Dateline Muzaffarabad: 'Azad' is how they want to stay

26 November 1999
The Times of India

'Azad' is the way they want to stay

By Siddharth Varadarajan
The Times of India News Service

MUZAFFARABAD (Pakistan- Occupied Kashmir): Perched precariously on a series of
escarpments high above the point where the Neelum and Jhelum rivers meet in frothy fury, the capital of `Azad' Kashmir does not feel like frontier territory. Though the Line of Control separating Indian and Pakistani troops is only a few miles away and armed militants slip across the border with apparent abandon, Muzaffarabad is surprisingly calm and peaceful, its residents more preoccupied with the vicissitudes of Pakistani politics than with developments in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.


A large cardboard and metal model of the Ghauri missile displayed prominently at the entrance to the town is perhaps the only physical marker of war the casual visitor encounters; otherwise, the steep, winding bazaars full of woollens, dry goods, bakeries and skewers of roasting meat look and smell just like any other hill station.

Unlike the Kashmir on the Indian side, there are no soldiers or paramilitary troops watching edgily from fortified bunkers, but nor are there any women visible on the streets. When asked about their absence, a fruit seller on Katcheri Road said women came in groups to shop but mostly in the mornings. ``Baqi time to gents ka hi silsila zyada chalta hai (The rest of the time it is mostly men).''

The `Azad' part of the region's name may be nomenclaturally inexact but the Pakistani
establishment takes care to keep up the fiction of separateness. The military dismissed all the provincial assemblies of Pakistan after the October 12 coup but the `Azad' Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) parliament has not been touched. Barrister Sultan Mahmood, the `prime minister', remains in place along with his cabinet.

In any case, sentiment for independence runs pretty low in these parts. Of all the people I spoke to in the bazaars, hardly anyone expressed enthusiasm for azadi from Pakistan. ``Why do we need independence?'' asked Mahmood Butt from behind a pile of green Kashmiri tobacco. ``Far from being kept down, we are better off than the rest of Pakistan. Our literacy rate is double, prices are low, there are not so many jobless.'' And what about Indian Kashmir? ``You say you are a democracy but why did you force people to vote?'' he replied as others around him nodded. ``The military has only now come to power in Pakistan, after ten years. But in Srinagar there has been virtual army rule for the past decade,'' said a bystander angrily. ``We Kashmiris will always consider ourselves Pakistanis.''

Of course, the people of Muzaffarabad, like the rest of `Azad' Kashmir, are not Kashmiri speakers. Their language is pahadi or Hindko, a cognate of Punjabi, and communication between Indian and Pakistani Kashmiris takes place in Urdu.

For ordinary people here, the Lahore Agreement between India and Pakistan represented a great betrayal of the Kashmiri cause and Kargil was an attempt by the army and Mujahideen to redeem the honour of Pakistan. ``Nawaz was very popular in AJK but everyone here felt angered by what happened in Lahore,'' said a local journalist.

``Your leaders have to understand the fact that ordinary Pakistanis - and especially the people of `Azad' Kashmir - are not willing to make any compromise with India over Kashmir. After Lahore, the impression here was that Nawaz wanted to put Kashmir into deep freeze. People feared that the idea was to make the LoC into a permanent line of partition and their perception was that the US also favoured such a plan,'' he added.

When asked about the idea of turning the LoC into an international border, people at large reject the proposal out of hand. ``The real trouble spot is the valley of Kashmir,''said one man. ``You are oppressing people there,'' he claimed. ``How does making the LoC into a border help them?''

For all the emotion that allegations of human rights violations in Indian Kashmir stirs up, there is little hostility on the streets of Muzaffarabad towards Indians as a people. Zee TV and Sony are the most frequently watched channels and everyone I spoke to expressed a marked preference for Zee News over the rather muted fare served up by PTV at news time. ``Even during the Kargil war, people here watched Zee News,'' said a shopkeeper. ``It was not all propaganda. Kuch ham log sahi batate, kuch aap log sahi batate (we would report some things correctly, you would report some things correctly).''

