We stand with Pakistan: Hillary Clinton

The Times of India

WASHINGTON: Greeting the people of Pakistan as it celebrates anniversary of Lahore Resolution that led to the creation of the country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday said that United States stands with them.

“As you celebrate Pakistan Day, know that the United States stands with you,” Clinton said in a message issued on the occasion.

“I join President Obama and the people of the United States in congratulating the people of Pakistan as you celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Lahore Resolution this March 23, which laid the foundation for the creation of Pakistan,” she said.
The US and Pakistan are united by shared values, common interests and mutual respect, she said.

“We are constantly striving for greater tolerance, to enforce the rule of law and uphold the principles of democracy in both our countries,” she added.

“As Mohammad Ali Jinnah said the story of Pakistan, its struggle and its achievement, is the very story of great human ideals, struggling to survive in the face of great odds and difficulties,” Clinton said.

“These words ring true today as Pakistan works to fulfill the vision of its founders,” Clinton said.

“We join the people of Pakistan in honoring these ideals and the valiant sacrifices the Pakistani people are making every day in the fight against violent extremism,” she said.

“We remember the message of hope, courage and confidence the Quaid-e-Azam expressed to the Pakistani people and we continue to support your efforts to strive for a more peaceful and prosperous Pakistan,” Clinton said. PTI LKJ.

The ‘bin Laden’ of marginalisation

Larbi Sadiki

The real terror eating away at the Arab world is socio-economic marginalisation.

Conventional wisdom has it that ‘terror’ in the Arab world is monopolised by al-Qaeda in its various incarnations. There may be some truth in this.

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror is marginalisation

However, this is a limited viewpoint. Regimes in countries like Tunisia and Algeria have been arming and training security apparatuses to fight Osama bin Laden. But they were caught unawares by the ‘bin Laden within’: the terror of marginalisation for the millions of educated youth who make up a large portion of the region’s population.

The winds of uncertainty blowing in the Arab west – the Maghreb – threaten to blow eastwards towards the Levant as the marginalised issue the fatalistic scream of despair to be given freedom and bread or death.

Whose terror?

The gurus of so-called ‘radicalisation’ who have turned Islam into a security issue have fixed the debate, making bin Laden a timeless, single and permanent pathology of all things Muslim.

It is no exaggeration to claim that since 9/11 so-called radicalisation has replaced new Orientalism as the prism through which Western security apparatuses view Middle Eastern youth and societies. Guantanamo Bay, profiling, extraordinary renditions, among others, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The policing, equipment, funding, expertise and anti-terror philosophy being fed to the likes of Algeria, Libya and Morocco are geared towards fighting the ‘bearded, radical salafis’ whose prophet is Osama bin Laden. But, the tangible bin Ladens bracing suicide in its entirety have emerged from the ranks of the educated middle classes whose prophet is Adam Smith.

Al-Qaeda, literally “the base”, may today be the swelling armies of marginals in the Middle East, not the ‘salafis’.

It is not the Quran or Sayyid Qutb – who is in absentia charged with perpetrating 9/11 despite being dead since 1966 – Western security experts should worry about. They should perhaps purchase Das Kapital and bond with Karl Marx to get a reality check, a rethink, a dose of sobriety in a post-9/11 world afflicted by over-securitisation.

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage, including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.

The armies of ‘khobzistes’ (the unemployed of the Maghreb) – now marching for bread in the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman, Rabat, San’aa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirut – are not fighting the terror of unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology. The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are ‘les misérables’ of the modern world.

The ‘bread compact’

The bread compacts which framed the political order in much of the Arab world came unstuck in the mid- to late-1980s.

In the 1960s, regimes committed to the distribution of bread (subsidised goods) in return for political passivity. In the 1980s, the new political fix shifted to giving the vote instead of bread.

Who can forget the 1988 bread riots that eventually brought the Islamists to the verge of parliamentary control of Algeria in 1991? The riots in Jordan at around the same time inspired state-led political liberalisation in 1989.

For Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Egypt, the impoverished Arab states, in need of the liquidity of Euro-American and International Misery Fund aid, infitah (open-door policy) was the only blueprint of forward economic management. Within its bosom are bred greed, land grab, corruption, monopoly and the new entrepreneurial classes who exchange loyalty and patronage with the political masters as well as the banknotes and concessions with which both fund flash lifestyles.

