The Politics of God

In this article Mark Lila discusses the rise of religion in a post-industrial completely secularised society. Just click on the link below to participate in a discussion around this important issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html

Last Night's TV: The Qur'an, Channel 4; Banged Up, Five Man on a mission restores some faith Reviewed by Brian Viner

Whatever is the opposite of turning in one's grave, Lord Reith must be doing it. The old boy, who gave the BBC the mission to educate, inform and entertain, would have heartily approved of The Qur'an, even if as a beetle-browed son of the kirk he would have wondered why two hours were being cleared from the schedules to transmit it. This wasn't the BBC's decision, of course, but that of Channel 4, which is more the home of Reithian values these days (not that there's much educational, informative or indeed entertainment value to be found in the Big Brother house any more).
The Qur'an was an exemplary piece of programme-making and Antony Thomas, who produced, directed and wrote it, fully deserves to go to paradise with 120 virgins. But not before he gets to focus his expertise on other complicated subjects. This was proper television for grown-ups.
At two hours it was also bottom-numbingly long, and I did wonder beforehand whether it might be excusable to take a 20-minute snooze somewhere in the middle, but I stayed awake and alert throughout, and congratulated whoever it was who decided to run the thing in a single go, and not in two or even three parts. In the age of the short attention span, that showed resolve, although I wonder how easy it was to sell advertising space: "Hello, would you like to take a 30-second spot in the middle of a two-hour documentary we're showing? It's called The Qur'an? Hello ... hello?"
Of course, even over two hours it is easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to explain the complexities of the Qur'an. Thomas did a fine job, concentrating on the apparent contradictions in "the most ideologically influential text in the world". How can a text that preaches tolerance and forgiveness, a text in which Jesus and Moses are revered as prophets no less than Muhammad, also be cited in justification for the jihad, the fatwa, the slaughter of the infidel? How can some Muslim countries have women as heads of state, and others insist on women being treated as chattels?
An admirable man called Dr Muhammad Hurani, from the Society for Inter-Religious Understanding, came closest to untangling these riddles, explaining that the Qur'an is like a supermarket, from which different shoppers choose different items to suit them. So it is with all religious texts (which, for the record, is why I maintain a robust scepticism about the existence of the Almighty: good people do good things in the name of religion, and bad people do bad things) but perhaps above all in the case of the Qur'an, which is frequently invoked in attempts both to make peace and to declare war. These contradictions have exercised scholars in every one of the 14 centuries since the word of God was supposedly revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, by the Archangel Gabriel, in a cave. Apparently, it boils down to whether Islam is feeling threatened by the non-Islamic world. There is one interpretation of the Qur'an for peacetime, and another in times of war. Which doesn't bode too well for the rest of this century.
Still, Thomas made sure that the benevolent face of Islam, all too often overlooked in the West, got a fair showing. I was almost moved to tears by the manifest decency and tolerance of a fellow called Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, who questioned how people can claim that their god is somehow more valid than their neighbour's. "Who are we to say that one is better? You have your religion and I have mine." That seems like a creed worth believing in.
Unfortunately, however, it is smothered by a belligerent, patriarchal form of Islam, called Wahabism, which has the formidable support of Saudi Arabian petro-dollars. This programme suggested that over the past few decades, upwards of $100 billion has been spent promoting Wahabism, and that the 10 million or so Qur'ans that roll off the printing presses each year are carefully doctored to appeal to modern emotions and prejudices. Thomas also found footage of a Cairo street in the 1970s. It looked like any southern Mediterranean city, with not a veil in sight, yet the same street now is full of heavily veiled women. Oil, it seems, is to blame.
The youths in Banged Up can count themselves lucky that they are not getting Wahabi justice for their petty crimes. They have been locked up in Scarborough prison, re-opened just for them, to show them that life behind bars is worth avoiding. Last night they were joined by real ex-convicts, the hardest-looking bunch imaginable, who gave the same message some flesh and blood. I'm not sure about the participation of the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose presence is meant to add an air of authenticity, but somehow does exactly the reverse, giving a worthwhile experiment the stale whiff of "reality-show" contrivance. But it makes absorbing viewing, all the same. There's more of it around than you'd think.
Source: 15 August 2008 Independent

Barack Obama still has reasons to be cheerful

Alex Spillus
Daily Telegraph
18 Jan 10

We all know that honeymoons come to an end, and even on that sparkling January day a year ago this week when Barack Obama made it official with the American people, both sides realised that such bliss could not be eternal. But neither partner in that marriage foresaw that the honeymoon would end so soon, with the bride of public opinion packing her bags in the holiday hotel in a tearful rage, leaving the groom to plead, "I never said this would be easy … come back, I can still bring change".
Americans have fallen out of love with their charming President at a fast rate, even as his popularity has remained high abroad. As early as October, his approval ratings had tumbled from 65-70 per cent to the high 40s. Obama's inheritance from George W Bush – some wedding present – was two wars, the worst recession for 70 years, unemployment heading for 10 per cent and a $1.2 trillion deficit. It guaranteed a first year of unprecedented challenge.

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Not content with dealing with all that, Obama decided to tame the monster of health care, tackle energy reform, sign a global green treaty, embrace the Muslim world, bring peace to the Middle East, establish a universe free of nuclear weapons and talk sense to the Iranians. Americans have baulked at the mind-boggling sums involved in his domestic reform: a $787 billion stimulus bill, a $1 trillion health care bill and plans for cap and trade that will cost industry dearly.
In Congress, his fellow Democrats are fretting about losing seats in November's midterm elections. The party has already lost the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia in the first major post-Obama votes. Even the late Senator Edward Kennedy's seat is now a close call in tomorrow's by-election.
The President has confessed to disappointment at breaking his vow on changing the political culture. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the inauguration," he admitted to People magazine. "That's what's been lost this year … that sense of changing how Washington works."
Overseas, Obama may still be seen as the great anti-Bush, but at home the standard narrative is that he has taken on too much, lost the ability to inspire, can't impose his will on Congress and been too soft abroad. That said, in many ways it has been a remarkable first year. Obama is on the verge of seeing reforms passed that will provide health insurance for every American for the first time. Plenty of presidents have talked about that since 1947; none has done it. A last-minute defeat would not be for lack of compromise on his part. If passed, it could prove political Viagra for him and his party in the next 12 months and well beyond.
He has propped up the economy, albeit with an inflated and, in places, misdirected stimulus bill. The housing market has bottomed out, and consumer confidence is returning. The possibility of a double-dip recession remains, but if most forecasters are right, unemployment should begin to fall. Belatedly, Obama and his ex-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have acknowledged popular outrage over the bail-out by proposing a special bank tax, a start towards easing Main Street's resentment over Wall Street's preferential treatment.
Contrary to Obama's big-spending image, he has cut more superfluous spending programmes in Congress than his Republican predecessor. And despite the image of stagnation – created in large part by the
10-month health care debate – Congress has passed more legislation supported by a president than any before him, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Furthermore, he has banned torture (just in case there was any confusion about America's position on this), ordered the closure of Guantánamo and sent the 9/11 suspects for trial in the civilian courts. Federal funding has been restored to stem-cell research, women's rights to equal pay have been improved, and new emissions standards have been set for vehicles. This is not a President who can't get things done.
And lest we forget, by his very presence, and by his handling of race when it has reared into public debate, he has gone some way to erasing what Condoleezza Rice called America's birth defect.
Critics have lambasted his foreign policy for appeasing terrorists, kowtowing to China and bowing to monarchs of far-off lands. With all this negotiation and reaching out, where are the results, they demand.
But who seriously expected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il to respond to overtures when their existence depends in part on vilifying America? Changing the tone in the Middle East conflict was clumsily done but could still bring results. In his Egypt speech last June, Obama said: "I've come to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect." Those are powerful words. In time, they could come to mean something.
In Britain, there has been speculation that Obama was going to jilt the US's greatest ally for another – the whole world. But after a rocky start with the Brits – that gift of DVDs to Gordon Brown still induce a wince – he does, at last, seem to be appreciating the value of the special relationship, thanks in chief to the British sacrifice in Helmand. Profound affinity there will never be, but practical friendship, yes.
He has made mistakes in foreign policy and there was an overconfident assumption in the White House that his golden touch in Iowa and South Carolina would work just as well in Moscow and Tel Aviv. Allowing his speech to students in China to be suppressed by the authorities should not happen to American presidents. Nor should arriving at the Copenhagen summit without a climate deal.
His decision to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan while setting a deadline for withdrawal could prove a disastrous lack of incentive for allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And his initial response to the botched Christmas Day plane bomb was strangely detached; it made him seem more interested in America's, and his, image, than in its safety. It took a week before he summoned any visibly strong feelings about the fact that terrorists wanted to kill large numbers of his compatriots.
In the heady early days leading to his inauguration, Obama's admirers forecast greatness. Would he be a Lincoln or a Kennedy or a Roosevelt, they pondered fondly. Such talk was still grossly premature – and remains so.
But who knows? Ronald Reagan is regarded in the US as one of the best presidents of the post-war era. He came into office in 1981 with ratings just above 60 per cent, but by 1983 they had plummeted to below 40 per cent as the economy slid into recession. Less than two years later, he trounced Walter Mondale. The President and his advisers insist they are taking the long view – at the moment, given the polls, they have no choice – and they may be justified.
Obama does have some defects to correct. He needs to stop blaming George W Bush for his problems and to find some of Bush's fire in the belly when it counts. There were encouraging signs of the latter when he delivered a forceful reaction to the Haiti disaster. It would help if he pruned his agenda. Hours after he had spoken about how the US would assist the Haitians, he spoke at the White House Forum on Modernising Government. Preparing for such events takes time that could be spent on weightier matters.
Obama has travelled more than any other president in his first year, visiting 23 countries on 10 trips. It might disappoint his admirers abroad, but the President needs to stay at home more in the next year.
The good news for Obama, and for all of us dependent on his success, is that he has shown he can learn from his mistakes. There was a long period at the start of the marathon 2008 campaign when his performances were lacklustre and his debating skills blunt. Possessing a self-awareness rare in politics, he identified his problems and corrected them.
What he hasn't been able to change is the habit of making cocky asides. Asked to grade his first-year performance – never a question a politician should answer – he gave himself a B+. He smugly told People that "I'm pretty good" at being president.
Obama's first year has not been nearly as bad as the received truth in Washington would have it. Having swooned for him in the campaign, the media has overcorrected its earlier collective abandonment of balanced reporting. But if he wants to win back those Americans he has lost, President Obama needs to appreciate that, as he often said on the stump, their relationship isn't about him, it is about them.

