A CONSIDERABLE TOWNTHE SLOW DEATH OF A CHOCOLATE CITY
Geeks in the 'hood and L.A.'s black exodus
BY JERVEY TERVALON
LA Weekly, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 - 4:00 pm
Lacking a strong economic link to their community, many upwardly mobile African-Americans — as many as 75,000 by some estimates — deserted the community for the suburbs.
—Joel Kotkin and David Friedman, The Los Angeles Riots: Causes, Myths, and Solutions
ONE MORNING BACK IN THE ’80S, when I was teaching 10th-grade English here in Los Angeles, I talked with my class about the changing ethnic makeup of the United States and what it meant to be a minority. Moette, a pretty, dark-skinned 15-year-old, didn’t seem to get it.
“Why am I a minority?” she asked. “All I see is black people and Mexicans. How’s that being a minority?”
I leaned forward and said with some confidence, “Los Angeles is not a black city, not like New Orleans or D.C. Most people are not black; most people in the United States are white. We’re about 11 or 12 percent of the population.”
“What?” said Moette. “L.A.’s black!”
“You live in black Los Angeles,” I patiently told her. “You just don’t see the rest of L.A.”
“Around here it’s black,” she persisted. “That’s what I know.”
I shrugged and continued to explain how Los Angeles had far more people of Mexican ancestry than black people, and that white people were the majority. Still, Moette refused to believe what I had to say about Los Angeles. For Moette and for many African-American kids growing up in near-absolute racial isolation, Los Angeles was still a Chocolate City, and she really didn’t know a thing or give a damn about the vanilla suburbs.
That was 1986, and maybe then she could believe that L.A. was majority black, but more than two decades later, this Chocolate City of Los Angeles, so named by George Clinton in his P-Funk days, has largely ceased to exist as we knew it then, except on the margins — Leimert Park and Baldwin Hills and parts of Crenshaw and Jefferson Park. The days of Los Angeles as an imagined Chocolate City are long gone; black people are steadily leaving the city and county of Los Angeles. Greener pastures beckon; sometimes it’s the beguiling song of the South and Atlanta in particular, sometimes it’s just down the freeway to Riverside or San Bernardino counties, anywhere outside of Los Angeles.
While it is reasonable to assume that this is natural — that when a people become decidedly more affluent and educated, they disperse; that, for various reasons, the ghetto, the barrio, the racial enclave becomes unsuitable — this dispersion feels different, like the emptying out of a region. It seems an inescapable fact that for many black Los Angelenos who have left or are in the process of getting out, running away, assimilating or disappearing into the greater vastness beyond Los Angeles, our presence is diluting into irrelevance.
L.A. County population changes from 2000 to 2006:
Total population change is +4.5 percent; African-American population change is –5.1 percent. The total county population is still under 10 million (about 9,950,000), while the African-American population was about 890,000 in 2005. (These numbers are survey estimates based on the American Community Survey and can’t be as detailed or precise as the 2000 Census.) Because of the faster growth of other groups, as well as its own decline, the share of the total county population made up of African-Americans declined from 9.8 percent to 8.9 percent in just five years.
—Dowell Myers, USC professor of urban planning and demography
IN 1994, MY MOTHER WAS ONE of those pioneers in the reverse migration who bailed to the sandlots and abundant cacti of Victorville. She left for very basic quality-of-life issues: rampant drug dealing, gang warfare, laughable policing and the common perception that black Los Angeles was going to hell. My former wife’s parents lived in L.A.’s Jefferson Park neighborhood in the late 1940s, and even then they saw the coming decline and headed first to the promise of San Bernardino, and then, having quickly given up on that, headed to the greater promise of Santa Barbara. They wanted better opportunity commensurate with their achievements; my father-in-law had multiple degrees and was a UCLA graduate. He and his wife, who also attended UCLA, wanted the best public schools for their children and the best neighborhoods, even if those neighborhoods would have few, if any, black folks.
My parents didn’t possess that kind of foresight; nor did they have the means to be so selective. We moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans in 1962, a few years before the Watts riots. I remember being frightened seeing jeeps driving down Exposition Boulevard with National Guard soldiers manning .50-caliber machine guns. I suspect that my parents thought they could isolate us, that we’d be cocooned safely inside our New Orleans culture, and in our neighborhood with many New Orleans expatriates that almost seemed possible. But in the end, that ploy failed miserably. What we all faced, those from New Orleans, or from Texas, or native black Angelenos, were disappearing jobs that paid a livable wage, policing that enraged far more than it protected, and a largely broken educational system. These problems overwhelmed whatever consolation a Los Angeles version of a po’ boy could provide.
Even so, I’m grateful for having grown up on Second Avenue in the Jefferson Park area. It was more of a small town than a city block, and life was a long unfolding tragedy or comedy, depending on how close you were to the epicenter of a neighborhood blowup. I remember the white-haired, rotund and sauced Mr. Bambino and his magical ribs — ribs he soaked in his homemade peach brandy when he tired of sipping the latest batch he had brewed in a wooden cask on his patio. Those ribs were sweet and beautiful with an intoxicating golden glaze. Mr. Bambino would tantalize us with a single rib, forcing us to return to that long line of feral kids, hoping that he’d throw us another bone. I remember Mrs. James, my best friend’s mother, with her Texas twang. She combed my unruly hair and soothed my fears about elementary school when my parents were too busy getting divorced to notice me, and I liked that she added a lot of oregano to the batter of her fried chicken. I remember Charles, our immediate neighbor and a no-nonsense man who fired a .38 into the air to commemorate the new year; he owned a Jaguar-repair garage and managed to retire in his 40s.
There were characters aplenty. Norman wanted to sell my mother a hot television at such a wonderfully cheap price that she couldn’t possibly resist. Of course, two days later, he stole the television back from her to sell to some other bargain hunter. Then there was the indestructible Leon, who seemingly drove only when he was high, very high. He had spectacular collisions with trees and walls and other cars, but miraculously never seemed to die. The most common theory of his amazing survival was that his drug-induced stupor allowed him to be so relaxed that he could bounce about the car, uninjured.
Back then, even the low-rent gangsters of the neighborhood, fellows who would inflict misery and who would die miserably, would wave at my mother and offer to help take in the groceries. We lived in a neighborhood that had its own culture and history that seemed as permanent as a small town could be, until crack invaded and the neighborhood imploded in on itself. The situation was so overwhelmingly dismal that it fed the numerous rumors that the government deliberately poisoned black neighborhoods with crack cocaine.
In 1990, I told my students at Locke High that a riot was coming; it wasn’t just because of police brutality, or gang violence or poverty alone. Crack played a vital role in fueling the mayhem that exploded in 1992; there was so much free-floating rage — families disintegrating, folks losing their houses, domestic violence and the ubiquitous violence on the street that could be directly or indirectly attributed to the crack epidemic. If those tapes of Rodney and Latisha had never reached the public, some other brutality would have triggered social unrest. If you were there, you’d know it too; the pressure was unbearable.
DORIS, MY GIRLFRIEND IN HIGH SCHOOL, was friends with Sandra Kirkpatrick, the one white girl at Susan Miller Dorsey High School in 1974. Now, in 2007, Dorsey High is one of the few majority African-American schools remaining in the L.A. Unified School District. Sandra was intelligent, shy and, I suspect, only a bit shell-shocked about being the red-haired, white girl in an overwhelmingly African-American school. We did have one handsome, well-built, redheaded boy, and though he was about as pale as Sandra, he had a spectacular Afro and there was no doubt on which side of the great racial divide he stood — black with a gallon of cream in his coffee.
I didn’t think back then about what it would be like to be in Sandra’s position, for me to attend a school as white as Dorsey was nonwhite, where I’d be that dash of color in a sea of white faces. It didn’t occur to me to think that it was odd that in 1976, the year that I graduated from Dorsey High, the school was 85 percent black and about 12 percent Asian. That was the world I lived in and I never found it wanting; from gangbangers to Soul Train dancers, there was a vast cross section of blacks and Asians. People I wanted to kick it with, and people who I thought might stomp me to death; people who would go far in life, and those who wouldn’t make it to their 17th birthday.
MY EXPERIENCE OF GROWING UP in that world felt separate but equal. I figured that whites had to be doing the same thing, dodging stray bullets and stray ass kickings. Though factually that was bullshit, that’s how I thought about my life in relation to white people. I didn’t know any except for teachers and police officers, so largely I could fantasize whatever I liked about them.
No doubt we were truly isolated, culturally and physically. Linguistically, the isolation manifested itself in odd usages that made little sense outside of our neighborhoods — dog as a verb is just one example. “We dogged the shit out of that car.” “He’s a doggish niggah.” It’s such a useful construction that when I arrived at college, I wondered why no one used it — and why they didn’t understand me.
But probably what shocked me more than anything else was that for white people, cock meant penis, when for myself and everyone I knew — and I heard this often — cock (coc, if seen scrawled on a wall) meant vagina. Really, something so simple can cause serious embarrassment for an unassimilated young black man at UC Santa Barbara or any other majority-white college. Imagine wanting to put a little emphasis on the need to quench your horniness: “Damn, I got to get me some cock.” New white friends might be confused, alarmed or possibly pleasantly surprised.
Consider the few whites I knew, and the oddness of the sample: the dude who played Grasshopper on Kung Fu, Sandra Kirkpatrick from Dorsey, and Jonathan Gold, who would hang out in Dorsey’s library, where his mom was the chess coach and librarian. How could I form a reasonable opinion of what it would have been like to go to an overwhelmingly white school?
Plus, I had enough cynicism to not trust the idea that being around white people had to be intrinsically better than going to my school and being around black people. What did I care that I couldn’t take AP calculus, or AP English? From soul music and funk, I discovered jazz and Jimi and white music. English literature came after the African-American literature I stumbled across at Hall’s bookshop on Santa Barbara Avenue; try reading Ishmael Reed first, then Wordsworth; read Invisible Man, then Jane Eyre. I just wanted to read and think my own thoughts and follow my own interests, as did many of my pardners. I didn’t have whiteness envy — the condition of believing on faith that if white people were near, things had to be better. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the opinion that white people had it wired; all you needed to experience the great abundance they had at their disposal was to transfer to Beverly Hills High and all the doors to prosperity would open. That was done often enough; kids bound and destined for Dorsey had parents sophisticated in the art of residency manipulation and would get transferred to Beverly Hills High or Palisades High, where, ironically enough, many were tracked into classes filled with the same sorts of black and brown faces they would have seen at their home schools.
For those of us unsophisticated types remaining at our high schools, we had to deal with the suspicion that we were at a serious disadvantage compared to our kin and neighbors who got themselves into those desirable white schools. Sure, I had dumb teachers, particularly a biology instructor who was so challenged she thought cats were in the canine family, but I also had wonderful teachers who didn’t reflexively think black kids were damaged in some way. Whatever monolithic stereotype you might have of a black school, if you truly knew Dorsey in the ’70s, you would be disabused of those stereotypes. Black kids listened to Pink Floyd, obsessed over nerdish topics, hated faking being hard, were gay as all outdoors and closeted as they wanted to be.
Earl, one of my best friends, handsome and insane, played junior-varsity basketball at Dorsey when Dorsey was the second-highest-rated team in the country, but secretly fiended for something more intellectual. He lost interest in sports when he discovered competitive chess, accommodating girls, and a raw and passionate love of philosophy. At one point, he decided that he wouldn’t be complete unless he could steal the high school library’s entire set of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy so he could read it at his leisure. Earl also thought of himself as some kind of urban naturalist, his interests largely being spider webs and bugs of any sort, and he researched those wild flocks of parrots who lived in the trees in the Jefferson Park and Crenshaw neighborhoods, and how they had absorbed all the songs of the area’s songbirds. The wild parrots freaked out the other birds with their cacophony of sounds. Later in college, when I was introduced to the music of Eric Dolphy, I swear I could hear those wild parrots in his solos. And when I read someplace that Dolphy, who was raised not too far from us, was influenced by those wild parrots, it all made sense.
Maybe we black kids going up in Los Angeles weren’t equal in economic terms to those white kids living on the Westside, but we suspected we might be making something of lasting cultural value. Though we didn’t talk about it, I and my crew of closet geeks and nuts, athletes and chess players, sometimes we suspected that this world we lived in, violent and beautiful, vibrant and unrestrained, would reverberate beyond the geographical boundaries of South L.A. But I didn’t think this interest would be manifested by the fact that it’s now possible to watch Boyz N the Hood almost any day or night of the year.
We didn’t look at the rise of gangs in our neighborhood as a shared pathology; the great majority of us didn’t bang. Gangs were the rule of force, of ruthlessness; gangs were logical and inevitable. Why wouldn’t they exist? It was happening all over the city, throughout black L.A., a teenage arms race. While in our part of the world it was the Cribs, a mile south it was the Brims, to the east the Pirus — all of them with as intolerant a view of outsiders as the Cribs. So Lamar, the handsome young ladies’ man I knew who liked to dance at house parties in different neighborhoods, who had no intention of beating on anyone, was stomped because it could happen to them, to those gangbangers who killed him. He had to be stomped to make it obvious to everybody what was happening: Our blocks, which were like small, self-contained towns, were now territory to be defended as though the avenues and streets had natural resources or religious significance. Notions of self-defense, of pre-emptive strikes, the need to never be caught slipping became a way of life. It was inevitable, or so it seemed, that sooner or later we would all die some stupid, miserable death. We lived in a world without an expectation of safety, not from each other and certainly not from the police, who themselves acted more in the fashion of a gang than protectors of the community. Truly, at some point, all I wanted to do was survive. I wanted to survive to go to college — that was what I wanted, the promise of a new world, not necessarily a white one, though it was very, very white.
I DON’T GET BACK to the old neighborhood very often, but I still remember the jacaranda trees on Buckingham, Ruth’s Hamburgers on Jefferson, the five-and-ten-cent store on Jefferson, the absurd abundance of the Holiday Bowl with grits and sushi under one roof, the deep hangouts on my porch in the avenues, when gunshots were far off in the distance and my girlfriend’s skinny, brown legs looked beautiful as she stretched out on the green St. Augustine lawn. Of seeing black faces at school and not noticing their blackness, of hearing accents from all over the place, New Orleans to Mississippi, and marveling at the differences. What happened to black Los Angeles wasn’t just the guns and the drug epidemics, the bad schools and the insane policing; it just cost too much... financially, spiritually and socially. So much goes wrong in Los Angeles that the things that go right don’t balance the scales for very many of us. Latinos have replaced African-Americans in these neighborhoods and schools, and I wish them luck. I hope that Los Angeles is kinder to them than to the black folks I knew in the Los Angeles I loved.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Enough Endowment Already!
Why Give to a College That Already Has Enough?
By STEVE O. MICHAEL
From the issue dated July 6, 2007
The law of diminishing returns, a simple but powerful concept that is widely known by everyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics, is often flagrantly disregarded by many — including the richest among us. The law states that there comes a time when additional infusion of a factor of production no longer leads to an increase in productivity. In fact, an increase in a factor of production may lead to negative productivity. Thus, bigger is not always better, and more is not always wiser.
This simple but important economic concept is generally observed religiously by investors who wish to maximize their returns. Investors search ardently for opportunities that will bring them the most returns and diversify their investments by redirecting funds to other ventures promising better yields. Although governments often indulge in endless and mindless expenditures on projects of dubious value, no business becomes successful by violating the principle of diminishing returns.
