ANZAC Day then and now

Why should I try dry my tears,
Or talk of victory?
For my heart lies dead in a nameless grave
On far Gallipoli

(Prose and Verse quoted in Gallopli to Petrov by Humphrey McQueen)

On 25 April 1915, soldiers from Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, India and many other parts of the world participated in what was unambiguously an act of aggression. To be sure, it was not uniquely aggressive; it was, after all, in the midst of one of the most savage conflicts of human history. But it was as remote from a defensive maneuver as military excursions can get. According to the respected historian John Keegan, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill "initiated the Allies' only major excursion to outflank the Germans" by sending the navy and later troops to the Dardanelles. Keegan describes the excursion as "a (sic) heroic failure."

Churchill’s motive in sending troops to Gallipoli was to "[s]top men chewing barbed wire in Flanders" by knocking Turkey out of the war. Another key motive was to persuade ostensibly neutral Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Italy to join the Allies. If Turkey could be knocked out of the war, it might prove to these neutral nations that it was best to side with the Allies as the likely winners.

That was the theory. In reality, the Gallipoli invasion was a shining beacon of reckless, negligent planning by ill-informed civilian decision makers who had no direct involvement in the exercise of the military excursion.

Does this sound familiar? It should. On 19 March 2003, the United States, with limited support from a few other nations, invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. The key reason given was that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a security risk to the world. US civilian decision makers hoped a successful invasion of Iraq would act as a catalyst for change throughout the Middle East. Whether this change would be in the form of the creation of ‘Western-style’ democracies or simply just pro-Western regimes is a whole other matter. Regardless, the Iraq invasion has cost the lives of several thousands. A respected Lancet study puts the figure of Iraqi deaths alone at around 650,000.

Prior to the Iraq invasion, record numbers of protestors took to the world's streets to oppose the war. In Australia, many thousands out of a traditionally apolitical society were part of that group. The Labor opposition went to great lengths to ensure that their opposition to what was quite obviously an unjustified war was as ambiguous as possible. However, once the invasion was under way, and Australian forces were involved in the war, most if not all mainstream commentators towed the familiar Anzac line. John Howard explained that since the war had begun, regardless of one's view of the invasion, Australians should support their troops. You could oppose the war and support Australian troops. But you must support the troops, because they are merely doing their time honoured duty. A duty exemplified by the first Anzacs at Gallipoli.

Our Anzacs, our young men, died needlessly at Gallipoli; as they did throughout the many killing fields of the Great War. They did not die out of necessity, but because someone with authority believed it was a good idea.

This reality should give us pause. For while our world is more sophisticated and technological in many ways today, there remains the ultimate reality that our lives, your’s and mine, are needlessly controlled by a few powerful people, mostly men, who deserve neither the privilege of our services nor the lives of those they carelessly toss away into that foul-smelling fire called war and conquest.

Lest we forget.

Dictatorship Pakistan

Musharraf's dismissal of the Pakistani Chief Justice reveals the true face of the War on Terror.

Friday, or ‘Jumma’ as it is known to Muslims, is the holiest day of the week. It is usually a day of rest and reflection. It was on a Friday, 9 March 2007, that President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan told the country’s senior most judge, Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry of the Supreme Court, that he was being dismissed due to allegations of misconduct. Little detail of the alleged misconduct was made public by the Government. What information is known of the allegations came from an open letter to the Chief Justice from a noted pro-Government lawyer and television presenter, Naeem Bokhari.

Bokhari alleged that Chaudhry excessively intimidated advocates in court, that he used his influence to get his son a comfortable Government job and shielded him from a court investigation, and that the Chief Justice abused his government transport privileges (an allegation that Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court may well appreciate). In a country rife with corruption, where ‘contacts’ and family networks are necessary to get everything from your driver’s licence to electricity, and where it is a well known ‘secret’ that President Musharraf himself has acquired many acres of public land for his private use, dismissing such a senior government official on such flimsy allegations seems rather harsh. In fact, it appears the allegations are a smoke screen for a politically motivated dismissal.

According to one of Pakistan’s most senior constitutional lawyers, former Law Minister Syed Iftikhar Hussain Gilani, Chief Justice Chaudhry told him:

[T]he president had given him [Chaudhry] two options — either to resign and the government would take care of him which meant that he would be accommodated at some lucrative post, and second to face the reference [alleging his misconduct]. And he told him that he would face reference.