While the Mujahideen leaders in Muzaffarabad refused to meet an Indian journalist without prior clearance from the Pakistani authorities, it was possible to glean an understanding of the jehadi groups' stand from conversations with people who identified themselves as activists of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Tehreek-e-Jehad. They acknowledged the presence of non-Kashmiris in the ranks of the militants but said these were mostly Punjabis. ``The Arabs went home at least four years ago. And what the valley people call `Afghanis' are actually Punjabis,'' said one. The Hizb man,however, insisted that only two per cent of his organisation's militants
were non-Kashmiri.

Asked about the future, one activist said that no Kashmiri would be willing to take a public stand in favour of a partition of undivided Jammu and Kashmir. ``But just as valley Kashmiris will never accept India, we know that Jammu and Ladakh will never accept a merger with Pakistan,'' he said. ``That's why if you ask the jehadi groups their private views, they know that partition will eventually be inevitable.'' According to a local journalist, there are three possible outcomes of the Kashmir problem. ``The first is that status quo and tension will continue. The second, India and Pakistan partition Jammu and Kashmir along religious lines. And the third, an independent state.'' The third option was the only way to prevent partition, he said, but this was the least probable. ``India and Pakistan will oppose it.

In `Azad' Kashmir itself, people are too integrated into the rest of Pakistan - economically, socially,culturally. Of course, if independence becomes the only option for solving the problem, public opinion here could shift.''

Later that night, fatigued from walking up and down the town's steep lanes, I sought refuge in Muzaffarabad's modest cinema hall. A Lollywood film, Ek Pagal si Ladki, was playing and a modest crowd of men had turned up, mainly to watch its heroine, Reema, go through a series of Bollywood-style gyrations. During the interval, I asked a group of young men whether they saw any difference between Pakistani and Indian films. ``Nowadays there is no difference,'' said one. ``The dances, the
dresses, they're all the same.'' I told him that in Srinagar the militants had at one
time ordered the closure of cinema halls. Was he afraid the Mujahideen would one day do such a thing in Muzaffarabad? ``Whatever happens to Kashmir,'' he said, ``I don't think we are going to stop watching movies.''

Then, almost as an afterthought, he smiled and added: ``Inshallah.''

Gen Beg praises India's concern for democracy

24 November 1999
The Times Of India

Gen Beg praises India's concern for democracy

By Siddharth Varadarajan
The Times of India News Service

RAWALPINDI: General Mirza Aslam Beg - the man who (as army chief)
oversaw the restoration of democracy in Pakistan after Zia-ul-Haq's
death in 1988 - has endorsed Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpayee's robust defence of his deposed counterpart Nawaz Sharif. Gen
Beg has also called for international pressure to be brought to bear on
Pakistan's new military regime.

Vajpayee's Durban statement expressing concern about Sharif's fate has
been denounced by Islamabad and most Pakistani analysts believe India
is criticising General Pervez Musharraf's coup only in order to score
political points. One senior Pakistani diplomat, who knew Vajpayee
personally and did not want to be quoted by name, said he was bitterly
disappointed by the Indian PM's ``unrealistic attitude'' towards what
had happened in Pakistan.

Gen Beg, however, believes India is doing the right thing by drawing
attention to the subversion of constitutional norms across its borders.
``I have great respect for Vajpayee for supporting the cause of
democracy in Pakistan,'' he said in an interview with The Times of
India.

If there is sufficient internal as well international pressure,
especially from India, ``this will force Gen Musharraf to decide very
soon to do what he can do in a limited period of time and then pack up
and go'', he said. If the army does not restore democracy by the end of
2000, Gen Beg said, there would be chaos and confusion, and, without
any viable political dispensation, rightist political forces would gain
clout.

``That is why I am working to develop an alliance of like-minded
moderate parties which can build a political movement to ask for the
restoration of democracy.'' What Gen Musharraf should be aiming for, he
said, is a peaceful way to transfer power so that the present military
set-up could be ``bailed out'' before trouble erupts.