Why, then, do private donors — some of them entrepreneurs who should know better — engage in mindless donations of their money? After all, one who gives money to a university must (or should) have done so with a serious thought about the difference that money would make at the chosen institution. In this sense, "return on investment" refers to a concrete, positive change.
Yet in the past 10 years, donors have parted with vast sums of money in donations to colleges and universities that truly do not need them. When a university is richer than several countries put together, when a university can comfortably live off the returns on its billions of dollars in endowment, and when a university can no longer convincingly demonstrate how new money will make a concrete difference in the academic experience of faculty members and students, additional donations to the university are not only mindless but outright wasteful.
In February, Jerry Yang, the CEO and a co-founder of Yahoo and a trustee of Stanford, and his wife were reported to have donated $75-million to Stanford University. This is a generous deed, and they should be applauded for it. But would the Yangs' donation have made a bigger difference in the lives of students and professors at a lesser-known institution? Probably, particularly since, as The Chronicle noted in an article on the Council for Aid to Education's annual "Voluntary Support of Education" survey, Stanford was the top fund raiser in 2005-6 with more than $911-million raised in one year. Harvard University and Yale University followed behind with $595-million and $433-million, respectively.
In June 2006, the market values of those endowments were staggering: Harvard's was $29-billion, Yale's $18-billion, and Stanford's $14-billion. With that kind of money, one would think that those institutions would be less aggressive in their competition for donations. But such is not the case. Last year Stanford kicked off a $4.3-billion campaign, the largest drive in higher education. Endowments of several millions of dollars are becoming increasingly insignificant to universities; the desire now is to become members of the billion-dollar club. Even among them, the race is on for a two-digit billion-dollar membership. One wonders if campaigns of that size are merely to accumulate wealth and bragging rights.
In the philanthropic world, it takes money to raise money. The success of those institutions in raising many millions of dollars results from their huge investments in the cultivation process. Development officers who command six-digit incomes now occupy impressive positions as university presidents' right hands. Such academic gold miners know where the money is and how to warm the heart to unzip the wallet. Increasingly, presidents' effectiveness is judged less by the academic success of their institutions and more by the size of donations generated under their watch.
Consequently, it is futile to expect institutions themselves to put the brakes on their development machines. Instead, attention must be directed toward the general public, both the rich and the regular Joes, who wish to see their precious savings support good causes in education. Donations to higher education are a noble cause and should, by all means, be encouraged. At a time when states' appropriations to higher education are declining relative to the cost of tuition, and students and parents are assuming an increasing proportion of educational cost, private donations have the potential to lessen that burden, especially on middle- and lower-class families. Just as the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider in the nation, so too is the gap between well-endowed and poorly endowed institutions growing alarmingly wider. Higher-education leaders have a responsibility to address that issue.
The success of American higher education lies in the diversity of our institutions — diversity of mission, size, academic focus, cost of operation, and tradition, to mention but a few. Those differences enable institutions to respond to the needs and abilities of students from all kinds of backgrounds. Varied sources of money and generous private support to the little-known but effective institutions preserve the diversity of institutions, so the increasing concentration of donations to the Ivy Leagues and top fund raisers should concern us. The 10 wealthiest institutions in the Council for Aid to Education's survey accounted for half of the total growth in private donations during the 2006 fiscal year — meaning that about $1.2-billion of last year's $2.4-billion increase in private donations went to last year's top 10 fund raisers. In a nation with more than 4,000 colleges and universities, that statistic is disturbing.
Naturally, most of those donors gave to their alma maters. But when your alma mater is already fabulously wealthy, it is advisable, indeed wise, to shun your sentimental attachment to the institution and adopt other institutions that can yield better returns. Making a concrete difference in the lives of students and faculty members should be the basis for giving to higher education.
Donations to mega-rich universities do not directly improve the academic experience of their professors and students, or result in any qualitative improvement in student learning. However, there are institutions where noticeable changes can be brought about by small donations — where classrooms can be upgraded, libraries renovated and expanded, and the burden of cost on students alleviated. These institutions are no Ivy Leagues; they may have no name recognition beyond a 10-mile radius of their locations; and they may have little or nothing to invest in their development efforts. However, they constitute a sector where donations may yield the highest returns on investment.
Donors should rethink their contributions to hugely endowed institutions, no matter how tempting their baits may be. With the exception of those who stumble into their wealth or inherit it, most rich people get that way by spending less than they earn and investing the difference in ventures with high-yielding returns. The same thinking and logic ought to steer their generous hearts and guide their decisions to donate to universities. They should think of where their dollars will make the most difference, where they will affect the most lives, where they have potential to transform the institution, where the campaign is for genuine academic excellence not merely the growth of the endowment or the ego of the president.
If I had a million dollars to donate, I would think of investing it in higher education for sure, but universities with endowments of more than $1-billion would have a tougher time persuading me to part with my money, while a struggling institution that is doing a superb job educating its students and that can demonstrate how the money will make a difference will readily command my attention.
Steve O. Michael is vice provost and a professor of higher-education administration at Kent State University.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i44/44b01001.htm
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 44, Page B10
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
By STEVE O. MICHAEL
From the issue dated July 6, 2007
The law of diminishing returns, a simple but powerful concept that is widely known by everyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics, is often flagrantly disregarded by many — including the richest among us. The law states that there comes a time when additional infusion of a factor of production no longer leads to an increase in productivity. In fact, an increase in a factor of production may lead to negative productivity. Thus, bigger is not always better, and more is not always wiser.
This simple but important economic concept is generally observed religiously by investors who wish to maximize their returns. Investors search ardently for opportunities that will bring them the most returns and diversify their investments by redirecting funds to other ventures promising better yields. Although governments often indulge in endless and mindless expenditures on projects of dubious value, no business becomes successful by violating the principle of diminishing returns.
Why, then, do private donors — some of them entrepreneurs who should know better — engage in mindless donations of their money? After all, one who gives money to a university must (or should) have done so with a serious thought about the difference that money would make at the chosen institution. In this sense, "return on investment" refers to a concrete, positive change.
Yet in the past 10 years, donors have parted with vast sums of money in donations to colleges and universities that truly do not need them. When a university is richer than several countries put together, when a university can comfortably live off the returns on its billions of dollars in endowment, and when a university can no longer convincingly demonstrate how new money will make a concrete difference in the academic experience of faculty members and students, additional donations to the university are not only mindless but outright wasteful.
In February, Jerry Yang, the CEO and a co-founder of Yahoo and a trustee of Stanford, and his wife were reported to have donated $75-million to Stanford University. This is a generous deed, and they should be applauded for it. But would the Yangs' donation have made a bigger difference in the lives of students and professors at a lesser-known institution? Probably, particularly since, as The Chronicle noted in an article on the Council for Aid to Education's annual "Voluntary Support of Education" survey, Stanford was the top fund raiser in 2005-6 with more than $911-million raised in one year. Harvard University and Yale University followed behind with $595-million and $433-million, respectively.
In June 2006, the market values of those endowments were staggering: Harvard's was $29-billion, Yale's $18-billion, and Stanford's $14-billion. With that kind of money, one would think that those institutions would be less aggressive in their competition for donations. But such is not the case. Last year Stanford kicked off a $4.3-billion campaign, the largest drive in higher education. Endowments of several millions of dollars are becoming increasingly insignificant to universities; the desire now is to become members of the billion-dollar club. Even among them, the race is on for a two-digit billion-dollar membership. One wonders if campaigns of that size are merely to accumulate wealth and bragging rights.
In the philanthropic world, it takes money to raise money. The success of those institutions in raising many millions of dollars results from their huge investments in the cultivation process. Development officers who command six-digit incomes now occupy impressive positions as university presidents' right hands. Such academic gold miners know where the money is and how to warm the heart to unzip the wallet. Increasingly, presidents' effectiveness is judged less by the academic success of their institutions and more by the size of donations generated under their watch.
Consequently, it is futile to expect institutions themselves to put the brakes on their development machines. Instead, attention must be directed toward the general public, both the rich and the regular Joes, who wish to see their precious savings support good causes in education. Donations to higher education are a noble cause and should, by all means, be encouraged. At a time when states' appropriations to higher education are declining relative to the cost of tuition, and students and parents are assuming an increasing proportion of educational cost, private donations have the potential to lessen that burden, especially on middle- and lower-class families. Just as the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider in the nation, so too is the gap between well-endowed and poorly endowed institutions growing alarmingly wider. Higher-education leaders have a responsibility to address that issue.
The success of American higher education lies in the diversity of our institutions — diversity of mission, size, academic focus, cost of operation, and tradition, to mention but a few. Those differences enable institutions to respond to the needs and abilities of students from all kinds of backgrounds. Varied sources of money and generous private support to the little-known but effective institutions preserve the diversity of institutions, so the increasing concentration of donations to the Ivy Leagues and top fund raisers should concern us. The 10 wealthiest institutions in the Council for Aid to Education's survey accounted for half of the total growth in private donations during the 2006 fiscal year — meaning that about $1.2-billion of last year's $2.4-billion increase in private donations went to last year's top 10 fund raisers. In a nation with more than 4,000 colleges and universities, that statistic is disturbing.
Naturally, most of those donors gave to their alma maters. But when your alma mater is already fabulously wealthy, it is advisable, indeed wise, to shun your sentimental attachment to the institution and adopt other institutions that can yield better returns. Making a concrete difference in the lives of students and faculty members should be the basis for giving to higher education.
Donations to mega-rich universities do not directly improve the academic experience of their professors and students, or result in any qualitative improvement in student learning. However, there are institutions where noticeable changes can be brought about by small donations — where classrooms can be upgraded, libraries renovated and expanded, and the burden of cost on students alleviated. These institutions are no Ivy Leagues; they may have no name recognition beyond a 10-mile radius of their locations; and they may have little or nothing to invest in their development efforts. However, they constitute a sector where donations may yield the highest returns on investment.
Donors should rethink their contributions to hugely endowed institutions, no matter how tempting their baits may be. With the exception of those who stumble into their wealth or inherit it, most rich people get that way by spending less than they earn and investing the difference in ventures with high-yielding returns. The same thinking and logic ought to steer their generous hearts and guide their decisions to donate to universities. They should think of where their dollars will make the most difference, where they will affect the most lives, where they have potential to transform the institution, where the campaign is for genuine academic excellence not merely the growth of the endowment or the ego of the president.
If I had a million dollars to donate, I would think of investing it in higher education for sure, but universities with endowments of more than $1-billion would have a tougher time persuading me to part with my money, while a struggling institution that is doing a superb job educating its students and that can demonstrate how the money will make a difference will readily command my attention.
Steve O. Michael is vice provost and a professor of higher-education administration at Kent State University.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i44/44b01001.htm
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 44, Page B10
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, December 31, 2007
Pakistan at Sixty
LRB 4 October 2007
by Tariq Ali
Pakistan is best avoided in August, when the rains come and transform the plains into a huge steam bath. When I lived there we fled to the mountains, but this year I stayed put. The real killer is the humidity. Relief arrives in short bursts: a sudden stillness followed by the darkening of the sky, thunderclaps like distant bombs and then the hard rain. Rivers and tributaries quickly overflow; flash floods make cities impassable. Sewage runs through slums and posh neighbourhoods alike. Even if you go straight from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned car you can’t completely escape the smell. In August sixty years ago, Pakistan was separated from the subcontinent. This summer, as power appeared to be draining away from Pervez Musharraf, the country’s fourth military dictator, it was instructive to observe the process at first hand.
Disillusionment and resentment are widespread. Cultivating anti-Indian/anti-Hindu feeling, in an attempt to encourage national cohesion, no longer works. The celebrations marking the anniversary of independence on 14 August are more artificial and irritating than ever. A cacophony of meaningless slogans that impress nobody, countless clichés in newspaper supplements competing for space with stale photographs of the Founder (Muhammad Ali Jinnah) and the Poet (Iqbal). Banal panel discussions remind us of what Jinnah said or didn’t say. The perfidious Lord Mountbatten and his ‘promiscuous’ wife, Edwina, are denounced for favouring India when it came to the division of the spoils. It’s true, but we can’t blame them for the wreck Pakistan has become. In private, of course, there is much soul-searching, and a surprising collection of people now feel the state should never have been founded.
Several years after the split with Bangladesh in 1971 I wrote a book called Can Pakistan Survive? for Penguin. It was publicly denounced and banned by the dictator of the day, General Zia-ul-Haq, but pirated in many editions. I had argued that if the state carried on in the same old way, some of the minority provinces left behind might also defect, leaving the Punjab alone, strutting like a cock on a dunghill. Many of those who denounced me as a traitor and a renegade are now asking the same question. It’s too late for regrets, I tell them. The country is here to stay. And it’s not religion or the mystical ‘ideology of Pakistan’ that guarantees its survival, but its nuclear capacity and Washington.
On the country’s 60th birthday (as on its 20th and 30th anniversaries), an embattled military regime is fighting for its survival. There is a war on its western frontier, while at home it is being tormented by jihadis and judges. None of this seemed to make much difference to the young men on motorbikes who took over the streets of Lahore in their annual suicide race. It seems the only thing worth celebrating is the right to die. Only five managed it this year, a much lower figure than in the previous five years. Maybe this is a rational way to mark a conflict in which more than a million people hacked each other to death as the decaying British Empire prepared to scuttle off home. On the eve of Partition a cabinet meeting in London was devoted to the growing crisis in India. The minutes reported: ‘Mr Jinnah was very bitter and determined. He seemed to the secretary of state like a man who knew that he was going to be killed and therefore insisted on committing suicide to avoid it.’ He was not alone.
Now yet another uniformed despot was taking the salute at a military parade to mark independence day in Islamabad, mouthing a bad speech written by a bored bureaucrat that failed to stifle the yawns of the surrounding sycophants. Even the F-16s in proud formation failed to excite the audience. Flags were waved by schoolchildren, a band played the national anthem, the whole show was broadcast live and then it was over.
The European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who as the papers see it are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is Musharraf. Alas, it now seems he might drown in a sea of troubles and so the helpful State Department has pushed out an over-inflated raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto.
In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote. There is no possibility of a takeover by religious extremists unless the army wants one, as in the 1980s, when General Zia-ul-Haq handed over the Ministries of Education and Information to the Jamaat-e-Islami, with dire results. There are serious problems confronting Pakistan, but these are usually ignored in Washington, by both the administration and the financial institutions. The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to jihad.
During periods of military rule in Pakistan three groups get together: military leaders, a corrupt claque of fixer-politicians, and businessmen eyeing juicy contracts or state-owned land. The country’s ruling elite has spent the last sixty years defending its ill-gotten wealth and privilege, and the Supreme Leader (uniformed or not) is invariably intoxicated by their flattery. Corruption envelops Pakistan. The poor bear the burden, but the middle classes are also affected. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, small businessmen, traders are crippled by a system in which patronage and bribery are trump cards. Some escape – there are 20,000 Pakistani doctors working in the United States alone – but others come to terms with the system, accept compromises that make them deeply cynical about themselves and everyone else.
The resulting moral vacuum is filled by porn films and religiosity of various sorts. In some areas religion and pornography go together: the highest sales of porn videos are in Peshawar and Quetta, strongholds of the religious parties. Taliban leaders in Pakistan target video shops, but the dealers merely go underground. Nor should it be imagined that the bulk of the porn comes from the West. There is a thriving clandestine industry in Pakistan, with its own local stars, male and female.