Confusion has reigned over the dismissal. Originally, it was asserted that he had been removed from office. Then, perhaps after Government lawyers inspected the nation’s constitution, it was announced that Chaudhry was still the Chief Justice and had merely been placed on “forced leave” while an investigation into the allegations unfolded. There were also reports that he was under house arrest. Yet only a few days after his removal, Musharraf, through the Acting Chief Justice, confidently assured all that Chaudhry was not under house arrest and was free to do as he pleased – except return to the Supreme Court.

After private television stations broadcast images of the Chief Justice and members of his family being manhandled by police, a Supreme Court panel was hastily set up to investigate the incident. At least one of these stations was ransacked by police for showing images of police clashing with lawyers protesting the Chief Justice’s removal. Soon after, the Government took both private television stations off air. The public outcry from these actions eventually forced the Government to allow the television stations back onto the airwaves and compelled Musharraf to personally apologise live on air.

Given this environment, it is very unlikely that Chaudhry will be able to serve as Chief Justice with the same level of freedom and impartiality as before. His best hope of returning to the Court at all would be through concerted political pressure. In a dictatorship heavily reliant on foreign military, economic and political support, the most effective form of pressure would be from key international allies, particularly the United States but also Britain, and even Australia. I will elaborate on this further later.

The real reasons for his dismissal

It is widely understood in Pakistan that Chaudhry has been removed not because of any misconduct but because he threatened Musharraf’s absolute rule, as demonstrated in a number of Supreme Court decisions which condemned the corruption and oppression of Musharraf’s Pakistan. Last year the Chaudhry Supreme Court refused a government request to dispose of a matter seeking to trace the whereabouts of hundreds of missing persons believed to have been abducted by Pakistani intelligence services. Chaudhry and a majority of the Supreme Court have been highly critical of the Musharraf Government’s inability to prosecute individuals guilty of ‘honour’ crimes against women and children, particularly in rural Pakistan. Last year the Chaudhry Supreme Court over turned the sale of the National Steel Mills to a private consortium on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Prior to the decision, the Government had virtually completed the sale of the National Steel Mills to a consortium headed by a close friend of Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz at below the steel mill’s market price.

Another perceived reason for Chaudhry’s removal was Musharraf's fear that Chaudhry would not endorse his re-election as President while also holding the office of Chief of the Armed Forces later this year, presumably on the basis of its questionable constitutionality.

Although these decisions suggest that Chaudhry is something of a judicial activist, he is also a respected member of Pakistan’s elite society. In 2004, Chaudhry supported President Musharraf’s amendment of the national constitution to enable him to serve as both Chief of the Armed Forces and President at the same time. The following year Chaudhry was promoted to Chief Justice. Such is the ever increasing impunity of the Musharraf regime that simple judicial accountability has become a heresy, even when practiced by a respect member of elite society.

A dangerous vacuum in legitimate authority

Chaudhry’s dismissal has increased Pakistan’s already fragile political fabric in a way that is difficult to underestimate but easy to misinterpret. One obvious repercussion has been the further erosion of the Musharraf regime’s legitimacy as the government of Pakistan. Already a deputy Attorney-General and at least five judges have resigned in protest at the dismissal. Thousands of lawyers throughout Pakistan have staged boycotts of the country’s courts system. The main opposition parties have also condemned the dismissal, some even demanding that Musharraf resign. What is most interesting about this opposition is that it has united, at least for the time being, parties from both the religious and secular sides of the political spectrum.

Whereas the general perception in the West is that Musharraf is a bulwark against a growing Islamist movement in Pakistan’s Army and frontier regions, Chaudhry’s dismissal undermines one of Pakistan’s most powerful surviving secular institutions – a common law judiciary modeled on its English counterpart.

In an environment where governance is mired in corruption and human rights abuses are frequent, the Supreme Court has been one of the few institutions capable of challenging the twin threats of fundamentalist violence and increasing authoritarianism. Pakistan has a system of Sharia or ‘Islamic Law’ Courts whose decisions only the Supreme Court has the power to overturn. This has been demonstrated over the past few years in a string of matters where the Supreme Court overturned decisions of the Sharia Court which allowed a number of sex offenders to go unpunished, and which had limited the rights of women in property disputes. The Supreme Court’s scrutiny of the Musharraf regime has already been described above.