The closed minds that deny a civilisation's glories

Yasmin ali-Bhai Brown
onfused Dad Mohamed from somewhere in the US sends his dilemma to an Islamic guidance website through whom Allah apparently communicates his orders – on how we dress, what we do minute by minute, unholy TV programmes, wicked vitamins and even wickeder relations between males and females.

I paraphrase Mohamed's frantic appeal for clarity. His children watch cartoons, and have stuffed toys, quilts and pillow cases with Mickey Mouse on them. Is all that halal? Now many of us detest the addictive and manipulative Disney brand which targets young children. But this fully grown, procreative adult cannot trust his own mind and seeks instructions from unverified voices of authority. How abject is that?

These global sites control people, push through Maoist "cleansing". Miserable mullahs are closing down the Muslim mind and heart the world over. Meanwhile "true believers" desperately seek enslavement and thank their enslavers. The questions posed are startling in their naiveté. May we sing? Is it OK for a man to listen to a woman singer? Do I watch a female newsreader? Yes, says a wise one – as long as she is properly covered up and not wearing perfume. Don't laugh. It is tragic, not funny.

Somehow in the last decade or so, millions of believers have been persuaded that they are repositories of sin because they watch films, love music and paintings, read books, experience temporal pleasures and ecstasies. Remember the ferocity with which the Taliban destroyed all pre-Islamic treasures? Saudi Arabia is guilty of similar vandalism. Thus they seek to recreate the piety of triumphant Islam. Well they didn't have cameras, mobile phones, cars and computers then. Should these be banned too?

Muslim children are now programmed to obey – robbed of imagination, independent thought and refinement. UK Muslim parents are increasingly coming out against school visits, music and drama, novels, exercise, scientific facts. Teachers know these parental demands leave Muslim children under-educated and emotionally numbed, rendered unresponsive to artistic words, sights and sounds.

This is a travesty of our history, our love of truth and beauty, the intellectual energy that throughout history uplifted Muslim civilisations. The current Science Museum exhibition of Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world proves we were never the barbarians promoted in Western demonology. Some of the earliest manuals on surgery and optics, astronomy and flying machines came out of Muslim regions. And those same places were creative hubs producing great works of art, incredible buildings and intricate crafts.

There is no Koranic injunction against the depiction of the human form, yet pictures from previous ages would today not be painted – a kneeling, sensual angel by an Ottoman artist in the mid-16th century, a man filling his cup of wine. Passion plays were performed through the centuries in all main Arabian conurbations. Poetry was written and recited by both men and women. Music, devotional and romantic, was in every household. All that is under threat today.

The Pakistani blogger Raza Rumi writes: "Who are these butchers of culture? What religion do they follow? They have no religion except barbarism." Exactly. British Muslims for Secular Democracy (of which I am chair), supported by the British Council, is tomorrow organising a conference on artistic and cultural freedom at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Speakers include Miss Pakistan (who is also a professor), fashion designers, the entrepreneur Saira Khan, painters, stand-up comics, musicians, writers, others who are concerned. The event is open to all. Check the BMSD site. We will be launching an advisory guide for teachers on protecting the interests of the Muslim child.

Many sagacious websites will warn that mixing with us, people with faith who are also freethinkers, is definitely haram (a sin). That will keep away the born-again religious troglodytes. But our hope is that the nervous and undecided will turn up to listen to artists and entertainers – and throw off their chains.

One artist I know put it beautifully: "Allah gave me my mind, my hands my eyes, my patience, my selfhood. I use all these gifts and show people the wonders of the world. How can that be wrong? Does God want us to be deaf, stupid and blind?"

No, but God's army sure does.

Monday, 15 February 2010

My compatriots' vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear

Tariq Ramadan
It wasn't meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people's fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.

At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, "What are our roots?", "Who are we?", "What will our future look like?", they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?

The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.

Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely "integrated". That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe

The generation that failed

Like Russians, we Pakistanis remain obsessed by two great questions formulated by 19th-century Russian writers Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: who is to blame and what is to be done?

Many nations in the past have attempted to develop democratic institutions, only to lose them when they took their liberties and political institutions for granted, and failed to comprehend the threat posed by a powerful military establishment and corrupt political leaders. Pakistan is a classic example.

As he left the constitutional convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked by an admirer: “Dr Franklin, what have you given us?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Not too long ago, we too possessed a great country earned for us by the sweat of the brow and iron will of one person. We have done to Pakistan what Lenin’s successors did to the Soviet Union.

On Oct 7, 1958, democracy was expunged from the politics of Pakistan with scarcely a protest. The result is the mess we are in today. As a direct consequence of military intervention in October 1958, we lost half the country in 1971. A weak political system and corrupt political leaders allowed the Generals to manipulate events and hijack the state.

There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others, have shaped our history during the last 62 years. One is the growing power of the military in running the affairs of state. The other, without doubt, consists in the total failure of the politicians, the intelligentsia, the intellectuals, the civil servants — in fact, the entire civil society — to comprehend the threat posed by a powerful army to the country’s fragile democracy, and to devise ways and means to thwart it. “Military coups,” Alexis de Tocqueville warned more than 200 years ago, “are always to be feared in democracies. They should be reckoned among the most threatening of the perils which face their future existence. Statesmen must never relax their efforts to find a remedy for this evil.” Sadly, the warning went unheeded in newly-independent Pakistan. When our descendants, in a century’s time, come to look at our age, it is these two phenomena that will be held to be the determining factors of our history — the most demanding of explanation and analysis.

“Perhaps no form of government needs great leaders so much as democracy,” said the historian and diplomat Lord Bryce. The leadership Pakistan brought to power in 1947 proved unable to govern a country rent by political, ethnic, economic, and social conflicts. No wonder, today it is a nightmare of despair and despondency, in doubt about its future. The rich are getting richer, while the poor are sinking deeper and deeper into a black hole of abject poverty. The country appears to be adrift, lacking confidence about its future. Disaster and frustration roam the political landscape. Look into the eyes of a Pakistani today and you will see a smouldering rage.

Sixty-two years after independence, are we really free? Are the people masters in their own house? Are our sovereignty and independence untrammelled? On Aug 14, 1947, we thought we had found freedom, but it has turned out to be another kind of slavery. The independence of Pakistan is a myth. Pakistan is no longer a free country. Today it is not just a “rentier state,” not just a client state. It is a state with a government set up by Washington. It is no longer a democratic country. Today we have a disjointed, dysfunctional, lopsided, hybrid, artificial, political system — a non-sovereign rubberstamp parliament, a weak and ineffective prime minister, appointed by a powerful accidental president. Armed American security personnel crisscross our border without let or hindrance. They violate our air space with impunity, bomb our villages and kill innocent men, women and children. Everyday I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in Jinnah’s Pakistan? Where are the voices of public outrage? Where is the leadership willing to stand up and say: Enough! Enough! We have sullied ourselves enough. Why are we so passively mute? How can we be so comatose as a nation when all our political institutions are crumbling before our own eyes?

Many questions come to mind. Why did the army get involved in the politics of Pakistan in the first instance? Why did Ayub Khan stab Pakistan’s fledgling democracy in the back? Why was he allowed to commit the original sin? Worse still, why did everybody acclaim it? There was no breakdown of law and order to justify imposition of martial law. There was also no civil commotion to prevent the judges from attending their courts. The country was abuzz with politics, but that happens in all democracies, especially on the eve of elections.