Meanwhile the Islamists are busy picking up supporters. The persistent and ruthless missionaries of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) are especially effective. Sinners from every social group, desperate for purification, queue to join. TJ headquarters in Pakistan are situated in a large mission in Raiwind. Once a tiny village surrounded by fields of wheat, corn and mustard seed, it is now a fashionable suburb of Lahore, where the Sharif brothers built a Gulf-style palace when they were in power in the 1990s. The TJ was founded in the 1920s by Maulana Ilyas, a cleric who trained at the orthodox Sunni seminary in Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh. At first, its missionaries were concentrated in Northern India, but today there are large groups in North America and Western Europe. The TJ hopes to get planning permission to build a mosque in East London next to the Olympic site. It would be the largest mosque in Europe. In Pakistan, TJ influence is widespread. Penetrating the national cricket team has been its most conspicuous success: Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammed Yousuf are activists for the cause at home while Mushtaq Ahmet works hard in their interest in Britain. Another triumph was the post-9/11 recruitment of Junaid Jamshed, the charismatic lead singer of Pakistan’s first successful pop group, Vital Signs. He renounced his past and now sings only devotional songs – naats.
The Tablighis stress their non-violence and insist they are there merely to broadcast the true faith in order to help people find the correct path in life. This may be so, but it is clear that some younger male recruits, bored with all the dogma, ceremonies and ritual, are more interested in getting their hands on a Kalashnikov. Many believe that the Tablighi missionary camps are fertile recruiting grounds for armed groups active on the Western Frontier and in Kashmir.
The establishment has been slow to challenge the interpretation of Islam put forward by groups such as Tablighi. Musharraf advised people to go and see Khuda Kay Liye (‘In the Name of God’), a new movie directed by Shoaib Mansoor (who wrote and produced some of Vital Signs’ most successful music). This may not help the film, or the moderate Islam it favours, given that Musharraf’s popularity ratings currently trail Osama bin Laden’s, according to a recent poll, but I went to a matinee performance in Lahore and the cinema was packed with young people. The film is well intentioned, also long-winded and crude. It has, however, had an impact. At least it tries out a few ideas, which is unheard of in a country where the film industry produces nothing but Bollywood-style dross, even if the ideas are limited to the good Muslim, bad Muslim stereotype. Jihadi violence is bad. Music is good and not anti-Islamic. Violence and rape in the badlands of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier are intercut with scenes in a post-9/11 United States, where an innocent Pakistani musician is lifted by intelligence operatives and tortured (these scenes go on far too long). The implication is that each side feeds on the other. It is a prim film and the row of youths sitting behind me clearly wanted some more action on the sex front. When a white female student in Chicago gives the Pakistani musician a present, one of them commented: ‘She’s giving him her phone number.’ If the ushers hadn’t told the youths to keep quiet I might have enjoyed the film more.
One of the main threats to Musharraf’s authority is the country’s judiciary. On 9 March, Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, pending an investigation. The accusations against him were contained in a letter from Naeem Bokhari, a Supreme Court advocate. Curiously, the letter was widely circulated – I received a copy via email. I wondered whether something was afoot, but decided the letter was just sour grapes. Not so: it was part of a plan. After a few personal complaints, extravagant rhetoric took over:
My Lord, the dignity of lawyers is consistently being violated by you. We are treated harshly, rudely, brusquely and nastily. We are not heard. We are not allowed to present our case. There is little scope for advocacy. The words used in the Bar Room for Court No. 1 are ‘the slaughter house’. We are cowed down by aggression from the Bench, led by you. All we receive from you is arrogance, aggression and belligerence.
The following passage should have alerted me to what was really going on:
I am pained at the wide publicity to cases taken up by My Lord in the Supreme Court under the banner of Fundamental Rights. The proceedings before the Supreme Court can conveniently and easily be referred to the District and Sessions Judges. I am further pained by the media coverage of the Supreme Court on the recovery of a female. In the Bar Room, this is referred to as a ‘media circus’.
The chief justice was beginning to embarrass the regime. He had found against the government on a number of key issues, including the rushed privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, a pet project of Prime Minister Shaukat (‘Shortcut’) Aziz. The case was reminiscent of Yeltsin’s Russia. Economists had estimated that the industry was worth $5 billion. Seventy-five per cent of the shares were sold for $362 million in a 30-minute auction to a friendly consortium consisting of Arif Habib Securities (Pakistan), al-Tuwairqi (Saudi Arabia) and the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works Open JSC (Russia). The privatisation wasn’t popular with the military, and the retiring chairman, Haq Nawaz Akhtar, complained that ‘the plant could have fetched more money if it were sold as scrap.’ The general perception was that the president and prime minister had helped out their friends. A frequenter of the Stock Exchange told me in Karachi that Arif Habib Securities (which owns 20 per cent) was set up as a front company for Shaukat Aziz. The Saudi steel giant (40 per cent) is reputedly on very friendly terms with Musharraf, who turned up to open a steel factory set up by the group on 220 acres of land rented from the adjoining Pakistan Steel Mills. Now they own it all.
After the Supreme Court insisted that ‘disappeared’ political activists be produced in court and refused to dismiss rape cases, there were worries in Islamabad that the chief justice might even declare the military presidency unconstitutional. Paranoia set in. Measures had to be taken. The general and his cabinet decided to frighten Chaudhry by suspending him. The chief justice was kept in solitary confinement for several hours, manhandled by intelligence operatives, and traduced on state television. But instead of caving in and accepting a generous resignation settlement, the judge insisted on defending himself, triggering a remarkable movement in defence of an independent judiciary. This is surprising. Pakistani judges are notoriously conservative and have legitimised every coup with a bogus ‘doctrine of necessity’ ruling (although some did refuse to swear an oath of loyalty to Musharraf).
When I visited Pakistan in April the protests were getting bigger every day. Initially confined to the country’s 80,000 lawyers and several dozen judges, unrest soon spread beyond them, which was unusual in a country whose people have become increasingly alienated from elite rule. But the lawyers were marching in defence of the constitutional separation of powers. There was something delightfully old-fashioned about this struggle: it involved neither money nor religion, but principle. Careerists from the opposition (some of whom had organised thuggish assaults on the Supreme Court when in power) tried to make the cause their own. ‘Don’t imagine they’ve all suddenly changed,’ Abid Hasan Manto, one of the country’s most respected lawyers, told me. ‘On the other hand, when the time comes almost anything can act as a spark.’
It soon became obvious to most people in the Islamabad bureaucracy that they had made a gigantic blunder. But as often happens in a crisis, instead of acknowledging this and moving to correct it, the perpetrators decided on a show of strength. The first targets were independent TV channels. In Karachi and other cities in the south three channels suddenly went dark as they were screening reports on the demonstrations. There was popular outrage. On 5 May Chaudhry drove from Islamabad to give a speech in Lahore, stopping at every town en route to meet supporters; it took 26 hours to complete a journey that should take four or five. In Islamabad they plotted a counter-strike.
The judge was due to visit Karachi, the country’s largest city, on 12 May. Political power here rests in the hands of the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement/United National Movement), an unsavoury outfit created during a previous dictatorship and notorious for its involvement in protection rackets and other kinds of violence. It has supported Musharraf loyally through every crisis. Its leader, Altaf Hussain, guides the movement from a safe perch in London, fearful of retribution from his many opponents were he to return. In a video address to his followers in Karachi he said: ‘If conspiracies are hatched to end the present democratically elected government then each and every worker of MQM . . . will stand firm and defend the democratic government.’ It was typical of him. On Islamabad’s instructions, the MQM leaders decided to prevent the judge addressing the meeting in Karachi. He was not allowed to leave the airport. His supporters in different parts of the city were assaulted. Almost fifty people were killed. After footage of the violence was screened on Aaj TV, the station was attacked by armed MQM volunteers, who shot at the building for six whole hours and set cars in the parking lot on fire.
The management of the TV station mysteriously failed to reach senior police officers, the chief minister or the governor. People understood why, and a successful general strike followed, which further isolated the regime. A devastating report, Carnage in Karachi, published in August by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, confirmed in great detail what everyone already knew: the police and army had been ordered to stand by while armed MQM members went on the rampage.
Musharraf, trying desperately to keep a grip on the country, had no alternative but to sound the retreat. The chief justice’s appeal against his suspension was finally admitted and heard by the Supreme Court. On 20 July a unanimous decision was made to reinstate him, and shamefaced government lawyers were seen leaving the precinct in a hurry. A reinvigorated court got down to business. Hafiz Abdul Basit was a ‘disappeared’ prisoner accused of terrorism. The chief justice summoned Tariq Pervez, the director-general of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, and asked him politely where the prisoner was being kept. Pervez replied that he had no idea and had never heard of Basit. The chief justice instructed the police chief to produce Basit in court within 48 hours: ‘Either produce the detainee or get ready to go to jail.’ Two days later Basit was produced and then released, after the police failed to present any substantial evidence against him. Washington and London were not happy. They were convinced that Basit was a terrorist who should have been kept in prison indefinitely, as he certainly would have been in Britain or the US.
The Supreme Court is currently considering six petitions challenging Musharraf’s decision to contest the presidency without relinquishing his command of the army. There is much nervousness in Islamabad. The president’s supporters are threatening dire consequences if the court rules against him. But to declare a state of emergency would require the support of the army, and I was told that informal soundings had revealed a reluctance to intervene on the part of the generals. Their polite excuse was that they were too heavily committed to the ‘war on terror’ to be able to preserve law and order in the cities.
As the judicial crisis temporarily ended, a more sombre one loomed. Most of today’s jihadi groups are the mongrel offspring of Pakistani and Western intelligence outfits, born in the 1980s when General Zia was in power and waging the West’s war against the godless Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. That is when state patronage of Islamist groups began. One cleric who benefited was Maulana Abdullah, who was allotted land to build a madrassa in the heart of Islamabad, not far from the government buildings. Soon the area was increased so that two separate facilities (for male and female students) could be constructed, together with an enlarged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. State money was provided for all this, and the government is the technical owner of the property.
During the 1980s and 1990s this complex became a transit camp for young jihadis on their way to fight in Afghanistan and, later, Kashmir. Abdullah made no secret of his beliefs. He was sympathetic to the Saudi-Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and during the Iraq-Iran war was only too happy to encourage the killing of Shia ‘heretics’ in Pakistan. It was his patronage of ultra-sectarian, anti-Shia terror groups that led to his assassination in October 1998. Members of a rival Muslim faction killed him soon after he had finished praying in his own mosque.
His sons, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, then took control of the mosque and religious schools. The government agreed that Aziz would lead the Friday congregation and preach the weekly sermon after Friday prayers. His sermons were often supportive of al-Qaida, though he was more careful about his language after 9/11. Senior civil servants and military officers often attended Friday prayers. The better-educated and soft-spoken Rashid, with his lean, haggard face and ragged beard, was left to act as spin-doctor. He was wheeled on to charm visiting foreign or local journalists, and did it well.
But after November 2004, when the army, under heavy US pressure, launched an offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, relations between the brothers and the government became tense. Aziz in particular was livid. He might not have done anything about it, but, according to Rashid, ‘a retired colonel of the Pakistan Army approached us with a written request for a fatwa clarifying the Sharia perspective on the army waging a war on the tribal people.’ Aziz did not waste any time. He issued a fatwa declaring that the killing of its own people by a Muslim army is haram (‘forbidden’), ‘that any army official killed during the operation should not be given a Muslim burial’ and that ‘the militants who die while fighting the Pakistan Army are martyrs.’ Within days of its publication the fatwa had been publicly endorsed by almost five hundred ‘religious scholars’. Despite heavy pressure from the mosque’s patrons in the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence, the brothers refused to withdraw the fatwa. The government response was surprisingly muted. Aziz’s official status as the mosque’s imam was ended and an arrest warrant issued against him, but it was never served and the brothers were allowed to carry on as usual. Perhaps the ISI thought they might still prove useful.
Earlier that year the government claimed it had uncovered a terrorist plot to bomb military installations, including the GHQ and other state buildings, on 14 August. Machine-guns and explosives were found in Abdul Rashid Ghazi’s car. New warrants were issued against the brothers and they were arrested. At this point, the religious affairs minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, General Zia’s son, persuaded his colleagues to pardon the clerics in return for a written apology pledging that they wouldn’t become involved in the armed struggle. Rashid claimed the whole plot had been scripted to please the West and in a newspaper article asked the religious affairs minister to provide proof that he had given the undertaking the minister had supposedly asked for. There was no response.
In January this year, the brothers decided to shift their focus from foreign to domestic policy and demanded an immediate implementation of Sharia law. Until then they had been content to denounce US policies in the Muslim world and America’s local point-man Musharraf for helping dismantle the Taliban government in Afghanistan. They did not publicly support the three attempts made on Musharraf’s life, but it was hardly a secret that they regretted his survival. The statement they issued in January was intended as an open provocation to the regime. Aziz spelled out his programme: ‘We will never permit dance and music in Pakistan. All those interested in such activities should shift to India. We are tired of waiting. It is Sharia or martyrdom.’ They felt threatened by the government’s demolition of two mosques that had been built illegally on public land. When they received notices announcing the demolition of parts of the Red Mosque and the women’s seminary the brothers dispatched dozens of women students in black burqas to occupy a children’s library next to their seminary. The intelligence agencies appeared to be taken aback, but quickly negotiated an end to the occupation.
The brothers continued to test the authorities. Sharia was implemented and there was a public bonfire of books, CDs and DVDs. Then the women from the madrassa directed their fire against Islamabad’s up-market brothels, targeting Aunty Shamim, a well-known procuress who provided ‘decent’ girls for indecent purposes, and whose clients included the local great and good (a number of them moderate religious leaders). Aunty ran the brothel like an office: she kept office hours and shut up shop at midday on Friday so that clients could go to the nearest mosque, which happened to be the Lal Masjid. The morality brigades raided the brothel and ‘freed’ the women. Most of the girls were educated, some were single parents, others were widows, all were desperately short of funds. The office hours suited them. Aunty Shamim fled town, and her workers sought similar employment elsewhere, while the madrassa girls celebrated an easy victory.
Emboldened by their triumph, they decided to take on Islamabad’s posh massage parlours, not all of which were sex joints, and some of which were staffed by Chinese citizens. Six Chinese women were abducted in late June and taken to the mosque. The Chinese ambassador was not pleased. He informed President Hu Jintao, who was even less pleased, and Beijing made it clear that it wanted its citizens freed without delay. Government fixers arrived at the mosque to plead the strategic importance of Sino-Pakistan relations, and the women were released. The massage industry promised that henceforth only men would massage other men. Honour was satisfied, even though the deal directly contradicted the message of the Koran. The liberal press depicted the anti-vice campaign as the Talibanisation of Pakistan, which annoyed the Lal Masjid clerics. ‘Rudy Giuliani, when he became mayor of New York, closed the brothels,’ Rashid said. ‘Was that also Talibanisation?’
Angered and embarrassed by the kidnapping of the Chinese women, Musharraf demanded a solution. The Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Ali Saeed al-Awad Asseri, arrived at the mosque and spent ninety minutes with the brothers. They were welcoming but told him all they wanted was the implementation of Saudi laws in Pakistan. Surely he agreed? The ambassador declined to meet the press after the visit, so his response remains unrecorded. His mediation a failure, Plan B was set in motion.
