Issue 41 Vol II, June 15, 2007

F E A T U R E S

A Pakistani diplomat remembers
Ishtiaq Ahmed

THE Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, has very kindly invited me as a senior research fellow to work on Pakistan-India-US relations. The whole family will now move to Singapore and stay there during July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Researching the Pakistan-India-US triangle will surely prove to be very exciting.

I have not as yet in my academic career researched international affairs as a distinct subject, although the role of external factors in the study of domestic or regional politics has been included in several of my writings. Autobiographies and biographies are a major source of material for the study of relations between states.

Therefore I was very pleased to receive the autobiography by one of Pakistan's very prominent career diplomats, Sultan Muhammad Khan. The second edition of Memories & Reflections of a Pakistani Diplomat (Karachi: Paramount Books, 2006) is written in a very lucid style and easy, straightforward prose. I believe the book was first published in 1998 but is now available in a cheap paperback edition and includes a new chapter on the Zia period.

It is my belief that if one is by temperament a storyteller then writing an autobiography is the best way to tell one's life story. Sultan Muhammad Khan is undoubtedly a very gifted storyteller. The narratives flow smoothly and one learns a great deal about Pakistan's diplomatic history from 1947 till 1980.

It begins with a brief presentation of family history during the colonial period. We learn that the author belongs to a branch of the royal family of Afghan origin of a small princely state, Jaora, which existed in the Central Indian State Agency during the British period. He lost his father when still an infant and his mother when he was in his early teens but was brought up with great affection by his uncle.

To everybody's surprise he joined the British Indian army, something which in his family was not done as they were expected to serve the state. He was in the Indian army and was posted in Malaysia. At the time of the partition of India he opted for Pakistan, although he did not have any particular political grudge against the Congress Party.

He began his diplomatic career in Delhi being assigned a position in the Pakistan High Commission in that city. He describes a scene one day when anti-Muslim riots and attacks were still taking place. He writes:

"One day I was passing the shopping area of Connaught Place in New Delhi and saw the only Muslim shop there -- Ghani's -- being looted. Some policemen were pretending to be asleep on their cots nearby. Suddenly a car pulled up, and Pundit Nehru rushed towards the policemen, picked up one of their "lathis" (steel-tipped long stick) and started hitting and yelling at them to stop the looting. They were shocked to see the Indian Prime Minister of India, and carried out his bidding effectively" (page 52).

Later, in the book where Sultan Muhammad Khan refers to Nehru it is always in his role as a patriotic Pakistani and diplomat and given the bad relations between the two countries I can understand that he has nothing good to say about the late Indian prime minister.

An interesting revelation that is made is that King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had proposed that India should be invited to join the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and at the Rabat Conference of 1969 India had been invited to participate. The Indian ambassador, a Sikh, was present when the first meeting was held and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, who was then a minister (later president of India) was on his way to the meeting. President Yahya Khan had agreed but then some Pakistani journalists in Rabat started a campaign against India's participation. That campaign finally succeeded and India was denied membership.

There are very interesting anecdotes from his postings in Egypt, Turkey, Italy, UK, China, Canada, US and Japan. He also served as foreign secretary. He is witness to many events during that long period and speaks about them with utter candour. He praises General Ayub Khan as a good president who conducted himself gracefully on his foreign trips and was a successful negotiator when dealing with foreign leaders.

It seems that of all the statesmen and political leaders he met he admired the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai (Chou En Lai) the most. Zhou En Lai apparently was the architect of maintaining good relations with Pakistan whereas he was always suspicious and wary of the Indian ambitions. From the Pakistani side we know that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the one who promoted good relations with China.

Zhou En Lai offered sincere advice to Pakistan at the time of the East Pakistan crisis when Sultan Muhammad Khan met him in April 1971. He told the author that the military should exercise restraint and efforts should be made to find a political solution to the violent confrontation. Moreover, the Pakistan army should have mixed units including East Pakistanis. Sultan Muhammad Khan thinks that had Pakistan followed the advice of the Chinese Premier the break up of Pakistan could have been avoided.

We also learn that Nixon and Kissinger were sympathetic to Pakistan's survival as a state and the French were also concerned, but India drew full capital out of the situation. Mrs Gandhi could thus achieve the dismemberment of Pakistan. The Soviet involvement was dictated by its Cold War concerns.

The author, however, does not hesitate to condemn the disastrous impact of the Cultural Revolution on China. It was perhaps the most negative feature of Chinese mob rule in which the perfectly honest and patriotic Chinese, some of them heroes from the Liberation struggle were humiliated and meted out degrading punishments including executions.