Gen Beg - who had predicted a coup more than a month before it
occurred - said that news of the military takeover came as a painful
blow to him. ``I am one person who has not welcomed the army's
intervention. I firmly believe Pakistan's future lies in liberal,
participatory democracy. Anything else will lead to the dismemberment
of Pakistan, like in 1971, notwithstanding the other factors which were
operating at the time.''

``Every nation has a vision of life,'' he said. ``Our vision is
reflected in the struggle for Pakistan. The people who participated in
that struggle were liberal-minded, moderate people. None of the radical
religious parties supported the Pakistan movement. In fact, every time
Pakistanis have been given the opportunity, they have voted for
democracy and not fanaticism. Religious nationalists have never got
more than a handful of seats. Tomorrow if there are elections, I don't
think they will improve their showing.''

Asked whether he believed India was right to force a postponement of
the SAARC summit after the coup in Pakistan, Gen Beg said New Delhi's
stand was constitutionally correct. ``Gen Musharraf has not sought to
validate his regime through the courts. So Vajpayee's objections are
valid in a sense.''

At the same time, Gen Beg added, this did not mean India should refuse
to hold talks with Pakistan until democracy is restored. ``Once
Musharraf gets the legal and constitutional backing of the courts,
India must conduct business with Pakistan as usual.''

Pressing on with write and wrong

19 November 1999
The Times of India

Pressing on with write and wrong

By Siddharth Varadarajan
The Times of India News Service

KARACHI: Three things distinguish Pakistan's English language dailies
from their Indian counterparts: High price, low circulation, and
marvellously slipshod but inventive prose. At Rs 13 a copy and a print
run of only 60,000, Dawn, Karachi's flagship daily, suffers from the
first and second problems but not the third. Others too charge double-
digit prices, but inflict some truly atrocious language on their
readers.

Of course, Indian newspapers also publish priceless English from time
to time, but few could match the following gem, quoted in extenso, on
an Islamabad jewellery exhibition carried in The Nation recently:
``Bridal set assuming lustful and prancing looks were wooing
inquisitive looking lasses ready to be imprisoned into wedlock to
enable them to strike their best at the threshold of ambition packed
life. Life to come will ring with paltry delights but we want to
immortalise every moment...whispered a smart looking lady rolling her
eyes enthralled with the spell of the stone. This portends good luck
only when it is worn with hole drilled into it otherwise it will sound
ominous, interrupted another girl in a bid to help make right choice
for averting leery looks of some foreboding at the outset of days
bordering on tumult and vibrancy.''

``Diamonds decorated jewellery, which was majestically stirring tremors
of sweetness and pleasantries deep down in the realms of future brides
seemed to have been transformed into storms of unabated
passions...Thrust of foreign ladies was showing unbound curiosity and
eagerness with which they were capturing every glimpse of glittering
the magic of the jewellery and imprisoning mesmerising power of these
sets of ornaments.''

It is not as if all news here is written like this. Far from it.
Pakistani sub-editors may have an aversion to the definite and
indefinite articles but most stories do conform to minimum acceptable
standards. However, bloomers, malapropisms and just plain bad writing
occur frequently enough to suggest a pattern. ``Hilariously bubbling
festivities, upbeat delights emerging on frolicsome faces, blazing
firework, blaring fanfares and bustling marriages,'' The News reported
recently, ``have revived pre-ban Walimas' era with eliciting mixed
response from the public.''

A government employee is then paraphrased: ``With three daughters
reaching marriageable age, I was demented to think how to manage their
marriage parties...This state of affairs had been haunting our minds
like a freak, which had so perturbed my wife that she became hysterical
and insomniac, while persistently making her mind hostage to frenzied
thoughts of securing suitable matches for daughters, he added.''

