Say No To Sexual Abuse By Sherry Rehman: New Age Islam's Selection 15 January 2018
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
15 January 2018
• Say No to Sexual Abuse
By Sherry Rehman
• Child Sex Abuse — Reframing The Narrative
By Chris Cork / Valerie Khan
• Kasur Kiska
By Kamal Siddiqi
• Child Abuse and Social Complicity
By Marria Qibtia S Nagra
• Kasur as a Political Failure
By Umair Javed
• Our Crocodile Tears
By Zaigham Khan
• Indispensable United Nations
By Gulshan Rafiq
• The Year That Was
By Shahid Javed Burki
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Say No to Sexual Abuse
By Sherry Rehman
January 14, 2018
As the news cycle inevitably shifts to politics, violent extremism, the national debt, we all know that little Zainab’s story will fade away into a niche issue until the next such horror erupts. That is the nature of human memory, especially in the age of quantum processing and 24/7 television.
Our task as citizens, legislators, public representatives is not small. If we use our individual and collective agency to effect change, our first, minimal responsibility to our people, our children will be on its way to opening the gateway to change.
The one most widespread response that sexual abuse of any kind elicits, the world over, is the resort to silence. The videos that exposed a hall of horrors in the annals of sexual abuse in 2015 from Kasur took a long time in pushing their way to public light. Many lives were permanently ruined in the blackmail and maiming that underpinned those serial crimes. The community’s anger was matched by a sad, unfair seam of shame and socially induced guilt that invariably scars victims and their families. Such social attitudes helped in burying the case. Islands of complicity and the disastrous role of privatised justice played a huge part in either buying off or scaring away the affected families from pursuing prosecution. A key lesson learnt was that the power of socially-induced shame must never be underestimated in pushing the scale, nature and perpetrators of this evil under the rug.
But even with the muzzling of voices, the data on the subject is harrowing. Global accounts suggest that one in five women and one in 13 men already report being sexually abused as a child. In Pakistan, according to SAHIL, the NGO that works on child abuse, in only the reported cases, every day, more than 11 children fall prey to sexual abuse. Forty-three per cent of the survivors said they knew their assaulters, while 16 per cent testified to family abusers.
Clearly, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
First thing first. Of course we must hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that each province and the Islamabad federal area have optimal laws in place. Without the laws little will get done on the ground. At the federal level, the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance 2000, which provides for free legal advice for victims, just does not make the policy implementation cut. Out of all four provinces, Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have done better in having the most robust child protection laws in place. Punjab, which is home to 62 per cent of the child abuse cases, has no such omnibus law on the table. The existing Punjab Destitute and Neglected Children Act of 2004 is too weak and of low scope to cope with the complex set of protections needed for a material impact on such crimes. Kasur itself continues to report 11 such more grisly crimes just in one year before Zainab’s brutally ravaged body was dumped on a trash heap.
But even once the laws are in place, as we know, a law is as good as its citizens and the justice system allows it to be.
Let’s be clear: Every law will require a social coalition against sexual abuse, and it will need time. The real change that will shift the game on the ground will not happen overnight, or even in 10 years or 20. It will take a lifetime of pushing, but there can be no doubt that each push will be worth the effort. Not only time, and of course dogged commitment will be needed, but a resilience against reversals. Rights campaigners will all know that after the media starts reporting, and victims gather courage to speak out, we can even expect perhaps a visible spike in crimes based on higher reporting. The disappointment against more cases coming to public light must therefore only be handled with more action and support, not a debunking of laws or a resort to inaction fuelled by the very natural response of despair.
A few non-governmental organisations are doing important work. Let us encourage them instead of penalising them, and help with building global linkages. Sexual abuse is the one nasty worm that infects every class, every community in Pakistan, but the light in this tunnel is that sexual abuse both against children and women and men is embedded in regional and growing global trends of activism against such crimes. Let us identify all such potential partners as actors for a better future for our young people. Let us resolve to do more in just making public discourse a safer space for victims and their families so they can report, see justice and rebuild their lives.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1608066/6-say-no-sexual-abuse/
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Child Sex Abuse — Reframing The Narrative
By Chris Cork / Valerie Khan
January 14, 2018
The rape and murder of another child in Kasur has prompted a range of ill-informed or misinformed responses from both print and electronic media platforms, and politicians. Self-appointed ‘experts’ with little or no experience of how to handle such a case, get airtime and column space, but there is little anywhere about what should be done beyond catch the man responsible and then lynch him. Countering violence with yet more violence is no solution. Suddenly there are dozens of child protection specialists: politicians, media anchors, citizens, actors, lawyers, anybody who chooses to connect with the unbearable pain that the child victim’s parents are going through. Sadly, ethical guidelines have vanished into thin air.
