September 28, 2007
Indigenous Rights and the Quartet
After two decades of deliberations, the United Nations General Assembly finally adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples on September 13. The voting demographics were most interesting: 143 nations in favour, 11 abstaining and 4 against. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were the quartet that voted to deprive indigenous people of a largely ceremonial endorsement of their fundamental rights. Pakistan happily voted in favour of this resolution, though I wonder how much our government really appreciates the status of our tribal populations.
After two decades of deliberations, the United Nations General Assembly finally adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples on September 13. The voting demographics were most interesting: 143 nations in favour, 11 abstaining and 4 against. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States were the quartet that voted to deprive indigenous people of a largely ceremonial endorsement of their fundamental rights. Pakistan happily voted in favour of this resolution, though I wonder how much our government really appreciates the status of our tribal populations. The list of abstentions was all over the map: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Nigeria, Russian Federation, Samoa, Ukraine. This resolution was not about some external immigrants trying to gain access to post-colonial resources, but rather an affirmation of the rights of the original inhabitants of the lands that we now rank among the most economically productive places on Earth.
The impact of this negative vote from the quartet on native communities was palpable. “We’re very disappointed... It’s about the human rights of indigenous peoples throughout the world. It’s an important symbol,” said Phil Fontaine, leader of the Canadian Assembly of First Nations in a press interview.
Why would the quartet miss an opportunity for such a chance at cross-cultural understanding with their own citizens? The arguments given for the negative votes revolved around contesting sovereignty and incompatibility with the constitutions of the respective countries.
Yet even if such contestations might prove to be true in a purely legal context, the fact remains that this declaration was purely ceremonial and no litigation could possibly be launched on its behest. The sole purpose of the declaration was to hasten the healing process between settler populations and pre-colonial indigenous communities. Regardless of how we may view social policy towards indigenous people at present, there is little doubt that settler communities in all the quartet countries benefited enormously from the victimisation of the indigenous inhabitants. From land appropriation to forced cultural assimilation, the impact of colonialism was most acute in these four countries where the colonisers also became the majority population.
All this declaration aimed to do was to acknowledge that hurt and move on. This declaration was no threat to any of these states in terms of a cavalcade of lawsuits. Granted that many positive laws have been passed in the quartet during the last few decades to give greater rights to indigenous communities but the statistics are still grim. In a Harvard study published last year, Native American males in South Dakota had the lowest life expectancy of only 58 years among all counties in the country — 33 years less than the highest life expectancy that was found among Asian women in Bergen county, New Jersey. Data from the other three quartet shows a similar asymmetry between indigenous and settler populations.
Sadly, many politicians continue to blame the victims as being culturally indolent or perpetually inebriated with welfare payments. Yet, we refuse to confront the underlying causes of despair in these communities that often stems from a sense of rejection and diminished self-worth.
As I have argued in these pages before, tribal populations constitute ancient social systems that historically provided a means of survival under hostile environmental conditions. In Pakistan, the term “tribal” has an ominous ring because of its association with a decadent form of medievalism that masquerades as conservative theology. At one level, we should try to transcend “tribalism” as broader conceptions of human civilisation become widely accepted; on the other hand, however, these tribal affiliations give us distinct and diverse cultural traditions — food, music and language, which provide texture and meaning to the fabric of humanity. It is this positive side of tribal identities that we should embrace, while rejecting the exclusionary attributes.
If we are to mitigate threats to national unity and contain conflict escalation, we must first acknowledge the past. In the case of Pakistan, it requires acknowledging past injustices against tribal groups such as the Baloch or the Kalash. This is only possible through collective healing processes such as those enunciated by the UN declaration, which also affirms that: “all peoples contribute to the diversity and richness of civilisations and cultures, which constitute the common heritage of humankind.”
Given their unique historical status, indigenous communities in the quartet countries deserve to be specially recognised not just for political correctness but for the larger good of democratic governance. The great American jurist Felix Cohen’s words come to mind: “Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, marks the rise and fall of our democratic faith.”
Pakistan should be proud of voting in favour of this resolution but the affirmative vote also brings forth immense responsibility. We should consider how the development paths of our tribal groups could be improved while celebrating the positive attributes of their cultural traditions.
Instead, we seem to cling on to the negative aspects of tribal culture (such as misogynistic behaviour) and reject the ancient positive aspects such as music and religion. There is a glimmer of hope that trends are changing. At least Islamabad now has a national museum that can institutionally support cultural attributes of our indigenous people. Let us make this UN declaration more than a mere document that resides in a database or a web site. Only then can we overcome the despair that ails so many of our most ancient cultural brethren.