Or consider another report in The Nation from Rawalpindi under the
headline ``Bunni market gives miserable look'': ``The whole area
plunges into murky darkness with the fall of night and the isolated
nooks, corners and turns become heaven for romance and love explorers.
They are seen ruling over the whole scene in complicity with darkness
and rotting the market with flinging indecent remarks or displaying
prohibited gestures and thrills of their bodies.''

Ardeshir Cowasjee, Dawn's acerbic columnist, was characteristically
blunt when asked about this problem. ``You have three English
newspapers. There just aren't enough qualified people to go around. And
then you have the overall deterioration in society as well. This takes
its toll.'' Abid Ali Syed, chief sub-editor of the Business Recorder,
recalled the last set of interviews he had conducted for new recruits.
``We had a tough time getting people who could write five clear
sentences.'' Imran Aslam, senior editor of The News in Karachi, joked
that several years of dealing with sub-standard copy had turned him
prematurely grey. ``Finally, I had to tell these guys, `Just get me the
facts. I'll write the story'.''

The irony, of course, is that the deterioration in linguistic skills
has occurred despite the proliferation of journalism and mass
communication courses throughout Pakistan. At a recent media conference
in Karachi, a young woman who had studied journalism at Kinnaird
College, one of Lahore's elite institutions, brandished her exam paper
angrily. Students were only asked three questions: (1) What are the
different types of journalism? (2) Compare and contrast the different
types of journalism (3) How would you categorise different types of
journalism? ``If this is the kind of exam we had, you can imagine what
we were taught,'' she said.

According to Qazi Ashraf Shah, editor of the Sindhi daily Kawish, it is
not just the English language press which is having a tough time
finding quality people. ``In the old days, the joke was that a
journalist is somebody who can write a lot about things he knows
nothing about. Nowadays, many of the younger journalists do not even
know how to write!''

Mahmood Sham, editor of the Jang, Pakistan's leading Urdu daily, rues
the day `mass communication' became a university subject. ``In the old
days, the Urdu press attracted people with a literary bent --poets,
writers, cultural personalities. Now we get journalism students who can
write Urdu alright but they have no flair. Their vocabulary is limited
and there is an acute poverty of expression.''

At another level, the biggest problem the press faces is illiteracy
because that affects both the quality and quantity of the media's
output. Nobody here believes the Pakistani government's claims of close
to 40 per cent literacy. Journalists and educationists put the figure
at around 25 per cent and that does not seem improbably low. In big
cities like Lahore, most auto drivers cannot even read street signs,
let alone newspapers and magazines. Even though the leading Urdu
dailies sell two or three million copies nationwide --and hence are
monitored more closely by the authorities than the English dailies --
their circulation is very low when set against what it should be in a
nation of 140 million. India, of course, has no reason to be enthralled
by upbeat delights and frenzied thoughts of gloating in the depths of
its realms. If the Pakistani vernacular circulation figures give
miserable look, Indian ones are not very much less ominous and
bordering on vibrancy, either. Period.

Back to the Future: International Law after Nato's War

November 13, 1999
The Times of India

Back to the Future
International Law after NATO's War

By Siddharth Varadarajan

PARIS: Five months after NATO ended its bombardment of Yugoslavia, scholars, jurists and diplomats are still arguing over whether there is such a thing as the right to humanitarian intervention in international law. At a conference organised by the journal Dialogue in the French capital recently, academics and lawyers from several countries described NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia as illegal and argued against any dilution of existing norms on state sovereignty and non-intervention. The consensus was that while the existing body of international law is flexible enough to handle serious humanitarian crises, its procedures have to be respected. There can be no room for unilateral action.

Exaggerated Estimates

During this year’s session of the UN General Assembly, Secretary General Kofi Annan and several European leaders made an impassioned plea for the international community to abandon ‘rigid’, legalistic notions of sovereignty and adopt a more contingent definition wherein the systematic violation of human rights by a state would constitute legitimate grounds for outside military intervention. It is surely not a coincidence that such proposals — which normally do the rounds at academic and NGO circuits but not UN meetings — were aired so soon after NATO’s war against Yugoslavia. After all, the US and its allies had insisted that compelling humanitarian considerations had prompted them to act despite prior authorisation from the UN Security Council. The situation in Kosovo was described as critical and the Yugoslav authorities were accused of indulging in a genocidal campaign against the ethnic Albanian population of the province.

