What would MLK say?

The last few days have been full of conflicting emotions for me. On the one hand, I'm glad and a little inspired that the people of the United States have elected their first leader from a minority community. For a country born of the genocide of native americans, nurtured on slavery and full to this day of contempt for its impoverished peoples, this is a huge step. It means that we're a far more civilized place than we were even when I grew up in the 1980s, and certainly more civilized than we were in the era of Jim Crow apartheid and before.

But on the other hand, the carnage in Gaza has really left me feeling hollow. To think that a country can impose an economic blockade on its own occupied territory, and then when that blockade is resisted go in and kill more than a thousand, wound several thousand, leave as many as 30,000 homeless... It's terrible and makes one wonder if we as a species have really progressed since the time of the crusades, or Genghis Khan or Hitler. The fact that it is all done with U.S. money and U.S. political support means that all of us are ultimately responsible for this carnage.

Two articles caught my attention today. The first, on the BBC website, shows Ban Ki-moon, secretary General of the UN and a man not known for emotional outbursts to say the least, completely losing control while talking to journalists in Gaza about the devastation.

Appearing stern and at times angry, Mr Ban called the attacks on Gaza "outrageous" and demanded guarantees that it would never happen again.

"I have protested many times. I am today protesting again in the strongest terms. I have asked (for a) full investigation and (to) make those responsible people accountable," he said.

"I am just appalled. I am not able to describe how I am feeling. This was an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations."

Israeli shells hit the UN headquarters as well as two UN schools during the recent three-week offensive. The headquarters were badly damaged and nearly 40 people were killed near one of the schools.

The second article, on Al-Jazeera, shows that the main political fallout of the war is that all the various factions in Gaza are uniting behind Hamas.

The al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, an armed wing of Fatah, once threatened to kill Khalid Meshaal, the leader of Hamas.

However, from the beginning of the war on Gaza up to the ceasefire called by Palestinian factions on Sunday, it was fighting shoulder to shoulder with its former rival, lobbing rockets into Israel from the beleaguered coastal strip, Fatah representatives in Damascus say.

Israel says it has dealt Hamas a crippling blow, but its 22-day onslaught that killed around 1,300 civilians and injured at least 6,000 more has brought together a slew of Palestinian factions, many of them previously sworn enemies of Hamas.

Many observers are left wondering if the Hamas-allied coalition will be a new front against Israel and whether Hamas will be able to prevent other factions from launching attacks from Gaza, breaking the fragile calm.

"Israel's aggression on Gaza has unified the Palestinian groups in the face of the Zionist aggression," says Mohammed Nazzal, a member of Hamas' political bureau in Damascus.

This was completely predictable, of course. When your people are under attack, political differences matter less. The important thing is to get together and fight to protect your homes and your families, and if Hamas is leading the defense, then you fight with Hamas.

Since there's been so much talk of Dr. Martin Luther King around Obama and the inauguration, it's important to remember what he said about wars of aggression. King is most known for his "I have a Dream" speech, but in my mind, this speech given April 1967 - a year to the day before he died - was even more important. The entire speech is worth reading, but for me the most important line is:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

And neither can we.

Here's the first part of the speech. For the rest, you can go here.

Understanding Musharraf: the U.S. and Pakistan

Here's a short piece that I had intended to try to publish in the mainstream. I think the coverage of the democratic convention kind of squashed it... H/t to Emily at Foreign Policy in Focus for doing an edit on this.



Understanding Musharraf
What the U.S. needs to know about Pakistan's recent past and immediate future
Sameer Dossani

In September 2001, Pervez Musharraf had a choice. He could either fulfill his promises made to the Pakistani people (to hold an election in early 2002 and resign as president) or he could bow to U.S. pressure to cancel those plans entirely and allow Pakistan to serve as a lynchpin for an upcoming U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. If any democratic principles were to be invoked, there’s no doubt what the Pakistani people would have chosen. They had no interest in getting involved in a U.S. war against their neighbor. Instead of following the will of the Pakistani people and following through on his commitments, Musharraf chose to embrace the U.S. agenda.

Now that he has announced his resignation seven years later, Musharraf’s decision to side with U.S. interests against the interests of his own people remains the central moment of his leadership. Defenders of his legacy may say that given the dire events of September 11, 2001 and the strong role that the United States has played in Pakistan since the 1970s Musharraf had little choice. Detractors may retort that regardless of the limited options, it was unconscionable to invest resources in a U.S. war when Pakistan clocks in at 136th place out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program. The country needs to spend its limited resources instead on basic infrastructure, education services, and healthcare.

These points of view ignore a basic fact – whether Musharraf's actions were right or wrong, they took the country further away from democracy. No one believes that the Pakistani public would have supported the war against the Taliban - an AC Nielsen poll conducted in December 2001 showed only 9% support for the U.S. action in Afghanistan. In order to act in line with U.S. interests, Masharraf was playing the part of the totalitarian dictator. He overrode existing safeguards – by consolidating his power as head of all branches of the armed services, for example – to ensure that his wishes were obeyed. For his heavy-handed actions he was richly praised in the U.S. media and elsewhere. It wasn’t until he repeated that heavy-handedness in 2007, when Musharraf suspended the constitution as well as several senior judges in order to ensure his smooth transition to civilian rule, that anyone in the West began to criticize him.

Musharraf's story gives the lie to the claim that the Bush's agenda in the Muslim world was one of "democratization." If Musharraf had followed the will of his people in 2001, the United States may have taken measures to remove him from office in addition to waging war against the Taliban, so important was Pakistan as the frontline in the “War on Terror”.