Thus the map of distribution was gerrymandered at the expense of the have-nots who are placated with insufficient micro credits or ill-managed national development funds. The crumbs – whatever subsidies are allowed by the new economic order built on the pillars of privatisation, the absence of social safety nets and economic protectionism – delay disaffection but never eliminate it.

Below the surface the pent-up anger of the marginals simmers.

‘Tis the season of ‘bread intifadas’

The ‘khobzistes’ have returned. At home they are marginals; abroad, they are largely persona non grata for being born in the wrong geography, inheriting the perfect genes for ‘profiling’ and being too culturally challenged for some European assimilationists. Their only added value is as objects of social dumping in capitalism’s sweat shops.

Potentially, they are the fodder of chaos in the absence of social justice, culturally sensitive sustainable development and democratic mediating networks and civic channels of socio-political bargaining and
inclusion.

Bread uprisings have a plus and a minus. On the positive side, they act as elections, as plebiscites on performance, as an airing of public anger, they issue verdicts on failed policies and send stress messages to rulers.

The response comes swiftly: when initial oppression becomes too heavy and politically costly, bargains begin. They include promises of jobs and policy, reversals of hikes in food prices and even scapegoats in the form of ministerial dismissals.

This is where Algeria and Tunisia are today.

In Tunisia, in particular, the government has been clumsy, nervous and completely out of line for threatening the use of force and then employing it. Fatalities have been on the rise. The death toll is heavy and may already have produced irreversible tipping-point logic.

Bargains, but no democracy

On the negative side, there is no ‘democratic spring’ in Algeria. Bread riots come and go. But regimes stay on.

The absence of a critical mass that produces a tipping-point dynamic means that regimes know how to buy time, co-opt and fund themselves out of trouble when pushed. Genuine democratic bargains do not ensue. The states have not invested in social and political capital.

Oppositions and dissidents have not yet learned how to infiltrate governments and build strong political identities and power bases. This is one reason why the protests that produced ‘Velvet revolutions’ elsewhere seem to be absent in the Arab world.

The momentum created by the bread rioters is never translated into self-sustaining critical mass by opposition forces. Regimes wait until the last minute after use of force fails to kill off the momentum through the offer of concessionary and momentary welfare.

Tunisia will be the first Arab exception to this: Ben Ali is in no position to act Machiavellian and intransigent. He is weak, and the party following and army that has protected him for 24 years may be withdrawing loyalty as the crisis deepens.

The ‘fishers of men’

The misery belts tightening around the pockets of affluence and opportunity from Algiers to Amman hint at the microcosm of the unevenness of global distribution.

Just as Sidi Bouzid, El-Kobba, Ma’an or Imbaba function internally in that belt of misery, so do the cities of Arab states globally. They are the periphery, literally the misery belts tightening around rich ‘fortress Europe’ – a Europe that is increasingly more interested in the technology of security, surveillance systems, ‘radicalisation’ theories, policing and the mental nets functioning as ‘fishers of men’ according to one study. Today the ClubMed geography is in rebellion mode.

Frontex is the EU agency that spearheads the task of constructing fortress Europe. It is at the front, fighting against the boat people that threaten the lifestyles and comfort of the EU. Its planes, frigates and patrols literally fish men from the tiny boats laden with Arab and African human cargo destined for EU shores.

These desperados weather the high seas knowing that their chance of survival is not more than 10 per cent. Many drown. Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of insanity was not the only suicide. The ‘harraqa’, as North African boat people are called, seek exodus by stealth, and by death.

Those who do not drown are chased back to their shores of departure. Some are caught and returned to countries of transition such as Libya.

A 2009 EU agreement assigns maritime patrolling and policing to Libya so that boat people do not reach Italian ports, discarding the ethical implications of entrusting refugee protection to countries with dubious human rights records.

From Israel to Spain, fences are erected to keep non-Europeans out. They are allowed to dream of Europe … but not of setting foot in it.

The time has come for the Arab Gulf labour markets to do more for the Arab marginals.

The ‘geography of hunger’

In Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth one finds resonance with the misery engulfing Tunisia and Algeria today, where the have-nots, or the mahrumin, and the khobzistes strike back at the state and target its symbols. They fight back and thus “struggle … and with their shrunken bellies [and humiliated egos] outline of the geography of hunger”.

In this geography of hunger and marginalisation, the ruling native becomes the new coloniser. By contrast to the have-nots, the ruling natives and the economic ‘mafias’ are sheltered not only in mansions and villas, but also within ‘a hard shell’ that immures them from the “poverty that surrounds” them.