On 3 July, the paramilitary Rangers began to lay barbed wire at the end of the street in front of the mosque. Some madrassa students opened fire, shot a Ranger dead, and for good measure torched the neighbouring Environment Ministry. Security forces responded the same night with tear gas and machine-guns. The next morning the government declared a curfew in the area and the week-long siege of the mosque began, with television networks beaming images across the world. Rashid must have been pleased. The brothers thought that keeping women and children hostage inside the compound might save them. But some were released and Aziz was arrested as he tried to escape in a burqa. On 10 July, paratroopers finally stormed the complex. Abdul Rashid Ghazi and at least a hundred others died in the ensuing clashes. Eleven soldiers were also killed and more than forty wounded. Several police stations were attacked and there were ominous complaints from the Tribal Areas. Maulana Faqir Mohammed, a leading Taliban supporter, told thousands of armed tribesmen: ‘We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf and we will seek revenge for the Lal Masjid atrocities.’ This view was reiterated by Osama bin Laden, who declared Musharraf an ‘infidel’ and said that ‘removing him is now obligatory.’
I was in Karachi in the last week of August, when suicide bombers hit military targets, among them a bus carrying ISI employees, to avenge Rashid’s death. In the country as a whole the reaction was muted. The leaders of the MMA, a coalition of religious parties that governs the Frontier province and shares power in Baluchistan, made ugly public statements, but took no action. Only a thousand people marched in the demonstration called in Peshawar the day after the deaths. This was the largest protest march, and even here the mood was subdued. There was no shrill glorification of the martyrs. The contrast with the campaign to reinstate the chief justice could not have been more pronounced. Three weeks later, more than 100,000 people gathered in the Punjabi city of Kasur to observe the 250th anniversary of the death of the great 17th-century poet Bulleh Shah, one in a distinguished line of Sufi poets who denounced organised religion and orthodoxy. For him a mullah could be compared to a barking dog or a crowing cock.
The fact is that jihadis are not popular in most of Pakistan, but neither is the government. The Red Mosque episode raised too many unanswered questions. Why did the government not act in January? How did the clerics manage to accumulate such a large store of weapons without the knowledge of the government? Was the ISI aware that an arsenal was concealed inside the mosque? If so, why did they keep quiet? What was the relationship between the clerics and government agencies? Why was Aziz released and allowed to return to his village without being charged? Has the state decided to relinquish its monopoly of violence?
A lot of this has to do with Afghanistan. The failure of the Nato occupation has revived the Taliban as well as the trade in heroin and has destabilised north-western Pakistan. Indiscriminate bombing raids by US planes have killed too many innocent civilians, and the culture of revenge remains strong in the region. The corruption and cronyism of the Karzai government have alienated many Afghans, who welcomed the toppling of Mullah Omar and hoped for better times. Instead, they have witnessed land-grabs and the construction of luxury villas by Karzai’s colleagues. And there are persistent rumours that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the biggest drug barons in the country. The Pashtun tribes have never recognised the Durand Line, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by the British. And so when guerrillas flee to the tribal areas under Pakistani control they are not handed over to Islamabad, but fed and clothed till they go back to Afghanistan or are protected like the al-Qaida leaders. Washington feels that Musharraf’s deals with tribal elders border on capitulation to the Taliban and is angry because Pakistani military actions are paid for by the US and they feel they aren’t getting value for money. This is not to mention the $10 billion Pakistan has received since 9/11 for signing up to the ‘war on terror’.
The problem is that some elements in Pakistani military intelligence feel that they will be able to take Afghanistan back once Operation Enduring Freedom has come to an end. For this reason they refuse to give up their links with the guerrilla leaders. They even think that the US might one day favour such a policy. I doubt whether this could happen: Iranian influence is strong in Herat and western Afghanistan; the Northern Alliance receives weapons from Russia and India is the major regional power. A stable settlement will have to include a regional guarantee of Afghan stability and the formation of a national government after Nato withdrawal.
Even if Washington accepted a cleaned-up version of the Taliban, the other countries involved would not, and a new set of civil conflicts could only lead to disintegration. Were this to happen, the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line might opt to create their own state. It sounds far-fetched today, but what if the confederation of tribes that is Afghanistan were to split up into statelets, each under the protection of a larger power?
Back in the heart of Pakistan the most difficult and explosive issue remains social and economic inequality. This is not unrelated to the increase in the number of madrassas. If there were a half-decent state education system, poor families might not feel the need to hand over a son or daughter to the clerics in the hope that at least one child will be clothed, fed and educated. Were there even the semblance of a health system many would be saved from illnesses contracted as a result of fatigue and poverty. No government since 1947 has done much to reduce inequality. The notion that the soon-to-return Benazir Bhutto, perched on Musharraf’s shoulder, equals progress is as risible as Nawaz Sharif imagining that millions of people would turn out to receive him when he arrived at Islamabad airport last month. A general election is due later this year. If it is as comprehensively rigged as the last one was, the result will be increased alienation from the political process. The outlook is bleak. There is no serious political alternative to military rule.
I spent my last day in Karachi with fishermen in a village near Korangi creek. Shortcut Aziz has signed away the mangroves where shellfish and lobsters flourish, and land is being reclaimed to build Diamond City, Sugar City and other monstrosities on the Gulf model. The fishermen have been campaigning against these encroachments, but with little success. ‘We need a tsunami,’ one of them half-joked. We talked about their living conditions. ‘All we dream of is schools for our children, medicines and clinics in our villages, clean water and electricity in our homes,’ one woman said. ‘Is that too much to ask for?’ Nobody even mentioned religion.
Tariq Ali’s The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power will be published next year.
by Tariq Ali
Pakistan is best avoided in August, when the rains come and transform the plains into a huge steam bath. When I lived there we fled to the mountains, but this year I stayed put. The real killer is the humidity. Relief arrives in short bursts: a sudden stillness followed by the darkening of the sky, thunderclaps like distant bombs and then the hard rain. Rivers and tributaries quickly overflow; flash floods make cities impassable. Sewage runs through slums and posh neighbourhoods alike. Even if you go straight from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned car you can’t completely escape the smell. In August sixty years ago, Pakistan was separated from the subcontinent. This summer, as power appeared to be draining away from Pervez Musharraf, the country’s fourth military dictator, it was instructive to observe the process at first hand.
Disillusionment and resentment are widespread. Cultivating anti-Indian/anti-Hindu feeling, in an attempt to encourage national cohesion, no longer works. The celebrations marking the anniversary of independence on 14 August are more artificial and irritating than ever. A cacophony of meaningless slogans that impress nobody, countless clichés in newspaper supplements competing for space with stale photographs of the Founder (Muhammad Ali Jinnah) and the Poet (Iqbal). Banal panel discussions remind us of what Jinnah said or didn’t say. The perfidious Lord Mountbatten and his ‘promiscuous’ wife, Edwina, are denounced for favouring India when it came to the division of the spoils. It’s true, but we can’t blame them for the wreck Pakistan has become. In private, of course, there is much soul-searching, and a surprising collection of people now feel the state should never have been founded.
Several years after the split with Bangladesh in 1971 I wrote a book called Can Pakistan Survive? for Penguin. It was publicly denounced and banned by the dictator of the day, General Zia-ul-Haq, but pirated in many editions. I had argued that if the state carried on in the same old way, some of the minority provinces left behind might also defect, leaving the Punjab alone, strutting like a cock on a dunghill. Many of those who denounced me as a traitor and a renegade are now asking the same question. It’s too late for regrets, I tell them. The country is here to stay. And it’s not religion or the mystical ‘ideology of Pakistan’ that guarantees its survival, but its nuclear capacity and Washington.
On the country’s 60th birthday (as on its 20th and 30th anniversaries), an embattled military regime is fighting for its survival. There is a war on its western frontier, while at home it is being tormented by jihadis and judges. None of this seemed to make much difference to the young men on motorbikes who took over the streets of Lahore in their annual suicide race. It seems the only thing worth celebrating is the right to die. Only five managed it this year, a much lower figure than in the previous five years. Maybe this is a rational way to mark a conflict in which more than a million people hacked each other to death as the decaying British Empire prepared to scuttle off home. On the eve of Partition a cabinet meeting in London was devoted to the growing crisis in India. The minutes reported: ‘Mr Jinnah was very bitter and determined. He seemed to the secretary of state like a man who knew that he was going to be killed and therefore insisted on committing suicide to avoid it.’ He was not alone.
Now yet another uniformed despot was taking the salute at a military parade to mark independence day in Islamabad, mouthing a bad speech written by a bored bureaucrat that failed to stifle the yawns of the surrounding sycophants. Even the F-16s in proud formation failed to excite the audience. Flags were waved by schoolchildren, a band played the national anthem, the whole show was broadcast live and then it was over.
The European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who as the papers see it are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that stops a jihadi finger finding the nuclear trigger is Musharraf. Alas, it now seems he might drown in a sea of troubles and so the helpful State Department has pushed out an over-inflated raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto.
In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote. There is no possibility of a takeover by religious extremists unless the army wants one, as in the 1980s, when General Zia-ul-Haq handed over the Ministries of Education and Information to the Jamaat-e-Islami, with dire results. There are serious problems confronting Pakistan, but these are usually ignored in Washington, by both the administration and the financial institutions. The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to jihad.
During periods of military rule in Pakistan three groups get together: military leaders, a corrupt claque of fixer-politicians, and businessmen eyeing juicy contracts or state-owned land. The country’s ruling elite has spent the last sixty years defending its ill-gotten wealth and privilege, and the Supreme Leader (uniformed or not) is invariably intoxicated by their flattery. Corruption envelops Pakistan. The poor bear the burden, but the middle classes are also affected. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, small businessmen, traders are crippled by a system in which patronage and bribery are trump cards. Some escape – there are 20,000 Pakistani doctors working in the United States alone – but others come to terms with the system, accept compromises that make them deeply cynical about themselves and everyone else.
The resulting moral vacuum is filled by porn films and religiosity of various sorts. In some areas religion and pornography go together: the highest sales of porn videos are in Peshawar and Quetta, strongholds of the religious parties. Taliban leaders in Pakistan target video shops, but the dealers merely go underground. Nor should it be imagined that the bulk of the porn comes from the West. There is a thriving clandestine industry in Pakistan, with its own local stars, male and female.
Meanwhile the Islamists are busy picking up supporters. The persistent and ruthless missionaries of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) are especially effective. Sinners from every social group, desperate for purification, queue to join. TJ headquarters in Pakistan are situated in a large mission in Raiwind. Once a tiny village surrounded by fields of wheat, corn and mustard seed, it is now a fashionable suburb of Lahore, where the Sharif brothers built a Gulf-style palace when they were in power in the 1990s. The TJ was founded in the 1920s by Maulana Ilyas, a cleric who trained at the orthodox Sunni seminary in Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh. At first, its missionaries were concentrated in Northern India, but today there are large groups in North America and Western Europe. The TJ hopes to get planning permission to build a mosque in East London next to the Olympic site. It would be the largest mosque in Europe. In Pakistan, TJ influence is widespread. Penetrating the national cricket team has been its most conspicuous success: Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammed Yousuf are activists for the cause at home while Mushtaq Ahmet works hard in their interest in Britain. Another triumph was the post-9/11 recruitment of Junaid Jamshed, the charismatic lead singer of Pakistan’s first successful pop group, Vital Signs. He renounced his past and now sings only devotional songs – naats.
The Tablighis stress their non-violence and insist they are there merely to broadcast the true faith in order to help people find the correct path in life. This may be so, but it is clear that some younger male recruits, bored with all the dogma, ceremonies and ritual, are more interested in getting their hands on a Kalashnikov. Many believe that the Tablighi missionary camps are fertile recruiting grounds for armed groups active on the Western Frontier and in Kashmir.
The establishment has been slow to challenge the interpretation of Islam put forward by groups such as Tablighi. Musharraf advised people to go and see Khuda Kay Liye (‘In the Name of God’), a new movie directed by Shoaib Mansoor (who wrote and produced some of Vital Signs’ most successful music). This may not help the film, or the moderate Islam it favours, given that Musharraf’s popularity ratings currently trail Osama bin Laden’s, according to a recent poll, but I went to a matinee performance in Lahore and the cinema was packed with young people. The film is well intentioned, also long-winded and crude. It has, however, had an impact. At least it tries out a few ideas, which is unheard of in a country where the film industry produces nothing but Bollywood-style dross, even if the ideas are limited to the good Muslim, bad Muslim stereotype. Jihadi violence is bad. Music is good and not anti-Islamic. Violence and rape in the badlands of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier are intercut with scenes in a post-9/11 United States, where an innocent Pakistani musician is lifted by intelligence operatives and tortured (these scenes go on far too long). The implication is that each side feeds on the other. It is a prim film and the row of youths sitting behind me clearly wanted some more action on the sex front. When a white female student in Chicago gives the Pakistani musician a present, one of them commented: ‘She’s giving him her phone number.’ If the ushers hadn’t told the youths to keep quiet I might have enjoyed the film more.
One of the main threats to Musharraf’s authority is the country’s judiciary. On 9 March, Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, pending an investigation. The accusations against him were contained in a letter from Naeem Bokhari, a Supreme Court advocate. Curiously, the letter was widely circulated – I received a copy via email. I wondered whether something was afoot, but decided the letter was just sour grapes. Not so: it was part of a plan. After a few personal complaints, extravagant rhetoric took over:
My Lord, the dignity of lawyers is consistently being violated by you. We are treated harshly, rudely, brusquely and nastily. We are not heard. We are not allowed to present our case. There is little scope for advocacy. The words used in the Bar Room for Court No. 1 are ‘the slaughter house’. We are cowed down by aggression from the Bench, led by you. All we receive from you is arrogance, aggression and belligerence.
The following passage should have alerted me to what was really going on:
I am pained at the wide publicity to cases taken up by My Lord in the Supreme Court under the banner of Fundamental Rights. The proceedings before the Supreme Court can conveniently and easily be referred to the District and Sessions Judges. I am further pained by the media coverage of the Supreme Court on the recovery of a female. In the Bar Room, this is referred to as a ‘media circus’.
The chief justice was beginning to embarrass the regime. He had found against the government on a number of key issues, including the rushed privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, a pet project of Prime Minister Shaukat (‘Shortcut’) Aziz. The case was reminiscent of Yeltsin’s Russia. Economists had estimated that the industry was worth $5 billion. Seventy-five per cent of the shares were sold for $362 million in a 30-minute auction to a friendly consortium consisting of Arif Habib Securities (Pakistan), al-Tuwairqi (Saudi Arabia) and the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works Open JSC (Russia). The privatisation wasn’t popular with the military, and the retiring chairman, Haq Nawaz Akhtar, complained that ‘the plant could have fetched more money if it were sold as scrap.’ The general perception was that the president and prime minister had helped out their friends. A frequenter of the Stock Exchange told me in Karachi that Arif Habib Securities (which owns 20 per cent) was set up as a front company for Shaukat Aziz. The Saudi steel giant (40 per cent) is reputedly on very friendly terms with Musharraf, who turned up to open a steel factory set up by the group on 220 acres of land rented from the adjoining Pakistan Steel Mills. Now they own it all.
After the Supreme Court insisted that ‘disappeared’ political activists be produced in court and refused to dismiss rape cases, there were worries in Islamabad that the chief justice might even declare the military presidency unconstitutional. Paranoia set in. Measures had to be taken. The general and his cabinet decided to frighten Chaudhry by suspending him. The chief justice was kept in solitary confinement for several hours, manhandled by intelligence operatives, and traduced on state television. But instead of caving in and accepting a generous resignation settlement, the judge insisted on defending himself, triggering a remarkable movement in defence of an independent judiciary. This is surprising. Pakistani judges are notoriously conservative and have legitimised every coup with a bogus ‘doctrine of necessity’ ruling (although some did refuse to swear an oath of loyalty to Musharraf).