Why did the superior judiciary, the guardian of the Constitution, the protector of the citizens’ rights, become subservient to the executive and to the philosophy of the party in power? Why did we allow the rule of law to give way to the rule of man? Why did our judges match their constitutional ideas and legal language to the exigencies of current politics? Why did the courts tailor their decisions for reasons of expediency or, at times, for simple survival?

Why did parliament, the pillar of our state, the embodiment of the will of the people, become a rubberstamp? Why did it allow itself to be gagged? Why did it surrender its sovereignty to both military and civilian dictators?

Why did Pakistan become a land of opportunities for corrupt, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians; judges and generals; corrupt and dishonest civil servants; smugglers and tax evaders who have bank accounts, luxurious villas, mansions, and apartments in the West? Why did Pakistan become a nightmare of corruption, crime and despair? Why? Why?

Aug 14 gave independence to Pakistan, but not to Pakistanis. The greatest disappointment of my generation has been its failure to stand up to Generals who have robbed us of everything — our past, our present, our future. Prolonged army rule has reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves. We seem to be helpless in the grip of some all — powerful monster; our limbs paralysed; our minds deadened. Few Pakistanis seem ready to die for anything anymore.

Who has done this to us? There is something pitiable about a people that constantly bemoans its leaders. If they have let us down, it is only because we have allowed them to. With the mess we are in, we look everywhere but within. It is the fault of corrupt politicians. It is Washington’s fault. It is the Pakistan army and power-hungry generals. It is the corrupt bureaucracy. Somebody fix it! What about us?

We have made a mockery of the gift of independence. What gift, shall we, the living, bequeath to the unborn? What Pakistan shall we hand over to the future? Today we feel ourselves unable to look our children in the eye, for the shame of what we did, and didn’t do, during the last 62 years. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.

Today the Supreme Court, the guardian of the Constitution, is the only ray of hope in the darkness that surrounds us. After years of subservience, it is on its feet and holding its head high. Sadly, in spite of a strong and independent judiciary, the present corrupt order may survive because both the presidency and the Parliament are dysfunctional and out of sync with the spirit of the times.

What is to be done? At last, people have found their life mission: fight corrupt, discredited rulers, elected or unelected, when they capture the commanding heights of power. And I believe they have also found the tool to achieve this mammoth task: peaceful streets demonstrations and rallies.

When we organise with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But corrupt leaders who have nothing but contempt for the people and no respect for democracy, freedom or justice have taken it over. It is up to all of us to take it back. And as Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The writer is a former federal secretary. Email: roedad@comsats.net.pk, www.roedadkhan.com

Vitaly Ginzberg

Vitaly Ginzburg, who has died aged 93, was a Nobel prizewinning Russian physicist and a father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was born in Tsarist Russia so long ago that even the calendar was different: his date of birth was 21 September 1916, according to the old Russian calendar, or 4 October in the western version.

The discovery of superconductivity – the ability of electric currents to flow in certain materials for years without resistance, whose theoretical explanation would lead to his Nobel prize – had occurred five years before his birth. Its mechanism remained a mystery for 40 years, until Ginzburg and Lev Landau produced their theory in 1950. With the phenomenon having defied explanation for so long, the Nobel committee seemed in no rush to recognise their success, and another half-century elapsed before Ginzburg shared the 2003 prize (with his fellow Russian Alexei Abrikosov and the Briton Anthony Leggett, Landau having died in 1968).

It is customary for Nobel laureates to produce a brief autobiography, which usually amounts to a few hundred words. Ginzburg's was different. Having lived through so much – born in pre-revolutionary Russia, maturing in Stalin's Soviet Union, and spending his latter years in the new Russia – he had a broad vision, rich experiences and much to say. The result was an epic, exceeding 14,000 words, the reason being that: "I am already 87 and will hardly ever have another occasion to write about myself and my views."

A member of a Jewish family, the son of an engineer and a doctor, he had lived through times of economic degradation, and hunger. One of his memories from early childhood was of "a wagon, loaded with half-covered coffins with dead bodies and pulled by a horse past our house in the centre of Moscow". He did not start school until the age of 11, as it was not obligatory and his parents were concerned at the state of Soviet schools. Four years after he eventually entered formal education, his school was abolished, leaving him "lost and unhappy". By chance, an acquaintance of his aunt was a professor of science in a higher educational establishment, and he helped get Ginzburg a job as a laboratory assistant. Ginzburg recalled: "I did not have any talent, but in physics I was at least interested."

He progressed rapidly, entering Moscow State University, graduating in 1938, receiving his PhD in physics in 1940 and DSc in 1942. In 1937 he had married a fellow student, Olga Zamsha, from whom he divorced in 1946, the same year that he married Nina Ermakova. In 1944 Nina had been arrested, allegedly for being part of a plot to kill Stalin. She was released in an amnesty the following year, but exiled to Gorky. Ginzburg was at that stage teaching in Gorky University, which is where they met.

From 1946 to 1953 Ginzburg was living in Moscow, but his requests for Nina to be released from exile to join him were refused. In turn, the paranoia of the Stalinist tyranny determined that he, as her husband, was "politically unreliable". So it is remarkable that, in 1950, Ginzburg was recruited to the team developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

Only after the story of the Soviet weapons programme was declassified did the importance of Ginzburg's contributions become known. Before those times the folk wisdom was that Andrei Sakharov had made, enigmatically, "the first idea", and Ginzburg "the second idea", which had opened the way to the H-bomb. The essential fuel is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, which is a gas. However, a gas is hard to control in hydrogen bombs, and Ginzburg's insight was that it could be made, within the device, by bombarding solid lithium deuteride with neutrons.

Crucial though this idea had been, concerns about Ginzburg's "reliability" led to him being excluded from the weapon's actual test, and in 1951, during one of Stalin's antisemitic purges, he was removed from the project entirely. He feared that he was about to be put into a special prison for scientists, but was saved from this fate by Stalin's death in 1953. At this, Ginzburg was reinstated into the project, and also became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

At the same time that he was involved with the secret weapons programme, he was also working in fundamental pure research, producing his famed paper with Landau on the phenomenon of superconductivity in 1950.

In 1911, the Dutch physicist Heike Onnes had discovered that, when cooled to -269C, solid mercury suddenly lost all resistance to the flow of electric current. This phenomenon – "superconductivity" – was later found in other materials, such as tin and metal alloys. In a loop of wire made of superconducting material, electric currents can flow for years without needing any voltage to be applied. This astonishing phenomenon defied explanation for decades.

In the micro-world of atoms and particles, such as electrons, quantum mechanics applies. The phenomena are often weird, such as the well-known uncertainty principle – the inability to know precisely both the position and speed of an atomic particle. In the large scale, or macro-world, we are used to more "common sense" – the laws of Isaac Newton, which enable us to know both where we are and how fast we are travelling. However, even in the macro-world there are examples where quantum mechanics rules, one such being the phenomenon of superconductivity. There are two types of superconductors, one which completely rejects magnetic fields, and the other, known as "type 2", where superconductivity and magnetism can co-exist.

Landau and Ginzburg used quantum theory to produce a series of equations which successfully predicted that, under certain circumstances, superconductors can tolerate magnetic fields. This led to work by Abrikosov, who discovered how magnetic fields penetrate superconductors, and opened the way to many practical applications.

These breakthroughs led to many ways of achieving superconductivity, even in the presence of large magnetic fields, which today is widely used in science, industry and medicine. In 1962 the first commercial superconducting wire was made using a niobium-titanium alloy. Superconductivity has vast implications in technology, being used in powerful electromagnets, such as are found in MRI scanners in hospitals, in magnetic levitation systems for high-speed transport, and in the world's largest cryogenic facility – the 27km ring of superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator, at Cern in Geneva.

In addition to this seminal work on superconductivity, in a career that spanned seven decades Ginzburg authored several fundamental papers in a range of areas: quantum theory; the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the ionosphere; the origin of cosmic rays; radioastronomy and astrophysics. Several of his ideas were regarded as being of Nobel prize calibre.

He held passionate opinions about topics far beyond science, being a strong believer in the global triumph of democracy, and that "secular humanism" would overcome threats such as Islamic terrorism, poverty and Aids. He was one of a group of scientists that helped bring down Trofim Lysenko, whose beliefs about biological inheritance had impeded genetic research in the Soviet Union for decades.

Ginzburg was a vehement atheist, and strongly opposed the growing role of the Russian Orthodox church in state affairs after the 1991 Soviet collapse. He protested against attempts to introduce religious lessons in schools, telling a Russian newspaper in 2007 that "these Orthodox scoundrels want to lure away children's souls". As a result, several Orthodox Christian groups threatened to sue him for "offending millions of Russian Christians".