Whilst this sympathy is natural, it is also dangerous if not tempered by reason and objective information. Some things have been changing almost unnoticed. For instance, there is a developing climate of disclosure in Pakistan in which children are more comfortable with telling parents or caregivers that they have been inappropriately touched, but disclosure is of little value if those to whom the disclosure is made are unable to respond to it. Parental and caregiver awareness needs to be universally raised and that can be done via a cooperative intervention by a coordinated group comprising civil society actors, NGOs and INGOs, agencies and existing government bodies. There are child protection offices staffed by qualified social workers in Punjab. The model could be replicated nationally.
There are ill-informed assumptions that ‘the government’ is doing nothing in the face of a developing problem and that Pakistan has done nothing to curb child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) in the country. This is not true. In a historic move, Pakistan has amended its penal code in March 2016 to criminalise CSAE and make it a non-compoundable and non-bailable offence. At the Saarc level, Pakistan has also been in the lead to develop a Saarc regional strategy against CSAE and its online manifestations such as child pornography. The regional strategy will be further worked on during the International Human Rights conference to be held in Islamabad from 19th to 21st February 2018 and eventually submitted to all Saarc countries’ governments for endorsement.
Additionally, the federal Ministry of Human Rights has agreed to develop a national policy against CSAE in collaboration with SAIEVAC (a Saarc apex body) and civil society. A workshop will take place to this effect on 22nd February in the federal capital.
Another noteworthy structural improvement is the enactment of a law to establish the National Commission on the Rights of the Child so that enforcement of child rights — which includes right to protection, can be monitored. The appointment of an ombudsperson is also significant. Lastly, the federal Ministry of Human Rights has been working for years on the enactment of a child protection Bill for the Islamabad Capital Territory along with a reviewed Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, aiming to divert juveniles in conflict with the law from jail because the risks of CSAE are magnified exponentially in a jail environment.
At a provincial level, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and Balochistan have enacted comprehensive child protection laws that clearly criminalise CSAE. In Punjab, the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau provides rescue and rehabilitation services to child victims of CSAE. In K-P, the provincial government has established a child protection and welfare commission and child protection units at district levels along with a pilot child protection institution ‘ZamungKor’ for children who are highly vulnerable to CSAE.
At an institutional level, judicial activism and collaboration of law-enforcement agencies with civil society have moved effectively to create another historical milestone. The first child court in the country was established in Lahore by the chief justice of the Lahore High Court in December 2017 and training has been regularly conducted by qualified and experienced child protection and gender experts in the police or in the judicial academies.
Other actions by the Sindh and Punjab governments to enhance education and counter child labour also indirectly contribute to reducing CSAE. More importantly, the Sindh legislation raising minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 plays a vital role in curbing what is nothing but a disguised form of child sexual abuse that some ill-informed or ill-intended stakeholders justify through a distorted religious interpretation that the OIC has dismissed through its Khartoum Declaration.
This is not to say that the state has done its job and that the problem is anywhere near resolution because clearly not.
There is an urgent need to work on a national policy to set up guidelines, and perhaps even more importantly establish a cross-sectoral coordination body to bring the many disconnected threads of child protection together. Establishing provincial child rights commissions and protection mechanisms aligned with international standards, and shifting from welfare-based models to empowering ones that are child centered and gender sensitive, is equally essential. A rights-based approach is required where full institutionalisation is used as a last resort. Those mechanisms would not only allow easier referral but also adequate management of cases of CSAE.
Then it is crucial to develop specialised units in the police, able to use forensic and new technologies along with knowledge of criminology, victimology and behavioural sciences to tackle cases of CSAE.
