Annapolis summit

EVEN before the delegates to the Middle East peace conference have started gathering at Annapolis, things have gone awry. As announced by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, his government and Israel have failed to agree on the document the conference will adopt. There are differences even over what the statement to be adopted will be called. Convened by President George Bush, the international conference at Maryland’s capital beginning tomorrow seems to be his last attempt to achieve peace in the Middle East before he quits the White House in January 2009. The decision by the Arab foreign ministers at Cairo on Friday to attend the conference has been a positive development. More surprisingly, Syria will be there, even though there is no indication yet that the conference will also take up the question of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The Palestinians want the final statement to include a timeline for resolving the major issues — the final status of Jerusalem, the boundaries of the Palestinian state to emerge and the right of Palestinian refugees to return. Israel wants the document to comprise a list of principles on which to base negotiations.

We now know what Israel did to the Declaration of Principles adopted on Sept 13, 1993, at the White House. The DoP, the signatories to which included Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton, laid down Dec 13, 1993, as the date for the start of Israel’s military withdrawal, with the final settlement to be in place by April 13, 1999. Nothing of the sort happened, even though Clinton was to remain at the White House for the next seven years. In fact, Clinton helped the Israeli prime ministers who followed Rabin’s assassination — Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak — to circumvent the DoP’s implementation. At Camp David in July 2000, Clinton made his last attempt at peacemaking and failed because both he and Ehud Barak wanted Arafat to sign on the dotted lines and write off Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees’ right to return.

Today, the Palestinian Authority stands divided and destroyed, with Gaza and the West Bank having an anomalous existence independent of each other. This ideally suits Israel and America. Barring a miracle, nothing positive is going to come out of the Annapolis summit because the Arab world is not in a position to influence events and make things move. Israel is not going to withdraw even from the West Bank, much less Golan, and — as always — it will enjoy America’s unqualified support. The success of the Annapolis summit is dependent upon one condition: Israel must categorically announce a date by which it will withdraw from the West Bank, dismantle all settlements built in violation of the 1993 DoP and give up the territory which it has further gobbled up by aligning the wall in a way that eats into Palestinian territory. With the presidential election due next year, it is futile to expect President Bush to be a peacemaker and not adopt a strong pro-Israeli stance to boost the Republican Party’s chances at the hustings.

Protecting the consumer

LAHORE’S manufacturers, dealers and service providers are gradually discovering that they may not get away with cheating their customers any more. Since February this year, a consumer court has been working in the city, and more often than not, it has upheld the consumers’ and customers’ complaints — sometimes ruling against the country’s leading manufacturers and service providers. Only last week, the court decided that manufacturers and traders were liable to replacing faulty goods even if they do not provide any warranty or guarantee at the time of their sale. According to some news reports, the number of cases filed at the court has exceeded 150 with almost one-third of them already decided. Set up with help from the Asian Development Bank’s Access to Justice Programme, the consumer court in Lahore — and 10 other similar courts in different districts of the province — has come about as a result of the Punjab Consumer Protection Act, 2005.

Though the provincial government took two long years after the enactment of the law to set up the first consumer courts, and that too only in a few districts, both the legislation and legal forums it has created provide a much-needed missing link in a market economy. Under the basic principles of such an economy, the market forces of demand and supply determine the prices and quality of the goods sold and services offered. But the fact is that manufacturers and traders can manipulate market forces for their benefit by holding back supplies or supplying defective products when demand is high. If they are not properly monitored and regulated, and their customers and consumers are not provided with any forum to have their grievances addressed, a market economy will certainly create only robber barons to make money at the expense of ordinary citizens.

But in a city of about six million people, how many have heard that there exists a court which can provide them justice against the depredations of crooked manufacturers, traders and service providers? Certainly not many. The government and non-government bodies working on consumer rights need to launch a sustained awareness campaign to let the people of Lahore know about the court as well as other provisions of the Punjab Consumer Protection Act. An informed citizenry will certainly go a long way in creating a level playing field between the manufacturers, traders and service providers on the one hand and their consumers and customers on the other.

Excesses of private health sector

ONE fails to understand why, despite deploring for years the irregularities witnessed in private healthcare institutions, and subsequently readying an ordinance to curb these, the Sindh government chose not to promulgate the much-needed law. The draft was sent to the Governor House seven months ago but has been shelved ever since. Although there have been complaints that the draft was prepared without consultation with the major stakeholders, there was much in it that could have led to reforms in the private health sector, had the ordinance been promulgated. The draft sought to establish a provincial authority that would have maintained strict checks on private hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres, etc, essentially to stop them from fleecing patients and to ensure that punitive measures were taken against medical malpractice or negligence. The government’s inaction on this front — and one might add the health department’s failure to press for the ordinance’s promulgation — speaks volumes for a serious lack of political will. Or are there other considerations at work — primarily the reluctance of private health facilities, some major hospitals among them, to be brought under the ambit of a law that limits their independence?