As Bush's tenure draws to a close, leaving a legacy that includes a failed foreign policy, this is a good time to evaluate the nation’s relationship with Pakistan and to seek a new course. Pakistan's current leaders have spoken out in favor of negotiating with tribal leaders allied with the Taliban instead of seeking to drop bombs on them - bombs that don’t discriminate between soldier and civilian. If they are sincere in their efforts, they have a chance at ending the cycle of violence that has plagued the region for decades. Since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, both of Pakistan’s mainstream political parties enjoy mass support in a completely new way. For us in the United States, the best way we can show our support for the struggling Pakistani state and any hope it has at democracy is to get out of the way.

Sameer Dossani is a Pakistani-American, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, and director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice.

The King is Gone, Long Live the... Maovadis?

Regardless of your political inclinations, you've got to be happy about this.

Nepal is set to abolish its once revered monarchy and create a new republic in the Himalayas.

I've had the honor of visiting Nepal on a few occasions, in solidarity with the communities campaigning against the Melamchi Valley Water Supply project. The project was designed to divert water from the Melamchi valley to the neighboring Kathmandu valley to provide drinking water for the inhabitants of Nepal's capital city.

Aside from the dangers for the inhabitants of Melamchi Valley (water scarcity during the dry season, potential overflow and flooding during the rainy season) and potential design flaws (the project included a 25 kilometer tunnel through the earthquake prone Himalayan mountains) the thing that worried me most about this project was its premise: It's ok for Nepal's biggest city to continue to grow at alarming levels, to continue to attract lots of new Nepalis leaving their villages, while those who stay in the villages remain impoverished. The government (at this time the King's government) would be happy to invest in the booming city, but not to provide badly needed infrastructure to those in the rural areas who need it most.

Though Melamchi is close to Kathmandu, in 2004 and 2005 when I visited it was firmly under control of the Maoists (Maovadis). When we arrived in Melamchi and found the guest house where we were to stay completely full, we stayed with a relative of our guide who claimed to be the proud owner of the "poorest" land and house in the village. The family consisted of this man, his wife and two teenage children, a son and a daughter. My conversation was almost entirely with the father, as he was the only one who spoke Hindi (which he learned while driving taxi in India).

Being the blunt American that I am, I immediately questioned him about the two things that I really cared about - the Maoists and the water project. His replies were polite and somewhat curt. "What should we have to do with the Maoists? We are common people and the King has protected us for generations." And "water is needed by all. If we have much and Kathmandu has little, why shouldn't we share?"

Two hours and a plate of daal bhat later, his tune had changed. "Look Sameer, we have lived here for generations and the king has done nothing for us. The road you came up on, that was built by the Maoists. The water pipes that we have, they were built by the Maoists. At least they are doing something. And this project, I don't know what it will do but we are powerless to stop it."

It was a valuable lesson in the importance of trust building.

I can't honestly say whether the current politically disparate forces in Nepal - Maoists, liberal democrats and the remnants of the Royalists - will succeed where others have failed. But I, and 15 million Nepalis, at least have some hope today.

May Birthdays - Tagore & Israel

May seventh was the 147th birthday of Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps the most famous Bengali ever.

Tagore's poetry, prose and political writings earned him numerous awards, including the distinction of being Asia's first Nobel laureate, and he was a significant influence on the struggle for Indian independence. His role in the freedom struggle is often underestimated and misunderstood - most people over emphasize the role of Gandhi and underemphasize the role of everyone else, including Tagore.

One of the more interesting aspects of Tagore's contributions to the freedom struggle were his criticisms, especially his criticism of the concept of nationalism. Amartya Sen (another Bengali Nobel prize winner), in his recent book The Argumentative Indian has this to say about Tagore's critique of nationalism:

Rabindranath rebelled against the strongly nationalist form that the independence movement often took... He wanted to assert India's right to be independent without denying the importance of what India could learn - freely and profitably - from abroad. He was afraid that rejection of the West in favour of an indigenous India tradition... could easily turn into hostility to other influences from abroad, including Christianity, which came to parts of India by the fourth century, Judaism, which came through Jewish immigration shortly before the fall of Jerusalem, as did Zoroastrianism through Parsee immigration later on (mainly in the eighth century), and, of course - and most importantly - Islam, which has had a very strong presence in India since the eighth century.

Tagore's views are very prescient in considering the history of India and the rise of religious nationalism (see our post on Shamsul Islam's recent books). But they are perhaps even more prescient in light of another May birthday.

On the 15th of May of 1948, the British occupation of Palestine ended with a handover of power to a branch of European zionists, thereby creating the state of Israel. In the process, tens of thousands of Palestinian families were displaced. While the anti colonial sentiment and resistance to the British is to be applauded, the supposed justification for this situation (the terrible crimes committed by the Nazis against Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others) does not justify the "catastrophe" or "Nakba" as this displacement is known to Palestinians. The real reason for the creation of Israel lies in the continuation of a kind of colonialism, one that is evident whenever we consider the double standards applied to Israel on issues of nuclear proliferation, rule of law, and human rights. All nationalism has its ugly side, but the current celebrations of Israeli independence are perhaps a display of nationalism at its ugliest.

Here's a short youtube clip from Edward Said on apartheid within Israel (more of him here). More info can be found here, and a really good timeline of events can be found here.

Shamsul Islam's Latest Books Reviewd

As many of you know, Shirin's father just released a series of seven(!) books on the 1857 first war of Indian liberation (known to the British as the 1857 mutiny. The Sunday Tribune has done a review of all seven.