Last but not the least, training teachers, caregivers, LEAs, doctors, community members, parents and children themselves on child protection, positive disciplining and good parenting is an emergency. The state must conduct nationwide sensitisation campaigns using cognitive tools such as arts, drama and radio that directly impact viewers in a culturally-sensitive manner. This may be challenging, but this is feasible. Overcoming taboos will also require a reinforced political and social commitment to evolve and unlearn some of what we may have already learnt. The abusers are usually our own family members or people close to us. Parents, individuals who will have the courage to support the child and challenge family/cultural norms need support and protection. A mountain to climb but not impossible.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1608063/6-child-sex-abuse-reframing-narrative/
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Kasur Kiska
By Kamal Siddiqi
January 15, 2018
Within one month we will forget the Zainab case. Those few arrested will be let off. The policemen who killed two protestors will be quietly released. And Kasur will return to “normalcy.” A sleepy town once known for Madam Noor Jahan and for its variety of Methi, is now being called the rape capital of Pakistan.
Of course, the case will remain alive on social media. In fact, it is thanks to social media that we saw the public outcry after the death of the innocent victim. So powerful is the social media in this day and age that the image of a would-be assailant holding little Zainab’s hand and leading her on touched a very raw nerve. We have seen similar cases before. But it was this one that shook the conscience of the people who went out the streets to protest.
The Zainab incident, sadly, was not an isolated event. This newspaper has reported that over 720 incidents of such nature have been reported from Kasur in the last three years. This was also the 12th case of sexual abuse of a child reported from within a two-kilometre radius in the past 12 months. Sahil, an NGO that fights child sexual abuse, revealed that according to its records in 2017 a total of 129 cases of child assault were reported from Kasur alone. Of them, 34 were abductions, 23 rapes, 19 sodomy, 17 attempted rapes, six abduction and rapes, and four abduction and gang-rapes. The year 2015 saw the most such incidents recorded, a total of 451 cases of child abuse were registered in the area. The infamous Kasur child abuse scandal accounted for 285 of these cases.
Sahil says that there are many families who are reluctant to report sexual assault cases because of the social taboo attached to them. They believe that such cases will bring only shame upon them. Given how the police deal with such incidents, this belief is not without foundation. Even in the Zainab case, when it was reported to the police, they started to harass the family and wasted valuable time in finding the actual rapist. But there is more to this. If we take the paedophile ring that was uncovered, we are at a loss to understand why no one has so far been punished for this unspeakable crime.
In 2015-16, media reports had said that at least 280 children were sexually abused in Kasur over the past five years. A joint investigation team formed to probe the incident later interviewed over 400 witnesses and found that evidence in 19 cases was credible. The JIT found that 47 video clips and 72 photos presented as evidence were four to five years old. In its report, it said that there was a gang that worked together to produce the material.
For a government that is so keen on capital punishment, one can only wonder why the Kasur child abuse perpetrators were gradually let off and not hanged for their sins. Even in the Zainab case, a JIT is being formed. This is a waste of time. Our illustrious past president, General Musharraf, made two illuminating statements that need to be mentioned here. On one occasion, he noted that women get raped in order to get immigration for Canada. This was in reference to the Dr Shazia case at the PPL compound in Sui, Balochistan. In another statement, Musharraf said when asked why rape was seen as such a big issue in Pakistan. He likened it to a conspiracy against his government. “After all, women get raped all over the world.” This is how most Pakistani men think.
What we see in Pakistan is that the state works effectively against the rape victim and not in their favour. From the time of lodging First Information Report (FIR) to when a case is presented in court, loopholes in the system lead to increasing number of culprits being acquitted. Incomplete or misleading information in the FIR is one of the main reasons behind the weak prosecution. Our police make this happen.
The lengthy judicial process is one of the reasons not only behind why few cases are reported, but also weakly prosecuted, leading to more and more culprits being acquitted by courts. So far in the Kasur child pornography scandal, an anti-terrorism court had acquitted four accused. We need to strengthen the system. Clean up the police and make the courts proactive. Only then will things change.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1608834/6-kasur-kiska/
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Child Abuse and Social Complicity
By Marria Qibtia S Nagra
January 15, 2018
Does the emotional and physical vulnerability of children makes them worthy of being horrifically manipulated, physically abused and atrociously murdered? Does it make it justifiable for them to be the brutal targets to the vile satiation of pedophiles? Does it reduces them to trash that is to be dumped in rubbish pits by predators, preying on their innocence and naivety, since the state as well as the society failed to shield them by providing them security? The recent case of horrendous physical abuse and subsequent killing of seven year old girl Zainab in Kasur followed by another grim incident of a five year old minor in Karachi allegedly assaulted by the school guard, immediately raises these questions to which just no explication is possible.