Sultan Muhammad Khan praises Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but says that once he became president and later prime minister he was surrounded by sycophants. He started losing touch with reality and that brought him down ultimately. Bhutto sent him, the author, into retirement in 1976. But he was recalled by General Zia who appointed him as ambassador to the US again in 1979 where he served for two years. The last chapter on Zia discusses how the general acquired self-confidence and proved to be a shrewd and crafty political animal who outmanoeuvred his opponents.

The writer is professor of political science at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Email: ishtiaq.ahmed@statsvet.su.se
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=58777

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One World and the Women
Dr. Manju Singh

Globalization is not a linear process, nor a singular end point for global social change. Nations and people experience new opportunities and a constraint placed on them by the increasingly rapid shifts in global security arrangements and globalizes domestic economies differently. Nevertheless, the way we live in one part of the world can have repercussion in another part of the world. The different ways in which this process has been understood and analyzed has produced a large and diffuse literature.

Discussions of globalization generally focus on the globalization of capital, transnational forms of production, increased integration of economies and the interdependence of trade. Although there is no agreement about its meaning, form or implication to humanity, the term has also been used to describe and explain a range of contemporary cultural, ideological and political phenomena. The most significant antecedent of globalization was the earlier state of economic, political and cultural interconnectedness through various forms of colonialism. What distinguish the current era are the speed and degree of interpenetration of capital, goods, labor, communication, financial markets and cultures worldwide.

It is generally agreed that we live in an increasingly interdependent and globalized world. Our minds have become encompass by a diffuse awareness that the world is one, and that we are all interconnected. Ideas such as ‘global village’, ‘international community’, or ‘borderless world’ have been used to explain the perspective in which relations between nations take place. There is however little or no agreement about the current global exchange of information and goods resulting in global compassion or the reciprocal understanding of different cultures.

Two entirely opposed views of globalization are projected in the literature: one predicting a prosperous, unified ‘One World’ scenario and another leading to a disparate, fragmented ‘Worlds Apart’. ‘One World’ proponents believe that the spread of capitalism and the increased interaction of world economies will bring immense benefit and prosperity and have a positive outcome for developing countries. They affirm that with the dissemination of new technologies, freer movement of capital, labor, trade and services, globalization offers the potential for living standards to rise, in form of increased productivity levels, better health and education facilities for all. Furthermore, globalization benefits consumers by increasing the scale and locative efficiency of markets for both goods and capital.

A study by the World Economic Forum in Davos predicts, “travel, trade and interrelated markets meant that disasters in one part of the globe could set dominoes falling elsewhere…As an example, it cited a bird flue epidemic, which it said was currently the biggest threat facing the planet”.

Conversely, ‘Worlds Apart’ dissenters view globalization as an uneven process, where power and the control of global resources remain in industrialized capitalist countries and in the hands of global elites. They state that the unintended by product of economic globalization has as its most salient feature a huge concentration of wealth in the North. Thus massively widening the gap between rich industrialized countries and poor developing countries, and bearing disproportionately on the majority of world’s women.

Economic development implies local realities even though local and global forces impact on each other in the development process. Nevertheless, culture plays an important role in the construction of economic and political institutions. It also provides the contextual framework under which political power can be exercised legally. In spite of global pressures, the cultural locale in which institutions grow has resulted in a numerous different economic and political practices. Even culturally and linguistically similar countries like the USA and the UK have developed their own forms of political institutions. Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea and more recently China and India have achieved economic development, which are set within their chosen cultural contexts. And yet the concept of globalization has become fused with that ideal ‘One World’ becoming ‘Westernized’. Rightly or wrongly the focus is on altering the cultures and lives of women of the ‘non-western’ underdeveloped area. Women in the developing world are thus trapped between western ethnocentric bias induced development agendas and local forms of cultural relativism that deny them their say in life choices.

The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex series of overlapping multiple centers that are trapped into a messy coexistence. Globalization has enabled some women in the rich industrialized world and local elite women to access higher education, better jobs, health care, welfare and civic rights. The globalization which has brought about this attrition of gendered division of labor and entitlements is the same phenomenon that has created inequities between poor and rich nations. From this perspective, globalization has had negative consequences for most women, the poor, and the marginalized. This is because they lack access to new technologies, experience unequal terms of trade in global markets and have no opportunities to influence global decision making, which affects their everyday lives. The great majority of the world’s women are still excluded to the corridors of political power. They still suffer disadvantages in education, civic rights, and healthcare, skilled labor force participation and are subjected to domestic violence.

While acknowledging the harm inflicted by globalization, its interpretive outline can also be used to consider its potentially beneficiary dimension. Globalization has produced a cosmopolitan public sphere, fostering innovative forms of political reform and activism by the very communication technologies and flows of capital, goods and people. Human rights as dialogue or international law, has enjoyed massive growth and significance and is being adopted as a resource in manifold local as well as global situations. A vibrant diversity and creativity is emerging, such that indigenous rights movements, women peace movements and civil societies are appropriating this apparently globalised dialogue as a suitable form for the expression of local identities. Human rights can thus be seen to afford a symbolic common ground whereby different individuals and groups can dialogize.