In The Wretched of the Earth one reads about the “poor, underdeveloped countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty”.

To map out the “geography of hunger” is not complete without marking out the geography of authoritarianism. In both Algeria and Tunisia, the big interests and profiteers supporting Bouteflika and Ben Ali seem to fulfill Fanon’s prophecy about corruption “sooner or later” making leaders “men of straw in the hands of the army … immobilising and terrorising”. It is the security forces and the army that run the show in both countries.

Fanon, the ideologue of the Algerian revolution, is probably turning in his grave at the thought that a country of “one million martyrs” sacrificed for independence is today battling for new freedoms from housing shortages, rising food prices, autocracy and overall marginalisation.

The figures construct on paper stories of growth and stability that are not matched by the reality of marginalisation.

For how long republics of paper and men of straw can withstand the hell-fire of the Algerian and Tunisian eruptions fuelled by marginalisation remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the beginnings of a ‘Tunisian democratic spring’ are in the offing.

1 in 7 Americans live in poverty

By Carol Morello

In the second year of a brutal recession, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.

About 44 million Americans – one in seven – lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago.

The snapshot captured by the census for 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency, shows an America in the throes of economic upheaval.

Since 2007, the year before the recession kicked into gear, the country has almost 4 million fewer wage-earners. There are more children growing up poor. And for the first time since the government began tracking health insurance in 1987, the number of people who have health coverage declined, as people lost jobs with health benefits or employers stopped offering it.

With midterm elections less than two months away, the statistics bare the reality fueling much of the anger toward Washington.

In the Washington region, Virginia’s poverty rate rose the most, to 10.5 percent from 8.6 percent. Maryland’s edged up half a percentage point to 9 percent. The District’s rate was the highest, but it declined from 18 percent to 17 percent.

Although the recession’s impact was broad-based, there were disparities among groups. The official poverty rate increased for all races and ethnicities except Asians, who continued to have the highest median household income. More working-age adults lived in poverty, while the number of poor people 65 or older fell, largely as a result of increases in Social Security payments.

More than 51 million Americans lack health insurance, the census reported, and a greater-than-ever percentage of those who do have insurance are getting it from the government.

Scholars, nonprofit groups that work with the poor and President Obama all expressed concern about the gloomy picture.

Obama said the numbers could have been much worse were it not for government assistance.

“Because of the Recovery Act and many other programs providing tax relief and income support to a majority of working families – and especially those most in need – millions of Americans were kept out of poverty last year,” he said in a statement.

Many conservatives, however, laid the blame on government programs that don’t work.

“We’re spending more money fighting poverty than ever before, yet poverty is up,” said Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “Clearly, we’re doing something wrong.”
Along with a rise in the number of people living in poverty, the census reported a decrease in the number of people who are living just above poverty level, suggesting that many of those just slightly above poverty slipped over the edge in the previous year.

Food banks and shelters around the country say they are seeing former donors asking for help.

Dale City resident Jamie Imler is one. She used to give money to charity and make quilts for homeless shelters. But since she began treatment for breast cancer last year, she has been too weak to work at either of the two jobs she held, one in a restaurant and one for a recruitment agency. Her income has dropped from $2,000 a month to less than $700 – not enough to cover her rent – and she has been coming for the past six months to a food pantry in Prince William County called Action Through Service.

“Things were good,” she said. “I was a single mom, raised my son and needed food stamps.”

“And now I’m here,” she added.

While the number of the country’s poorest people is higher than in any other recorded period, the rate is not without precedent. The last time it was this high was 1994. And in the early 1960s, it was over 20 percent.

Despite the jump in poverty, median income did not go down for those who still had jobs. Men working full time saw their median earnings rise 2 percent, to $47,000, while the median wage of women rose about the same amount, to a little over $36,000.

The median household income declined a little, to just under $50,000. But household income is down 4.2 percent since the recession began and 5 percent from its peak of more than $52,000 in 1999. Black households fared particularly poorly, as incomes dropped 4.4 percent compared with 1.6 percent for white households.

“We always have a situation where some population groups have higher poverty rates than others,” said Margaret Simms, who directs the Low Income Working Families Project at the Urban Institute. “During recessions, we see who bears the brunt in hard times in the kinds of numbers we see today.”

The statistics have quickly become fodder for a debate on the proper role of government in combating economic downturns.