Posted by Saleem Ali at 07:45 PM
May 28, 2007
Critical Education
For the past three months, the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad has been under high alert due to a group of renegade clerics at the largest mosque in the city. Maulana Ghazi, the imam of the mosque (known as Lal Masjid) has been leading a squad of vigilante students from the mosque's madrassah to close "sinful" commercial businesses such as video shops. The government responded by surrounding the mosque's compound with military troops and police. Some plain-clothes police were held hostage by the mosque clerics last week, leading to intense negotiations to resolve the mounting crisis. Despite the release on May 24 of policemen abducted by the Lal Masjid cadres, anxiety about the situation in Islamabad continues. The government is clearly in the most uncomfortable position in dealing with the problem, which requires, among other things, a look at “absolutist” educational institutions and their rejection of critical reasoning.
Perhaps the starkest example of such an educational institution was the “University of Dawah [evangelism] and Jihad” set up in the mid-eighties in Peshawar by Professor Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf. The founder of this “university” which produced acrimonious alumni such as Ramzi Yousef and whose aim it was, and remains, to quash critical reasoning has been one of the top warlords during the Afghan war and later the civil war. Since 2001 he has been vying for supremacy within the Karzai government. To call this institution a “university” is particularly unfortunate.
This is not peculiar to a particular country or religion. Institutions that stifle critical reasoning and thrive on agenda-driven education can be found at many places.
In the United States, one of the leading lights of the evangelical movement with absolutist views about Christian supremacy, Reverend Jerry Falwell, died last week. His well-known Liberty University produced a legion of activists, many of whom have found employment in prominent government positions. Falwell was as much valorised by his disciples and with as much fervour as Maulana Ghazi of Lal Masjid is by his minions. While the tone of his messages was more measured, he clearly stirred militancy in his own way.
Consider that only a few days after his passing, a young student from Liberty was arrested with a cache of bombs. Authorities in Virginia indicated that Mark David Uhl intended to use the bombs to “stop protesters from disrupting Falwell’s funeral”.
It should be noted here that like Christianity, Islam is a strongly evangelical religion (unlike Judaism). Even the more enlightened institutions of higher learning such as the Islamic University of Islamabad, which offer courses on global trade and environmental law, have a “Da’wah Academy”. This should, itself, not be a cause for concern, since Islam ordains that there must be “no compulsion in religion”. However, problem arises when other competitive forces of evangelism are stifled in countries like Saudi Arabia, leading to an autocracy of proselytisers who claim monopoly over communication.
Similar to other social movements, religious motivation has often been linked to violence as well as building peace. Like any powerful human phenomenon, religion can be used to either end and has tremendous potential to instil pugnacity as well as cooperation. Similarly, we can find ways of harmonising the best of Eastern and Western traditions, if absolutism is avoided. There are some remarkable stories to be told of graduates of Islamic schools that have been able to bridge their education with Western traditions.
Consider the case of Bakhtiar Effendy, who started his formal schooling in the Pesantren Pabelan in central Java, Indonesia, in the early 1960s. While at that Islamic boarding school, he received an American Field Service scholarship and attended Columbia Falls High School in Montana. Subsequently, he returned to Jakarta for his college degree and then went back to the States for his doctorate at Ohio State University. Following his doctoral degree, Dr. Effendi returned to his homeland and joined the faculty of the Islamic State University in Jakarta. Such meandering interactions between East and West, while rare, are possible between educational traditions and deserve more careful study and analysis.
The use of educational institutions for political ends is a well-established tradition across cultures and societies. Exemplified recently by anti-war activism at universities in the West as well as the rise of Marxist movements in schools in South America or the Ayatollah ascendancy at Tehran University, institutions of learning are often places of revolution. Ideas invigorate young minds to action but Alexander Pope’s prescient observation of “a little learning being a dangerous thing” is just as true today. While the independence of educational institutions must be maintained, some level of quality assurance and critical reasoning is also essential to ensure that captive audiences of students are not manipulated.
The Lal Masjid case clearly shows us the need for instituting a peace-building curriculum in all educational institutions across Pakistan. We shall explore the efficacy of such a curriculum in this space subsequently. Until then, let us reflect on the words of Robert Frost:
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence”.
Saleem H Ali is associate dean of graduate education at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and a senior fellow at the United Nations mandated University for Peace. He can be reached at saleem@alum.mit.edu
Posted by Saleem Ali at 01:37 PM | TrackBack
April 28, 2007
Demography of Terror
By Saleem H. Ali
Former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, in a recently released confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the American war on terror: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassahs and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Starting with Rumsfeld’s question, journalist, Mark Danner has commendably approached this issue in detail and his answer is a resolute “no”.
Danner quotes counterinsurgency specialist John Arqullia who compares the US reaction as highly mercurial: “We have taken a ball of quicksilver, and hit it with a hammer”. The irony of this analogy is that it also shows how elusive our statistics might be — ascertaining the actual number of atomised extremists is just as difficult as trying to quantify mercury particles in motion.