During the war, widely exaggerated estimates of the number of ethnic Albanians thought to have been killed by the Yugoslav authorities were given by the leaders of the US and Britain. At one point, the claim was made that as many as 100,000 people, mostly young men, had summarily been executed and thrown into mass graves. When the war ended and NATO troops moved into Kosovo, several suspected massacre sites were scoured for evidence. Bodies were exhumed under the supervision of expert forensic scientists from Canada, Spain and the US, and prosecutors from the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said they had begun to collect evidence which would help in the prosecution of President Slobodan Milosevic and other senior Yugoslav leaders.

Moral Grounds

In the past weeks, a controversy has arisen about the nature of the grave sites and the precise number of bodies exhumed. A Spanish forensic scientist told El Pais that the number of bodies examined was under 200 and that he was quitting Kosovo because of the lack of work. Stung by allegations that the US and the ICTY had wilfully exaggerated the extent of war crimes committed by Serb forces, Ms Carla del Ponte, the ICTY’s chief prosecutor, told a press conference in New York on Wednesday that so far some 2,000 bodies had been exhumed. She said this was still a preliminary figure as many suspected grave sites had yet to be dug up. However, the numbers are unlikely to rise much further since the ICTY started with those sites most likely to yield mass graves first and now what remains are sites thought to hold only one or two bodies each. It is also not immediately apparent that each and every one of the bodies exhumed is of victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

If one sets aside the legal objections to NATO’s intervention, could its bombardment of Yugoslavia be justified on moral and ethical grounds? This is a difficult issue because 2,000 dead bodies, though far short of genocide, is no small matter. However, two questions are in order here. First, by intervening ostensibly in the name of saving innocent civilian lives in Kosovo, was NATO morally justified in killing innocent civilians elsewhere in Yugoslavia? The official estimate of the number of civilians killed in NATO bombing is approximately 2,000. By refusing to help Serbia rebuild and insisting on a fuel embargo this winter, the US and its allies will cause further death and morbidity among Yugoslav civilians. Surely all of this must rob NATO of its morality card. Second, what happens if the ICTY’s forensic tests establish that most of those killed by the Serb forces were killed after NATO started bombing Yugoslavia? Their deaths would still be a crime but surely they cannot be invoked as a posteriori justification for the intervention.

In legal terms, it is a fact that international law, even as it stands today, contains provisions for humanitarian intervention. As Prof Oliver Corten of the Free University of Brussels argued, the UN Charter does not explicitly provide this right but non-intervention does not mean that a state can do exactly as it pleases. In particular, the UN Security Council can authorise military intervention if it apprehends a threat to international peace.

Although international law does provide for the possibility of humanitarian intervention, precise minimum conditions have to be satisfied for any action to be legal: the given situation must be a threat to international peace, there must be a vote in the Security Council authorising intervention, and no permanent member must exercise its veto. These formal criteria do not necessarily make an authorised intervention justified in political and moral terms; if Russia and China decide not to use their vetos, the US could use the UN to target any country it wants to. However, these rules certainly do establish the bounds of impermissible behaviour.

Legitimate Reason

Even if the international community accepts the principle that intervention is justified in the event of human rights violations, different states will have different interpretations whenever a concrete case comes up. According to Prof Corten, all law contains procedures for dealing with interpretations. “But when you don’t follow procedures, every state can simply assert that it is right. So we have come back to the 19th century definition of international law: States cannot use force except when there is legitimate reason, but it is the state which decides whether its reasons are legitimate.''

Before the UN Charter, there were moral and ethical rules governing the use of force and the right of intervention. The UN Charter was epochal in that it introduced legal rules. What an irony that on the threshold of the year 2000, one of the greatest achievements of the present millennium is being deliberately undermined.