According to Sahil, an NGO, working towards the eradication of child sexual abuse, each day eleven children are physically abused in Pakistan. This is indeed disturbing since it accounts for only the reported cases of child abuse in Pakistan, with others being unreported and hastily shoved under the covers for fear of social castigation, judgement, victim blaming and shaming. The grim dynamics of child abuse in Pakistan unravels the hard truth of the state as well as the society being equally complicit in the silent suffering of its children population. The states complicity is manifested in not only in its failure to ensure protection for the most vulnerable of its segments that is its children, but also towards the lax posturing of law enforcement agencies which have recurrently failed to arrest, let alone prosecute child predators and paedophiles. On the other hand, the society’s complicity verges on its general denial of such episodes of abuse and in its convenient castigation and mortification of abuse victims.
The surge in child abuse cases in Pakistan requires that effective measures are resorted to clamp down spine-chilling cases of child abuse and paedophiliac activities destroying the future generation of the country. For this fore mostly of all precedential punishment needs to be accorded to the accused at hand. Drawing a leaf from neighbour Iran’s book that accords capital punishment to paedophiles to relieve the general populace’s “troubled minds” and to “restore the citizen’s sense of security”, and last year executed forty two year old man Esmail Jafarzadeh , involved in the brutal murder and assault of seven years old girl Atena Aslani, Pakistan too needs to follow the course since such despicable paedophiliac instances demand harsh repercussions.
Secondly, the much awaited recommendation by the Child Rights Movement (CRM) on the establishment of the independent National Commission on the Rights of Child (NCRC) has although been partially implemented in the form of the passage of the National Commission on the Rights of Child Act 2017, however proceedings are still to be taken to institute and operationalise the NCRC and to allocate adequate fiscal support for its functionality to monitor the status of child rights in the country. Until this is not done, many children will continue to suffer in silence all because of governmental apathy. Moreover, it needs to be realised that abuse thrives in an environment of silence and ignorance. The general denial of child abuse and its ironic pervasiveness simply suggests that countering it involves, talking about it more often, to not only raise awareness but to accept the fact that it exists and mandates robust actions in its curtailment.
Furthermore, child abuse can be effectively targeted if preventive measures are resorted to in place of reactionary ones. In this context, it is incumbent upon parents, the primary caregivers of a child to provide for their emotional as well as physical security. Parents need to concern themselves with the activities, movements and interactions of their children. Leaving them unattended, without imparting them an awareness of good and bad adult behaviour, parents do grave injustice to their children, which in most of the cases results in tarnishing the physical as well as the psychological selves of children.
Lastly, it is pertinent for schools which come across as secondary seats of learning of children to introduce courses on grave concerns as child abuse to familiarize the children with its pervasion and to enable them to voice up and report any apprehensive or pervert adult behaviour they might encounter. Wrongfully associating cultural and religious dogmas with plausible changes in school syllabi, which are essentially aimed at spreading awareness on abuse, is contentiously fueling the existent surge in child abuse cases
It needs to be duly realised that no child’s childhood warrants to be punctuated with untold incidents of grief, shock and vehemence No child should have to fight for his right to security and peace. No child deserves to live a life of perpetual fear and castigation. These children are our collective responsibility, the provision of whose security should never come at callous costs. Our reticence in child abuse cases today, makes us complicit to the abuse, depriving many from a normal childhood, and a chance for life itself. Let it not jilt an innocent soul, let it not scar her with marks that would never fade, let it not distort her faith in humanity itself, even before she has explored and experienced life.
Source:pakobserver.net/child-abuse-social-complicity/
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Kasur As A Political Failure
By Umair Javed
January 15, 2018
THE rape and murder of six-year-old Zainab in Kasur, and ensuing events and conversations in its aftermath, provide yet another exemplary display of what all is broken in Pakistan’s political system. Firstly, as the 12th such case reported over a couple of years in a two-kilometre radius, it tells us (again) just how badly compromised Punjab Police is as an institution. This was visible first through its indifferent attitude towards the investigation and then through a display of ingrained incompetence and brutality as it fired upon protesters.
Secondly, the fact that these events took place in Kasur, a city no more than half an hour away from the over-governed provincial capital, lays bare the hollow claims of political performance in the province. This wasn’t some peripheral region whose political economy and historical conditions make it difficult to run rules-based institutions; this is as heartland Punjab as it possibly gets. If this is the standard of governance that Shahbaz Sharif proclaims to champion, one shudders to imagine a not-too-distant (and wholly likely future) where the entire country is run the same way.