Whatever the case, it is essential that there is legislation that holds private medical outlets accountable for their actions. It is the absence of such a law that has made medical malpractice so common. There is little compensation for the patient and no penalty for the erring doctor or hospital. The high fee structure at many private hospitals and clinics is also a worrisome aspect. With government hospitals in a shambles and unable to cater to the needs of patients, the poor have no option but to turn to quacks whose flawed prescriptions complicate matters even more. One can only hope that more resolve is shown by the authorities and that eventually a comprehensive law is enacted to check this wholesale commercialisation of the medical profession, while taking everybody on board and refraining from issuing arbitrary rules. It is equally important to work towards introducing positive changes in government hospitals and clinics so that private institutions are forced to review and improve their own performance.

Sixteen days for women

SOME years ago, a woman undergoing life imprisonment in Sukkur jail for murdering her husband — something she readily confessed to — said poignantly: “I don’t know why he beat me. He didn’t have to because I always obeyed him. I wouldn’t dare otherwise. He could have just asked without violence, and I would have done the same and more.”

She echoed many women who continue to voice similar sentiments, when they have the opportunity or courage to do so, to social workers and doctors. Why men are unnecessarily violent remains an even greater mystery to women than why most men tend to be violent which is assumed to be inherent. But part of the reason is obvious: many men are violent because they know they can get away with it.

As in this prisoner’s case, the woman’s husband beat her almost daily so that her face or some part of her body was always lacerated or swollen. Yet, like most other poor women, she was not welcome to return to her parental home and she had nowhere else to turn to.

He had already fractured each limb at least once, and one day he tied her to the charpoy and then sat and slept on it all night, pressing his full weight on her extremities. Her piercing screams failed to draw the neighbours — it was ‘none of their business’ — until she fell unconscious. Permanently deformed, she decided she would take no more.

When her wounds finally healed, she poisoned him to death. It is easy to understand why she feels at peace in prison and has no desire for freedom.

Violence against women has always been viewed as a strictly social problem, even by some of the most well-intentioned activists and scholars. Some appeal to the better side of the male nature, others exhort men to exhibit the behaviour that religion expects of them — essentially asking for consideration and compassion rather than protection and penalty against violence as a human right.

This is not necessarily because women automatically accept second place or are unaware of their rights. This approach has been used as a strategy. Aware of the unlikelihood of achieving guarantees against violence overnight, women turn to a long-term plan and ask for less in the hope that they’ll make some headway over the years before asking for a little bit more until finally all their rights are realised even if it takes decades. Better late than never. Even the UN has adopted this strategy. It has been organising women’s international regional conferences at three- to five-year intervals.

All this suits male-dominated societies and governments that emerge from the mindset of entrenched hierarchies. It gives them reason to do as little as possible for women. It allows for many double standards — confinement, restrictions on mobility, lower wages, no genuine participation or representation in unions or politics or ministries, caps to promotion, denial of leadership, and so on.

While some countries have indeed raced ahead, many governments of formerly colonised ‘developing’ countries still prefer to keep women confined to their traditional role or allow ‘progress’ at a snail’s pace only, and are not expected to see genuine results for half a century or more. Conferences and special days are even observed by cynical governments to best effect.

It is only in recent years that some have started to come out more into the open about the economic and political objectives of violence or its threat to women’s progress. One has only to trace the linkages among women’s subservience, power hierarchies, global wealth monopolies and militarisation. Some have begun to think in terms of getting freedom from domestic and workplace violence to be guaranteed under the constitution of their country.

Long, compulsory jail sentences could prove to be a deterrent. That seems unlikely in many, especially Muslim, countries; also because men would be likely to demand the same guarantees against their oppressors, whoever.

Ever since governments came round to accepting the concept of nations respecting the culture of others, without defining any parameters, it became even easier for many wayward countries to retain bad habits on untenable religious or cultural grounds. An organised effort to mount an international campaign regarding the issue to pressure governments began in 1991, when the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute sponsored by the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership in the US came up with the ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence’. It has been painstakingly slow work, but since 1991 more than 2,000 organisations from over 150 countries have participated.