The number of civilian casualties in the current conflict has been the single most motivating factor in galvanising public opinion against the “war on terror”. I have often heard the most astounding accounts of casualties in Afghanistan at mosques in America. When asked where the numbers were obtained, the response is often a nondescript web site or an anecdote.
Manipulation of statistics to spin conspiracy theories is of course not just confined to Muslims. Every community seems to have its share of such spin masters and conspiracy cultivators. The US has certainly contributed to the phenomenon by not keeping data on civilian casualties and then dismissing any attempt at scientific study. This was especially apparent when the US army rejected a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and published in the British journal The Lancet earlier this year on the alarmingly high rate of civilian casualties in Iraq. The matter could have been easily resolved if the army had kept track of civilian casualties by death certificates with just as much care as they do with their own personnel.
However, even when government keep the data, the statistics can be used in rather contorted ways. For example, in India, Hindutva activists have on numerous occasions used census data to give the impression that Muslim population increase is a targeted effort to outnumber Hindus and cause a diminution of India’s Hindu identity. I amusingly recall my taxi ride in Mumbai last year when the friendly taxi driver commented, while passing by the shrine of Haji Ali, that he believed there were now more Muslims in India than Hindus!
Such contorted visions of demography became especially acute when the results of the Indian census were released in 2001. J Sri Raman has admirably described this propaganda campaign by Hindutva activists in detail along with an exposition of how Hindutva activists continue to mislead with erroneous analysis of statistics. Of the total Indian population of 1.028 billion at the time of the census, the Hindus totalled 827 million, comprising 80.5 percent of the population. The Muslims numbered 138 million or 13.4 percent of the population. The next in size were the Christians (24 million or 2.3 percent).
Census data since 1951, the year of the first Indian headcount, suggest that the Muslim population has increased by about one percent every decade. Activists used this data to suggest that it will take three centuries for India to become a Muslim-majority country! The figures, turned out to be inaccurate because the census of 2001 included India’s only Muslim-majority State of Jammu and Kashmir which had been excluded in the 1991 exercise, and the Northeastern State of Assam, excluded in 1981.
After two days of rising tensions, the commission came out with “adjusted” figures, which told a rather different story. They showed that the growth rate of the Hindu population had declined from 22.77 percent over 1981-91 to 20.02 percent over 1991-2001, and that of the Muslim population from 32.86 percent to 29.33 percent. In other words, the decline in the population growth rate has been greater for Indian Muslims.
The misuse of data by politicians is of course a continuing embarrassment for the Indian government since it prides itself on being the world’s largest secular democracy. It is interesting to note that, in the tradition of Gandhi, many left-leaning non-Muslims such as Yoginder Sikand in India are leading the struggle to protect Muslim rights in this regard. We must not forget that Gandhi, a man of universal integrity, was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic because he was perceived to be too friendly to Muslims. This is of course reminiscent of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish fanatic or Anwar Sadaat’s assassination by a Muslim fanatic. In all cases the conflict within the community to resist change was the most potent and pernicious factor in the escalation of violence.
Such episodes as well as the support of some authoritarian regimes by Western powers have led to an unusual alliance between secular leftists and Islamists. The Kefaya (“Enough”) movement in Egypt exemplifies the willingness of Islamists to form coalitions, albeit reluctantly with other secular movements for reform. This diverse coalition of oppositional movements — new Islamists, liberals, Nasserists, and Arabists — has demanded change from below and an end to the rule of President Hosni Mubarak as well as American influence in the region.
Unequivocal support of authoritarian regimes at the behest of security is problematic without a more acute awareness of demographic trends. Coalitions, such as those in Egypt, in a democratic setting might lead to electoral power for Islamists. However, if there are adequate checks and balances, they may also play a moderating role on each side.
Demography has always been a tool for democratic agency since the lowest common denominator is always a voting individual whether in India or the United States. The ways in which the US political parties in power have redistricted various constituencies to get more votes for a particular party are emblematic of this matter.
The West has clearly been concerned about the impact of population dynamics on extremism — hence its willingness to support autocratic regimes at the expense of its democratic ideals. Clearly this is not a sustainable strategy. The best way for building bridges between the East and West is for the western powers to only intervene on humanitarian grounds where needed, and build a reputation for non-opportunistic action. There may be initial setbacks, as was the case with the well-intentioned US intervention in Somalia, but slowly there may be a mark to be made.