Third, the collective hopes and aspirations of justice for an entire population have once more been outsourced to (ephemeral) media attention and ‘notice-taking’ efforts by state elites of various shapes and sizes, from the chief minister, Punjab, to the army chief to the Lahore High Court and Supreme Court chief justices to the chairman, Senate. This begs the question of what happens when an equally gruesome incident does not, for some reason or the other, garner as much attention as this one.
Our political system is responsive in particular moments of heightened media frenzy and public attention, but callously indifferent in most other instances.
At the heart of these three failures lies a long-festering vacuum in Pakistan’s political sphere: the absence of societal channels for articulating accountability and reform. In functioning countries, this articulation is carried out by robust and cause-specific civil society organisations, which can take up issues that require particular social and policy changes. For instance, child abuse cases would see an outpouring of societal resources, a well-thought-out cultural and legal response, and sustained pressure to ensure requisite organisational changes take place. In such countries, an incident like the Kasur child pornography scandal would’ve been the absolute final straw, and not been allowed to wilt at the altar of a ruling party’s expedient politics. It goes without saying that Pakistan is not one such country.
Over the past decade and a half, Pakistan has seen the rise of party competition and a concurrent explosion of private media, which many perceive as necessary conditions for making the state more responsive. In some rudimentary ways, this is correct. Parties compete to be seen as better suited for the task of governing, while media attention is supposed to keep citizens informed and decision-makers honest.
Unfortunately, it seems many have also deemed this to be a sufficient condition for responsive government. Some have vested their aspirations in parties, proposing that one party may do better where others are clearly failing. Those who’re disillusioned by the weakness and expediency of political parties, pin their hopes on other forms of state intervention, such as suo motu by the court, or the various forms of notice-taking that the military frequently carries out.
In a country with a long history of authoritarianism, centralised deployment of executive power, and a deeply ingrained (and purposefully cultivated) fetish of strongmen, these are exactly the kind of responses one would expect. And as is clearly visible, these responses do not appear to be taking us very far.
By now, the limitations of our political system are clear. It is responsive in particular moments of heightened media frenzy and public attention, but callously indifferent in most other instances. It is somewhat competent in coming up with social justice-oriented legislation, but completely incompetent in implementing it. It can deliver infrastructure and other brick-and-mortar projects, but has no will or incentives for reforming systems of governance.
These assertions are not just built on one or two tragic cases in Kasur, but are clearly visible over the past two decades, and stand regardless of whether the country was being run as a military dictatorship or as a procedural democracy. Therefore, for anyone interested in a more responsive system of government, the question of forcing the state to do its job on a regular basis, rather than praying for a change of incentives or a sporadic outburst of attention, becomes key.
And the answer, to put it simply, is that making the state more responsive and competent requires socially mobilising in a sustained manner, well beyond what the public is accustomed to at this point. It means building autonomous institutions and organisations that can lobby, advocate, and force the government to act. It means building networks across the social spectrum in order to garner as much public support as possible and to popularise the right kind of solutions to particular problems. It means dropping a tiresome reliance on various state institutions, given the fact that they too are wholly incapable of solving every problem or pushing through the kind of reform required at this point. And it means seeing private news media as one instrument of political pressure, rather than as the sole articulator and protector of the public will.
None of this is easy in a country where the extant civil society landscape consists of NGOs largely dependent on international donor funding, or professional associations interested only in protecting and perpetuating sectional privileges. In instances like the Kasur tragedy, it also means intervening — as Shehzad Roy has bravely done — in an obtuse cultural field where the religious right carries both discursive and coercive authority. Yet this remains the only long-term solution to the myriad of state failures this population is forced to experience on a regular basis.
Source: dawn.com/news/1383057/kasur-as-a-political-failure
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Our Crocodile Tears
By Zaigham Khan
January 15, 2018
When was the last time we debated child welfare and child protection so vigorously? Almost every week, the body of a child who is murdered after being raped is found somewhere in the country. Twelve such bodies were found in the Kasur district last year. What made the media rush to Kasur this time and why did politicians put aside their mud baskets and rush to seven-year-old Zainab’s funeral? The real news from Kasur is not the horrific murder of a girl child, but our reaction and outrage.