When I visited Pakistan in April the protests were getting bigger every day. Initially confined to the country’s 80,000 lawyers and several dozen judges, unrest soon spread beyond them, which was unusual in a country whose people have become increasingly alienated from elite rule. But the lawyers were marching in defence of the constitutional separation of powers. There was something delightfully old-fashioned about this struggle: it involved neither money nor religion, but principle. Careerists from the opposition (some of whom had organised thuggish assaults on the Supreme Court when in power) tried to make the cause their own. ‘Don’t imagine they’ve all suddenly changed,’ Abid Hasan Manto, one of the country’s most respected lawyers, told me. ‘On the other hand, when the time comes almost anything can act as a spark.’
It soon became obvious to most people in the Islamabad bureaucracy that they had made a gigantic blunder. But as often happens in a crisis, instead of acknowledging this and moving to correct it, the perpetrators decided on a show of strength. The first targets were independent TV channels. In Karachi and other cities in the south three channels suddenly went dark as they were screening reports on the demonstrations. There was popular outrage. On 5 May Chaudhry drove from Islamabad to give a speech in Lahore, stopping at every town en route to meet supporters; it took 26 hours to complete a journey that should take four or five. In Islamabad they plotted a counter-strike.
The judge was due to visit Karachi, the country’s largest city, on 12 May. Political power here rests in the hands of the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement/United National Movement), an unsavoury outfit created during a previous dictatorship and notorious for its involvement in protection rackets and other kinds of violence. It has supported Musharraf loyally through every crisis. Its leader, Altaf Hussain, guides the movement from a safe perch in London, fearful of retribution from his many opponents were he to return. In a video address to his followers in Karachi he said: ‘If conspiracies are hatched to end the present democratically elected government then each and every worker of MQM . . . will stand firm and defend the democratic government.’ It was typical of him. On Islamabad’s instructions, the MQM leaders decided to prevent the judge addressing the meeting in Karachi. He was not allowed to leave the airport. His supporters in different parts of the city were assaulted. Almost fifty people were killed. After footage of the violence was screened on Aaj TV, the station was attacked by armed MQM volunteers, who shot at the building for six whole hours and set cars in the parking lot on fire.
The management of the TV station mysteriously failed to reach senior police officers, the chief minister or the governor. People understood why, and a successful general strike followed, which further isolated the regime. A devastating report, Carnage in Karachi, published in August by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, confirmed in great detail what everyone already knew: the police and army had been ordered to stand by while armed MQM members went on the rampage.
Musharraf, trying desperately to keep a grip on the country, had no alternative but to sound the retreat. The chief justice’s appeal against his suspension was finally admitted and heard by the Supreme Court. On 20 July a unanimous decision was made to reinstate him, and shamefaced government lawyers were seen leaving the precinct in a hurry. A reinvigorated court got down to business. Hafiz Abdul Basit was a ‘disappeared’ prisoner accused of terrorism. The chief justice summoned Tariq Pervez, the director-general of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, and asked him politely where the prisoner was being kept. Pervez replied that he had no idea and had never heard of Basit. The chief justice instructed the police chief to produce Basit in court within 48 hours: ‘Either produce the detainee or get ready to go to jail.’ Two days later Basit was produced and then released, after the police failed to present any substantial evidence against him. Washington and London were not happy. They were convinced that Basit was a terrorist who should have been kept in prison indefinitely, as he certainly would have been in Britain or the US.
The Supreme Court is currently considering six petitions challenging Musharraf’s decision to contest the presidency without relinquishing his command of the army. There is much nervousness in Islamabad. The president’s supporters are threatening dire consequences if the court rules against him. But to declare a state of emergency would require the support of the army, and I was told that informal soundings had revealed a reluctance to intervene on the part of the generals. Their polite excuse was that they were too heavily committed to the ‘war on terror’ to be able to preserve law and order in the cities.
As the judicial crisis temporarily ended, a more sombre one loomed. Most of today’s jihadi groups are the mongrel offspring of Pakistani and Western intelligence outfits, born in the 1980s when General Zia was in power and waging the West’s war against the godless Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. That is when state patronage of Islamist groups began. One cleric who benefited was Maulana Abdullah, who was allotted land to build a madrassa in the heart of Islamabad, not far from the government buildings. Soon the area was increased so that two separate facilities (for male and female students) could be constructed, together with an enlarged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. State money was provided for all this, and the government is the technical owner of the property.
During the 1980s and 1990s this complex became a transit camp for young jihadis on their way to fight in Afghanistan and, later, Kashmir. Abdullah made no secret of his beliefs. He was sympathetic to the Saudi-Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and during the Iraq-Iran war was only too happy to encourage the killing of Shia ‘heretics’ in Pakistan. It was his patronage of ultra-sectarian, anti-Shia terror groups that led to his assassination in October 1998. Members of a rival Muslim faction killed him soon after he had finished praying in his own mosque.
His sons, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, then took control of the mosque and religious schools. The government agreed that Aziz would lead the Friday congregation and preach the weekly sermon after Friday prayers. His sermons were often supportive of al-Qaida, though he was more careful about his language after 9/11. Senior civil servants and military officers often attended Friday prayers. The better-educated and soft-spoken Rashid, with his lean, haggard face and ragged beard, was left to act as spin-doctor. He was wheeled on to charm visiting foreign or local journalists, and did it well.
But after November 2004, when the army, under heavy US pressure, launched an offensive in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, relations between the brothers and the government became tense. Aziz in particular was livid. He might not have done anything about it, but, according to Rashid, ‘a retired colonel of the Pakistan Army approached us with a written request for a fatwa clarifying the Sharia perspective on the army waging a war on the tribal people.’ Aziz did not waste any time. He issued a fatwa declaring that the killing of its own people by a Muslim army is haram (‘forbidden’), ‘that any army official killed during the operation should not be given a Muslim burial’ and that ‘the militants who die while fighting the Pakistan Army are martyrs.’ Within days of its publication the fatwa had been publicly endorsed by almost five hundred ‘religious scholars’. Despite heavy pressure from the mosque’s patrons in the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence, the brothers refused to withdraw the fatwa. The government response was surprisingly muted. Aziz’s official status as the mosque’s imam was ended and an arrest warrant issued against him, but it was never served and the brothers were allowed to carry on as usual. Perhaps the ISI thought they might still prove useful.
Earlier that year the government claimed it had uncovered a terrorist plot to bomb military installations, including the GHQ and other state buildings, on 14 August. Machine-guns and explosives were found in Abdul Rashid Ghazi’s car. New warrants were issued against the brothers and they were arrested. At this point, the religious affairs minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, General Zia’s son, persuaded his colleagues to pardon the clerics in return for a written apology pledging that they wouldn’t become involved in the armed struggle. Rashid claimed the whole plot had been scripted to please the West and in a newspaper article asked the religious affairs minister to provide proof that he had given the undertaking the minister had supposedly asked for. There was no response.
In January this year, the brothers decided to shift their focus from foreign to domestic policy and demanded an immediate implementation of Sharia law. Until then they had been content to denounce US policies in the Muslim world and America’s local point-man Musharraf for helping dismantle the Taliban government in Afghanistan. They did not publicly support the three attempts made on Musharraf’s life, but it was hardly a secret that they regretted his survival. The statement they issued in January was intended as an open provocation to the regime. Aziz spelled out his programme: ‘We will never permit dance and music in Pakistan. All those interested in such activities should shift to India. We are tired of waiting. It is Sharia or martyrdom.’ They felt threatened by the government’s demolition of two mosques that had been built illegally on public land. When they received notices announcing the demolition of parts of the Red Mosque and the women’s seminary the brothers dispatched dozens of women students in black burqas to occupy a children’s library next to their seminary. The intelligence agencies appeared to be taken aback, but quickly negotiated an end to the occupation.
The brothers continued to test the authorities. Sharia was implemented and there was a public bonfire of books, CDs and DVDs. Then the women from the madrassa directed their fire against Islamabad’s up-market brothels, targeting Aunty Shamim, a well-known procuress who provided ‘decent’ girls for indecent purposes, and whose clients included the local great and good (a number of them moderate religious leaders). Aunty ran the brothel like an office: she kept office hours and shut up shop at midday on Friday so that clients could go to the nearest mosque, which happened to be the Lal Masjid. The morality brigades raided the brothel and ‘freed’ the women. Most of the girls were educated, some were single parents, others were widows, all were desperately short of funds. The office hours suited them. Aunty Shamim fled town, and her workers sought similar employment elsewhere, while the madrassa girls celebrated an easy victory.
Emboldened by their triumph, they decided to take on Islamabad’s posh massage parlours, not all of which were sex joints, and some of which were staffed by Chinese citizens. Six Chinese women were abducted in late June and taken to the mosque. The Chinese ambassador was not pleased. He informed President Hu Jintao, who was even less pleased, and Beijing made it clear that it wanted its citizens freed without delay. Government fixers arrived at the mosque to plead the strategic importance of Sino-Pakistan relations, and the women were released. The massage industry promised that henceforth only men would massage other men. Honour was satisfied, even though the deal directly contradicted the message of the Koran. The liberal press depicted the anti-vice campaign as the Talibanisation of Pakistan, which annoyed the Lal Masjid clerics. ‘Rudy Giuliani, when he became mayor of New York, closed the brothels,’ Rashid said. ‘Was that also Talibanisation?’
Angered and embarrassed by the kidnapping of the Chinese women, Musharraf demanded a solution. The Saudi ambassador to Pakistan, Ali Saeed al-Awad Asseri, arrived at the mosque and spent ninety minutes with the brothers. They were welcoming but told him all they wanted was the implementation of Saudi laws in Pakistan. Surely he agreed? The ambassador declined to meet the press after the visit, so his response remains unrecorded. His mediation a failure, Plan B was set in motion.
On 3 July, the paramilitary Rangers began to lay barbed wire at the end of the street in front of the mosque. Some madrassa students opened fire, shot a Ranger dead, and for good measure torched the neighbouring Environment Ministry. Security forces responded the same night with tear gas and machine-guns. The next morning the government declared a curfew in the area and the week-long siege of the mosque began, with television networks beaming images across the world. Rashid must have been pleased. The brothers thought that keeping women and children hostage inside the compound might save them. But some were released and Aziz was arrested as he tried to escape in a burqa. On 10 July, paratroopers finally stormed the complex. Abdul Rashid Ghazi and at least a hundred others died in the ensuing clashes. Eleven soldiers were also killed and more than forty wounded. Several police stations were attacked and there were ominous complaints from the Tribal Areas. Maulana Faqir Mohammed, a leading Taliban supporter, told thousands of armed tribesmen: ‘We beg Allah to destroy Musharraf and we will seek revenge for the Lal Masjid atrocities.’ This view was reiterated by Osama bin Laden, who declared Musharraf an ‘infidel’ and said that ‘removing him is now obligatory.’
I was in Karachi in the last week of August, when suicide bombers hit military targets, among them a bus carrying ISI employees, to avenge Rashid’s death. In the country as a whole the reaction was muted. The leaders of the MMA, a coalition of religious parties that governs the Frontier province and shares power in Baluchistan, made ugly public statements, but took no action. Only a thousand people marched in the demonstration called in Peshawar the day after the deaths. This was the largest protest march, and even here the mood was subdued. There was no shrill glorification of the martyrs. The contrast with the campaign to reinstate the chief justice could not have been more pronounced. Three weeks later, more than 100,000 people gathered in the Punjabi city of Kasur to observe the 250th anniversary of the death of the great 17th-century poet Bulleh Shah, one in a distinguished line of Sufi poets who denounced organised religion and orthodoxy. For him a mullah could be compared to a barking dog or a crowing cock.
The fact is that jihadis are not popular in most of Pakistan, but neither is the government. The Red Mosque episode raised too many unanswered questions. Why did the government not act in January? How did the clerics manage to accumulate such a large store of weapons without the knowledge of the government? Was the ISI aware that an arsenal was concealed inside the mosque? If so, why did they keep quiet? What was the relationship between the clerics and government agencies? Why was Aziz released and allowed to return to his village without being charged? Has the state decided to relinquish its monopoly of violence?
A lot of this has to do with Afghanistan. The failure of the Nato occupation has revived the Taliban as well as the trade in heroin and has destabilised north-western Pakistan. Indiscriminate bombing raids by US planes have killed too many innocent civilians, and the culture of revenge remains strong in the region. The corruption and cronyism of the Karzai government have alienated many Afghans, who welcomed the toppling of Mullah Omar and hoped for better times. Instead, they have witnessed land-grabs and the construction of luxury villas by Karzai’s colleagues. And there are persistent rumours that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the biggest drug barons in the country. The Pashtun tribes have never recognised the Durand Line, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by the British. And so when guerrillas flee to the tribal areas under Pakistani control they are not handed over to Islamabad, but fed and clothed till they go back to Afghanistan or are protected like the al-Qaida leaders. Washington feels that Musharraf’s deals with tribal elders border on capitulation to the Taliban and is angry because Pakistani military actions are paid for by the US and they feel they aren’t getting value for money. This is not to mention the $10 billion Pakistan has received since 9/11 for signing up to the ‘war on terror’.
The problem is that some elements in Pakistani military intelligence feel that they will be able to take Afghanistan back once Operation Enduring Freedom has come to an end. For this reason they refuse to give up their links with the guerrilla leaders. They even think that the US might one day favour such a policy. I doubt whether this could happen: Iranian influence is strong in Herat and western Afghanistan; the Northern Alliance receives weapons from Russia and India is the major regional power. A stable settlement will have to include a regional guarantee of Afghan stability and the formation of a national government after Nato withdrawal.
Even if Washington accepted a cleaned-up version of the Taliban, the other countries involved would not, and a new set of civil conflicts could only lead to disintegration. Were this to happen, the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line might opt to create their own state. It sounds far-fetched today, but what if the confederation of tribes that is Afghanistan were to split up into statelets, each under the protection of a larger power?
Back in the heart of Pakistan the most difficult and explosive issue remains social and economic inequality. This is not unrelated to the increase in the number of madrassas. If there were a half-decent state education system, poor families might not feel the need to hand over a son or daughter to the clerics in the hope that at least one child will be clothed, fed and educated. Were there even the semblance of a health system many would be saved from illnesses contracted as a result of fatigue and poverty. No government since 1947 has done much to reduce inequality. The notion that the soon-to-return Benazir Bhutto, perched on Musharraf’s shoulder, equals progress is as risible as Nawaz Sharif imagining that millions of people would turn out to receive him when he arrived at Islamabad airport last month. A general election is due later this year. If it is as comprehensively rigged as the last one was, the result will be increased alienation from the political process. The outlook is bleak. There is no serious political alternative to military rule.
I spent my last day in Karachi with fishermen in a village near Korangi creek. Shortcut Aziz has signed away the mangroves where shellfish and lobsters flourish, and land is being reclaimed to build Diamond City, Sugar City and other monstrosities on the Gulf model. The fishermen have been campaigning against these encroachments, but with little success. ‘We need a tsunami,’ one of them half-joked. We talked about their living conditions. ‘All we dream of is schools for our children, medicines and clinics in our villages, clean water and electricity in our homes,’ one woman said. ‘Is that too much to ask for?’ Nobody even mentioned religion.
Tariq Ali’s The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power will be published next year.
