refugee camp, and that it's here where he earns his livelihood as a labourer in nearby Hayatabad where even the billboards are in Dari Persian.

It's a no-win situation. Pakistan cannot afford to shelter millions of refugees for much longer and Afghanistan is not able to care for its existing citizens, let alone its exiled citizenry. Undoubtedly, Pakistan has been infinitely kinder to its population of Afghan refugees than Iran was. When in Tehran earlier this year, a woman dealing with the UN repatriation project there told me that due to inflation and umemployment it became illegal, literally a crime, to employ an Afghan in the Iranian workforce. In Iran they existed in the underbelly of society, biding their time until it ran out and they were chased out of yet another country. I want to tell the man with the ID card that, I want to tell him that we've tried to be good to him and his family but that in some government office in Islamabad it's been decided that the effort is no longer sustainable. But we tried…I really believe we did try. No one is listening to me, however. I haven't spoken since arriving in the camp, everyone is talking to me and since I can do nothing more than listen, I do just that.

As I'm on my way out of the camp, on my way back to a comfortable house in Peshawar, a young boy sidles up to me and says in English "How are you?" He's nervous, I can tell. Speaking English is a great deal here and all the other children around us are aware of his enviable ability to do so. I tell him that I'm fine and ask his name. He tells me his name is Jahanzeb. A beautiful name. I ask him if he knows what it means and he shakes his head. Someone who loves the world, I tell him and he looks at me unmoved. In retrospect it was a stupid thing to say, to tell a boy living in a refugee camp that his name means someone who loves the world.

I asked Jahanzeb what he wants to be when he grows up and he hesitated in answering me. "What can I be? I can't do anything here in Pakistan". Jahanzeb speaks Farsi, Pushto, Urdu, and English. He is ten years old. I told him he could be anything he wanted.

After thinking for a moment, he said "I'd be a doctor" and smiled.

Email: fatima.bhutto@gmail.com


http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=59875

[mtgondal]

Condi's creative chaos

A hundred beats

By Fatima Bhutto

Sunday,June 17,2007

On summer trips to Lebanon, we pass by Naher al Bared all the time. The Palestinian refugee camp turned mini-city lies halfway between Tripoli and Akkar, my Jiddo's ancestral village, and on our way to spend a few days in the sleepy hamlet of Akkar we would break at Naher al Bared and load up on supplies. The camp, 'Cold River' in English, was wholly unremarkable until May 20th.

On the surface it seems quite simple. A bank robbery gone awry leads the Lebanese army into a gunfight with the supposed perpetrators, members of the shadowy Fatah al Islam. The gunfight escalates into the worst internal fighting Lebanon has witnessed since the end of its civil war 17 years ago as the refugee camp of Naher al Bared, home to 3,000 civilians, becomes ground zero for a protracted fire fight between the Lebanese army and a novice militant group.

Due to a longstanding convention that the Lebanese army cannot enter any of Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps, the two armed sides are exchanging machine gun and shell fire over a civilian population that is being held hostage by the recent outbreak of violence. Humanitarian aid has been blocked from entering the camp and according to the International Committee of the Red Cross the refugees of Naher al Bared now face the threat of unexploded munitions, obstructing both outward mobility and the inflow of aid supplies.

Two Lebanese Red Cross workers have been killed as they struggled to evacuate civilians, two off-duty Lebanese soldiers have been beheaded -- if that doesn't reek of Al Qaeda I don't know what does. It's their signature calling card -- and the danger of war is fast spreading across the country. Beirut has been rocked by four explosions, one in a relatively calm Christian area, and the Ain el Hilweh ('a sweet water stream') refugee camp in Southern Sidon has been hit by an eruption of bloodshed similar to Naher al Bared's.

There is no shortage of people that the Lebanese government is willing to point fingers at for backing Fatah al Islam - the Syrians, the Palestinians, Hamas, and so on and so forth. But it's never that simple. Not these days. In an investigative report published in the New Yorker in March, Seymour Hersh claimed that as per an agreement between Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrahams the Deputy National Security Advisor, and the simian Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi National Security Advisor, it was decided that the Saudi government would provide covert funding to the Sunni Fatah al Islam as a means of defeating the Shiite Hizbollah party.