In all likelihood, our momentary anger is both the cause and effect of a freak news event; our tears are merely crocodile tears that will dry as soon as something equally gruesome or fantastically tantalising finds its way to the television screens. Zainab’s heartrending story somehow found its way to the middle of two great news events – the story of the Rumian marriage of Pakistan’s most eligible single man and the march of Tahir ul Qadri’s army that, according to Allama Qadri himself, has been promised a prominent place in the end-of-time army of Jesus Christ. Perhaps, it was her picture – a little angel looking straight into our eyes – that melted us. She looks so familiar. Almost any middle-class parent can see the image of their own child in her.
Most children who are abused are not like her. Most news stories do not appear at such a perfect time. In 1999, Javed Iqbal, a serial killer was apprehended. He had been able to lure more than a hundred children to his house, located in a congested Lahore neighbourhood, where he killed them after sexually abusing them. There was no evidence other than the shoes of his victims, as he used to dissolve their bodies in drums of acid. Despite the scale of his brutality, no one could detect what was going on till he himself decided to go public. The police were not able to capture him till he chose to turn himself in. The story ended when he and his accomplice were found hanging in their prison cell.
Javed Iqbal had hunted his victims at the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh. As we all know, dozens of children from all over the province find their way to the shrine after running away from their homes or their places of work. Usually, this is the only place that they know of in the megacity and it holds the promise of free food and a sanctuary. But sanctuaries can be deceptive. They could be snares for the weak.
For centuries, our madrasas have provided refuge and education to vulnerable children. Today, stories of abuse emerge from their high walls from time to time and these madrasas are also used as a recruiting ground for extremist and militant organisations.
When I visited a small facility established by the Social Welfare Department at the shrine complex some years ago, I found a couple of well-meaning officials trying to do their best. “Our resources are too limited [but] the magnitude of the problem is too large,” an officer told me. The department tried to find runaway children from the complex and send them back with the help of a couple of charities.
It is not very difficult to imagine where these children come from. Almost all of them come from impoverished families where they are denied their childhood and face abuse. Some children flee from their abusive places of work. One child at the facility complained of sexual abuse at the house where his parents had installed him as a domestic servant. These children did not seem to know that even Data Ganj Baksh could not help them escape from their destiny.
As the law, lawyers and judges dominate our discourses, we often fail to analyse the roots of our problems and jump from one case to another. Our media fails to look at the processes behind the events. With our new political environment, almost every event can be instantly thrown into the muck and thrown at the enemy.
After all, who would like to debate the socio-economic conditions of the families that are breeding these children? The recent census showed that Pakistan’s population is growing at 2.4 percent – more than double the rate of our South Asian neighbours – with similar levels of social and economic development. Behind this growth rate lies a dysfunctional health system, a decaying education system and the denial of power to women over their bodies.
A large number of children born into poor families become an economic resource for the household. Among the poorest households, the share of the family income contributed by child workers may reach nearly 50 percent. The magnitude of child labour is huge in Pakistan. The estimates vary from four million to 12 million.
These children are also a source of good news for millions of middle-class families who find a cheap human resource in them that is available at a fraction of the cost they would be required to pay to an adult worker. How these children are treated at the homes of middle-class families is clear from two cases.
In 2010, the “tortured body” of 12-year-old housemaid Shazia Masih was recovered from the home of the former president of the Lahore Bar Association. The lawyer and his family was acquitted as the medical board had declared that the “infection in the wounds and lack of nutrition was what caused Shazia’s death.” Neither the court nor the bar found anything wrong in the fact that a senior lawyer had employed a minor and neglected her condition (or caused it), which had resulted in her death.
In 2016, an additional district and sessions judge in Islamabad, Raja Khurram Ali Khan, and his wife were charged “for their alleged involvement in keeping a ten-year-old housemaid in wrongful confinement, burning her hand over a missing broom, beating her with a ladle, detaining her in a storeroom and threatening her with dire consequences”. To my knowledge, despite the help from his community, the honourable judge remains stuck – perhaps mainly due to the media attention.
The situation of the vulnerable sections of society cannot improve without economic development, a robust social policy and reforms in our justice system. Pakistan is an elitist economy that calls itself a social democracy. Imagine a social democracy that collects merely eight percent of its GDP in taxes. Norway, a social democracy, collects 38 percent of its GDP in taxes. Even India is able to collect 16 percent of its GDP. Only fake revolutionaries can promise us the moon and the stars without demanding or doing anything to improve taxation in this country.