The Austrailian Elections
Diary
Tom Nairn
LRB 13 December 2007Tom Nairn
On voting day I took the Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to display, often brutally, just what Robert Hughes’s ‘fatal shore’ has become: a terrain beset by identity dilemmas and querulous uncertainty. Who dunnit? Well, everybody, in one way or another. Temple’s Joe Cashin fights his way through gangsters and bent cops to reveal Melbourne as the capital of paedophilia, as well as of southern hemisphere organised crime. Down these mean tourist routes a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The battered policeman from Port Monro (a fictive place somewhere down Great Ocean Road) finds himself searching for an answer far beyond his culprit – and so do the readers, presumably.
Identity lurks between the lines, and surfaces in every punch-up and revelation. Australians don’t tire of reading about this. Recently, there have been three other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous inhabitants, now often called ‘First Australians’ rather than ‘Aborigines’. Hence the point must lie in reimagining the machinery of cohabitation and – more important – in an ever present, questioning epilogue: what’s to be done? Australia was ‘the greatest country on earth’ throughout the recent federal election campaign. Sure, but what (in Benedict Anderson’s inexhaustible phrase) about its ‘imagined community’, its sense of itself? Is community in that overarching sense possible when an unhealed wound remains?
Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly Aboriginal population. In The Broken Shore the cop-hero repeatedly finds his inquiries sidetracked by crazed ideas about native Australians (‘Bongs’) being responsible for most crimes and complaints. He gets somewhere only by disregarding such delusions. But Howard wasn’t so smart. Instead, his campaign of what one important study has called ‘coercive reconciliation’ led right on to the decisive defeat of 24 November.5 He forfeited even his own constituency, as did Mal Brough, the minister for families, community services and indigenous affairs, who was directly in charge of the military intervention.
Are identity dilemmas just a hobby-horse for intellectuals and academics? Six weeks before the election I attended a meeting in Brunswick Town Hall, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It was to be addressed by the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, on the theme of reconciliation. Knowing the unpunctuality of left-wing events, I put off driving down Sydney Road until a quarter of an hour before the talk was due to start: a bad mistake. It took twenty minutes to get through the queues and find somewhere to stand, or rather crouch.
Dodson is splendid in appearance as well as oratory, a prophetic white beard underlining his main argument, that Australia should try and emulate Mandela’s South Africa by setting up commissions to work out reconciliation – and, by implication, to revise the historical understanding that has travestied such problems. Comparatively few Native Australians were present, but the Anglo-Celt-Euro audience was totally absorbed. Something was really on their minds. I imagine they nearly all voted Labor on 24 November. As Thomas Keneally put it in The Age a couple of weeks before the election, this vote should have been on something crucial, and not just Kyoto or global warming in the abstract. The populations around the greatest desert in the world are fearful that climate change will let the desert destroy them, amid mainly unresolved problems – including the key one Dodson was addressing.
By contrast, the election campaign instructed them firmly to stop worrying about all that. Time for change? Well, possibly. In an Australian Financial Review article, the former Labor leader Mark Latham maintained that the last year has been marked by a crippling ‘convergence’ between the Liberal-National alliance and Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to appear even more moderate, business-oriented and pro-American than Howard. Despairing media critics baptised it ‘Me-tooism’, and the result was a campaign setting new standards of witless boredom.
Four days before the vote, my morning latte and toast was droned over by an ABC interview with the Labor finance spokesman, Wayne Swan. Denouncing the Coalition finance minister, Peter Costello, as a reckless spendthrift, he promised his party would be more ‘economically conservative’ (his actual words) than the outgoing neoliberals, and never spend a single cent more than was in the household purse. Most November mornings, I’ve found myself waking up in the grip of a daft dream-notion: Gordon Brown must be behind all this. Does he need a soulmate on the other side of the earth so badly? Kevin Rudd, too, is a politico-intello often caught reading books, who can write uplifting essays based on them, and even speaks good Chinese. His best-known writing is probably on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, claimed as his inspiration just before he was made Labor leader.
The best daily election coverage came from www.crikey.com.au, which acknowledged the wish for a change of government but complained that nobody could imagine what that change might amount to. Between that wish and this election result the shadow has fallen. That is, a conspiracy to prevent Australia’s imagined community of culture from infecting a political order founded on keeping it in its place. Canberra doesn’t only have a stiff upper lip: neoliberal propriety seems to have added steel braces to its Anglo-Celtic heritage. It is now keeping the lid on things by means of a ‘realism’ wholly identified with competence and sound economic management. A Brownish fog had materialised Down Under well before the vote.
This is why it all proved too much for Keneally. Driven to ask in his Age article why political life has forsaken republicanism since the referendum of 1999, he pointed out that clinging to the UK monarchy is a way of keeping everything else unchanged as well. The Anglo-Celtic heritage now desperately needs every symbol and relic it can find. The society so vividly portrayed in Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987) hasn’t disappeared, Keneally contends – it’s simply sat upon. ‘In all the justifiable concentration on other matters,’ he adds, ‘it is worthwhile remarking that after 220 years of loyalty to the British Crown, the very last of the avowed Queen’s men, John Winston Howard, will soon be passing from power by electoral defeat or party handover.’
Won’t that make some difference, given that ‘we know from polls that a majority of Australians will not choose to see their sovereignty reside in Prince Charles’? Only if the whingeing latte-sippers and culture-heads get their act together for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the monarchy turned into a popular revolt against the system of two-party professional politicos. Neither old nor new immigrants could stand the idea that they (and not ordinary voters) would award themselves still more power by appointing a president. It’s true that Kevin Rudd has indicated a wish to reopen the republican door. But how far? Is there really a chance of an Irish-style popular-vote presidency, as Keneally would like? Or would it be another establishment face-saver, leaving Charles and Camilla in with a chance?
In Coercive Reconciliation, Patrick Dodson considers the ‘unfinished business’ of reconciliation, and points out that ‘symbolic’ recognition at constitutional level would be highly practical in reality, believing it would help those in ‘that vast new region of northern and central Australia where Indigenous people maintain their languages, own their traditional lands under Western legal title, and practise their customs while seeking to survive on public sector programmes whose poor design has resulted in entrenched dependency’. This is the world depicted in vivid detail by Wright’s Carpentaria.
Later in Coercive Reconciliation, Guy Rundle argues that Howard’s ‘military humanitarianism’ has both pushed the issue to crisis point, and given a new opportunity for it to be tackled. The European occupation of Australia had the effect of decisively interrupting indigenous evolution towards forms of nation and statehood – thrusting them aside, in effect, and creating in the longer run an inevitable dilemma of readjustment and recognition. Thus ‘reconciliation’ is less a moral posture than a necessity. There can be a viable ‘identity’ only where common assumptions inform an emergent common will.
And, of course, that’s the problem on the new government’s doorstep. A non-military humanitarianism has to base itself on equality, not paternalism. But the former demands a frontal approach, impossible without a re-engineering of existing constitutional norms and practice. Rundle argues that a return to real ‘self-determination’ for Indigenous Australia will be impossible without a recasting of all-Australian self-determination – that is, identity. Is it conceivable that the Howard-Brough breakdown could lead to such broad reform? It may be expecting too much from Rudd’s new government; but what counts is the direction so clearly projected in Coercive Reconciliation, which it would be reasonable to hope Labor would keep open, or at least not obstruct.
In both Australia and the UK, neoliberalism has brought about more authoritarian government. The election was about the Howard government’s abuse of such powers in a number of directions. The positive aspect of the vote was the resistance it expressed to this trend; accompanied by uncertainty about whether Labor would itself succumb to ‘the times’. Just before the vote, the weekly Bulletin’s cover story was an analysis of Rudd’s political personality. The paper’s political correspondent, Chris Hammer, argued that Rudd displayed ‘an autocratic style, with decision-making resting firmly in his hands’. He wants decisions to be based on ‘the broadest possible consultations’ – and then he and his make the key decisions. ‘Who’s electing Rudd?’ Hammer asks, ‘the electorate or the times?’ The latter demand an all-powerful ‘prime-minister/president’ who can play the important cards just as close to his chest as he likes, while remaining ‘relaxed and joking in shopping malls’ and on morning radio shows.
By the end of Hammer’s piece I had that early morning feeling again. Just which country or continent was being discussed? There is for sure one vital distinction: Australian electors have at least voted for Rudd. A written, fixed-term constitution left no alternative. However, with or without a ballot, a popular authoritarianism has become the structural and personal norm. Up Over as distinct from Down Under, acquiescence by the mechanisms of early modern representative democracy may remain preferable, but Brown has made it seem quite non-urgent. ‘Managed capitalism’ has to be managed, while other things can be postponed or sidelined (if not dispensed with ‘for the duration’). Isn’t that the national government Brown aspires to – ‘all the talents’ and so on? In effect, a two-party order mutates into a one-party (and one-nation) identity, the hardened shell of an inherited habitus whose key ambition continues to be expansion, as well as to be on the right side diplomatically.
Harold Laski diagnosed Motherland two-partyism long ago, pointing out that any ins-and-outs system could work only by extensive agreement between the parties – a ‘de facto’ one-party national order where the common ground was all-important. Stability and continuity are sacred, while democratic change and initiative, with their associated risks, are dispensable: small doses please, always at the right time (which may or may not come).
Yet alongside the vote (not exactly because of it) there may be signs of hope. Just after sending the army in, Howard dumbfounded government, party and people by openly admitting something more serious was wrong. He had been previously identified with a dismissal of ‘the black armband view of history’, but now he proclaimed that the true purpose of sending the troops into the outback had been reconciliation: the integration of ancient and contemporary societies into ‘one great tribe’ via a national consultation – in effect, a willed renewal of the country as multiculturally equal. No amount of coercion would achieve that, he conceded. It amounted to recasting the constitution itself, which he proposed to do via its preamble – a curious preface defining greater aims and principles.
But if the constitution were thus redefined, it would be preposterous not to become a republic. A combination of reconciliation and the foundation of a popular republic could then provide an alternative framework to the endlessly reiterated ‘greatest democracy in the world’. Howard’s wild oscillations prior to his annihilation on 24 November indicate how hopeless defence of the system is becoming. As indeed did the campaign and the vote.
The issue foregrounded in the campaign was industrial relations. Howard’s government chose the workplace as its battleground, defending its anti-union legislation and the extraordinary policy of using AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements) as the principal regulator of the labour market. Straightforwardly intended to foster enterprise and obstruct trade-union ‘interference’, the new rules were warmly welcomed by the Australian Business Council, as well as by the usual fleet of free-market columnists in Murdoch’s the Australian and elsewhere. In practice, the programme proved a minefield, with casualties far outnumbering the AWA survivors. It turned getting and keeping a job into a matter of federal policy: for a society reared on the rhetoric of Ned Kelly, egalitarianism and the ‘fair go’, this was hopeless. The Australian ended up urging readers to vote for Rudd.
The same prim authoritarianism more or less excluded Iraq and Afghanistan from the campaign. Surveys have shown a majority of Australians either opposed to or dubious about the Howard government’s military support for these ventures, and the campaign period itself was marked by more casualties in Afghanistan. Rudd has advocated withdrawal from Iraq in 2008, a pledge normally accompanied by new oaths of loyalty to the American alliance. As a Sunday Age editorial commented the day after the vote,
Now, with the death of the third Australian digger . . . it is high time our leaders on both sides of politics did mention the war . . . it is clear that both Howard and Rudd (and their senior ministers and shadow spokespeople) have found it convenient not to draw attention to an issue that could, like the ‘improvised explosive devices’ devised by Taliban bomb-makers, go off at any moment.
Thus the new authoritarianism over-reached itself on both the domestic and the foreign policy fronts. The vote was a rebuke, but not – or not yet – a defeat. The latter would require a sustained strategy, which could not avoid returning to the underlying constitutional issues. In the few days since the vote, signs are less than encouraging. Though Rudd earlier declared his sympathy for Howard’s surprise October initiative, he has now drawn back from it. In the Weekend Australian, the influential Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson said he felt ‘absolute devastation’ at this betrayal.
A centralising authority that has imploded to such an extent must first be reconstructed and imposed, before taking on new aims or directions. And the risk – or should one say, the near certainty? – is that still greater powers will seem to be called for, with further postponement of new designs and shifts, however desirable and overdue.
In Secret River, Kate Grenville tells the story of a vital watercourse that leads to Thornhill’s Place in New South Wales: the ideal home of a penniless 19th-century immigrant. Unfortunately, it was also the route to a frightful massacre of Aboriginal people. The settler’s wife, Sal, is driven by the horror to give up; but he won’t listen. ‘We ain’t going . . . It’s them or us and by Jesus Sal it won’t be us!’ Long after the battle William Thornhill looks out across his domain, proud yet incurably uneasy: ‘Each time, it was a new emptiness . . . He could not understand why it did not feel like triumph.’ As darkness falls he turns to his telescope, searching for something no longer findable: ‘Even after the cliffs had reached the moment at sunset where they blazed gold, even after the dusk left them glowing secretively with an after-light that seemed to come from inside the rocks themselves: even then he sat on, watching, into the dark.’ And in a sense, he watches still. Grenville’s after-light (and darkness) is what matters most here. Australian identity is still anxiety-ridden, if sometimes screened by bluster – but it is also open, and still in search of signs and wonders. Australia’s inhabitants don’t always understand this is why outsiders love the country: its hidden river matters more than the Opera House and the beaches – and infinitely more than the federal political system.
Notes
1 Quercus, 352 pp., £6.99, March, 978 1 84724 044 6.
2 Canongate, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 1 84195 828 6.
3 Vintage, 528 pp., £8.99, June, 978 0 09 948 374 8.
4 Published in Britain next March by Constable.
5 Coercive Reconciliation edited by John Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Arena, 340 pp., A$27.50, October, 978 0 98041 580 3).
Tom Nairn is a researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, concerned with nationalism and the political and cultural effects of globalisation.
Tom Nairn
LRB 13 December 2007Tom Nairn
On voting day I took the Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to display, often brutally, just what Robert Hughes’s ‘fatal shore’ has become: a terrain beset by identity dilemmas and querulous uncertainty. Who dunnit? Well, everybody, in one way or another. Temple’s Joe Cashin fights his way through gangsters and bent cops to reveal Melbourne as the capital of paedophilia, as well as of southern hemisphere organised crime. Down these mean tourist routes a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The battered policeman from Port Monro (a fictive place somewhere down Great Ocean Road) finds himself searching for an answer far beyond his culprit – and so do the readers, presumably.
Identity lurks between the lines, and surfaces in every punch-up and revelation. Australians don’t tire of reading about this. Recently, there have been three other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous inhabitants, now often called ‘First Australians’ rather than ‘Aborigines’. Hence the point must lie in reimagining the machinery of cohabitation and – more important – in an ever present, questioning epilogue: what’s to be done? Australia was ‘the greatest country on earth’ throughout the recent federal election campaign. Sure, but what (in Benedict Anderson’s inexhaustible phrase) about its ‘imagined community’, its sense of itself? Is community in that overarching sense possible when an unhealed wound remains?
Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly Aboriginal population. In The Broken Shore the cop-hero repeatedly finds his inquiries sidetracked by crazed ideas about native Australians (‘Bongs’) being responsible for most crimes and complaints. He gets somewhere only by disregarding such delusions. But Howard wasn’t so smart. Instead, his campaign of what one important study has called ‘coercive reconciliation’ led right on to the decisive defeat of 24 November.5 He forfeited even his own constituency, as did Mal Brough, the minister for families, community services and indigenous affairs, who was directly in charge of the military intervention.