Having lived under Stalin's yoke, and seen Hitler ravaging Europe, he remained an optimist. "The forces of democracy have saved civilised society and nowadays both nazism and communism have almost sunk into oblivion," he wrote in his Nobel biography. He was certain that this proves that "we can hope for the ultimate triumph of the democratic system and secular humanism all over the world". All that are required, he said, are "the presence of historical memory, and the development of science".

He is survived by Nina, and by the daughter of his first marriage.

• Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, born 4 October 1916; died 8 November 2009

A hope in Helmand

Theo Farrell
The news from Afghanistan has been grim. The collapse of the second round of the national elections; Hamid Karzai's government tainted by corruption; and, last week, five British soldiers killed by a rogue Afghan policeman in Nad-e'Ali. All the while, Washington continues to dither over its strategy. Small wonder that the British public have lost faith in this war: 57% now think it unwinnable.

However, on the ground in Afghanistan things look a little more optimistic. I have just spent two weeks in Helmand, talking to dozens of civilian stabilisation advisers and military officers. Predictably, everybody complains about the shortage of helicopters (with good reason). But local governance has been reestablished this past year in the key district centres of Garmsir, Gereshk and Nad-e'Ali. And though the formal justice system has been slow to take root because of the difficulties of putting judges and prosecutors in district centres, in its place an informal justice system has developed supported by international advisers.

In all districts, schools and health clinics are being built or refurbished. And even in the area of counter-narcotics, there are some encouraging signs. Poppy cultivation is down 37% this year in Helmand. A significant increase in poppy cultivation in neighbouring Kandahar suggests that this reduction is not simply due to market forces. In Helmand, a wheat seed distribution programme (which encourages farmers to grow wheat instead of poppy)is covering more farmers. Often the best solutions in Afghanistan are local ones.

Notwithstanding the tragic events in Nad-e'Ali, the Afghan security forces are getting better, as is the partnership between Afghans and the International Security Assistance Force. I saw this most visibly in Garmsir, where I spent some time with the US marines. Garmsir district centre has tarmac roads, solar streetlights and a thriving bazaar. US-run Radio Garmsir pumps out popular programming courtsey of its two local DJs; it also receives over 1,000 letters a month from listeners. Most striking of all, the marines trust Afghan police and soldiers to secure the district centre. Garmsir feels very much like a society that is shaking off the shackles of war.

So what accounts for this success? First, an offensive by the marines in collaboration with the Afghan armyover September and October, that pushed the Taliban lines far south of Snakeshead (the main population and agricultural area, extending far beyond the district centre). This created the perception of security that underpins local support for the government. It also gave locals the confidence to send their children to school, to trade in the bazaar and return to normal life. The US marines' campaign in Garmsir has built on foundations laid by British military operations and stabilisation efforts. But the British lacked the forces to hold captured territory. The marines have created outposts and stayed. Such commitment is crucial to Afghan confidence.

Second, security operations are a true partnership between the marines and the Afghan security forces. I observed the marine commander signing up to an Afghan security plan for the elections, and deferring to a shura of local leaders in deciding the fate of eight men the marines hadapprehended planting a roadside bomb. Finally, contrary to stereotype, the marines have been more concerned about making peace than making war. To be sure, the campaign in Garmsir has involved a lot of hard fighting by marines (and the British army before them). But as Lt Col Cabaniss put it, the main effort for his battalion has focused on expanding the "hope bubble" and "restarting civilian society".

The events in Nad-e-Ali are unquestionably a setback. But they will have little impact on the success stories like Garmsir. Garmsir highlights the importance of nurturing effective local government, and of boots on the ground. Most of all, Garmsir underlines the importance of partnership between international and Afghan security forces. Garmsir enjoys an advantage here in that the local army, police and national security chiefs are all professional and work well together. As Nad-e-Ali suggests, police quality, especially of the lower ranks, is a key priority. There is a new police academy opening in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, to provide basic and specialist training to police throughout Helmand.

There is much to be done in Helmand, especially in towns such as Sangin and Musa Qala, where the Taliban still threaten security. But on the ground, one can begin to see the green shoots of progress and, in Garmsir, the conditions of stability and Britain's eventual withdrawal

Obituary: Israel Gelfand

Israel Gelfand, who has died aged 96, was a major figure in mathematicsfor seven decades. His research ranged over most of pure maths, including algebra, analysis, and geometry. He also worked in mathematical biology, opening up the field of integral geometry, a topic that is fundamental to medical scanners. He was an incomparable teacher and made significant advances in every field that he touched.
Gelfand was born to Jewish parents in the small town of Okny (now Krasni Okny) to the north of Odessa in southern Ukraine, which was then a part of the Russian empire. In 1930 he moved to Moscow to complete his secondary education. However, he was not permitted to enrol as an undergraduate, having (according to some sources) been expelled from school because his father, a miller, was considered to be a capitalist. Israel took a part-time job as doorkeeper at the Lenin Library and taught evening classes on mathematics. The work made it possible for him to attend mathematics courses at Moscow State University.
He showed such talent that Andrei Kolmogorov, the leading Soviet mathematician of the period, took him on as a postgraduate student. His 1935 PhD thesis was in the relatively new area of functional analysis, where the ideas of calculus are extended from finitely many variables to infinitely many. One practical application is to partial differential equations, the mathematical physicist's favourite tool for describing the natural world. Another is the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics.
Gelfand was appointed to the Steklov Mathematical Institute and taught at the university, but lost both positions temporarily through antisemitism. He was elected a corresponding (low-status) member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but it was more than 30 years before he was made a full member. His seminar series, run independently of the university and open to anybody, ran for nearly 50 years and is famous throughout the mathematical world. He moved to America in 1989, first to Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then settling at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
The heart of Gelfand's research was representation theory, a formal setting for symmetry, a concept of central importance in mathematics and physics. A symmetry of an object is a transformation that preserves its structure, and the collection of all such transformations is the object's symmetry group. The physical world, at subatomic level, is highly symmetric: if you change an electron's direction of spin, or its electric charge, the laws of physics still work the same way. Representation theory studies all the contexts in which a particular symmetry group can arise. Its applications include subatomic particles and pattern formation – why snowflakes are six-sided, and why tigers have stripes but leopards have spots.
The most important types of symmetry are the "classical groups", a typical example being the group of all rotations of space. Gelfand solved many fundamental questions about classical groups, using a mixture of algebraic and geometric methods. His interests went beyond mathematics into theoretical and experimental science. In 1958, when his son, Aleksandr, contracted leukaemia, he started applying mathematics to cell biology, setting up the Institute of Biological Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Some of his discoveries have applications that are important for everyone: medical scanners. Doctors routinely use several different kinds of scanner. CT scanners, for example, use beams of x-rays to obtain a three-dimensional image of the body's internal organs. This is a bit like holding a semi-transparent object up to the light and using the resulting shadows to work out its true shape. The first steps in this area were taken in 1917 by Johann Radon. Gelfand developed Radon's ideas extensively, founding an entire field of mathematics, now called integral geometry. His ideas are vital to today's medical imaging methods.
I first came across Gelfand in 1973, early in my academic career. Oxford University was awarding him an honorary degree, and – unusually for that time – he had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union to receive it. So this was a rare opportunity to see the great man in action. Several of us piled into a car and drove to Oxford's Mathematical Institute. I still remember the lecture, which was about a remarkable geometrical phenomenon, the "five subspace" theorem. Today it is interpreted as a deep phenomenon in representation theory, placing limits on what is theoretically possible. Gelfand had a reputation for clear, well-organised lectures, and this one was no exception. It was aimed at professionals, and quite technical, but he developed the ideas systematically, explaining their significance as he went along. By the end of the talk, he had made a very surprising result seem natural and inevitable – a sure sign of high-quality mathematics.
Gelfand received many awards. The Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Lenin three times. He won the Wolf prize (comparable to a Nobel) in 1978, and the Kyoto prize (for "significant contributions to the progress of science, the development of civilisation, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit") in 1989. He was elected to innumerable academic bodies, including the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Science.
He was also a great teacher. He set up a distance-learning school for mathematics in the Soviet Union, and a similar one in the US in 1992. He considered teaching and research to be inseparable, and was equally comfortable talking to schoolchildren or his research colleagues. He supervised 22 PhD students, several of them now outstanding mathematicians in their own right.
Gelfand is survived by his second wife, Tatiana, two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
• Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, mathematician, born 2 September 1913; died 5 October 200

1989 Changed the World

Nineteen eighty-nine was the biggest year in world history since 1945. In international politics, 1989 changed everything. It led to the end of communism in Europe, of the Soviet Union, the cold war and the short 20th century. It opened the door to German unification, a historically unprecedented European Union stretching from Lisbon to Tallinn, the enlargement of Nato, two decades of American supremacy, globalisation, and the rise of Asia. The one thing it did not change was human nature.

In 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution, challenging the violent example of 1789, which for two centuries had been what most people thought of as "revolution". Instead of Jacobins and the guillotine, they offered people power and negotiations at a round table.