The Western intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo are cases where Muslims were advantaged by US and European intervention. Yet in these cases, little effort is made to highlight the statistics of Muslim lives saved or how the interventions might have led to the growth of Islamic institutions. Such efforts should be given more coverage in historical accounts of East-West relations in textbooks and media outlets in the Muslim world. Demographic shifts and migration patterns of asylum-seekers in the West, which advantage oppressed groups, also deserve more coverage and analysis.
There is no doubt that demography is essential to our understanding of extremism as well as its antidotes. However, the lens or frame with which we view and analyse these numbers is just as significant.
Dr Saleem H Ali is associate professor of environmental planning and conflict resolution at the University of Vermont and a senior fellow at the United Nations mandated University for Peace. He can be reached at saleem@alum.mit.edu
Posted by Saleem Ali at 11:56 AM | TrackBack
January 22, 2007
Tribal Targets
For much of the Pakistan’s history the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) have been off limits to the central government both in terms of governance systems as well as social services. Governing the tribal belt was a tabooed topic that no one dared to advance in Islamabad’s halls of power. There was a stale sense of sanctity ascribed to this terrain that most were too afraid to tread upon. With scant investment in educational infrastructure and social development the tribal areas became a twilight zone for those who wished to cling to a bygone warrior era.
The missiles that destroyed a madrassah in Bijaur agency last year (supposedly fired by American aircraft) have alerted Pakistanis to how President Musharraf has taken on the task of breaking the tribal taboo. Yet has the government considered what constitutes a tribal identity in the greater context of pan-Islamism that so many in this frontier region claim to espouse? The other tribal target for the current government has been the Baluch communities which also frame their identity in tribal terms, though with a much lesser allegiance to Islam. As one Baluch leader recently remarked in an interview to the BBC, betrayal of his tribal identity was an act of kufr (blasphemy) for him. The notion of kufr leads us to yet another tribal group that have been given the epithet of kafir, (infidel), though with more benign connotations.
The fabled Kafir-Kalash tribe (a.k.a. Kalasha) have been the most celebrated “infidels” of Pakistan, but have lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with their Muslim neighbors in the Chitral valley. However, even this remote community of less than 3000 individuals has recently been under siege through forces of religious intolerance and economic intrusion. As polytheists, the tribe have found themselves in the unenviable category of mushrikeen and hence particularly ripe for conversion. Unlike their ethnically similar neighbors in Nuristan, the Kalasha have so far been spared any cornered conversions. However, this may change as religious radicalization spreads across the tribal frontier. While Islamic doctrine is very clear on there being “no compulsion in religion” (Surah Baqarah, verse 256), there is no denying the pressure of evangelism in Pakistan, from cricket teams to remote tribal communities.
Tribal populations constitute ancient social systems which historically provided a means of survival under hostile environmental conditions. At one level, we should try to transcend “tribalism” as broader conceptions of human civilization are accepted. On the other hand, such tribal affiliations, give us distinct and diverse cultural traditions -- food, music and language which provide texture and meaning to the fabric of humanity. Thus targeting tribalism is always going to be a challenge for those who wish to preserve such diversity.
Unlike Judaism, both Christianity and Islam have attempted to go beyond tribal identity as a binding force. All ethnic groups are welcome to join without any requirement of matrilineal association or ethnic descent as was traditionally the case with Judaism. However, the darker side of this universalism in the later two Abrahamic faiths has been their propensity to proselytize and claim exclusivity over salvation. By claiming that only their adherents can reach heaven, many Muslims and Christians have themselves formed tribal identities that are connected by scripture rather than ethnicity or genetics.
The international community is confronted with the dilemma of whether or not religious identity should be subsumed within the broader categorization of “culture,” when it serves to negate other cultural attributes such as music and art. Last year, I attended a meeting of the United Nations Permanent forum on Indigenous People in New York. This was a colorful gathering of tribal groups from around the world who self-defined themselves as those having the most continuous and close relationship to their region of habitation. There was one Pakistani delegate at the meeting from Chitral who repeatedly expressed concerns about the perils of nationalism in stifling tribal expression.
Given this prior exposure to the debate on indigenous recognition, it was gratifying to learn in June of this year that the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a landmark declaration on the rights of indigenous people. Pakistan voted in favor of this declaration along with 44 other members. Only two members of the council voted against the declaration – Russia and Canada, which are physically the world’s first and second largest countries respectively. Geographic expanse may explain the fear of these two countries in endorsing some aspects of the declaration which they felt could erode a sense of national identity. Yet, if we are to mitigate such threats to national unity and conflict escalation, the only way forward is to develop a truly global identity which trumps the divisive aspects of tribalism at multiple levels.
Once we are able to recognize our mutual interdependence on global resources, the positive aspects of tribalism, as exemplified by indigenous languages, art and learning can shine through. Religious devotion and patriotism to national identities could also coexist in such a world but with due deference to the larger goal of a truly “civil” society.