Are identity dilemmas just a hobby-horse for intellectuals and academics? Six weeks before the election I attended a meeting in Brunswick Town Hall, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It was to be addressed by the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, on the theme of reconciliation. Knowing the unpunctuality of left-wing events, I put off driving down Sydney Road until a quarter of an hour before the talk was due to start: a bad mistake. It took twenty minutes to get through the queues and find somewhere to stand, or rather crouch.
Dodson is splendid in appearance as well as oratory, a prophetic white beard underlining his main argument, that Australia should try and emulate Mandela’s South Africa by setting up commissions to work out reconciliation – and, by implication, to revise the historical understanding that has travestied such problems. Comparatively few Native Australians were present, but the Anglo-Celt-Euro audience was totally absorbed. Something was really on their minds. I imagine they nearly all voted Labor on 24 November. As Thomas Keneally put it in The Age a couple of weeks before the election, this vote should have been on something crucial, and not just Kyoto or global warming in the abstract. The populations around the greatest desert in the world are fearful that climate change will let the desert destroy them, amid mainly unresolved problems – including the key one Dodson was addressing.
By contrast, the election campaign instructed them firmly to stop worrying about all that. Time for change? Well, possibly. In an Australian Financial Review article, the former Labor leader Mark Latham maintained that the last year has been marked by a crippling ‘convergence’ between the Liberal-National alliance and Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to appear even more moderate, business-oriented and pro-American than Howard. Despairing media critics baptised it ‘Me-tooism’, and the result was a campaign setting new standards of witless boredom.
Four days before the vote, my morning latte and toast was droned over by an ABC interview with the Labor finance spokesman, Wayne Swan. Denouncing the Coalition finance minister, Peter Costello, as a reckless spendthrift, he promised his party would be more ‘economically conservative’ (his actual words) than the outgoing neoliberals, and never spend a single cent more than was in the household purse. Most November mornings, I’ve found myself waking up in the grip of a daft dream-notion: Gordon Brown must be behind all this. Does he need a soulmate on the other side of the earth so badly? Kevin Rudd, too, is a politico-intello often caught reading books, who can write uplifting essays based on them, and even speaks good Chinese. His best-known writing is probably on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, claimed as his inspiration just before he was made Labor leader.
The best daily election coverage came from www.crikey.com.au, which acknowledged the wish for a change of government but complained that nobody could imagine what that change might amount to. Between that wish and this election result the shadow has fallen. That is, a conspiracy to prevent Australia’s imagined community of culture from infecting a political order founded on keeping it in its place. Canberra doesn’t only have a stiff upper lip: neoliberal propriety seems to have added steel braces to its Anglo-Celtic heritage. It is now keeping the lid on things by means of a ‘realism’ wholly identified with competence and sound economic management. A Brownish fog had materialised Down Under well before the vote.
This is why it all proved too much for Keneally. Driven to ask in his Age article why political life has forsaken republicanism since the referendum of 1999, he pointed out that clinging to the UK monarchy is a way of keeping everything else unchanged as well. The Anglo-Celtic heritage now desperately needs every symbol and relic it can find. The society so vividly portrayed in Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987) hasn’t disappeared, Keneally contends – it’s simply sat upon. ‘In all the justifiable concentration on other matters,’ he adds, ‘it is worthwhile remarking that after 220 years of loyalty to the British Crown, the very last of the avowed Queen’s men, John Winston Howard, will soon be passing from power by electoral defeat or party handover.’
Won’t that make some difference, given that ‘we know from polls that a majority of Australians will not choose to see their sovereignty reside in Prince Charles’? Only if the whingeing latte-sippers and culture-heads get their act together for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the monarchy turned into a popular revolt against the system of two-party professional politicos. Neither old nor new immigrants could stand the idea that they (and not ordinary voters) would award themselves still more power by appointing a president. It’s true that Kevin Rudd has indicated a wish to reopen the republican door. But how far? Is there really a chance of an Irish-style popular-vote presidency, as Keneally would like? Or would it be another establishment face-saver, leaving Charles and Camilla in with a chance?
In Coercive Reconciliation, Patrick Dodson considers the ‘unfinished business’ of reconciliation, and points out that ‘symbolic’ recognition at constitutional level would be highly practical in reality, believing it would help those in ‘that vast new region of northern and central Australia where Indigenous people maintain their languages, own their traditional lands under Western legal title, and practise their customs while seeking to survive on public sector programmes whose poor design has resulted in entrenched dependency’. This is the world depicted in vivid detail by Wright’s Carpentaria.
Later in Coercive Reconciliation, Guy Rundle argues that Howard’s ‘military humanitarianism’ has both pushed the issue to crisis point, and given a new opportunity for it to be tackled. The European occupation of Australia had the effect of decisively interrupting indigenous evolution towards forms of nation and statehood – thrusting them aside, in effect, and creating in the longer run an inevitable dilemma of readjustment and recognition. Thus ‘reconciliation’ is less a moral posture than a necessity. There can be a viable ‘identity’ only where common assumptions inform an emergent common will.
And, of course, that’s the problem on the new government’s doorstep. A non-military humanitarianism has to base itself on equality, not paternalism. But the former demands a frontal approach, impossible without a re-engineering of existing constitutional norms and practice. Rundle argues that a return to real ‘self-determination’ for Indigenous Australia will be impossible without a recasting of all-Australian self-determination – that is, identity. Is it conceivable that the Howard-Brough breakdown could lead to such broad reform? It may be expecting too much from Rudd’s new government; but what counts is the direction so clearly projected in Coercive Reconciliation, which it would be reasonable to hope Labor would keep open, or at least not obstruct.
In both Australia and the UK, neoliberalism has brought about more authoritarian government. The election was about the Howard government’s abuse of such powers in a number of directions. The positive aspect of the vote was the resistance it expressed to this trend; accompanied by uncertainty about whether Labor would itself succumb to ‘the times’. Just before the vote, the weekly Bulletin’s cover story was an analysis of Rudd’s political personality. The paper’s political correspondent, Chris Hammer, argued that Rudd displayed ‘an autocratic style, with decision-making resting firmly in his hands’. He wants decisions to be based on ‘the broadest possible consultations’ – and then he and his make the key decisions. ‘Who’s electing Rudd?’ Hammer asks, ‘the electorate or the times?’ The latter demand an all-powerful ‘prime-minister/president’ who can play the important cards just as close to his chest as he likes, while remaining ‘relaxed and joking in shopping malls’ and on morning radio shows.
By the end of Hammer’s piece I had that early morning feeling again. Just which country or continent was being discussed? There is for sure one vital distinction: Australian electors have at least voted for Rudd. A written, fixed-term constitution left no alternative. However, with or without a ballot, a popular authoritarianism has become the structural and personal norm. Up Over as distinct from Down Under, acquiescence by the mechanisms of early modern representative democracy may remain preferable, but Brown has made it seem quite non-urgent. ‘Managed capitalism’ has to be managed, while other things can be postponed or sidelined (if not dispensed with ‘for the duration’). Isn’t that the national government Brown aspires to – ‘all the talents’ and so on? In effect, a two-party order mutates into a one-party (and one-nation) identity, the hardened shell of an inherited habitus whose key ambition continues to be expansion, as well as to be on the right side diplomatically.
Harold Laski diagnosed Motherland two-partyism long ago, pointing out that any ins-and-outs system could work only by extensive agreement between the parties – a ‘de facto’ one-party national order where the common ground was all-important. Stability and continuity are sacred, while democratic change and initiative, with their associated risks, are dispensable: small doses please, always at the right time (which may or may not come).
Yet alongside the vote (not exactly because of it) there may be signs of hope. Just after sending the army in, Howard dumbfounded government, party and people by openly admitting something more serious was wrong. He had been previously identified with a dismissal of ‘the black armband view of history’, but now he proclaimed that the true purpose of sending the troops into the outback had been reconciliation: the integration of ancient and contemporary societies into ‘one great tribe’ via a national consultation – in effect, a willed renewal of the country as multiculturally equal. No amount of coercion would achieve that, he conceded. It amounted to recasting the constitution itself, which he proposed to do via its preamble – a curious preface defining greater aims and principles.
But if the constitution were thus redefined, it would be preposterous not to become a republic. A combination of reconciliation and the foundation of a popular republic could then provide an alternative framework to the endlessly reiterated ‘greatest democracy in the world’. Howard’s wild oscillations prior to his annihilation on 24 November indicate how hopeless defence of the system is becoming. As indeed did the campaign and the vote.
The issue foregrounded in the campaign was industrial relations. Howard’s government chose the workplace as its battleground, defending its anti-union legislation and the extraordinary policy of using AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements) as the principal regulator of the labour market. Straightforwardly intended to foster enterprise and obstruct trade-union ‘interference’, the new rules were warmly welcomed by the Australian Business Council, as well as by the usual fleet of free-market columnists in Murdoch’s the Australian and elsewhere. In practice, the programme proved a minefield, with casualties far outnumbering the AWA survivors. It turned getting and keeping a job into a matter of federal policy: for a society reared on the rhetoric of Ned Kelly, egalitarianism and the ‘fair go’, this was hopeless. The Australian ended up urging readers to vote for Rudd.
The same prim authoritarianism more or less excluded Iraq and Afghanistan from the campaign. Surveys have shown a majority of Australians either opposed to or dubious about the Howard government’s military support for these ventures, and the campaign period itself was marked by more casualties in Afghanistan. Rudd has advocated withdrawal from Iraq in 2008, a pledge normally accompanied by new oaths of loyalty to the American alliance. As a Sunday Age editorial commented the day after the vote,
Now, with the death of the third Australian digger . . . it is high time our leaders on both sides of politics did mention the war . . . it is clear that both Howard and Rudd (and their senior ministers and shadow spokespeople) have found it convenient not to draw attention to an issue that could, like the ‘improvised explosive devices’ devised by Taliban bomb-makers, go off at any moment.
Thus the new authoritarianism over-reached itself on both the domestic and the foreign policy fronts. The vote was a rebuke, but not – or not yet – a defeat. The latter would require a sustained strategy, which could not avoid returning to the underlying constitutional issues. In the few days since the vote, signs are less than encouraging. Though Rudd earlier declared his sympathy for Howard’s surprise October initiative, he has now drawn back from it. In the Weekend Australian, the influential Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson said he felt ‘absolute devastation’ at this betrayal.
A centralising authority that has imploded to such an extent must first be reconstructed and imposed, before taking on new aims or directions. And the risk – or should one say, the near certainty? – is that still greater powers will seem to be called for, with further postponement of new designs and shifts, however desirable and overdue.
In Secret River, Kate Grenville tells the story of a vital watercourse that leads to Thornhill’s Place in New South Wales: the ideal home of a penniless 19th-century immigrant. Unfortunately, it was also the route to a frightful massacre of Aboriginal people. The settler’s wife, Sal, is driven by the horror to give up; but he won’t listen. ‘We ain’t going . . . It’s them or us and by Jesus Sal it won’t be us!’ Long after the battle William Thornhill looks out across his domain, proud yet incurably uneasy: ‘Each time, it was a new emptiness . . . He could not understand why it did not feel like triumph.’ As darkness falls he turns to his telescope, searching for something no longer findable: ‘Even after the cliffs had reached the moment at sunset where they blazed gold, even after the dusk left them glowing secretively with an after-light that seemed to come from inside the rocks themselves: even then he sat on, watching, into the dark.’ And in a sense, he watches still. Grenville’s after-light (and darkness) is what matters most here. Australian identity is still anxiety-ridden, if sometimes screened by bluster – but it is also open, and still in search of signs and wonders. Australia’s inhabitants don’t always understand this is why outsiders love the country: its hidden river matters more than the Opera House and the beaches – and infinitely more than the federal political system.
Notes
1 Quercus, 352 pp., £6.99, March, 978 1 84724 044 6.
2 Canongate, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 1 84195 828 6.
3 Vintage, 528 pp., £8.99, June, 978 0 09 948 374 8.
4 Published in Britain next March by Constable.
5 Coercive Reconciliation edited by John Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Arena, 340 pp., A$27.50, October, 978 0 98041 580 3).
Tom Nairn is a researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, concerned with nationalism and the political and cultural effects of globalisation.
Black-White Anti-Immigration Alliance?
Activist fails to rally blacks on illegal-immigration issue
Homeless advocate Ted Hayes is making little ground in uniting those who believe that migrants pose an economic threat.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 31, 2007
The forum seemed tailor-made for Ted Hayes, the Los Angeles activist for the homeless who has become one of the nation's most visible African Americans raising a ruckus about illegal immigration.
A mostly black crowd had gathered at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles for a feisty debate about illegal immigration's effects on the African American community. When Minister Tony Muhammad of the Nation of Islam and others called for black-brown unity, they drew boos and yells of dissent.
"Illegal immigration is wrong! They have no business being in this country!" shouted one audience member, drawing thunderous applause.
But Hayes was nowhere near the podium. He sat in the church's back pew, silent. He had not been invited to speak. In fact, he had been explicitly rejected because panel organizers felt he lacked legitimacy, according to one of them.
And therein lies a conundrum. As immigration becomes a red-hot issue in the presidential campaign, it is stirring volatile sentiments among a sizable number of blacks who believe illegal immigrants are threatening their jobs, housing, healthcare and educational benefits. But no one has been able to unite them and effectively push for their interests.
Certainly not Hayes. Since last year, the 56-year-old lean and lanky activist has tried to rouse blacks against illegal immigration with fiery appearances on national TV, protest marches, civil disobedience and leadership of Choose Black America, an anti-illegal immigration organization launched and financially supported by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"Illegal immigration is the greatest threat to blacks since slavery," Hayes declared at a recent Choose Black America meeting in Inglewood. "Immigrants got our jobs, the hospitals, the schools. Black folks can't compete."
So far, Hayes has failed to gain traction. His events go mostly unattended. His organization has managed to recruit only about 50 members nationwide. An Internet appeal to support his crusade netted only about $500, at last count.
A huge misstep, said commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, was Hayes' decision to align himself with the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group viewed as extremist by many people, including blacks. Founder Jim Gilchrist, who calls Hayes "spectacular," sharply disputes the charge and said Minutemen are patriots of all races who do not engage in violence.
The Minuteman taint continues to reverberate, however. It's one reason the Community Call to Action and Accountability's executive committee rejected Hayes as a panelist for its recent immigration forum, said member Greg Akili.
"When you align yourself with people who have been an anathema to civil rights, people scratch their heads. They say, 'I may support your position but I see you standing with people who I know ain't with me,' " Akili said.
The activist denounces all the charges and says he is no extremist. At least one Latino activist, Nativo Lopez of the Mexican American Political Assn., agrees.
Lopez said he has met with Hayes to discuss common concerns about immigration's impact on blacks and U.S.-Mexico trade and labor policies. Hayes proposed that the two men plan a joint march in support of civil rights and economic justice for Mexicans in Mexico.
"He's not a racist," Lopez said. But the furor has badly damaged him, and Hayes said it illustrates the vicious treatment blacks get when they dare to criticize illegal immigration. Which is why, he added, few black leaders publicly do.
On that point, many of his critics agree.
"In black neighborhoods, most of the folks I encounter are leery of immigrants and most have negative perceptions of them, unfortunately," said Larry Aubry, columnist for the black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel and an executive committee member of the action and accountability group. "But black leadership throughout the community has been frankly derelict in addressing this issue."
A recent Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll showed that more than two-thirds of blacks nationwide said that illegal immigration was an important problem. About half supported a pathway to citizenship for those who learn English, pay fines and have no criminal record, compared with 60% of whites.