With Mikhail Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire that had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation, just softly and suddenly vanished. But then, as if this were all somehow too good to be true, 1989 also brought us Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie – firing the starting gun for another long struggle in Europe, even before the last one was really over.

Such years come only once or twice in a long lifetime. 2001, the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was another big one, of course, above all because it transformed the priorities of the US in the world, but it did not change as much as 1989 did. As the cold war had affected even the smallest African state, making it a potential pawn in the great chess game between east and west, so the end of the cold war affected everyone too. And places like Afghanistan were forgotten, neglected by Washington since they no longer mattered in a global contest with the now ex-Soviet Union. The mujahid had done his work; the mujahid could go. Except that a mujahid called Osama bin Laden had other ideas.

The epicentre of 1989 was Europe between the Rhine and the Urals, and it's there that most has changed. Every single one of Poland's neighbours today is new, different from what it was in 1989. In fact, many of the states and quite a few of the frontiers in eastern Europe are now more recent than those in Africa. And the lived experience of every man, woman and child has been transformed out of all recognition: nowhere more so than in the former German Democratic Republic, whose death warrant was written 20 years ago next Monday night, with the breaching of the Berlin wall.

So, closest to the ground, we have the stories of those individual human lives: of the young Czechs, Hungarians and east Germans, born in 1989, who are seizing and enjoying the chances of freedom, and of the many older, less well-placed people, who have had a rough time since, and are angry and disillusioned.

At the other extreme, we have the global dance of old and new superpowers. Potentially, there are now three of them: the US, China and the EU. The US is still the only genuine, three-dimensional superpower. When former presidents Gorbachev and George H W Bush got together with former chancellor Helmut Kohl in Berlin last week, Bush senior paid fulsome tribute to his friend "Mikhail". He could afford to be generous; after all, America won.

More accurately, the US emerged the winner, thanks partly to its own policies but also to the work of others. But it would be hard to argue that the US has used its subsequent two decades of supremacy very well – least of all, under Bush, son of Bush. The country has lived high on the hog, running up a pile of both household and national debt. It has not created a durable new international order. Now it has a wonderful president who wills that end, but probably no longer has the means.

China is the most unexpected winner of them all. Remember that when Gorbachev visited Beijing in the early summer of 1989 he had to be smuggled into the communist party leaders' Zhongnanhai compound through a side entrance, because so many protesters were filling Tiananmen square. China seemed to be on the brink of some kind of a velvet revolution of its own. But then came the 4 June massacre. A shudder reverberated across Eurasia, from Beijing to Berlin. China and Europe dramatically parted ways.

Traumatised both by the Tiananmen protests and by the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, China's communist party leaders systematically learned the lessons in order to avoid their European comrades' fate. Seizing the economic opportunities offered by globalisation, which itself was decisively catalysed by the end of European communism, they marched further down the road on which Deng Xiaoping (an individual to rank with Gorbachev in his impact on history) had launched them.

The result: a hybrid that can crudely be summarised as Leninist capitalism – something we simply did not imagine in 1989. And an emerging superpower with $2 trillion of reserves, holding the US in a financial half-nelson.

This is a fragile superpower, to be sure, with many internal tensions and contradictions, and too little freedom, but still a formidable competitor for western-style liberal democratic capitalism. Far more formidable, incidentally, than backward-looking, militant Islamism, which is a real threat but not a serious ideological competitor.

And then there is us: old Europe, where it all began. I have suggested before that 1989 was the best year in European history. That's a bold claim, and readers are invited to point to a better year. But two decades later, and in my darker moments, 1989 sometimes seems to me like the last, late flowering of a very aged rose. To be sure, we have done some big things since. We have enlarged the EU. We (or at least, some of us) have a single European currency. We have the largest economy in the world. On paper, Europe looks good. But the political reality is very different.

This is not the big-hearted Europe of which visionaries like Vaclav Havel dreamed in 1989. It is the Europe of the other Vaclav – Vaclav Klaus – signing the Lisbon treaty with gnashing teeth, after exacting some small, provincial concessions. It is the Europe of David Cameron, who, in the defensive, national narrowness of his European vision, is actually a rather representative contemporary European. (Churchill! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: Europe hath need of thee.) Sunk in the narcissism of minor difference, only half awake to the world of giants emerging around them, your average politician in France, Germany or Poland is little better.

So, 20 years on, the question before us Europeans is this: can we recapture some of the strategic boldness and historical imagination of 1989? Or shall we now leave it to others to shape the world, while we snuggle down, Hobbit-like, in our national holes, and pretend there are no giants yomping overhead?

Invent Invent Invent

June 28, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?
Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.
Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.
We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.
I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.
Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.
At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.
As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.
China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.
We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!
Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.
We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”
Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.
Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.

Tryst with Destiny

Jawaharlal Nehru

14th August 1947 Speech delivered in the Constituent Assembly, New Delhi, on the eve of the attainment of Independence.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stoke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake t life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

Understanding Balochistan

Understanding Balochistan

Qurat ul ain Siddiqui
Thursday, 23 Apr, 2009 | 02:29 PM PST |

As tensions flare in Balochistan and the government alleges foreign involvement in the nationalist movement there, Dawn.com talks to Sanaullah Baloch, the Central Secretary Information of the Balochistan National Party – Mengal.

Your name was placed on the Exit Control List (ECL) and your brothers were reportedly abducted by the agencies during the Musharraf government. Have you considered filing charges now that the judges have been reinstated?
My entire family, including my parents, was placed on the ECL. Our assets were frozen, my brother was abducted and kept in an illegal detention centre for six months, and I was physically attacked by Musharraf’s agents during a conference in London. My website and 36 other Baloch websites were blocked by Pakistan Telecommunications Authority.

As for filing charges, several Baloch political parties tried to file charges against Musharraf, but the country’s institutions lack the will or courage to accept our plea against him.

You advocate a non-violent, political struggle to accomplish BNP (Mengal)’s goals, but it was the Balochistan Liberation United Front that succeeded in pressurising Islamabad…

Unfortunately, our deaf regimes and policy makers are not used to logical arguments. They only understand the language of power, force, guns and canons. That is why several resistance movements in Pakistan have taken on an increasingly violent character. Unfortunately, this becomes the culture in states governed by dictatorial regimes.

However, I don’t think that the non-violent aspect of the Baloch struggle has been nonproductive. Our political struggle, media campaigns, diplomacy, extensive inquiries on Baloch deprivation and its expression has widened our support beyond Balochistan and Pakistan.

In that case, why did you resign from the Senate?

From 2002 to 2006, as an active member of the Senate, I did my best to highlight the Baloch people’s plight. I was elected by the people to protect their rights, but we could not stop Islamabad’s assault on Balochistan. We could not protect the innocent Baloch from disappearances, torture, displacement and we could not stop our resources’ unabated exploitation. That is why we decided to quit the parliament. It is better to be among the people and tell them the truth as opposed to giving them false hope.

You have previously said that the National Security Council (NSC) can ensure that Balochistan has greater autonomy over its resources. But you also emphasise on electoral politics. If the NSC is the deal-breaker, why bother with political deliberations?

Unfortunately, it is a reality in Pakistan that the corridors of power are outside the Parliament. The NSC is basically the visible face of the establishment that consists of civil-military elites. They approved the military operation against Balochistan and, without their consent, no political regime can undo their policy of continued suppression.

In Swat, the government has negotiated a deal with the Taliban. What message does this give to groups aspiring to a more autonomous Balochistan?

The establishment in Pakistan has always felt comfortable with religious groups as they do not challenge the centralised authority of the civil-military establishment. The demands of these groups are not political. They don’t demand economic parity. They demand centralised religious rule which is philosophically closer to the establishment’s version of totalitarianism.

Islamabad’s elite are stubborn against genuine Baloch demands: governing Balochistan, having ownership of resources, and control over provincial security.

Some people believe that Baloch nationalist groups are materially supported by India in its bid to destabilise the Pakistani federation. How do you respond to this allegation?

Unfortunately, this has been the culture in Pakistan that all legitimate political movements against injustice have been labeled as foreign machinations and leaders of those movements have been called traitors and agents. Even the credibility of the lawyers’ movement was questioned by the establishment. Human rights defenders have also been labeled foreign agents. These are old tactics that all despotic regimes use to undermine legitimate political movements.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has promised resolving the Balochistan issue and President Asif Zardari recently announced a Rs 46.6bn package for Balochistan. Can the government shift the current Balochistan policy?

I am not optimistic about the PPP’s Balochistan policy. Musharraf promised and even spent more money to expand Islamabad’s strategic control over Balochistan. He pumped billions and officially decentralised corruption at all levels in the province to buy artificial sympathy, but failed. Millions were spent on media campaigns to prove that the central government is spending billions to develop Balochistan, but years of defective policies have further deteriorated the masses’ lives. Poverty only increased in Balochistan during Musharraf’s rule. According to one study, rural poverty in Balochistan increased 15 percent between 1999 and 2005. The only ‘development’ Balochistan has witnessed during Musharraf’s rule is the 62 percent increase in police stations.

