West Pakistani refugees refused basic human rights

Early Times

Hundreds of refugees from West Pakistan, who have been living in wretched conditions at different places in Jammu province since 1947, today reached Delhi by buses to attract the attention of the Union President, Prime Minister, Union Ministers and MPs to the problems they have been facing as a result of refusal on the part of the state government to grant them citizenship rights by sitting on dharna at Jantar Mantar. They had migrated to Jammu from Pakistan in the wake of the country’s communal partition to escape the wrath of the protagonists of two-nation theory that had resulted in the emergence of Pakistan as a separate country. Almost all of them are members of depressed communities. It may appear ludicrous, but it is a fact that these refugees numbering about 100,000 do not enjoy the right to immovable property, right to job under state government, right to higher and technical education, right to bank loan, right to vote in the assembly and local body elections and so on even after more than 64 years of the state’s accession to India. They can vote only in the Lok Sabha elections and are eligible only for the central government jobs, which they cannot get because they are not suitably educated. They wanted to quit Jammu in 1947-1948 itself and settle in other parts of India, but they were barred by then political leadership of the time to leave the state. They were assured by the then state wazir-e-azam and others who mattered that they would take appropriate steps calculated to empower them to exercise all rights available to the people of the state and their fellow countrymen. They did nothing in that direction.

Between 1947-1948 and 2011, these abandoned refugees organised hundreds of demonstrations, sit-ins and marches to achieve fundamental rights and lead a dignified life. In between, they also attempted to gehrao the civil secretariat leading to clashes between them, including women and children, and the police. But nothing came out of their efforts. Every political party active in Jammu province exploited them but did nothing for them. It was just a lip service. They even approached the Supreme Court but with no result. The Supreme Court left the matter to the discretion and judgment of the state government. The state government did appoint a committee during the regime of Ghulam Nabi Azad to look into their grievances but the committee did not recommend citizenship rights for these hapless refugees. The committee simple recommended that each refugee family be given some financial relief subject to the condition that the amount would not exceed Rs. 200,000. The committee made this recommendation knowing it full well that they had been fighting for citizenship rights and not for money. Some of the members of the Prime Minister’s Working Groups belonging to Jammu province also raised their issue and demands in their respective Working Groups, but the chairmen of the said groups did not do anything in order to redress their grievances, notwithstanding the fact that it was a human issue. On the contrary, one particular Working Group made recommendation after recommendation aimed at appeasing, pleasing and rehabilitating Kashmiri militants, surrendered or otherwise, with honour.

The truth, in short, is that neither the state government nor the central government has taken cognizance of this human problem in Jammu province and the result is that these refugees have been unsuccessfully moving heaven and earth to get their issue suitably addressed. It is extremely unlikely that their dharna at Jantar Mantar would produce the desired results. The reason is that the Kashmiri representatives are well-entrenched in the New Delhi’s corridors of power. They will surely play a dirty role and defeat all of the moves of these oppressed, suppressed and abandoned refugees. They have been opposing the refugees’ demands right from day one saying grant of citizenship rights to them would not only change the demography of the province but would also increase its representation in the state legislature. It must remain a matter of shame that that we have in our country a group of people are not considered fit for exercising the rights which are available to everyone in the state and outside.

How Iran’s oil was nationalised

Recently I came across a remarkable book entitled Patriot of Persia – Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup. Written by Christopher de Bellaigue, it is simply brimming with interesting details. For the major part of the last 100 years, until the revolution launched by Ayatollah Khomeini, the people of Iran have had a pretty raw deal. What is worse, they continue to be treated by the West as the pariahs of the Middle East. Iran, the land of Cyrus the Great, was the home of one of the world’s grand civilisations. Nevertheless, Sir Harold Nicolson – British diplomat and author of 24 books, among which was the oft quoted Diplomacy published in 1939 – had the most disparaging things to say about the country and its people. To an extent he helped to mould public opinion in Whitehall and influenced British foreign policy towards that country. Born in Tehran, he was posted as British charge d’affairs to Iran in 1923. The Persians were always treated with a certain aloof condescension, as if nobody wanted to touch them with a barge pole. The problem was that they had something that the West wanted. And this meant that the country was ripe for plunder.

Top of the list of exploiters were Britain and Russia. In 1907, when the two countries made a deal to divide Iran into ‘spheres of influence,’ it was apparent to the rest of Europe that what the British were after was Persian oil. At the outbreak of the First World War, one of England’s top racist politicians Winston Churchill, (who years later tortured President Barack Obama’s grandfather in Kenya,) had secured for Britain a majority shareholding in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This yielded for London twice the revenue that accrued to Tehran. To the American political observer, it certainly looked as if the land of the once great Achaemenid Empire was being administrated from Whitehall for the benefit of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Iran was governed between the two World Wars by a brutal and hardnosed dictator named Reza Khan who established the Pahlavi dynasty. Under his ruthless rule the people of Iran suffered great hardship and poverty. Fortunately for the masses, he decided to flirt with the Nazis which hastened his swift departure into exile. The British then installed his son who was quite happy to honour the existing oil treaty and with the help of the CIA, spawned the dreaded secret police known as Savak, who at its peak had 60,000 agents. While Tehran became the Paris of the East, people in the rest of the country groaned under the capricious rule of the Shahenshah. Then the aristocrat Muhammad Mossadegh arrived on the scene. ‘Iranian oil is for the Iranians’ he maintained. Mossadegh was scrupulously honest and incorruptible. Bellaigue narrates a charming story of the time when Mossadegh’s wife was arrested for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. When she protested to him, he telephoned the chief of police and ordered him to promote the constable who had arrested her.