But more believed illegal immigrants had a negative impact on their community than those who viewed them positively. And blacks generally supported harsher enforcement measures, such as deportation and border security, than whites.
Such sentiments -- and a push from a friend -- helped propel Hayes to take on the controversial issue last year.
Inglewood businessman James Spencer plied him with arguments, Hayes said, that illegal immigrants were draining resources that could otherwise help the homeless on skid row, most of whom are black men.
Hayes knew the issue would jeopardize his homeless work, endanger his safety and strain ties with Latino friends.
He chose to do it anyway, he said, because he could not avoid seeing a link between illegal immigration and diminishing resources for struggling blacks.
"I thought, 'OK, I can suffer for this cause,' " Hayes said.
And he has.
When focused on homelessness, Hayes lived in relative comfort. A $330,000 budget of mostly state and federal grants supported Dome Village, enough to hire a 10-member staff and pay Hayes a $30,000 annual salary as president.
The village, launched in 1993 when the Atlantic Richfield Corp. donated $250,000 to buy 18 portable domed housing units, has sheltered about 500 people since its start, and offered them schooling, job training and other services.
The village was Hayes' most tangible success in a 23-year history of homeless activism. A Georgia native personally seared by Jim Crow racism, Hayes first came to Los Angeles in 1970 and says he found Jesus. He became a born-again Christian and traveling minister, got married, moved to Riverside in 1981 and suffered several business disasters in auto detailing, break-dancing and roofing.
In 1984, Hayes said, God called him forth to a new cause: helping the homeless. As he watched a televised report about Tent City, a two-week gathering of homeless people in downtown Los Angeles at Christmastime, he abruptly decided to join them.
After city officials shut down Tent City on Jan. 2, 1985, Hayes spent the next eight years living on skid row and elsewhere on the streets. With Dome Village, Hayes began receiving international news coverage, visits from the likes of Britain's Prince Edward, help from a raft of community volunteers and, for the first time in many years, a steady paycheck.
Now most of that is gone.
Last year, Dome Village shut its doors after losing its reduced-rate rent and subsequently lost its federal funding. Hayes sold off the domes and, with part of the proceeds, moved his operations to a $2,000-a-month downtown loft. But the money is just about gone, and Hayes is in constant fear of eviction. Today, he lives on monthly unemployment benefits of $1,200, which he said are set to run out next month.
The "dominoes started falling," wife Arlene Hayes said, when news hit in 2005 that Hayes had become a Republican. For whatever reason, his Democratic landlord subsequently raised his rent by 700%, forcing Dome Village to close.
Hayes, whose father was an Army sergeant and a World War II veteran, said he liked President Bush's muscular Mideast foreign policy and supports the Iraq War. Those positions have not endeared him in the largely Democratic black community.
Then Hayes took up immigration, embraced the Minutemen and got slammed even harder.
Hayes makes no apologies for his positions. He does, however, voice regrets about his confrontational style, which has alienated him from such powerful black leaders as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and City Councilwoman Jan Perry -- neither of whom chose to publicly comment on him.
Asked to evaluate his effectiveness, Hayes is unflinchingly blunt. "Horrible. A failure," he said. "I'm a liability to the cause, because I seem to anger more people in power than make them allies." Organizations he began with a flourish, including the Black Elephants Republican group and the anti-illegal immigration Crispus Attucks Brigade, never grew beyond a handful of members.
Choose Black America also has failed to take off -- one reason the Federation for American Immigration Reform has not been entirely thrilled with Hayes' leadership.
Hayes' penchant for confrontation and civil disobedience is not a tactic the federation would use, said national director Susan Tully. "I'm not sure he's the guy to take the organization where it wanted to go," she said.
Hayes said he would likely step down as acting director.
For now, he continues to meet regularly with the dozen or so Choose Black America members in Spencer's Inglewood office. At one recent meeting, initial discussion about immigration-related news quickly turned into tirades about illegal immigrants -- their "slave labor" wages, their use of housing and healthcare benefits, their appropriation of black civil rights symbols for their cause.
But the outbursts masked personal pain. Elzie Alexander, jobless and homeless, said he has applied for dozens of jobs flipping burgers and cleaning hotels but has been turned down each time because he can't speak Spanish. Spencer said nearby hospitals have had to close, which he blames on too many uninsured illegal immigrants.
For speaking up about their plight, the men say they are grateful to Hayes.
"He stood up to the plate when no one else did," Spencer said.
teresa.watanabe@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hayes31dec31,1,298879.story?track=rss
Homeless advocate Ted Hayes is making little ground in uniting those who believe that migrants pose an economic threat.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 31, 2007
The forum seemed tailor-made for Ted Hayes, the Los Angeles activist for the homeless who has become one of the nation's most visible African Americans raising a ruckus about illegal immigration.
A mostly black crowd had gathered at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles for a feisty debate about illegal immigration's effects on the African American community. When Minister Tony Muhammad of the Nation of Islam and others called for black-brown unity, they drew boos and yells of dissent.
"Illegal immigration is wrong! They have no business being in this country!" shouted one audience member, drawing thunderous applause.
But Hayes was nowhere near the podium. He sat in the church's back pew, silent. He had not been invited to speak. In fact, he had been explicitly rejected because panel organizers felt he lacked legitimacy, according to one of them.
And therein lies a conundrum. As immigration becomes a red-hot issue in the presidential campaign, it is stirring volatile sentiments among a sizable number of blacks who believe illegal immigrants are threatening their jobs, housing, healthcare and educational benefits. But no one has been able to unite them and effectively push for their interests.
Certainly not Hayes. Since last year, the 56-year-old lean and lanky activist has tried to rouse blacks against illegal immigration with fiery appearances on national TV, protest marches, civil disobedience and leadership of Choose Black America, an anti-illegal immigration organization launched and financially supported by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"Illegal immigration is the greatest threat to blacks since slavery," Hayes declared at a recent Choose Black America meeting in Inglewood. "Immigrants got our jobs, the hospitals, the schools. Black folks can't compete."
So far, Hayes has failed to gain traction. His events go mostly unattended. His organization has managed to recruit only about 50 members nationwide. An Internet appeal to support his crusade netted only about $500, at last count.
A huge misstep, said commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, was Hayes' decision to align himself with the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group viewed as extremist by many people, including blacks. Founder Jim Gilchrist, who calls Hayes "spectacular," sharply disputes the charge and said Minutemen are patriots of all races who do not engage in violence.
The Minuteman taint continues to reverberate, however. It's one reason the Community Call to Action and Accountability's executive committee rejected Hayes as a panelist for its recent immigration forum, said member Greg Akili.
"When you align yourself with people who have been an anathema to civil rights, people scratch their heads. They say, 'I may support your position but I see you standing with people who I know ain't with me,' " Akili said.
The activist denounces all the charges and says he is no extremist. At least one Latino activist, Nativo Lopez of the Mexican American Political Assn., agrees.
Lopez said he has met with Hayes to discuss common concerns about immigration's impact on blacks and U.S.-Mexico trade and labor policies. Hayes proposed that the two men plan a joint march in support of civil rights and economic justice for Mexicans in Mexico.
"He's not a racist," Lopez said. But the furor has badly damaged him, and Hayes said it illustrates the vicious treatment blacks get when they dare to criticize illegal immigration. Which is why, he added, few black leaders publicly do.
On that point, many of his critics agree.
"In black neighborhoods, most of the folks I encounter are leery of immigrants and most have negative perceptions of them, unfortunately," said Larry Aubry, columnist for the black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel and an executive committee member of the action and accountability group. "But black leadership throughout the community has been frankly derelict in addressing this issue."
A recent Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll showed that more than two-thirds of blacks nationwide said that illegal immigration was an important problem. About half supported a pathway to citizenship for those who learn English, pay fines and have no criminal record, compared with 60% of whites.
But more believed illegal immigrants had a negative impact on their community than those who viewed them positively. And blacks generally supported harsher enforcement measures, such as deportation and border security, than whites.
Such sentiments -- and a push from a friend -- helped propel Hayes to take on the controversial issue last year.
Inglewood businessman James Spencer plied him with arguments, Hayes said, that illegal immigrants were draining resources that could otherwise help the homeless on skid row, most of whom are black men.
Hayes knew the issue would jeopardize his homeless work, endanger his safety and strain ties with Latino friends.
He chose to do it anyway, he said, because he could not avoid seeing a link between illegal immigration and diminishing resources for struggling blacks.
"I thought, 'OK, I can suffer for this cause,' " Hayes said.
And he has.
When focused on homelessness, Hayes lived in relative comfort. A $330,000 budget of mostly state and federal grants supported Dome Village, enough to hire a 10-member staff and pay Hayes a $30,000 annual salary as president.
The village, launched in 1993 when the Atlantic Richfield Corp. donated $250,000 to buy 18 portable domed housing units, has sheltered about 500 people since its start, and offered them schooling, job training and other services.
The village was Hayes' most tangible success in a 23-year history of homeless activism. A Georgia native personally seared by Jim Crow racism, Hayes first came to Los Angeles in 1970 and says he found Jesus. He became a born-again Christian and traveling minister, got married, moved to Riverside in 1981 and suffered several business disasters in auto detailing, break-dancing and roofing.
In 1984, Hayes said, God called him forth to a new cause: helping the homeless. As he watched a televised report about Tent City, a two-week gathering of homeless people in downtown Los Angeles at Christmastime, he abruptly decided to join them.
After city officials shut down Tent City on Jan. 2, 1985, Hayes spent the next eight years living on skid row and elsewhere on the streets. With Dome Village, Hayes began receiving international news coverage, visits from the likes of Britain's Prince Edward, help from a raft of community volunteers and, for the first time in many years, a steady paycheck.
Now most of that is gone.
Last year, Dome Village shut its doors after losing its reduced-rate rent and subsequently lost its federal funding. Hayes sold off the domes and, with part of the proceeds, moved his operations to a $2,000-a-month downtown loft. But the money is just about gone, and Hayes is in constant fear of eviction. Today, he lives on monthly unemployment benefits of $1,200, which he said are set to run out next month.
The "dominoes started falling," wife Arlene Hayes said, when news hit in 2005 that Hayes had become a Republican. For whatever reason, his Democratic landlord subsequently raised his rent by 700%, forcing Dome Village to close.
Hayes, whose father was an Army sergeant and a World War II veteran, said he liked President Bush's muscular Mideast foreign policy and supports the Iraq War. Those positions have not endeared him in the largely Democratic black community.
Then Hayes took up immigration, embraced the Minutemen and got slammed even harder.
Hayes makes no apologies for his positions. He does, however, voice regrets about his confrontational style, which has alienated him from such powerful black leaders as U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and City Councilwoman Jan Perry -- neither of whom chose to publicly comment on him.
Asked to evaluate his effectiveness, Hayes is unflinchingly blunt. "Horrible. A failure," he said. "I'm a liability to the cause, because I seem to anger more people in power than make them allies." Organizations he began with a flourish, including the Black Elephants Republican group and the anti-illegal immigration Crispus Attucks Brigade, never grew beyond a handful of members.
Choose Black America also has failed to take off -- one reason the Federation for American Immigration Reform has not been entirely thrilled with Hayes' leadership.
Hayes' penchant for confrontation and civil disobedience is not a tactic the federation would use, said national director Susan Tully. "I'm not sure he's the guy to take the organization where it wanted to go," she said.
Hayes said he would likely step down as acting director.
For now, he continues to meet regularly with the dozen or so Choose Black America members in Spencer's Inglewood office. At one recent meeting, initial discussion about immigration-related news quickly turned into tirades about illegal immigrants -- their "slave labor" wages, their use of housing and healthcare benefits, their appropriation of black civil rights symbols for their cause.
But the outbursts masked personal pain. Elzie Alexander, jobless and homeless, said he has applied for dozens of jobs flipping burgers and cleaning hotels but has been turned down each time because he can't speak Spanish. Spencer said nearby hospitals have had to close, which he blames on too many uninsured illegal immigrants.
For speaking up about their plight, the men say they are grateful to Hayes.
"He stood up to the plate when no one else did," Spencer said.
teresa.watanabe@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-hayes31dec31,1,298879.story?track=rss
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Robert Fisk on Bhutto Assassination
They Don’t Blame Al-Qa’ida. They Blame Musharraf.
by Robert Fisk
Published on Saturday, December 29, 2007 by The Independent/UK
Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi - attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives - and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.
But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa’ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.
Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy - and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr - it’s not surprising that the “good-versus-evil” donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.
Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight - which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.
Only a few days ago - in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year - Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: “Daughter of the West”. In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.
Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister - and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir’s appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.
In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir’s murder, the report continues: “The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated - a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.”
When Murtaza’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested - rather than her father’s killers - she says Benazir told her: “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Or so Tariq Ali’s exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.
This vast institution - corrupt, venal and brutal - works for Musharraf.
But it also worked - and still works - for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America’s enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the ” extremists” and “terrorists” who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander’s office. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI’s web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.
But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was “looking forward” to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance - a certain Mr Khan - who supplied all Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let’s not bring that bit of the “axis of evil” into this.
So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those ” extremists” and “terrorists”, not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir’s assassination.
It doesn’t, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.
So let’s run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman’s notebook before he became the top cop in London.
Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir’s supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.
Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?
Er. Yes. Well quite.
You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a “murderer” were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
by Robert Fisk
Published on Saturday, December 29, 2007 by The Independent/UK
Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi - attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives - and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were “extremists” and “terrorists”. Well, you can’t dispute that.
But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa’ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.
Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy - and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr - it’s not surprising that the “good-versus-evil” donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.
Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight - which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.
Only a few days ago - in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year - Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: “Daughter of the West”. In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.
Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister - and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir’s appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.
In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir’s murder, the report continues: “The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation - false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated - a policeman killed who they feared might talk - made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.”
When Murtaza’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested - rather than her father’s killers - she says Benazir told her: “Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.” Or so Tariq Ali’s exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan’s ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.
This vast institution - corrupt, venal and brutal - works for Musharraf.
But it also worked - and still works - for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America’s enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the ” extremists” and “terrorists” who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander’s office. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI’s web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.
But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was “looking forward” to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance - a certain Mr Khan - who supplied all Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let’s not bring that bit of the “axis of evil” into this.
So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those ” extremists” and “terrorists”, not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir’s assassination.
It doesn’t, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.
So let’s run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman’s notebook before he became the top cop in London.
Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir’s supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.
Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.
Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?
Er. Yes. Well quite.
You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a “murderer” were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
Tariq Ali on Bhutto Assassination
A Tragedy Born of Military Despotism and Anarchy
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto heaps despair upon Pakistan. Now her party must be democratically rebuilt
by Tariq Ali
The Guardian
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies - both while she was in office and more recently - are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.
An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country’s supreme court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.
How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?
Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People’s party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.
Pakistan’s turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government’s foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.
Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.
What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It’s a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.
I first met Benazir at her father’s house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father’s death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.
She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn’t be on the “wrong side” of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People’s party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
Benazir’s horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People’s party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto heaps despair upon Pakistan. Now her party must be democratically rebuilt
by Tariq Ali
The Guardian
Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies - both while she was in office and more recently - are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.
An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country’s supreme court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.
How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?
Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People’s party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.
Pakistan’s turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government’s foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.
Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.
What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It’s a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.
I first met Benazir at her father’s house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father’s death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.
She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn’t be on the “wrong side” of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People’s party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
Benazir’s horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People’s party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)