Meaningful development can only occur if there is political empowerment, adequate healthcare, educational and employment opportunities and peace. At this moment, there is no spending in these sectors.

You have listed eight confidence-building measures that the federation can adopt to ease political tensions with Balochistan. Have any been implemented?

No. Displaced people are still living in appalling conditions, disappearances are still occurring, the military operation has only intensified and more senior Baloch nationalists are being intimidated, harassed and killed.

In a more autonomous Balochistan, how might the life of an average Baloch improve?

Political and economic empowerment will bring positive social change. It is unfair to blame the Baloch or tribal system for illiteracy, violations of women’s rights and poverty. How can people benefit from the existing system when there are more soldiers than teachers, more military cantonments and naval bases than universities and colleges, more police stations than vocational training centres?

In December 2008, a group in Quetta circulated pamphlets directing women to observe purdah. How will the BNP-M ensure security and respect for women?

We condemn all kinds of discrimination against women. Historically, Baloch society has been liberal when compared to other groups settled in and around the region. We have maintained a moderate identity since 1920 and have never used religious slogans to gain public support. However, the establishment has used religious groups to change Balochistan’s social fabric. There is no restriction and control on the Taliban in Balochistan, but agencies continue to intimidate Baloch nationalists.

Some analysts say that Baloch groups have been inconsistent in their struggle…

I can call it a gap or a pause rather than inconsistency. There has been suspension in the movement for many reasons. But as compared to other nationalist movements the Baloch struggle is surviving after continuous state suppression. Moreover, there are forged nationalist groups that have recently been created by the agencies to continue their policy of dividing and ruling.

Instead of always blaming Islamabad, why don’t Baloch leaders claim some responsibility for the current state of Balochistan?

There has been no fair opportunity for Baloch nationalists to govern Balochistan. The first Baloch government headed by Sardar Ataullah Mengal was toppled in 1973 just before completing nine months. The second coalition government of Nawab Bugti worked for 18 months. The third, of Akhtar Mengal, was removed after 14 months. Not a single Baloch government was allowed to continue for a complete parliamentary period. That is why we hold Islamabad responsible for the Baloch people’s plight. Without giving authority to genuine Baloch leaders, we cannot blame them for the appalling state of affairs in the region.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/balochistan/Understanding-Balochistan--qs
Copyright © 2009 - Dawn Media Group

The end of Prosperity? Nial Ferguson

Congress' initial rejection of Bush adminsstration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression — a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill.

It's fair to ask whether America's lawmakers could do it again. The bursting of the debt-fueled property bubble and the crippling losses suffered by banks, together with the political dithering of recent days, have set in motion a chain reaction that, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to something like a 21st century version of the Depression — even if a bailout package does eventually get approved.

The U.S. — not to mention Western Europe — is in the grip of a downward spiral that financial experts call deleveraging. Having accumulated debts beyond what's sustainable, households and financial institutions are being forced to reduce them. The pressure to do so results from a decline in the price of the assets they bought with the money they borrowed. It's a vicious feedback loop. When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging. This process now has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it.

In the case of households, debt rose from about 50% of GDP in 1980 to a peak of 100% in 2006. In other words, households now owe as much as the entire U.S. economy can produce in a year. Much of the increase in debt was used to invest in real estate. The result was a bubble; at its peak, average U.S. house prices were rising at 20% a year. Then — as bubbles always do — it burst. The S&P Case-Shiller index of house prices in 20 cities has been falling since February 2007. And the decline is accelerating. In June prices were down 16% compared with a year earlier. In some cities — like Phoenix and Miami — they have fallen by as much as a third from their peaks. The U.S. real estate market hasn't faced anything like this since the Depression. And the pain is not over. Credit Suisse predicts that 13% of U.S. homeowners with mortgages could end up losing their homes.

Banks and other financial institutions are in an even worse position: their debts are accumulating even faster. By 2007 the financial sector's debt was equivalent to 116% of GDP, compared with a mere 21% in 1980. And the assets the banks loaded up on have fallen even further in value than the average home — by as much as 55% in the case of BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities.

To date, U.S. banks have admitted to $334 billion in losses and write-downs, and the final total will almost certainly be much higher. To compensate, they have managed to raise $235 billion in new capital. The trouble is that the net loss of $99 billion implies that they will need to shrink their balance sheets by 10 times that figure — almost a trillion dollars — to maintain a constant ratio between their assets and capital. That suggests a drastic reduction of credit, since a bank's assets are its loans. Fewer loans mean tighter business conditions on Main Street. Your local car dealer won't be able to get the credit he needs to maintain his inventory of automobiles. To survive, he'll have to lay off some of his employees. Expect higher unemployment nationwide.

Anyone who doubts that the U.S. is heading for recession is living in denial. On an annualized basis, real retail sales and industrial production are both declining. Unemployment is already at its highest level in five years. The question is whether we're headed for a short, relatively mild recession like that of 2001 — or a latter-day version of what the world went through in the 1930s: Depression 2.0.

The Historical Parallels
We tend to think of the Depression as having been triggered by the stock-market crash of 1929. The Wall Street crash is conventionally said to have begun on "Black Thursday" — Oct. 24, 1929, when the Dow Jones industrial average declined 2% — though in fact the market had been slipping since early September. On "Black Monday" (Oct. 28), it plunged 13%, the next day a further 12%. Over the next three years, the U.S. stock market declined a staggering 89%, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until 1954.

On Sept. 29 of this year, as investors and traders reacted to Congress's rejection of the bailout plan presented by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the stock market sell-off was dramatic: the Dow fell nearly 7% that day, a one-day drop that has been matched only 17 times since the index's birth in 1896. From its peak last October, the Dow has fallen more than 25%.

Yet the underlying cause of the Great Depression — as Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in their seminal book A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, published in 1963 — was not the stock-market crash but a "great contraction" of credit due to an epidemic of bank failures.

The credit crunch had surfaced several months before the stock-market crash, when commercial banks with combined deposits of more than $80 million suspended payments. It reached critical mass in late 1930, when 608 banks failed — among them the Bank of the United States, which accounted for about a third of the total deposits lost. (The failure of merger talks that might have saved the bank was another critical moment in the history of the Depression.)

As Friedman and Schwartz saw it, the Fed could have mitigated the crisis by cutting rates, making loans and buying bonds (so-called open-market operations). Instead, it made a bad situation worse by reducing its credit to the banking system. This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and making balance sheets look even worse. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial-bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion — 9% of the total. By January 1932, 1,860 banks had failed.

(See the ten steps to the financial meltdown here and TIME's photos of the global financial crisis here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week here.)

Only in April 1932, amid heavy political pressure, did the Fed attempt large-scale open-market purchases — its first serious effort to counter the liquidity crisis. Even this did not suffice to avert a final wave of bank failures in late 1932, which precipitated the first state "bank holidays" (temporary statewide closures of all banks).

When rumors that the new Roosevelt Administration would devalue the dollar led to widespread flight from dollars into gold, the Fed raised the discount rate, setting the scene for the nationwide bank holiday proclaimed by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 6, 1933, two days after his Inauguration — a "holiday" from which 2,500 banks never returned.

The obvious difference between then and now is that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has learned from history — not surprising, given that he once studied the Great Depression intensively. Since the onset of the credit crunch in August 2007, Bernanke has repeatedly cut the federal-funds rate from 5.25% down to an effective rate at one point last week of about 0.25%. He has pumped money into the financial system through a variety of channels: in all, about $1.1 trillion over the past 13 months.

The Treasury is also active in ways it wasn't during the Depression. Back then, conventional wisdom held that the government should try to run a balanced budget in a crisis, even if that meant cutting welfare spending and raising taxes. A generation of economists inspired by John Maynard Keynes taught us that this is precisely the wrong thing to do. Government deficits in a recession are good, the Keynesians argued, because they stimulate demand. The Bush Administration, which ran substantial deficits in the boom years, looks set to run an even larger deficit now.

Indeed, even without the $700 billion bailout, Paulson has already written some big checks — to cover the subsidized sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan, the nationalization of mortgage monsters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailout of insurance giant AIG and the sales of Washington Mutual to JPMorgan and Wachovia to Citigroup. All of this will cost somewhere between $200 billion and $300 billion.

Some say you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. But that's what the Fed and the Treasury are attempting. Faced with the potential debacle of Depression 2.0, they have tried to calm the fears with up to $2 trillion of liquidity. Call it the Great Repression: a Depression denied.

Why Depression 2.0 Can Still Be Avoided
At the moment, a reworked bailout deal seems likely to pass. But the world may still be heading for a severe downturn. Interbank lending remains stubbornly frozen, despite the Fed's liquidity fire hose. With WaMu and Wachovia wiped out, the stampede out of bank stocks and bonds will surely claim new victims. As the recession bites, Main Street firms will start going bust too. And the impact on the $62 trillion market for credit-default swaps could be explosive.