“It’s a strong indication that there is not enough focus on growth and investment in job production,” said Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio state treasurer who is a fellow at the Family Research Council.

Ron Haskins, a head of the Brookings Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, said government programs do not have enough money to make up for the decline among private and employer-provided health care. “Is the government going to pick it up?” he said. “That means bigger government, bigger expenses, more taxes.”

This summer, a proposal to extend jobless benefits to the long-term unemployed came under attack by Republicans, who objected to more spending that would add to the soaring deficit. The measure eventually passed.

Some of those who have struggled to find work are making their way to Good Shepherd Alliance, a food pantry in Loudoun County, which is one of the country’s wealthiest jurisdictions.

Vickie Koth, executive director, said she has grown accustomed to hearing clients say, almost as if dazed by their dizzying descent, that they used to volunteer at nonprofits like hers. The downturn will end some day, she noted, and hard times should be remembered.

“A lot of the community is really seeing this issue for the first time,” she said. “. . . Once this turns around, I hope that people will remember what we went through so that our communities will be more open to serving those around us who are in need.”

Held Kashmir: the agony goes on

By Bassam Javed

Ten weeks into Jammu & Kashmir’s surge of violence, the use of force against un-armed civilians continues unabated. This time the struggle for their rights through street protests has cost the peaceful movement over 60 dead, mainly Kashmiri youth in their teens and twenties, and hundreds of innocent injured.

The surge of violence in the Kashmiri movement with protesters chanting ‘Go India Go’ slogans commenced after teenager Tufail Mattoo’s brutal death at the hands of Indian security forces on June 11 this year. The movement through street protests just keeps picking up in intensity with each passing day and has been so fierce at times that security forces were forced to retreat.

Whatever the protestors are demanding in the streets today is nothing new and is absolutely the same agenda what their elders have been fighting to achieve through their life times. There is no deviation in the basic agenda of seeking their right of self determination.

The ferocity in the current uprising is amazing despite the fact that their leadership is confined to their residences by force and is not allowed to move around. They have not even been allowed to meet and sympathise with the families whose beloved ones have been killed by the Indian security forces. But India remains in a denial mode.

Initially, India had tried to give a turn to the current spate of violence by terming it as terrorism perpetrated from across the border, a popular outlet they find in Pakistan to cover their inabilities to either recognise the gravity of issues that plague their security or their failure to control the fallouts of these issues.

The anger on the streets of Indian held Kashmir today is a clear manifestation of decades of deprivation of their statehood and identity. From official counts till 4th of August, 872 stone throwing incidents caused injuries to 1,456 security men. Elsewhere nine police stations, police posts, a camp of services special operations group, two houses of political activists,

round 10 government vehicles, a train coach besides a railway station itself and 13 government office buildings have been destroyed as revenge for killing over 60 Kashmiris, mostly teenagers by security forces deployed in Kashmir. A police officer was quoted as having said: “They are taking over the country and we are to face their wrath. It is not a simple law and order problem.”

The fact that the Indian leadership always viewed the core issue of Kashmir as a security issue rather than a political one has made the people of Jammu and Kashmir robust in their demands. During the past 20 years, it has been recognized by India and Pakistan as the core issue that mars the security of the region.

Many a times the echoes of ‘out of the box’ solution gathered optimism but as always have been in the India-Pakistan context, that remain a far cry. Meanwhile, the Kashmir’s current wave of struggle driven by the valiant youth continues to claim innocent lives at the hands of Indian security forces.

India needs Azadi from tinted vision

By Khalid Awan

The Kashmiri youth want to get rid of Indian yoke come what may be the cost. Their demonstration of frustration and anger in the face of bullets and curfews bear testimony to this fact. Indian authorities, right from the beginning, have been blaming Pakistan for fomenting trouble in Kashmir and instigating the Kashmiri youth to rise in revolt against the Indian sovereignty. But the facts speak for themselves; the struggle of Kashmiri youth is indigenous.

The Indian Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram, repeated the same mantra recently, saying that Pakistan based organisations were behind the ongoing agitation in the Kashmir Valley and the protesting youth were being supported by Pakistan. However, an opinion poll conducted by the Outlook magazine of India, in association with the Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA), has totally nullified the Indian propaganda, while exposing some of the hard facts about the Kashmir movement.

The poll conducted in Srinagar revealed that 75 percent of those polled did not see Pakistan behind the protests in the occupied territory and believe that it is an indigenous struggle. A majority of the respondents recorded their anger against the New Delhi government, saying that it was responsible for the whole mess.