The Lebanese government, according to Hersh, supported the plan. Dr Franklin Lamb, professor at the American University of Beirut and a researcher on the politics of Hizbollah, furthered Hersh's allegations by adding that the American Assistant Secretary of State David Welch negotiated the deal to funnel arms and aid to the Sunni terror group through the Saudis and Saad Hariri, the son of assassinated premier Rafic Hariri who seems bent on wreaking havoc under his father's name. Hizbollah released a statement this past week saying "We feel that there is someone out there who wants to drag the Lebanese army into this confrontation and bloody struggle to serve well-known projects and aims." There you have it -- sponsored terror, courtesy of the United States and their friends at Al Qaeda: the most efficient means of destabilising developing countries.

It cannot be a coincidence that all the ongoing conflicts in the world are now internal. This is nothing if not the "creative chaos" of Ms Condoleeza Rice; this is the birthing pangs of her "new" Middle East and rest assured, the Middle East that Ms Rice and her cohorts feebly imagine is one most certainly conceived out of terror. The violence that plagues the Middle East today is one of factionalism and convenient internal strife. In Palestine the violence of Israel's continued occupation is being undermined by infighting among Hamas and Fatah. In Iraq the brutality of America's illegal occupation is undercut by quarrelling among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.

The formula applies not only to Lebanon, but to us too. This past month has proven that the way to really shake the foundations of Pakistan is by sowing the seeds of provincial and ethnic hate -- Sindhi versus Mohajir versus Pathan.

The violence of May 12 is evidence of just how simple it is to capture the prize, how easy it is to destroy and confuse. The potential of explosive antagonism is only furthered by the continually asinine and distracting actions of various establishment actors. Lodging UK court cases may be lauded for bravado, but surely not for sense or deep intelligence.

But it is not as dark as it seems. We are shortsighted, that is the problem. Muhammad Hassanein Haikal, the great Egyptian journalist and Al Jazeera commentator, calls this the fight between the defeated and the exhausted. America is being defeated at home, with every soldier that comes home in a body bag America is one step closer to losing the game. But unfortunately our leaders cannot see that from here so they continue to act as the lap dogs of America in her fight against "terrorism", a fight which she has already lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Make no mistake, this last surge of soldiers sent to Iraq is simply a last ditch effort. It's over. Condi's euphemistic and heartless "creative chaos" is at the end of its rope. This is how the Soviet Union crumbled. This is how we fell with them as we sent our men to fight in the jihad against the Russians, which was at best a bleeding giant in Afghanistan.

As Marx said, when history happens the first time it tends to be dramatic. The second time it's impressive. By the third repetition it becomes a mockery. It's no longer history repeating itself, but the people stupidly repeating their own mistakes.



Email: fatima.bhutto@gmail.com

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=60862

[mtgondal]

May you have many more

A hundred beats

Fatima Bhutto

Sunday,August 12,2007

Happy Birthday Pakistan. At 60 years old you're still a young lady, you have many years to go. You're not yet in the prime of your life, there's time for that still.

Growing up in a foreign country, I always felt Pakistani. Even though the language I heard everyday was not mine and the people I lived with were not technically like me, and despite the fact that Pakistan was a mythological land for me until the age of seven when I came home for the very first time, I was at heart a Pakistani. What does it mean to be Pakistani? Is it a question of values? Is it a question of religion or belonging? Or of opposition? As the fourteenth of August approaches and every near surface is covered in the flag, like clockwork we will be dutifully lectured on the precise qualities that make us Jinnah's children instead of Nehru's -- Islam, unity, the 1965 war, faith, the 1971 war, discipline, and all the rest. But for me, Pakistan is not the wars it has fought, the speeches of its founding father, or the shade of its passport. For me, Pakistan is something more visceral. It is the homeland of my soul and the point in time and space that my memory always returns to. It's a beat. Before you think me a bit drippy and swivel away to turn on PTV, let me explain.