What's more, this is no longer an exclusively American crisis. European banks are going under as well. Growth rates in the euro zone and Japan have fallen further than in the U.S. Emerging markets too are suffering. With the exception of Brazil, stock markets in the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are now down about 40% or more on the year.

The notion that Asia has somehow "decoupled" itself from the U.S. now seems fanciful. China and America have come so close to merging financially that we can almost speak of "Chimerica." When Fannie and Freddie were on the brink of collapse, many were surprised to learn that fully a fifth of China's currency reserves was composed of their bonds. Small wonder. Having spent much of the past decade intervening on currency markets to prevent the appreciation of its renminbi, China has accumulated a huge hoard of dollar-denominated bonds. No foreign nation stands to lose more from a U.S. financial collapse.

In the end, what made the Great Depression so greatly depressing was that it was global. The combined output of the world's seven biggest economies declined nearly 20% from 1929 to 1932. The unemployment rate soared in the U.S. and Germany to a peak above 33%. World trade collapsed by two-thirds, not least because of retaliation to the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

But while we certainly face a global slowdown, we may yet avoid another depression. Now, unlike in the Great Depression, central banks and finance ministries know it's better to run deficits and print money than to suffer massive losses of output and jobs. And the introduction of U.S.-style deposit insurance in many countries means banks are less vulnerable to runs by depositors than they once were. Finally, the possibility still exists (though the odds are slimmer than they were a year ago) that the Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds could step in to recapitalize U.S. and European banks before they succumb to another great contraction.

Given the immensity of the crisis, a Congress-approved bailout may be just a short-term fix. But a short-term fix is better than no fix. If nothing else, it would signal to the world that — unlike in 1930 — the U.S. is doing what it can to avoid financial calamity and sidestep Depression 2.0.

(See the ten steps to the financial meltdown here and TIME's photos of the global financial crisis here.)

(See TIME's Pictures of the Week here.)

Our skewed world view won't let us see the real Pakistan

The west can no longer afford to impose its values and notions of democracy on countries that neither want nor need them

First for the good news: Pakistan is not about to explode. The Islamic militants are not going to take power tomorrow; the nuclear weapons are not about to be trafficked to al-Qaida; the army is not about to send the Afghan Taliban to invade India; a civil war is unlikely.
The bad news is that Pakistan poses us questions that are much more profound than those we would face if this nation of 170m, the world's second biggest Muslim state, were simply a failed state. If Pakistan collapsed, we would be faced by a serious security challenge. But the resilience of Pakistan and the nation's continuing collective refusal to do what the west would like it to together pose questions with implications far beyond simple security concerns. They are about our ability to influence events in far-off places, our capacity to analyse and understand the behaviour and perceived interests of other nations and cultures, about our ability to deal with difference, about how we see the world.
Pakistan has very grave problems. In the last two years, I have reported on bloody ethnic and political riots, on violent demonstrations, from the front line of a vicious war against radical Islamic insurgents. I spent a day with Benazir Bhutto a week before she was assassinated and covered the series of murderous attacks committed at home and abroad by militant groups based in Pakistan with shadowy connections to its security services. There is an economic crisis and social problems - illiteracy, domestic violence, drug addiction - of grotesque proportions. Osama bin Laden is probably on Pakistani soil.
For many developing nations, all this would signal the state's total disintegration. This partly explains why Pakistan's collapse is so often predicted. The nation's meltdown was forecast when its eastern half seceded to become Bangladesh in 1971, during the violence that preceded General Zia ul-Haq's coup in 1977, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when Zia was killed in 1988, during the horrific sectarian violence of the early Nineties, through sundry ethnic insurgencies, after 9/11, after the 2007 death of Bhutto and now after yet another political crisis. These predictions have been consistently proved wrong. The most recent will be too. Yesterday, tempers were already calming.
Some of the perpetual international hysteria is stoked by the Pakistanis themselves. Successive governments have perfected the art of negotiating by pointing a gun to their own heads. They know that their nation's strategic importance guarantees the financial life support they need from the international community. More broadly, our understanding of Pakistan is skewed. This is in part due to centuries of historical baggage. Though few would quote Emile Zola on contemporary France, Winston Churchill, who as a young man fought on the North-West Frontier, is regularly cited to explain today's insurgency. This legacy also includes stereotypes of "Mad Mullahs" running amok, an image fuelled by television footage that highlights ranting demonstrators from Pakistan's Islamist parties though they have never won more than 14% in an election.
For many Britons, Pakistan represents "the other" - chaotic, distant, exotic, dirty, hot, fanatical and threatening. Yet at the same time, Pakistan seems very familiar. There is the English language, cricket, kebabs and curries and figures such as Imran Khan. There are a million-odd Britons of Pakistani-descent who over four decades have largely integrated far better in the UK than often suggested.
It is the tension between these two largely imaginary Pakistans that leads to such strong reactions in Britain. We see the country as plunged in a struggle between the frighteningly foreign and the familiar, between fanaticism and western democracy, values, our vision of the world and how it should be ordered. Yet while we are fretting about Pakistan's imminent disintegration, we are blind to the really important change.
Recent years have seen the consolidation of a new Pakistani identity between these two extremes. It is nationalist, conservative in religious and social terms and much more aggressive in asserting what are seen, rightly or wrongly, as local "Pakistani" interests. It is a mix of patriotic chauvinism and moderate Islamism that is currently heavily informed by a distorted view of the world sadly all too familiar across the entire Muslim world. This means that for many Pakistanis, the west is rapacious and hostile. Admiration for the British and desire for holidays in London have been replaced by a view of the UK as "America's poodle" and dreams of Dubai or Malaysia. The 9/11 attacks are seen, even by senior army officers, as a put-up job by Mossad, the CIA or both. The Indians, the old enemy, are seen as running riot in Afghanistan where the Taliban are "freedom fighters". AQ Khan, the nuclear scientist seen as a bomb-selling criminal by the West, is a hero. Democracy is seen as the best system, but only if democracy results in governments that take decisions that reflect the sentiments of most Pakistanis, not just those of the Anglophone, westernised elite among whom western policy-makers, politicians and journalists tend to chose their interlocutors.
This view of the world is most common among the new, urban middle classes in Pakistan, much larger after a decade of fast and uneven economic growth. It is this class that provides the bulk of the country's military officers and bureaucrats. This in part explains the Pakistani security establishment's dogged support for elements within the Taliban. The infamous ISI spy agency is largely staffed by soldiers and the army is a reflection of society. For the ISI, as for many Pakistanis, supporting certain insurgent factions in Afghanistan is seen as the rational choice. If this trend continues, it poses us problems rather different from those posed by a failed state. Instead, you have a nuclear armed nation with a large population that is increasingly vocal and which sees the world very differently from us.
We face a related problem in Afghanistan where we are still hoping to build the state we want the Afghans to want, rather than the state that they actually want. Ask many Afghans which state they hope their own will resemble in a few decades and the answer is "Iran". Dozens of interviews with senior western generals, diplomats and officials in Kabul last week have shown me how deeply the years of conflict and "nation-building" have dented confidence in our ability to transplant western values. Our interest in Afghanistan has been reduced to preventing it from becoming a platform for threats to the west. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the west has glimpsed the limits to its power and to the supposedly universal attraction of its values.
The west's dreams of a comfortable post-Cold War era have been rudely shaken. We have been forced reluctantly to accept the independence and influence of China and Russia. These are countries that we recognise as difficult international actors pursuing agendas popular with substantial proportions of their citizens. Other countries, particularly those less troubled than Pakistan or Afghanistan, are likely soon to join that list.
This poses a critical challenge in foreign policy. Worrying about the imminent collapse of Pakistan is not going to help us find answers to the really difficult questions that Pakistan poses