The occasion has been made 16 days long not only to enable a sustained spotlight while giving women sufficient continuous time for lobbying and awareness-raising activities, but also to encompass several other related occasions — Nov 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women); Nov 29 (International Women Human Rights Defenders Day); Dec 1 (World AIDS Day); Dec 6 (the Canadian National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women, commemorated after a young man shot 14 women engineering students in 1989 at a Montreal polytechnic before killing himself); and Dec 10 (International Human Rights Day). A few Pakistani women’s NGOs first joined up with the ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence’ in 2003. Violence against women is universal but Pakistan has its own brand too, such as ‘honour-killing’ which actually saw resurgence under authoritarian rule. This year more groups are expected to join up despite the distractions of the emergency.

Nor does the occasion depend on seminars and workshops alone. A key feature of ‘16 days’ is website information and ideas, Internet exchanges and discussions that take place which anyone can join and share with those groups that are not computer-literate or have no access. The theme is the same everywhere: gender-based violence is a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels. The common denominator, violence against women, is a violation of human rights. If it is not acceptable against men, it is not acceptable against women either.

OTHER VOICES - American Press

Harper’s Pakistan push

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the principled choice at yesterday’s Commonwealth meeting, successfully lobbying for General Pervez Musharraf’s military regime in Pakistan to be suspended for its serial assault on democracy. Canada has a duty to stand with Pakistan’s 165 million people, who are clamouring for a restoration of constitutional order, civilian government and free elections… The Commonwealth move late last night to suspend Pakistan was the only appropriate outcome. It gives Pakistan’s democrats reason to press on, and steps up pressure on the generals.

With this decision the Commonwealth has rightly honoured its 1991 pledge to defend “democracy, democratic processes and institutions ... the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, just and honest government.”…

While Musharraf yesterday tried to stave off a suspension, he was nowhere close to meeting the Commonwealth’s core demands that he lift the state of emergency, reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and other judges, free all political prisoners, lift gags on the media, and allow free and fair elections. He had merely agreed, grudgingly, to hold parliamentary elections Jan 8, to free 5,600 current prisoners and to shed his uniform now that pliant, handpicked judges have endorsed him as president for five more years. It was too little, too late.

Despite promising a return to democracy, Musharraf continues to wield draconian powers... If the military has its way, rule-by-Gen.-Musharraf will be replaced with rule-by-Mr.-Musharraf, nothing more. Unless the regime restores constitutional rule, opposition leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif would be more than justified in boycotting the Jan 8 elections. They risk being a manipulated farce.

Canada and its partners now must bring what extra pressure they can to ensure that the people of Pakistan are heard, not the generals. In Harper’s words, Musharraf’s “flagrant disregard” for freedom, democracy and the law makes him unfit for high office. He should go. The people of Pakistan can do better. (Nov 23)

A respite from airport misery

AIR TRAVEL in the United States has become an almost uniformly dismal experience. So it’s newsworthy that in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, by and large, airline passengers actually got to their destinations…Yet the absence of major problems so far this weekend looks like a temporary respite. Within the nation’s commercial aviation system, fundamental problems are festering. There’s not enough airspace for planes to fly in, especially in the crowded Northeast. There aren’t enough empty seats available to accommodate passengers whose flights are cancelled. Checked luggage ends up where it ends up.

And yet neither the airlines nor their regulators see the value of minimising passengers’ misery. Hence the need for a strong passenger bill of rights, to keep airlines from severely overbooking flights and holding people aboard delayed planes for hours.

Alas, the changes that eased air travel this week do not herald better days ahead, for they are unlikely to recur on a regular basis. For the long Thanksgiving weekend, airlines and aviation authorities fully staffed check-in desks, security checkpoints, and other potential bottlenecks. Imagine - having enough employees on hand to deal with a crush of travellers! Meanwhile, the Bush administration temporarily opened up certain military airspace for commercial use, thereby speeding traffic to and from busy airports in the Northeast. This raises an obvious question: Should the balance between military and civilian uses of the nation’s airspace be adjusted year-round?

Sadly, some baleful trends are accelerating. As The New York Times reported, the number of bags lost is rising, from one in every 155 checked bags last year to one in 138 this year. This isn’t just annoying; it also prompts travellers to carry on whatever luggage they can. This means boarding and unloading take longer, which means more time at the gate.

Commercial aviation today leaves no margin for error…. But without more far-reaching changes, travellers year-round should still be prepared for sleepless nights on the airport terminal floor. (Nov 24)