The Shah was not amused. In 1940, Mossadegh spent five months in solitary confinement. By 1949 anti-British sentiment had reached fever pitch. The results of a shamelessly rigged election were rejected by the nationalists. The Shah, still acting under British orders, appointed an army general as prime minister who rejected the demand for nationalisation. The fellow was promptly assassinated by the Warriors of Islam. Finally Mossadegh took over, nationalised Persian oil, was removed from power in a CIA plot, incarcerated and exiled. When an objective history of modern Iran is written he will be remembered as Iran’s greatest nationalist.

Useful Idiots

THE DEAD MEMO

Some facts are clear. There was a memo. It was written by an affluent Europe based US citizen of Pakistani origin whose self stated loyalties are to the US and not Pakistan. It was delivered to Admiral Mike Mullen when he was the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 2011 by a retired four star general of the US Army on the request of the Pakistani American author. The author of the memo had been in extended contact with Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States and they had discussed the content and thrust of the memo as well as its destination. Almost five months later the memo was deliberately resurrected by public exposure in a newspaper article written by the author of the memo. After its publication the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency personally contacted and subsequently met the author of the memo as part of an investigation and later briefed Pakistan’s Army Chief on his findings. The Army Chief briefed the President and as a result Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US resigned and ‘memogate’, as it began to be called, became the subject of two separate investigations—one by a Parliamentary Committee ordered by the government and one by a judicial Commission set up by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in response to a petition filed by the opposition political party. These investigations are ongoing and are the subject of much speculation—mostly in a segment of the local Pakistani media.

There are some grey areas. Was the memo the brain child of the Pakistani Ambassador and did he use the Pakistani American to write the memo and have it delivered or was the memo the idea of its author who used the Ambassador to discuss his ideas thereby involving him inextricably? Did the Ambassador act on his own in his interaction with the Pakistani-American gentleman or did he get the matter approved from his superiors? Did the Ambassador provide input and give encouragement if the memo was not his own idea? These are the questions to which the investigative bodies have to get answers in order to reach a final conclusion. This is by no means an impossible task.

There is one important factor that overshadows everything else. The accusations being hurled at each other, the efforts to undermine credibility, the deliberate obfuscation of facts and the attempts to kill the memo all combine to hide the fact that there is a basic convergence in the long held and often stated views of the two main protagonists. Both have a pathological hatred of the Pakistan military and its intelligence agency. Others share this view because they see these two institutions as being the center of gravity in Pakistan that must be undermined— and it is these ‘’others” who are busy explaining the memo as a plan to undermine the democratically elected government by the military/intelligence establishment. There are many in Pakistan who, foolishly, are furthering such an agenda. This makes the result of the investigations most important—-the memo is dead, long live the memo.

By Ghalib Sultan

Court notice demands Musharraf to appear for Bhutto assassination case

By: Peer Muhammad

Following the Supreme Court orders, summons for former president General (retd) Pervez Musharraf in the Benazir Bhutto assassination case has been pasted outside his farmhouse in the Chak Shahzad neighbourhood of Islamabad.

The Supreme Court notice was glued to the gate of Musharraf’s farmhouse located in the Chak Shahzad area of Islamabad.

The notice demanded that the former military ruler return from exile and appear before the apex court on March 22. “You are required to bring your original identity card for entering the premises of the Supreme Court building,” the notice reads.

The notice was pasted at the main entrance to Musharraf’s extravagant farmhouse which was locked up from all sides and nobody was available at the residence to comment on whether the message has been conveyed to the former military ruler.

“Yes, I can confirm that a notice has been pasted on the main gate of Musharraf’s farmhouse,” Sheikh Naeem, a senior police official, told AFP.

A three judge-bench, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhamamd Chaudhry, on Monday directed a notice be pasted at Musharraf’s residence after he failed to respond to repeated notices to appear before the court.

When contacted, Musharraf’s former spokesperson Rashid Qureshi refused to have received any such warrants, saying that he has no idea in this regard and referred the issue to Barrister Saif, who is the incumbent spokesperson for the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) – Musharraf’s political party. However, a response from Saif was not forthcoming despite repeated attempts on his cell phone.

An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Rawalpindi has issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf after his ignorance to appear before the court to respond to questions about the murder of former prime minister Bhutto.

A court in Quetta had also issued a similar arrest warrant for the former president in connection with the murder of Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006.

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a petition filed by Bhutto’s former protocol officer Advocate Aslam Chaudhry, who wants a second FIR be registered against Musharraf and 12 others in connection with her assassination. President Musharraf has been living in a self exile since 2009.

Earlier, the interior ministry also issued red warrants to Interpol’s headquarter in Switzerland for the former president’s arrest and sought his return to carry out proceedings against him in the murder probe.