Globalization creates uniformity but it has also created resistance to uniformity. A new international politics of identity is emerging. Individuals or groups of women are actively engaged in shaping their own worlds, rather than that their actions being wholly pre-ordained by capital, global penetration or ideological differences. Women are increasingly enmeshed within the broad fields of human rights activism, environmentalism, anti-multinational and peace movements in order to influence and shape globalization in the interest of social processes which do not curtail their families’ life choices.

[The writer is a Senior Fellow, Council for Social Development, Southern Regional Centre, Hyderabad]

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Lesotho: A Brief Profile
Vinod Anand & N.Yadav

Lesotho is a mountainous country and as such is called the moutnain kingdom. It has a land area of 30,355 square kms. It lies in the southern region of Africa,and is fully land locked by the Republic of South Africa. It has a high altitude all over, both with highlands and lowlands and remains cooler throughout the year. It is naturally a very scenic country and has no pollution whatsoever. It has four ecological zones: mountains, foothills, low land,and the Senque( Orange River Valley).

The present Lesotho emerged as a single state under paramount chief Moshoeshoe in 1822; It was a British  colony and gained full independence fromin on 4 October 1966. The country’s Government is a constitutional monarchy. The Prime Minister is head of the government, and the king no longer possesses any executive authority.The constitution provides an independent judicial system, and protects the basic civil liberties.

Lesotho has ten districts, and the districts are further subdivided into 24 wards.

The growth rate of population in Lesotho is about 2.6% per annum. In 1966 the population was 9,70,000. Since that time it has shown a rising trend. In 1976 it reached the level of 1.2 million, and in 1986 it went up to 1.5 million, and in 1996 it crossed the 2 million mark. It is expected to reach a level of 4.395 million by the year 2030. About 75% of the population comes from the rural areas and is basically dependent on agriculture, but the problem is that Lesotho’s arable land, with a mountainous topography, variable climate and severe soil erosion severely constrain the agricultural sector to generate adequate levels of income and employment to support the country’s rapidly increasing population. Population is also highly dispersed, and the population density is just 65 people per square km.  Apart from that, the HIV/AIDS, a virus attacking the immune system, also severely affects the country’s population.

The rate of economic growth is very low in the country. In 1998 it  was in fact negative   (-4.53). In the year 2005 it was estimated to be 2.98%. Lesotho’s income inequality is ranked among the highest in the world. There is a vast disparity of income distribution in the country. In this respect, the Gini Coefficient, it exceeds 0.60. It is also highly skewed in the sense that in the rural areas, as shown by the Gini Coefficient, it is 0.69 as compared to 0.52 in the capital city, Maseru and other urban areas.

There is severe unemployment. In the year 2006, it was estimated that about 45% of the labour force was unemployed. About 40% of the labour force works in South Africa. Quite a number of households staying in the highlands/remote areas have no links, whatsoever, with the market system, and as such they live their own lives and are completely on their own for day-to-day needs. They are in fact subsistence households, and as such, their economic activities are not accounted for in the national income estimation.

Besides these social issues, the inflation rate is also very high. It has been gradually increasing to a double-digit figure, which has a very severe and “immiserizing” impact on the people in general.

Lesotho’s economy   basically depends on water, electricity, agriculture and livestock. It is the only country in the world that exports water to other countries, especially to South Africa. It has a lot of other potentials like tourism and agricultural development. We are sure that in time to come it will emerge as a prospering economy. Despite the various problems it faces, the country is highly peaceful, and is culturally rich as is exhibited by the famous Morija Arts and Cultural Festival, which is held annually in the town of Morija. The country has a substantial youth population numbering around 37%. Besides that, the literacy rate is quite high. It is estimated to be 85%. All these attributes augur very well for country.

Because of the long history of missionary activity, Lesotho has exhibited highly comprehensive development of education. Schools of high educational standard at primary, secondary and high school level are available throughout the country, with Maseru (the capital city) having several well-established international schools. As a cosmopolitan country, Lesotho has child population of all nationalities, and these are able to receive a secondary education in Maseru up to entrance level for universities in their home countries. Teaching is initially in Sesotho, but English is the medium of instruction used in the upper classes of primary schools and in secondary schools. In contrast with many other developing countries, female participation in education in Lesotho has been much higher than that of males. As a key sector that leads to a more employable and productive workforce, the education sector receives a significant share of recurrent expenditure proposals.

The authors are presently placed at the National University of Lesotho{Southern Africa]

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