A majority has described yearning of liberation amongst the Kashmiri masses as the main factor of the current situation. For how long, India will succeed in hiding the truth and gruesome ground realities by blaming Pakistan for its wrongdoings?

Indian authorities must realise that they are themselves responsible for current deteriorating situation in the IOK, and throwing muck on someone else will neither improve the situation nor let them succeed in achieving their false claims. The opinion poll of the Outlook magazine must serve as an eye opener for India as well as the international community. The writing on the wall is what noted human rights activist and author Arundhati Roy said, “India needs azadi (freedom) from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs azadi from India.”

8-Rockets hit Israel, Jordan resorts; one dead in Aqaba

* Four civilians hurt in Jordanian Red Sea port

* No word of casualties in adjacent Israeli resort Eilat

* Short-range rocket lands in prime Aqaba hotel district

* Jordan investigating source of rocket salvo

By Mohammed al-Ramahi

AQABA, Jordan, Rockets from Egypt’s Sinai, where Islamist militants have operated in the past, hit Israel’s and Jordan’s Red Sea port resorts on Monday, killing a Jordanian civilian and injuring three others, Jordanian and Israeli police said.

A Jordanian interior ministry source said one of the four injured when a rocket exploded near a five-star hotel in Aqaba, later died from his injuries.

There was no word of casualties in the adjacent Israeli port and holiday resort of Eilat, police said. Aqaba and Eilat lie on the narrow northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, an extension of the Red Sea, with Sinai stretching west and south of Eilat.

Jordanian Minister of State Ali al-Ayed said the kingdom would continue its “fight against terrorists who undertake callous attacks that targets innocent people”.

Israeli President Shimon Peres condemned the rocket fire and said Israel and Jordan, who made peace in 1994, were “partners in the uncompromising struggle to eradicate terrorism”.

“There is a real struggle in the Middle East between the peace camp of moderate countries and the camp of extremists, who want to sabotage any chance for peace,” Peres said.

Asked where the Aqaba rocket was fired from, the Jordanian source said without elaborating: “It came from the west.” Experts were investigating the site to find out where the short-range rocket had been launched, he said.

Egyptian security sources were quoted by the state news agency as saying rockets could not have been fired from Sinai since the largely empty, desert region was very mountainous.

“The only missiles that can be fired from Sinai are mortars which can pass over these heights,” General Abdel Fadeel Shousha, governor of South Sinai, said adding the area such an operation would require open space.

EXPLOSION BY BEACH

Aqaba resident Ibrahim Salymehin said he heard one loud blast and when he arrived at the scene he saw at least three injured men taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance.

A crowd gathered near the scene of the explosion several hundred metres away from a five-star hotel close to the beach.

“We saw the wreckage of a taxi which was burnt, and fragmented metal scattered around the area that was cordoned off by police,” another Aqaba resident, Abdullah Yashin Rawashdehd, told Reuters.

Eilat District Police Commander Moshe Cohen told Israel Radio that his forces were still trying to confirm that five explosions heard in the morning had been caused by shelling.

Two of the suspected rockets or mortar bombs appeared to have landed in the sea, while another hit Aqaba, he said.

“It’s a little early to say, but it is reasonable to assume that it came from the southern area,” he said, referring to neighbouring Egypt, whose Sinai Peninsula has suffered occasional violence attributed to Islamist militants.

A police spokesman later said the remains of one rocket was found in Eilat and was being examined by bomb experts.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the rocket salvo was a “deplorable action” intended to undermine direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Asked if Washington knew who was behind the attacks, Crowley told a news briefing: “There are armed elements here that want to see the conflict continue. They have used these tactics before and we’re not surprised that they are using them again.”

At least one rocket struck Aqaba on April 22, causing no casualties. Amman said the rocket had been fired from outside Jordan and Israeli media said Sinai was a possible launch point.

In 2005, rockets were fired at U.S. warships in Aqaba but missed their target and killed a Jordanian soldier on land. A group claiming links to al Qaeda said it was behind the attack.

Two years later, a Palestinian suicide bomber infiltrated through Sinai and killed three people at a bakery in Eilat, which lies on Israel’s southern tip and has only rarely been touched by the Middle East conflict.

Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states to have full peace treaties with Israel. Those relations were frayed by Israel’s crackdown a decade ago on a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.