Silence from the West

There has been a deafening silence from the United States, Britain, and Australia – all key allies of Pakistan – over the Chief Justice’s dismissal. The US State Department’s first response to the dismissal was to assert that it was an internal matter for the Pakistan Government to sort out. A US Department of State spokesperson later explained:

We believe that President Musharraf has made a commitment to change Pakistan and we think that is a positive thing. We're not going to dictate to him or anybody else and the Pakistani people exactly what those changes are going to be or specific steps that they might need to take. Of course we can offer guidance and counsel and encouragement to continue along the pathway to democracy. But President Musharraf is good -- has been a solid friend in fighting the war on terror.

Neither the British nor the Australian Governments have issued any public statement on the dismissal.

This remarkable silence is not an insignificant matter. Pakistan is heavily reliant on economic and political support from the West, particularly from the US. Without this support there is a real prospect that Pakistan would become a failed state like its eastern neighbour Afghanistan.

Prior to September 2001, the Pakistan economy was severely depressed due to an international economic embargo in response to its decision to go nuclear and refusal to become a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That situation quickly changed as Musharraf realized a dramatic shift in the political winds. As the US State Department country profile for Pakistan explains:

The events of September 11, 2001, and Pakistan's agreement to support the United States led to.. military assistance… to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan's capacity to police its western border and address its legitimate security concerns. In 2003, President Bush announced that the United States would provide Pakistan with $3 billion in economic and military aid over 5 years. This assistance package commenced during FY 2005.

Incredibly, that economic support is expected to increase over the next few years despite the present crisis.

It would be unsurprising if, in the event a regime unfriendly to Western interests came to power in Pakistan, there was a sudden well spring of concern and condemnation of Pakistan's poor human rights record, lack of democratic reform, and support for militant orthodox Muslims – all of which the present regime that is allied to the West is already guilty.

A telling contradiction

At the same time as current events were unfolding in Pakistan, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer found time to condemn the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe:

The brutal suppression of a rally in Zimbabwe over the weekend by the Mugabe Government, including killing an opposition activist, is further evidence of the regime’s utter disregard for basic democratic principles and the human rights of the people of Zimbabwe.

Both the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett made statements to the same effect.

The sad irony is that countries like the United States, Britain and Australia can play a bigger role in fomenting democracy in Pakistan than Zimbabwe because they have stronger and much more cordial military, economic and political ties with Pakistan. A bureaucrat from any one of these countries might claim that they are doing 'all they can' behind the scenes to protest the removal of the Pakistani Chief Justice. But there is no better way to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of ordinary Pakistanis and the global Muslim community than to issue a strong public condemnation of the dismissal.

Part of the thinking in the West, especially the US, Britain and Australia, may be that Musharraf provides stability in a volatile region of the world. The problem with this thinking is that it is incredibly shortsighted and naïve because it does not take into consideration the very dynamic nature of geopolitics in Pakistan and its surrounding region. Moreover, it places too much emphasis on Musharraf as an individual as an agent of stability. By investing so much in one individual, Pakistan’s western allies actually consolidate his grip on power instead of developing institutional stability in the country. Further, rather than being a vanguard against religious fanaticism and militancy, Musharraf is in fact creating a vacuum in legitimate authority that is improving the prospects of a militant Islamist takeover.

In other words, by supporting Musharraf and ignoring his contempt for democratic reform, of which the dismissal of Chief Justice Chaudhry is but the most recent example, Pakistan’s Western allies are actually undermining their own stated aim of combating religious fanaticism and promoting democratic reform around the world.

An edited version of this piece is available at New Matilda.

Diplomacy in uncharted waters

The Guardian

Imagine if a bunch of Iranian sailors were captured between the high seas and British territorial waters (A peculiar outrage, March 30). The media would say they had no right to be there in the first place. They would certainly be paraded on TV. The prime minister would condemn this act of aggression by Iran. And Iran would profess that it was unlawful for Britain to detain its sailors, who were merely undertaking a routine exercise on the high seas. This scenario appears absurd because one cannot think of a circumstance where the Iranian military would be roaming around waters in western Europe. And that absurdity is at the heart of the present situation.

What right does Britain have to be in the Persian gulf in the first place? Please, spare me the patronising talk about UN security council resolutions, of maintaining international peace, or even that the Iraqi government, which was installed by the US and Britain, invited the British into its waters. And don't even mention the matter of US designs over Iran; how Pentagon planners are drawing up targets for a possible US invasion.

None of this would have happened if western nations did not interfere in the geopolitics of the region. Let us not forget that most of the borders and nation states of the modern Middle East were created by the British, with some help from the French, after the first world war.

Mustafa Qadri
London