My dear readers, without realising it, you may be enjoying the adrenaline rush that is evoked by the hysterical rant of your favourite television anchor. Wipe your tears. A chota or choti might have prepared your breakfast by now.
Source: thenews.com.pk/print/268435-our-crocodile-tears
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Indispensable United Nations
By Gulshan Rafiq
January 15, 2018
IS the United Nations (UN) effective in international affairs anymore? The general perception is: it is effective when major powers allow it to be effective. However, it depends a lot on how one defines effectiveness. If one defines it the way George Bush defines it; effectiveness is following the US lead and endorsing US wars. Beyond the very high publicity security aspects, though, there’s the question of what the UN does on issues of development, wiping out communicable diseases, childhood education, clean water, economic development; the whole range of issues that one hears very little about. In those ways, the UN is much more consistently effective. Though it is not perfect, but it does a lot better on those issues than it does on issues of peace and security where the heavy hand of the US, through the veto in the Security Council (UNSC) and in other ways, comes to bear on what the UN can and cannot do.
The UN is a multi-purpose agency directed to specific goals including collective security, peace-keeping, health, environmental and human rights concerns. Although the concerns for UN are many, there are two classical viewpoints which divide opinion on the UN’s effectiveness in global politics; the liberal and the realist argument. The realists view international organizations such as the UN ‘of little help in channeling the perpetual power struggle between states, since they cannot change the anarchical structure of the international system. In contrast, the liberal view, strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant, argues that ‘well functioning international organizations contribute to the formation of peace.’ Given that the UN is a multi-purpose agency, it would be inappropriate to evaluate its effectiveness based on a specific goal, i.e., security.
Collective security was a priority of the UN’s agenda post World War II. However, realists may have the slight edge when they argue that the logic of collective security is contrasted with the difficulties of its application. Unsurprisingly, there was a large sense of distrust after the Second World War. The US invasions of Vietnam, Grenada and Panama in addition to the Soviet Union’s invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan are merely a few examples of the constant proxy war operations conducted throughout the second half of the 20th century. This highlighted the ineffectiveness of the UNSC in preventing conflict, and strongly supported realist thinkers that there is no supranational authority capable of wielding overwhelming power.
The realist school view international organizations used by powerful states to implement their power politics more effectively and to pursue self-interest. Kant, however, claims that international organizations can constrain decision-makers by positively promoting peace. However, liberals claim that after the Cold War it became more difficult for states and diplomats to accept that what happened within states was of no concern to outsiders. As a result, the UN became more involved in the mediation between nations, which granted it higher respect from member states. By the mid-1990s the UN had become involved in maintaining international security by resisting aggression between states. Liberalists including Kofi Annan argued that the ‘security dilemma’, which is built on the premise that one country improves its security at the expense of other states, had been averted.
With regards to peace-keeping, although realists make the point that the network of international organizations is spread very unevenly across the globe, liberalists have the upper hand when defending UN success rates in areas of civil conflict, Namibia (1989-90), El Salvador (1991-95) and Cambodia (1991-93) are repeatedly cited as success stories. In addition, the presence of peacekeeping forces is involved in the democratization processes. As Kant claims in his works, one of the objectives of international organizations such as the UN is to democratize single party countries through this process, allowing countries to benefit in areas such as health and human rights and prevents further conflict. Thus, in agreement with Kant’s liberalist theory that international institutions promote positive results in countries in need of aid and mediation; It can be concluded that the UN has been an effective institution in establishing peace and promoting health-care efforts. Similarly, the UN has been equally effective in raising awareness and legislating environmental practices in most of its member states. The Kyoto Protocol was a major step towards the UN framework on climate change. Establishing a welcome precedent, the 128 out of 193 UN member states voted for a motion on 21 December, 2017, that rejected US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Though US used its veto power at the UNSC to block a similar measure. While the vote has little practical impact, it is not legally binding; it is a considerable embarrassment for the US as it reflects global opinion. Though the UN has failed in assuring the right of self-determination to disenfranchise groups, our convoluted world needs the UN. The UNSC must be strengthened to enable the UN as a whole to confront and resolve complex challenges of our world, such as resolution of Kashmir dispute as per the Resolutions of UN. Lastly, as former US President Obama once said, the UN is imperfect, but it is also indispensable.