Pakistan is the sound of the myna birds that nestle quietly in the trees all day and come alive at five in the morning. It's the smell of jasmines worn tightly around the wrist. It's the rush of hitting a six. It's the nuclear green, cardamom smelling Pakola drink.

Pakistan sports, in my heart and memory, not the modern day refugee camp look that construction companies and government bulldozers think is so in this season, but a simple elegance that is found in every crack on every sidewalk. It's the Islamia College in Peshawar, the electricity of flavour and noise of food street in Lahore, the Isfahan blue and yellow of Hyderabad, it's the art deco (Salman Rushdie calls it 'art dekho') of Karachi's older sprawls. It's a monument, this country, to difference and the variant hues of beauty.

But most of all, most certainly, Pakistan is the people. When I was in Chitral earlier this year, driving in the nearby town of Ayoun, my companions and I stopped by a local market to ask if they were selling mulberries. You can only find them around the North and as it was the season, we figured that someone somewhere must be selling mulberries or shatoot. One fruit seller pointed us to another who pointed us to another until finally someone understood the desperate importance of our shatoot quest. The man told us that if we carried up the road we would reach a place that had shatoot. We hungrily followed his directions and were confused when we landed up outside a dead ended police thana. I'm no fan, I wasn't interested in pursuing this particular lead, but an uncle of mine got out of the car and went inside the station to ask for directions. He came out looking quite happy and waved me out of the car. The police officer in charge of the thana was with him. 'We have shatoot' he said pointing to an enormous tree in the compound 'come and have a glass of water while we bring some down for you'. And they did just that. They climbed the tree and shook down some fresh mulberries just because I had asked. I was a stranger in Ayoun, no one knew I was there or who I was. In Kubu Sayed Khan, in Sindh, still devastated by the monsoon floods and left unsheltered and uncared for, all the women I spoke to -- all of them with sick children and themselves dying of thirst – asked me how I was and shook my hand, inquiring after my journey, before they answered my questions. One of them stretched her dupatta out to cover my head as well as hers from the midday sun. I do not know of a kinder people anywhere else in the world; if you claim to know otherwise, you're a stone cold liar.

This is undoubtedly my Pakistan and the Pakistan that makes me feel proud to belong. But there is another Pakistan, the one I encounter every day, and I am not proud of that one. On Friday on my way back from the airport, I didn't feel proud of Pakistan. Up till Sharah-e-Faisal the roads were thigh high with water and men and women waded through dirty rainwater to get to their places of work in the early morning hours. It's been raining since June. It has rained every summer of every year since 1947. How is it that people are still forced to brave pneumonia every time they leave their houses? And brave dysentery and cholera because their houses, shantytowns, are overcome by water? I'd been away for a week, blissfully out of contact with the world, and when I opened my newspapers once we had waded home I felt ashamed once again. Is this the Pakistan that Jinnah imagined? A Pakistan where we thank military dictators for not imposing emergencies, where self exiled and famously corrupt politicians hammer out power sharing deals amongst each other in the name of 'democracy'? I'm not proud of the Pakistan that is dictated to by Condoleezza Rice and her tag team at the White House, but I'm even less proud of the Pakistan that allows politicians such as those mentioned above to make a continual mockery of the people's suffering while they carry on shamelessly exploiting them. I'm not proud of the Pakistan that spends less than two per cent of its budget on education and I'm not proud of the Pakistan that with its bulldozers and extra judicial police powers treats life so cheaply. I'm not proud of the Pakistan where crimes against women are sanctioned by the constitution.

On this, our country's sixtieth year of independence, we must begin a process of healing this other Pakistan. The Pakistan in the newspapers and on the streets, the Pakistan for the millions of poor and disenfranchised of our country, must be critically examined and it must be rebuilt. It's not the Pakistan I want and it's not the Pakistan we deserve.



Email: fatima.bhutto@gmail.com

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=67991