Sustainable Development: Prince Saddrudin

It will be my thesis today that the dogma of "sustainable development" is inherently misleading, and is now deluding our mindsets in much the same way as the flat earth theory once did -- but with implications which are infinitely more dangerous to our future survival.
Accordingly, I will refrain from the politically correct -- and attempt to highlight how the once noble notion of "sustainable development" has been diverted.
Despite all the rhetoric about basic needs and poverty alleviation -- and despite several decades officially dedicated to development -- the number of people in extreme or absolute poverty continues to increase.
The inclusive outcomes of the latest meetings in The Hague and Monterrey can hardly add to our optimism. This doesn't augur well for Johannesburg.
The time has come to end what Kofi Annan has aptly described as 'business as usual'. He is right in his analysis that "as our attention has been focused on conflict, on globalisation, or most recently on terrorism, we have often failed to see how these are connected to the issue of sustainability. That word has become a pious invocation, rather than the urgent call to concrete action it should be."
The irony is that those who promote sustainable development often do so under the guise of providing benefits to the poor nations of the south. The fact remains, however, that 80 countries now have per capita incomes lower than they were a decade ago, and the number of people living in poverty (those who earn less than $1 a day) is stuck stubbornly at 1.2 billion, while those earning less than $2 per day number almost 3 billion.
Someone on a daily wage of one dollar would take 109 years to earn what French footballer Zinedine Zidane is currently earning per day!
Sustainable development has been diverted in the following ways:
I) THE OXYMORON OF SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
Firstly by business -- to become synonymous with sustainable growth -- an oxymoron which reflects the conflict between a trade vision of the world and the environmental, social and cultural vision.
It has become a mantra for big business and multi-national corporations. Worse, it has unwittingly opened the door to a green backlash -- the gradual hi-jacking of the environment movement by so- called 'corporate realists'.
Even terms like 'environmentalist' or 'conservationist' are now not infrequently used to describe those who indiscriminately clear cut forests or kill animals for their skins. Such activities are now clouded in dubious euphemisms such as 'yields' or the 'harvesting' of natural and wildlife resources.
II) THE 'WISE USE' MOVEMENT
This leads me to the second negative evolution of 'sustainable development' into the term 'sustainable use' -- an anathema conjured by the so-called 'wise use' movement to mask activities which are exactly the opposite.
It is the alibi which facilitates lethal consumptive use and which has regrettably infiltrated key international fora such as CITES and the IWC 'sustainable use' of marine resources means killing whales and 'sustainable use' of native wildlife has spawned a multi-million dollar 'bushmeat' industry, particularly in Africa.
'Sustainable users' hope to convince poor Africans and Asians that they should not kill wildlife to collect the equivalent of several years' wages, while rich European and American trophy hunters kill the same animals for fun.
It is also the philosophy which has fragmented the movement -- dividing to rule by divorcing 'conservationists' (serious and 'scientific') from ethical causes such as fur and circuses (emotional idealists). The fact that an activity such as whaling may be economically sustainable does not make it desirable, or acceptable ethically.
In a speech to IWC delegates the assistant director general of the fishery agency of Japan -- and his country's IWC commissioner -- revealed that Japan had fishing agreements with eight countries, and has spent £400 million in aid -- 'fishing for votes' in the most literal sense of the words.
We have moved from a prudent, precautionary approach to a situation whereby our natural heritage has to 'pay its own way' and not form 'an impediment to free trade' if it is to have any chance of being preserved.
III) CORRUPTION
Thirdly, the sustainable development mindset indirectly fosters corruption.
Every year, businesses from OECD (organisation for economic and co-operative development) countries pay huge amounts of money in bribes to win friends, influence and contracts. These bribes are conservatively estimated to run to $80 billion a year -- roughly the amount that the UN has suggested is needed to eradicate global poverty.
The trade in banned animal parts is second only to the trade in illegal narcotics. Indeed, it has become a lucrative and low-risk sideline for international crime syndicates, such as the Yakuza in Japan, the Poon family in Hong-Kong, or the South American drug cartels -- especially as enforcement is relatively lax and discovery rarely involves more than a cursory fine. Already the trade has pushed species such as tigers and rhinos to the verge of extinction. Figures released last month indicate that the population of wild Asian elephants has been decimated by 80 per cent during the last decade.
An additional tragedy -- again reflecting the drugs trade -- is that war and the indiscriminate arms dealing that comes in its wake, invariably exacerbates the decimation of wildlife and its habitat.
IV) CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF GOVERNANCE
The fourth negative impact of 'sustainable development' is that it fosters the corporate takeover of governance. Has the new hymn indeed become 'he who pays the lobbyist calls the tune'? Just look at the corporate quid- pro-quo exacted after George W Bush's election as president of the United States.
Richard Parsons, head of Time AOL speaking at the world economic summit meeting in New York has been cited as declaring (without apparently a hint that there could be anything abnormal or worrying in the statement) that: "once the church determined our lives, then the state, and now it's corporations".
Everywhere we hear about the advantages of an essentially market-based response to the world's ills -- philanthropy, self-regulation, corporate social responsibility and voluntary codes of conduct. None of these can be deemed an acceptable proxy for state responsibility, policy and control.
Even the UN system has been jumping on the bandwagon through initiatives such as the 'global compact' with 50 of the world's biggest and most controversial corporations. As The Guardian commented, the UN "appears to be turning itself into an enforcement agency for the global economy, helping western companies to penetrate new markets while avoiding the regulations which would be the only effective means of holding them to account. By making peace with power, the UN is declaring war on the powerless."
V) CONSUMPTION
Everywhere the emphasis seems to be firmly on money and conspicuous consumption. This brings me to a fifth side--effect of sustainable development philosophy which has fostered a wholly abhorrent notion of 'sustainable consumption'. This in turn illustrates just how far the concept of sustainability has been allowed to stray down the path of Orwellian newspeak.
'Sustainable development', as defined following the Brundtland Report, calls not for a continuation of present growth patterns but a five to ten-fold acceleration thereof! But, surely, growth during maturity is either obesity or cancer.
Eight hundred million people are suffering from malnutrition while a small percentage of the world's population is choking on 'fast food'.
The food industry provides excellent focus for the themes of this session -- including consumerism, global disparities and the breakdown of governance.
The opening up of a great world market in the name of free trade, the rules of the WTO and the orientation of grants, all promote the consolidation and centralisation of the food industry. Sixty per cent of the international food sector is controled by 10 companies dealing in seed, fertilisers, pesticides, processing, manufacture and shipment.
Business has gone global -- but our systems of governance have failed to keep pace.
There currently exist more than 200 treaties of the environment -- three-quarters of which have been ratified during the last 30 years. But, for the most part, the commitments made with such a media splash in Rio and elsewhere remain a dead letter. Worse still, the effectiveness of these agreements is all too often undermined by vague commitments and lax enforcement.
Could the subtle shift in emphasis from focus on the 'Environment' (Stockholm 1972) to 'Environment and Development' (Rio, 1992) have anything to do with this?
It may not be popular to emphasise just before Johannesburg, but many processes are already probably irreversible. I wonder if it is not already too late for 'sustainable'.
Environmental crises, like climate change won't wait while we procrastinate for 'conclusive' scientific data. The gods' punishment for Hubris is blindness to warnings of impending doom.
Nor can we expect too much from technological lifeboats when the final SOS calls go out.
Must we be doomed to proceed by 'catastrophism'? To limit ourselves to dealing with symptoms rather than addressing the causes? Perhaps the time has come to impose a moratorium on new scientific or technological innovations that have potentially negative implications for the planet and society.
Indeed, science -- or what I fear we should increasingly term 'corporate science' -- always seems to be in on the verge of some major new breakthrough which, however ominous it may sound, is inevitably accompanied by reassuring noises regarding its ultimate potential to cure cancer, reverse climate change or end world hunger, if only we can keep the research grants flowing.
If the nations of the European Union are prepared to surrender part of their sovereignty to promote economic unity, why can't the nations of the world do the same to safeguard the ecological capital on which our survival depends?
Can't we identify a new direction? One which places greater emphasis on 'regeneration' rather than 'sustaining' an untenable status quo, on sound 'stewardship' rather than 'development' and relentless pursuit of growth? On quality of life rather than living standards? On being more rather than having more? About living more fully rather than faster? About multiplying our values rather than our possessions?
Stewardship has the advantage of going beyond mere economic values -- important as these may be -- by restoring the equilibrium and giving parallel emphasis to the environmental, ethical and spiritual values that are vital ingredients of any true and viable civilisation.
Look at how quickly progress was made in reducing violence in New York once the neighbourhoods were re-connected and re-involved. The same goes for restoring the urban landscape, as we heard yesterday from the mayor of Tirana.
Even 'stewardship', whilst already a significant improvement, could be taxed for its anthropocentric connotations. And besides, I wonder if any term -- however nobly conceived (like sustainable development) -- could not ultimately be diverted in the pursuit of human greed. Perhaps the world has had enough of slogans, soundbites and spin- doctors. Especially in an age when everything seems to have become urgent except for the essential.
We must strive towards a new mindset -- one which will allow us to challenge what we are trying to achieve, a new pact with nature -- one that restores our sense of balance, moderation and humanity.
Somewhere in our scientific confidence and economic gigantism, we have lost the plot -- lost our vision as well as the spiritual unity which these gatherings so rightly emphasise.
What is needed is a new renaissance -- on a par with that which moved us out of previous dark ages into a new spirit of enlightenment. As Einstein wrote, "you cannot solve the problems with the ways of thinking that led to their creation".
If globalisation has any positive merits, the creation of a universal social consciousness must be the greatest among them. Thanks to global communications, we are instantly aware of the slightest outbreak of injustice, hardship or abuse wherever it may be occurring on the planet. This has facilitated the emergence and global organisation of alternative movements exemplified by the Porto Alegre initiative. Here lie the seeds of hope.
Just as the key to human sickness is often in the mind, so the key to the planet's ills may be in our collective mindsets -- the priorities we give to our lives and our lifestyle choices.
In the final analysis, change can only come from within ourselves, and the only truly 'sustainable' progress must be that of the heart.
Reproduced with permission of the author.
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