Source: pakobserver.net/indispensable-united-nations/
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The Year That Was
By Shahid Javed Burki
January 15, 2018
There is a consensus among academics as well as those who watch policymaking across the globe that 2017 was a bad year. Why was that the case and will 2018 be different? There are a number of reasons why the year that became history a few days ago is regarded so poorly. Five of these are worth reflecting on. The first is the near-collapse of the old order put in place in the years after the end of the Second World War. The second is the inability of what came to be called ‘globalisation’ to spread evenly the rewards of steady growth. The third is related to the second. Fairly significant segments of the populations in the West voted into office leaders who promised to kill the old order and replace it with something quite different. The fourth are the demographic developments coupled with political turmoil in the more populous parts of the world that produced large movements of people. These migrations were seen as threatening precisely by the people who had been hurt by globalisation. The fifth was China’s continuing economic as well as military rise that brought to the fore a non-Western power that challenged those that had dominated for three quarters of a century the old system. Each of these five developments is worth examination.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, boasted of the rising power of the country over which he presided. “Whether you like or not, history is on our side. We will bury you,” he told the leaders of the West. That, of course, did not happen but the claim did not seem ridiculous then. The break-neck speed at which the Soviet Union had industrialised helped it to defeat the Nazi armies. The Germans, when they sent in their troops into Russia, thought they were invading a rural economy. Instead, they met an industrialised power that was able not only to push them back but bring under its control much of Eastern Europe. A dozen years later, in 1957, Moscow launched the Sputnik, a clear indication that it had become a technological rival for the United States. However, two decades later, this new industrial and technological power was not able to overcome the fierce resistance offered by an essentially primitive people when it invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets fought for 10 years but in 1989 they pulled out. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed bringing to an end the advance of Communism into Europe.
These were such impressive developments that they prompted the sociologist Francis Fukuyama to proclaim “the end of history.” The West, liberal democracy and capitalism, had won decisively and would become the only system of governance worldwide. History had ended as there would no longer be ideological conflicts.
But “globalisation has its discontents” warned the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz who had closely watched the process unfold while he was serving at the World Bank as the chief economist. It was not only academics that saw danger in leaving the management of the economies into the hands of private enterprise. Years after globalisation had diluted the presence of the state in domestic economic systems, another economist pointed out the contradictions in the process. Thomas Piketty of France worried about the widening of income disparities as the return on capital was significantly larger than the return on labour. Profits had outpaced wages by a wide margin. There was discontent and it produced a political backlash. What came to be known as ‘the base’ elected an unlikely leader, Donald Trump, to the American presidency.
By reducing not the physical but the effective distance between the West and the populace of the developing world, people, displaced by domestic conflict and economic distress, moved to the more developed parts of the globe. This brought not only those from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe but also East Europeans into Britain, and other Western nations in the continent. There were also large illegal and legal migrations from Mexico and Central America into the United States. There was deep resentment among those who believed that the newcomers had cost many in the host populations jobs and reduced income. This added to the discontent produced by globalisation. As many migrants who forced their way into Europe were Muslims, it produced a wave of Islamophobia that led to the rise of extremist parties in several countries.
It was in this turmoil in the West, that China continued its economic rise. At the 19th session of the Chinese Communist Party, the position of its energetic and ambitious president was consolidated. The ‘Xi Jinping thought’ was incorporated in the party’s constitution, giving it the place occupied by Mao Zedong. The most important part of this thought was the reference to the “new era”, meaning that China will be an important if not the dominant player in the new global order.
It was obvious that China was now putting forward a new form of governance. In it, one party controls the government and the government controls the people. The party, in turn, is controlled by the supreme leader. This was also the Soviet Union’s system that did not work and ultimately collapsed. Why did it fail in the Soviet Union but has worked spectacularly in China until now? Financial Times’ Martin Wolf provides a credible answer. “The big difference between the two outcomes lay with Deng Xiaoping’s brilliant choices,” he wrote in a column published late last year. “China’s paramount leader after Mao Zedong kept the Leninist political system — above all, the dominant role of the Communist party — while freeing the economy.” Xi Jinping is likely to follow the same route with one big difference. While Deng wanted to keep his and his party’s focus on home, Xi will have China project itself in what he calls the “new era”. The Road and Belt Initiative is a part of this projection.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1608831/6-the-year-that-was/
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